We Were Fucking Corndogs: A (Secret) History Lesson

To the uninitiated, the items displayed at The Secret History of the Cedar Valley exhibit were nothing more than photocopied fliers of fly-by-night local bands. For some, those fliers represented something more.
The flier to the left? It’s a show for a Dutch hardcore band, B.G.K. I hadn’t seen that flier in twenty years.
Hell, I hadn’t thought about that band in twenty years.
But it was more than just a cheap advertisement for a band no longer relevant.
For me, that was the second show I saw after arriving at the University of Northern Iowa. The first, in case you’re wondering, was a cover band at some meat-market club located well off campus. Being new to the area, I initially hung out with a crowd that contained people from my hometown. With long hair and a Smiths t-shirt, I suppose that I qualified as the odd one in their circle, and this was glaringly obvious one night when I agreed to join them when they went to the bar that featured a popular bar band. I think they were called Litterer, and they actually incorporated some original songs into their set, but the bulk of the audience (including my friends) were there to see the band perform familiar favorites while they drank beer and got loaded.
Apparently, the Litterer band had quite the following; the place was packed.
They had a full-on stage presence about them, and they worked their shitty hair-metal act quite well (the band members were siblings with the last name, no shit, Litterer).
The music was not my cup of tea, however, I did my best to fake it.
After all, I didn’t really know anyone yet at U.N.I. I certainly couldn’t burn the bridges of the relative few that I actually did know: those that found me cool enough to drag to a club to “rock.”
I drank. More than I should. I drank to the point where I didn’t give a shit if the people I came with knew how much I thought Litterer sucked.
I made my way to the front of the stage, directly in front of the lead guitarist, ironically, the only dude in the band that did not have the last name of “Litterer.” I let him know that I thought he was “shredding” by throwing up devil horns and screaming “Yeah!” whenever he made his way towards the front of the stage to solo or show off to the crowd.
In front of me, I noticed that he had quite the assortment of effects which he used efficiently. Knowing a little about guitar pedals, I drunkenly memorized which ones provided him with reverb, chorus, distortion, delay, whatever.
The guitarist worked the entire stage, paying close attention to provide the audience of stage right with just as much attention as stage left. So, whenever he moved over to rock another section of the audience, I tried to sabotage his performance by hitting the various effect pedals on stage and within my reach.
It wasn’t just a matter of smacking a button randomly.
There was a science to my vandalism.
He’d be really getting into his performance, eyes closed and head pointed up during a solo, when I determined “What this fellow needs to send this dramatic moment over the top is….a shitload of echo.”
I’d hit the delay pedal.
This technique of mine was not lacking in subtlety. The guitarist almost instantly knew something was wrong and he almost immediately knew where the problem was originating from. It was only going to be a matter of time before my drunken shenanigans got me thrown out of the club.
But it was too funny for me to stop, so I changed my strategy somewhat. Instead of hitting such a momentum-shifting pedal, I targeted ones that provided more nuanced changes, like the chorus pedal. Typically, if he was really rocking, he had enough distortion going that he didn’t notice what I had done as quickly as before. The moment he did usually resulted in some confusion on his part, to which he’d go to his amplifier first to investigate. After figuring out that there was nothing awry with the settings there, he’d eventually come back to his pedal board and see that someone had fucked with his shit again.
One of my friends noticed me doing this.
“What are you doing?” He yelled in my ear over the music.
“Helping.” I replied.
As fun as this was, it wasn’t something I wanted to do every weekend. It made no sense to me to spend money on a high cover to see a band I had no interest in only to spend even more money getting drunk to tolerate it.
So when I saw the flier for B.G.K., I understood that I’d probably be going to the event alone and I knew that the event would not be serving alcohol.
It didn’t matter, the band was on Alternative Tentacles, and in my mind, that was just as good as being on Sire.
Plus, the shit was only three bucks.
There were probably about three dozen like-minded souls there, and probably a few of them knew who the fuck B.G.K. was.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I took part in some fairly weak slam-dancing during all three bands. One of the guys I ran into was a skinny Mohawked fellow who I’d seen around campus and immediately formed a negative opinion of. Not because of his chosen hair style, but because I automatically assumed that he donned the haircut immediately after arriving on campus, well away from the watchful eye of any parents who may object to it. In other words: I assumed he was a poseur.
My own hairstyle, the obligatory collegiate longhair look, must have made an impact on him. I later learned that he noticed me on campus too and he said that I always looked like I wanted to “punch somebody.”
So two college students with two similar negative perceptions with one another, literally, ran into each other during a B.G.K. show on the campus of a Northern Iowa university.
We continue to be close friends to this day.
And it all started with a cheaply made flier.
While at the Secret History exhibit, I noticed dozens of fliers that provided similar stories for me and I could easily create a years-worth of blogs devoted entirely to the stories of those shows that the fliers on display created for me.
I started to randomly photograph several of them before I figured out that there were too many to take.
Then I brought it into some semblance of context: understanding the impact that some of these shows had on my life, I imagined the impact that they had on others. I’m not talking about the more recognizable acts like B.G.K. (if you could even call them recognizable), but instead the hundreds of local artists with enough fortitude to contribute to a scene with a slim possibility of never even being acknowledged outside of their immediate network of friends. It’s an algebraic equation when you put this in perspective; a half-dozen here, a few dozen there, and then suddenly you have a substantial amount of people with direct connections, notable impacts, and common threads between them. And, to that point, most of them probably don’t even know it.
How ironic then that those fliers, once thought of as a cheap form of marketing that could be easily disposable would have created such an emotional effect even after being twenty years (or more) removed from the actual event. Kudos to Matt Wilson and whoever contributed and compiled to the event for having the foresight to hold onto these Xeroxed fliers with the understanding that so many memories would be contained within them.
It’s going to be interesting to see if similar memories can be created for future generations as there’s been a dramatic shift against such manual intensive forms of promotion (fliers, and fuck, even cds/vinyl/tapes are quickly becoming a thing of the past) are switched to more digital means like mp3s and MySpace calendars. Will they be able to remember events when the hard drive crashes?
Is music itself becoming such a disposable art form that the emotional connections are becoming a thing of the past too?
These are the things I think about, worry about, and consider, particularly after encountering the wave of nostalgia from visiting the Secret History exhibit.
Because I know how one flier can ultimately change someone’s life.