Doug Roberson

It’s truly an end of an era when the final remnant of one of Iowa’s most legendary music venues is dismissed, seemingly another victim of today’s economy and Iowa City’s fickle local support.
Doug Roberson was given the pink slip from his gig at The Picador on Thursday, marking the end of over twenty years at the venue, most when it was known as Gabe’s Oasis. A full account is given at Corridor Buzz, with Roberson giving his take on the event with brutal honesty and without a hint of bitterness.
It’s fairly typical of him to speak his mind like that; I’ve heard him talk about previous bandmates in unfavorable fashion, lay into current members if he felt they were wasting precious time in expensive recording studios, and toss a stern word or two at anyone he felt wasn’t giving their best. It’s probably because he’s had his hand stuck in so many different areas of the business that he doesn’t suffer fools lightly. He’s been there, he knows what the job demands, and all that he asks that you put the whining aside and just do what you’re asked.
One constant has remained over the years: Doug Roberson looks pretty much the same as he did twenty years ago. I remember once admiring his sense of Rat Pack style and asked him about his attire. I learned that looking like a million bucks only cost him ten; everything on his body that night was gleaned from second-hand stores. I swear his wardrobe could have been nothing but designer fashions.
His complexion retains this certain youthful exuberance to the point where he’s always looked like this handsome thirty-something, even when he was in his twenties. Because of this, he’s suited his share of ladies, including one that I used to date.
I didn’t feel bad, that’s just Doug.
If The Picador thinks they’ll be able to find someone who can manage that place better, I’ll be hard pressed to know whom. These are different times, but not in the sense where someone Roberson’s age should be used as the reason why The Picador isn’t drawing the crowds like it used to. The reason…and I believe anyone around the area would tell you…is because Iowa City no longer has the type of local talent that will draw crowds like they do when a national act is coming through town. Back in the day, you had local talent that would draw crowds just as large, and no young blood is going to change that within the Picador. That change has to come from the musical talent themselves.
As symbolic as Doug’s firing is, the real test will be how long the club itself can withstand this recession without him. It’s been through them before, but something leads me to believe that there’s some financial backers at the club that are desperately trying to get their investments back. While there’s nothing wrong with that, it sounds as though some of these dealings are causing local talent to go a book their shows through other venues, perhaps because they’re getting a better deal.
I don’t know anything about the back-end dealings, I only know that the place was getting some good shows as of late and that Doug was the only recognizable face there for me. After my obligatory beer, I’d follow it up with straight soda paying for the first one while Doug would pour the next ones without charging. It was a brief gesture of goodwill of my loyalty, perhaps, one in which I’m hard pressed to return the favor somehow.
So thanks Doug. Thank you for those free refills, booking all those great bands, and getting up on the stage yourself and performing some excellent music. More than anything, thanks for being there…that reliable constant that made me feel how we’re all young at heart for rock and roll no matter how old we may have looked to that collegiate clientele.
The picture of Doug holding a bottle of Blatz was taken without permission from his MySpace page.

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.

The Youth Are Getting Restless: The Secret History of the Cedar Valley

Trust me: when you get older, you spend a lot of time waxing about the good old days (as evidenced by the number of nostalgia related posts here) and, particularly to those individuals that have no frame of reference to the events (as evidenced by the number of eye-rolls I get from the SLF), there’s a limited appeal to the stories you tend to repeat. These stories increase with every passing drink of alcohol, which may explain why I tend to avoid both alcohol and bars myself.
So I try to keep current events a frequent part of this site with the occasional foray into history; I hope for those of you with no frame of reference find those posts fairly entertaining and understand that a lot of Glam-Racket tends to serve as a mental catalog for me should my mind start to fail or should, God forbid, there’s some documentation of things if I happened to leave this existence.
After all, I want my kids to read about all of my youthful indiscretions so that they can pass them along in future family gatherings.
I suppose it’s an “art form,” if one widens their definition and considers the written word to be this. But it’s nowhere near the level that some individuals succumb to when combining nostalgia with actual art.
Matt Wilson, member of the punk band Crock Of Dookey and frequent Cedar Valley scenester, has found himself combining both the elements of his rock past with his recent position as a college art professor to develop The Secret History of the Cedar Valley, an interactive exhibit taking place at the Waldemar A. Schmidt Art Gallery on the Wartburg College campus in Waverly, Iowa. This exhibition runs from March 17th to April 14th with the opening reception taking place on Saturday, March 17th between 6 – 8 pm.
Wilson had the incredible foresight to utilize his parent’s attic to store show fliers, band photographs, photocopied fanzines, and other seemingly disposable artifacts that demonstrate the zeal of youth and DIY ethos that the scene created.
While billed as a reflection of the Cedar Valley’s underground music scene between 1977-2007, it appears that a lot of the memorabilia will center on the salad days of the late 80’s. This happens to be the era that I’m most familiar with, so the exhibition has some added interest for yours truly.
Occasionally, I’ll pull out a lost 7” single, flier, demo cassette from my own collection and it will immediately take me back to that time where faces like Wilson’s are permanently burnt at the age of 18 in my own memory.
While I meandered through the history that’s documented on his project, I came face to face with bands that I hadn’t thought of in two decades (Aggressive Chubbies, Drednex) and the names of performers that had been lost over time.
When the SLF and I moved to our new home last fall, I came across an old SST album that wasn’t packed properly. After securing it, I found a piece of colored paper that contained the photocopied remnants of a handwritten fanzine (“35% Combed Cotton”) on one side and an autograph from Black Flag’s Greg Ginn on the other. It reminded me of a few things: first of all, how much manual intensive work was involved in DIY compared to now. While it’s easy to create a “scene” using on-line communities like MySpace and Facebook today, back then it required a lot of personalized attention. It also reminded me how scenes across the country worked independently of each other, yet had a symbiotic relationship with each other, particularly when booking shows. I mean, there’s no way Greg Ginn would have been in Cedar Falls, Iowa without a network of like-minded people preaching the gospel and inviting such an artist into the local environment for a show. And if the show ended up to be created by some enthusiastic yet poorly organized people, the word tended to get out for other bands to avoid making the same mistake and accepting a future invitation.
Perhaps this all amounts to a bit of “fogeyism” on my part, but I firmly believe that the loss of community is directly attributed to a lack of the younger set implementing the ideals of past generations in order to get the wheels of a viable music scene in motion. Maybe The Secret History of the Cedar Valley exhibit will change that and provide those with a vested interest in having their own creativity reach a larger audience instead of merely being supported by a privileged few.
After all, I probably only enjoyed the music a small fraction of those who are featured at the exhibition, but I admired and respected every one of those that had the moxie to truly do it themselves.