DJ Hostettler
Cultural Zero

Poster Children in Champaign, IL: On Vacation For Forever and a Day

By - May 30th, 2009 09:32 pm

highdive_marquee

Fig.1: The High Dive has only a limited amount of black letters (photo ganked from new pal Liz)

If I lived in a sitcom or slapstick comedy feature film picture thingy, Tuesday morning would have seen me hop out of bed only to immediately pancake my face on the bedroom floor, much to the amusement of the cats. However, I live in the real world, devoid of laugh tracks (thank god) and twice-revised dialogue; as a result, I merely noticed a deep throbbing in my shin muscles and the cleverest thing I could think to utter was “Ow! What the fuck?”

Man, this wasn’t an issue back in my 20s—back then I could pogo up and down in front of a stage for 60 minutes and not feel a damn thing in two days’ time. But as I often like to remind myself with a bracing combination of sitting in non-ergonomic chairs, typing with a wrist guard and staring at my gray hairs in a mirror, I ain’t no spring chicken anymore.

Still, I seem to be staving off the advances of Father Time to a satisfactory degree, since I still run into the occasional look of bewilderment when I tell someone my age. “34? No way. You look like you’re in your 20s.” Obviously they’re not scoping the gray. But it’s led me to a theory: acting young keeps you young. It’s not a very scientific theory, but it’s fueled by what I see as the Public At Large’s perception that certain lifestyle choices are connected to certain age groups. Play in a band? Anyone over 30 who does that is a loser, right? (Because obviously we’re all trying to get signed and become rock stars. Of course.) Never been married? No kids? You must be in your 20s then, because who isn’t wanting to pump out rugrats by the time they’re 25? (I remember once a co-worker at an Appleton call center looking at me with genuine bafflement when I told her I had “too much other stuff I wanted to do” instead of having kids. I may as well have told her “I’ve had 5 kids already, but I devour them shortly after birth. It’s like the Chicken Lady’s omelets—straight from her body onto my plate!”)

So, it’s important to me to keep doing the things I love doing, because they keep me young—not just in other people’s eyes, mind you, but in spirit as well. I think so anyway. So when Champaign, IL indie-rock institution Poster Children announced that they were headlining the “Pose or Play” Josh Gottheil memorial show at the High Dive in Champaign, along with other old-school Champaign acts like The Outnumbered (Jon Ginoli’s pre-Pansy Division jangle-pop band), I knew I had to be there. Because in many ways, Poster Children represent my youth.

It occurred to me during the drive down to Champaign (accompanied by HiFi bassist The Fucking Wizard, former HiFi dude Sean and his ladyfriend Abbie) that more than any other band (including the sources of the “Cultural Zero” reference and my favorite band of all time, Brainiac), the Pkids are the band of my 20s. I saw them for the first time in early 1995, when I was 20 (they headlined a bill on the Marquette campus featuring Brainiac and Unwound—bills like that just don’t happen anymore); the last time I saw them, we were opening the Champaign record release show for their No More Songs About Sleep and Fire album in 2004, the year I turned 30. But instead of honoring that sublime piece of synchronicity by turning around and driving straight back to Wisconsin, we pushed on and arrived in Champaign at the High Dive around 5:30 PM on Sunday, May 24, 2009, a good five years since we’d seen them last.

reospeedwagon

Fig.2: I am unable to fight this feeling that this sign is ridiculous

The High Dive resides on Main St. in Champaign, which is also known as “Honorary REO Speedwagon Way” if you believe the signs underneath the official street labels (the band had its roots in Champaign, although they don’t seem to have inspired the likes of Hum or Menthol). As we found ourselves “reelin’” from this revelation, we decided it was “time for [us] to fly” and find some food before the rain clouds above began to dump on us. So we “took it on the run” to local pizza joint Papa Del’s while we “rode the storm out.” I’m really sorry about this paragraph. Let’s “keep pushin’” on, shall we? (Gah! Sorry!)

040_papa_dels

Fig.3: A file photo of Champaign’s home for deep-dish insanity (since as an intrepid blogger, it’s apparently my job to not own a goddamn digital camera of my own)

We met up with our old pal Mike, whom we had met long ago through the Pkids Listserv (an old internet nerd community of Poster Children fans) as well as our bud Dixie from Milwaukee’s own white, wrench, conservatory. and enjoyed a serviceable meal of flat-crust Papa Del’s pizza (Mike seemed to regard it as the best pizza ever; Abbie thought the crust should have been thinner. I enjoyed it overall, but would have rather sampled the incredible-looking pan-style shit that was floating around the restaurant. A vaguely nauseated shake of the head from thin-crust loyalist Abbie dashed those hopes). At that point it was back to the High Dive (while walking past “Ye Olde Donut Shoppe: since 1976”) for the start of the show and still more reunions with old friends from Pkids-list as well as current pals from a newer online nerd community: the Electrical Audio Forum, a message board run by Steve Albini’s recording studio.

We fanboys and fangirls weren’t the only ones feeling the reunion vibes—the evening’s lineup was one of reunited 80s/90s Champaign bands. Openers The Outnumbered regaled the audience with stories from their heyday, including a pretty funny moment when the bassist read a passage from Ginoli’s new book, Deflowered: My Life In Pansy Division, and busted Ginoli for getting his height wrong. The songs were fun, singer-songwriter-style jangley guitar pop, but I couldn’t help wondering if I’d bother with it if I had first heard it on a recording.

Second band The Lonely Trailer, on the other hand, entertained the hell out of not only the Champaign faithful but also those of us who had never heard of them before. Our new pal Carlin (an EA Forum dude) had hyped them up to us, and when I said hi to Pkids bassist Rose Marshack during the Outnumbered set, she echoed Carlin’s endorsement. They weren’t lying, as the Trailer plowed through a solid set of eclectic screwy-time-signature-laden freak-folkish punk (and I know I rip on freak-folk a lot, but I mean this in a good way). What can you say about a singing drummer who occasionally drums while playing harmonica at the same time? Holy crap. Bar = raised.

After the following set by Cowboy X (which I almost completely missed due to chatting with some of Dixie’s pals, but the Wizard really dug their Damien Jurado cover, I know that much), the night’s star attraction began to set up. During the evening I had benefited from Carlin’s generosity as he plied us Milwaukeeans with $2 PBRs, even when I had bought my own. (One of my Twitter posts at this point: “Double fisting 2 dollar PBRs at the Hi Dive in Champaign, waiting for Porter Children. Q: Am i living the High Life?” I leave in the typos as proof that indeed I was living the High Life, even if it was PBR and not Miller.) Thus, by the time the Pkids were ready to play, I was ready to fricking dance, as were the rest of the Pkids-list/EA Forum-dominated throng we had assembled at the front of the stage.

roseonstage

Fig.4: Rose! (photographed by Tarik Dozier, as are the rest of the shots in this post) Let’s see you rock this hard mere weeks after popping out a kid

Poster Children are definitely starting to look like Poster Adults at this point in their lives; since we met these kids back in 1995, Rose and guitarist Rick Valentin have gotten married and had two kids, and guitarist (and Rick’s brother) Jim Valentin’s hair has gone from blonde in 2004 to completely gray. The only dude in the band who still really fits the definition of “child” (relatively speaking) is Matt Friscia, the band’s seventh drummer who I’m pretty sure is actually younger than me (obviously making him a “child,” right? Right?). But for all the collective “holy cats are we getting old” sentiments in the building, all it took was Rose’s trademark “Hi, we’re Poster Children from Champaign, IL” for the entire room to instantly de-age 15 years.

rickonstage

The band blasted into the opening chords of “Wanna,” off the band’s debut album, Flower Plower (released twenty fricking years ago in 1989), and the place went nuclear. There wasn’t much room for dancing with everyone crowded near the stage, so I opted for non-stop pogoing through the entire hour-plus the Pkids were on, blasting through their trademark blend of new wave and post-punk—sort of a Mission of Burma/Talking Heads hybrid (NOTE: It has come to my attention that the word “pogoing” is seen by some as a bit of an anachronism, but I dunno, what do you call a dance where you jump up and down in place because there’s limited room for booty-shaking? “Jumping up and down?” That’s why you’re not a writer, sparky). All the notes of a classic Poster Children set were hit: during the computer-nerd shut-in anthem “6X6,jimonstage” chunks of the crowd followed along with the Pkids fanboy “6X6” hand motion (three fingers held up on each hand, crossed arms, three fingers held up on each hand while the chorus “six! by! six!” is sung…I think I may have invented that, actually); during breaks in the action, Rose asked for questions from the audience (a trick they borrowed from Steve Albini’s band Shellac, cleverly referenced when our pal Joe Lemur yelled out “What was it like working with Nirvana?”). Rose, mere weeks removed from the birth of her second child (which Rick claimed was a piece of cake, much to Rose’s bemusement), ran around the stage like a twentysomething while the rest of us danced, pumped our fists, and yelled in a similarly youthenized (as opposed to euthanized, ha) fashion.

For those of you who are actually Poster Children fans, here’s the setlist, a cross-section of the band’s entire 20-year discography:

pkidssetlist

Fig.5: Proof that Poster Children need to play out more: Rick’s lyrical crib notes for “21st Century”

After “The Bottle,” the set closed with an impromptu “Where We Live” off Daisychain Reaction, and then it was on to encore #1: “Sick of It All” off the Just Like You EP and “New Boyfriend” from Junior Citizen. When they again left the stage, a chant of “You’re not done!” brought them back one more time for a second encore that no one was expecting—a cover of Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” The fuck? By the end of it, several fans were on stage singing along, including, well, Joe Lemur, Carlin, and myself. Ridiculous.

prfknockin

Fig.6: l-r. Carlin, Some Dude, Joe Lemur, and I mangle a classic

It can’t be stressed enough how important this band is to many of my friends and me. While I’m not sure if my band was influenced by them musically, reading Rose’s years of tour journals gave us invaluable advice on the mechanics of being in a band long-term. I met one of my ex-girlfriends when a mutual friend drove both of us to a Pkids show in Beloit. We met Sean because of the Pkids in 1997, and he eventually joined our band in 2001. To say that this band affected the course of my life would be a major understatement. During the between song Q-and-A session, one fan yelled out “When are you playing again? I can’t live without this!” I found myself hard-pressed to disagree, given the evidence.

At the end of the weekend, we all went back to our regular lives, including the quieter family life that Rick and Rose have settled into, complete with ordinary day jobs. Sure, they got signed, but they never became the huge rock stars that the office co-workers that don’t “get it” always assume we’re trying to become (not that this was ever their goal). But despite the day jobs, the child-rearing, and the gray hairs, they occasionally come back out of hibernation to turn back the clock for themselves and their overly-excitable fans. So, guys…when are you playing again? Because ok, maybe I can live without this, but with it, I can guarantee I’ll stay young a little longer.

0 thoughts on “Cultural Zero: Poster Children in Champaign, IL: On Vacation For Forever and a Day”

  1. Anonymous says:

    Hey! I didn’t “borrow” the question and answer session technique from Shellac, although I noticed after we did it the first couple of times that they do it too. I have no idea how it started, but it seems like a pretty natural thing to do when you’re on a stage in front of a lot of people.

  2. Anonymous says:

    A picture AND a quote!

    Going forward, all communication with me shall be through my agent.

  3. Anonymous says:

    Hrm, so maybe the Q-and-A was just some spontaneous collective-consciousness idea generated by both bands simultaneously through an undetected telepathic brainstorming linkup?

  4. Anonymous says:

    dude! at age 73, I’d never ever have guessed I’m that old, my hair is totally white, so fret not o’er a few stray grays. you are a rockin writer…

  5. Anonymous says:

    I’m actually a fan of my grays. My dad at 60 has a pretty 50-50 black/gray salt and pepper mix, and i’m looking forward to it. 🙂 And thanks for the compliment!

  6. Anonymous says:

    I cannot even count the number of important people I know in my life that I would not know because of the poster children.

    It’s true, and strangely I have only ever seen them play one time.
    Great piece.

  7. Anonymous says:

    Thanks for the great write-up DJ! I hated to miss this, but it’s too far/expensive from Texas. (the HiFi should play down this way sometime, btw)

    quoted for truth: “I cannot even count the number of important people I know in my life that I would not know because of the poster children”
    -Conan

  8. Anonymous says:

    Take warning: If you call them “The Poster Children” instead of “Poster Children,” Rose Marshack and Rick Valentin will publicly ridicule you on their Podcast. No, I’m not kidding. Yes, it is the saddest thing ever.

Leave a Reply

You must be an Urban Milwaukee member to leave a comment. Membership, which includes a host of perks, including an ad-free website, tickets to marquee events like Summerfest, the Wisconsin State Fair and the Florentine Opera, a better photo browser and access to members-only, behind-the-scenes tours, starts at $9/month. Learn more.

Join now and cancel anytime.

If you are an existing member, sign-in to leave a comment.

Have questions? Need to report an error? Contact Us