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New book by ISU professor Rose Marshack details life with the punk-rock band Poster Children

Rose Marshack holding her new book 'Play Like a Man: My Life in Poster Children'.jpg
Jon Norton
/
WGLT
ISU Professor of Creative Technologies Director Rose Marshack is the author of "Play Like a Man: My Life in Poster Children."

"Play Like a Man: My Life in Poster Children" is a new book authored by Illinois State University professor Rose Marshack. It documents her life as a woman in the punk-rock band Poster Children.

The director of ISU's Creative Technologies program and fellow professor/husband Rick Valentin formed the quartet in the late 1980s in Champaign-Urbana. Poster Children recorded on a major record label and toured the U.S. and Europe extensively.

The book also details the band at the forefront of the DIY music scene. One example is how Marshack utilized the community information network Prairienet to stay in touch with fans. Essentially blogging before there was a name for it.

Marshack spoke with WGLT's Jon Norton about the book in this lightly edited interview.

WGLT: You say the title comes from an admonishment by your father while practicing classical piano once as a child, that he wanted you to play "harder."

Marshack: He said, “You need to play more like a man.” And then he said, “I can tell the difference. If I have my eyes shut and I hear a recording or I hear somebody playing, I can tell if they're a woman or a man.” I was like, “Oh, well, then I'll just play harder.” I wasn't like, “Oh, you're calling me weak.” I'm kind of proud of the fact that, “Oh, he's telling me that women are equal to men. And I'll just play harder.”

That's what was fascinating. You didn't take offense to that at all?

No, no, I just figured he's telling me that everybody could be equal. And I must have grown up that way. I'm like, oblivious to these places that I've been in. I've (been a) computer science major. I studied martial arts, I'm in a rock band. And there are apparently not a lot of females that do these things. And it just never even occurred to me. And I think I wrote that in the book, too. I, at some point, looked around and my computer programming class has there's three women and 100 men in this room? Wow. I didn't know, never noticed it.

You ended up playing bass in a punk band. How did that idea play out … instrumentally … for you? Were your father's words etched in your head as you picked up that instrument?

They probably were. My dad was pretty intense on me when I was learning as I was younger, and I would get into arguments with him. Sometimes they'd get physical. I talked back to him all the time. I think I reenact that on the stage. So, I have a pretty physical presence on the stage. And I know I'm smiling on the stage. I try to play violently, but happily and violently on the stage. There's a lyric in one of our songs that Rick sings, called "Violence with Guitars.” I think we try to carry that out.

That's an interesting observation. Because Rick, your husband, is the front person in the band. He's the lead vocalist. He's the principal songwriter, right?

Yeah.

So ostensibly, he is the front person of the band, but you are the one that it's hard to keep eyes off of, because you are so physical on stage.

Rick gets that way, too, I think. And our drummer is very physical also. So, if you watch us play, you'll see my algorithm on the stage as to … if there's an empty space on the stage then I attempt to occupy it. You can imagine, oh, there's an empty spot right there, I better go over there. And then I kind of look around as I'm playing. Oh, there's an empty spot over there. I better go over there. And during this time, I'm paying very close attention to the drummer. I think, all of us together, we are pretty physical on the stage.

Let's stay on this idea for a minute. Then I want to get into the more DIY ethic of Poster Children. You guys started out in the 1980s. And having a female in almost any kind of band at the time was kind of unusual, but especially in a punk band, right?

I think there were more women in the DIY indie rock scene than there were probably anywhere else.

At that time?

Yeah, even at that time. Sure. I think so. I think there was a low bar for entry. Right? I think it was a grassroots community. And I think people were very accepting.

Oh, interesting. How has that gravitated over the years?

I think that there's more emphasis now. “We have to get lots of females on the stage, there’s not enough.” I think there's more of an effort to … you guys (WGLT) did a good story on this back when I was writing this book. You realize that there are tons of female musicians. If you go to BJ HS (Bloomington Junior High School) and you look at the orchestra, I'm guessing it's more (females) than the amount that you will see on the rock stages, right? So, there's some bar of entry for women. They don't feel like they can go on the more rock stages I guess.

I know you talked about in the book … how I think you said you didn't care much for the idea when they featured women in magazines, like Women of Rock or women of this …

I learned that as I was researching in this book. There's a great quote from … Can I quote?

Sure.

I'm opening the book.

You wrote it (laughter).

So yeah, Marion Leonard writes in “Gender in the Music Industry” … “The very phrase ‘women in rock’ usually works to peculiarize the presence of women performers. Rock discourse thus normalizes the male performer and so deems the activity of women in the field worthy of note." So it's like, oh Rolling Stone (magazine) this month will be the month of the women. It's so weird that women are in rock you know … what a strange thing that women could be musicians and then we go back to the normal life, the normal life of these magazines which still have mostly men in them. And it shouldn't be that way. It's so when women are singled out when there's a Year of the Woman or something like that, that's sort of, Oh, that's peculiar that women are there.

Did you feel different back then?

No, I'd never noticed any of that. I mean, I'm sitting in a van with three other men and they're hanging their smelly wet underwear in the van and stuff. And I was just like, I'll hang my bra here. Yeah, when I talk to my fellow Midwestern bass sisters, Heidi from Mercy Rule, Barb from House of Large Sizes, and they're like, “Yeah, we didn't notice that we were women and rock or anything.” Nobody thought about that at all. We were just doing our jobs like the like the rest of the men in the rock bands.

You said you don't consider yourself a writer, yet you started this conversation with how you were writing what essentially was a blog before we had a name for a blog. You mentioned Prairienet was your way into doing that … and you were able to stay connected with your fans that way.

Yeah, Rick and I are kind of predecessors to all this dissemination of information on the internet. And it was his idea, I think, to write. “Why don't you write little tour reports and just upload them in HTML to the internet and see what happens." I think I started in 1995. So, the word "blog" came about way, way later than that.

Did you feel it was a great … for lack of better way of saying it … marketing tool for the band?

Oh, Poster Children was never really into marketing … “Oh, we have to get more people to find out about us. And we're going to sell lots of merchandise.” We were never like that. We were really into trying to get our word out by trying to inspire others ... trying to just have a community of like-minded people. So, writing tour reports, and uploading them to the internet. And then we would travel to the next show. And I think one of our tours … we had 88 shows in a row, right? This is what a tour was for us … just touring around the United States and just driving around van. Maybe we play Iowa City. And then I'd upload a tour report for whatever happened there, and then we drive up to Minneapolis, and people who came to see the show in Minneapolis would already know everything that had happened to us. And they'd have things to discuss with us. And it was great.

Well, it's interesting, a record label or PR firm would say this is great marketing.

Right.

But you call it community building.

Yeah. So, one of the things that I really loved back in the day was that we had a Usenet newsgroup. And it was alt.music.posterkids. This is kind of the predecessor to Reddit. Every band would have their own little … it was a news group … not a chat forum, but a forum where you could leave messages. Every band had that. But for ours, I remember we were kind of in control of our News Group. And we said, "please, when you write in this news group, don't write anything about us. We don't want to hear about ourselves. We want to hear what you learned today, please just write about stuff that's interesting to you. It shouldn't have anything to do with our band." So, we had the best posts in there. We learned all kinds of stuff from people who liked our band, I guess.

You are very emphatic in the book that you didn't want to “sell out.” That was a Poster Children thing. But you signed to a major record label.

That was an indie rock thing. So you didn't want to sell out and we never would have wanted to be on a major label. And then I remember standing in front of a class and I was like, “and then we had to sign to the major label.” And one kid in the back raised his hand and said, “why wouldn't you want to do that?” I was like, “oh, yeah, I have to explain that.”

Wasn't that considered selling out to sign with a major record label?

Yeah.

So how did you guys come to terms with that?

That’s a good question. So, we signed to Sire, because we knew they had a history of developing bands. We were kind of afraid of Columbia (Records) and I think we had Interscope even looking at us. And I remember us asking some of the people at the major labels, "Well, how many records do you think we could sell?” I remember, I think, maybe Jimmy Iovine said at least 100,000. We were like, “No, there's no way we'll ever sell that much." And we sound like a punk rock band and we're not going to change. So, we signed with Sire, because it seemed like we would be able to keep our integrity, we would be able to keep control of everything. In that way, we kind of felt like we weren't selling out. We we made our own cover art all the time. We still drove ourselves around in our van.

Was that part of the deal that you wanted to do your own cover art?

Yeah, simple. Yeah. Absolutely, yeah.

In the book, you said you turned down a tour bus … that the record company would pay for a tour bus for you.

Oh, sure, we could have taken tour support. And we did take tour buses in Europe, but in America, yeah, that would cost them a lot of money. And you could take tour support from the record label, but that would be money that you kind of owed them back.

So, for the last 20 years, it's been more academic, but you stayed with the band. How has that whole ethos of what we were just talking about … flying under the radar, the DIY ethic? How has that played out over the last 20 years?

I'm so lucky that I became the music business teacher here at ISU. The things that we learned over the years, like being able to speak for ourselves and using technology to do that, is very important now for students these days. Because everybody's got access to digital media, and everybody can promote themselves and everybody can get their message out that way.

(pause) No, that's terrible. I would say … I'm so used to just Rick (being with her) and then he'll be like ...

Actually, I was thinking about asking you about that. That it's an interesting dynamic, the two of you have.

Somebody asked me why I come off the stage crying all the time. “You know, you wrote about this in the book, you're crying, even if you had a good show, you know, why? Why did you get so upset?” I looked over to Rick, I'm like, “Rick, why did I get so upset?” And he had the perfect answer. ”We were up against Gods; we would see all these bands like for Fugazi and The Didjits from Champaign. And we had to prove ourselves, you know, we had to be as good as them.

Are you happy with how the book turned out?

Yeah, I am really happy with it. I can't believe I've written a book. I can't. I know I was in the process for many years. It's kind of like when your first record comes to your house in a box, you open it up and you're like, “Oh my god, this is our record! This is the cover art and everything.” I went through three different banks of peer review. The peer reviewers had great things to say … like really good input. And I was also like, “Well, what's gonna happen when I get my first peer review? Am I going to cry and give up? And I didn't, I was like, “oh, somebody read what I wrote. And they actually had interesting input. I don't consider myself a writer at all. I think that's why I didn't have any high expectations.

Jon Norton is the program director at WGLT and WCBU. He also is host of All Things Considered every weekday.
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