Shut Up and Listen

I was born and bred in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa (pop. 7,513), the live-wire son of an ultra-driven but hard-drinking savings and loan executive and a hyperactive perfectionist with a cleaning fetish who had once been voted "America's Most Beautiful Teenager." Believe me when I tell ya my mother, Alice, was a real show-stopper in the looks department - china doll skin, long, shapely legs, willow wasp waist and all. We had a lousy county fair, a state institution for the mentally deranged - (my mother told me they had people in there who ate their own poop) - a highly regarded high school football program, and our tallest building was three stories high. We even had a Dairy Queen. There were eleven bars. Drunken lushes everywhere I looked.For the first 14 years of my life, we were a racing town, which suited me just fine. But Mt. Pleasant, then as now, can't do anything right. With the stroke of a city planner's pen, racing was abolished without fanfare in 1968. This was the first of many grudges that I still hold against my hometown. One day, I swear I will burn the president of the fair board's house to the fucking ground (not really) to get even with him for this unspeakable crime against humanity. The once mighty half-mile Iowa top-soil oval has now been reduced to hosting tractor pulls and demolition derbies once a year during our pathetic county fair. Dirty bastards. For a kid like me, who craved non-stop action and cheap thrills, the small town pace felt like slow death. Me and my best friend, Joe Rommel, great-nephew of the Desert Fox, Erwin Rommel, engaged in constant rounds of malicious vandalism and grand larceny capers. Brushes with the cops became commonplace.Mt. Pervert, as my friends and I liked to call it, used to be known as a nice, squeaky clean place to raise a family - a regular Norman Rockwell painting sprung to life.But not anymore.In the span of just 12 years, there were 15 homicides, most of them unsolved, easily the most notorious of which was the point-blank assassination of our mayor at a city council meeting in 1985. I'd known Edd King all my life, and he was a prince of a man if ever there was one. Whacked-out World War II vet Ralph Oren Davis (how come assassins always have three names?) was unhappy that his sewer was backing up, and when the meeting was called to order, Davis approached the dais and started blasting. Put a woman in my mom's bridge club in a wheelchair for life. Davis, I hope, is still rotting in prison in nearby Fort Madison.Suddenly, meth labs were as plentiful as pig shit, and these tweaked-out thugs would shoot you in the face over a rack of 8-ball. I just had to get the fuck outta there and fast.After a four-and-a-half-year stint at a cow college in Missouri armed me with a bachelor's degree, I began my first real stab at becoming a responsible citizen in Champaign, Illinois. This proved to be a complete debacle. Convinced that certain pop stardom was my destiny, me and my beloved '59 Ludwigs migrated to Milwaukee's burgeoning punk scene, where my services were enlisted as drummer and singer for such notable acts as RPMs, Red Ball Jets, Plasticland, Liquid Pink, Dog-Style Dandies, The Carolinas, White-Hot Tizzies, Love Bully, Rob McCuen and the Ruins, and countless other bad-ass, fly-by-night combos.At last count, I have plied my trade in 29 states and 14 countries on rock and roll's dime, and have appeared either as singer or drummer on 23 records. My life's work now lives in bargain bins all over the world. All the while, my musical "career" has been repeatedly interrupted by the annoying reality of earning a living, an endeavor in which I continue to fail miserably. In the 31 jobs I have been force-fed throughout my slapstick life, there is but one common denominator: They all sucked.Rob McCuen