Running Man performing at Ragged Records' Alternating Currents concert: August 19, 2023
Shortly after I started snagging handbills and fliers from the Davenport and Moline Co-Op Records shops and stuffing them in my brown paper bag, with all the used CDs I’d just purchased, as a fresh driving high school kid, I began hearing that the Quad Cities music scene was shitty. Or that it was hard to make anything work. Or that no one cared. Or that you couldn’t expect to get anyone out of their houses. Or that nothing good ever came here. Or that every music scene in the country was more robust or done better. Or that, or that, or that … . It was never-ending, and has never been productive.
It felt like there was a constant supply of bitterness and nay-saying that people wanted to throw down on a plate and chow up, like kenneled puppies and degenerates stuck in a doom spiral of their own making. It always felt like those badmouthing the scene and area, those putting this weird-ass cluster of cities on a list of the least desirable of places to live or entertain oneself, were missing everything. Even as a teenager, it felt like hollow cries made by uninformed and ignorant babies – pissed children. But that’s what we’ve grown up with and that’s what we’ve lived with. We correct when it gets egregious and we scold when they nettle and pinch too hard, but for some reason, this moronic thought that the Quad Cities music scene is crippled or lesser prevails through the times.
We do live in an age of the unenlightened, to put it mildly, so I guess grains of salt are the tea leaves that we have to position against or around. But I’ve never been one to think that this place is beaten. As a lifelong QCA boy, man, or whatever, I’ve been willing to bark and bite at anything challenging what a lot of us have been working on. I will fight – not literally, but maybe literally fight – anyone who thinks we live in a place that needs to be looked down upon. I will stand up to anyone who believes that this city and this place are subservient to anywhere else, as if there are end caps to towns and scenes – if one person determines that there’s no hope, then there’s no hope. I’ve been doing this too long. So have Pat Stolley and Ian Harris and the Parris brothers and Jason Gilliland and Ben Fawks and Bob Herington and Kate Benson and Kyle Peters and the other lifers who do all of the things on the other side of the kite. There is a side of this argument where you can just spit in a general direction and you can say, figure it out, 'cause we’ve been banging our heads forever and things aren’t really looking so bad, so just come out and have a good night. If you can’t handle that, then you’ve got problems.
The scene right now is sneaky-good, almost white-hot – in the way it was during the time when we opened the Daytrotter venue and Condor & Jaybird, Mountain Swallower, and Sister Wife were feeding off one another in very cool ways, more than a decade ago. Here’s a bit of a story that makes me think this little fire is going to result in a prolonged come-up for the scene.
This last Monday, an unassuming one, anyone could have been invited to a gathering at the airplane-hangar-like room slapped onto the east side of Pour Bros. in Moline, for an evening of special and inviting offerings of creativity that otherwise wouldn’t have been offered. What the gathering of 50 to 75 people – who purchased tickets in advance – witnessed was a couple of hours of vulnerable writing that Netflix doesn’t give you. When we sit on the couch, there’s a pill that we swallow. We are taking down what they want us to: the stories and the tones. But they aren’t fully ours, and maybe that’s why folks around here feel misrepresented. Rightly or wrongly, we are river rats and Midwesterners of various biochemistries. We might be here or there or augmented with other temperaments. But when we get mad, we will get mad about similar things, and we can huff about what other grumpy dissenters huff against.
What happened on Monday – last week or whenever – was that these three writers gave of themselves in scary ways. For a small 15 dollars, anyone who decided to show up got a trio of people exposing themselves. The capper was Maggie Discal, performing her never-before-heard opus “Mommy Planet,” in front of friends and strangers, for the first time. I will gladly speak for everyone who was in attendance that evening and say that none of us have had a night like that in forever. None of us have felt like anyone from here has made us feel so buzzed about what is out there, undiscovered, being woodshedded.
It wasn’t necessarily the lyrics (but it was the lyrics). It wasn't the content, even though it was absolutely the content. It was the delivery. It was that it was a Monday and it was the unassuming nature of asking people to come out for something they didn’t know anything about. This is what the Quad Cities music scene is and has always been about. Sure, we can show up for Nirvana at Palmer Auditorium or Vampire Weekend at Huckleberry’s Pizza Parlor or Bon Iver at the Rust Belt. But can we be there for the question marks? For those trying to find their punctuation?
The Quad Cities, in the 20-plus years that I’ve been actively doing things here – from the Daytrotter days to the days of new, where nothing makes much sense as the squiggly matters go – has been known for its persnickety attitude towards anything unheard of. It shouldn’t matter, and wouldn’t matter, if we didn’t hold a reputation for being one of those weird, sorta college towns that’s not really a college town, that still has a lot of young folks hanging around in it, and it just so happens to be right in the middle of the country’s most prominent highway, which cuts straight through.
People need to sleep. People need to break up drives and that’s why we get bands from all over the world, stuck between Chicago and Colorado, with nothing better to do than to play a show. And we’re lucky. We aren’t shown pity. These artists want to be here. They aren’t doing us a favor. But if no one shows up, it doesn’t feel good at all. Then it’s worse than something feeling like a favor.
Rather than having a scenario where we have artists stopping in town to throw us a bone, over the last 20-some years, we have established ourselves as one of the best scenes in the Midwest, if not the entire country. Go ahead and look at the evidence and there’s no way anyone can dispute that the Quad Cities is one of the preeminent music scenes in the country. Not only are numerous venues hosting some of the best nationally touring bands on a nightly basis. But for the first time in a long time, we are witnessing – in real time – a chest-out presentation of great great great local artists, from every genre, presenting their art, their soul, their reality, in a way that they haven’t been able to show until a few years ago.
We have everything. We have the standard bearers like Subatlantic, Chrash, and Mountain Swallower, who have all been around for ages and ages, assuring us that there can be beautiful longevity to the idea of sticking around and taking shows and being unique and showcasing what it means to be an example for those unwilling to just be lookers. Everyone in these bands does a million things, and yet they present themselves as curious and feisty, and if that isn’t an example what it takes to be a true artist, then I’m not sure what could ever be more of one.
We are surrounded by new artists, big-eyed and ready to play all of the tough nights, and to be there to show that there is nothing better than to be torn to shreds for blissful side work. We have punk and weirdo bands like Cough ‘n Flop, Blaster, and Mocktag. We have the graphic novel types – the Lady Igraine and Company Dimes sect of the Quad Cities. We have Systems doing Metalmouth versions of noisecore songs on knitting needles, along with Void Church shows that will demand that you stop trying to come up with reasons not to be in the room. Because every time one happens, you’re likely to stay up too late and get into the weeds about silly nuances that matter a whole lot. You have the three hundred Alex Mahaffey bands, including Everlasting Light and The Hunting Grounds Death Cult, always geared up and primed for all-welcoming ruckus or sea shanty, if needed. We have Giallows and the occasional recurrence of Archeress and their touching soundtracks to an assortment of feels.
There is Running Man, a local super-group featuring members of every great local indie-rock band of the last 20 years and the lead singer of The Dead Kennedys, one of the most famous punk bands in U.S. history. There are singer/songwriters who bust their humps getting out there and keeping it tight: Angela Meyer; Lewis Knudsen (Lewy Canoe); Tambourine; JD Aguilera; Tobin Kirk; Nicole Dean; Matt Van; Mo Carter; Scott Stowe. There are auxiliary geniuses like Jenny Lynn Stacy, Jon Burns (Centaur Noir & Camp Regret), and others in bands that change names to fit the day, who show that there’s nothing like being able to just show who you are.
We might not have everything. We might not have it all. But the Quad Cities is currently showing something that it hasn’t in a very long time, and if you aren’t paying attention, that’s a damned shame.
Sean Moeller books the Raccoon Motel in downtown Davenport, and is releasing his first book – Plain Clothes Hamburglar – March 11 on Rejection Letters (RejectionLetters.bigcartel.com/product/pre-order-plain-clothes-hamburglar-by-sean-moeller).
