Marketplace of Ideas Blog

Wikipedia says the following about “Music of Wisconsin”:

Wisconsin was settled largely by European immigrants in the late 1800s. This immigration led to the popularization of galops, schottisches, waltzes, and, especially, polkas. Classical composers and conductors from Wisconsin include Hans Balatka, Hugo Kaun and Eugene Luening.

Whether or not you danced the schottisch in gym — sorry, physical education — class, or, like me, took a dance class with your spouse to learn how to correctly dance the waltz and polka, you’ll note that that paragraph says nothing about rock music being a staple of Wisconsin. For some reason, the state that produced Spencer Tracy, Fred MacMurray, Orson Welles, Harrison Ford (once he got to Ripon College), Willem Dafoe and numerous other film industry figures, and a state that, at Lawrence University, has a music conservatory of note (and which hosted really cool jazz concerts over the years), has produced no rock and roll figures of similar stature.

In fact, even the broader world of pop music has few Wisconsin contributors. If your definition of “Wisconsin rock” includes someone with songs that reached the charts, then all of them are from the Madison and Milwaukee areas. (However, if you know of an act based somewhere in Northeast Wisconsin that did reach the charts — Billboard and the like, which counts out the Wizenheimers, CWA and other bands that recorded Packers-themed songs — do let me know.)

Any discussion of Wisconsin’s contribution to popular music starts with Waukesha guitarist Les Paul, who died this week. Paul not only recorded 47 hit singles between 1945 and 1961 and 40 albums, including the 2008 “Les Paul and Friends: A Tribute to a Legend,” but was responsible for such musical innovations as the solid-body electric guitar, overdubbing, reverb, such delay effects as sound-on-sound and tape delay, phasing effects, and multitrack recording. The latter set of contributions — the Smithsonian Institution calls him “a unique blend of musician and inventor” — earned him the nickname “the Wizard of Waukesha.”

What was Wisconsin’s first rock band? Sarah Filzen, author of The History of Cuca Records, 1959–1973: A Case Study of an Independent Record Company, says:

Rock, however, was a relative latecomer to Wisconsin. In other parts of the country, rock-a-billy groups like Bill Haley and Elvis, who married the blues and country styles on their recordings, were hitting the charts as early as 1953. Southern Wisconsin, by contrast, did not see its first rock big-name group until 1958 when Vilas Craig formed his band, the Viscounts. …

Craig and the Viscounts, joined by a student string section from University of Wisconsin–Madison, recorded the single “Little Miss Brown Eyes” at the Cuca studios in 1962. This was their fifth venture into the recording milieu, having started in 1959 at Kay Banks studio, an independent label located in Chicago. By 1962 the band had a large Wisconsin audience and supply of teenage buyers for their rock music. In 1959, however, while playing live in Baraboo, Craig recalled that teens, “didn’t even know what rock was … they weren't into it.” Also in 1959 the band played gigs in Prairie du Chien, Readstown, and Soldiers Grove, where they had to guarantee the inclusion of polkas in their repertoire in order to secure the gigs.

Why, you ask, do I bring up Vilas Craig and the Vicounts (not Viscounts, originally the Kollege Kings)? Well, you are reading the work of the son of the band’s first piano player (second from the right with poor posture; Craig is second from the left), that’s why. (He lives in Waupaca, so he’s local now. I too was in a band, and I can say that I played in front of more people than he did.) Their recorded hits (and I’ve seen the records — seven inches, round, with big holes in the middle — so I can attest to their existence) include “Spring Fever” (note the piano work from 10 seconds onward), “Little Miss Brown Eyes,” “Little Miss Mary,” “You Know How,” “Poor Loser,” and “Walking Down the Avenue.”

(Craig sounds interestingly like Bobby Vee in some of the songs, and Vee has a link of sorts to this area. As you know, the next to last concert of Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Richie Valens and The Big Bopper before their deaths in a 1959 plane crash was at the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay, following a harrowing subzero bus ride from Duluth to Green Bay. One night later, the plane Holly chartered crashed shortly after takeoff outside Clear Lake, Iowa. The next night, the dead musicians were replaced at the concert they were flying to in Moorhead, Minn., by a band fronted by 15-year-old Robert Velline of Fargo, N.D. Velline later changed his name to Bobby Vee.)

Wisconsin’s two most notable acts, in terms of record sales, would probably be Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs. Miller, a Milwaukee native whose godfather was some guy named Les Paul, and Scaggs met in prep school in Dallas and formed a band, then reunited at the University of Wisconsin. After Miller went back to Dallas, he ended up in San Francisco, then met Scaggs again, and Scaggs was a guitarist in the first iteration of the Steve Miller Band. The band first became known on the San Francisco blues scene, including the Monterey Pop Festival, but by the 1970s Miller reached his commercial zenith with the "Fly Like an Eagle" album, along with "The Joker" (which includes the immortal lyric “’cause I speak of the pompatus of love”), “Jet Airliner,” “Rock ’N Me,” “Take the Money and Run” (where he tries to rhyme “Texas,” “what the facts is,” “justice” and “the people’s taxes”), “Swingtown,” “Jungle Love” and “Abracadabra.”

Scaggs left the Steve Miller Band in 1968 to embark on a solo career, which didn’t reach fruition until his 1976 album “Silk Degrees,” which featured “Lowdown” and “Lido Shuffle.” He also contributed “Look What You’ve Done to Me” to the soundtrack of the 1980 movie “Urban Cowboy.” (The side note, so to speak, is that Scaggs reportedly didn’t want to contribute “Lowdown” to “Saturday Night Fever,” whose star, John Travolta, later did “Urban Cowboy.”)

Two Madison residents deserve mention for their roles in popular acts. Clyde Stubblefield, the drummer of James Brown, reportedly has the most sampled song in history. (Warning: Go here, and you won’t be able to get that out of your head all day.) Ben Sidran was the Steve Miller Band’s second keyboardist before moving off into the jazz world, quite successfully.

In the 1980s, Milwaukee’s Violent Femmes recorded “Blister in the Sun,” which is still heard on radio today. So is “The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades,” sung by Timbuk3, which began in Madison. (Timbuk3’s lead singer, Green Bay native (as a correspondent reminded me, for which I pass on thanks) Pat McDonald, is involved with Sturgeon Bay’s Steel Bridge Songfest, the effort to save the Michigan Street Bridge, which has in the past attracted Jackson Browne and Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Gos.)

Wisconsin’s best known rock band is a contemporary of the Violent Femmes and Timbuk3 — the BoDeans, which recorded “Fadeaway” (not to be confused with “She's a Runaway”), “Good Work,” “Good Things,” “Still the Night,” and “Closer to Free.” Their debut album, “Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams,” has been called one of the best first albums of all time.

The BoDeans were huge for a while in the 1980s — Rolling Stone magazine’s readers’ poll named them the Best New American Band in 1987 — and certainly will always be popular in Wisconsin. They are an example of what’s called “roots rock,” an amalgam of blues, country and folk music, all of which (along with jazz) contributed to rock and roll. The BoDeans could be said to be the successors to such acts as the Allman Brothers, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Marshall Tucker Band, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young, along with their contemporary, John Mellencamp.

Wisconsin’s most recent contribution to rock music is Garbage, formed in Madison, whose drummer, Butch Vig, was producer of the Nirvana album “Nevermind” (which included “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Come as You Are”) and the Smashing Pumpkins album “Siamese Dream.” Garbage is known most for “Only Happy When It Rains,” and for the theme song to the James Bond movie “The World Is Not Enough.”

The aforementioned acts, though, do not make up a long list. (But it’s longer than Wisconsin-based country acts — as far as I know, no country band with Wisconsin ties has ever charted.) Obviously Wisconsin has a lot of rock bands of local popularity (for instance, Vic Ferrari and Copperbox), some of which even have their own recordings (which, thanks to recording technology and the Internet, is easier to do today), but very few have jumped over the state lines.

Perhaps the Wikipedia entry is correct that waltzes and polkas have always been more popular than more nationally popular forms of music. (Northeast Wisconsin Packer fans from the ’60s recall that the Alvin Styczynski polka band show preceded Packers games on WBAY-TV (channel 2) in Green Bay, part of a long tradition of polka shows on Wisconsin TV and radio. This listing doesn’t even include Ripon’s own “Tuba Dan.”)

An example is the Happy Schnapps Combo, whose creator, Jim “Bruiser” Krueger, wrote “We Just Disagree,” which recording by former Traffic member Dave Mason reached number 12 in the U.S. in 1977. The Combo’s biography says that Krueger tired of the Los Angeles lifestyle and returned to his hometown of Manitowoc, where he “soon realized that Manitowoc, with its Polish, Czech, German and Bohemian ancestry needed a sound all its own. Something that was unique to its people. Something that went great with beer! The answer? POLKA!… So it was… the Happy Schnapps Combo was born!” (As to what polkas go great with, the Combo’s Web site says, “Wisconsin’s Favorite Drinking Band Reminds You To Binge Responsibly!”)

To quote the Thomas Magnum character in “Magnum P.I.,” I know what you’re thinking: Perhaps the answer is to create a rock and roll polka or rock and roll waltz. In both cases, your idea is too late.