Play Like a Man: My Life in Poster Children

Understandably, Chicago attracts most of the attention when it comes to documenting Illinois's rich musical history, but as Rose Marshack's excellent memoir makes clear, many other places across the state, including the college towns of Urbana-Champaign, have produced vibrant music scenes. Marshack, the bassist of the rock group Poster Children, which formed at the University of Illinois in 1987, has not penned a clichéd rockstar autobiography with a rags-to-riches theme. Play Like a Man is a more commonplace story, and ultimately, a more interesting one, of a working band that tours on a shoestring and records mostly on small independent labels.Marshack, a self-styled “white, privileged Jewish American Princess from the Chicago suburbs” (p. 5), found her calling when she went off to study computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There, she met fellow student Rick Valentin, and they formed Poster Children, a four-piece, high-energy guitar-based rock band influenced by hardcore punk and melodic new wave music. In loving detail, she describes the record stores, venues, and fans that sustained a thriving local music scene. Poster Children exhibit remarkable dedication to their craft, as Marshack illustrates by recounting the group's tedious travels across North America and Europe in a cramped van, sleeping on the floors and couches of strangers while trying to maintain jobs back in Urbana. Although engagingly written, she disrupts the narrative by inserting contemporaneously written tour reports throughout the book that provide details of the time on the road.When grunge sensations Nirvana stormed the charts in the early 1990s, major record labels came calling in search of the next “Alternative Rock” sensation. Poster Children signed with Warner Brothers’ subsidiary Sire Records and enjoyed an uptick in fortunes, even playing at the iconic Lollapalooza music festival. Chart success eluded the group, however, and Sire dropped them in favor of the next flavor of the month. Poster Children returned to the grueling touring circuit, selling T-shirts to supplement their meager income. While remaining committed to performing and recording music, Marshack and Rick Valentin toured less in recent years as they both found employment as professors of creative technologies at Illinois State University.One of the more fascinating sections of the book is when Marshack documents how Poster Children had to adapt and change to meet the challenges of the new computer era. The Internet made it more difficult to earn money from physical recordings but also offered opportunities to reach a wider audience and build an online community. Websites, blogging, podcasting, and social media became essential components of their lives as musicians.Those wishing to find the sex, drugs, and rock and roll tales of the road, or the usual intra-band squabbles, will have to look elsewhere. Marshack refuses to discuss her romantic relationship with band member Rick Valentin or how they managed to survive as a couple while working together amid the stresses and temptations of the music business. There are no tales of rock-star egos, on-the-road debauchery, or addiction problems from either Poster Children or from other bands she encountered. The nearest thing to rock stars in the book, such as record producer and musician Steve Albini, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Sonic Youth, make fleeting appearances without too much apparent drama. Indeed, everyone appears remarkably nice and sweet, descriptors Marshack employs throughout the book to describe fellow musicians. She frequently mentions the camaraderie and generosity she received from other performers on the scene, but disputes were apparently rare.Considering the title of the book, Marshack spends little time discussing sexism in the male-dominated music industry. Not being taken seriously as a musician, the pressure to look a certain way on stage, and record companies marketing the lone female at the expense of the other members of the group are briefly mentioned but not explored in any depth. This aligns with the tone of the entire book. There is no axe to grind here, no depravity to highlight, just the story of a dedicated musician who played a major role in an unheralded but important music scene in 1990s Urbana-Champaign.