Vespa Venus by Boris the Sprinkler
For as agreeably goofy as Boris the Sprinkler’s music can be, the leader of the Wisconsin punk rock institution can be positively humble, even philosophical, about the music and his four decades in it.
“It's pretty humbling to have somebody say that they saw one of your bands 40 years ago or whatever and that it totally changed the trajectory of their life,” “Rev.” Norb Rozek observes.
“Being in bands and making music that appeals to what might be charitably referred to as a ‘niche’ market can seem like an awfully trivial way to spend your life sometimes; as you age, you tend to suspect that maybe you were kidding yourself at the time about the importance of what you were doing. To have people come up to you and cite you as a source of youthful inspiration for them is a legitimately humbling experience, albeit somewhat of a weird one. I'm not sure how many people get to experience that. I feel pretty fortunate, all things considered. Everybody's gotta do their part, and I guess this is mine.”
Rozek and his Boris bandmates are a headliner at 2024’s Bay View Bash, held on Kinnickinnic Avenue between Potter and Clement on Saturday, Sept. 21. How did a band known for their Green Bay origin and members now residing there, Tomahawk, Door County and New Jersey, land a top spot for a Milwaukee street festival?
“I have absolutely no idea how we landed this gig,” Rozek admits. “I guess someone must've had fun when we played the X-Ray Arcade in 2021, which was the last time we played in Milwaukee.” As for what attendees can expect from the, the Rev. Says it will be a mystery to him.
Spaghetti at the Wall
“I have never seen a Boris the Sprinkler show from the audience. We basically just throw the spaghetti at the wall and see who salutes,” he quips. One thing the Bash's audience should expect—apart from the quartet’s pre-hardcore style of old school, funny punk—is for Rozek to wear some memorably outrageous attire.
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It's not that Rozek set out to make himself a spectacle for spectacle’s sake, however. He recalls, “It was never really my intention to wear costumes, as such, on stage. I just wanted to wear my wacky punk rock finery and prance around like a demented runway model.” Though he would at first don his everyday “wacky punk rock finery” of painted over street clothes. But “as time went on, I found that while audiences might like a paint-spattered jumpsuit, they loved completely ridiculous things like a Wolverine costume with silverware duct-taped to my hands for claws, so things moved in that direction.
“Nowadays,” Rozek continues, “we only play a few times a year, so I feel obligated to wear something noteworthy. I don’t think costumes are necessarily the way to go in rock and roll, but I do feel that if people are going to spend an hour looking at you that you’d better give them something to look at. Whenever I go to see a band and it turns out to be four guys in black t-shirts, I’m always tempted to ask for my money back and go home, just out of general principle.” Similarly, it wasn’t necessarily, or only, a desire to rebel against hidebound corporate rock that drew Rozek to punk, it was the music's similarity to what he recalled from the weekend screen time of his youth.
Fun, Direct Appeal
“People my age, 59. started listening to music at this weird transition point where the original audience for rock and roll had aged out. AM radio was sort of dull housewife music and FM radio was equally dull ‘serious’ rock music. All the good music was on Saturday morning TV shows! We had the Archies, Lancelot Link & the Evolution Revolution, the Banana Splits, the Groovie Goolies, the Cattanooga Cats, Josie & the Pussycats, the Bugaloos, “Schoolhouse Rock” andMonkees re-runs!
“Punk rock took that same fun, direct appeal and amped it up to mesh with the needs of my over-adrenalized teenage hormones. I thought it was perfect. There’s also a low barrier to entry; you don’t need highly developed talents or state-of-the-art equipment in order to ply your craft. What remains appealing to me in this day and age is the relatively short turnaround time between having an idea and getting that idea out into the world.”
The latest idea Rozek and “the finest dorks to ever trod the face of the planet,” as he calls guitarist Paul #1, drummer Paul #2, drummer Ric Six, has foisted on the world is an EP based on a mystery game. Of the fun and feisty Boris Gets a Clue, Rozek shares, “I was going through one of my typical obsessive periods where I was really interested in the board game Clue—particularly the graphic design history, the playing pieces, the card artwork, that sort of thing—and I was thinking how I always wanted to be Professor Plum when I was a kid.”
Bane and Boon
Childhood reminiscence of playing the game with his family and at least one pre-existing idea he had for a song about a ‘70s Japanese anime character, among other element, led to “the ridiculous conceit of making a concept record. It’s brief enough that if you think it’s the dumbest idea in the world, you don’t have to spend too much time in anguish listening to it.”
Producing Clue and the rest of the catalog from isolation from Northeastern Wisconsin has been both a bane and a boon for Boris. As Rozek laments, “Well, the drawbacks are pretty obvious: I’ve always had to drive two hours to play in Milwaukee. It’s two hundred miles just to get to Chicago. On the bright side, if you’re a band from somewhere like Green Bay, you wind up not getting as contaminated by whatever the latest flavor-of-the-month BS is, and sometimes that's refreshing. You can also grow up to be a big fish in a small pond, for whatever that's worth on the open market.”
Boris the Sprinkler is still on that market still making music hooky, smartly silly punk rock. But as to just wat constitutes punk, it remains a bit enigmatic to Rozek.
“I do not have a ready answer. Like some judge or another once said about pornography, ‘I know it when I see it.’”
Here is Boris The Sprinkler from their 2021 X-Ray Arcade appearance. Rozek’s the member in the zebra-print top, fuchsia body suit and lime leggings, of course!
