Photo credit: Michael Dober
Rob McCuen is best known as the drummer for Milwaukee bands Plasticland and Liquid Pink
Assertive is a diplomatic word to describe Rob McCuen. The Milwaukee drummer expressed himself as strongly in person as he did behind his kit. He died earlier this week.
McCuen emerged on the Milwaukee scene in the early ‘80s with The RPMs and The Red Ball Jets. Back then punk could be dangerous—if you met the wrong person in the wrong bar. McCuen’s response? “Some frat boy jockatoid started in on me, so I had to deck him and make him buy me a drink before I’d let him off the floor,” he recalled in Brick Through the Window, the oral history of Milwaukee punk rock.
McCuen hit his stride mid through late ‘80s with the paisley resurgence, drumming for the internationally recognized Plasticland and the regionally popular Liquid Pink. While he may have peaked in psychedelia, playing to the largest audiences of his career, his primary inspiration was always Iggy Pop, not Syd Barrett.
McCuen could be a provocative prose writer. His best fiction was assembled in the 1988 collection Square Dancing in a Round House. I was closest to him during his tempestuous tenure with Plasticland and was drawn into this side project. My role included “typesetting” his stories on an IBM Selectric in the A/V office of drummer Ron Faiola, deep inside the law firm of Foley & Lardner (a big employer of music scenesters in those years). I described his stories in the preface: “McCuen’s America is a place of unlimited opportunities for life to go wrong. Warts, bad grammar, foul smells, ignorance and all around general stupidity are as prevalent as the incurable common cold.”
McCuen kept on drumming and writing. He reached his height in 2013 when his band, Animal Magnets, released Step on Your Neck. In my review, I called it “one of the most powerful rock ‘n’ roll records out this year—here in town and elsewhere.” Working with producer Paul Kneevers, he crafted the sort of punk album Phil Spector would have made with The Ramones—if The Ramones had brought better songs to the End of the Century sessions. McCuen told me: “It was all analog and we used up to 55 tracks on some songs. I wanted more guitars! Bigger! Louder!”
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Disconcerting stories about his behavior circulated around town during the past year. But according to a report surrounding his death in an Oskaloosa, IA hotel room, he had been taking care of himself, giving himself daily insulin injections for diabetes, had just purchased a new car and was in Iowa to attend the Knoxville Nationals sprint car race.
Many of us remember that on Sundays McCuen could be found at Great Lakes Dragaway in Union Grove. He wanted me to come with him to “the biggest little track in the world.” I wish I had.
