by Tom Lounges

Rock Star Club!   What a powerful image the very name conjures up. 

Say it with gusto and see if outrageous MTV-style visuals of a bunch of David Lee Roth wannabes come dancing before your mind’s eye.   Say it again and see the mental picture of a band, hell bent on living life to the hilt and pandering to the stereotypical images of overindulgence we have come to expect.  

Now throw away ALL such thoughts and images and meet the real deal!

 Rock Star Club is a beautifully ironic name for a quartet of earnest Chicagoland players who are the very antithesis of what being a “rock star” is supposed to be all about.  There’s no pretentious posing, no fashion statements made, no overblown sense of self-importance, and no egos.  Just four guys with loud amps and great original songs.

 Rock Star Club are four local music misfits –– guitarist/ vocalist Paul Kasprzak, bassist Chuck Tipton, drummer Eli Sabbagh and guitarist/keyboardist Justin Zucker –– who play some damn good original rawk ‘n’ roll. 

 Their sound owes deep allegiance to ‘70s punk icons like The Dictators, late ‘60s garage rock groups like The Stooges, and to the early ‘90s Chicago underground scene that begot bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Red Red Meat. 

 Like those bands, RSC’s sound is raw and unrelenting. Their songs are all in the two-minute range. “If a song is 1:30 and the message is conveyed, it ends,” said Kasprzak, stressing RSC has never been chained to the normal – verse, chorus, bridge, chorus songwriting aesthetic.

 Their very appeal is their very lack of commercialism and the free-spiritedness that inspires them to write songs that are snapshots of life from the eyes of working stiffs from da region.   These are regular guys making music under the gray skies of the steel mill region. 

Kasprzak writes all of the band’s aggressive guitar-driven numbers.  His lyrics are about –– losing your job; drinking too much; a dead end “region rocker” in Kid Rock’s fast-paced MTV world; and being a white guy afraid to stop for catfish ‘n’ hot sauce in a ghetto neighborhood.  There is nothing Beverly Hills about RSC...they are all about the dirty reality that is Chicago’s South Side. 

The lyrics that comprise the 12 songs on RSC’s third and latest full length regional CD –– Shut Up And Work It! –– once again use local links to color the stories and pull us into the songs. 

 Recognizable people and places that pop up in the verses include -- Davenport College, Marshall Fields, Huron Street, Richard Milne (of WXRT) and the great pumpkin himself, Billy Corgan.   This latest album topped Midwest BEAT columnist David Buco’s list of “Favorite Aalbums for 2002”.   It also landed in this writer’s personal “Top 10 for 2002.”   I’m sure it also impacted other media and non-media folks in much the same way.  Stellar effort.

  “In the summer of 1988, when Chuck and I made plans to form the most important rock ‘n’ roll band in history, he said something that has become our mission statement,” recalled Kasprzak, of their first group -- The Young Lords. 

  “[Chuck] said that even if we fail and never become big stars, if one person buys our record and says to us – ‘I get it. I was going through the same thing you were singing about and didn’t think another person felt like I did. That song helped me through a tough time and made me feel okay, like I wasn’t alone.’ –– then it was worth it and we didn’t really fail.” 

one album that was popular with the Midwest underground scene.  The project morphed into RSC in the mid-‘90s when Sabbagh and Zucker came on board.  Together they released 1998’s America Needs Rock Star Club and 2000’s The Entertainer, to widespread critical acclaim, if not retail success.

 When you’re on a mission, you can’t quit,” added Tipton.  “[You can’t] just stop because it’s hard and you are tired.  You have to keep on going, working, playing and writing, because it’s what you do.  It’s about the music and connecting with other people who love music as much as Rock Star Club does.” 

Kasprzak concludes that -- “It’s unrealistic for a group of guys to get together and try to take over the world with guitars and the dream of being rock stars.   Everyone wants to be famous and rich, but if you don’t love playing for those few people that ‘get it’ when the rest of the world turns away, then you won’t last long.”  

       RSC plans to be banging around for much, much longer. And thank God for that!

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