Ask Billy Bob Brockali about his favourite moment as a member of the Rock-afire Explosion, and he won’t tell you. He’ll show you.
In the den of his remote Oregon retreat he walks stiffly to a wall, and pulls down a framed newspaper clipping of the band performing at a packed outdoor festival.
“Reading Festival. This was eighty… six. Sun was hot that day.” For the first time during our interview, a brief smile crosses his face. “We nailed it.”
When Brockali talks about the Explosion, you’d think it had played its last show twenty years ago, not two. He speaks in brief eulogies.
“I won’t say that I don’t think about the band every day. But most days I don’t think about it for very long.”
They “exploded” onto the scene in the early eighties, and quickly became known as the godfathers of anthropomorphic rock. The band’s roster was culled from the ashes of other Kansas-based bands. “Mitzi (Mozzarella) and Beach (Bear) had just broken up the Burger Time Players, and they knew Dook (Larue) who drummed for You Can Even Bring Grandpa. And Fatz (Geronimo) had played in Throne of Hate.”
Quickly, Topeka blossomed into the next Athens, Georgia – a hotbed of musical creativity – and the Rock-afire Explosion were the reason why. National tours, then international, beckoned and the group found itself strapped to a rocket.
“It was insane – that’s the only word for it. I mean, (in) 1982, I’m still sitting in my parents’ basement strumming on a banjo made out of an old birdhouse. Fast forward a year and we’re on a tour bus in London with fans beating on the windows. It’s just nutty.”
The band was run as a democracy. “It was the only way to keep everyone happy.” And while it meant everyone had a hand on the steering wheel, Billy Bob says it amounted to their eventual downfall.
“In 1993, Showbiz Pizza came knocking. They had a deal for us to play exclusively in their restaurants across the US. I was against it from the word go. We still hadn’t done Australia, hadn’t done Japan and… you know. They don’t have a Showbiz Pizza in Hokkaido.”
But Brockali was overruled and outgunned. The Showbiz contract was signed, sealed and delivered. He recollects it bitterly. “Everyone had a reason for why they wanted (the Showbiz deal). I guess you could call that selfish. Not like it’s news nobody knows, but Mitzi was having Uncle Klunk’s kid, and I guess she didn’t want to have to pop it out when we were halfway around the world.”
The quality of the shows declined sharply, as is agreed almost unanimously among fans, who now had to have a reservation for at least six and a pocket full of tokens to see the band in what Bob called “a manufactured state”.
“It was hard to get motivated to play. You’d get out on stage and there’d be about fifty dead-eyed kids staring back at you, and a bunch of parents who were just trying to keep them from ralphing up their chilli fries. And I’m like, ‘Wow, how did this happen?’”
Billy Bob turned to drugs. “I was so fucked up. Most of the time I couldn’t even tell you who the lucky birthday boy was.” This caused tension between he and Earl Schmerle, a born-again Christian. The hostility between the two grew. Eventually, they were placed on opposite sides of the stage from one another, with the entire band separating them in an apt allegory to the way things were kept behind the curtain.
“Hey, we had a contract. I had to find a way to keep myself going. But yeah, it caused problems. Basically, Looney Bird was the only person who had my back for the last eight years.”
“I wanted to re-invent, I wanted to move in new directions, chase after a new sound. I said we should get a bunch of cormorants and give them each a synth pad. But I wasn’t the captain of the ship. We got turned into a glorified cover band.”
In 2006, their contract came up for renewal. Brockali fought against an extension, but his bandmates had aged and settled into their touring schedule. They agreed to re-sign, and Brockali hung up his guitar.
“They knew I couldn’t do it anymore, so I guess that was their way of giving me an out. I got to say goodbye to most of them and stay on good terms, but when Earl Schmerle wouldn’t even shake my hand, Rolfe deWolfe had to stop me from knocking him the fuck out.”
The Rock-afire Explosion tried to forge ahead, but quickly realized that something important was missing, and broke up only two months later. Billy Bob bought a home in the rural northwest, and now is embarking on a solo acoustic tour of several Pizza Huts in Washington and British Columbia.
“I won’t lie – if I could be anywhere, it’d be with the whole band, even Schmerle, in our heyday. At our height. In front of one of the big crowds. I still wish I coulda played Japan, you know? But this is good too. Every show I get a little bit more closure, on my career I guess. And I feel like a real musician again.”
Billy Bob places the picture back up on the wall with a heavy sigh. Call him overly wistful, or even the one to blame for the group’s demise, but you can’t deny the Rock-afire Explosion their place in history, nor the ground they broke for acts to follow. Bob definitely doesn’t.
“Arcade Fire? What do they got, twenty people in the band, all on a different instrument? Wonder where they got that from.”
