Secret History of the Cedar Valley

March 14, 2007 10:22 PM

Punk rock in north-central Iowa, 1977-2007 as featured in The Secret History of the Cedar Valley, an exhibit at Wartburg College (Waverley, Iowa). The opening reception is this Saturday, March 17, with performances by Modern Life is War, Beat Strings, Brooks Strause, and The Torpedo Darlings [WARNING: these four band links have music on them!]. --more inside
posted by tracy_the_astonishing (14 comments total)

Wartburg professor Matthew Wilson-Pickering is a veteran of the Cedar Valley scene who came back to Iowa to take a teaching position near the town where he grew up. One of the innovative things he has done in the art department at Wartburg is a very good courseware catalog on del.icio.us. Perhaps also worth debating: how does punk rock square with Wartburg's central mission?



A capital addition to anyone's Iowa punk rock resources.
posted by tracy_the_astonishing at 10:22 PM on March 14, 2007

Neat stuff. The only band I know out of those is Modern Life Is War, which shows up on comps from time to time.
posted by klangklangston at 10:25 PM on March 14, 2007

I don't know any of those bands, but it's beautiful in there. Thanks.
posted by freebird at 10:50 PM on March 14, 2007

The stink of human sin is more that I can bear.
posted by homunculus at 11:47 PM on March 14, 2007

Long live "The Law!"
posted by caddis at 12:55 AM on March 15, 2007

Des Moines Rock City.
posted by bardic at 4:56 AM on March 15, 2007

Awesome. Brings back a few memories.
posted by Kudos at 8:51 AM on March 15, 2007

Nice post. I remember some of this from my days at Grinnell College...
posted by MarshallPoe at 10:45 AM on March 15, 2007

Cool. I'll have to pass this along to Mrs. Slogger, who grew up near Waterloo. Who knew central Iowa was such a hotbed of counterculture!
posted by slogger at 10:46 AM on March 15, 2007

I remember seeing House of Large Sizes quite a bit while growing up in Des Moines.

neat.
posted by djseafood at 11:28 AM on March 15, 2007

Wow... I went to Wartburg College from 91-95. House of Large Sizes was definitely sort of the ubiquitous everybody-knows-them band, although Fat Bertha and the Love Shakers is one name that pops out at me as being really huge with the people I knew.

We had really great music opportunities for such a small college -- I think our biggest on-campus show was probably Twin-Cities-born Trip Shakespeare, but I'm now realizing how foggy my memory of that time is. The radio station was fun, too. Really neat post, thank you! U-rah, rah, rah!
posted by kittyb at 1:49 PM on March 15, 2007

Well I'll be damned. I went to high school in Waverly and had a show on Wartburg's radio station, KWAR (rawk spelled backwards!). I even played a few songs by Houses of Large Sizes. Wow, something I never expected to see it on Metafilter.

I live in San Francisco now, and interestingly it seems like there was a higher percentage of punk rockers there than here.
posted by hal incandenza at 6:00 PM on March 15, 2007

Vive the Iowan diaspora.
posted by tracy_the_astonishing at 9:12 PM on March 15, 2007

Vive the Iowan diaspora.

Hear hear!!
posted by thedaniel at 9:49 PM on March 15, 2007