Lincoln Hall Project
Bill Johnson (BS ’89, psychology; MBA ’91) and Michael Roux (BS ’86, finance) remember how their 1980s bands, Bad Flannel and Last Gentlemen, found support in the campus community.
Michael Roux: I went to school here from 1982 to 1986 and started a band with three others in 1983. We played our first show in 1984, and really the reason we put the band together in Champaign at the University was two of the members went here. The two other members moved to Champaign specifically to help form the band because of the history of bands that play original music having success coming out of Champaign. The most obvious one is REO Speedwagon, and, you know, at the time they had just had one of the biggest records in the world, and they had started here, and, you know, there was an infrastructure in place with live music venues that supported bands that played original music. There were radio stations that played songs by those bands. There were the Daily Illini and News-Gazette; I mean, there was media presence in place that also supported those bands. And from our standpoint, from the band, there were tens of thousands of 18- to 24-four-year olds, which was really what we saw as our target audience.
Bill Johnson: I, too, came to campus in the mid-’80s, in the fall of 1985. You know, I came to the University to study psychology, but in short order found people who liked the same kind of music that I liked. These were people who were outliers at the time. They weren’t listening to top-40 radio or hair metal or whatever. They were listening to independently produced or foreignly produced music that was exciting to me, and found like-minded people within a week in the dorms, where in my whole high school, I might have only had a couple of kids with those same interests. For me, you know, I found these people who identified with music as strongly as I did, and it was kind of a happy accident that we formed a band. There was no motivation to do anything other than have camaraderie amongst peers. It was our socializing—very loudly.
Roux: You know, I think we approached it differently. I think we were in town one of the more “pre-fab” bands, or bands that were trying to appeal to what would be considered a more popular audience, and we would reach out to the fraternities and sororities and, you know, actually hand-deliver mail, flyers, trying to encourage them to hire us as a band. But we also at the beginning of school years would try and set up outdoor shows at independent dorms like Illini Tower, where before school would start, you know, they’d rent the Showmobile from the park district, and you’d have thousands of kids, hopefully freshmen, because if you could attract them as a freshman, hopefully you’d then have them through their whole college career, coming to your shows and then supporting what you do.
Johnson: It is interesting because that was the case, where grassroots was handing out flyers, and people who are in your psychology class are coming to see you because they like you in psychology class, and won’t it be funny to see him play in this very unusual band? You know, these people were living and breathing in the room, and there was a sense of community and validation.
Roux: One of the guys in one of my classes was a DJ at WPGU, and so we got our songs played on PGU at some point because we knew that person, and you know, he had some vested interest in our success. You know, there wasn’t necessarily this institution-wide official support for music, but there were elements there, whether they were friends you made or existing organizations that did help support what bands were doing.
Music credits: “One Possession” by Last Gentlemen, “Crawl” by Bad Flannel, “Wish You Were Shy” by Last Gentlemen, and “Miserable” by Honcho Overload.
(Length: 4:03)