Poster Children's release Tool Of The Man.

buzz: What are the members of the Poster Children up to currently?

Rose Marshack: Rick Valentin is the Web specialist at the Beckman Institute here in Champaign and is working on new music. I am teaching music business and new media/arts technology at Illinois State University and am due to have a baby in early April. Jim Valentin is up in Chicago playing music and finishing a degree. Matt Friscia is working at Radio Disney, DJing and playing in a rock band called Team Rockit. Poster Children itself hasn’t played since last year when we played a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art and also at Millennium Park. We’ve been having babies, and that has gotten in the way of practicing! We’re very excited to be playing an upcoming show here on May 25 in Champaign. It is a sort of 1988 reunion weekend and also a memorial for the wonderful Champaign promoter Josh Gottheil.

buzz: Poster Children were, and still are, a heavy force in CU music. Do you have any favorite memories of the area?

RM: I remember running back and forth between Mabel’s and Trito’s on Green Street because there were fantastic bands playing every Tuesday. So you’d have to run up the stairs of one venue to see one act (like Lonely Trailer), and then you’d have to run down the stairs, across two doors and up the stairs again to see The Didjits...same night, back and forth. It was exhilarating!

Poster Children did most of our playing out and about the United States and Europe, so my favorite moments of playing usually took place in odd places like Bozeman, Montana, where kids would hang off the lighting rafters, screaming as we played, or Seattle or Boston where people would be screaming and dancing as we played.

But, here’s my favorite story about playing in CU: We had been recording one of our records for a major label here in town at the wonderful Pogo Studios, and it wasn’t going well. Our A&R person had visited and was trying to get us to delay our record (when they do that, you know you’re screwed!)

So, we were all sitting at the Courier Cafe in Urbana, dejected, and suddenly a kid comes up to us and says, ‘Are you guys POSTER CHILDREN?’ and we nodded yes. He said, ‘Wow, I cannot believe I have actually run into you in your own town. This is wonderful.’ He proceeded to tell us that he was visiting from New Mexico and was looking at going to graduate school here. He had chosen to look at this school because it was where the Poster Children had gone.

He explained that years ago, he had written to us and told us he hated school and wanted to drop out. We had written back and told him to stay in school and that it would get better. He told us it was basically our writing to him that had kept him in school, and he was here now because of us. I think we all floated back to the studio.

We’ve played through all sorts of wonderful shows — lots of compliments, people yelling words to our songs, dancing, covering our songs, and that’s all fine, but when you change someone’s life in an unrelated area, I think that’s really fulfilling.

buzz: What do you think about the present state of music in CU?

RM: I think it has always gone in waves. About five years into Poster Children’s ‘career,’ there was a lot of major label interest in bands like us, so we and many of our CU colleagues, like Hum, Menthol and Love Cup, were being snatched up by majors. This led to an odd time in the scene because other younger bands were either also trying to ‘get signed’ or rebelling against wanting to ‘get signed.’ I think it always ebbs and flows, and I’m very careful to not say, ‘Oh, the scene sucks now, and it was so much better when I was younger.’ I think that just makes someone seem old and out of touch!

But there is one thing that was always very important to the Champaign scene, especially when we were very active in it, and that is that the bands were always extremely supportive of each other. We complimented each other in out-of-town interviews, talked about how great our scene is, took other Champaign bands on tour with us — and this has always worked out wonderfully for our scene. Any band going out on tour and landing in a place where another Champaign band has played already comes with a reputation of, ‘Oh, they’re from Champaign. I hear it is a great scene there. They must be good!’