Play Like a Man: My Life in Poster Children

by Rose Marshack

As a member of Poster Children, Rose Marshack took part in entwined revolutions. Marshack and other women seized a much-elevated profile in music during the indie rock breakthrough while the advent of new digital technologies transformed the recording and marketing of music. Touring in a van, meeting your idols, juggling a programming job with music, keeping control and credibility, the perils of an independent record label (and the greater perils of a major)—Marshack chronicles the band’s day-to-day life and punctuates her account with excerpts from her tour reports and hard-learned lessons on how to rock, program, and teach while female. She also details the ways Poster Children applied punk’s DIY ethos to digital tech as a way to connect with fans via then-new media like pkids listservs, internet radio, and enhanced CDs. An inside look at a scene and a career, Play Like a Man is the evocative and humorous tale of one woman’s life in the trenches and online.

Genres: Memoir, Music, Nonfiction

254 pages, Hardcover

Published April 1, 2023

Reviews

[Steve Gozdecki]

Amazing recap of a bygone era told in wonderful detail by a witty, brilliant writer. You didn't have to be there; Rose will make you feel like you are.

[Alex]

One of the most open-hearted, wonderfully guileless memoirs I’ve ever read. This is what honesty sounds like, almost foreign given the fraudulence of the majority of memoirs.

[Steve]

It took me a bit to get into this, but after about 30 pages Marshack (of the Urbana-Champaign/U of IL indie punk pop art band The Poster Children) starts writing about touring and the band. And after that half the book is a who's who of '90's indie music (especially in the Midwest and Chicago) and bands. I've now got a nice list of bands to listen to, new and old.
A number of things make this book worth a read as well.
She is a woman in a rock band. She writes about that, and shares feedback from other women rock musicians.
She writes about the music industry. They never wanted to be "big" (although they did sign with Reprise, mostly for distribution purposes - the label then pretty much ignored them for other bands they thought had a big hit within them [Filter!], but at the same time allowed them a great deal of independence). Income was often dependant upon selling merch at shows. Including their own CD's - and cassettes!
She and co-band founder/husband Rick were computer programmers, and used their knowledge of technology within their releases. They were rather cutting edge, but I am not sure the technology still exists to play some of their add-ons. Outdated, and left behind. .
And so it it is also a bit of a history of online history - with listservs and usenet and such. Small Internet/email providers (I think I went through 6 in about 2-3 years there, as they bought each other out). And word spread about bands by word of mouth and zines made in copy shops, and posters stapled about town.
Oh, and much of the text of the book is from the updates she was posting online while touring in rhe '90's - equal to today's "blogs".
She admires Steve Albini and Ian MacKaye (Fugazi) and what they talked to her about regarding performace on stage and the music business.
Early on she mentions that they always gave it their all, no matter how small the audience. I can swear by that - I saw a great show of theirs in LA (the Troubador?) around 1997, with about 30 people there. Non-stop energy and music!
The last 30 pages or so is a bit of a mish mash of more info about their life in the '90's, notes about going back out on tour in 2002 and 2016, and their academic careers (IL State U). She is also into martial arts and Buddhism, so that pops up now and then throughout the text.
Read as an ebook - 200 pp of text, the rest is taken up by notes, Index, and a complete list of every title in this U of IL Press monograph series on music (fairly long!).
Always one of my favorite bands - but I see now I never got into their "community".
4 out of 5.

[Nick Spacek]

an autobiography of a member of a band with little-to-no internal turmoil sounds like a bum read, but marshack's recollections of how she came to playing in a band while also discussing her interest in computer programming makes for a memoir which leans into concepts not usually explored.

gender roles, touring, the rise of online fan culture and how to nurture it -- these are all topics discussed, and they're done so with a clear-eyed analysis of their ups and downs, with a heaping helping of contemporaneous tour diaries which offer a glimpse into a world not long past, but forever changed by technological advances.

[Chris Conaton]

A really engaging memoir from the bassist of the great but overlooked 90’s alternative band Poster Children. Marshack layers in entries from her web-published tour diaries along with stories of how the band got started and how it kept going. There are also plenty of fascinating tangents, most involving the differences in being a woman in two male-dominate fields: tech in the 80’s and 90’s and rock music.

[Jeanette]

I received this book as a Christmas gift and am so happy that someone thought I would enjoy it. Before reading this book, I had never heard of Rose Marshack or Poster Children. Once I started it, I knew immediately that I would love them and immediately ordered one of their albums. Rose's writing is perfection and the fact that she had all her early notes from touring through the 90's and 2000's made this so much fun to read. I may be very late to the party, but I am now a fan for life. :)

[Anthony Friscia]

The only thing that could have made this book better is mention of the Poster Children Band Biologist.

[Peggah Ghoreishi]

I'm not cool enough to get all the references in this book.

[Matthew Stolte]

I only got a bit frustrated when Rose wrote about C-U bands - how did I not know any of them not being very far away? Questions I had about the band were indirectly answered by the end.

[ba]

I was lucky enough to be in Urbana, IL in the '90s when Poster Children and a shocking number of other Champaign-Urbana indie bands roamed the Earth. This book eloquently captures the feel of the time, the DIY scene ethos, and the specific circumstances of this particular band.

Ms. Marshack constructed the book from tour report blog entries wrapped with context added from the future (our present), and the format is perfect for a band that came of age as the PLATO system begat BBS's which begat the world wide web, CD-ROMS, and social media.

Poster Children effectively went undercover as an indie band in the majors, and came out unscathed, with intel on both sides of the music scene/business.

I highly recommend this book to those interested in rock music, living life according to your ideals, or getting some sense of what life might have been like if you had stuck with your college band instead of your stupid career.

[T. Scott]

This unconventional bio is delivered in a nonlinear format that is as much a travel journal, philosophy seminar and 90's music business course as it is anything else. I lived through these times working at indie record companies and as a tour manager visiting many of the same clubs. Play Like A Man rings true and serves as a good document of those days. It's worth the read!