Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
Nostalgia tells us that the “alternative” musical revolution of the early 1990s saw androgynous shoegazers, fierce riot grrrls, and punky grunge bands elbowing aside hair metal and slick pop on the charts. But this cultural shift didn’t mean local scenes were suddenly inclusive, aesthetically diverse places. Though the 90s underground in Champaign-Urbana had a few woman-led bands (Sarge, Corndolly), it was dominated by ironically macho rock (Honcho Overload, Hardvark, Steakdaddy Six) and manly “butt grunge” (my term, please share). The group Viewfinder, formed in C-U and later based in Chicago, swam against this current with an artful sound indebted to sophisticated, decadent UK artists—and during their initial late-90s run, they didn’t find an audience. A new reissue is giving them a second chance.
Viewfinder front man and guitarist Nathan Rosser was born October 30, 1974, in Decatur, Illinois. At age ten, he loved the new-wave radio anthems of Wham! and got a cassette of Tears for Fears’ Songs From the Big Chair as a gift. In high school, he was drawn to the literate tunes of Depeche Mode, XTC, and the Smiths.
Guitarist Jeff Madden was born September 7, 1973, also in Decatur. Rosser says the two of them “have a shared history of underage drinking in cornfields.” Along with his seven siblings, Madden took piano lessons and played in the school band. His brother Scott, a jazz drummer, got him into drums, and he also picked up saxophone and guitar.
Bassist Jay Gocek has the same birthday as Madden, but he was born in Franklin Park and raised in the Chicago suburb of Addison. He started messing around on keyboards in junior high, and he and two friends formed a bedroom recording project called the Puppet Club, which he calls “a sort of lo-fi Negativland meets Ween meets Front 242 bit of nonsense.” In 1992 he picked up his first bass, inspired in part by Peter Hook’s melodic playing in New Order.
Rosser and Madden attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where they met Gocek. I got to know Rosser because we were both fine arts students at UIUC, concentrating on painting. Rosser had several Champaign bands before Viewfinder, and in 1994, he briefly drummed in one with me (I owned a guitar but couldn’t play a note) and future members of Spires That in the Sunset Rise (friends of his from Decatur). After a living-room gig that ended in seconds when a guitar amp blew up, that group dissolved before even getting a name.
Rosser fell under the spell of T. Rex and Roxy Music and decided he wanted to be a singer and guitarist. At a college party, he strolled up to the most stylish guys he could find, guitarist Steve Lyon and drummer Joaquin McCoy, and asked them to start a glam-rock group. They became Secret Agent X-9, and after a few practices, Gocek joined.
Gocek’s only real band up to that point had been short-lived shoegaze act Drown, who broke up without a recording in 1993. “My lasting memory of that group was playing our last show completely out of my head on acid at a campus church while a fog machine engulfed me,” Gocek recalls. “I wondered how the hell I was going to keep it together long enough to finish the set. Our guitarist had an ancient Vox amp that had once nearly electrocuted me at practice, and it blew up about three songs in. I was never more relieved.”
Secret Agent X-9 lasted less than a year, but they laid the groundwork for Viewfinder to form in mid-1996. From the beginning, the core lineup consisted of Madden, Rosser, and Gocek. Madden started on drums but switched to guitar (after Lyon moved to Chicago), and he influenced the band’s sound with his record collection as well as his riffs. “Madden brought a lot of bands to my attention that I had never heard before, like Big Star and the Go-Betweens,” Rosser says. “I recall listening to a lot of Ride, Blur, Pulp—honestly any soppy fey British trash I could get my hands on.”
After Madden became Viewfinder’s second guitarist, the band went through almost as many drummers as Spinal Tap. The first one was nicknamed “Creepy D,” and though Rosser recalls him having “some kind of mentor vibe,” he went AWOL at a rough moment. “He ditched us on the eve of our first Blind Pig show,” Rosser says. The band begged their friend Rob Lloyd (who drummed in Bantha) to step in, and he learned their whole set in two days in Creepy D’s basement, where they were still rehearsing.
“This was around the time one of Creepy D’s housemates stole my first amp and his dog left a giant deuce in front of my amp in the practice space,” Rosser recalls. Drummer Jeff Garber (from multifaceted emo band Castor) eventually took over from Lloyd.
At the time, the Blind Pig was the best club on the Champaign indie circuit (I saw Mazzy Star and Unrest there), and Viewfinder opened a show at the Pig for the legendary Brainiac in November 1996. “Our friend Faiz Razi recorded the Brainiac show off the soundboard and released it on [the Brainiac rarities compilation] From Dayton Ohio in 2021,” Madden says. “Brainiac pretty much blew us off the stage.”
Viewfinder didn’t suffer from a shortage of gigs in Champaign-Urbana. They played the usual house parties and bars, plus annual festivals such as the Band Jam. Toward the end of their time downstate, they opened for indie bands Holiday, Braid, Sarge, and Acetone, among others. But they still felt like outsiders. “We were different sounding from the Champaign scene at the time—everything was so RAWK,” Madden says. “We loved guitar pedals that weren’t distortion. Anything that created emotion in the music that wasn’t ‘I am going to rock your ever-lovin’ brains out.’”
Viewfinder captured their nuanced sound on their lone album, The Stars on Ice. They’d signed to the local Mud Records, founded by Geoff Merritt, who also ran a label called Parasol and its associated distributor. (He handled many UK imports, which made him a good fit for Viewfinder.) The band recorded the album in early 1997 at Private Studios in Urbana with Brendan Gamble (drummer of the Moon Seven Times) and released it in May of that year.
The first track from The Stars on Ice, “Zero Coupon,” sounds like a mission statement: arty jangle turns on a dime into urgent postpunk topped with Rosser’s dour, New Romantic–style vocals. On “Night’s Life and the Morning’s After,” Gocek’s supple bass, Madden’s shimmery post–Cocteau Twins guitar, and Rosser’s glammy but gloomy vocals invite comparisons to the Chameleons and Pale Saints. “I Wouldn’t Go Out With Me Either,” with its clubby drum-machine beat and synths and Rosser’s self-deprecating post–Magnetic Fields lyrics, sounds like it could’ve charted in the UK alongside Pulp or Electronic. Music mag The Big Takeover gave The Stars on Ice a glowing review, while the Daily Illini at UIUC was, as Madden puts it, “catty.”
Before a small east-coast tour to promote the album (at one gig, the audience consisted entirely of Rosser’s brother and his wife), Viewfinder brought aboard yet another new drummer, Champaign-Urbana native Rebecca Rury. When the band moved to Chicago in summer 1997, renting a house at Whipple and Waveland, she stayed behind. They returned to C-U later that year to play with Rury at a beloved annual cover-band extravaganza called the Great Cover Up (where they appeared as Wham!).
Viewfinder hoped more people in Chicago would appreciate their Anglophilic leanings, and they hit the ground running—soon they’d landed gigs at Lounge Ax, the Empty Bottle, and Metro. The band’s next drummer, Kamran Sullivan, joined in late 1997, and Viewfinder recorded at Kingsize Sound Labs with Mike Hagler.
“Our poor drummer ended up paying for about a third of the Kingsize session of three songs, even though he only played on half of just one song,” Madden says. “I think someone still owes him for that!” On the other tracks, they used a drum machine. Unfortunately, they didn’t release the recordings at the time.
Rosser remembers Viewfinder being met with skepticism at a Fireside Bowl gig where they ambitiously brought along a cellist (who only stayed in the band for a few weeks). They felt out of step with their musical surroundings, even in Chicago. Viewfinder dissolved when Rosser moved to Los Angeles in 1999.
Madden, Gocek, and old pal Lyon (who’d rejoined Viewfinder on keyboards after their move) carried on as Good Robot. That quickly fizzled out, though—they didn’t have a singer, and they were too spread out around Chicagoland. Gocek is now raising a family in Evanston and working as a graphic designer. Madden still lives in Chicago, where he holds down a job in the mortgage business and plays keys, guitar, and baritone sax with the Joynt Cheefs. Rosser is in Pasadena, where he works for a poster company and continues to pursue his early love of painting.
Twenty-five years after Viewfinder broke up, though, Rosser was approached by an old fan, Jake Burkhart, who now runs a boutique vinyl reissue label called Castle Danger Records. A deluxe two-LP version of The Stars on Ice came out November 19, and it includes four bonus tracks: the three unreleased Kingsize tunes as well as a demo.
“I always felt that the vision we had for our songwriting, and the unspoken mission we shared as a band, was representing influences and styles not particularly fashionable at the time,” says Rosser. Here’s hoping now is a better time for Viewfinder. Personally, I’m pulling for a reunion.
The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived here.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
