Time Crash brings “trock” across the pond
Beloved BBC sci-fi franchise Doctor Who turns 50 this week, and at least one Chicago band is ready to celebrate.
You can go to shows for years and never see a Klingon play guitar. ¶ The many subspecies of nerd rock thrive at house concerts, comic conventions, and sometimes even ordinary music venues— but because the bands involved tend to cluster on bills with like-minded acts, outsiders are unlikely to stumble into this geek ecosystem.
Nerd rock harnesses the power of fanfiction writers, cosplayers, and obsessive episode re-watchers, benefiting from legions of ready-made fans who love inside references to their favorite books, TV shows, video games, and movies. The concerts provide safe spaces where hard- core fans can arrive in costume and sing along with other devotees—when the entire crowd is on the same wavelength, nobody has to worry about coming off as a dweeb. The downside of this cozy community is that sometimes clever wordplay and inside jokes take precedence over chops; fans might forgive sloppy guitars or weak drumming for an excellent Captain Kirk pun.
The paths that can lead a musician into nerd rock are many. Parry Gripp’s pop-punk band Nerf Herder, which wrote and played the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme, takes its name from an insult Princess Leia spat at Han Solo (“Why you stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder!”). Wizard-rock bands such as Iowa’s Ministry of Magic and California’s Roonil Wazlib (the genre is also called “wrock”) write songs about Harry Potter, as of course do Harry & the Potters, a Massachusetts group often credited with founding the genre in 2002. On “New Wizard Anthem” they sing, “You guys can forget about the Sorcerer’s Stone / ’Cause we got the rock right here.”
Other niche bands might pay tribute to Middle Earth or Mass Effect, often dressing as characters onstage. Trekkie group Il Troubadore (who call themselves “Indianapolis’s 24th-century Klingon opera ensemble”) perform in full-face alien makeup, and Tolkien-inspired Finnish heavy-metal band Battlelore (currently on hiatus) wear chain mail and elven cloaks to sing about the Lord of the Rings. There’s even Twi-rock, in which teenage girls posting acoustic songs to YouTube channel the angst and sparkle of Stephenie Meyer’s divisive Twilight saga. But today’s vampires are yesterday’s hobbits, and bands can end up short-lived if a certain fandom goes out of vogue.
It’s surprising, then, that there aren’t more songs about time-traveling blue police boxes. Beloved BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who has been around for 50 years, and on Saturday, November 23, it celebrates the golden anniversary of its very first broadcast
with an 11-city simulcast of the new episode “The Day of the Doctor” (the local venues are Century 12 and CineArts 6 in Evanston and Cinemark at Seven Bridges in Woodridge). On Monday, November 25, an additional 300 or so U.S. theaters, including more than two dozen in Chicagoland, host their own screenings.
The show has had a cult audience for decades. The London-based Doctor Who Appreciation Society was founded in 1976, and the Doctor Who Fan Club of America popularized the term “Whovian” in the 80s. The 2005 reboot of the series rejuvenated and expanded that following, and today you can buy BBC-official sonic screwdrivers and Dalek salt and pepper shakers at any respectable comics shop. Look around on the el and you’re likely to spot at least one TARDIS smartphone case. But despite its status as one of the longestrunning shows on TV, this seminal sci-fi hit has i nspired relatively l i ttle music making.
Chicago band Time Crash say they’re the first Americans to play “Time Lord rock” ( often shortened to “trock,” by analogy with “wrock”). It’s a plausible claim, considering how thoroughly the genre has been dominated by British and Australian acts during its short history. You could argue that trock began when the Timelords topped the UK singles chart in 1988 with “Doctorin’ the Tardis,” but that “band” was just a goofy, halfway cynical alter ego of the KLF, and never put out another song. It’s more accurate to say that Time Crash follow in the footsteps of UK group Chameleon Circuit, who came up with the term “trock” in 2008 and take their name from the TARDIS’s camouflage feature, which lets the ship blend in no matter where or when it ends up—in ancient Greece, for example, it might appear as a column. (The chameleon circuit on Doctor Who’s vehicle of choice is broken, which is why the TARDIS always appears as an iconic but conspicuous police box.)
Time Crash’s beginnings were so casual as to almost count as accidental. In 2011, Northwestern University theater graduate Ronen Kohn, who’d been busking and playing local shows, started taking breaks from working on a folk-rock solo album called Cracks to obsessively watch Doctor Who. Kohn began to wonder how the show’s storytelling could translate to lyrics. “I was thinking that my entire brain is full of Doctor Who right now, and if I write any song it’s going to secretly be about
Doctor Who,” Kohn says. “So then I thought, Well, why does that have to be a secret?”
That June, Kohn posted a spur- of- themoment Facebook status wondering if anyone else wanted to play rock songs about time travel: “Are any of my friends musicians who are also huge geeks? Say, for instance, Doctor Who fans?” Dave Kitsberg responded within hours, jumping in as lead guitarist; he soon brought along bassist Michael Fye, a former coworker at GameStop. (Kitsberg now manages a Radio Shack, and Fye works at the Land of Nod and the Music Industry Workshop. Kohn has a support job with a software company.)
Kitsberg didn’t feel right playing space-centric songs on an ordinary earthbound guitar, though. He wanted a GuiTARDIS. Challenged with turning a terrible pun into a proper musical instrument, he approached his friend Chris Rice at Chicago-based Rice Custom Guitars. Rice had been building guitars with his dad, Rich, for more than 15 years, but he’d never modeled one after a police box. “How are we gonna do this so that it’s not a gimmick guitar, so that it’s a serious instrument that does justice to the music?” he remembers thinking.
Rice started watching the show to “capture the essence of the TARDIS,” noting the box’s subtle changes through five decades of screen time—and in short order he got hooked. Within days, he’d watched all the rebooted seasons and moved on to classic Who. He didn’t just build Kitsberg a GuitTARDIS; he also joined up as Time Crash’s pedal-steel guitarist. He recruited his brother Andy, a manager at an Arlington Heights pawn shop, to play drums, and in June 2012—a little more than a year after that initial Facebook post—the band’s current lineup finally took shape.
It takes a while to come up with a set’s worth of songs, of course, but Time Crash had started writing material when Kohn and Kitsberg first met up, long before all five members were aboard; they made their live debut in September, just three months after the Rice brothers joined. Soon they were opening for fellow nerd rockers, including local video-game band Arc Impulse, at the Abbey Pub and the Elbo Room. Fans began showing up stageside in bow ties and suspenders, a nod to the current Eleventh Doctor’s dress sense.