FIELD NOTE//The Function of the Behavior | Mannequins for Friends, Cold Sweat Cabin & Reptile House at Soundbite Social

FIELD NOTE// THE FUNCTION OF THE BEHAVIOR

Mannequins for Friends, Cold Sweat Cabin and Reptile House at Soundbite Social
Warehouse on Broadway
Kansas City, Missouri
August 5, 2026

Written by: Alethea Mehdipour- Slightly Feral Media 

Humans are forever building rooms and then filling them with things the walls were clearly not designed to contain. 

Bass. Sweat. Grief. Joy. Somebody’s entire personality expressed through a guitar pedal. 

She likes humans this way. Not polished. Not especially sensible. Gathered together in the dark making something temporary and loud and impossible to keep.  The photographs are the data.  The evidence something happened.  

On this particular Wednesday, the raccoon arrived at Soundbite Social inside Warehouse on Broadway carrying a camera, several lenses, and the remains of a very long day.

The earlier professional habitat remains classified. The small human involved deserves privacy. 

The only relevant field note is this:  The raccoon had been thoroughly tested. The small human won.

By evening, the internal raccoon operating system was running several processes at once and at least one of them was making a noise nobody could identify. 

Camera packed. Shoes on. The humans were gathering. The raccoon went. 

This is another thing she has learned. Humans can be exhausting. Humans are also worth showing up for. Especially when they make things together.

The raccoon was wearing a shirt. It read:

It’s all fun and games until someone figures out the function of your behavior.

At the time, this had seemed funny. The universe had apparently been listening. The raccoon does not enjoy making claims without evidence. Unfortunately, the evidence kept getting weirder. The raccoon knows enough behavioral science to be suspicious of the obvious explanation.

What a behavior looks like is not necessarily why it happens.

A human moves toward the stage.Why?

A human leaves the room. Why?

A musician leans toward the crowd. Why?

A raccoon follows an increasingly ridiculous trail involving pyrotechnicians, an algorithm, and a mannequin with hard nipples. Definitely why.

The function is the reason for the behavior. What does it get? What does it change? What disappears? What becomes available? 

Behavioral science commonly describes four broad functional categories. 

Attention. 

Access to items or activities, often called tangible. 

Escape. 

Automatic reinforcement, often described more casually as sensory. 

The categories are useful. Humans, though, remain inconveniently resistant to behaving like diagrams. The same behavior can serve different functions in different contexts. Different behaviors can accomplish the same thing. Sometimes several variables are operating at once. The raccoon appreciates this. She has never trusted a creature that fits too neatly into a chart.

So the plan for the evening became: Observe. Photograph. Collect evidence. Do not diagnose strangers from across the room. Try not to become part of the experiment.

The last item would be a fail.

THE MANNEQUIN INCIDENT

Several days earlier, the raccoon had been in Frontenac, Kansas for fireworks. The crew went to The Pitt. There was a mannequin. The mannequin had hard nipples. This became important later.

Not scientifically important. Probably.

But humans are very good at taking one absurd little detail and carrying it with them until it becomes shared language. Someone notices. Someone laughs. Someone brings it up again twelve hours later. Soon an object that had absolutely nothing to do with anything becomes part of the mythology of the weekend. 

The raccoon loves this about humans. They make tiny cultures everywhere they go. A joke becomes a reference. A reference becomes a story. Eventually somebody can say three words and an entire group of humans knows exactly what they mean. Humans collect stories the way raccoons collect shiny things. The raccoon understands.

She returned to Lawrence. The mannequin should have stayed in Frontenac.

It did not.

Suddenly, Mannequins for Friends began appearing in the raccoon’s digital habitat. Suggested posts. Event listings. Social media. Again. And again. And again.  The raccoon knows recommendation systems are built from behavior. Clicks. Views. Interactions. Patterns.  The raccoon also knows correlation does not equal causation. Still. The timing had become curious. So she looked up the band.

Mannequins for Friends. A three piece rock band from Lawrence, Kansas describing itself through sonic heaviness and head banging grooves. Their own classifications wander through sludge rock, alternative metal, groove rock, heavy psych and post hardcore. Hmmmmmm. The raccoon continued digging. There was a show at Soundbite Social inside Warehouse on Broadway.  Home away from home.  

Cold Sweat Cabin. Mannequins for Friends. Reptile House. Wednesday night. At some point, coincidence becomes a pattern. At some point after that, the raccoon stops arguing with it and packs the camera.

This is how raccoon destiny works.

FUNCTION ONE ESCAPE

The first band reached the raccoon before the door did.

Cold Sweat Cabin was already playing when she climbed out of Elvira. The sound came through the parking lot warm and thick. Deep maroon. Orange around the edges. The color of an August sunset after the sun itself has gone down but everything it touched is still radiating heat.

The raccoon stopped. Listened. 

The building was leaking sunset. 

She had not even gone inside yet.

Cold Sweat Cabin is a Kansas City psychedelic and alternative rock band. 

Useful classification. 

But taxonomy only gets the raccoon so far. The sound did not merely occupy the room. It escaped it. Crossed the parking lot. Found the raccoon. Changed the color of the evening before she ever reached the door.

The raccoon’s classification was simpler A sunset had learned how to use an amplifier. She moved toward it. Which makes escape a slightly ridiculous place to begin. 

But behavior is like that sometimes.

Escape is the function when behavior gets something unpleasant to stop, become smaller, arrive later, or become avoidable. Humans do this constantly. Leave the loud room. Move away from the irritating human. Take the long route. Put in earplugs. Remember something suspiciously urgent in the car. 

Different behavior. Potentially the same outcome. Make this less. Make this stop. 

Not tonight, apparently. The raccoon noticed something under her shoe. A lump. She stopped. Looked down.

Fruit snacks. Of course.

Earlier that day, fruit snacks had been doing respectable work as reinforcers in the raccoon’s professional habitat. A group of them had apparently chosen a second career. By the time the raccoon discovered them, the specimen had collected gravel. 

It was no longer particularly fruit snack shaped.

It had become geology. 

Scrape. Inspect. Scrape again. Less lumpy. Acceptable.

The raccoon entered Soundbite Social. 

Step. 

Stick. 

Step. 

Stick. 

Step. 

Stick. 

The fruit snack had opinions. 

At one point the raccoon almost giggled out loud. There was something exquisitely silly about spending the day around reinforcement and then arriving at a Kansas City live music show with an actual reinforcer glued to the bottom of your shoe. 

The literature does not prepare you for everything.

Field observation: Escape was available to the raccoon. Escape was apparently less available to the shoe. Going home remained an option. Quiet den. Shoes off. No humans. No amplifiers. No mysterious mannequin trail. 

A perfectly respectable raccoon response.

Instead, Cold Sweat Cabin kept pouring maroon through the room. 

The raccoon lifted the camera. Interesting light. Click.

Interesting human. Click.

Interesting shape. Move. Click. There.

And then the raccoon noticed the rig. Oh. Now this was interesting. The guitar. The amp. The microphone. The pedalboard. The cables.

Orange. Coily. Coordinated. Everything belonged together.

The raccoon hesitates to use the phrase aesthetically pleasing. There are only certain environments where the raccoon considers this acceptable language. This was one of them. The entire setup was extremely aesthetically pleasing to the raccoon. Suspiciously so. The evidence required closer inspection.

Initial classification: Equipment belonging to the guitarist.

Further observation weakened this hypothesis. 

The orange coils were too magnificent. 

The pedalboard knew things. 

The guitar appeared entirely too comfortable with the arrangement. And the whole system sat there looking coordinated enough to suggest planning beyond ordinary human capability.

The raccoon reviewed the evidence. New hypothesis: The rig may be sentient.

More concerning: It appears to control the human.

In at least one photograph, the being appears to be attempting to lure the raccoon closer.

A classic strategy. Use beautiful colors. Create curiosity. Wait for the raccoon to approach voluntarily. The raccoon recognizes a trap. The raccoon is also forced to document an inconvenient fact. The colors are excellent. Obviously this is what the human uses to summon the guitar gods. There is no other reasonable explanation. Further research is recommended. Possibly from closer range. The raccoon accepts this risk for science.

Now we have another problem. If leaving would have produced escape, what was being produced by staying? The photograph, perhaps. The sound. Curiosity. The relief of letting somebody else make the noise for a while. A suspicious guitar system. Several things can be true at once. Humans do this. Raccoons too.

The raccoon stayed. The shoe occasionally stayed half a second longer.

Science continued.

FUNCTION TWO ATTENTION

By the time Mannequins for Friends took the stage, the fruit snack had been downgraded from reinforcer to environmental condition. The raccoon had more interesting organisms to watch.

Attention is one of those words humans have somehow managed to make embarrassing. Attention seeking. They say it like an accusation. The raccoon has never understood this. Humans are social creatures. They spend astonishing amounts of energy pretending they do not want to be seen and then write songs, form bands, dye their hair, build stages, post photographs, tell stories and stand under lights. 

The raccoon finds this very endearing.

Attention is the function when the response of another human is what the behavior produces. At a concert, attention becomes almost architectural. A musician moves forward. The room changes orientation. A vocalist says something. A human near the front answers. Someone else answers louder. A guitarist shifts. Phones rise. The crowd gives something back. Nobody has announced a contingency. Nobody needs to. The room has already figured it out.

Then there were Mannequins for Friends. Three humans. Lawrence, Kansas. Sonic heaviness. Head banging grooves. Sludge rock. Heavy psych. Alternative metal. Useful classifications.

The raccoon had another one. 1990s. Not costume. Not retro branding. Not a careful reconstruction of grunge under LED lights. More like somebody opened a basement door from 1994 and these three came out still carrying the distortion.  The raccoon was there in 1994, she knows what this looks like.

Heavy. Loose around the edges. A little sludge in the seams. The posture of humans who do not appear especially worried about whether the room cares.

They played. The room looked. Attention can be the consequence of behavior without necessarily being the reason for it. The raccoon knows this. 

The raccoon also knows better than to stand fifteen feet away with a camera and announce the motivations of strangers. She is observant. She is not psychic. Still, the loop was visible. Band plays. Humans orient. Heads begin moving. Conversation thins. Camera rises. Click. 

The raccoon became part of it. Something changed. Expression. Movement. A hand sliding into place. A body folding toward an instrument. The raccoon followed. Click. Click. Click. Attention had become visible through the viewfinder. And then something happened.

The mannequin stopped being the most interesting thing about Mannequins for Friends. The raccoon had invested considerably in that joke. This was unfortunate. But evidence is evidence.

Apparently there was an actual band hiding underneath the algorithm. A loud one. A  heavy one. A suspiciously 1990s one. 

Some decades do not disappear. They simply find new amplifiers.

FUNCTION THREE SENSORY

Then Reptile House arrived. And the room went green. Not pretty green. Not ugly green. Green without moral assignment.

The raccoon’s brain immediately began supplying visual references. Cartoon. Horror movie. Radioactive barrel. Basement creature. Heat lamp. Something that should probably not be fed after midnight even though that is technically a different franchise. The green kept shifting.

The raccoon knows this color. The daughter creature has maintained a long standing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fandom. Years of field exposure have produced expertise. This was not moss. Not forest \Not emerald. Not quite neon. This was the green that turns turtles into mutants.  Field identification complete. Reptile House had lived up to its name before the raccoon finished looking at them.

Then there was the sound. Reptile House is a Kansas City, Kansas band. Their own taxonomy is considerably more efficient. Blood and Guts Rock n Roll. The raccoon appreciates this. No flowchart. No dissertation.

Blood. Guts. Rock n Roll. Proceed accordingly.

Their catalog carries names like Age of the Lizard Man, Ultra Violence and Reptile House Live at Lansing Prison. The naming conventions provide additional supporting evidence.

Automatic reinforcement is the function when the behavior itself produces the reinforcing consequence. Nobody else has to deliver it. Live music makes this much easier to feel than explain. Bass enters the ribs. Light fills the eyes. A foot begins moving before the human has decided whether dancing is occurring. The body knows something before language catches up.

Reptile House was extremely useful for this research. The sound did not remain politely in the ears. It traveled. Sternum. Jaw. Floor. The raccoon’s remaining fruit snack infrastructure.

The humans moved. The raccoon will not claim to know why any individual human moved. A headbang is not automatically sensory maintained. A dance is not automatically sensory maintained. Topography is not function. What a behavior looks like is not the same thing as why it happens. The raccoon cannot climb inside another human’s nervous system and inspect the contingency. This would violate several professional and social boundaries. 

But the environment itself was undeniable. The green. The volume. The movement. The weight. 

Cold Sweat Cabin had painted the evening maroon and introduced potentially sentient musical equipment. Mannequins for Friends had pulled something distinctly 1990s through the room. Reptile House turned the whole habitat radioactive. Same floor. Same walls. Different world. Humans do this constantly in live music habitats. They build a room. Then musicians enter. The lights change. Sound begins. And suddenly everybody agrees they are somewhere else.

The raccoon loves this trick. Sometimes the riff is the reinforcer. Sometimes the vibration itself is enough. 

Sometimes the nervous system simply answers. More.

FUNCTION FOUR TANGIBLE

Tangible is the easy one to underestimate. The more precise behavioral term is access.  Behavior happens because it produces access to an item, an activity, an experience, or something else the organism wants. Humans do this all night at shows. 

Approach merch table. Acquire shirt.

Move toward bar. Acquire drink.

Shift six feet left. Acquire unobstructed view.

The raccoon is no better. In fact, photographers may be among the easiest organisms to train. Interesting light appears. Raccoon moves. Interesting expression appears. Raccoon crouches.

Human begins doing something visually improbable. Raccoon nearly climbs into furniture. Click. Image acquired. The desired object did not exist a fraction of a second ago. Now it does. This is extremely effective reinforcement.

Give the raccoon a room full of interesting humans and occasionally produce one extraordinary frame. She will return indefinitely. This may explain Slightly Feral Media better than any business plan ever has. But the photograph is more than acquisition. Iis access to something humans are very bad at keeping. Moments. Humans make temporary things. A note disappears. A hand drops. A face changes. A room empties. The lights go dark. The band packs the equipment. Everyone returns to whatever life was waiting outside.

The raccoon photographs because sometimes she wants to keep one tiny piece from disappearing. She is very fond of these creatures. She does not trust their memories. Evidence helps. And perhaps that was the tangible thing the raccoon had been pursuing from the beginning.

Not Mannequins for Friends. Not exactly. Access to the question. What happens if I follow this strange little thread? Frontenac. Mannequin. Algorithm. Lawrence band. Warehouse on Broadway. Cold Sweat Cabin. Mannequins for Friends. Reptile House. A sticky shoe. A potentially sentient rig. A camera full of proof.

Scientifically, the mannequin caused none of this. Probably. The raccoon respects causal inference.

The raccoon also knows a good story when one wanders into the habitat.

FIELD CONCLUSION THE FUNCTION OF THE NOISE

By the end of the night, the raccoon had accidentally turned a three band Kansas City live music show into a lesson about the four functions of behavior. cThis is why the raccoon should not be given both a camera and a conceptual framework without supervision.

Escape. Attention. Sensory. cAccess. They were all available somewhere in the room.

But the raccoon kept returning to a different question. Why do humans keep making these rooms? Not venues. The other rooms. The ones that only exist for a few hours. A room where someone can be noticed. A room where someone can disappear. A room where the bass feels better than whatever they were thinking about before they walked in. A room where a stranger makes a sound and another stranger recognizes something inside it. A room where somebody can stand alone in a crowd without necessarily feeling alone.Attention. Escape. Sensory. Access. Perhaps several at once.

Perhaps none in the tidy way an instructional diagram suggests. Humans are like that. They resist clean categories. The raccoon is grateful.

Clean is optional. Evidence is required.

The shirt had said: It’s all fun and games until someone figures out the function of your behavior.

The raccoon did not figure out the function of everyone’s behavior that night. That was never the assignment. She learned something better. The same room can do different work for every human inside it. For one person, the noise pulls them closer. For another, it lets everything else disappear. For another, it is physical. For another, it is belonging.

And sometimes a tired raccoon walks into a room because a mannequin joke followed her home from Frontenac. The literature still does not recognize raccoon destiny as a fifth function. The raccoon has checked. Further research is recommended. The humans keep returning. So does the raccoon.

FURTHER FIELD RESEARCH

The field note is complete.

The evidence is not.

The full photographic record from Cold Sweat Cabin, Mannequins for Friends and Reptile House at Soundbite Social inside Warehouse on Broadway is available here.

The raccoon recommends further investigation. Listen to the bands. Follow the humans. Support the strange little ecosystems where live music continues to happen. Then go stand in one of the rooms. The function may vary.

FIELD NOTE COMPLETE

The room left evidence.

The raccoon collected it.

Slightly Feral.
Entirely Capable.

-Laverna the Rockin Raccoon

Photography and field documentation by Alethea Mehdipour

Slightly Feral Media

Published by My Midlife Crisis Creative Inc.

FIELD REFERENCES

BEHAVIOR SCIENCE
Behavior Analyst Certification Board 

BAND RESEARCH

MANNEQUINS FOR FRIENDS

Bandcamp

Linktree

COLD SWEAT CABIN

Bandcamp

YouTube

REPTILE HOUSE

Bandcamp.  

LinkTree 

FIELD NOTE //Combo Diablo and the Doo-Dads: Kansas City Music History

FIELD NOTE // THE BAND NAMES CHANGED. THE HUMANS KEPT PLAYING.

Combo Diablo, the Doo-Dads, and a Slightly Feral Journey Through Kansas City Music History

By Alethea F. Mehdipour — Slightly Feral Media

THE SHIRT

The first thing the raccoon saw was the drummer’s shirt.

THE GRAND EMPORIUM.

The letters reached into an old, poorly labeled section of the archives, grabbed an entire collection of memories, and dumped them directly onto the floor. The raccoon may have squealed. Not a dignified, professional Kansas City concert photographer squeal. More like a slightly feral teenage girl encountering a boy band in the wild. This was unexpected. She had arrived to photograph Kansas City rock ’n’ roll band Combo Diablo. Instead, before the band had played a single note, drummer Joe Gose was standing there wearing a doorway into the raccoon’s own live-music history.

BEFORE THE DIGITAL EVIDENCE

Many years ago—decades, even—before digital cameras allowed a raccoon to take 1,200 photographs and quietly dispose of the evidence that 900 of them were terrible, she made her first attempt at live-music photography inside the Grand Emporium in Kansas City.

The Grand Emporium was dirty in all the right ways.

It was not the kind of dirty that required cleaning up.  It was the kind that proved something had happened there. The walls were covered from floor to ceiling with concert posters. The posters continued into the bathroom and, if the raccoon’s recovered archives are accurate, onto the ceiling.

This may be where the fascination with Kansas City venue bathroom walls began. Further study is probably required.

A neon sign reading 18th and Vine stood on a post in the middle of the room. Another neon image of Stevie Ray Vaughan glowed from the wall.  In the far back corner was Amazing Grace’s barbecue operation, serving food from a makeshift kitchen inside one of Kansas City’s most important live-music rooms.  The raccoon can see it in her brain.   There is also a completely unnecessary but historically delightful family footnote here: the raccoon’s stepdad’s brother apparently dated Amazing Grace way back in the day.

Kansas City is not a large city. Kansas City is a very complicated collection of humans who have all met each other at least once.

THE FIRST FIELD NOTES

The raccoon remembers seeing Chris Duarte at the Grand Emporium on New Year’s Eve. She also remembers Annetta “Cotton Candy” Washington and So Many Men. There were others. Their names have slipped behind boxes in the archives, but pieces of those nights remain.

A hippie couple wearing fringe danced between the tables.  A tall man moved through the room in a full-length fur coat, pointy boots, and a hat that appeared to have been fashioned after Mr. Bojangles. The room was crowded with live blues, barbecue smoke, clothing choices, neon light, and humans who knew exactly why they were there.

The Grand Emporium eventually followed the raccoon into college.

Experiences from that room became assignments in a creative-writing class many years later. The raccoon had already been writing for most of her life. She began writing poetry in second grade and has had more than one piece published over the years. Still, some of the best pieces she produced for that college class came from the Grand Emporium. That room gave a young raccoon something worth trying to describe. It also gave her one of her earliest reasons to carry a camera into Kansas City live music.

Somewhere along the way, those memories disappeared into the archives. They were not gone. They were simply waiting inside Joe Gose’s shirt.

AN ALMOST-MEDIOCRE PHOTOGRAPH

The raccoon was so excited to see the Grand Emporium shirt—and so thoroughly flooded by beautiful memories she had forgotten she possessed—that she failed at the very task she had arrived to perform.

She photographed the shirt. Almost. The resulting image is almost mediocre. This is particularly unfortunate because the raccoon is allegedly a professional concert photographer. 

However, the photograph still contains the important evidence: The shirt existed. The raccoon saw it. The archives opened.

The shirt also started a conversation. It took approximately .28 seconds for the raccoon to realize that the members of Combo Diablo were going to be fun.

FRIENDS WITH THE DRUMMER

Shortly before the Grand Emporium incident, the raccoon had been in the little girls’ room, where she encountered another human. The human explained that she was friends with the drummer. This statement means something very different in adulthood than it might have meant when the humans were younger. In this case, it appeared to mean that she was genuinely friends with the drummer.

This was consistent with the rest of the room. Much of the audience seemed to be made up of people who knew the members of Combo Diablo personally. Friends had come to see their friends play music.

The raccoon noticed something very quickly.

THE SMILES.

This may have been the smiley-est collection of humans she had encountered in some time. There were smiles onstage. There were smiles in the audience. There were smiles during the conversations before the music began.

For a Kansas City band called COMBO DIABLO, there was a suspicious amount of joy in the room.

The seriousness of the name appeared to be a front.

THE SLIGHTLY HAUNTED PEDALBOARD

Then there was the electric guitarist’s pedalboard. Don “Gator” Wilson had assembled a collection of completely individualized little gadgets, each apparently responsible for convincing the guitar to make a different kind of noise. These were not anonymous factory pedals lined up neatly and behaving themselves.

Each one had its own design. Its own identity. Possibly its own backstory. Collectively, they looked like a row of tiny, slightly haunted machines waiting for someone to step on them.

The raccoon had questions. Did each gadget have a name? Had any of them been constructed during a thunderstorm? Was the guitarist controlling the pedals—or had the pedals selected a guitarist capable of carrying out their instructions?

No definitive answers were available. What was clear was that this was not simply a collection of guitar effects. It was another piece of Combo Diablo’s personality: individualized, a little strange, and far more interesting than anything designed to disappear quietly beneath someone’s boots.

The raccoon photographed the evidence.

Carefully. Some equipment should not be startled.

THE STORIES CAME FREELY

As the raccoon talked with the members of Combo Diablo, the stories came freely. These humans had history. Not polished biography history. Real Kansas City music history. The kind that arrives through half-finished sentences, remembered shows, former band names, old venues, shared jokes, and somebody suddenly saying, “Wait until you hear about this.”

Combo Diablo is a Kansas City trio featuring Mike Niewald on acoustic guitar and vocals, Don “Gator” Wilson on guitar, and Joe Gose on drums.

They describe what they do as soul-scorching rock ’n’ roll. That description is useful, but it does not contain the entire creature. There is Americana in it. Rockabilly. Blues. Punk. Traditional rock ’n’ roll. There are also decades of Kansas City music history moving underneath it.

Between the three musicians are connections to bands including Absolute Ceiling, the Bindlestiffs, the Saddlemen, the Grave Escape—and one band the raccoon was not expecting to uncover that evening. The guitarist handed her a treasure.

THE DOO-DADS.

THE DADS ADAPTED

Apparently, these humans have been together—in various musical configurations—for quite a while. Long enough to play in bands. Long enough to become fathers. Long enough to discover that mainstream adulthood has some very strange ideas about what responsible parents are supposed to give up.

There is an old assumption that becoming a dad means placing certain parts of yourself in storage. The guitar. The stage. The band. The loud parts. These Kansas City musicians did something much more interesting. They adapted.

Instead of giving up live music when fatherhood arrived, they made music that their children could enter with them. They became the Doo-Dads.

THE DOO-DADS

The Doo-Dads formed in Kansas City in 2002. The original band brought together four musician fathers: Mike Niewald, Matt Kesler, Joe Gose, and Ken Lovern. These were not children’s entertainers attempting to imitate a rock band. They were experienced Kansas City musicians who redirected everything they already knew about live performance into music for kids and the adults trapped in the room with them. The result was kid-cool, adult-friendly rock ’n’ roll.

The songs covered matters of serious concern to small humans: Bicycles. The zoo. Brushing teeth. Potty-related business. The Doo-Dads performed in matching shirts, filled rooms with bubbles, and built shows that allowed parents to bring their children into live music without reducing the adults to hostages.

Their own children became part of the story. Known as the Doo-Drops, they sang on the records and grew up around the music their fathers had refused to abandon. The dads had not stopped being musicians. Fatherhood simply changed the set list.

THERE WILL BE ROCK

The story of Kansas City children’s rock band the Doo-Dads eventually became the documentary There Will Be Rock. Directed by Kansas City filmmaker Anthony Ladesich, the film followed the band’s unusual history as working musicians, fathers, and performers inside the world of children’s music. It also preserved something larger than a novelty band. It documented what happened when a group of musicians decided that becoming responsible adults did not require them to become entirely different humans.

WATCH THERE WILL BE ROCK ON YOUTUBE: Watch The Doo Dads Documentary Here!

There Will Be Rock premiered on Kansas City PBS in December 2020. The documentary later received a 2021 Mid-America Emmy Award in the Arts and Entertainment long-form category.

THE CHILDREN GREW UP

Eventually, the children grew up. This is a known side effect of feeding them. The Doo-Drops were no longer little. The songs about bicycles, bubbles, brushing teeth, and other urgent tiny-human affairs had served their purpose. 

The musicians, however, were still musicians. The band names changed. The humans kept playing.

Now there is Combo Diablo. Not the Doo-Dads with darker clothing. Not a children’s band attempting an adult rebrand. Combo Diablo is its own creature: a Kansas City rock ’n’ roll band carrying the accumulated history of the people inside it. The Doo-Dads are one chapter. Before that were other bands, other stages, other versions of the same humans.

After decades of Kansas City music, fatherhood, children’s shows, bubbles, old venues, lost memories, recovered stories, slightly haunted guitar equipment, and at least one Grand Emporium shirt, they are still doing the thing. They are still getting onstage. They are still playing together. And judging by the suspicious number of smiles in the room, they are still having an unreasonable amount of fun.

The raccoon arrived expecting to collect photographs of Combo Diablo. She left carrying part of Kansas City music history—and a collection of her own memories that she did not realize had been missing.

All because the drummer wore a shirt. The archives are strange that way.

DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE

View the complete Combo Diablo concert photography gallery from Soundbite Social inside Warehouse on Broadway:

https://mymidlifecrisiscreativeinc17.pixieset.com/combodiablosoundbitesocialwarehouseonbroadway/

FOLLOW COMBO DIABLO

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/share/1C4GuUDmWb/?mibextid=wwXIfr

SoundCloud:

https://on.soundcloud.com/D2pVPuxbYf6aQMrz7

SUPPORT THE HUMANS WHO MAKE THE NOISE

Follow the band. Listen to the music. Support local venues. Buy something directly from the artists whenever possible. Tell the humans when their work matters.

The room left evidence. 

The raccoon collected it.

Slightly feral.

Entirely capable.

— Laverna the Rockin’ Raccoon

Written and photographed by Alethea F. Mehdipour — Slightly Feral Media

Published by My Midlife Crisis Creative Inc.

 

All photographs and written content are protected by copyright. Please do not download, reproduce, alter, or redistribute images without permission. Bands and performers may contact Slightly Feral Media regarding personal and promotional use with proper photographer credit.

REFERENCES AND FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Combo Diablo. Music, recordings, and band information. SoundCloud.

https://soundcloud.com/combo-diablo

Kansas City PBS. “Local Kids Rock Group Takes the Stage in New Doc.” Information about the Doo-Dads documentary There Will Be Rock, directed by Anthony Ladesich.

https://www.kansascitypbs.org/blogs/station-news/local-kids-rock-group-take-the-stage-in-new-doc/

Mid-America Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. 2021 Mid-America Emmy Award recipients. There Will Be Rock is listed as the winner in the Arts and Entertainment long-form category.

https://emmymid-america.org/files/2022/04/2021-WINNING-ENTRIES.pdf

The Pitch. “The Doo-Dads Bring Garageland to Kidsville.” Background on the Kansas City children’s rock band, its members, performances, and music.

https://www.thepitchkc.com/the-doodads-bring-garageland-to-kidsville/

University of Missouri–Kansas City Libraries. Grand Emporium Collection. Historical photographs, flyers, promotional materials, and information documenting the Kansas City venue.

https://library.umkc.edu/grand-emporium-collection-added-to-umkc-digital-special-collections/

The Pitch. “Requiem for a Room.” History and remembrance of Kansas City’s Grand Emporium.

https://www.thepitchkc.com/requiem-for-a-room/

The Clio. Grand Emporium historical entry. Background on the venue, its ownership, performers, and place in Kansas City music history.

https://theclio.com/entry/191261

KCUR 89.3. “Music Review: The Bindlestiffs’ Long-Lost Tracks.” Additional Kansas City music history connected to Mike Niewald.

https://www.kcur.org/arts-life/2015-12-08/music-review-the-bindlestiffs-long-lost-tracks

Marmoset Music. Absolute Ceiling artist history. Additional background on the Kansas City band and its members.

https://www.marmosetmusic.com/browse/33754-death-and-fear-of-dying-young

Some details in this field note—including the Grand Emporium memories, conversations with Combo Diablo, the remarkably cheerful audience, and the suspicious pedalboard devices—come from the raccoon’s direct observations and personal archives.

The memories remain the raccoon’s own.  The supporting history has been linked for humans wishing to investigate further.