Friday, Aug 29, 2008
After graduation, Rosser jumped at national exposure with fellow Bloomingtonian John Mellencamp's band. Rosser soon became "Doc," the professor of the piano who added a refined musicality to the rock 'n' rollers. On stage, Mellencamp would prance and strut in sneakers and jeans and then whirl with a pointed finger to introduce, "Doctor Eric Rosser!" Rosser sat conservatory-straight at his Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer and poured out elaborate melodies.
But his cerebral sophistication and big ego didn't meld well with Mellencamp's domineering redneck nature. However uncomfortable the relationship, Mellencamp's music began to climb the charts. It was the cusp of the 1980s, when groupies were media figures and rock stars were rutting dogs on the loose. "We were all trying to get laid," a former band member says. Entourage members recall Dionysian road scenes, kept secret by "the code of the road" from spouses and girlfriends back home. One says, "I don't think they were carding for underage."
By late 1980, Rosser was thoroughly disenchanted with the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, Mellencamp's volatility and the lack of musical challenge, often disappearing into the night after gigs. "By then, he was like, 'I'm not going to play that, I hate it.' He hated 'Jack and Diane,'" singer-songwriter Ted Kubiniec says. Rosser quit the next summer during another Mellencamp tirade.
After leaving Mellencamp's band, Rosser recorded an album of piano bar music. In the liner notes, he thanked an old friend, Bill Platz, who photographed him "at a moment of mutual inspiration." A skinny man with a big mustache that hid bad teeth, Platz was a Bloomington photographer some called "Stoney."
Rosser began performing for regional children's groups, including "Kid's Alive," a local TV show. In the opening scene, he explained the piano to a clutch of toddlers and young children sitting around a battered old upright. "Just to show you how the piano works, how it makes sound," Rosser told them, "I'm going to take the clothes off of the piano. I'm going to take the pants down on this piano so you can see a naked piano. Don't make fun of it or you might get embarrassed."
In the mid-1980s, Rosser took a gig on the Delta Queen riverboat, churning the river between New Orleans and St. Paul. "I obviously have some sort of attraction to romantic lifestyles," he said. As one acquaintance recalls, Rosser was, "no stranger to hashish." His former agent saw him in St. Paul, and remembers, "He looked impaired. He looked really stoned. It wasn't like he was doing a little marijuana. He was on something."
When in Bloomington, Rosser lived in various bohemian digs. While some conjectured he was gay or bisexual, he had many girlfriends, most with small children. He intimated to one petite live-in girlfriend that he didn't like her body type, and he had some urges that might overtake him. Increasingly, he hung out in the rustic hills west of town where Bill Platz lived with his wife and two daughters. There was a large hippie-owned commune nearby, the perfect setting for Rosser to work on his Musicruiser.
The Musicruiser, or "Wanda Lust" as he nicknamed it, was a 1967 Dodge church bus. Rosser transformed it into a peppermint-green and pink proscenium on wheels he piloted around the Midwest. Once parked, Rosser wrestled his polished black 1926 Steinway grand piano out onto the cantilevered stage. Like a musical Walt Whitman, Rosser then entertained and enlightened the gathered citizens. I took my family to Rosser's summer concerts on Bloomington's vintage courthouse square. His abrupt segues from Chopin to Scott Joplin to down-and-out blues sometimes left me feeling both uncultured and slightly risqui, as though the mix was just a touch naughty.
Both People magazine and the Chicago Tribune ran articles about the Musicruiser in 1987. "Traveling gives you a real opportunity to meet an awful lot of people," Rosser told a filmmaker about his music. "People want to know you and with just a little work you can get them to open up and maybe get to know them much faster than anyone else."
For years, he brought the Musicruiser to the hill country commune's May Day party. The remnants of the local hippie horde toked and drank with hundreds of neighbors, lawyers, teachers, social workers and university folk, celebrating spring with abandon. Naked swimmers of all ages filled the pond, nude parents smiling as their bare children cavorted.
One former commune member who asked not to be named says, "I remember Bill Platz taking pictures down by the pond. He must have been loving it." Rosser and Platz found another "mutual inspiration," and began exchanging child pornography. Platz photographed young girls in sexual poses, genitals sometimes exposed. Platz encouraged the girls to "dress-up" for his photography sessions, which included provocative negligee and boudoir shots. One girl's parents complained to the children's alternative school. The school dismissed the issue.
Get Salon in your mailbox!
