This story is part of Illinois Student Newsroom’s series: Champaign’s Honorary Streets: the Stories Behind the Signs.
CHAMPAIGN – Taylor Street between Market Street and Walnut Street in downtown Champaign is named in honor of Mark Rubel, who devoted his life to pursuing arts and music.
Rubel’s wife, Nancy Rubel, said her husband had many careers: audio engineer, rock musician, consultant, legal expert and instructor. Rubel opened Pogo Studio on Taylor Street in 1980 and recorded over a thousand albums. He worked with a wide variety of artists including Alison Krauss, Fall Out Boy, Adrian Belew and Ludacris. Rubel died on March 8, 2024.
In 1980, Rubel joined the band Captain Rat and the Blind Rivets. He played bass guitar with them for more than 20 years.
Nancy Rubel said her husband wanted families with children to come to see the band’s performances. She said the band also had wacky costumes and created special events with different themes.
Pogo Studio was a hub for musicians. It attracted both local and international artists. Nancy said Rubel could get the best out of people in the studio.
She said he would go out and find bizarre instruments to experiment with and find creative ways to help people relax. “He had a box of silly hats. So, if someone was too tense to get the vocal right, he would put on a silly hat and turn all the lights off,” Nancy said. “He would hit the record button but not tell the band. He just said, ‘Hey, just do a practice run.’”
Working with so many different people in the studio eventually led Rubel to teaching. He started at Parkland College in the early ‘80s. He taught a class on the history of rock and roll at Millikin University from 2005 to 2008. He was an instructor and audio and recording director at Eastern Illinois University from 2008 to 2013. In 2013, Rubel and Nancy moved to Nashville, Tennessee, so Rubel could serve as director of education at Blackbird Academy.
Nancy said music was the lens through which her husband looked at the world, and that his passion for music fueled everything else.
“He said he thought teaching was one of the most noble and relevant, worthwhile things that you could do with your life to impact what you are passionate about,” Nancy said. “What you love to do to others and help them achieve their goals.”
Nancy described Rubel’s influence as a pebble in the pond. When people throw a pebble, she said, concentric rings will expand, and this was what he loved doing.
“He loved meeting people and getting them excited about their life, about what they wanted to do,” she said. “If they didn’t know what they wanted to do, he would help them figure it out.”
Sasha Rubel is Mark’s younger sister. She said Rubel taught people both technical and interpersonal skills.
“As a teacher, he taught his audio engineering students about how to greet people, how to sit physically with people who were entering your space, how to guide the energy, how to shape the energy and the sound, how to draw things out of people,” she said.
“He wanted people to understand that audio engineering is more than equipment, that it’s a way people can communicate with each other and express themselves,” Sasha said.
Nancy said the honorary street is better than a monument because it is tied to the specific location where Rubel spent years with Pogo Studio.
She said Rubel’s legacy lives on in other people.
“His legacy is not tangible, but it’s in me. It’s in his sister. It’s in all the students that he had. It is in all the musicians he worked with,” Nancy said. “We all have a version of Mark in our heart that we carry forward into our own endeavors.”