Local band Captain Rat and the Blind Rivets has been entertaining crowds for over four decades with their repertoire of 1950s and 1960s pop rock standards and zany on-stage props.
This 40-plus year reality was thrown into question after both longtime drummer Jeff Evans and founding member Mark Rubel passed away within months of each other this past year.
The remaining band members, however, say they had little doubt about their future: They were going to keep performing.
“Mark, in one of my last conversations with him, said ‘I really want you guys to keep the band going’,” said keyboardist Roger Prillaman. “We even talked about possible replacements for him, which was kind of a tough conversation, but he was in good spirits about it.”
Tim Vear, who founded the group alongside Rubel in 1980, said that after playing live music for so long, it would have been nearly impossible to walk away from performing.
“One of the great joys of everybody in the band over all these years is playing live music,” Vear said. “You almost can’t stop playing live. It becomes a thing you look forward to, so we agreed ‘yep, as long as it’s still fun, we will keep doing it.’ That’s the decision we came to, even before Mark had passed.”
Vear and Prillaman were not able to make a career out of the band alone, but both are consummate musicians through and through.
Vear, who performs under the stage name “Timmy Ray,” said he worked for Shure Microphones for more than 35 years, and like a true musician, he called it his “gig.”
Prillaman continues to work as a bankruptcy lawyer in Urbana, but on stage, he’s Todd Modern, a persona that Prillaman carries from one of his previous bands, The Edge.
“I did that, to be frank, when I was a young kid right out of law school starting a practice here in Champaign,” Prillaman said of his stage name. “I didn’t particularly want the local judiciary to know that I was playing in a rock ‘n’ roll band.”
Prillaman and Vear, along with drummer Terry “The Hawk” Hawkins and Jon “Cody Lee” Sokolski, make up the current iteration of the group.
One of the group’s most recent shows was the Shumway Sesquicentennial. The town of Shumway has a population of less than 200, but their performance in September drew a crowd larger than that.
“For their 150th anniversary, they hired a band who’s about half that age to come play,” Vear joked. “We’ve probably played a dozen sesquicentennials over the last 20 years.”
According to Vear, the band already has several shows booked for next year.