When I was a kid one of my favorite places to go was Showbiz Pizza. My dad would take there nearly weekly, something fun we would do together or with the family. Now a lot of you may not know about Showbiz, as it was generally a south-eastern thing and it’s heyday was the 80′s and early 90′s in America. I’m sure most of you have heard of Chuck-e-Cheese, which is to Showbiz what McDonald’s Play Place is to Disneyland. Showbiz was a magical experience and everyone I knew had their birthday parties there. The reason for the magic, the metaphysical glue that held this place together was the Rock-afire Explosion.
The Rock-afire Explosion was an animatronic band made up of Billy Bob Brockali, Looney Bird, Duke Larue, Fatz Geronimo, Beach Bear, Mitzi Mozzarella, Rolfe DeWolfe & Earl Schmerle (and the spider, Antioch). Each week they would entertain us kids by singing and cutting up with eachother. Laugh or not, this is the first place I heard the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and many more. There’s a great documentary about The ROck-afire Explosion under the same name, but that isn’t the point here.
The Rock-afire Explosion was the brainchild of one man, Aaron Fechter. Since I saw the documentary, I went on a mission to find Aaron. I was inspired by the fact that after all these years, he retained the rights to his creation long after Chuck-E-Cheese came in and bastardized the franchise, disassembling his beautiful pieces of art and replacing them with a hack band with zero personality. Aaron had kept onto his dream, and had been spending all this time working on other inventions, doing philanthropic work and keeping the Rock-afire alive.
After enough searching, I finally found Aaron and my wife, the Colonel Jon Hensley, Mary Sparr and myself all went down to Orlando to visit Aaron and all of the Rock-afire Explosion. He took us around his magical warehouse, much like Willy Wonka’s factory, stacked to the ceiling with antique electronics, unfinished inventions, old memorabilia and of course, The Rock-afire Explosion, alive in all it’s glory. He welcomed us into his factory, and cooked us the best steak I’ve ever tasted with his experimental Hydrillium. I can’t tell you enough how all of this just made me feel like a child again. It was so inspiring that honestly I kind of changed my view of art and music and everything that day. The importance of holding on to the dream and making sure every corner of the childlike inspiration that creates your greatest aspirations had never been more important. Needless to say, being the way I am, Aaron and I became fast friends and have begun working on some other projects ourself together.
But now to important moment at hand. There’s a bully of sorts in Orlando who hides behind the “Dr. Phillips Charitable Organization”. They basically take money and build skyscrapers and get tax write-offs anywhere they can. They hate Aaron and the Rock-afire Warehouse because it’s the only piece of the block they don’t have, so as you can imagine they don’t stop at anything to try and get Rock-afire to move off their block. Well they won’t! That’s the good news. But Aaron wrote me the other day concerned about this shared wall on the top of the building. Dr. Phillips and Co, want it gone because it’s visible from I-4 and blocks their new skyscraper, but this wall has been part of this side of the skyline for a long time. He was trying to get as many people as they could to write in or call and protest the tearing down of the wall. In the video, he included that it was always a dream to paint the wall with the Rock-afire logo for all of Orlando to see as the drove across the I-4.
– Article by Shooter Jennings
