SuperMonkey

Kent State University Write Up

It was in the middle of a dinner rush, washing dishes at Rockne’s on Main Street when Christian Groblewski realized that he wanted to pursue a career in rock’n’roll. From that moment, it only took him a little more than a decade to turn it into a reality.




Groblewski, better known today by his stage name SuperMonkey, now leads a six-piece hard rock band that’s rising up steadily in Pittsburgh’s bar-blues scene. A part of his Midwestern tour, SuperMonkey will be performing at the Musica in Akron on Friday, Oct. 10. He’s also recently released his first LP, “The Pennsylvania Blues Revolution,” which is, Groblewski said, an amenable phrase to what he plans to spearhead.

“I would like to represent our region musically,” he said. The lack of a strictly-defined Pittsburgh brand of music, Groblewski said, gives him “a little bit of a niche.”

But SuperMonkey isn’t a Pittsburgh native. He said he owes his rock’n’roll debt to the university town of Kent, where his musical shtick came to be.

Like others before him, Groblewski shuffled through a range of majors, starting with architecture, something he said he liked on account of his penchant for design, but disliked for the neverending studio hours. After dropping out of accounting because he “didn’t want to crunch numbers all day,” he found he enjoyed classes in marketing and graduated with a B.B.A. in 1995. Yet Groblewski still didn’t see himself walking into work with a briefcase everyday.

“I figured I more so like making rock’n’roll records and playing guitar,” Grobleski said. “That’s what I did the most when I was in school.”

Groblewski said he was still able to put his marketing knowledge to use. After he officially moved to Pittsburgh in 1998, he knew he needed a brand and a business for his work to be taken seriously. After reading Donald Passman’s All You Need to Know About the Music Business, and following the advice from legendary concert promoter Pat DiCesare, Groblewski decided he wanted to go by a stage name. At band practice one day, he told a friend that he wanted his epithet to start with super, followed with an animal.

“And he gave me ‘monkey’, and that was it,” he said. “I just picked up the football and ran with it.”

And he sure did. In 2002, Groblewski started SuperMonkey Enterprises and the SuperMonkey Record Company. He started calling radio stations, putting out flyers around Carson Street and building relationships with musicians. He also started his own marketing firm which, he said, he uses to promote everything SuperMonkey-related.

Yet business is only secondary for a group such as SuperMonkey.

“It really all goes back to the music,” Groblewski said. “If music isn’t any good then all that other stuff really doesn’t matter.”

He said SuperMonkey’s latest album is in line with the Pittsburgh predilection for hard rock and blues, heavily-distorted guitars and stacked amplifiers. Songs like “Nashville” and “Last Rock God” are laced with overdriven leads and Southern rock vocals, with a honky-tonk piano riffing somewhere in the mix. “Last Rock God,” about the state of traditional hard rock in today’s society, is a common radio play on Pittsburgh’s KEV, even making it to Cleveland stations.

Along with playing at bars and theaters on Carson Street and in venues around Ohio, as leader of his record label Groblewski also plays the role of manager. He recently picked up “the best metal band in Pittsburgh,” Solarburn, who will be hosting their own gig in Cleveland this month. Along with promoting a Pittsburgh music scene with his own group, Groblewski said that he’s eager to enlist other solid musicians to help SuperMonkey along the way. If that means signing a reggae band, he said, that means a reggae band — as long as it’s good music.

As far as making ties with local bands, getting gigs or selling records, Growbrekski said that having an established record label in an era of self-promotion is essential to building contacts and followers. There would be no SuperMonkey, he said, without the business of hard work.

“It comes down to strength in numbers and teamwork,” he said. “You’re only as good as the people you surround yourself with — and also, a lot of the business of music is the business of life: It’s who you know.”

Contact Mark Oprea at moprea1@kent.edu. - www.kentwired.com

When it came time to put out his new album, Pennsylvania Blues Revolution, Christian Groblewski decided he wanted to do it himself. So he formed his own label SuperMonkey Recording Co. A Kent State graduate, Groblewski has lived in Pittsburgh since 1997. But don’t hold that against him. He has fond memories of Northeast Ohio and wants to help local bands here. “The one thing I remember learning at Kent was that I wanted to be a musician,” he says in a press release issued about the label's new ventures. “I used to wash dishes and cook at Rockne’s Pub with Jeff Finn who played in a local band Dink and we became friends. I watched Dink go from being a local band selling tapes (I still have mine) to being given the blessing of Bevis & Butthead for ‘ruling.’ Jeff told me if music is what I wanted to do with my life it can be done, and I believed him because I saw it happen to him with my own eyes.”

SuperMonkey Recording Company is looking to sign Cleveland bands; anyone interested can send an EPK to supermonkeyrecordingco@gmail.com. “Our goal is to do for Cleveland music scene what labels Sub Pop did for Seattle in the ‘80s and 90s except run by musicians for musicians,” says Groblewski, who also runs his own booking agency. SuperMonkey headlines the Phantasy Night Club in Lakewood on June 7. Go to ilovesupermonkey.com for more info. - Cleveland Scene

SuperMonkey is a Pittsburgh based original Rock 'n Roll band. After making several demos which yielded several artist endorsement deals and airplay, Pennsylvania Blues Revolution is SuperMonkey's debut album. From start to finish, this is hands down one of the best rock albums ever to come out of the greater Pittsburgh region. - Southern Blues Rock

This post is inspired by some GREAT teamwork between us and two area promoters, that started with a miscommunication.

Essentially, we ended up DOUBLE-BOOKED for our 2nd floor stage, due to a simple and understandable miscommunication – I thought the one promoter was simply inquiring about a date, he thought it was confirmed, yadda yadda yadda. I’ve seen and personally been involved in situations like this that went decidedly “south” – where it turned into a big, public rant / bash, got ugly, caused a lot of hurt feelings and and the music scene got a little more fragmented. A little more “clique-ish”.

But that doesn’t solve anything does it?

Luckily, I was working with very professional people. One promoter agreed to move his acts earlier in the evening and to utilize both first floor and second floor stages to compress his evening further. The other promoter agreed to move his acts later and to move 1 act to the first floor. We designed a 2-floor stage plan that worked for all artists and promoters involved. And simply stated, we “got her done”. The result? From the venue perspective, we had a great night, and I’m considering starting all of our Saturday nights earlier in similar fashion. It gave us a head start on sales for the evening, and we had a consistently full house. As for the promoters, they were happy because nobody had to be canceled, which would damage their professional reputations. And the bands were happy because not only did they each get to play, but they had mad exposure to way more fans than they were expecting to have access to because of the added acts on the bill, plus more musician to musician networking opportunities than is typical at a live show, plus they were playing to a nice full house. We had to run the show tightly, and we have the pro staff at Dobbs to ensure that happens.

And since the bar did well, we absorbed almost all of the production costs, which gave almost 100% of the door back to the promoters and bands. We believe very strongly in the mantra “You help make us successful, and we will help make you successful.”

See what happens when we partner for success? We can take a difficult situation, and turn it around into a positive. HUGE thanks to Gravity Given Productions, LLC and SuperMonkey Enterprises, for their flexibility, professionalism, and positive attitudes about it all! - Legendary Dobbs

Great review for our debut album! - OneBurgh

Download issue above - Jenisis Magazine

Download issue above - Jenisis Magazine