Robby Roadsteamer and Nikki Dessingue of
Super Time Pilot (E Records)
Robby Roadsteamer is often recognized around Allston, but the reason why can vary greatly on any given day. “I have about 20 different pockets of fame around here,” says the musician and comedian. He’s the former snarling frontman of a heavy metal parody band who once stole a trophy on stage at the Boston Music Awards and offended callers as a WBCN dj. The older “mom and pops” still remember him as the crazy guy from an episode of Sox Appeal, a local cable dating show that set him up with three women during a game. More recently, he’s been a local club fixture, performing songs from his prodigious acoustic catalog and berating comedy show audiences. “Allston seems to cater to my multiple personalities just fine,” he says. “It’s an environment where if you have an idea, there are a lot of crazy people around to encourage you.”
For Roadsteamer (born Louis Robert Potylo), ideas never seem to be in short supply. But unlike many Allstonians toiling away in obscurity, he has the drive to see them through to fruition. He has 13 albums on iTunes and more than 200 videos on YouTube, and has performed on stage more times than he can count. The key is fearlessness and persistence, he says, comparing his career to wooing a girl. You may be scared and fail miserably at first, but if you keep at it, good things happen.
Roadsteamer regrets nothing, but now he’s moving on from his past shenanigans. He’s cleaned out the box he calls his hope chest, relegating nearly a decade worth of clippings and cover stories to a desk drawer in order to make room for guitar equipment for his new band, Super Time Pilot. And he’s throwing his considerable energy into building the local comedy scene, joining forces with other edgy talent like Mehran and Joe Madaus to create a largely improvisational YouTube sitcom about the struggle to make a decent living out of your creativity.
Comedians in Boston have few opportunities for exposure, Roadsteamer says, particularly if they’re not willing to compromise their routines. They get stuck performing in front of drunk bachelorettes looking for easy laughs and glassy eyed tourists who have no idea why they’re even at a comedy show. Or they leave Boston for greener pastures in New York or Los Angeles.
Roadsteamer hopes the show, Quiet Desperation, will plant the seeds for a bigger Boston-based sitcom that would allow comedians to stay in the area and provide a launching pad for lucrative touring careers. “But with something like this, you break your heart if you project things for it that aren’t really up to you, but rather the right place, right time,” he says. In the meantime, he vows to keep doing the show “until it becomes painfully unfunny and our friends tell us to stop. Even if nothing comes out of it, then at least we’ll know we did it.”
Roadsteamer’s storyline on the show mirrors true life events: he forms the band Super Time Pilot with Nikki Dessingue (singer and synth player with the bands Where the Land Meets the Sea and Campaign for Realtime), and they record an album of quirky indie folk that manages to blend an undercurrent of pain and longing with video game metaphors and a childlike love of music.
The album represents the next step in Roadsteamer’s fast-moving musical evolution. Potylo’s first incarnation under the Roadsteamer name – a crass, homophobic, heavy metal god – brought him national radio airplay and a spot on the Warped tour. But he broke up his band two years ago at the height of their fame.
“I was tired of playing in front of people doing this Cookie Monster voice and yelling,” he says. But there was also a deeper motivation. When Potylo first tried on the character, “it was as a shy kid who hid behind a pair of sunglasses and ferociousness to protect myself from actually being vulnerable with an audience.” The band was born out of cynicism, he says, rather than any actual interest in the music. After two years, he decided to try a more honest approach and play music as himself.
So he “went underground,” learning how play the guitar beyond a few rudimentary chords and recording an astonishing five acoustic albums in about a year. He met Dessingue last fall, and was inspired to write his first solo album with a full band, I Solved Every Miniquest, out of their adventures. The pair began making music and video blogs together, and then in April, “It kind of snuck up on us and we were like, maybe we should go into the studio with this,” he says. A month and a half later, they had 20 songs.
The album, Did We Happen to Begin?, was recorded over two days, with each of its songs captured in only one or two takes. “It has the energy of something we did in the moment,” Roadsteamer says. “We tried to get as many sounds as we could on the album because we couldn’t afford another day.” He contrasts the album’s spare, intimate feel to an overproduced John Mayer song. Did We Happen to Begin? isn’t polished to perfection, but it’s real.
Sooner or later, one of Roadsteamer’s many projects will start demanding a greater share of his attention, but for now he’s thoroughly enjoying spreading himself thin. He recently played both a comedy show and a singer-songwriter open mic night at the Cantab Lounge, and noted with amusement that the same song could inspire both laughs and serious chin stroking depending on which label he put on the performance.
And he could still come up with another new idea. “I’m not done yet,” he says. “When people define you that’s when they get bored with you. Who knows? I might go into 80s synth rock after this.”
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