Juggalo by Steve Miller

Author:Steve Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780306823787
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2016-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

Rob Bruce has a strategy about signing artists to Psychopathic. Being good is one thing. But you have to be able to hang. People have come over with all the jam in the world and lost the deal. The unnamed female rapper is exhibit number one. She swung for sure—chops, looks. Got into the Lotus Pod, fired it up. And up some more. And then started bossing people around like she owned the place.

“We had her cut a track,” Rob says. “And she left and no one wanted her around, even though it was good.”

She had talent but no skills.

“And no one ever heard of her again.”

Rob was just out of the Army when he first came on board, working as a dishwasher and checking out the possibilities of civilian life.

“I was hesitant to leave my job,” he says. “I liked it, but I said, well, let’s just do this,” he said. “I started in shipping.”

Now Rob sits behind a desk strewn with paper and deals. He books the Gathering, then switches to any tours, then to Hallowicked, then to . . . whatever needs attention. The liner notes, the more spacetastic writing in the Gathering program—that’s Rob.

In a closet in Rob’s sizable, sparsely decorated office, he keeps games. Wall to wall, up and down, and sideways stacks of fantasy games. The same world he adopted when he was barely ten years old he still lives in at forty-five years old and counting.

“Oh, yeah, I am still in that world,” he says, despite being a husband and the father of a daughter. He pulls a game out that he created called Morton’s List. It’s something you’d find at one of those comic book stores full of dudes with no girlfriends and bad hygiene. Rob created the game over the course of seven years, wrote a good portion of a three-hundred-page book, figured out the dice configuration—the whole deal. Like some of the other fantasy games like his beloved Dungeons and Dragons, Morton’s List has roles to play and tasks to accomplish. “The beauty of the game is that it puts you in situations you’d never find yourself in normally,” Rob says. “It opens you up to new experiences, and it opens you up to life.’”

He created a company, Dark Carnival Games, printed ten thousand of Morton’s List, and sold nine thousand of them. Hot Topic carried it for a while, and when the Juggalos found out Rob made it, it sold like crazy. Then the Hot Topic wholesaler read the book that detailed the tasks one might perform playing the game. One element involved stalking. Another dealt with explosives. And the Hot Topic orders stopped.

To be clear on what the problem was, they ran the book by a lawyer. “We got back the book, and about a quarter of it was highlighted. He said we’d have to take all that out in case people got hurt doing things in the book, so we’d have to water it down. We had to make a choice—do we want to do that?”

The answer was no.

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