Chad Wants to Know
Robbie Roadsteamer
Robbie Roadsteamer, also known as Rob Potylo, is a musician, producer and enduring Boston personality. In addition to performing all over the city and featured on the late radio station WBCN, he has starred on the internet mockumentary series Quiet Desperation (available for viewing on his YouTube page). Robbie has also appeared as such TV shows and films as “Ellen,” “The Gong Show” and the documentary Who Is Vermin Supreme.
Arguably, his most important role in recent years was helping to produce Vice Versa: Chyna, the documentary on the late wrestler Joanie Chyna Laurer.
In 2023, he began the “Make Boston Shitty Again” campaign against Boston’s continuing gentrification. This has since evolved into his “Make America Shitty Again” campaign while he has been documenting performance political candidate Vermin Supreme’s latest venture on the campaign trail, singing such impromptu songs as “She Wore a Red MAGA Beret” and an ode directly to Marjorie Taylor Greene, where he professed love for her “strong horse legs.”
“It’s A Crab Rangoon Brawl At Kowloon!” is Robbie’s latest single on Bandcamp, which also has his Greatest Hits album that includes such songs as “We Drink in the Pit Tonight” and “I Put a Baby in You.”
In some of your Facebook posts from prior years (particularly regarding Chyna’s life and the documentaries you helped with), you seem torn between your two homes of California and Boston. What ended up bringing you back?
For several years I felt i couldn’t really go home back East till I helped out with what I could with Chyna’s Documentaries, and with honoring her legacy somehow. Got so close to her before she passed and feel haunted. I came back to Boston to find some semblance of a pulse, for myself before my Act III is up.
Areas of both California and Massachusetts are notorious for their high rents. Which state harder to survive in as a starving artist?
Definitely Massachusetts is harder to survive as a desperate artist 10 fold. There’s no Winter in SoCal.
Also, In Boston if you tell people you’re creative after age 25 they’ll put you on a watchlist.
On your Bandcamp, you wrote in the bio section, “After the Patriots won a few rings New England needed a dirty rock god quick.” Does that mean you think things went downhill when the Pats were on top? Because I think that too, only on a national (and even global) level.
Boston is a sports first, local arts dead last…behind public transportation sorta town But maybe that’s because local artists should start taking more fkn chances with their art and hit it outta the fkn park. Like Where’s the next punk? We can win a fucking title right now tonite in Allston for America for arts if we can empower the local creative type more. Let’s make Boston Shitty Again! Take back BCN.
I remember fondly the days where I tried to make art while living in an apartment where I couldn’t put my bed close to the windows or I’d catch pneumonia (seriously). What’s your vision of keeping Boston “shitty” where you can stop horrible gentrification but stop Boston from keeping truly poor areas poor and leaving people to freeze or die?
I’m a loner, struggling artist, a bit more sick these days…I just hope on a larger scale we can provide more environments for artists in greater Boston to live and create in. I see alot of empty Loews sized buildings we could put 30,000 Boston artists in tonight. They just need a space heater, and sum food…and a wee bit of sanitation…put them in warehouse studio loft type spaces where quite plainly they can live cheap, live the way they want, get inspired, create, and grow old in early retirement artists homes. $100 a month rents!!!
Even to someone who isn’t a big attendee of local shows, it seems like the scene for local music has been gutted. Do you think there’s any room left in the city for an entrepreneur to take advantage of what’s lacking? Would you ever be that person?
I just try to get inspired and make art that keeps the demons at bay. The demons in this case is the destruction of many art scenes and venues like Great Scott, Sound Museum, EMF.
What’s your role as Vermin Supreme’s producer and what’s your promised cabinet position?
These days I just wanna help Vermin as much as I can without being any sort of liability. I do my videos, live performance art around him, attend events, meet people, collab…Vermin opened that world up to me in a political sense in 2012.
He’s a Folk Hero in an area of the country where we need creative heroes. Once again if you look at it like sports, let’s get over the Pats sucking the 12 dicks of failure, and go out there and fkn win a creative world championship title belt right here tonight in Allston Massachusetts!!!
Listen, being creative in New England can be soul crushing over and over and over, but instead of playing defense we can bring back culture, real alternative culture. Vermin Supreme is a large part of that original creative culture to bring us there.
Are most of the MAGA gatherings you record while on Vermin’s campaign trail local? I know there are red streaks in this supposed blue state that make me horrified.
Mostly New Hampshire. I like bringing my creative to where Vermin is campaigning. I also really love the way Vermin connects with mostly everyone at these crazy events on both sides. Yay political art.
