PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL WILSON
Rob Fetters is a restless guy. As such, the veteran singer/guitarist for esteemed Cincinnati-based power-pop bands The Raisins, The Bears, and psychodots wasn’t about to let a global pandemic slow him down.
Less than two weeks after COVID descended in March 2020, Fetters put together a YouTube live stream dubbed “Fetters Is Cheap!” so he could perform songs from across his vast catalog. He continued the roughly 75-minute solo performances every Saturday night for the next 13 weeks, gathering a small but dedicated cadre of online viewers in the process.
An adventurous acoustic rendering of “Fear Is Never Boring” kicked off the first show, a sign that Fetters wouldn’t hesitate to reimagine even his most revered creations. For the uninitiated (or those who have forgotten), that song was on The Raisins’s self-titled 1983 debut album, which was produced by Northern Kentucky native and future Bears bandmate Adrian Belew; it remains a timeless, ear-wormy concoction—jaunty riffs and rhythms play off lyrics about unconventional sex and seizing the moment, capped with an inventive guitar solo that could spring only from the mind of a man equally influenced by Jimi Hendrix, surrealism, and a particular brand of Midwestern malaise.
Proof of The Raisins’s enduring popularity? Last month the band’s prime-era 1980s lineup played three sold-out reunion shows at the Woodward Theater in Over-the-Rhine.
“Fear Is Never Boring” was a regional hit, earning heavy rotation on rock radio mainstay WEBN and adding fuel to the idea that Fetters and his merry band of co-conspirators would soon enjoy widespread fame and fortune. If that kind of success would ultimately prove out of reach, there’s no denying that the musical lifer, at the age of 69, has flourished over the course of a career that dates back a half century.
At the same time, Fetters carved his niche in Cincinnati as a professional creative, writing and producing music for an array of clients—from local businesses like United Dairy Farmers and Rumpke to national brands Microsoft and Kellogg’s. He operates these days out of a second-floor studio in his Victorian-style home in the far west side neighborhood of Sayler Park. He remains immersed in music day and night.
Fetters wasn’t sure a live stream would work at first. It took some convincing from his son, Noah, who’s also a musician and does production work for touring artists.
“Noah called me because all the gigs he did production for had been cancelled,” Fetters says, thinking back to March 2020. “And I was trying to figure out, Well, what can we do? because my gigs had been cancelled as well. But Noah, being a younger musician, was closer to starvation and homelessness, so he said, Why don’t you try a live stream? My first reaction was, No, I can’t do that. And then when I investigated it more, I was still, No, I can’t do that! And Noah said, Yes, we can do that!”
A sonic perfectionist, Fetters was concerned about the various technical issues that might arise with a live-stream performance. Then there was the lack of direct audience interaction, a symbiotic relationship that’s fueled his work as a guitarist and performer of rare physicality and vitality. On the other hand, his extensive experience as a studio musician and producer was likely to mitigate the technical concerns. Even more assuring was his experience doing dozens of solo house shows, which involved using prerecorded backing tracks for everything but his vocals and guitar, after psychodots disbanded in 2018.
“Noah helped me wade through a lot of information, and we were able to make intelligent choices,” says Fetters. “And my choice was, I want this to be cheap. I don’t want this to be fancy. I want this to look like it’s going to go off the rails any second. I guess I had seen enough Alice Cooper shows early in my life to know that it’s a lot more fun if you think the guillotine may actually work.”
Indeed, there is a playful, almost ramshackle quality to “Fetters Is Cheap!” that brings to mind an aesthetic melding of Pee-wee’s Playhouse and Bob Shreve’s vaudeville shenanigans on local late-night television in the 1960s and ’70s. A recent visit to the “Fetters Is Cheap!” set in his house reveals a treasure trove of paraphernalia and gear.
Fetters’s guitars, familiar to anyone who’s followed him over the years, line up in a row. Ephemera from various musical ventures is abundant, including a pillow emblazoned with “Red Hot Tots,” a band he formed with longtime friend and collaborator Bob Nyswonger when they were high school classmates in Sylvania, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo. (The pair moved to Cincinnati in the late 1970s.) There are synthesizers, mics, keyboards, cords, and other contraptions with impressive-looking knobs and lights strewn throughout the room. A Bears album cover sits next to an amp adorned with a psychodots sticker.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL WILSON
Fetters has used this space to record commercial jingles for his “day job” as well as for his various solo albums. Throw in the capabilities of modern computers, and it’s allowed him a creative freedom he didn’t have as an ambitious but cash-strapped musician the ’70s and ’80s. “I have the keys to the candy store,” Fetters says of the ability to work in his own studio. “And it helped me get good enough to engineer and to mix. I started understanding production a lot better. It opened the doors to this, I hate to use the word art, but it allowed me to be an artist instead of a person who had to sell the art.”
Fetters saved the selling for his forays in commercial advertising, which became a necessity after the arrival of four kids in five years in the 1990s. Along with Noah, there are Sam, Grace, and Robert. Fetters addresses the advertising work with typical self-deprecation in the biography he wrote for his website: “When Sam—baby #1—was still in the oven I was asked to write a jingle for LaRosa’s, a beloved Cincinnati restaurant chain. My commercial music experience up to that point had been as a session guitarist and vocalist on a failed dishwasher soap demo. The advertising world and The Dark Side were synonymous to me. However, I had diapers to buy and a mortgage to pay…so I swallowed my pride, tried not to gag, and lifted a progression from an old Raisins song called ‘Dirt,’ inserted the immortal lyrics ‘347-1111,’ and to my utter surprise produced a very successful piece of music whoredom and cracked the code to self-finance my music career and family.”
A few years later, Andy Haskins, a multitalented Cincinnatian who moved to Los Angeles more than two decades ago, reached out to Fetters for musical assistance. Haskins has worked with various bigwig media entities—including ABC, Disney, and NBC—over the course of a career that also includes his own work as a filmmaker and animator. And, of course, he was a big fan of The Raisins, The Bears, and pyschodots. He knew Fetters could deliver whatever he might need, resulting in, per Haskins, “dozens” of commercial collaborations.
“The kind of music I required tended to be all over the map,” he says. “It wasn’t just alt-rock or country or whatever genre you can pick. I would be spoofing 1950s sitcom themes with strange orchestrations and really unusual and old vocal harmonies. I would go from that to a cheesy 1970s rock band spoof, so the breadth of Rob’s musical production knowledge is astounding. He can do the strings and harmonies from obscure ’50s sitcom rip-offs to whatever is happening now.”
Belew can’t help but admire Fetters’s versatility. “Not only has he done so much music as a rock recording artist, but he’s also done great in the ad world, which is hard to do,” he says. “When you’re in the ad world, you are at the mercy of people demanding seemingly impossible things. It just shows you the kind of guy he is. Rob gets things done. He’s a straight-up hardworking musician who’s very creative.”
More than three years after the first live stream, Fetters is still at it, completing his latest run of shows—or, as he labels it, Season 8—of “Fetters Is Cheap!” in December. The recent set lists included a handful of songs from Fetters’s latest album, Mother, which came out in October. He wrote most of the new material, his fifth self-produced solo effort after 1998’s stellar Lefty Loose Righty Tight, from a rented apartment in Brooklyn, New York, where he and his wife of 35 years, Susan (a.k.a. “Swany”), would decamp off and on over the past two years.
It seems they needed a new adventure after more than a year of lockdown. There was also the added incentive that their New York City–based son, Sam, had recently made them grandparents for the first time.
Fetters says the Brooklyn experience couldn’t help but influence Mother, which, as its title would suggest, is at least in part a nod to his own mom and her nurturing influence. Alternately, as the notes that accompany the CD version describe the album’s songs, it’s “11 slightly warped guitar-pop meditations on relishing life’s ass-kickings past, present, and future.” The curious cover image features a vintage photo of his mother from 1952, before Rob was born. “It’s not a concept album, but there are a lot of songs about women,” says Fetters.
See “Girl on the Q,” a reference to an encounter the song’s protagonist has on a New York City subway train. A catchy but oddly off-kilter number, it opens with a bluesy acoustic guitar riff and an ambient cough from off mic. Brushed drums, piano, and Fetters’s modest but expressive vocals enter as he eventually reveals that “her understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe did not come from a rational mind.” And then that signature Fetters electric guitar tone floods the zone—an instantly recognizable sound to anyone who’s ever had it enter their ear canals.
Nyswonger is/was bassist in The Raisins, The Bears, and psychodots—as well as an occasional guest on “Fetters Is Cheap!”—and first witnessed Fetters’s guitar stylings in ninth grade. “It was at some after-the-game dance, and I just thought he was fantastic,” says Nyswonger. “He would do knee drops and slide 15 feet across the gym floor playing some guitar. He had a really loud amplifier. He was good. He was way better than the drummer and bass player he was playing with.”
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF FRED BURKHARDT
Belew, who knows a thing or two about guitar wizardry, was also a convert upon first exposure—a Raisins show in Nashville, where he lived at the time, in the mid-1970s. “He’s always been one of these people who kind of attacks the guitar with relish,” Belew says. “He’s bending the neck and doing all kinds of things, runs up and down. The first couple of times I saw Rob, I just was amazed. Anybody could see this guy play and say, Gosh, this is a great guitar player, not just a really good one.”
If there is a through line in Fetters work, it’s his admiration for a concise, well-crafted song that transports listeners to often strange or unfamiliar places. Fetters turned 13 in 1967, an era of music-making and cultural upheaval that couldn’t help but infect his worldview.
“I grew up in a weird period of time when in three or four minutes my whole mental state and whole physical feeling about the world could be changed dramatically by a song and the people I listened to,” he says. “Take somebody like The Kinks’s Ray Davies. The song ‘Lola,’ for instance, is amazing on so many levels. It’s evident that we’re talking about transgender love, and yet it almost turns into a drinking song where the crowd can sing along with it. Those kinds of things did something to me at a very impressionable age.”
Seeing his heroes in a live setting only heightened the fascination. “When I was 14, 15, 16, and going to concerts, it made life bearable for me,” says Fetters. “When I was in ninth grade, my dad, the insurance salesman who took me to see Jimi Hendrix when I was a bit younger, had to listen to ‘If 6 Was 9’ on Axis: Bold As Love probably three times every morning before he went to work for a whole school year. I couldn’t bear to go to school if I didn’t get fortified by Jimi Hendrix. It was beyond life-affirming for me. It was what made me not want to kill myself. That’s what three-minute songs have the power to do.”
Fetters is a creative sponge, taking inspiration from whatever might come his way, which is why his Brooklyn excursions were so useful. “I go for lots of runs, and the music I could hear on a five-mile run in Brooklyn through the different neighborhoods and parks—especially on weekends where the cultures would be represented by families picnicking—was really vibrant,” he says. “It just opened me up.”
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF CHUCK MADDEN
Listening to his many band and solo albums, it’s clear that Fetters has never hesitated to tackle sensitive topics. The most viscerally emotional song on Mother, “Lamento,” is a clear nod to his long friendship with the late Chris Arduser. The two met in 1971 as participants in the Sylvania music scene. Five years younger than Fetters, Arduser was a precocious and powerful drummer at an early age. It was a no-brainer that the two would eventually play together.
Sure enough, when he wasn’t working on other projects, Arduser spent some time touring with an early version of The Raisins in the late 1970s despite still being in high school. When it came time to find someone to join Fetters, Belew, and Nyswonger in The Bears, Arduser was the perfect fit, resulting in four delightful power-pop records (1987’s self-titled debut, 1988’s Rise and Shine, 2001’s Car Caught Fire, and 2007’s Eureka!) and a slew of undeniably explosive live shows.
Arduser also played drums on the four pyschodots albums (1991’s self-titled debut, 1993’s On the Grid, 1995’s Awkwardsville, and 2005’s Terminal Blvd) and another seemingly endless run of inspired live shows. It wasn’t entirely clear at the time, but the pyschodots’s 2018 disbanding resulted partially from Arduser’s alcohol use disorder, which had become too much for his bandmates to bear.
“Lamento” opens with this lyrical admission, in which one envisions Fetters addressing Arduser directly: “This sounds like a song you might have written/ Must have been something in the water back where we were livin’/ But now we’re at the bitter end we thought we’d never live to see/ Yeah, it’s the end of the story, the end of you and me.”
“I didn’t write that to hurt Chris,” says Fetters. “The last years of his life were very disordered due to his alcohol use. It exploded. A lot of dreams were dying on a regular basis, and I know only about the irons I had in the fire that could have involved Chris. So that’s a song of heartbreak. It’s a love unrequited song, I guess you could say, because I loved the guy. I really cared for him, and I didn’t want to see him destroy himself.”
The song closes with a searching, otherworldly guitar solo, the likes of which only Fetters can conjure. Arduser wouldn’t live to hear “Lamento”—Mother surfaced about a month after he died in September 2023. Fetters had been dreading that outcome since the psychodots’s demise five years earlier. Few can relate to Arduser’s situation as well as Fetters, who had his own substance-abuse issues before getting sober for good in November 1989.
Nyswonger witnessed Fetters’s personal transition up close—the two have been playing together in one project or another since Richard Nixon was president. “He’s been sober for 30-plus years, and that helped him a lot,” says Nyswonger. “He’s an extreme sort of person, and I think he realized he was heading for a fall. But, that aside, Rob is an artist. We just figured out how to do what we want to do. That’s all. If people are hip to it, fantastic. We’re past the age where we’re going to be heartthrobs for anybody. We’re old guys who know how to do something, and we do it the best we can and take satisfaction in that. Music connects people.”
Belew couldn’t agree more. “One of the things I love about Rob is that I’ve watched him grow as a person in such mature ways,” he says. “I think he’s now one of the most well-adjusted people I know, happy with his life, with his family, with his friends, with his music—that’s just really a rare thing. He’s worked at it a lot.”
Fetters turns 70 later this year, yet he remains as creatively restless as ever. He has more solo house shows on the horizon, more production/recording work, and of course more “Fetters Is Cheap!” episodes. The maturity Belew mentions certainly carries over to an evolving artistry that shows no signs of slowing, even if that long-ago dream of wider appreciation never arrives.
“I stopped worrying about that a long time ago,” says Fetters. “I really did utterly give up on what the reaction might be to the work I did and instead put all my energy into just doing the best I could and just seeing where the chips fell. And where the chips fell was that I didn’t have any real major career breakthroughs. I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was really doing was establishing a very strong foundation with a very small hard-core fan base. And for that I’m lucky.”
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