The Penn Stater Magazine

The Annual Cartoon Concert at Arts Fest

July 16, 2011 at 8:00 am Tina Hay Leave a comment

There was a time, back in the early 1980s, when you could see the band Cartoon play somewhere in the State College area at least once a week. I remember seeing them at the Saloon, in the Hippo Room at the Deli, and at a now-defunct bar called Rego’s, among other places. Or you could hear them live on QWK Rock on Sunday nights—I remember taping some of those shows from the radio, and I still have those cassettes somewhere in my music collection.

It’s been 31 years since Cartoon formed as a band (they were Menagerie at first, but I think they learned that the name was already taken, so they had to find a new name). And it’s probably been 25 years since they broke up. The members—Glenn Kidder ’73, Kevin Dremel ’81, Randy Hughes ’79, and Jon Rounds ’87, ’94g—graduated, got married, took jobs elsewhere. But once a year, they get back together to play music at the Arts Festival—and a second show the next night at the Ale House in Toftrees. They call these two shows their “Summer Tour.”

I had a chance to see their show last night in Schwab Auditorium, and better yet, I had permission to shoot photos for the whole concert. It was a good show.

The guys are definitely getting older (but then, so are those of us in the audience), but the musicianship and fun are still there. They always have a new song or two, and one that stood out for me last night was Kevin Dremel’s “Aberdeen”; you can hear a demo of it here. They also did a bunch of songs from the CD they released last year, The Chapel Sessions, and plenty of their old material from their Penn State days (“Carolina One Time,” “Comin’ Down Off the Mountain,” “Carrier Wave,” and “Lady Jamaica,” among others).

They mentioned that a lot of their music can now be purchased, either in CD form or as instant downloads, at CDBaby.com.

You can see a dozen or so photos I took last night on Facebook. I’ll try to add more once I get a chance to go through them all. And, for comparison, here is a slide show of photos I took of them on the same stage in 2009.

Tina Hay, editor

Entry filed under: Penn State alumni. Tags: Cartoon, CDBaby.com, Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts, Glenn Kidder, Hippo Room, Jon Rounds, Kevin Dremel, Randy Hughes, Rego's, Schwab Auditorium.