Punk Music

Mike Roth, known to friends as "Q," is as much a hard-nosed businessman as he is a punk. That may sound like a contradiction to anyone familiar with the fast, loud and angry lyrics of punk music, often laced with alienation, aggression and an aversion to social, political and economic institutions.

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But the soft-spoken Roth, of Wilkinsburg, used long-term financial planning and sound, conservative economic principles he picked up as a college business major to create and sustain The Mr. Roboto Project, often cited as one of the area's best-known punk music venues and a true example of authentic, edgy culture in youth-deficient Pittsburgh. Roth and the others who run Roboto, which hosts small concerts and leases "punk incubator" space to an alternative bookstore and bike-repair shop, "draw young people from all over the country and host artists and musicians from all over the world," said Darcy Trunzo, a musician with the band "New Pussycats" who also works for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

"They are actively accomplishing the things that this city has been trying to get its head around forever." Set in a 1,000-square-foot space that once belonged to a Wilkinsburg furniture store, Roboto has gray carpeting on the floor, humdrum tiles on the ceiling, a few mike stands and a raised stage that bands typically abandon for the floor. The only piece of furniture is a desk at the front door, where earplugs are sold for 50 cents apiece. There is a toilet seat on the wall, a single record left from a recent "record-breaking frenzy," a green street sign lifted from a road in Grand Rapids, Mich., and an array of homemade signs. One reads, "Sometimes good guys don't wear white." Roth, standing in the middle of The Mr. Roboto space, is tall and thin, with mussed hair. Originally from Quakertown, Pa., Roth moved to Pittsburgh in 1996 after getting a business management degree from York College, south of Harrisburg. He answered phones for Mellon Bank and worked in Carnegie Mellon University's human resources department before hatching the idea, with a friend, for Roboto.

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From the beginning, though, he wanted to avoid the "knee-jerk, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants" ethos that pervades the punk community. Such thinking, he said, "harms the longevity of a lot of projects." In creating Mr. Roboto, he "wanted to pay a lot more attention to the financial end." As Roth explained in an article published in San Francisco punk magazine Maximum Rock and Roll -- where he doled out advice on business plans, real estate, occupancy permits and rent -- punks hoping to build their own institutions need to "realize that good planning will help you overcome bad luck." See also punk rock music, and pages relate to punk music | more