Bringing the World to the Twin Cities

After leaving Harry Hope’s in 1979, Kubeczko worked at Chicago-based Flying Fish Records. Started by one of Rounder Records’ cofounders Bruce Kaplan, the maverick label was the first to take a gamble on the likes of Sweet Honey in the Rock and Utah Phillips.

Tired of the violence that was  plaguing Chicago, Kubeczko and his wife, Mag McDermott, moved to the Twin Cities in 1980. Soon after, Kubeczko got a call from local stalwart Willie Murphy, who asked him to work with Willie and the Bees, Murphy’s rising blues/R & B outfit. Kubeczko served as manager, booking agent, and soundman until the band split in 1983. Murphy called again, in 1986, to say he’d signed the local Celtic-rock band Boiled in Lead to his Atomic Theory label. He wanted Kubeczko to manage the band.

In 1987, Kubeczko took Boiled in Lead to the Winnipeg Folk Festival, where the lineup included Brave Combo, the Oysterband, 3 Mustaphas 3, and Billy Bragg—artists with whom Boiled in Lead would become fast friends and share stages. That was also the year the British consulate sent a bunch of music-business folks to Winnipeg, including Pete Lawrence, who recorded Michelle Shocked’s The Texas Campfire Tapes and started the now-legendary Cooking Vinyl label.

The gig in Winnipeg led to a European deal with Cooking Vinyl, and Boiled in Lead took off on both sides of the Atlantic. Kubeczko spent weeks at a time scheduling European tours from Cooking Vinyl’s London office.

All indications were that Boiled in Lead was going to be huge. “We were playing Reading Festival in front of 400,000 people, onstage between Billy Bragg and the Oysterband with June Tabor,” Kubeczko recalls. Then, after a string of festivals, one of the founding members decided the extensive touring wasn’t for him. Personnel and musical changes ensued, and Kubeczko rethought his plans. “I missed my family,” he says. “That made me think it was time to do the family thing and do [another] business.” In 1991, Kubeczko parted amicably with the band, but the experience made a lasting impact.

“Spending all that time in London, it was almost impossible not to be bitten by the bug to check out all these different African acts, or Madagascar acts, or [Indian] subcontinent acts,” he says. “It’s amazing—not only the level of awareness of music around London, but the rabid and enthusiastic following that happens at an underground level all the way up to a mainstream level.”

Toward the end of 1992, Kubeczko got a call from an old friend, Cedar board member Marty Keller. Three years after its founding in 1989, the organization was looking for its sixth executive director. Kubeczko applied and was hired as executive and artistic director.

He started under difficult circumstances. The theater’s stage had been replaced with a dance floor, which gave the venue a gymnasium feel. But Kubeczko made the best of it. “I thought, ‘I’m a soundman. When the lights go down, we just need to make the sound good.’ What little money we had, we put into building a bigger and better sound system. We soundproofed and fireproofed the ceiling. The room became, within a year or two, one of the best-sounding rooms in town.” And no seat is more than thirty feet from the stage, an artist’s dream.

Through bad luck and lack of business acumen, the first five executive directors had racked up, as Kubeczko recalls, more than $250,000 of debt (in contrast, The Cedar’s 1992 revenue totaled approximately $65,000), so he began running the place like a business and paying off the debt. He continues to run a tight fiscal ship and projects that three-quarters of The Cedar’s revenue will come through earned income this year—unprecedented for a nonprofit music venue.