Quad Cities Underground

Before the hit reality TV show American Pickers brought fame to the region, the Quad Cities of Davenport and Bettendorf in Iowa, and Moline and Rock Island in Illinois were best known as the hometown of jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke, football great Roger Craig, as well as the radio broadcast beginnings of future president Ronald “Dutch” Reagan.


Writer Chad V. Holtkamp began his own career with an entertainment column focused on the happenings of the local music scene. Between 1999 – 2005, his “Quad Cities Underground” column appeared monthly in The Dispatch and Rock Island Argus newspapers.


As Y2K fizzled and the millennium safely turned, the local music scene in the Quad Cities proved fertile ground for a wide variety of musical styles. Everything from hardcore punk, country, rock and pop, to improvisational jazz and fusion was featured in the “Underground.”


Dive deep into the days when bands released physical CDs burned at home on Pentium-based Dells and candy-colored iMacs, back before the creation of YouTube and the iPhone, and even MySpace and Facebook.


With feature stories on bands like Wicked Liz and the Bellyswirls, Intensity!, Bruised, Mommy’s Little Monster, Dani Lynn Howe, Provoke, and The Angsted, relive the golden era of Napster and GeoCities homepages in Quad Cities Underground.