Bob Cormack
Bob Cormack is a Chicago-based musician, artist and writer. He changed his name to King Cormack while living in New York in the 1990s. Cormack was co-founder of the seminal Chicago alternative rock band Immune System in late 1976 which developed out of a scene associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He later co-founded Poison Squirrel, a rock trio that won high critical marks and enjoyed some success through out the midwestern United States.
Biography
Bob Cormack was raised in the suburbs of Chicago and began playing the guitar at age 11 inspired by the Beatles and folk music. He got his first Stratocaster at 17 but also enjoyed pursuits in film-making and other visual art forms. He honed his chops in a jam band scene in DeKalb, IL and spent some time in Santa Fe, New Mexico and San Francisco before returning to Chicago in 1976 and meeting Jaime Gardiner at the School of the Art Institute. The two of them soon met the other musicians that became Immune System and broke open the Wicker Park scene for subsequent generations.
Cormack moved to New York in 1984 and, living in the red-hot East Village, formed liaisons in the New York art and performance communities. He wrote incidental music for theater and live performance, did a lot of theater tech and recorded song demos at 4 Rivington St Studios in the 1990s. He changed his name to King Cormack in the mid-1990s, claiming he was "self-branding" and creating an ongoing piece of performance art. He moved to San Francisco again in 2000 where he enjoyed success with producing, visual art and where he found his funky little 1958 Gibson LG-0.
Returning to Chicago as King Cormack, he resumed his work in the Chicago cultural community in which his roots lie so deeply and continues to produce the diverse media he enjoys. King Cormack is currently collating material on Poison Squirrel as well as producing a new, modern body of songwriting that he hopes to have published in the near future.