Rob began playing steel drums in high school, but he first fell in love with the instrument while watching Sesame Street. With his charming manner and contagious charisma, Rob is the key to the Toucans' success.
Rob is one of the original members of the Toucans. He has been playing pan for over 10 years, and loves all things Caribbean, from the music to the spicy food. Rob is currently involved in many projects besides the Toucans. He designs and builds the puppets for his own maniacal puppet productions (including Tales of the Caribbean), and enjoys teaching theatre to children at Youth Theatre Northwest.
Rob enjoys tandem biking and fine homebuilding. He also plays a variety of different instruments, like the clarinet, tin whistle, accordion, saxophone, and concertina. He is currently involved with the production of a sequel album to Sea Chantyes of the Toucan Pirates. This album includes traditional and original pirate and sea-faring compositions of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh derivation. Additionally, Rob plays in several Seattle groups of high repute, including Saint Bushmill's Choir, Moriarty's Stevedores, the Magic Peanut Orchestra, and Sanford Arms.
Rob's hobbies include
building theatrical props, collecting accordion jokes, constructing
scale models of the Titanic, and creating Lego dioramas. Featured
here is the diorama which appeared on the back cover of the Toucans'
1994 release of By Request.
It took several weeks to construct and contains Lego representations
of all of the Toucans as well as Rob's favorite cartoon characters.
Another diorama of note is the Sunken
Ship underwater seascape, and you may also be interested in
viewing a production model
for the upcoming clay animation music video for the Toucan
Pirates. Rob has even made a stop-motion animated film with
Legos, filmed in conjunction with Toucan Pete over a period of
two months in early 1993. Scored with incidental music from the
Star Wars trilogy, this film short was screened for the first
time in late 1997 to rave reviews from Seattle film-goers.
The funny thing about Rob is, while he eats
all food at a rate calculated to be 1/2 the rate of a normal human's
consumption, he can consume ice cream and similar products at
twice the rate of a normal person, or 4 times as fast as he normally
eats! Here, we see Rob downing what proved to be his 6th and final
Krusty Pup (aka corn dog) of the 1994 Puyallup Fair. Special thanks
to the Sales family for dipping our tofu dogs in their special
Krusty Pup batter! Rob, by the way, would like you to read an
article which has changed his life, a paeon
to the hot dog by Christopher Walken.
Rob's also enjoys organizing and leading event-oriented food tours of the Pacific Northwest. His latest outing, SuperFryZoopa, was a smashing success! His pot-luck sensation, The Corn Dog Casserole, is also sweeping the nation.
