Golomboski follows his Bliss

ENTERTAINMENT | MUSIC
R.I.’s ‘Iceman’ Golomboski left business world to be country music DJ on the Web

The Providence Journal
Country music DJ Robert "The Iceman" Golomboski, left, with sidekick Alberto Ray Fazzo, known as "The Cleaning Guy." From his West Warwick studio, Golomboski, of North Providence, runs a 24-hour show on the Internet that draws a worldwide audience.

By Alex Kuffner

Journal Staff Writer

akuffner@providencejournal.com

WEST WARWICK, R.I. — How did a 50-year-old half-Italian, half-Polish one-time financial planner who grew up on Federal Hill, lives in North Providence and records in a basement studio in West Warwick become an Internet sensation as a tattooed, scraggly-haired, scruffy-bearded, moonshine-drinking, Nashville-loving country music deejay?

That’s a good question, says Bobby Golomboski, better known as “The Iceman” to his 36,000 followers on Twitter, the 46,000 people who’ve “liked” his Facebook page and the thousands who tune in to his radio show four times a week all over the United States, as well as in far-flung places such as Ireland, Australia and the Netherlands.

“It started out as a love,” Golomboski says as he sits behind a desk in his producer’s home studio near Arctic village on a recent afternoon.

He is without his cowboy hat on this day, but he is wearing beat-up cowboy boots. As he talks, Golomboski offers to open a half-empty jar of Ole Smoky Moonshine that sits on a corner of his desk.

Golomboski’s tale goes back to his childhood, when he fell in love with radio listening to top-40 hits on local Providence station JB105, and, through syndication, the shows of Wolfman Jack, the California rock deejay of the 1960s and ’70s.

Golomboski dreamed of becoming a deejay himself and studied broadcast production at The Sawyer School in Providence, but he got sidetracked — for a few decades — working first in sales for AT&T before getting finance jobs with Morgan Stanley and Raymond James.

In 2013, he decided that if he waited any longer he’d lose out on finally making that dream come true, so, with enough money saved to live on for a while, he quit his job and set out to create his own Internet radio station.

That February, after figuring out how to set up a web stream and pay royalty fees for songs, he aired his first show. He adopted as his on-air moniker the nickname he’d been given for his other lifelong love: hockey. He started growing out his hair and beard. The production was pretty rudimentary.

“I was using a headset from a cellphone,” he says. “I had two listeners — my mother and, um, I forget who else.”

For a year, he did a four-hour show every day, with each day of the week devoted to a different genre of music. There was classic rock on Wednesdays, R&B on Fridays, and in homage to his childhood on Federal Hill, Frank Sinatra and other crooners on Sundays.

Then he got hired by a more established Internet station to host shows devoted to new country artists. The job didn’t work out, but Golomboski saw a niche that was being underserved.

He went back to his own station and devoted himself entirely to finding undiscovered country talent. He first aired the new show, called “The Iceman’s Cavern,” last March. Within three months, he was an accredited member of the media at the Country Music Association’s annual festival in Nashville. In June, he’ll again be in Music City for the festival, but this time he’ll be hosting his own concert featuring the most popular artists on his show.

Now, the show is on the Web in a hundred countries. He’s doing on-air interviews with bigger names such as Craig Wayne Boyd, the most recent winner of “The Voice,” and “The X Factor” alums Makenna & Brock, but he’s still putting relative unknowns on his show.

Every six weeks, he travels to Nashville, where he visits honky tonks and juke joints to listen to new bands and singers. When he’s back in Rhode Island, he cruises social media and tracks down obscure recordings. Musicians also email songs to him — hundreds every week, says Golomboski, who listens to all of them.

“I have to,” he says. “I could miss one and it could be the next superstar.”

Some of the songs have been professionally produced. Others are nothing more than a man and his guitar. That was the case with Canaan James, a musician who listens to Golomboski and decided to send him a song he taped at home. Now, after that song was played on Golomboski’s show, James is set to record professionally in Nashville.

Golomboski has also given air time to James Michael Miller, a musician he met in Nashville who was living out of his car. Miller is one of 16 artists who will play at Golomboski’s CMA concert in June.

“If I had the money, I’d buy him a house,” Golomboski says. “The guy just needs a break.”

What that type of exposure means to a musician becomes clear when Golomboski plays a video of singer Prevo Rodgers Jr., an Iraq War veteran whose vocal cords were damaged in a bomb explosion and who is also set to perform at the CMA event.

Before announcing Rodgers’ selection on air, he confided in one of the singer’s friends. When Rodgers heard the news, the friend was secretly recording. In the video, Rodgers is overcome and starts to cry.

The Iceman is a persona that Golomboski created for radio, but he’s occupying it more and more these days. He says his 14-year-old daughter has asked why he’s always wearing cowboy boots.

“That’s me now,” he says.

He has a few sponsors, including Fireball Whisky and Ole Smoky Moonshine, which explains the jar on his desk and the baseball cap with the company’s logo that Golomboski wears.

But he’s only starting to make some money now. An investor recently offered to back him, but, in exchange, Golomboski would have had to give up creative control of his show. He turned the proposal down.

He doesn’t want to change what he’s doing. Finding new country artists has become his life, Golomboski says.

“I’m helping people get to their dreams, and they’re helping me get to mine,” he says.

On Twitter: @KuffnerAlex