Making A Living Through Art, Music, And Behind-The-Scenes Magic: Rod Stroup’s Creative Career

By LYDIA BERGLAR
News Editor

When Rod Stroup was 12 years old, he landed his first paying job as an artist while also beginning his first entrepreneurial adventure. He spent the rest of his career working on a wide variety of artistic endeavors and musical pursuits and started several small businesses.

“I never claim to be a fine artist,” Stroup said. “I’m a commercial artist. I wanted to make a living at it. I didn’t want it to be a hobby.”

The story starts in a town in Arkansas when 12-year-old Stroup saw that someone had painted storefront windows for Christmas. He decided that he could do the same thing. The only catch was he didn’t have money to buy paint. He visited the paint store which told him to bring in some sketches. They liked his designs and agreed to supply the paint in exchange for Stroup painting their windows for free. The leftover paint was his to keep.

“As soon as I finished, I went right next door and told the guy, ‘I paint windows for Christmas.’ I just kept going down the block,” Stroup recalled. He returned to the stores after Christmas offering to clean the windows—for a charge, of course. He hired his younger brother, his first employee, to wash the windows.

The rest of Stroup’s career featured this same creative and entrepreneurial spirit, but it also included music, performance, and an element of engineering.

Stroup spent some of his childhood in Arkansas and then much of his life until 2019 in California. Now retired, Stroup and his wife moved to Dade County six years ago to retreat from The Golden State. Readers may recall a story about a unique vacation rental called The Merry Mushroom (see the July 16 Sentinel). Stroup is the artist who came up with the concept drawings for this house.

Stroup’s first art job published in print came to him after he gave a speech on art in college. His professor at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, Calif., asked to see some of his work and then connected him with an illustrating gig at the magazine she wrote for.

This gig opened the door to other jobs, like working in the graphic arts department at Naval Air Station North Island. “It was commercial art, basically, but that looks great on your resume,” Stroup said.

He also worked for the San Diego Union-Tribune, first as a freelancer and then a staff artist working on political cartoons, illustrations, and more.

Stroup’s next entrepreneurial endeavor, a graphics business, was much less successful than his window painting business. “It was a total flop. It went down in flames,” he said, but he was undeterred.

Soon, Stroup and his friend named George founded Hollywood Hollywood (a play on “New York, New York”) and found great success. They built and rented out props, backdrops, and special effects pieces for the entertainment industry, making adjustments to existing pieces and building new ones as needed for each client’s needs. The team also delivered and set up the pieces. “We did everything from kids’ birthday parties to Hollywood productions,” Stroup said.

Some of his fondest Hollywood Hollywood memories are from working on the 1988 horror parody “Return of the Killer Tomatoes.” Working behind the scenes in Hollywood, Stroup learned how the magic is made. “It’s not what people think. The public never knows about some of the stuff you pull off.”

For example, one shot required a lightning strike, and strobe lights weren’t going to work, so Stroup suggested two pieces of cardboard. Holding the cardboard, he flashed them quickly over the light to create the perfect effect. “It was just so camp, you couldn’t believe it, but that’s what the film was,” he laughed.

One of Hollywood Hollywood’s young employees asked if he could be in the movie in some way. “I can’t even get in the movie,” Stroup told him. The young man was tasked with laying out a newspaper page with an article about the killer tomatoes. “He does his page up, it looks great, we set it up, we shoot it,” Stroup said. “I didn’t see until I watched the movie that he put his picture as a wanted convict on the front page of the paper. He worked himself into the movie anyway. I would’ve done that if I’d thought of it!”

Stroup also saw firsthand the difference that music and sound effects make on the final production. An audio engineer once showed him the same scene twice of a golf ball being hit, first with a light “plunk” sound effect, then again with a loud whack, whistle, and glass breaking in the distance sound. “It was a real eye-opener of how important sound is,” Stroup said. “People don’t realize the power of music and sound effects.”

Stroup and George sold Hollywood Hollywood after five successful years, and Stroup founded Stroup Studios, continuing in the same line of work. He recalled, “One section of the warehouse was nothing but walls made from 4×8 panels. You want brick? You want lattice? We made whatever you want. We stuck them in there like books and called it Wall Street.”

Over his career, Stroup worked on projects for Disney, SeaWorld, Jay Leno, the San Diego Zoo, fancy fundraisers, and galas with celebrity guests. He designed and installed home decor pieces as well as small murals in homes and much larger murals in hotels. He created wall-sized paint by numbers for guests at events to fill in. He started another side business dedicated to life-sized caricature cutouts of celebrities and athletes.

Each project came with its own unique challenges, creative elements, and styles. Stroup blended practicality with creativity, doing whatever it took to meet clients’ needs and make the audience believe the magic.

For example, Hollywood Hollywood once had to build a free-standing bar counter for an event without bolts or screws. It needed to be set up in a minute or two, so the pieces had to click together easily. The team also had to take into account uneven ground and crowds of people moving around, all while making it an elegant piece that fit the classy event.

Another time, Stroup designed and made trophies for a Professional Baseball Scouts Foundation award event, but there wasn’t time to cast the trophies in bronze, polish them, and put them together before the event. Instead, Stroup built one copy out of plastic. “When you lifted it up, it didn’t weigh anything, so I filled it full of birdshot,” he said.

As recipients walked offstage holding the stand-in trophy, they handed it off to be presented again to the next person. “No one in the crowd knew that it was the same trophy over and over,” said Stroup.

He mingled with many celebrities over the years, but two stood out from the crowd. “The two nicest people I met in the whole industry would probably be Dick Clark and Jack Lemmon. Jack’s as real as you can get, and Dick is all business, but he’s very kind and thoughtful. Most clients didn’t care about our crew, but Dick made sure we were taken care of.”

One little Hollywood secret he learned about was Rent-A-Wreck. “I don’t know if it still exists, but there used to be a place that rented out these junky cars. Movie stars would use them because nobody would believe that the celebrity they thought they saw would drive a car like that. The stars could put on jeans and a ball cap and go anywhere they wanted.”

Stroup’s creativity isn’t limited to art and design; he also plays guitar, drums, bass, and keyboard, still performing today at Chattanooga venues like Songbirds and HiFi Clyde’s. “Music was a cultural thing in California,” Stroup said. “I happened to be in the right place at the right time a lot in my career. When I was a teenager, I met a guy named Jerry Seeger who taught me guitar and took me to Capitol Records where I met The Wrecking Crew. I kind of became a roadie and loved it.”

Stroup joined his first band, called The Sessions, and did all the graphic design for the group. Another band he was part of found a creative way to get gigs. “We were a 911 band: If the band you booked didn’t show up, you’d call us, and we’d show up and take the gig.” He also found work doing commercial jingles and voice overs for companies like General Dynamics and Transamerica Corporation. 

Stroup has written just under 200 songs, ranging from humorous to heartfelt and emotional. Primarily a live performer, his music isn’t easily available for purchase or on streaming platforms. He enjoys adding interactive elements to his live shows. “In San Diego, a partner and I did a two-man show, both serious and humorous. You’ve got to bring the audience up and bring them down,” he said.

In both his design career and music career, Stroup followed one maxim: “You never turn down work.” He was almost always working two or more jobs, like running Stroup Studios during the day and playing gigs at night.

“Starvation is a great motivator,” he said bluntly. “Some people get this idea that artists—I don’t care if you’re a potter, a dancer, or a country music singer—that there’s some pinnacle you’re supposed to be standing on and everyone goes, ‘Ooo, wow!’ I never was an ‘ooo, wow’ kind of guy. I looked at it as a way to provide for my family.”

Through hard work and long hours, he was able to support his family by doing what he loved. “The only thing that kept me going is that I loved what I was doing. When I had Stroup Studios, I could still play music when I wanted to, but I also couldn’t wait to go to work in the morning.”

Stroup also learned that he could earn the right to creative freedom even in commercial art. “You have to earn it. They don’t trust you at the start,” he explained. “They just want to see what they want because they need it by deadline.”

Stroup would show two mockups to his bosses and clients. The first followed the specific rules of the project. The second was his own idea. Soon, people began selecting the latter. “They quit telling you what to do and start asking you, ‘What can you come up with?’ Creativity is just a matter of putting things together that don’t usually go together in a palatable sequence.”

However, he added, “The biggest creative freedom is when you’re your own boss. You can do whatever you want; they either buy it, or they don’t.”

Music, entertainment, and engineering run in Stroup’s family, and his career melded all of these skills together. Stroup’s dad was an engineer whose mechanical mind was always at work improving little details in the world around him. His dad worked for the contractor who built the original Anaheim Disneyland, so Stroup’s work for Disney years later was a full circle moment.

Stroup grew up watching his uncle (on his mom’s side) play music with Red Foley, an influential figure in country music in the 40s and 50s. He enjoyed the live filming of Foley’s show “Ozark Jubilee” when the family went to watch Uncle Bob play on the show. Especially impressive to Stroup were the mechanics behind the rolling credits. Back then, credits literally rolled via a wheel that an employee turned by hand. Young Stroup thought that must be the best job in the world. Little did he know that one day, he would get to make all kinds of behind-the-scenes magic like this.