Every hometown has a soundtrack, but few towns have one as richly documented as Pekin's. The story of the Bicentennial Dragon Jam begins not with a single concert, but with the decades of guitars, garages, radio dedications, and recording tape that made Pekin a surprising node in the Midwest's musical map. To understand why the Dragon Jam matters, you have to trace the threads back through the people who wove them.
A Guitar Picked Up in 1962
The story often starts with Michael Isenberg, who in 1962 picked up a guitar and, without quite meaning to, set off a chain of events that would shape Pekin's musical identity for generations. Isenberg wasn't just a player; he became the town's unofficial keeper of memory, someone who recorded not only songs but the stories behind them - the personalities, the late nights, the small triumphs of bands that never left the Midwest but built something lasting anyway.
Until his passing in February 2022, Isenberg carried those stories with him, and shared them freely. He understood, perhaps better than anyone, that a town's music scene is only as alive as the memory kept of it. That instinct - to preserve as much as to perform - is part of why his name remains inseparable from any conversation about Pekin's musical past.
His band, The Jets, rose out of that same 1960s momentum. By 1973, with a lineup of Isenberg, Greg Clemons, Graham Walker, Randy Kohtz, and Greg Wilson, The Jets had become, by most accounts, the most popular band in the Midwest region. Lineup changes followed - Clemons departed, and Thomas Walker stepped in to relieve Kohtz on bass - but the band's momentum did not slow. In fact, it carried them to a distinction no other band could later claim: they headlined the very first Pekin Marigold Festival, cementing their place as a genuine piece of local history rather than just a footnote.
The Man Behind the Amp: Jay Goldberg
If Isenberg represents the performer-historian, Jay Goldberg represents something different but equally vital: the promoter, the connector, the man whose name became a familiar sign-off on radio announcements across the region. Anyone who grew up listening to Midwest radio in certain decades remembers the phrase "brought to you by Jay Goldberg Events and Entertainment" trailing the end of a concert announcement. The list of shows he brought to the region, and the number of acts whose careers he helped along the way, is long enough that it resists a tidy summary.
Goldberg's roots in Pekin came through his family's move from Chicago, where they opened a children's clothing store in town. He went through Pekin High School during a period that, coincidentally or not, coincided with the school's last two state basketball championships. Goldberg himself never played sports, but he found his own arena in the town's music scene, which even then was unusually dense with working bands.
Goldberg has always been candid about the fact that he never considered himself a true musician, despite his love of the guitar. His real advantage, by his own account, was a very good amplifier.
“I really couldn’t play my guitar very well,” he told the Pekin Daily Times. “However, since I had one of the best amps (a Fender Super Reverb) in town, all the players would invite me to hang out with them. They would say, ‘Jay, bring your amp!’ Of course, they implied for me to leave my guitar at home. I understood.”
That self-deprecating story captures something essential about how music scenes actually function - not always through the most technically gifted players, but through the people who show up, bring the gear, make the connections, and eventually turn that social gravity into something like a career. Goldberg's path from amp-lender to major regional promoter is very much a Midwest story: modest beginnings, persistence, and a refusal to leave home even after achieving national-level success.
Golden Voice Recording Co.: Capturing Pekin's Sound
No account of Pekin's music history is complete without Jerry Milam and his wife Mary Ann, who founded the Golden Voice Recording Co. in South Pekin. It was, by all descriptions, a modest studio - small in footprint but outsized in ambition. The Milams didn't set out to build an empire; they built a space where local musicians could actually record their work, refine it, and send it out into the world with a professional polish that had previously required a trip to a bigger city.
For many area artists, Golden Voice was the first real studio experience they ever had. It gave working musicians in Pekin and the surrounding towns a chance to hear themselves the way listeners eventually would: through a mixed, mastered recording rather than a live-room echo. That accessibility mattered enormously in an era when recording technology and studio time were expensive, scarce, and usually concentrated in major cities.
The Milams' studio became something of an incubator, launching or boosting the careers of a number of artists whose music would go on to resonate well beyond the borders of Tazewell County. Golden Voice is a reminder that a music scene doesn't just need performers and promoters - it needs infrastructure, a physical place where songs become recordings and recordings become careers.
Why These Threads Converge in the Dragon Jam
The Bicentennial Dragon Jam exists because these separate strands - Isenberg's performing and storytelling, Goldberg's promotion and connections, the Milams' recording studio - never actually operated in isolation. They fed into one another. A band that recorded at Golden Voice might get booked through Goldberg's growing network; a story that Isenberg preserved about a gig or a rivalry might be the only record left of a band that otherwise vanished from memory entirely.
Framing a bicentennial celebration around music, then, isn't just a matter of throwing a concert for nostalgia's sake. It's a recognition that Pekin's musical output over the decades constitutes a real, if under-sung, cultural achievement - one built by people who often didn't think of themselves as making history, just making music, running amps, or running tape.
A Living Local Legacy
What makes Pekin's music history worth celebrating isn't a single hit record or a famous name that everyone recognizes nationally. It's the density and continuity of the scene - bands headlining the first Marigold Festival, a promoter whose name became shorthand for quality regional entertainment, and a studio that gave everyday musicians a shot at something more permanent than a live show.
The Dragon Jam, in that sense, functions as both celebration and archive: a chance to hear the echoes of The Jets, to acknowledge the quiet influence of figures like Goldberg and the Milams, and to keep alive the kind of storytelling that Michael Isenberg spent a lifetime practicing. It's a fitting tribute for a town whose musical history has always been less about fame and more about persistence, community, and the stubborn belief that even a small studio in South Pekin could produce something worth remembering.