Howdy partners!  My name is Cory Popelka.  I live in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with my beautiful wife, Laura, our son, Jackson Marshall (named after my Jackson guitar and Marshall amplifier), our Bulldog, Magnus ver Magnusson, our cat, Thor, and a bunch of fish.  By day, I am the Eastern Iowa district manager for Miracle-Ear® hearing center in Cedar Rapids.  By night, I morph into my alter-ego... Porkchop Thunderhorse.

Here's my story.  As long as I can remember, my love for music and performing began like many others did.  I saw a Kiss concert on TV when I was probably 5 or 6 years old.  Damn devil music anyway!  My brother and I eventually coerced our parents into buying us an acoustic guitar and into taking lessons.  Like most kids, our interest in being the next Gene Simmons quickly faded.  Later on around the age of 10 or 12, I remember my Dad getting a Harmony electric guitar and amp from my Mom for Christmas.  I didn't even know my Dad could play but one night he fired that bad boy up, cranked the 5 watt amp and played some pretty cool distorted guitar.  All of a sudden, I wanted to be Gene Simmons again.

After beating on Dad's Harmony for a couple of years, I finally was able to get my own. I remember going to Carma Lou's House of Music on Center Point Road and picking out my Epiphone Strat Style guitar.  It was a big step up from the old Harmony.  It was black with shark tooth inlays in the neck. I wish I still had it actually.  I also picked up a Crate G-60 amp.  Wow, an amp with distortion actually built in.  I didn't care that it sounded like a chain saw... it was frickin' loud and that was all that mattered.

I began to play quite a bit - never taking lessons, just beating around in the basement. I eventually formed a band called "Twisted Christian." It didn't last long as half of Vinton was pissed about the name, so we changed to "Green Eggs & Ham."  We played together my sophomore through senior years of high school doing Metallica, Sex Pistols and other metal stuff.  We wrote a bunch of originals and eventually recorded "Drop My Load" in Waterloo shortly before breaking up when people went off to college.  It ended up selling 134 copies... not exactly platinum but we had people buy it that we didn't even know and that was cool.

Later we reformed as a three-piece band.  I switched to bass and vocals and we changed our name to "Green Eggs & Jam."  We played the Vinton "Party in the Park" festival and, much to our dismay, got the plug pulled on us after three songs due to "objectionable lyrics."  How rock 'n roll is that?  After that, I was so disgruntled by the whole thing, I pretty much quit playing for a good 10 years.

Then the itch came back.  In the last year, I started playing a lot more and decided I wanted to give the rock star dream another shot, so I reinvented myself as Porkchop Thunderhorse.  I took the name from my childhood nickname, "Porkchop", and my other alter-ego porn star name, "Manmeat Thunderhorse."  I was going to go with that but the wife found it offensive. But Porkchop Thunderhorse describes my music today... lots of classic country like Johnny Cash and Alan Jackson, along with great 80's party songs like Flock of Seagulls, Poison, Cyndi Lauper and a bunch of others.

Hope you make it to a show sometime, and when you do there is only one requirement...