The Riverside Plumber Tells a Great Story

The room was packed beyond capacity. Fifty people were left outside, unable to squeeze anyone else into what was supposed to be a simple Saturday talk about Riverside's punk rock history. Inside, John Riley Dixon faced a crowd predominantly populated with people who had actually lived through the story he was about to tell.

Dixon is Riverside's most unlikely social media influencer. By day, he works as a plumber and was once featured as a Gazette Neighbor of the Week. By evening, he researches local history with the dedication of a graduate student. His approach to both has made him enormously popular online, but not for the usual reasons.

The punk rock presentation became an unexpected test. Dixon was there to discuss how venue closures in the early 1990s, tied to Mission Inn redevelopment efforts, had killed a thriving cultural scene that only recently began rebuilding. His audience included people who had been there when it died.

Old punks have finely tuned detectors for posers and pretenders. They've watched their culture get sanitized and sold back to them too many times. In punk rock, credibility comes as much from the perception of authenticity as it does from experience. Dixon's nervous energy translated into something else entirely: genuine curiosity and respect for what they had experienced.

Where other social media personalities might have positioned themselves as experts, Dixon approached the story as a student. He wasn't there to lecture but to honor what had been lost. His humility disarmed a potentially hostile crowd.

"It was a community effort, it took a lot of people lending their time and their artifacts," Dixon says. "The community made it happen." For him, meeting some of these figures he had only heard about was remarkable. "Meeting some of these people I had only heard about seemed unattainable. It was amazing to see that even after all these years, these people had such a love for the era and an affinity toward each other and the community."

Dixon breaks the typical influencer mold in crucial ways. First, his plumbing business means social media remains a passion project rather than a hustle for clicks and sponsorships. Second, he approaches his subjects with scholarly rigor, digging into substantial materials because he wants to get the stories right.

The result is content that spotlights Riverside rather than using the city to highlight himself. He's not drawing attention to John Riley Dixon through local history; he's drawing attention to overlooked moments and forgotten cultural movements that shaped the place he calls home.

That Saturday afternoon, his approach worked. The crowd didn't just tolerate his outsider perspective on their lived experience but embraced it. Dixon made a lot of friends in the scene that day, including members of some of the biggest bands of the era, The Skeletones and Spiderworks and 98 Posse member Bill Fold.

In a landscape of manufactured authenticity and algorithm-chasing content, Dixon represents something increasingly rare: influence built on curiosity rather than ego. His success suggests there's still room for storytellers who approach their subjects with genuine respect and the humility to know what they don't know.