 |
| · · · · · · · · · |
|
Pomona College Magazine is published three times a year by Pomona College
550 N. College Ave, Claremont, CA 91711
Online Editor: Mark Kendall
For editorial matters:
Editor: Mark Wood
Phone: (909) 621-8158
Fax: (909) 621-8203
PCM Editorial Guidelines
Contact Alumni Records for changes of address, class notes, or notice
of births or deaths.
Phone: (909) 621-8635
Fax: (909) 621-8535
Email: alumni@pomona.edu
|
|
| · · · · · · · · · |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Occupation: Pop Star
Or Keith, Chris & Michael's Excellent
Adventure
By David Scott
On Feb. 9, 1964, four mop-topped lads from England calling
themselves the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Next
they skyrocketed into the cultural stratosphere.
On Dec. 19, 2005, three scruffy kids from The Claremont Colleges calling
themselves We Are Scientists appeared on that same stage; this time it
was the Late Show with David Letterman.
 Too soon to know if a place in the pop culture pantheon awaits the trio
of Keith Murray ’00 (guitar and lead vocals), Chris Cain ’99 (bass and
vocals) and Michael Tapper, a ’99 graduate of Harvey Mudd (drums and
vocals). However, the Scientists do present an ideal case study of the
effect of four decades of evolution on the occupation of rock ’n’
roller.
I followed We Are Scientists for more than half a year via e-mail and
the Web as they toured Europe and Japan as opening act for the latest
“big thing”—the Arctic Monkeys. For now, however, we’re a few blocks
north of Chicago’s Wrigley Field on a sweltering June evening backstage
at the Metro, a 1,100-person concert venue featuring emerging modern
rock bands. It’s a few hours before the third show of the band’s
headlining U.S. mini-tour that will take them from Michigan to
Massachusetts.
Now that I’m finally meeting the band in person, they’re lying to my
face. “We lie all the time,” says Cain, noting an affinity for the
time-honored pop-star tradition of manufacturing your own past. Asked
what’s the biggest lie We Are Scientists tell, Murray beats Cain to the
punch and answers the question with his own: “That’s the thing, we lie
about things big and small. Do a hundred tiny lies add up to one big
lie? We don’t know.” Cain thinks seriously about
this for a moment—clearly doing the mental math—and says, “Roughly,
yeah.”
“Any time anyone asks us if we’re really scientists—to which the answer
is, I think, fully selfevident—we say, ‘Absolutely!’” notes Cain, “and
we create a huge mythical catalogue of important publications and
achievements and assure the inquisitor that when we’re done withmusic
we’re going to return full time to the sciences which direly miss us.”
This has Murray going now: the band members play off each other like the
college pals they are, so he has to top Cain with his tale of the dark
side of living a lie. “You know what really, really deflated me on the
first day of this tour?” he asks. “Heather, one of the people in Au
Revoir Simone [the trio of women who are opening for We Are Scientists]
asked ‘Are you really scientists?’ not because she was really interested
but it turns out she was making conversation. And I was like ‘uh, no,’
because I wasn’t going to lie to someone I was going on
tour with—and then she divulged that she currently is getting a Ph.D. in
astrophysics at Columbia, and I was like ‘HA HA HO HO …. Oh, Jesus!’
That really deflated me.”
“That’s a real shot in the face,” admits Cain.
“Made me wish we had thought of a different name,” says Murray.
The banter comes to a halt.
Tall tales, flirtatious flame outs—it all helps get to the truth of an
engineering major (Tapper) and two humanities guys (Murray studied
international relations; Cain, English) who came to call themselves We
Are Scientists and record a major label debut, With Love and Squalor,
that name-checks an essay by J.D. Salinger. The album serves up a dozen
tightly-wound tunes that document with a lab report’s precision the
romantic and relational ups and downs of 20-something guys who clearly
did their homework and still managed to make the social rounds.
 Typical lyrics:
This scene is dead, but I’m still restless
An hour or so until last call, I guess.
I shouldn’t even be here, much less
Drinking myself into excess.
Twenty years of bad decisions
Haven’t taught me much at all.
Yeah we’re all about the same
A bunch of slaves to fashion
Who are tall, dark and scared
And just praying for some action.
A footnote on that fashion part: Early press on We Are Scientists cited
the band’s tendency to sport shabby-chic dorm duds with a marked
preference for tweed jackets and button-down sweater vests, suggesting
that the Scientists were launching a new sartorial wave as rockers you
could emulate without jeopardizing early admission into the Ivy of your
choice. Murray denies that there’s anything calculated about the
Scientists’ look—with the possible exception of Cain’s “vaguely silly”
mustache.
The band’s genesis and, no doubt, fashion sense date back to their time
at The
Claremont Colleges when Murray and Tapper met while playing in various
campus
bands. Murray and Cain were “buds” before the music, and after
graduation in 1999 moved north to Berkeley, which is where they
originally formed We Are Scientists with Scott Lamb ’99. This line-up
existed until Cain and Murray returned to the Pomona Arts Colony in late
2000. According to Cain, they moved because “we both had girlfriends who
were still in school. …”
“WHAT?!” This sets off Murray—we’re backstage at the Metro again—who
bristles at
Cain’s suggestion. “I didn’t have a girlfriend when I moved back there.”
“OK, so we both moved back for my girl,” Cain, unfazed, offers
nonchalantly.
Murray is off and running with the gag now: “Yeah, I missed Chris’
girlfriend.”
Cain rolls his eyes in mock long-suffering cuckoldry: “Yeah, she’s
great.”
We Are Scientists built a local reputation gigging at The Claremont
Colleges and
around the local Inland Empire and Los Angeles music scenes. They set
out for
New York once Tapper finished his master’s at Harvey Mudd, not to make
it big on the music scene, it turns out, but to share a good deal on housing in
Brooklyn.
They continued to play as a band, but settled into that familiar
after-college
routine of finding those all-important if not always satisfying first
jobs.
“We had good jobs,” Murray corrects me. He worked for the Independent
Film
Channel, and Cain took a job with an advertising firm. Tapper landed
most
comfortably of all at the World Bank. I have to ask if the guys put
these jobs
on hold as a hedge against the often fickle fate of pop success. “We
cast it
aside,” Cain answers with authority. Murray is more introspective,
noting that
the cushy jobs “went down the grinder.”
 “There was an element of security in signing a five-album deal with
Virgin,”
Cain explains of the band’s recent major label deal. “There’s definitely
enough
money there to allow us to live moderately—frugally, really.”
The move to New York raised the band’s profile as they gained a local
reputation
for their energetic, witty live performances. First fame would find the
band in
the United Kingdom via Texas, however. In the spring of 2005, the band
set out
for the SXSW (South by Southwest) music festival in Austin. For newly
emerging
bands, SXSW serves roughly the same purpose as the Sundance Film
Festival,
garnering wider industry exposure for artists who have developed strong
underground or alternative followings.
“We somehow found ourselves touted as one of the ‘must see’ unsigned
bands of
the festival,” Murray notes. “Why? We can’t be sure. We weren’t
expecting it,
and, to be honest, were totally unaware of our status as such until
after our
performance, when we were informed and then reminded of the situation
with
regularity. … Our showcase … was pretty much filled beyond capacity with
industry folk, so that our friends from the Brooklyn band Oxford
Collapse—with
whom we’d played to exactly six people in Atkins, Ark., the night
before—couldn’t gain access to the building.”
One of the music industry “heavies” in attendance that night was veteran
British
disc jockey Steve Lamacq. He liked what he heard, invited the band to
play live
on his BBC radio show and added their songs to his play list, ensuring
that
“Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt,” the first cut on the demo that would
become With
Love and Squalor, became a hit in the UK. The deal with UK–based Virgin
Records
quickly followed.
When I ask if it’s safe to say that the band is “bigger” overseas than
at home,
Murray notes, “Not only safe to say, it’s imperative to say.” In fact,
the band
is well on its way to the rarified stratosphere of “pop sensation” in
Britain,
having already sold out 14 of the 18 shows in its upcoming fall tour.
Cain has
developed his own theory why the band “blew up” in England: “Well,
they’re so
smart, and the education system is so good. …”
And now for a post-modern pop problem:
Forty years ago, if a fan had received a personal letter from Paul
McCartney,
her parents would have had to call the fire department to scrape her off
the
ceiling. For today’s Web–wired indie rock “scene queen,” it’s almost
sacrilege
to follow any band if you can’t boast some personal link to one of the
members.
This has become a bit of a sticky wicket for We Are Scientists. The band
built
their original fan base from the shows in Southern California and then
New York.
Even during their Brooklyn days, they made the effort to return for at
least one
show on the Claremont campus per semester. This was, of course, before
they took
off in the UK and found themselves rocking David Letterman.
The band prided itself on staying in touch with its fans, but the sheer
numbers
associated with media exposure proved overwhelming. “It’s fair to say we
no
longer know most of our fans,” laments Cain. For example, the band ran
an advice
column on its Web site (www.wearescientists.com). “Until last summer, we
responded to every single request,” he notes, “and then the big
geometric uphill
progression began. We were getting several a day; nowadays we get like a
hundred
a day or something. It’s just huge.” The same holds true for e-mails
sent to the
band via their site. “We still try to reply to people, but the best we
can do is
just sort of a peppering of responses.”
Confounding it all is the nearly simultaneous emergence of We Are
Scientists’
notoriety and the electronic meeting place for the Internet generation,
myspace.com, sort of an international, electronic Mall of America for
today’s
cyber teens. Any performer who covets cultural currency has developed
his or her
own myspace page (personality profile/personal ad meets DIY publicist),
and the
band of course has one, too. They use it to gauge their popularity the
way
that—oh, say, George and John—might have obsessively checked their rank
on
Billboard’s Top 40 chart. Murray notes that the band is up to 85,000
myspace
“friends and people” listings (user links that encourage myspacers to
stockpile
electronic popularity). This is not quite double the amount of
fans—50,000—that
are signed on to the band’s e-mail list. “I don’t know which indicates
more
allegiance, but my sense is that signing up for a band’s mailing list
gives more
of a sense of allegiance than being its friend [on myspace],” reasons
Cain, and
I realize that for once he’s not offering his bemused analysis in de
rigueur
ironic quotation marks.
Still, Cain offers wistfully, “there certainly is a loss of intimacy as
you go; it’s almost so obvious as to not rate mentioning, but I would
say more interestingly that it’s true these days that technologies like
myspace and the Web have allowed us more of an intimacy with our fan
base than we would have had 15 or 20 years ago. Like, I think our Web
site is pretty much an unadulterated picture of us.”
In Beatles terms, it’s not the real Ringo, but a reasonable facsimile.
Version 2.0 is now a big deal for We Are Scientists. Their huge success
overseas
and moderate break-through at home earmarks their all-important
sophomore album
as a potential make-or-break proposition. Has the band been working up
some new
stuff?
“We haven’t made time to do it this entire time we’ve been on tour,”
Murray admits, “and now, you know, there’s something of a creeping panic.”
Spend anytime at all with the band, however, and you soon realize that
there’s
absolutely no shortage of enthusiasm, energy and rock ’n’ roll–worthy
zaniness.
A bit comes to Murray as he talks about opening act Au Revoir Simone.
Perhaps
the band should call their next album Au Revoir Camus. This jape ignites
Cain
and Murray.
“I’m gonna text myself that right now!” Murray cries as he grabs his
cell phone
and taps away. “That would be the most idiotic album title ever. I love
it!”
Cain rolls his eyes while Murray explains that he’s been “memo-ing”
himself ideas on his phone throughout their time on the road. We learn that Au Revoir
Camus is text message No. 6. This, naturally, begs the 1-through-5
question.
Murray bites:
No. 5: “Booger Watson.”
No. 4: “Tell your neck it’s hickey time.” (Murray: “This was actually
overheard
in a bar, so I had to write it down.”)
No. 3: “We Kill Werewolves.” (Cain: “It was a title for a business.”)
No. 2: “Weeknight at Bernie’s.”
As if on cue, Murray fumbles the phone and flubs the big finish. “No. 1
represents his oldest and least evolved self,” says Cain, filling time,
“so it
could be really stupid. This could very well embarrass us all.”“Oh no!” Murray cries in disappointment as he recovers the phone. “No. 1
is
‘Ruby Tuesday’ because I had been intending to illegally download that
Rolling
Stones’ song. Actually, I now have it on my iPod. It came on somewhere,
and I’m
like, ‘Man I need this song,’ although I don’t need all the songs off
the album.”
“Too much to wade through,” Cain concurs. “It’s like wading through
syrup.” I
think he’s trash talking about the Rolling Stones’ Between the Buttons
album. …
But Murray’s back to the text list. “Booger Watson. What could I have
intended
with that?”
“It’s a good name for a dog,” Cain shrugs.
Lycanthropic extermination seems a perfectly viable fallback career
option, I’m
thinking, so I ask Cain and Murray how long they hope that this We Are
Scientists job might last.
“Ten minutes!” We all jump. The answer has come not from the band but
from their
British tour manager and minder Storme; her choice to burst through the
door and
wrap up the interview at this very moment is sterling.
“It’s hard to say at this point,” Murray says. Cain notes that the band
is clearly the type to end not with a whimper but with a big, goofy
Booger Watson–worthy bang once the fun has gone down the grinder.
“Unless,” Murray
corrects him, “at that point we’re making a million dollars a year, in
which
case we’ll do it until we die. …” Seems he has been studying the Rolling
Stones.
Cain is more pragmatic. “It’s not like there’s some huge $5 million
account waiting for us to cash out when we finish or anything,” he says.
“We’re pretty much going to go do another job, actually.”
Tonight’s assignment, however, is clear. We Are Scientists go out and
rock the Metro like a mofo, leaving the capacity crowd screaming for
more.
|
|
|
|
