College Bands And Their Thoughtful Punk Eternity
Words: Celine Dipp
December 8, 2023
The Grateful Dead refuted the idea that their music was an act of creation. Instead, their “eternal music tapping” harnessed a singular perpetual beat—one that pervaded the universe—into a long, heavy, rhythmic impulse. The members of the cover band The Mud Room hold their heads low in the soft light and reverberate philosophies from the long-gone rockers. Yet, the sentences fit right and clear and sincere in their mouths. Time feels lucid in the seconds-long gap between their words and the music.
In the middle of February, I spent a week curving the hood of a college music scene splitting open. That ever-present pulse shook the walls of fluorescent practice rooms, the popcorn ceilings of dorm rooms, and the peeling boots that enclosed tapping feet. And, spread thin along campus, I shied and smiled. The strumming and sound and glory left me fortuned to taste the Dead’s far-flung tapping firsthand.
Dazed-out, cool-headed college students make their way underground. They crowd a wilting basement beneath a two-story rental home on Hope Street. Wind steeps in from upstairs and grows warm and damp the second it touches the inside. And, when a note comes out, the room melts. Tendrils of sound shred apart walls, heads pulsate with a liberating rage, and, out of it all, a silver and gritty A-sharp rises like steaming, hot fire. A song is sung, the words nondescript and nearly imperceptible under the shouts of a fevered crowd. The audience seizes and careens and bursts open. It vibrates until all onlookers are one being, unified by the movement and the tenor and the soft, surging feeling of a group in synchronicity. The room caches a clique—musicians rolling open for their devotees, their lovers, their groupies. They come alive and apart. A note halos in and out of a clustered audience like a breeze. A strum catches a soul and forces it open. Lightning noise and tepid entrancement fever the night into an eternity.
The four bandmates reflect with casual nostalgia: “Basements are fun.” The band arrives four minutes late to our interview on Angell Street. They come in like a crashing cacophony, spilling open with laughter. NIFT’s four members—Brown University students vocalist and bass player Evan Mickelson, lead guitarist Matt McQuistion, rhythm guitarist Giuseppe Canta, and recently added drummer Ryder Lippman—crack a smile when I ask about the name. “Lukewarm Welcome” and “Shower Shoes” lost out when Evan closed a song with a one-off afterthought: “That was nifty.”
They move one by one to confess their musical backgrounds with a warm-glowing, high-loving reverence. Canta received his early tastes from his dad, who put him on hardcore and metal. He eventually jammed with a punk band in the UAE before graduating to jazz. Their guitarist, McQuistion, spent his early years in the Oklahoma City local scene playing with a hardcore band named “Grandpa Vern.” And, when his words touch the music, they glitter. Pious about punk rock, he nods fast while his energy sears each sentence alive.
Mickelson’s high school pop band “Rain Tree Driver” steeped him in a sun-fried alternative surf rock scene. He breached the California sky with earwormed guitar riffs. Since settling in the Northeast, Evan fled to punk. While freshman Lipmann confesses that this year is his first foray into bands, his peers betray his shyshied humility. They gush and tease him open. He straightens up a little, brushes off some of his reservations, and admits that he’s spent a lifetime with the guitar, piano, and drums. Ryder’s a perfectionist, sure, but, the thing with bands is that, “it’s just so much fun.”
To Matt, the music’s gritty, but they’re aiming for a feeling that’s “a little less polished and a little more cathartic.” The band finds its home in a liminal place between genre and flux. The walls of a freshman living hall were the first venue that showcased NIFT—the band’s first show was in a dorm loungelongue. Sweated-over bodies tumulted forward, and thundering heads buzzed under Mickelson’s freshly spirited lyrics.
When I ask how they found their sound, they cast their eyes to the ground for a second. “We haven’t.” As they rattle on, their language stays cool and honest. NIFT self-describes their “post-hardcore sound” as “thoughtful punk.” They step on each other’s toes a bit and laugh about it and nod slowly and carefully and earnestly at each other. It is impossible to ignore NIFT’s nearly religious devotion to rock. They leave the interview after forty-five minutes. The chairs of a once pristinely tucked kitchen table are now scattered. The room feels emptier once they’ve left than it was before they entered.
Requesting an interview with Julien Deculus in The Underground coffee shop was a happy accident. The spot is commandeered by student baristas who pass out tunes to customers dashing in and out—and, sometimes, the space houses college musicians on its off hours. Deculus’s eyes move slow and long across the room. A year and a half ago, he closed his first show here to a group of forty chanting his name. Julien and I take to some couches. When I get him talking about the music, he glows gold. He rattles off like a music encyclopedia: taking his favorites in artists like John Mayer and Stevie Wonder, genres like soul-pop and old-soul with a modern infusion, and retro-school love ballads.
We scale back to earlier days, memories tucked in far places and vibrating with flavor. On his morning route to elementary school, he rolled in the backseat of his dad’s car along Los Angeles hills. The ride thundered beneath sounds of old soul, funk, and R&B. Eventually, the self-proclaimed “heartthrob” touched his first guitar at age ten. Within a year, his first band, Nostalgia, made their humble beginnings at monthly gigs in bowling alleys. Just another year later, Deculus’s first song found its way to a recording studio. Now, he tells me with quiet and cool awe that he’s nearly on “the edge” of finding his sound. He smiles to himself a little, looks up at me with a timid grin, and confesses: “What better career for a hopeless romantic?”
That night, at 11:00 pm on a nothing-shaped Tuesday, I wait for Linus Lawrence’s text while pacing in circles and triangles and lopsided loops in the SteinertSteinart Music Hall lobby. The space’s silence is sweet and sharp. Until, suddenly, the tide of a warm note melts down the stairs. Soft and raw and dreamy, a surge draws me to a practice room on the upper level. A sound twice its volume stretches out and grabs me. The Stowaways, Brown’s Beach Boys cover band, splits sky and sings sunlight.
When their sound rings out, it is impenetrable. Its vibrations thunder and slump into every corner, warping linoleum tile. A tapping foot in a dirt-soaked sole betrays a universal rhythm. A khaki-clad leg pulses back and forth. Hands with nails picked at the ends grasp a melody into a microphone. The Stowaways’ chain of noise cuts and grits against the walls, meandering with relentless hubris. A melody hacks out of their instruments like an easy beam of light. The music is warm and yellowed and fraying at the ends and hot all over and spiraling in clean-cut and clear beams.
Every time I blink, I miss something.
The Stowaways are taken by a case of jitters. They shake their ankles, draw clusters with their footprints, and tease one another between hysterics. Singer Elsa Block yanks out her phone and snaps a video. In the middle of practice, Ryder Lippman—disguising his taste for NIFT’s iron punk as a Stowaway’s double-member—turns nineteen years old. A slowed and mellowed “Happy Birthday” kicks open a new year for Lippman. Singer Michael DeLaurier reveals impending dread about his closely awaiting homework. Linus lets off a sigh of faux exhaustion, hiding glittering eyes, and turns to me: “This is what I have to deal with… these little rascals.”
The band ebbs and clutters and slices open sound. In the meantime, I reminisce. I’d caught Michael’s name in a defunct and roughed-up dorm loungelongue our first semester. I’d shyly met Linus in a shadowed nook of our dining hall. We’d chatted finals and close-cut traditions and college flings. We’d gotten our haircuts over winter and spring breaks. We’d waved and passed by, wrung our rituals right. Yet, seated here, now, I face strangers. I am crushed beneath the weight of their forever sound. They are technicolored by an eternal rhythm. Their unending harmony is as wide and confident as a loose sky. On an empty Tuesday evening, my friends make a sound so beautiful it changes my life. I sit still and careful as they come together and make light out of nothing.
Guitarist David Tapper and bassist Liam Rogers tick their feet expectantly. Their chairs are scattered in a practice space known colloquially among the musicians on campus as the Red Room. They pass in and out of my questions with kind and honest attention. The duo caught a Grateful Dead show in Chicago’s Wrigley Field and couldn’t itch the memory when they got back to college. Out emerged their cover band. The Mud Room’s new drummer arrives thirty minutes late with sunglasses shading his eyes from the overheads. He peels them off when they ask about his affiliation with the Dead, mumbles off a bit, and tosses out: “My science teacher in middle school really dug them. Looking back, he was probably a stoner.”
They try a few songs, but the band strains. Guitarist Jack Morris suggests that they vamp, the practice of dipping in and out of chords with no particular direction or end. The group plunges head first. Their liquid sound rolls in smoothly like a stale wind. Soon enough, it whips around my head as though it were a viper. David Tapper wears a tight-necked wool sweater and shreds his guitar. The room sounds from all four corners, and each musician slips like a river on top of one another. Morris later describes this unifying closeness as “grooves.” Finally, the sound is a thousand places all at once, spiraling and clumping together and coming apart. The hands of the four players tap into eternity. Their instruments weep. No note is left dry.
As I rest on the blue moleskin subjected to the ravings of a week of music, I’m at a loss. I struggle to write any more about their mercury vibration or infinite-reaching cacophony or long-strung playing. A sweat takes my skin. My pen falters. And, a feeling takes over. I can only describe that inane and brutal easing of the mind as a feeling I know often but can hardly pin down—bravery. I flip to another page, and words come out meandering and halting and running loose at the ends. Those words belong to a heart with far more hubris than mine. The band sweeps into silence. I shut my notebook. I walk out fast and scattered, and I don’t look back once I’ve offered my “thank you.”
By Friday, I try to remember what first inclined me to treat rock with reverence. It starts at age six. I was laying on the floor in my grandmother’s Studio City home when my sister found out that Michael Jackson had died. It was a different day. Jackson’s name lacked infamy, his legacy was not yet paled, and his music lingered in the childhood of young people born just at the turn of the century. My sister was eleven years old. When she found out about his death, she wept.
Jackson’s private funeral was held in the intimate Forest Lawn Memorial Park Hall of Liberty for family and close loved ones. His public services were held in the Staples Center on July 7, 2009. A website had bargained off 17,500 gratuitous tickets lottery-style to the general public. Nearly one million people waited outside. His casket—finished with 14-karat gold and azure carpeting—was wheeled onto its stage only minutes before the event began.
My family caught wind of his public services too late. Resultantly, my sister was forced to watch a later taping with her legs crossed in front of a CRT-brand television set. She cried for a man she would never meet at the sight of a coffin she will never see. But, the famed star and his sounds and the vibrations of a bygone era stirred her to tears. Maybe in that moment too, she felt that eternal tapping beat. Or, she feared the possibility that its unending tremor might halt with the conclusion of a single man’s life.
Still, the song lives on.
NIFT and Julien Deculus and The Stowaways and The Mud Room perform in basements. And, backyards. And, cramped living rooms. Local stages. Familiar faces reach into that large and venom-splitting and undulating sound. That grand tradition of sizzling noise from silence stifles and seizes.
There’s a language to college band music. It rocks clean-cut denim riffs and hallway asides and dorm room amps and last-minute concerts and fast encounters and friends seated in the front row screaming names they hold tight. The music, brilliant and brightened at its edges, shapes up on landscapes of dingy dormscapes and stained-carpeted rooms and 20-somethings in poorly fit khakis. They’re no celluloid heroes. They don’t linger in the pages of biographies cloaked in dust on shelves.
These musicians are not impossibly far. They’re desperately close. College bands reach toward that forever drumming sound. And, in their wake, they make crowds of company along their journey. That eternal music refuses to take preference in larger-than-life, unsung idols. It bleeds through the present and befriends today.