A Band of Brothers: Music at Georgetown

In Georgetown, even daytime house concerts attract police attention. Though a D.C. noise ordinance gives officers the right to arrest perpetrators creating noise that is “likely to annoy” anyone after 10 p.m., when student band Text Message played a daytime house show, they still had multiple run-ins with the Metropolitan Police Department. Although the police were unable to take lawful action before 10 p.m., neighbors repeatedly called the cops anyway. The band tried to take it in stride.

“The police disturbances split the show into three 20-minute sets,” Mike Jaroski (COL ’14) said.

Georgetown isn’t a school known for its music scene. Aside from venues outside the Georgetown neighborhood, there are only a handful of opportunities for bands to play on campus every year. WGTB hosts an open mic night once a semester, and the Guild of Bands has a performance every semester, but the lack of regular on-campus performance areas in combination with the dearth of house shows, forces bands to look beyond the front gates.

Despite these obstacles, Text Message is one student band that has been able to thrive with the help of University resources. A self-described “low-fi indie rock band,” Text Message formed last spring when Jaroski joined forces with brothers John (COL ‘14) and Joe Romano (COL ‘12). The group began to write material, and in the last two weeks of the semester, Text Message recorded a 10-song album in an on-campus studio.

Having a pair of brothers who both happen to be musicians turned out to be a very convenient aspect of forming the band. And as Joe and Jaroski had already been playing together before John started at Georgetown, the trio fit together naturally. “We all had an idea of what we were going to play,” John said.

With the help of the Guild of Bands, Text Message was able to overcome a major obstacle: access to practice space. The Guild of Bands is a one-credit class that gives musicians access to Studio D in New North, tucked away from hostile neighbors. To practice, the band simply puts their name on a schedule. Since a large batch of Guild members has recently graduated, Text Message has space to practice three times a week.

Professor Joe McCarthy, who has led the Guild of Bands for the past three years, said that the program was created to put students together in an environment that fostered both songwriting creativity and musical skill development. McCarthy meets with bands at least once a week, giving them advice on technique and performance. At the end of the semester, all the bands get together for a concert on Georgetown’s campus.

The Guild of Bands has also given Jaroski and John the tools to learn drums. With the help of McCarthy, who is also the drummer for the Grammy Award-winning Afro Bop Alliance, Jaroski and John have reached a comfortable level in their drumming. “He’s given good advice, and it’s also been a blast to learn drums,” John said.

The Guild of Bands has been so helpful to the band that John said, “I would find it very unlikely that there would be a band around that isn’t in the guild.”

But Geordie Kieffer (COL ’12) has taken a decidedly different route from Text Message. Coming off the success of New Vo Riche, an EMI-signed band that he formed with his brother and their friend, Kieffer is starting a new project with a few other seniors he started playing with in his freshman year. Kieffer’s project decided to work outside the Guild of Bands, citing the sense of “feeling locked in there” as the main concern with the class. Unlike Text Message, this unnamed project has been able to practice two to three times a week in a basement.

Though not part of the Guild of the Bands, Kieffer has still tried to pursue music on his own.

“Here at Georgetown, there’s not much of a music program, but there are a lot of kids that play music that are kind of hidden and tucked away,” Kieffer said. “You have to find yourself around that scene.”

When it came time to record the 10-track album, Text Message used Georgetown resources again. The band needed a friend taking an advanced recording class to give them access to the New North recording studio—not to be confused with the Guild of Bands practice room—but after seven or eight sessions in the last two weeks of spring semester, Text Message had a finished product.

After uploading the tracks onto their bandcamp.com page this September, Text Message was ready to move on to shows—an arduous step that would present the band’s biggest challenges to date. Text Message began sending out emails to 10 venues around D.C., of which only two have proved fruitful. This September, they performed a 40-minute set at the Velvet Lounge with four other bands.

However, getting booked at a small venue like the Velvet Lounge is not the same as getting paid. Since all proceeds came from the door, they only earned around ten dollars each.

With profits based on proceeds at the door, venues expect bands to bring the crowds. Door-polling, a system that asks audience members which bands they have come to see at the door, and then pays the bands accordingly, has been implemented at clubs such  as DC9.

“They’re more concerned about making money off the bar, so it doesn’t matter if you’re a new band that’s either good or not good. It just matters how many people you can bring,” Jaroski said. “We took a cab to bring equipment, and we barely broke even with the cab drive.”

Sasha Lord, the booking agent at Comet Ping Pong on Connecticut Ave., where Text Message is performing on November 12, is against this recent trend.

“Touring bands get paid higher percentages because they have higher expenses, but we divide payment equally with local bands,” Lord said.

The door-polling payment system has presented a problem for Text Message. If promoters are measuring success by crowd size, they need to bring an audience over from Georgetown. But with the closing of the bar Saloun, the last small venue for bands on M Street, there are no places to perform in the proximity of Georgetown, so packing a concert with University students becomes a daunting task.

The only viable solution has been to befriend other bands in the hope of opening for them in the future. “One of the only things you can do is open for a band that has had experience playing at these places,” John said.

The band just linked up with Mercies, a band composed of Georgetown alumni, at the Velvet Lounge show. But befriending bands outside of the Georgetown circle may take a little more time.

“There’s a bunch of places to play [in D.C.], but not necessarily local bands and a local scene doing their own stuff,” John said. He has found the ratio of touring bands to local bands in D.C. as a source of the difficulty in booking shows.

After working at the Black Cat—a medium sized gig—for ten years, Lord has found a strong local presence with her booking experience. She admitted that there has been a shortage of college bands looking to perform, either from Georgetown or other local universities.

“College bands should have more opportunities here, but perhaps they’re new in booking, or new in town, so they still have to figure what the venues are and who the contacts are,” Lord said. “It takes a while to move to a town and meet the right people.”

Lord has also seen a rising number of independent promoters who book gigs at restaurants or other less conventional locations. In established night life scenes like U Street and in areas like H Street where bars and eateries are sprouting up, local start-up bands may have a better shot at booking consistently than if they were to aim for medium-sized bars that favor touring bands that draw more crowds.

McCarthy, who has lived in D.C. for 18 years, has found both ups and downs with D.C.’s music venues. “With the amount of different clubs around town, there are many different opportunities and lots of festivals,” McCarthy said.

Yet, at least in the Georgetown music scene, he has seen better days in terms of venues available for college bands. “Obviously, maybe 10 or 12 years ago, there was more work in terms of money,” McCarthy said. “But I don’t think that has affected the artistic end of things. I think people who are serious about their craft are going to move forward whether or not there’s money to be made.”

However, the lack of outlets for college bands in D.C. has left the band with dreams beyond D.C. altogether. As Joe and Jaroski approach graduation, the band has made a tentative outline for its future. They hope to record new songs on Long Island with Mike Fiore, a good friend of Joe’s who attends the University of Southern California. They said Fiore has had a drastically different experience as a musician in L.A., a city full of clubs and bars that cater to smaller bands.

Over the summer, Text Message plans to tour New York City, Chicago, and other Northeastern cities where they can count on friends to help them book shows. “It’ll be a graduation road trip,” Jaroski said. When summer ends, Joe and Jaroski will have to move back up to D.C. if they want to keep the band as a single unit, but John is already eyeing Text Message’s future after his graduation in 2014. He hopes to go to Los Angeles with Fiore’s band.

The band members are eager to look beyond Georgetown, which doesn’t seem to have as vibrant of a music scene as other schools.

“One of my buddies at Emerson has a couple groups he’s playing with, and it seems to me, it’s easier to get shows together, and there’s a lot more bands. … Georgetown could be the antithesis of all that,” John said. “It’s a very small group of people here that’s interested in music itself.”

At the same time, they’re grateful to the Guild of Bands for providing them the resources to practice and record an album.

“There’s a way to practice, there a place to play songs with your band, write songs, and get better,” Jaroski said. “All the opportunities are there, but they’re not utilized that well.”