WYBC imports precious rock supply

COURTESY EPHRAM LUSTGARTEN Wipe that glazed look off your face. WYBC wants you to rock!

Summer spoils us big city kids. Fun in the sun. Decent food. No papers or tests. And all the live music we can swallow, just a quick subway ride away. Then in late August, we haul our asses back to Yale, the campus where rock died—or at least where it was bludgeoned to the point where advanced cognition became exceedingly difficult. We scamper over to the just-round-the-corner-but-still-off-campus indie/punk/hardcore venue, the Tune Inn, to watch Ted Leo and the Pharmacists perform. But we continually kick ourselves inwardly for not going to Brown, where Busta Rhymes plays Spring Fling, or Wesleyan, where on-campus rock shows are almost as profligate and popular as hallucinogens and guts.

But lately, the Yale/New Haven scene has been making a more-rapid-than-expected recovery, proving the doctors and naysayers wrong—it's a veritable medical miracle. And in the latest move to become a warm and fuzzy college radio station, WYBC has plans to give this campus a good, strong, concert series shot in the arm.

That's right, soon all us Yalies thirsting for an extended musical interlude may have to look no further than our neighborhood residential college dining hall or courtyard for a regular infusion of big name, grade-A, uncut rock `n' roll.

"We're going to try to bring concerts to Yale on a regular basis, concerts by national acts that are also getting airplay on college radio," Rajeev Muttreja, SM '00, WYBC-AM's music director said. "We're not going to be bringing Ricky Martin or the Backstreet Boys by; we're much more likely to bring acts like Sebadoh or Elliott Smith."

But the concert series will not be exclusively rock, rock, and more rock. "We're trying not to limit ourselves in terms of any genre," Muttreja said. "It'll be sort of how the AM station sounds: mostly indie and punk, but with some hip-hop and electronica thrown in. Pretty much anything has a chance, though there is a financial aspect to consider. We'd love to have the Beastie Boys, but you sort of have to think about how realis-tic that is."

The concert series is an outgrowth of MusicFest '99's outdoor concert last spring where New Haven and Yale bands opened for indie stars Yo La Tengo. The joint venture by WYBC and the Performing Musicians Cooperative was exceedingly well received, especially by those Yalies who were less than thrilled with Spring Fling's Rusted Root.

"With MusicFest, we saw that the music scene is getting much stronger," said Ephram Lustgarten, PC '00, WYBC's president and general manager. "It can support frequent concerts, and there's a demand in the Yale community for them. We've seen the success of MusicFest, and we'd like to build on it this upcoming year by doing a much more significant concert series."

But MusicFest also brought some town/gown relation problems to the fore. "Last year's [concert] was in Pierson College, which is Yale property. So the show was technically Yale students and their guests only," Lustgarten said. "We'd love to do concerts in venues that are open to the entire community, but those are expensive and difficult to come by."

"It's something we have to deal with on a case-by-case basis," Muttreja added. "If we have difficulties finding venues we may be forced to compromise. This is the first time in awhile that WYBC has done a concert series. Back in 1996, Yo La Tengo, Sleater Kinney, Bikini Kill, Cold Cold Heart, and the Pushkings played here, but that was the end of YBC concerts until MusicFest last year. So this is sort of an experiment. We're just going to see how it flows."

As of now, the first phase in this experiment will take place on Fri., Sept. 17, in the Morse dining hall. The punk band Murder City Devils headlined, along with opening acts EnemyMine, Chockebore, Lowercase, and The Lies.

So don't be so quick to put away that bikini and baby oil just yet kids. Cause it just might be an endless sonic summer after all, even outside the City.

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