The trials and travails of rock after Yale

HYURA CHOI/YH

Dime-a-dozen rock aristocrats

Despite the initial difficulty of forming a band at Yale, the community can actually be too supportive to the few groups that consistently play around campus. According to Pearly Sweets, the celebrity he gained playing keyboards and singing blue-eyed soul with the Platonics left him ill-prepared for a world in which aspiring rock stars are a dime a dozen. "As a senior rocker at Yale you're kind of an aristocrat...Nobody asked you to show proof—you didn't have to do your reading in order to do well in section and you didn't have to rock to have a band with a good name."

In fact, the response to Pearly's band name was an early signal that playing music at Yale had been deceptively easy. As he said, "One of the first things I learned was that if you approach somebody with a name as wacky as Pearly Sweets and the Platonics, they don't just take it like a spoonful of sugar." After graduating, Pearly headed for Chicago with bassist Tupper to carve a niche in the Windy City's burgeoning rock scene. They were later joined by guitarist Carl Lowendorf, a new addition to the Platonics' former keyboard/bass/drums lineup, and drummer Brian Bosworth, a student at the Art Institute of Chicago. The group spent its first months in the city absorbing various lessons about what would and wouldn't work with a standard bar audience. "At Yale a lot of the show was self indulgent banter," Pearly remembered. "There was a real moment of comeuppance during the first show we did at a bar. I said something that I thought was just shiningly witty and looked out into the crowd and felt like somebody dropped me 40 feet into a cave, and I was like `Whoa, this is a town that just wants to rock.'"

`Prelude to a murder'

Even though Yale was an escapist musician's wet dream, Pearly acknowledges that not everyone got quite so caught up in the microcosmic fame that campus life offered. "The Platonics were caught up in being Yale's favorite band while Hrishi was saying, `What's going to happen when this little circus comes to a close' and was out making contacts in the New Haven rock scene." The networking paid off for Hirway, who gently twanged the eardrums of the Yale community while the Platonics were violently smacking its collective ass. He befriended local post-hardcore act Jerome's Dream, and together they recently embarked on a tour up and down I-95.

"When I started doing the one a.m. radio I was thinking about it seriously," Hirway said. "I tried pretty hard to get shows outside of Yale and New Haven." Also, Hirway admits that he had an easier time playing off campus than the Platonics because of the simple fact that "I wasn't playing with a band" and thus didn't have to organize a lot of equipment and people in order to travel.

Hirway's ties to the New Haven area kept him in New England after he graduated. He moved to Boston, which he said "is not really a move at all as far as `the scene' goes," and as a result has not had much difficulty finding opportunities for concerts. Nonetheless, he has tried not to get too complacent, only holding one of the four or so shows that he plays every month in the Boston-Cambridge area since "It's more important to play a lot of shows on the road than it is to play at home. I'm trying to make sure that I don't bore people if I play [here]."

Instead, the one a.m. radio embarked upon a December-January tour with Jerome's Dream. The trip took them as far as Florida, with local hardcore acts filling out the bill at each stop. While the one a.m. radio's sparse guitar lines, whispered vocals, and minimal lineup (Hirway played solo except for a few dates when he was joined by Jane Yakowitz, SM '01, on violin) might seem out of place amid the sweat and shouts of hardcore, Hirway says the juxtaposition works surprisingly well: "[A member of one of the local acts] said that the one a.m. radio was `like a prelude to a murder.' Usually two local bands would play, then we would bring the vibe of the place down. If it was a good show, people would be really quiet and absorbed and then Jerome's Dream would play and sort of destroy what was left." The lineup was such a success that the one a.m. radio managed to sell out of all 500 copies of its first album, making it the first release on Yale-student-run Garbage Czar records to go out of print. While Hirway was pleased with the sales, he didn't like being a novelty. "Kids would come up to me and say `Wow, that's really different,'" Hirway said. "I want to avoid being the quiet band who just plays hardcore shows."

Celibacy, amphetamines, and dining in

Meanwhile, a time zone away, Pearly Sweets misses the New Haven community but doesn't regret his move to Chicago. "At first we took a lot of shit about `Why Chicago, why not New York,'" he said. "I'm in Chicago because I have a real deep respect for the R&B and soul that's been coming out of here since the '50s and the indie rock of the early '90s." The other Platonics share his enthusiasm for the city, particularly for the cooperative spirit of the rock scene. "You'll go to see a band, and unlike in New York there's a large diversity of bands opening up that don't fit the genre of the main act," Tupper said. "We hope to benefit from that spirit."

At first, the Platonics compensated for their lack of recognition in the Chicago area by playing shows as frequently as possible. As Pearly puts it, "My goal was to be a whore, be visible, be out there all the time." While the Platonics' weekly concerts gave good practice in putting on a tight live show—especially for new member Lowendorf, who found it a "little trying" to be part of a band that had played for two years without a guitarist—it hurt their carefully crafted image. After several months of taking any gig they could get, Pearly developed a theory: "In big cities there are two types of bands—those that...have futures ahead of them and bar bands. To be in the former category you have to make every show count, either by playing with a band that's hot or at a club that's hot." Now he's aiming to play out-of-town venues more frequently, including an east coast tour that touches down at Yale on Fri., Mar. 23, and Brownie's in New York City on Sat., Mar. 24.

Even with their newfound freedom from the forcibly upright bourgeoisie behavior of Yale life, neither the Platonics nor the one a.m. radio is trashing any hotel rooms yet. The musicians all have day jobs—Pearly's alter ego Abe Levitan does office work, Tupper works in a chemistry lab, Lowendorf is a courier, and Hirway does graphic design for an Internet company. Pearly finds that Chicago is an excellent place to live a more focused, "monkish" life than Yale, particularly since, as Tupper points out, "unlike New York, [Chicago's] not too expensive." Among Pearly's new rules for living are "no girls, no dining out, no drugs except amphetamines, [while] taking out anything that distracts you from working as hard as you can on [music]." Hirway voices a similar devotion to "playing your ass off," having performed "about 80 shows...it's only now that I can get up on stage and be comfortable."

Next stop: world domination

Despite the initial hardship of establishing a reputation, both bands remain optimistic about their futures. Pearly is certain that "there is a way to maintain a financially comfortable existence and still have your freedom" and chalks his recent monastic devotion to rock up to the fact that "the first few years of that road are not glamorous." Still, Pearly Sweets and the Platonics do have concrete plans for world domination, although any attempt to question Pearly about them inevitably leads to phrases like "confidential" and "sealed 412-page document [that] I cannot publicize at this time."

Meanwhile, Hirway has less grandiose ideas but remains similarly optimistic despite some disappointing dates on the recent tour. "I left [Knoxville, Tenn.] and I was like, `What an arrogant thing it is to be playing music, to get up in front of people and assume that you have something to say,'" he said. "I was ready to give it up for a few days after that...but thereafter all the shows were great. I played a couple of shows where people started crying and it was the most amazing thing ever."

Graphic by Hyura Choi. Photo Courtesy City of Chicago.

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