Spring Fling's (mainly) Yale rockers

"We're not really a Yale band," Full Service drummer David Kepner, DC '03, said. They're an Amherst band, in fact. Vocalist Warren Seubal and bassist Kevin Downes are seniors at the well-regarded liberal arts college, from which guitarist Tim Kepner—David's brother—graduated last spring.

COURTESY FULL SERVICE Full Service aren't Yale students, they just play them on stage.

But being out-of-towners hasn't stopped Full Service from winning the acclaim of Yale's music fans. On Sunday, they won the Tune Inn's Yale Battle Of The Bands, which earned them a chance to play at the YCC Spring Fling. This will be the second year the band has played there, although its lineup has changed since last spring: new vocalist Seubal has replaced its previous singer, who left the band to enter medical school.

So how does a band that's relatively unknown in the Yale scene win a coveted Spring Fling opening slot? "You have to enjoy what you're doing," Kepner said. "You can't just get up and stand there. You've got to have attitude." The band's showman approach to straight-up hard rock—Kepner cites Guns 'n Roses, Led Zeppelin, and Rage Against the Machine as primary influences—was successful in winning over the crowd; Full Service pulled ahead of a three-way tie to reach first place. Although Kepner admits that he's "not at all involved with the Yale music scene," he has high praise for fellow hard rockers Hung Jury, who also played at Sun., Apr. 1's battle.

With its guitarist out of college—he's working as a teacher in Hartford—and two more members poised to graduate this spring, Full Service is preparing to leap headfirst into the national music scene. Although the band self-released its debut album last year, Kepner says that they "don't really play it for people any more—the production was terrible, and our style has changed a lot since then." The only member of the band who'll still be in school next year, Kepner has considered leaving Yale in order to pursue music full-time with his bandmates. "We want to do this while we're young. The sooner the better," he said. "We want to shake things up a little."

Full Service isn't the only Yale band that will be playing at Spring Fling. Gooden, Milo, and Nuts In Your Mouth (NIYM), who all tied for second place, will be joining them. For Milo, who bill themselves as "Yale's jam band," playing the Spring Fling will be a new experience—the all-freshman group has only been playing together since the fall. Regulars at Turn It Up's shows at the Women's Center, the band's relative youth hasn't stopped it from building up a word-of-mouth presence on campus. NIYM, which guitarist Seth Schlessinger, JE '03, describes as "dentist's office hip-hop for Ritalin addicts," will be at the Spring Fling as well. The band will be trying to expand its audience beyond a Yale scene that Schlessinger described as "like an undersized jockstrap—supportive, but way too small to be comfortable."

Also performing at Spring Fling will be Gooden, a pop-rock group that includes Yale scene stalwarts Sam Grossman, DC '03, and Daniel Silk, SY '01. At the Battle of the Bands, Grossman and Ian Cheney, BK '02, filled the duties of vocalist Rami Perlman (a senior at Brown) and drummer Matt Hayes (a senior at Bard), respectively.

With a new crop of freshman bands on the rise and consistent venues like the Calhoun Cabaret and the Women's Center starting to emerge, the future of rock at Yale looks far brighter than it has in past years. And with slots at the Spring Fling—which caters to a wider audience than the relatively small Yale music scene—the four Battle Of the Bands winners are set to introduce local sounds to the student body at large. Who knows—if headlining act Ben Harper is impressed, maybe he'll let them borrow his forklift.

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