“Hippity hoop lah!”
At this point, there’s no turning back. The guys in the
band Vain are trying everything to attract attention on Bruin
Walk.
“Want to be a model? Beautiful girls! Girls jumping on
trampolines! No? How about girls jumping? No? Just
girls?”
And it continues …
“Somebody find Waldo on these fliers! Did you find him? I
know you want a flyer. It’s lemon-scented!”
As one of the bands chosen to perform at this year’s
Spring Sing, UCLA’s annual talent show on April 29 at the Los
Angeles Tennis Center, the members of Vain were required to pass
out flyers around campus to publicize the event. It was one of the
many steps Vain had to take to perform.
Just a week earlier, another band scheduled to perform at Spring
Sing, A Quarter Shy, was also summoned to this arduous task.
Standing outside of the Court of Sciences, the band considered
various strategies to promote the event ““ everything from
running into the largest lecture hall and throwing the flyers into
the air, announcing that Ludicrous would be performing at Spring
Sing to sticking the flyers in midterm exams.
Both Vain and A Quarter Shy are bands completely comprised of
current and former UCLA students who are good friends and like to
play music with one another. In each other’s company,
they’re all comedians, but the one thing they’re all
serious about is music. To do all the work to get on stage at
Spring Sing, they have to be.
Vain, with guitarists Dan Apke, a third-year cognitive science
student, and Aaron Cohen, a third-year physics student, began seven
years ago while in high school. The group has played in venues such
as Chain Reaction, Highland Grounds and The Coach House. A Quarter
Shy, however, is a relatively new band. AQS singer and guitarist
Kevin Geary, a fifth-year electrical engineering student, and
drummer Alex Mach, a fourth-year biology student, used to play in
another band together, but the rest of the band came together in
the few weeks prior to Spring Sing auditions. Despite the
relatively young age of AQS, Geary says the band is focused when it
comes to performing.
“We’re serious,” Geary said. “We love
performing. When we perform live, we want to perform well. We want
to make quality music.”
Still, when the band is together, there’s constant humor.
Most of its songs are similarly light-hearted, like
“Butterflies,” which AQS is performing at Spring Sing.
It’s a song about how a girl gives Geary the feeling of
“butterflies.” Throughout “Butterflies,”
the band maintains a relaxed and steady medium tempo. Conga player
and fifth-year electrical engineering student Raj Sahae
doesn’t beat his instrument to death. Keyboardist and
third-year economics and international relations student Gary Der
plays with a clean, piano tone. And lead guitarist and UCLA alumnus
Tim Brockett plays a relatively conservative solo, as opposed to a
crazed one.
The guys of AQS say that while they consider themselves an
alternative rock band, they’re not your average angry garage
band.
“We write what makes us happy,” Geary said.
“There’s no “˜I’m gonna kill you’
songs.”
Another AQS song, “Lucky Day,” is an over-the-top,
happy, early-Beatles-esque song fit for a Claritin commercial. A
couple of AQS songs also carry humorous subjects like hangovers in
“2 Advil” and corndogs and cowbells in, well,
“Corndogs and Cowbells.”
Vain also has numerous joke songs, like “Supersize
Me,” in which Cohen sings, “I want a hamburger. I
really want it now. Big, fat and juicy, a whole lot of cow.”
But these are kept strictly as joke songs. Most of the songs the
band performs are rather serious in subject matter.
Former singer Kyle Gibson wrote most of the lyrics to the
band’s songs when he was experiencing a lot of family
trouble. “Dismay,” the song the band will perform at
Spring Sing, simultaneously reflects both a loss of hope as well as
a glimmer of it. In the chorus, it’s sung, “It’s
gonna be all right. It’s gonna get better.”
“Dismay” offers a sharp contrast to the light-hearted
feel of “Butterflies.” It’s alternative rock
music with plenty of dramatic hooks to run in your head all day
after just one listen and enough rhythmic changes to keep even
someone with the worst case of ADD listening until the end. Apke
and Cohen’s guitars are always in exciting interplay, weaving
in and out beautifully. Three-part vocal harmonies are another
strength of the band.
Vain’s songs contain large ranges of dynamics, pitch and
tempos, which create a dramatic feel.
It would be easy to assume that the band’s own experiences
and private hardships have not only fueled the drama of its lyrics
but also of their music. The band recently experienced a lot of
drama in their lives with the abrupt departure of Gibson, its
vocalist of three years. Up until a few weeks ago, Vain members
weren’t even sure if they’d be able to perform at
Spring Sing ““ that was until they found a new singer,
first-year student Nick Brown, who friends call
“Ryan-Cabrera-boy” for his striking resemblance to the
pop star.
“I thought we’d have Kyle,” Apke said
disappointingly over the phone, “and we were going to play
“˜Dismay,’ a song we’ve played a million times,
and that this was going to be big exposure for the band. But now,
it’s almost a burden. It’s all up in the air right
now.”
Cohen was similarly put in a state of utter anxiety.
“It was out of the blue,” he said. “He’s
always been not really close with us, and he got a girlfriend. She
went all Yoko on him. It kind of screwed us big time.”
Keeping the band together all these years hasn’t been easy
either. The band has gone through seven drummers and four bassists
alone. And before Apke transferred from a community college last
year, he drove up from San Diego every weekend to play with his
band mates in Los Angeles.
So what has kept the band going all these years?
“It’s humor, and having a good time with the music
and wanting to make something unique, and the dream of getting our
music out there and doing something with it,” Apke said.
Both of the bands seem more interested in the opportunity to
play on stage rather than in winning the talent show. “To be
honest, we have no idea (what our chances of winning are),”
Geary said. “We’re just happy to be playing
there.”
And Cohen is skeptical as to how well the judges could even
decide which band is best with both performing only one,
three-to-four minute song. For all the buildup and all the work
that bands put in to get on stage, the limited payoff may not be
worth it.
“It’s only one song,” Cohen said. “I
have no idea of how bands actually win. Unless (almost all) the
bands really suck, and there’s only one that hits
it.”
Spring Sing Executive Director Ross Harold says the competition
is based on stage presence, vocal quality and how well the band
entertains the crowd of 4,500. But how accurately the
competition’s judges, like Jason Alexander and Danica
McKellar, Winnie Cooper from “The Wonder Years,” could
evaluate these elements from such a short performance is
questionable.
For Cohen, the competition is of minuscule importance compared
to the actual performance. The best part of playing in Vain for him
is entertaining a crowd. For a show last year at Chain Reaction,
Cohen wrapped himself up in Christmas lights. He regretted,
however, not having cordless lights because he kept unplugging
himself while playing guitar on stage.
For Spring Sing, the guys in Vain are planning to wear some new
offbeat costumes. What exactly they’re going to be wearing,
however, is being kept under a tight lid and will remain a mystery
until Friday night, when the band closes the show.