“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.