Blind Fandom & Fundraising: A comparative analysis of Wicked Peach and Relay For Life

The tent was empty, except for a troupe of cookie-selling cancer activists and four middle-aged musicians playing a #1 hit from the year 2000. The 2014 Relayers for Life were perhaps too busy saving lives to enjoy Conn’s favorite cover band, but there’s little doubt that Wicked Peach has their fanbase among other sectors of our college community. Just think back, if you can, to around 3:00 p.m. on Floralia last year, or any of the previous fifteen for that matter; or good old Stash’s Cafe on one of those classic “Peach Nights;” or last year’s Canopy dance, or their performance in a packed 1941 room that time; and how could we forget when they rocked the Chu Room, or, well… you get the idea.

Wicked Peach is present at Conn events more often than Camel cookies. And it seems like that will remain the case until the band decides enough Weezer is enough. Although, considering their apparent Keith-Richards-like longevity, perhaps they’ll outlive the century-old institution that adopted them. If that is eventually the case, there’s no question: Green Day will remain on the setlist.

I wandered around the tent on Library Green, trying to repress all my childhood associations with the song playing through the speakers. There was one table selling T-shirts with a simple line-drawing of a camel. “Who created this design?” I asked a volunteer.

“It’s the Picasso Camel,” she said, with no small measure of Art History smugness. “… like the bull.” Apparently Picasso had a way of drawing bulls, and this T-shirt was the camel version. Clearly, original authorship mattered more to this volunteer than the person who booked the band for this Relay for Life event. In fairness though, artists and musicians have been borrowing and stealing from each other for centuries. In the 1950s, Elmyr de Hory (like the mysterious designer of that T-shirt) was able to imitate the Picasso style to such precision that he could drink a few glasses of wine, throw some paint on a canvas and the next day convince any of Europe’s best galleries that is was a never-before-seen Picasso masterpiece. In the world of pop music, forgery made it big in the form of the Tribute Band. Elvis impersonators lead to Beatles copy-cats and the phenomenon took off. Music venues and bars (and entire countries; see Australia) that couldn’t get the big-name acts themselves realized a demand for hits, no matter who happened to be playing them. But how did the art of the Tribute Band, with the fantastic wigs, the mentally disordered alter-egos and the legal name-changes, deteriorate to the far less bizarre idea of the Cover Band? At least Tribute Bands create something: an act, a theatrical ode to a particular obsession held by both audience and players. A cover band is less creative than a child banging two spoons together.

But I guess it makes sense, when you think about what Pop music is about at its core: Popularity. Ever since Elvis did his own version of a cover act, stealing Rock ‘n Roll from Arthur Crudup and the Bluesmen of Mississippi, the genre has been about getting the masses to stomp their feet. At the time, America wasn’t ready to scream and shout to Black music, so the King got his title, and “Popular” Music’s fate was sealed. In the Sixties, music didn’t matter unless the whole country – the whole world! was celebrating it. Youth culture was emerging for the first time, and it was fueled by the unprecedented popular appeal of the Jimis, Jerrys and Bobs of the time. Mass appeal changed the world. Fast forward fifty years, and mass appeal isn’t so cool. This might be because the studio producers figured out the formulas to make sounds we like, which is a lot easier than making good music.

Especially because for something to be considered “good,” it has to now avoid being called “Pop.” You can understand the urge to use auto-tune and synthesizers rather than musicianship and lyricism when the goal is to simply sell records (and streaming play counts.) Before they knew how to use these tricks, and turn the human ear into a predictable money-maker, the music just had to be good. And, at times, it was.

The Relay Tent, located beside the library, was getting too loud, so I walked down to the Floralia stage area, where the same band would be playing three weeks later to a rather different crowd, in size and temperament. I wondered why a cancer prevention fundraiser was so radically less attended compared to an event on the same day of the week, at the same time, in the exact same place – albeit our favorite day of the year. I mused that maybe the fight against cancer was more like Wicked Peach than I, or anyone, thought. Stay with me here.

The original Bluesman of Cancer was Richard Nixon, who declared the “War on Cancer” at a time when wars with positive results were desperately needed. The Elvis of this war was clearly Lance Armstrong. Boy, did he make it cool to punch testicular cancer in the balls! As a result, we have “fighters,” “survivors” and implicitly, “losers” in this war that enlists hundreds of thousands against their will. Relatedly, “Pink Ribbon Culture” has often been criticized for the commercialization of this “fight or die” attitude to cancer (specifically breast cancer), while many people with metastatic conditions simply hope to live well, before the disease inevitably takes hold. These victims, and others who have no interest in “the fight,” are ignored by the branding of mainstream cancer prevention. Of course, Livestrong and Komen have done incredible good for millions of people, but the point is that the desire to attract maximal popular (and financial) appeal can become primary to the real goals: to help people live healthier, happier lives as long as they’re around. And help them live longer if they feel like dealing with the challenges. Fundraising for and awareness of cancer has skyrocketed since the idea of fighting cancer became paramount. It’s marketable. It’s popular. It sells. But it can distract us from the amazingly complicated science and the ambiguous emotional issues related to the illness.

And that’s what brings us back to Cover Bands; Wicked Peach is a marketable product as well, at least on the right occasion. Other bands sell records and tickets too of course, but for every semi-successful indie band, there’s ten garage bands that don’t have the luck, or commitment or talent to make music that sells. Also, we all know that Cover Bands aren’t real music. You know it’s not the best thing you could be listening to, but with a few Budweisers and a crowd full of people singing literally all the words, it’s easy to have a good time. Similarly, there’s probably better ways to help your human neighbors than buying baked goods and walking around a $1,000-a-day tent. But it kind of feels good anyway, and everyone seems to be enjoying themselves.

The invention of the Cover Band was a logical but sad shortcut to popular appeal. Some Tribute Bands become famous in their own right. A true cover band, one that plays the songs the way they originally sounded, will never be successful outside, say, the “Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Southeastern Connecticut area.” Wicked Peach is certainly an example of this. One sophomore said her adoration for the band was because “they play songs I like without trying to make it their own.” The Cover Band is Pop without the music. Wicked Peach is not music; it’s entertainment. They haven’t contributed a single original note to the universe, but they can certainly get 200 hundred drunk ’90s kids into a mosh pit.

In their defense, at least they’re upfront about their unoriginality. With the majority of Pop music consisting of the same four chords, most contemporary music is essentially just slight variations on what’s come before. Add to that the banality of most lyric sheets, and you’re left with a pretty profound lack of originality coming from all the genres that could be termed “popular.” So maybe we should say “The Peach Boys” have merely accepted this fact, given up on any creative aspirations and hijacked this form of entertainment – two guitars, a bass and a drumset – for the simple purpose of leading a more kick-ass mid-life than most people my parents’ age. Their allegiances to hedonism can be seen in their “Band Interests” section of their Facebook page, which reads: “Patrón, cool people, women, good times, money, sounding good, looking good, smelling good and feeling good… and women,” while their official genre, “Rock/Hard Rock/Pop Rock” clearly shows a lack of allegiance to any specific musical movement. Playing songs ranging from Sublime and Nirvana, to Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga, they don’t even seem to have a comprehensible taste in music. And by including the almost-forgettable “She F***ing Hates Me” by Puddle of Mudd on their setlist, they all but admit that they’re not in it for the music; they’re in it for the attention, the screaming girls (some twenty years their minor) and the paycheck.

Based on their place in our hearts, it is fair to consider Wicked Peach the poets-laureate of Connecticut College. This indicates that original thought is less valued here than one would expect from an intellectual think-tank like ourselves. Perhaps it’s why we teach the rules of capitalism in so many of our classrooms but not ways to alter it, or why we put up musicals written by misogynists in the 1940s about misogynists in the 1940s, or why we have only one political theorist in our massive Government department while the details of specific international crises are memorized ad nauseum, or why we pay expensive lecturers to come and discuss styles of musical instruments from the Middle Ages, but let the MOBROC Barn rot physically, as well as spiritually.

This Saturday, Wicked Peach are scheduled to get 75 minutes (compared to the 90 minutes our student bands will get – total) on our sacred stage to play songs we’d heard too many times by the time we graduated high school. I hereby propose that our new President, with her well-known love of true music, exile Wicked Peach from our campus for the Honor Council violation of plagiarism. This wouldn’t be unprecedented.  The 2009 senior commencement speaker is still not allowed on campus for the inspiration he gained from a keynote address he found on YouTube. If we care at all about leaving an original mark on the world after we graduate from this place, we should stop celebrating the embodiment of anti-imagination itself. Boycott The Peach!

Indeed, this Saturday you may find yourself bopping along to the human jukebox I speak of. And you won’t be alone. For there are two types of Camels in this world: those who are filled with ecstasy after the first few familiar notes of every song that Wicked Peach has ever played; and then there are those that disguise this exact same ecstatic impulse with ironic screams: “I love this song!” However you choose to enjoy the 3 p.m. slot on Saturday, at least realize that you’ve been sold a product, one that feels good but isn’t exactly good for you. You might have the sensation of smoking a cigarette in the middle of a cancer relay race. •