It's a foggy night in Philadelphia, mid-week, cold, humid, not at all favorable conditions for going out. Still, a few brave and dedicated friends are making their way to North Philly to see a show. The Main Drag is playing at The Fire, and, contrary to appearances, it's a big deal. On stage are four seemingly unrelated college-aged guys standing amongst a desk lamp, chairs, instruments, posters and an American flag.
The bassist towers over the other members in a dress shirt and jeans. He hunches over and sways with his bass. The singer-guitarist next to him has a blue Dinosaur, Jr. T-shirt on, glasses and curly hair. He stands center but doesn't look at all intimidating, in fact, he looks almost childish. The violinist is the smallest. He wears a sports jacket over a t-shirt that broadens his shoulders and squares his frame. His eyes look intense -- questioning but not unsure. The drummer, lacking a drum riser, sits behind his instrument in a white tank top and a bandana covering his head. No preparation or thought has gone into the image of this band. The only indication that they are even in the same band is the fact that they all stand on the same stage at the same time holding their instruments. Ask them about it and you'll be met with "We're indie. Whatever." It's sort of funny. It's sort of refreshing. Mostly it's odd.
The place is barely half-filled, but the section of the audience that is there for the band more than makes up for the energy missing from the other section. They clap, they smile, they groove. To the excited part of the room, the moments the band is on stage are real, professional, worth paying money on a weekday to go out and see. And not just because most of them know someone in the band, but because somewhere in the dark air of The Fire's performance space -- with the music blasting from the speaker and the tall, bald doorman standing in the alleyway leading up to the entrance -- there is a feeling lingering, a thought that some day in the near future all of these people will be able to say "Hey, I knew them way back when."
***
"It's amazing how your fate is decided by where you're put in college freshman year. We might be playing some experimental jazz ensemble, who knows?" says Adam Arrigo, realizing he and his bandmates connected because they lived in the same dorm at Tufts their first year.
What's interesting about this statement is not the thought that some woman in the housing department can arbitrarily determine your future, but that Arrigo has just barely emerged from what he has decided is a defining freshman year experience. Sitting near the bar with his bandmates after their Philly debut at The Fire, a 21 year-old Arrigo seems anything but defined as far as his future is concerned. His band, the Main Drag, is the love-child of his musical partnership with Penn junior Matt Levitt, who transferred from Tufts after his freshman year. After spending all last summer recording and collaborating from across the country -- Levitt is from L.A., while Arrigo is from West Chester, PA -- the two have finally recorded and released their debut, Simmer In Your Hotseat. The cooperation between Levitt and Arrigo rests heavily on their ability to click musically. Arrigo writes the songs while Levitt, a violin player for most of his life, does all the string arrangements.
"I try to do something that's more interesting than subtle background arrangements," Levitt explains. "It's a combination of string arrangements and melodic figures that go together with the vocal lines."
"The collaborative process just clicked. As a songwriter it's so hard to find people that you can click with," Arrigo adds. "With Matt I gave him what I had and he just added the icing on the cake."
Over the summer Arrigo would record a song and send it to Levitt who would then do the nit-picking and send back suggestions for making each song better.
Arrigo remembers the summer months fondly.
"It almost killed me," he says. "I stayed up for like 48 hours on Adderall. I seriously was at my wits' end. I was completely delirious." The other band members switch around, but regular bassist Cory Levitt (no relation) and drummer Nate Reticker-Flynn agree that Arrigo became much more intense during the production of the album. Still, it's pretty safe to say some of the tension stemmed from spending the summer at a mental hospital.
"All I did last summer was be a music therapist for schizophrenics and produce the album. [The job] kind of colored all the tracks. I felt that some of the stuff that happened related to the themes of disabilitation on the album," Arrigo explains of his inspiration, specifically for the first track "North Shore, Music Therapist." Thankfully, listening to the album tells you mental hospitals were not the only source of inspiration.
The name the Main Drag originally came from Arrigo's favorite Death Cab for Cutie lyric. Now, he says, it causes more opportunity for open interpretation than inspiration.
"It can have multiple meanings. A lot of people assume we're some token reggae band," he says, laughing.
Smoking references or not, the men of the Main Drag take their music very seriously. On top of Death Cab, influences include the Beatles, John Vanderslice, Max Richter, Billy Corgan and even Elliott Smith, who Arrigo -- maybe not so wisely -- claims he always wanted to model his career after. Simmer In Your Hotseat is right on par with all of those. Not one for pep, Arrigo's voice is easily five years older than he is, and a good eight years older than he appears. If he was trying to set the mood he got from the mental hospital, he hit just the right button. The occasional harmonies give the album its sweeter moments, but Simmer sounds the way society feels about the mentally insane: a little sad, a little frustrated, a little detached and maybe even eerie, not because it's so unknown but because somehow you can still completely relate.
Levitt's string arrangements add just the right texture to set the mood, and without them, it's clear the band would be a whole other enterprise. What Levitt does with his violin is just as significant as what Arrigo does with his voice.
***
When it comes to the influence of classical music, Matt Levitt has more to thank his parents for than he probably knows.
"I don't come from a musical family at all," he says. But his mother begs to differ. From the family's home in L.A., she remembers her accidentally beneficial parenting techniques.
"Whenever Matthew and his younger sister took a nap I always played classical music. I wanted to be able to do what I had to do, so I would play classical music at a high volume so I could talk and move around the house and not worry about it," she says.
The violin, which Levitt has been playing since he was five, also appeared in his life due to circumstance.
"[My parents] just kind of had the idea, 'Maybe Matt should play violin,' and they stuck this miniature violin under my chin, and I guess I liked it, or was good," Levitt explains. Unbeknownst to him, his future with the violin was heavily determined by his aversion to sandy feet.
"When Matthew was about 4, I was at the playground with him. He always hated it because he got his feet sandy," Mrs. Levitt recalls. "I couldn't believe it because all the other moms, their kids couldn't wait to get into the sandbox and Matthew just didn't like it at all." Instead, a conversation between two other moms at the playground about the Suzuki violin encouraged her to prop one under her son's chin. Since then, he's been in several orchestras and even got the chance to play with New Found Glory.
"I was interning for Drive-thru Records when I was 14. My parents dropped me off there and picked me up because I couldn't drive. When New Found Glory was on the label, the band had an idea to do an acoustic song with violin, and I was right there. The next day I came up with a little something, and we recorded and played it at a show in Hollywood. At that point there were as many people there to see me as there were to see New Found Glory," Levitt recalls. They were one of his favorite bands at the time. Years later, the Main Drag would share the stage with up-and-coming indie players, The Arcade Fire, which gave the newer band similar feelings of achievement.
Anyone who sees Levitt play his violin may be immediately convinced that it's permanently attached to his chin. His small, square frame looks completely comfortable in what a non-violinist would probably find an extremely uncomfortable position. His talent is pretty clear. Not long after his transfer to Penn he joined the symphony orchestra. Penn Symphony Orchestra Director Dr. Brad Smith remembers Levitt leaving an impression.
"His initial audition with me was quite good," he says. "I seated him concertmaster for the first concert."
In a world where society encourages mothers to fill even their fetuses' ears with classical music, Levitt is a step above, and his involvement in the symphony orchestra seems only logical -- he lists Mozart along with Radiohead and Bright Eyes among his current listens. Smith believes the classical connection can't do anything but help.
"I don't think you necessarily have to study Bach, Beethoven and Mozart to get [the basic skills]. That said, it's good to remember that Beethoven was very much a rock star in his time," Smith says.
Smith's advice? "If you are going to succeed as a professional musician, don't lock yourself into a closet listening to one type of music on your iPod all day. Branch out, be adventurous."
***
Levitt's mother is convinced that her son's band has the potential to make it.
"I'm pretty excited for them," she says. "I think that they have a lot of talent. I think they actually have a chance." It seems obvious that a mother would be so flattering, but her opinion doesn't stand alone.
On top of recording and releasing an album on a label started by another junior at Tufts, the Main Drag also had the opportunity to play with the Arcade Fire, and thanks to Levitt's persistence with venues, took part in a mini-tour that ended in Philly before returning the bandmates to school. But that's not the extent of it. After an exchange Arrigo had with his idol John Vanderslice, they got in touch with an entertainment lawyer. Matthew Kaplan is also the lawyer for Bright Eyes and Azure Ray and has commitments with several indie labels that the guys are looking to get in touch with -- including Death Cab's former Barsuk (they recently signed with a major label). His first impressions of the album are favorable.
"This is a record I was willing to listen to more than once which, when you get a huge number of records on a regular basis, says a lot for them," he says. Finding someone in the business to believe in their music was the first step, though the relationship is still up in the air.
"We're dating," Kaplan says. "Hopefully one day soon we'll be going steady." However, Kaplan and the band's "going steady" depends on more than whether or not either party is a good kisser. Kaplan wants to see them live. He also wants to be sure he's working with people completely dedicated to the craft.
"If a band is looking for a record deal, I help facilitate that activity," Kaplan states. "The key is not being lazy. There's no reason for me to be working harder than the artist. If the artist wants to sit around smoking pot all day long, then they should be finding another profession -- like rehab."
But with their families and friends by their side, Arrigo and Levitt have every intention to make it work. Current plans involve taking next year off to pursue their rock star dreams. Both sets of parents have agreed to allow the year leave to happen, with the condition that the guys must return to school. During that year, L.A. will be their homebase and they will stay with Levitt's parents while they tour everywhere and anywhere they can. After their Philly show, the idea seems exciting. They sit and smile as they explain their plans for the upcoming year.
"We just put out the album. We're just starting to do shows. We need to either run with it, or get burned out," Levitt says. Their recent attempt at a tour turned slightly sour when Arrigo got sick and dates were cancelled, but that didn't take away from the experience for Arrigo.
"I've never been on tour before, never lived that sort of life, getting busted by the cops in NYC, sleeping in a van, being mugged, it was great," he says.
That attitude will take him a long way. Still, in the space between nothing and stardom there is a lot of work to be done. At the Fire, the crowd enjoys the show. They request songs, and they groove to the band playing. Even when Arrigo breaks a guitar string and has to go offstage to re-string, the feeling in the crowd stays positive. At the end, the venue cuts them off though the fans request more time. It is a successful homecoming show for the band. But their stage presence still needs some work. Arrigo needs to establish a stronger frontman persona. Standing in center stage and being the head of the band requires a kind of charisma that Arrigo doesn't seem to have worked up to yet. Levitt often looks uncomfortable, looking over to the bassist and to Arrigo as if he doesn't know what's coming next. Though no gig will ever require them to wear matching catsuits, the live show can only get better if they put in the time.
While Reticker-Flynn and Cory Levitt -- ranked numbers one and two respectively in their class -- are finishing their engineering degrees and going off to medical school, English major Arrigo and music major Levitt will hopefully be taking what Levitt calls their "rock and roll leave of absence."
Their status as students and the limitations that involves, as Kaplan explains, only means that they "have youth on their side."
With lawyers, record labels, images and tours to deal with, it seems that Levitt and Arrigo only need time and a little bit of luck on their side now. Fingers are already being crossed.
