Hours before Magic Man’s headling show at Union Transfer last Monday, fans wait in line down Spring Garden Street, desperate for the venue doors to open. Backstage, bassist Gabe Goodman aims a Nerf gun at his bandmates, shooting them when they least expect it. Justine Bowe, the spunky, gentle–faced keyboardist, sips a steaming cup of green tea. Vocalist Alex Caplow starts on his first Yuengling of the night. Complete with several bags of tortilla chips, six–packs of beer and sarcasm, the green room at Union Transfer feels like a typical night in the living room of friend’s apartment. But when Magic Man walks on stage, they’re no longer just a group of friends in their mid–twenties. Night after night, crowds of screaming teens treat the five–piece like they’re the next Vampire Weekend. 
Magic Man may be from Boston, but the synth-rockers have shared landmark moments here in Philadelphia, and headlining a show at Union Transfer only furthers the existing brotherly love between Magic Man and Philly.
When Magic Man isn’t headlining an astonishingly energetic national tour, they find themselves in a series of hilariously bizarre mishaps. Caplow puts it best: “Every day is weird.”
Last year, Magic Man and Ra Ra Riot opened for David Guetta at Penn’s Spring Fling concert. “It was actually one of the biggest shows we’ve ever played,” says Bowe. Though the band remembers Fling as one of their favorite performances, just hours before the show, Bowe, Goodman and Sam Vanderhoop Lee (guitar) almost got locked in the Pottruck gym showers.
Lee remembers a student from SPEC helping find the band a place to shower after they decided to run laps on the Franklin Field track. “Just in towels, we went to the showers, and of course, we got locked out without all of our belongings,” he says. “I had to wander around the gym trying to find someone. It was humiliating, but kind of funny.”
Once Magic Man was freed from Pottruck, they illuminated Franklin Field with their uplifting pop beats, and later, celebrated by dancing with Penn students during David Guetta’s headlining set.
Fling remains a landmark memory for Magic Man—but their earlier shows in Philadelphia weren’t as victorious. Childhood best friends Lee and Caplow remember playing at the now–defunct DIY venue, Bookspace, in Fishtown on a dangerously unstable stage with broken amps.
“[Lee] started playing the first song, and for some reason, I look up and there’s a woman hanging from cloth, tied to the ceiling, doing some sort of acrobatic activity,” says Caplow.
“And then there was a fire–twirler,” adds Lee. “I thought I was going to die. I thought the stage was going to collapse, and I was going to be crushed by a dancer falling from the ceiling.”
Caplow and Lee have been making music since they were kids—in middle school, they had a band called Yello Sno—and once Caplow went to Tufts, he met Bowe. Sulkowski and Goodman are also friends from college. “A lot of our first shows were at Tufts,” says Caplow. “We were playing a lot of shows at the Arts House, which is the house that Justine lived in.”
After graduating from college, Magic Man moved into the only living space more cramped than a college dorm: a tour bus. For the past month, Magic Man has been traveling across America, playing in a variety of cities from Houston to New York.
“We wake up each morning on a bus in a different city than where we fell asleep,” says Bowe. “How is that not the weirdest thing?” Though daily life on tour is certainly odd, Bowe has experienced far more peculiar incidents with the band. In Washington, D.C., Bowe claims to have encountered a ghost in the Rock & Roll Hotel. “I asked the guy who was working, ‘Hey, is this place haunted?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, this used to be a funeral parlor.’ They say that there is the ghost of some mourning mother in the bathroom of the third floor, which is where I was.”
Magic Man’s music balances the infectiousness of mainstream pop with the layered intricacy of indie rock. Their performance accomplishes the perfect mix of liveliness and musical mastery. As they wrap up their first headlining tour, Magic Man is gaining more recognition by the day. Waking up in a new city every day may be bizarre, but if their backstage antics and enthusiastic stage presence are any indication, Magic Man is about to spend many more months living in tour buses.
