Good afternoon Scripps fans, I have come on this blog to tell you a little bit about the band scene here at Scripps and the wider 5C’s. Needless to say, it rocks (haha).
Being in a band would have never occurred to me if I had not watched a little program called Julie and the Phantoms: it’s a tween show about a girl who forms a band with the ghosts of a 90s boy band, and it’s awesome. I just kept rewatching that show over and over again until I finally started to think, “Wait, maybe… maybe that would be kind of fun… if I started a band in college?” For some silly reason, it took a little while to convince myself to do it–for some reason I had it in my head that being in a college band was an embarrassing/lame thing to do, and I don’t know why I thought that. No one thinks this. Any time I tell someone I’m in a band, they say “Whoa that’s so cool!” So clearly I am really cool–and you can be, too!
It took a little while to find bandmates, and I almost gave up, but then in a crazy twist of fate, for my final project in Core 3: LA Rock ‘n’ Roll, I decided to do a live performance of a song with one of my friends in the class, we found other people to play instruments for the performance, and we all had so much fun that it turned into a real band that I am still in today.
And so now I get to be a part of this really incredible community full of super talented (and nice!!!) people who play music here at the 5C’s–we all share practice room space, and everyone goes to gigs to see the other bands play, so you end up meeting all the other bands soon enough. It’s like a whole little universe! And it’s fun to see how the makeup of the scene changes from semester to semester, as band members graduate or go abroad or start their solo careers, and so the rest of their band (and the scene) have to adjust. My first semester there were a lot of straight-up rock bands, then a lot of indie bands, jazz bands had a moment for a second there, now this semester we’re back to rock bands (but I’ve heard of a couple folk bands starting so I’m really hoping we get to see that next semester).
I really can’t overemphasize how nice everyone is in the Claremont band scene–the other bands are always the most enthusiastic ones in the crowd at gigs, people are always down to have random jam sessions with strangers, and in fact the way I met one of my current band members was because he agreed to loan us his guitar for our school project sight unseen. Nice kids.
While we don’t have the biggest band scene, it also means that we all get to play a lot of gigs! And there are tons of opportunities–campus parties, random student markets, senior brunch, student radio shows, Scripps-hosted concerts, parties at the Motley (our student-run coffee house at Scripps) and of course tons of events thrown by the 5C Musician Coalition that are specifically for bands to play! On pretty much any given weekend, you can hear a 5C band playing somewhere.
I could go on about the 5C band scene for a very long, ramble-y time, but overall I hope to leave you with a good impression of how welcoming it is, and just how fun. So many very nice, very silly people, who are very good at music and love to play. Join the scene!