And His Band Plays On

When Clay Tarver '88 elegantly sweeps his shoulder-length hair back with his hands and gazes silently into the distance, heads turn in the Adams House dining hall. Guitarist, basketball player and social studies major, Tarver is the closest thing to a sex symbol at Harvard.

But Tarver seems unaffected by his semi-celebrity status in Adams House or the hordes of 16-year-old punkettes who swoon at his concerts at local clubs. His aloof stance may seem pretentious or arrogant, but it's mostly natural shyness even if he does play it up occasionally.

When his friends describe Tarver, they emphasize his humility and his local, "organic" perspective. "He does what he wants to do well, with a complete lack of knowledge of how well he does it," says one friend. "The coolest thing about Clay is his humility--considering how cool everyone thinks he is."

Some disagree. "The coolest thing about Clay is his jaw," says a woman in Adams House.

Donal Logue '88 explains his roommate Tarver's modesty in terms of his local--as opposed to global--outlook. Tarver's identity has emerged simultaneously from three disparate cultures: the Boston underground music scene, his home town of San Antonio, Texas, and Harvard. Tarver's fascination with local communities appears in both his musical and academic interests. In the past few years, he has participated in the Boston music community's search for alternative forms of expression; and last year he observed and documented the struggle of a group of San Antonio parents fighting for their children's right to a good education.

Music provides Tarver with a way to express these contradictory backgrounds. Tarver describes Bullet LaVolta's music as somewhere between rock and punk, but "not hardcore"--somewhere between Boston underground music and the traditional rock music he listened to in high school. The five-person band avoids the standard Harvard band track of covers, playing only original compositions. Bullet LaVolta consists of a mix of Harvard students and local musicians. They may not make as much money as other Harvard bands, Tarver says, but they have developed their own style and gained a respected position in the Boston music world.

The band's first gig last year, in the Adams House dining hall, captured Tarver's Harvard student and Boston musician identities. Full-time punks, local musicans, and Harvard's own punks-by-night-history-majors-by-day stood side by side to listen to Bullet LaVolta. Hundreds of students, local skatepunks, and die-hard Boston scenesters slam-danced beneath the portraits of John Adams. Outside on Mt. Auburn Street, crowds of fans in combat boots gathered to cool off between sets.

Logue remembers the performance as exemplary of the local alternative music world, which he describes as "indigenous and original." His first contact with this genre of music occurred in the basement of an apartment building in Central Square. Performing in the band members' home gave the show an authentic personal quality lacking in stadium rock shows. It emphasized audience participation, instead of isolating rock star from fan. Bullet LaVolta's performance in Adams House had much the same effect, Logue recalls.

"Half of the people at the Adams House show had never been to Harvard before," Tarver says. Watching 400 people dancing to his music in his house made Tarver "feel like a part of Harvard for the first time," he says. "If the walls could talk they'd have something interesting to say about my time at Harvard."

Tarver's exposure to music began early, during his childhood in San Antonio, Texas. Coming from a long line of artists--his mother is a painter, and his father is a former artist who serves on the boards of several museums in the San Antonio area, Clay was encouraged to take up singing, violin and cello as a child. In high school he abandoned music for basketball, became MVP of the San Antonio area and played on one of the top All-State Texas teams. He returned to music, and the guitar, when he discovered alternative music in Boston.

The seeds of Bullet LaVolta were planted four years ago when Tarver met Bill Whelan '88 in Spanish class and on the basketball court. "I was better at Spanish, he was better at basketball," Tarver recalls. The two talked about forming a band and Tarver taught his friend to play bass guitar. At the end of their sophomore year, both joined WHRB's rock department, described by one somewhat disenchanted member as "a collection of misfits and degenerates who share an almost psychotic knowledge of obscure music." There, Tarver says, he "learned about music from the point of view of a DJ--one of the lower life forms."

In the fall of junior year, Whelan and Tarver joined forces with guitarist Corey Brennan, classics grad student and former member of the hardcore band Meltdown. Drummer Chris Guttmacher ("with an umlaut over every vowel," says Tarver) joined the trio and they wrote "tons of songs in three weeks." All they needed was a singer to sing them.

The first person they auditioned, a University of Richmond student from hardcore band Megadosage, refused to play without his army helmet and sang lyrics like "Frankie was a flaming fag." After a few more failed attempts, they stumbled on a "cool guy who had never sung before, but who was really into the same kinds of music we were," Tarver says. Kurt Davis, otherwise known as Yukki, performs in a bathrobe, changes the color of his mane of hair every few weeks and drinks two liters of Jolt cola daily.

About three months after Davis joined the band, Bullet LaVolta entered the underground Boston music scene--as the band played a show at Adams House and their single "Baggage" brought them airtime on local radio stations and a new, wider audience. That summer, the band produced its first limited release tape.

One major disruption for the band was losing Brennan. "A glamorous way to lose a band member is a plane crash, a drug overdose, or maybe asphyxiation, but we lost ours to academics," says Tarver, smiling. Brennan won the prestigious Rome Prize in classics for a year of study in Rome.

In August of last year, Kenny Chambers, formerly of the well-known Boston band Moving Targets, replaced Brennan. After their first show in their new incarnation, in November at T.T. the Bear's, Bullet LaVolta signed a contract with Taang! records, a small independent label. Two weeks ago, after a few months' delay, they released their first record. They were recently invited, as one of Boston's best 24 bands, to compete in WBCN's Rumble.

Tarver plans to spend the next year or two in Boston and on tour with the band, but he does not see himself headed for rock stardom. "It's not an attempt to try to make it in the music business," he says. "But I want to do it as well and as seriously as I can. Not being in school will give me a chance to concentrate on doing music really well."

The Boston music scene, explains Logue, has a lot to do with the music "intelligentsia," students from Harvard, Emerson and MIT who sport "the Allston Beat look and whose bands break up because one of the membners is going to law school," Instead of denying its Harvard affiliation or faking an anti-intellectual stance, Bullet LaVolta's performance style celebrates the fact that Harvard students can be real musicians.

Bullet LaVolta's not-quite-punk style evolved in part from Tarver's Texas childhood. "It combines the newest, most underground music I heard once I got to college with the shitty music I listened to in Texas," Tarver says, a bit nostalgic for San Antonio.

Tarver places great value on his Texas roots, defining himself as a Texas-bred boy. His family has lived in Texas for eight generations and he very attached to San Antonio. A city where Mexican and American culture are closely integrated, San Antonio is bigger than a small town but without a big city's alienation. Explains Logue, "Clay is really tied to all that."

This attachment is clear in Tarver's senior thesis, which he wrote about an educational issue fought out in the San Antonio public schools. "I wanted to write something about my home," Tarver says. "It's where I'm most comfortable and where I have the most invested." His thesis explored two cases which challenged Texas' educational financing methods, raising the question of whether education is a fundamental right protected by the Constitution.

Texas schools are funded according to a minimum foundation system, whereby each district is allotted an amount per student which is supplemented on an individual basis according to the property taxes the district pays. Thus, the districts with little or no valuable property receive far less money per student than property-rich districts. In 1968, a group of parents who felt their children were being cheated out of a good education charged that this financing system discriminates against the poor. The Supreme court judged that poverty could not be a cause for discrimination, but also stated that the right to education was not guaranteed constitutionally.

In 1987, another group of parents brought the same charges against the state and won. A specific restructuring plan has not yet been worked out, but Texas has agreed that it is unfair that the children of Edgewood, a lower middle-class residential district with low property values, receive an inferior education. One possible remedy under consideration is allotting funds based on sales tax instead of property tax.

In the 20 years between the two cases, a powerless group of parents evolved into a well-organized interest group with access to political resources. Tarver's thesis investigated "how people got involved in this sort of social movement and how it changed them," he says.

Eventually, Tarver says, he may pursue similar studies in the form of documentary films. Although he admits he may go to film school, he adds he is turned off by the fact that "everyone and his mother wants to go to film school now." For now, Tarver's ideology of cultural activism is at times hidden by his almost sullen silence--and his hair. On first impression, his quiet confidence crosses the line into arrogant rock stardom, and it is difficult to reconcile that image with that of the boy from San Antonio, Texas. Logue--who has lived with Tarver for three years--recalls the first time they met freshman year. "I was sitting outside playing my guitar, when Clay came and took it from me, without saying anything, and started to play. I looked at him and said, `That's pretty good, Clyde,' (that's what I thought his name was). He looked back, sneered and said, `My name is Clay.' I said, `Give me back my fucking guitar.' "