The Sounds of Silence

Take a microphone, an empty space and some money, and what do you have? A concert. This seems to be a little puzzle that the Undergraduate Council hasn't been able to put together in the past couple of years.

I know that organizing a major--or even a minor--concert is not this simple. It requires planning, negotiating skills, a sense of what music or comedy acts to pick and the support of a nebulous undergraduate population whose music tastes change weekly. But having a successful concert on this campus is not beyond the realm of possibility. And while it may sound far-fetched, having a regular program of varied entertainment (i.e., more than one event per year) is not beyond our scope either.

What would it take to get this campus to a reasonable entertainment level? Ask for it. It's that simple. This might sound like a Ross Perot platitude, but if there's one industry that only speaks the language of money, it's the music industry. The Red Hot Chili Peppers might go on the cover of Rolling Stone naked, and Nirvana might go on the cover wearing T-shirts that say "Corporate magazines still suck," but if you pay them enough money, they will give a concert wearing in three-piece suits in the atrium of the Time-Life building in Manhattan.

The problem with our Undergraduate Council is that the people in charge of scheduling concerts are as incompetent as the bunglers in Washington who waited four days to start mobilizing aid to Hurricane Andrew victims because the governor of Florida hadn't officially requested help. The leadership in the U.C. isn't asking for concerts, and when they are, they are asking in the wrong way.

Harvard is on a music black list of sorts. No one in the music industry wants to deal with the disorganization and arrogance that emanates from Undergraduate Council offices. And when you have as bad a record as we do, no musical act is going to want to risk coming here and bombing. Harvard may win the U.S. News and World Report sweepstakes, but if we were ranked on campus coolness, we'd be dusting the bottom of the heap--way under a school like Johnson and Wales University, a culinary and hotel management school in Rhode Island.

Johnson and Wales doesn't have academic powerhouses like Joe Nye and Milton Friedman. Their professors aren't swooped down to Washington every four years to serve as advisers. Yet Richard Lewis, Dennis Miller, Penn and Teller and Jay Leno have all performed on their campus in the last three years. If I remember correctly, it was a major project for the Undergraduate Council to get Stephen Wright to perform here, and they failed miserably with Penn and Teller negotiations.

My job this summer involved research on a project on how colleges across the country spend their student activity budgets on entertainment.

You would be amazed at the kind of programs that some other schools can put together. Major universities in the Midwest host the likes of M.C. Hammer, Guns N' Roses, Bob Dylan and U2 on their campuses. They turn over their stadiums and concert spaces to agents and collect a percentage of the profits. It doesn't cost them anything except the maintenance of the facility--and students even profit by being able to work major shows.

Schools also bring in more alternative acts they pay for themselves from activities budgets. One school I talked to gave me a list of acts--Faith No More, Toad and the Wet Sprocket, the Jesus and the Mary Chain and Helmet. When I asked how many years this list covered, they sounded surprised and told me that these were their upcoming fall semester concerts.

Why can't Harvard put together a program like these schools do? The black list, while it sounds like an ominous McCarthyite tactic, is serious. I talked to concert promoters who won't touch this school. One middle agent (a concert promoter who sells dates for certain acts in regions of the country) told me that the leadership at Harvard is so incompetent and arrogant that he couldn't work with them.

Last year's De La Soul fiasco could have been avoided, he said, if they had planned better, received a better price and picked a better venue. Of course, it's this man's job to convince colleges that they need him to promote a successful concert. But considering our track record, I think he might be right.

If the U.C. is skeptical about using agents, then they should get advice from other schools. The National Association for College Activities (NACA) is an organization that helps colleges handle their entertainment. They hold a showcase every year for new musical talent and set up the opportunity for campus representatives to meet with the groups and their managers to work out concert dates. Harvard, of course, doesn't belong to NACA.

If we did, we might learn about other national tours that would come to our campus for free. Ever here of the Nintendo Campus Challenge? Or the CBS Campus Tour? These are promotional entourages that tour the nation. The Nintendo tour is over, but the CBS tour, which sets up a carnival on campus and tapes soap opera and "Family Feud" parodies as well as giving away prizes, is still going on. They visited several Boston-area colleges this fall before heading south, but not Harvard.

This weekend--the weekend of the Head of the Charles regatta and the Undergraduate Council chair elections--we should think about the future of entertainment at Harvard. There is no reason why the only music we have on campus is what we individually pipe through our compact disc players, and what student bands provide at house dances and local bars. There is no reason why we should have to worry about looking lame in front of all of our East coast visitors who have some of the nation's finest film programs, concert series and comedians on their campuses.

If the leadership of the Undergraduate Council is too selfish to consider the rest of the school, then we need new leadership. If new leadership can't get music to this campus, then we need some sort of new activities board that will specifically handle our entertainment. Because if anyone in charge had an interest in using our activities budget to provide musical or comedy entertainment, then that's exactly what we would have. The acts are out there. All it takes is some money to get them here.

Beth L. Pinsker '93, editorial chair of The Crimson, writes this column every other Saturday, usually on the left-hand side of the page. Her favorite musical artist is Barry Manilow, so she won't take on the job of planning concerts herself.