"The Love Monsters started out practicing in a room underneath my room, so I have heard the genesis of the group," says Cyrus Patell '83 of Hand to Mouth. The Love Monsters have recently released an extended-play record featuring four original songs, but Daniel Wilson's graduation and another member's leave of absence make their future uncertain.
Hand to Mouth and The Girl Next Door have more definite outlooks. The bands will almost certainly cease to serenade undergraduates in the fall, according to members. Most of these are graduating, but as Patell explains, the demises are not unexpected.
"It's hard to keep a band together, given the outside pressure at Harvard," and easier to build an audience by confining appearances to campus locations, because of the transient nature of student musicians careers, Patell says.
Forming Hand to Mouth was "just a little Harvard fling," says Patell, but it did give rise to yet another soon-to-be-defunct group. The Girl Next Door.
"If there is a Girl Next Door [next year], it certainly won't be the Girl Next Door," says Millard Darden '83, the group's drummer. Darden, like numerous other rock musicians on campus, has played his instrument in more conventional groups as well, including the Harvard Jazz Band and various other jazz combos.
The formation last spring of The Girl Next Door, according to Patell, heralded a trend in which "There were a lot of bands, all of a sudden, where there hadn't been before--you'd always hear music coming from the bottom of the Union," where a practice room for rock bands is located.
Among these new entries and those that have appeared this year are three promising prospects, Speedy and the Castanets, Rhythm Co, and Jane's Parents.
"If they start to be more familiar with each other, they're going to sound real good." Noelani R. Rodriguez '83, bassist for The Girl Next Door, says of the younger groups. Rodriguez also played with Hand to Mouth and Rhythm Co., and organized dances with live bands under the pseudonym of the Performing Arts Committee.
The bassist also advises watching for a band called Final Cause in the fall, citing the group's "very peculiar technology." The places to look, she adds, tend to be Leverett. Adams and Quincy Houses.
"Different Houses have different philosophies" about the type of band they will hire to play at a dance, she says, adding, "the bands don't initiate--they really just have to wait" for the various House Committees to express interest.
"Speedy and the Castanets grew--they're getting better with practice," says Darden, adding that "Jane's Parents are just good."
But the major problem, according to Patell, is that playing in a band, any band, "has to come second to everything else--it's hard in this environment to keep something serious going."