Eight summers ago, Patrick Stickles and Sarim Al-Rawi took a 45-minute walk from Glen Rock to Ridgewood in the hot sun to see a show.
“I found a flier in a local guitar shop,” says Al-Rawi, now 22. “It sounded pretty cool. There was nothing ever going on in Glen Rock back then. I think we had one band in the whole town. It sounded like an adventure, so I called Patrick and told him we’d better go.”
They were a pair of bored, rock-starved teenagers then, growing up in an automobile suburb 30 miles removed from Williamsburg.
These days, they’re more likely to be providing the entertainment. Stickles became the frontman of Titus Andronicus, a critically acclaimed quintet with a recent album, “The Monitor,” which tackles heartbreak, hope, life in New Jersey and Civil War history. Al-Rawi turned the attic of his mother’s house into a studio, and there he recorded the debut album by Real Estate, Ridgewood’s best-known musical export.
“It was a pretty big show, outdoors, lots of bands,” says Al-Rawi, who also drums for punk band Liquor Store. “Ridgewood has a fake lake by the swimming pool, that’s where they did it. Martin Courtney and Alex Bleeker, who are now in Real Estate, were playing. Matt Mondanile, who’s also a member of Real Estate, was in a different group. But that was the day we met all of those guys.”
Courtney, 24, insists that he and the other members of his teenage bands didn’t expect anybody to take them seriously. But they were certainly committed to music — and, just as importantly, committed to each other. Courtney and his friends from Ridgewood High School scattered to different colleges across America, but after graduation, they returned to Bergen County, plugged in and started rocking again.
And an unexpected thing happened. The world noticed.
SOUND EXPLOSION
Sedate Ridgewood is currently in the midst of a pop boom. In the wake of the national success of Titus Andronicus, a remarkable number of distinct musical voices have sounded off from the grassy banks of the Saddle River. In addition to his work in Real Estate, guitarist Mondanile plays in the gentle, pastoral Ducktails; bassist Bleeker fronts the Freaks. Julian Lynch, who has collaborated with Mondanile and Courtney, puts out warm, experimental psych-pop albums under his own name. Samuel Franklin, who performs as the fuzzed-out Fluffy Lumbers, and nervy rockers Ian Drennan and Alex Craig, who call themselves Big Troubles, are slightly younger but part of the same group of friends. They’ve all been embraced by MP3 webloggers, reviewers, national music magazines, Bushwick tastemakers and booking agents at the city’s most adventurous concert spaces. Hipster Brooklyn, it turns out, loves Ridgewood.
How has it happened? There’s an easy, if incomplete, answer, and it’s one that Lynch, a graduate student in ethnomusicology at the University of Wisconsin, doesn’t reject. Ridgewood is an affluent town. The school system is widely considered excellent, and opportunities to learn an instrument aren’t scarce.
“People are living comfortably enough that parents can afford to buy their kids a guitar or a drum kit,” says Lynch, 26. “Funding was put into music education. We had really good public school music teachers. In Ridgewood, they get you started on your first instruments really young. I took up the clarinet in fourth grade, and no matter what else I play, I still think of it as my primary instrument.”
Guitarist and singer Cassie Ramone, a Ridgewood High School graduate who fronts the popular Vivian Girls, says that her parents moved to the Bergen County suburb to take advantage of the schools.
“There wasn’t really a club in town, but there were a lot of places to play,” says Ramone, who has toured in Europe, Australia and Japan with the Vivian Girls. “People’s backyards and basements, the high school open mics in the student center and cafeteria, shows at the local swimming pool, the Elks Lodge. We actually had shows once a month, maybe.”
The Ridgewood rockers convinced their school to splurge on a good P.A. system. They put it to heavy use.
“Those open mics were, early on, maybe the closest thing to a venue that helped bands develop,” Craig of Big Troubles says. “The guys from pre-Real Estate bands, pre-Titus Andronicus, Vivian Girls, Big Troubles; we all played the shows at the RHS open mics. They weren’t open mics in the traditional sense with singer-songwriters. These were more like indie-rock shows hosted at the high school.”
THE CAFETERIA CROWD
If all of this strikes you as oddly respectful, antithetical to rock traditionalism, no denim-clad punk would blame you for your puzzlement. Rock musicians are supposed to trash the school, not celebrate it, right? The notion of a nationally recognized pop movement nurtured in the halls of an educational institution may rankle old rebels, but as Courtney makes clear, he and his music-obsessed peers were taking whatever they could get. A cafeteria concert was just as good as a house party — especially if the cafeteria was where the crowd was gathering.
“It was a really good scene,” Courtney says. “All our friends would come to our shows, and then we’d go to their shows. I’d say there were 50 to 100 kids who would go to everything. That gave us all a head start, since we were 14 years old when we started. I have friends who still play music from as far back as second grade.”
Not all of those kids were musicians. Many moved to New York City after college, and the presence of old friends has eased the coterie’s transition into the Brooklyn underground. It’s a hurdle that many Jersey bands have found impossible to hop. The Ridgewood bands have cleared it with ease.
“A few of our friends had already integrated themselves into the music community in the city,” says Lynch, whose recent song “In New Jersey” has been praised on high-profile websites like Stereogum. “When you go to Bushwick and Greenpoint, they’re all over the place now.”
STAYING TOGETHER
A suburban, collegiate invasion of the underground? Driven by friendships and held together by personal connections? Well, that’s the same as it ever was. It’s worth noting that while all of the members of the Bergen County bands went to universities, they didn’t start university bands. Instead, as Alex Craig points out, they were moved to rock with the people they grew up with. Ridgewood called them home.
So far, they’ve hung together, too. The acts continue to share bills and collaborate on each others’ recordings; they’re mutually supportive, and their camaraderie and pride are genuine.
“Part of the reason the Brooklyn music scene and the indie-rock press has been so receptive to Ridgewood bands is because of a romanticized vision of suburbia,” concedes Craig. “But we always got excited about digging into the music of great bands that shared members and represented a certain area. The Elephant 6, early ’90s Chapel Hill, the Dischord D.C. scene, Seattle grunge.”
“A regionally based collective is a fun thing for music fans.”
Tris McCall: [email protected]