The
Dean of the University of Michigan Medical School just offered Rob
Cantor a full-ride scholarship, but Cantor’s passing it up—at
least for now—because he wants to be a rock star. So do pre-med
students Zubin Sedghi and Ross Federman. Along with Cantor, they’re
leaving the world of academia behind to go on tour. Joining them
are student/award-winning filmmaker Joe Hawley and music composition/English
double-major Andrew Horowitz, who has won the Hopwood Writing Award
twice (just like Arthur Miller.) They’re all from the University
of Michigan, their band is called Tally Hall, and they’re
starting to get noticed.
The name Tally Hall comes from a long-gone place that four of the
five band members frequented as toddlers. “Tally Hall was
a glorified food court in Farmington Hills,“ Federman, the
drummer, explains. “It closed in 1988, but I can remember
visiting with my family, eating dinner at Anita’s Kitchen,
and playing the games at the arcade that’s now called Marvin’s
Marvelous Mechanical Museum.
Cantor says, ”Tally Hall has become a fuzzy, nostalgic beacon
of something nice. It was everything anyone could ever want—and
that’s what we’re trying to make out our band.”
Last year Tally Hall (the band) found its way into the national
limelight as the in-house guests on the Mitch Albom Radio Show.
Albom said, “They look like they’re twelve, but these
guys are very talented. You’ll be hearing a lot from them.”
And that was back before Albom was accused of being a liar.
After their appearance, keyboardist Horowitz’s song “Good
Day” won the 2004 BMI Music Foundation’s John Lennon
Scholarship Award, which comes with $10,000 of Yoko Ono’s
money. Yes, Tally Hall sounds a bit like the Beatles.
“The comparison comes from a similarity in songwriting,”
Horowitz explains. “We’re very aware of the importance
of songwriting, and we make sure it serves as the building block
for the rest of the song’s realization. A lot of bands don’t
have the ability to write good songs; we’re lucky in that
we have a lot of talent to draw on within Tally Hall.”
Also like the Beatles, Tally Hall’s fans are mostly female,
there’s no denying it. And there’s certainly no denying
that many of those female fans are teenagers, but Tally Hall has,
at best, a love/hate relationship with radio-friendly pop tunes
and their potential mass-market appeal, so let’s hold off
on deciding which band member is the “Sporty One.” Tally
Hall insists on playing a wide range of songs, and some of them
can get pretty (too?) quirky.
But most fans appreciate the wonk. “We have great fans who
believe in what we do; they sing along and analyze our songs and
lyrics,” Horowitz says. “We couldn’t ask for anything
more.” Yes, fans sing along to guitarist Joe Hawley’s
existentialist “Ruler of Everything,” but I doubt they
understand what the lyrics mean (“Do you like how I dance?/I
got zirconium pants,/consequential enough to slip you into a trance.”)
On the one hand, nobody understood the White Album either; on the
other hand, the Beatles didn’t make that record until they
were huge (1968). When you’re the Beatles, listeners tolerate
and appreciate serious oddity. But Tally Hall still has dues to
pay.
*
In March of 2005, the band played at The Pingry School, a private
high school in New Jersey, which sounds like a throwaway gig, but
isn’t: former Pingry headliners include Guster and Dispatch.
(Yeah, it’s one of those private schools.) The students screamed,
lined up for autographs, and did everything else they could short
of fainting to send the band’s collective ego through the
roof. One girl beaded the chorus of Cantor’s song “Stationary
Love” onto her necklace, which especially pleased Cantor because
many consider “Stationary Love” to be Tally Hall’s
worst song. (Cantor also wrote the band’s first hit, “Greener.”
It remains an audience favorite, and it’s so catchy and good-natured
that it makes “That Thing You Do” sound like the Aphex
Twins.)
Tally Hall played a lot of covers back in their frat party gig days.
Now the band almost exclusively plays original songs (written by
Horowitz, Cantor, and Hawley). An exception is made for Biz Markie’s
“Just a Friend.” Most white college bands covering songs
from black rappers do one of two things:
1) They try to “sound black.”
2) They do the profoundly unoriginal “Isn’t this funny?
We’re white kids rapping a black song!” shtick.
It’s tough to decide which is more insulting, but that’s
not the point; Tally Hall’s “Just a Friend” cover
transcends all that. The band plays the song the best they can,
and like Andy Kaufman doing Elvis, they’re constantly surprising
Tally Hall virgins with their genuine, all-out performances. Their
Biz Markie cover got so popular that for a few months, the band
refused to play the song because they didn’t want to be seen
as a one-trick pony. But the band couldn’t fight popular demand;
they brought the song back, and now they end almost every show with
it.
The members of Tally Hall don’t hide from or apologize for
their upbringings. Cantor, Sedghi, Federman, and Hawley are all
from Bloomfield Hills/West Bloomfield, Michigan, and Horowitz is
from New Jersey’s functional equivalent. “An affluent
upbringing has opened a lot of doors,” Cantor says. “It
has allowed us this pursuit. It’s a blessing, and we’re
all completely grateful.”
The members of Tally Hall don’t pretend to be anybody they’re
not; they’re just five guys who love to play eccentric rock
music. They smile a lot, and their happiness is contagious. The
happiness is almost childish—in a good way.
Every 10-year-old boy wants to be a rock star. The textbook parent
response to a child’s musical ambitions goes like this: “Okay,
honey, you can be a musician as long as you have a backup plan.
If you go to college and get a degree, you can do whatever you want
because you’ll have something to fall back onto.” The
second part of the story goes like this: the 10-year-old boy grows
up, goes to college, studies engineering, forgets how to play all
the difficult guitar chords, and then graduates. As he walks across
the stage, takes his diploma, and shakes the dean’s hand,
he’s forgotten about rock star life plan. Well, either Tally
Hall hasn’t forgotten or they simply haven’t grown up.
(I suspect it’s a combination of the two.) And now we’ll
see if Tally Hall is just a short diversion in the academic lives
of the band’s members or if their educations really were backup
plans.
|
|
