Not so different after all – looking back on the yesteryear of Emerson’s music scene
Photos from the 2001 and 1997 Emerson yearbooks
By Kaitlyn Hardy
It’s 1998 and you’re a student at Emerson College. Having just finished class in the Ansin Building, you get a quick meal at the dining hall then walk through the Public Garden to your dorm at 100 Beacon Street to finish up some work. But once the clock strikes 7:45pm, your focus is broken and you leave, trekking back across the Common to see, maybe even participate in, an open mic night at The Cabaret.
The crowd’s pretty good tonight and seats are filling up fast. Last week, one of the singers was selling CDs of his original songs he recorded out of his dorm room. This morning he performed a few songs on the campus radio station, calling all listeners to come hear him live tonight.
The acoustics aren’t the best – a little messy, a little undone – but still, it’ll be a good night.
Emerson may not have any dedicated music programs or organizations, but within the hurricane of creativity the student body, alumni, and institution itself preaches, music is still a quintessential part of the school’s character. Today, we follow campus bands on social media and mesh concerts with print publication launch parties, announce upcoming singles and EPs via Instagram and play guitar in the Commons on a warm day. The school and its campus has changed quite a bit in the past few decades, but, at least reaching back into the 90s and early 2000s, the music environment has remained fairly similar.
In the early 2000s, Emerson began to reconfigure the layout of their campus. After the Tufte Performance Center, Cutler Majestic Theater, and Paramount Theater joined the school between 2003 to 2005, the student life became centered in the stretches of Tremont St. and Boylston St. that we’re familiar with today. Prior to this, the campus was spread out past the Common and Garden into Beacon Hill – on Arlington St., Beacon St., and Brimmer St.
“The Commons and The Garden really felt like campus for the school because you’d end up walking across it a lot to get to the other side, but a lot of things were starting to go on,” recalls Eric Hutchinson, an Emerson alum. “The Little Building was the hip new building in town.”
Hutchinson, a singer-songwriter with nearly two decades of experience in the music industry, attended Emerson from 1998 to 2002.
As the campus consolidated, Tremont and Boylston became the main performing centers for students.
“There was definitely still a lot going on on Beacon St. at that point, but mostly dorms and a few classes. But the performances were all going on at LB and Tremont St.,” explains Rob Laakso, a 2001 graduate of Emerson’s audio program.
Laakso played with a number of different bands throughout his years at Emerson, such as The Wicked Farleys. The band started while Laakso and Michael Brodeur – guitarist, keyboardist, and vocalist – were in high school. Brodeur, older than Laakso, attended Emerson himself, and once Laakso got to the school as well, the band continued.
In his years post-Emerson, Laakso has continued pursuing music, now an audio engineer, composer, producer, and solo musician.
“It’s not really a music school, but it did have enough avenues to pursue it,” he states.
Hutchinson, despite graduating as a film major, ventured down the avenue of music at Emerson as well. He’d play guitar in stairwells, sell his CDs out of his dorm room, perform on WERS, and attend the occasional open mic night, which he explains were hosted by campus organizations almost every week.
“There were a lot of different open mics that were sponsored by various organizations and fraternities and things, and I’d show up to a lot of those and there were maybe five or six other people I’d see doing that a lot,” he says.
Most of these performances were held in the basement of the Little Building, similar to the Black Box theaters we attend comedy shows and small concerts in today, but with a much more decadent name: The Cabaret.
“It was a small little theater next to where the gym was in the basement of the Little Building,” Hutchinson describes. “Calling it a theater is very generous. It was a space, it did have its own audio/video board so you could run lights and it had a stage they could set up, but it was pretty much just a blank basement with terrible acoustics. You could rehearse in there, but you could also set up the stage and have 200 seated people. Anybody could, in theory, rent the space.”
Laakso remembers seeing shows in the LB basement, sharing, “It didn’t have a proper acoustic treatment or anything, so it sounded kinda messy, but [it was] still fun to see a show there. It was a pretty positive atmosphere.”
In addition to The Cabaret, Laakso remembers another space: The Vault, in what is now the Union Bank Building’s Bill Bordy Theater. While less of a performance center today, the space still hosts a cappella shows, conferences, and readings.
Compared to the laid-back performance space The Cabaret offered, The Vault held performances that were arranged by the school, such as an annual Dragtoberfest.
Despite these spaces, both Laakso and Hutchinson said there weren’t too many performance opportunities on campus. Instead, musicians looked towards the expanse of the city to share their talents – at The Middle East in Central Square, Club Passim in Harvard, local coffee shops and cafes like the late Curious Liquids Cafe, where Hutchinson would regularly play.
“They would let me play there and people would show up and get coffees and sit on huge couches like we did in the ‘90s,” he recalls. Outside of Emerson, he states, “There was music everywhere. I remember seeing a ton of shows at the Orpheum and the Paradise [Rock Club] and the Middle East. It felt like Boston’s music scene was really just as big as anybody’s and it had a ton of famous bands come out of there.”
Although Emerson itself wasn’t necessarily a mainstay of this music scene, it found a way to fit into the groove.
“For a school that wasn’t really focused too much on music, I would say, I knew a lot of active musicians, [in] various genres, and I’d hear about them after I graduated,” states Laakso.
A “creative incubator,” as Hutchinson describes, Emerson has a music-adjacent culture, fostering creativity in whatever form.
“If I want to make something happen,” he remembers thinking, “there’s tons of people living on my own dorm room floor that are excited to go do that. It was a great place to learn how to be professionally creative.”
Laakso and Hutchinson’s descriptions of Emerson stay reminiscent of today’s culture – campus concerts in LB and Union Bank, catching a show in Cambridge, flyers of a classmate’s upcoming EP taped up in the halls of residence buildings – proving that our interactions, ideas, and creative sparks exist as a cycle, flowing through time connecting one person to another, one decade to the next.