Last Saturday, during Spring Weekend, students saw Umphrey's McGee, M.I.A. and Girl Talk make their Brown debuts. But just before those artists played their first concerts at Brown, a homegrown band played one of its last. After winning the Spring Weekend Battle of the Bands competition last Thursday, the Trolleys got to be the opening act for the Saturday Spring Weekend concert.
The band, which has been playing as a group for two years, consists of four seniors - Arthur Kim '08, Tim Drinan '08, Stephen Cellucci '08 and John Cockrell '08 - and Drinan's brother, Pete Drinan '11. "We started playing on campus and that turned into off-campus," Kim said. "Off-campus turned from downtown Providence to downtown Boston."
Kim had been planning to start a band when he came to Brown, he said, and when he was a sophomore, he joined with Tim Drinan, Cellucci and Cockrell to play at a friend's birthday party. They originally planned to cover 1990s songs for the concert, but Tim Drinan requested they play some of the songs he wrote instead.
"We were all of four bars into (Third Eye Blind's) 'Semi-Charmed Life' and Tim got bored," Kim said. "He said, 'This goes against my musical principles. Can we do some of my songs?'" The rapport of the band was so strong that the members decided to make the project more permanent - and they've been playing Tim Drinan's songs ever since.
During Spring Weekend in 2007, Pete Drinan, who had been wait-listed at Brown, came to visit his brother. He sat in and played saxophone for one of the Trolleys' shows at a sorority, and ended up joining the band permanently. "The first time we played, we sort of couldn't deny the chemistry was awesome," Pete Drinan said.
"I didn't even know (Tim Drinan) had a brother until he played with us," Cockrell said.
Pete Drinan explained that when he was on the wait-list, his brother and friends wrote letters to the Office of Admission urging them to accept him.
"He was finally officially inducted with his acceptance letter into the Trolleys," Cockrell said, who noted that three out of the five members of the band were originally wait-listed at Brown.
Now, a year later, and with the graduation of four band members looming, the Trolleys plan to stay together. The four graduating members are moving to New York City, and Pete Drinan still plans to play with the band despite being at Brown. Though they haven't yet figured out the logistics of practicing, Pete Drinan will join the other four for shows in New York City, Providence, Boston and - they hope - other Eastern locales stretching from Kim's home state of Tennessee up to Maine.
Cellucci plans on studying music in India in late 2008, and once he returns, Pete Drinan will take off the spring and fall semesters of 2009 to play with the band full-time, he said.
"We know that we're young and we have time and energy now, and we have good chemistry," Tim Drinan said. "We're going to give it a year till the end of 2009, try to build it as big as we can, see where we are."
Kim added that the Trolleys have good reason to try to succeed as a band. "We wouldn't be doing this if there wasn't some evidence that we could succeed at it," he said. "Almost every show that we play has resulted in us getting booked for another show. Every time we meet people and play a venue and then go back a second time, we've built a larger following."
The differing musical interests of each band member help make the band successful, they said. While Kim is into classical music and adamantly against jazz, Pete Drinan was trained in jazz and hopes to be a professional jazz musician some day. Tim Drinan was exposed to rock music when he was younger - citing the Beatles and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, as well as more modern artists including Dispatch and Jack Johnson.
Cockrell said he is into punk and alternative rock. He only recently started playing bass, which he does in the band. Cellucci, the drummer, credits hip-hop music as much of his influence, though he also plays Indian percussion.
"I try to sneak in as many hip-hoppy beats as I can without Arthur and Tim noticing," Cellucci said.
"The subtle interactions (of the various musical genres) make a lot of the songs interesting," Tim Drinan said.
"The key thing is that when we bring a lot of genres into the song, we all happen to be tasteful rather than forceful," Cellucci said.
Tim Drinan, the band's songwriter, said he has been writing music since he was in eighth grade. He noted that many of his songs have a strong American influence in them. "When I first wrote a song, I played it for my friend, and he said 'It's pretty good, but it's not what you listen to. Why don't you write the songs you like?'" he said.
He also noted that most of his songwriting is now a collaborative process, in which every member of the band contributes to the songs while he's writing them.
Drew Durbin '08, roommate of Tim Drinan and Cellucci, who lends his car to the band and has been their fan since the start, said the Trolleys are one of his favorite bands. He said their shows are always packed and full of energy.
"I don't even really like dancing, but I always get up and dance at the Trolleys' concerts," he said.
Tim Drinan said he and his bandmates have been able to balance being students and musicians, but recently, the band's activities have started taking over their time.
"At first we were primarily students playing music. Now we're almost primarily musicians trying to be students on the side," he said.
