The Trail

Issue date: 2/16/07 Section: A&E

Could we have the next The Who growing on UPS soil? If the Campfire Folklore Restoration Society has anything to say about it, we do. Comprised of Seniors Keith Gordon, Chris Dewar and TJ Rakitan, this campus band has composed an epic folk rock opera that will debut this Saturday, Feb. 17, at the Infinite Monkeys Festival.

Tickets cost three dollars, and the show starts at 7:30 p.m. in Rausch Auditorium, located in the basement of McIntyre Hall. There is another performance the following Sunday at 5:30 p.m. also in Rausch. I caught up with the band to ask them a few questions about their show, entitled "The Campfire Folklore."

Trail: So, you guys are a folk band?

Keith Gordon: You might say that.
TJ Rakitan: Sort of rock-influenced folk, if you could see that.
KG: We take our biggest influences from Led Zeppelin and The Who, that sort of stuff. So our influences don't really come out of folk or bluegrass. It definitely comes out of rock and roll, but we just play it with sort of a folk-
TR: Folk motif.
KG: Yeah.

Trail: I hear that what you're doing, you're calling a "folk opera?"

Chris Dewar: Folk rock opera.
KG: It's sort of like "Tommy," set in 1898.
TR: Imagine, if you will, "Quadrophenia" meets "The Odyssey" meets the Spanish-American war meets Bob Dylan.
KG: The whole point of our show is that it's one continuous storyline, that doesn't closely resemble "The Odyssey," but it is about the journey of a man back to his home, the trials and tribulations along the way and a certain event takes place at home that's sort of the climax of the story.

Trail: Would you say it follows the traditional journey pattern?

CD: Pretty much the first act is his journey home and the second act is concerned with what happens now that he is home.
TR: So we kind of start in the middle of the traditional hero's journey. He's already left - he's been away at war for a while, fighting in the Spanish-American war as a medic - and he undergoes a sort of prophetic experience.
He realizes that if he doesn't get out he's going to suffer the same fate as the rest of the poor sods. He goes home and comes back to find that nothing is quite as he left it.

Trail: This is all told through singing?

CD: Not entirely. We have four actors.

[The actors are also UPS students. Junior Rupert Cross plays the protagonist, a medic. Senior Katharine Messina plays Penny, the medic's wife. Senior Nelson Moody and freshman Matthew Jackson play the antagonists, Mr. Crawford and his seventh son.]

Continued...

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