After making their debut last fall at La Boca restaurant and bar on Main Street, “Kindness of Strangers,” a rock band composed mostly of Wesleyan students, will return to the venue to perform every other Wednesday night this semester. The band, which includes Mike Drucker ’05, Logan Durland ’05, Ray Rowland ’05, Amar Shibli ’05, Rob Weinstock ’06, Kumar Nair ’05, and Elvee, a Middletown resident, had its first performance this semester on Jan. 28. They performed covers of Tom Cochrane’s “Life is a Highway” and Red Hot Chilli’s Peppers’ “Under the Bridge,” as well as original songs titled “Don’t Look Back,” “Eleven Twelve,” and “Fly Blue Jeans.”
“The show was well received,” Drucker said. “We had everything planned out real well.”
A lot of preparation goes into each of the band’s shows. The group arrives at La Boca at around 9:30 p.m. to set up the equipment, they take the stage at about 10 p.m., and play until 1 a.m., when the venue closes.
“We’ll take 10 minute breaks maybe twice during the night, but otherwise we are on the rest of the time,” Drucker said.
“Kindness of Strangers” has a repertoire of over 20 songs, including covers of U2, The Fugees, Marvin Gaye and the Ghostbusters theme song.
The band, however, does not simply want to perform covers of their favorite songs; rather, they want to offer edgy renditions of them.
The band has recently been rehearsing Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” and The Beatles’ “Come Together” for their show on Feb. 9.
“This is our rocker song,” said Drucker of their cover of the Beatles.
While the band has only been performing since last fall, the group itself has been playing with each other for a year and a half.
“The band started with five guitars in my Lo-Rise [junior year],” Drucker said.
He invited Durland, Rowland, Shibli, Weinstock, and Nair to occasional jam sessions in his living room, and this past October the group found themselves rehearsing for their first live performance.
According to Weinstock, the band first performed this past Homecoming weekend to raise money for WesPrep, a student-run group dedicated to providing educational resources for people in prison.
The band’s second performance was last December, on the Wednesday of reading week.
“A lot of people had papers and assignments due that week, so [attendance] was not so bad considering that plenty of students had work,” Rowland said.
“We still did not have a band name days before the performance and we had to decide on what we were going to call ourselves,” Drucker said. “I had been watching some movies and wrote down some phrases from them. ‘Kindness of Strangers’ was one of the phrases that the group [liked].”
Rowland, one of the two vocalists, is a newer member of the band.
“[Drucker] had been asking me to come jam with the guys for almost a year,” Rowland said. “I was a bit intimidated. I’m only okay at the guitar and I’d never sang in a band before, although I’d always wanted to.”
The band will be performing at no cover charge at La Boca cantina on alternating Wednesday nights until the end of the semester.
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