Ivy League Rockers Work Connections

Bishop Allen has something to hide: they are east coast intellectuals lurking behind electric guitars. Their Diesel jeans, carefully crooked ties and artfully disheveled hair look like the outfit of a typical rock band. Their lyrics mourn lost love and lonely nights. But those lyrics belie a sophistication and tidiness that lurks under their disheveled public image.

If you didn’t dig a little, you might never know that all four members of Bishop Allen, the up-and-coming Brooklyn rock quartet, are Ivy League graduates.

“I try not to tell people,” says drummer Margaret A. Miller, who graduated from Yale in 2001. “It just doesn’t seem very rock ’n’ roll.”

Founded by Christian A. Rudder ’98 and Justin A. Rice ’99, Bishop Allen defies the seemingly indelible line that separates Ivy League from rock ’n’ roll. Backed by Miller and bassist Bonnie A. Karin, who graduated from Brown in 2001, Rice and Rudder serve up light, catchy rock fare, honed over four years in Cambridge.

Currently number one on Los Angeles radio station KXLU and Charlottesville’s WNRN, the band started performing on the east coast in March, and has since spent many hours driving to gigs in their 1989 Ford Econoline tour van. This past week alone found them playing in Charlottesville, New York, Philadelphia and Cambridge, and the band will be featured on a twelve-minute spot on “All Things Considered” on National Public Radio later in the spring.

Nice Work, If You Can Get It

“It’s a day-job. It’s an entrepreneurial venture. It’s a band,” says Rudder, who recently quit his job to devote himself full-time to managing Bishop Allen. “It’s been taking off in the last month, but there was a load of groundwork and busting our ass for a long time.”

The groundwork began in 1995, when Rudder and Rice met in a discussion section at Harvard. Soon after, they founded their first band together: The Pissed Officers.

“We were highly unprofessional. We were just some idiots playing music,” Rudder says. The band was known for its ability to play 17 “really, really fast” songs in seven minutes.

The experience, nonetheless, prepared Rich and Rudder for future ventures. They sent themselves on a small east coast tour, playing hundreds of shows during the band’s two-year stint. After graduation, both settled in Cambridge and found jobs away from music—Rudder as an editor with TheSpark.com, Rich as an assistant to documentary filmmaker Erroll Morris.

“Music was always part of the picture,” says Rudder. “We had to make money and pay off credit card debts for the first years out of school, so it was on the extreme back burner. But we were always thinking about it.”

New York, New York

Bishop Allen was born in 1999 when Rudder and Rice, then living on Bishop Allen Ave. in Cambridge, began writing again. Two years later, they recorded most of their debut album in Lynchburg, Va. (“because it’s really cheap,” said Rice) before moving to New York City.

“It’s not really the place to be,” Rudder says. “It’s a great place to be a connoisseur of things, but not to be a band. It’s highly competitive.”

Still, the city has been kind to Bishop Allen, and unexpected Ivy League connections in the artistic community have given welcome support. The band reports that their New York shows are regularly attended by alumni from all the band’s alma maters.

“These days, it’s starting to pay off,” says Rice. “We know a lot of interesting, smart people from…college. We help each other out.”

Miller uses her college connections as well.

“I know a lot of people who went to Yale who are now in bands,” she says. “That connection is very helpful. Connections are great to have. Obviously, for us, it’s been very useful getting shows in Cambridge.”

For Karin, a career in rock music is a new possibility—she was a bona-fide cellist until she first picked up the bass guitar last December. She says she never even listened to rock music before joining Bishop Allen, and laughs in response to Rolling Stone’s ascription of the term “indie-elite” to her music.

“I used to always feel really self-conscious because I was so uncool, and all the cool kids talked about [rock] music,” she says. “And so now I just fall asleep at night and laugh to myself. It really can happen to anybody. You can think you’re so uncool and then you can be in the indie-elite. And I don’t even know what that is.”

Though Karin and Miller still have day jobs, Rice and Rudder have faced the challenge of dealing with their parents, who were shocked by their choice of career.

“My parents were really, really skeptical that I could make a living,” Rice says. “They really wanted me to go work at some kind of career where you go to work every day and there’s a clear ladder. They didn’t think that I could make it…Now, they kind of see it.”

Bishop Allen is not just another amateur garage band waiting to be discovered—they are already making themselves a living. For Rudder, the band is as much an entrepreneurial venture as an artistic dream. The band is his third business venture, following the software company he founded in his senior year.

The band is releasing Charm School this month on their own label, Champagne School, and are planning a national tour for the summer.

“The thing is that statistically, anybody who goes into an artistic field fails,” Rice says. “But statistically, anybody who tries to get into Harvard fails.”