 "Photo: Andrew Zaleski/ Greyhound")
Days before the Loyola Battle of the Bands last March, five musicians assemble in an Evesham apartment living room. One guy slaps out a beat on his knees. The sounds of an acoustic guitar break through rapped verses while another guy steadily hums, mimicking a bass guitar line. Five days later, A Cool Stick walks off a makeshift stage in Reitz Arena, winners of the 2009 Battle of the Bands and an opening slot at last spring's Loyolapalooza.
"I was nervous as hell when we were about to go on," says Luke O'Brien, A Cool Stick's 22-year-old rapping frontman. "Winning that, it was like fate - it just all came together."
Since then, A Cool Stick has been riding a constantly ascending rollercoaster of musical success. In the past four months, the five Loyola graduates, four of whom just graduated this May, have played upwards of 30 shows, experiencing rapid success in the Baltimore music scene during their relatively short tenure as a band.
"There's a Baltimore food chain, sort of, and now we're kind of in the middle to upper echelons of that," says O'Brien. "We started at the Brass Monkey, which is as low as it gets - smells like piss when you walk in the door; the sound is horrible; literally in the middle of the stage there's a giant pillar blocking the band - so it's like, that's where you start. You get some gigs there, you get your name out, people start hearin' things, and now we're movin' up to places like the 8x10, the 13th Floor, and the Recher."
The infant band is also producing a six-song EP with the help of Jerome Maffeo, sound engineer and owner of Right-On Recording in Druid Hill.
"The recording's coming together really well," says 24-year-old Brendan "Fuzz" Floyd, the group's bassist and a 2007 Loyola graduate. "[We're] really getting everything tight. Drops are tight, parts are more intricate than they've ever been before - it's comin' together nicely."
For the members of A Cool Stick, their journey to this point has seemed pre-determined. O'Brien and John Fitch, 21, met during their freshman year at Loyola. Initially for them, making music meant driving around Roland Park in O'Brien's Jeep, listening to beats produced by Fitch and rapping freestyle verses. By the end of 2007, O'Brien and Fitch had produced a CD, "Neon City," under the name Luke and John. People started noticing.
"People who I have never met will approach me and explain that they heard it from somewhere and they really enjoyed it," says O'Brien.
By early 2009, four of the five group members - O'Brien, Fitch, Floyd, and James Hughes, 22, who puts the acoustic in A Cool Stick - were in place. They needed a drummer.
"I'm the type of person who likes to be safe about things," says Brian Aranda, 22. "James came to my house and he was pitching this whole thing. I didn't say a word, and my friend was like, 'Aranda plays drums, and he's really good.' I was just like, 'Let's just do it.' And it's by far one of the better decisions I've made. It's nice to just throw yourself a curve ball and just do something."
Just doing something has been on the front of A Cool Stick's mind since they won the March Battle of the Bands. Finishing recording their EP is the first step, as record companies in New York City and Philadelphia have begun to show interest in the group and have asked for more music. Aside from the recording, the band has been using the summer months to polish up their live show. The group rehearses religiously, meticulously plotting and planning out their stage performance during practice to prevent any glitches while on stage.
Drawing from a plethora of samples and originals, A Cool Stick's songs aren't "sloppily thrown together," says O'Brien. Fitch, the group's beat producer, constructs the group's songs based on the beat behind the song, giving instructions and suggestions as to how each instrument should be played during certain parts of the beat. Then, as a whole band, each instrument's role in each song is scrutinized until the band is satisfied with the end result.
"When you play real tight like that and all your drops are in sync, you hit the audience on a more subconscious level," says Fitch. "The gen pop [general population] won't recognize that anything happened there. But they'll just feel more safe, more comfortable with a band there that's really hittin' everything at the same time, and it's just more pleasing. That's why we're tight. We're not tight to feel mechanical."
Complementing the band's musical precision is their quirky yet cool personality, something O'Brien calls their swagger. "Our band is goofy. In the world of hip-hop, there is a little thing called swagger. Swagger is swag. Swagger is when you feel completely respected. Swagger does not usually entail behavior that involves five 20-year-old men dancing around, dressed in '80s attire, making fools of themselves, but that's our swagger."
Combining that swagger with clever, thoughtful lyrics - 'You 9 to 5 guys got nothin' for me / drivin' what you drive like a '95 Hyundai / tell me how it feel wakin' up on a Monday / then tell me who's the dummy, dummy.' - has, in four months' time, scored A Cool Stick shows at venues like the 8x10 where bands who have been together for two to three years usually play, according to O'Brien.
For now, A Cool Stick will have to settle with show requests from fraternities at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. The band's looking to drive down there for a show at the end of September. "Everyone's helping us out, from our friends to our families. Everybody wants to see us succeed," says Hughes.
"Our philosophy now is like, if you're gonna' do something, do it to the fullest. So now we're doin' the band to the fullest," says O'Brien. "We're out of college now. I don't really party that much; if I'm gonna' party, I'm gonna' earn it. I'm beyond red solo cups and I have my eye on champagne glasses."
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