For Lawnparties, USG targets rising stars

When the USG booked Rihanna in the spring of 2006 to play at Lawnparties the following fall, she had not even embarked upon her first tour.

“We heard she had been doing some studio stuff, so we booked her early,” Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Thomas Dunne said. “We had a sense she was going to be really big. We were in the right place at the right time.”

Rihanna performed in the backyard of Quadrangle Club at what, according to Dunne, may have been one of her first large-scale outdoor concerts. Rihanna, 18 at the time, was in the middle of her first tour.

While the artists the USG has invited in recent years — such as B.o.B., Wiz Khalifa, Far East Movement and Childish Gambino — have been relatively well-established, the USG has a history of pinpointing future stars, including top-charting artists like Lupe Fiasco, Maroon 5 and Train.

USG social chair Benedict Wagstaff ’14 said the USG Social Committee does consider artists’ career trajectories.

“We certainly consider what the artist has done in the past and where they are likely to go in the future,” Wagstaff said in an email. “The current nature of Lawnparties and its limits (beyond merely the financial) constrain the options of our artist search and generally we can either shoot for rising artists or musicians who have already passed the peak of their careers,” he explained.

Inviting groups to perform twice a year on the Princeton campus is a USG tradition that precedes the concerts in Quad’s backyard. Before 2004, the USG would sponsor biannual performances in Dillon Gymnasium.

Former USG social chair Jeff Leven ’00 noted that during the 1990s, Princeton had been more inclined to search for lesser-known artists.

“At the time, in the East Coast college music scene, there were a lot of bands starting to bubble up,” Leven said. “You could tell if a group was starting something. I was always identifying the path of where I thought bands were going.”

In 1996, Leven advocated for inviting Train to perform on campus, and the USG hired the band as the opener for that year’s concert for approximately $2,000. The band, which later went on to win three Grammy Awards and became known for their chart-topping single, “Hey, Soul Sister,” had not even produced their first studio album when they made their debut appearance in Dillon.

Former USG social chair Tim Skerpon ’03 also sought to bring rising talent to campus. A member of a band himself, Skerpon performed at a concert with Maroon 5 in 2002, when the group had just finished compiling their first studio album, “Songs About Jane.” Skerpon, who was also the social chair at Charter Club, booked the band to play at Charter for $2,000.

“That’s how much it would cost to hire [a DJ] with a sound system,” Skerpon said.

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According to Skerpon, when the band made its first appearance on campus in 2002, they arrived in a van and stayed overnight with students after their performance at Charter. While the band began its ascent to fame shortly after this visit, the group performed a second time at Charter before returning to headline Lawnparties in the spring of 2004.

“The second time we invited them to play at Charter, they arrived in a tour bus,” Skerpon said. “I heard when they played at Quad, they arrived in a truck. Something must have happened in between those performances.”

However, Skerpon noted that Princeton had “just as many bad calls as good calls,” noting that he failed to bring many soon-to-be-famous artists to campus. Skerpon had seen Coldplay perform at a festival and advocated for them to perform on campus shortly after the release of their first studio album, “Parachutes,” but other USG members rejected his appeal.

“We probably could have had them play for much cheaper when I was a freshman than when I was a senior,” Skerpon explained. “By that point, they had already released “A Rush of Blood to the Head,” and so we knew we couldn’t get them to play here anymore.”

Skerpon also noted that he “blew it” when he decided to not have a concert featuring John Mayer, who did not even have a band at the time when the USG was considering inviting him.

Dunne also noted that there have been times throughout his career when he has turned down future celebrities. When Alice Dymally ’05 approached Dunne about inviting Kanye West to perform at the Carl A. Fields Center in 2004, he rejected the proposal because West wanted Princeton to pay for his first-class flight back to California after the concert.

“We had no sense of what he was going to become,” Dunne said. “I think the next time I heard of him was when he played on MTV about a year later.”

But in recent years, many of the artists that have headlined Lawnparties have already been close to the peak of their popularity.

“I don’t feel like students have been getting cutting-edge, emerging-on-the-scenes artists,” Dunne said, noting that during his time at Princeton, he has felt that students have always been inclined to hire “people who are established.”

However, Leven noted that in recent years it appears that the process of artist selection has changed since his time as USG social chair.

“College campuses used to be more in the eye of the storm,” Leven said, adding that universities are no longer “the launchpads” for today’s budding artists.

At the same time, Skerpon believes the USG-sponsored concert in Quad’s backyard is the “right setting” for established artists, noting that other eating clubs’ more intimate concerts are more appropriate for groups that are on the rise.

Dunne said the location and theme of Lawnparties concerts are important considerations to make when booking artists. When concerts were held in Dillon, the USG invited a variety of older artists including Billy Joel and Bob Dylan, who both performed on campus at the start of the 2000s.

Dunne also noted that Lawnparties did not provide an appropriate environment for students to discover a new band, adding that performances on college campuses today are not suited for beginning artists.

“College shows are not in general performances that people are really excited about as audiences,” Dunne said. “The performers know that a big portion of the audience is there because that is the activity of the evening, not because [the students] really like the music.”

Nonetheless, according to USG Social Committee member Stephen Turner ’12, the student government will continue looking for future stars, as has been the developing tradition over the past two decades.

“It has been the policy of late to select artists that are on the rise,” he said in an email. “I feel that this has been the right choice.”

Correction: Due to a reporting error, a previous version of this story indicated that the band Maroon 5 first visited Princeton in 2002 for Lawnparties at Charter Club. In fact, the band visited Charter as part of a separate event in 2002. The 'Prince' regrets the error.