Nameless band seeking suggestions

I ring the doorbell to the Sigma Nu fraternity house on Professor's Row, and after about thirty seconds of waiting out in the frigid autumn air, I am let in. "I'm here to see Ben," I tell the guy who stands before me. He leaves to go find his frat brother, and after a minute, I hear footsteps coming down the windy wooden staircase next to me.

"Oh, what's up dude," Ben says as he sees me standing before him. "I totally spaced out. Come on up."

We make our way into a room in which a few other guys are watching television and we each plop down on our own couch. In between bites of pizza and chuckles invoked by a Saturday Night Live rerun, I get to know Ben Halperin, lead guitarist and singer for Boston Funk Band.

"BFB," as Ben likes to refer to them, was formed about a year ago here at Tufts. Since then, Halperin and the other members (Rich Wilner, Brian Ezra and Mark Shwayder) have made themselves prominent figures on the Tufts music and party scenes. The group formed through mutual relationships and after about a week of jamming together they performed their first gig on Dearborn Street in a friend's basement. The band only managed to perform six songs before the cops broke up the party, but BFB still received great feedback from everyone in attendance.

Since that first performance as a nameless band _ both literally and figuratively _ BFB has played at numerous fraternity parties on campus and has taken their music to Common Ground in Brattelboro, Vermont.

"We're taking definite steps to get outside Tufts more," explains Halperin. "Hopefully, by the end of the semester we'll be playing somewhere every weekend." Ben hopes to bring his group as far as Providence, Worcester, and Framingham, and looks forward to gracing the stages at The Middle East, Harper's Ferry, and The Burren.

After receiving his first guitar for his bar mitzvah, the twenty-one year-old college junior says "it has been uphill since then. I haven't hit a rut yet."

Halperin plans to take his band with him to the top, but realizes that it will take time and a lot of luck. "If I could march into Sony and say, 'Sign me,' I would, but you can't do that. They made a movie about that. It's called Airheads." His explanation amuses everyone else in the room.

"Fronk," not funk, is what the band calls its style of music, as it is a combination of rock and funk. With influences like Phish, the Beatles, jazz, and seventies funk, it is no wonder that BFB's music attracts an audience with a diverse musical palette.

Boston Funk Band's promotional CD, Ride the Train, was released last year and sold about fifty copies at various Tufts shows. Although the album didn't quite go platinum, Halperin is optimistic about the band's upcoming release, Connected to the Ground.

"But it's kind of hard to do that if we don't have a name for the band," explains Halperin, a grin taking over his face. The band, which was at one point in time unnamed, will soon again be nameless. That is, until they can come up with a new one.

"We're open for suggestions to tell you the truth," says Halperin after explaining that the group's manager, Josh Klein, a Sigma Nu alum and former member of the band, Stufus, advised that they change their name for marketing reasons.

Contributing to Halperin's enthusiasm about the upcoming album release was his involvement in creating the tracks. "In general I had a large influence on most of the lyrics," he says proudly.

In the past, Halperin rarely focused on the lyrics in the music he listened to, but a song called "The Other Man" by the Canadian band, Sloan, changed all that for him. "After about a dozen times of listening to the song I finally said, 'Whoa, they're talking about something really cool here', " he explains.

Aside from guitar practice on Mondays and Thursdays _ to which Halperin adds that Tufts need more practice facilities _ the musician keeps up with his studies as a political science major and still has a bit of leisure time. "We do a lot of chillin. Just chillin with the friends. Oh yeah, and I'm in a frat. I'm actually the president of this place," he tells me amidst the incessant crunching of pizza crust and a roomful of eyes fixated on ESPN.

"I'm not that interested in growing up right now," he exclaims as he finishes off his last slice. It becomes obvious that what he is interested in is finding a new name for his band. "Remember, we're taking suggestions," I hear him call out over the clanking of my feet on the windy, wooden staircase before I make my way out into the night.