As I wrote a couple days ago, I’ve been helping to promote concerts on the UAlbany campus. There’s a room in the Campus Center that was supposed to be a coffeehouse; they even built a small stage in the corner, complete with lighting. But plans changed and the space now holds a Wendy’s instead. Every Tuesday night, we claim the room in the name of Rock and Roll (and University Auxiliary Services), bring in free coffee and tea, and turn it into the coffeehouse it was meant to be. We call it the Fake Coffeehouse.

I play every week, but I’m not the attraction. What draws students to the Fake Coffeehouse – and they come in increasingly large numbers – is their eagerness to support friends who play on that stage. I’ve brought in local and touring acts, too, and so far it’s clear that students prefer their own. The audience is big and generally polite no matter who’s on, but when UAlbany students perform, the place comes to life. It’s awesome. We started with two acts per show, but response has been so overwhelming that we added a third slot, plus an open jam at the end of the night.

This past week, we had James Blackshaw and his acoustic 12-string in for a set. James turned our modest space into a cathedral with gorgeous playing that was at once delicate and majestic. But it was the opener, a duo from Brooklyn called Mountains, who provided the Fake Coffeehouse’s finest moment so far: they built a crushing wave of ambient sound so intense, powerful and just plain loud that everyone in the room appeared windswept, as if we were all caught in the wake of a rocket engine. The crowd was shocked… you could feel minds expanding to accommodate new definitions of music. When was the last time you were truly shocked by a pure musical experience?

For some student musicians, the Fake Coffeehouse also serves as a classroom of sorts. Sure, a few people are content to get up and play shitty Jack Johnson covers; that’s their prerogative… I’m not going to turn anybody away just because I don’t care for what they do. There are a couple of regular participants, though, who seem genuinely passionate about creating, growing and improving. To that end, I’ve brought in a professor: Jerry Marotta. Jerry’s been supporting me on drums during my set, but then he generously stays late to jam with students at the end of the show. Last week, Jerry conducted two student guitarists through an increasingly complex series of starts and stops in an otherwise straightforward blues, and they just got better and better before our eyes. It’s a weekly masterclass with one of the best drummers on the planet.

Will every student who comes down engage with the music? Of course not… right now, the experience is largely social. But there are 17,000 students here, and even if a fraction of them develop a passion for playing and listening locally, we’ll have an awesome scene in this town. Something is definitely happening on campus – there’s music almost every night in the Wendy’s lounge now, including a WCDB open mic on Mondays and a Hillel-sponsored jam on Thursdays. I see all this imitation as proof that we’re on to something. Will the student musicians and fans ultimately take the action into town? I hope so.

I want every good musician in Albany – and there are a lot of them – to play to a packed house every night. I want everybody in Albany who appreciates music to be able to see a great show every night. Thousands of potential new participants show up in this city every year; they come to the region’s dozen-or-so colleges full of energy and fresh ideas; then they return every summer to the faraway places from which they came, eager to share the great things they discovered here. I will proceed as if anything is possible.

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I pissed away most of the past decade working on a stage musical called Rise And Shine. I actually hate musicals, but a friend convinced me that I should write one with him. When we completed our first draft, some heavies told us that it was almost there, and we were only about ten years from getting it produced. Ten years later, we were told that it was almost there, and we were only about ten years from getting it produced. That’s when I decided I had wasted enough time on something I couldn’t really stand to begin with.

When I turned my full attention back to rock music, I discovered that in the decade since I had last put out a solo album, my entire audience had gone and decided that babies were preferable to… I dunno, name anything fun. Releasing The Cutting Room Floor felt great – so cathartic, after all I went through to get it done. But just as making that album was a learning experience, so was putting it out.

Now I want to do something new, completely new. Brand new songs; musicians I’ve never played with before; new audience, even, building from scratch. Maybe I’m just caught up in the college energy… dunno, don’t care. I’m going with it.

If I had to start a band from zero, and I could fantasy draft any musicians I know, my first-round choice would be Avi Buffalo’s Sheridan Riley on drums. And then I would pick Avi Buffalo’s Avi Buffalo on guitar. They inspire me and restore my faith in things… and they can play their asses off! Lucky for me, they’re both game. So in December, we’re going to SugarHill Studios in Houston, TX, to record our first batch of songs as Sevendys. Why Houston? Why Sevendys? A more important question would be: who’s playing bass?

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