A long line of tattooed, hair- dyed, plaid-skinny-jeans, thick- rimmed-glasses, converse-wearing, students lined up inside the Student Activities Center to see the band Best Coast perform for free as part of the newly revived Stony Brook Concert Series.
Stony Brook Concerts was a concert series that existed back in the 1960s and 1980s showcased bands such as Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, The Allman Brothers and Blue Oyster Cult before they became Billboard chart toppers. The concert with Best Coast, an American indie pop trio based out of Los Angeles, was the Undergraduate Student Government’s first attempt to bring back the concert series.
Moiz Khan, a member of the Music Advisory Board of the Undergraduate Student Government, USG, and 20- year- old history major, said the purpose of bringing back the concert series is to “connect the previous history that was so awesome” to the present. He hopes to expand and get more people involved in the Stony Brook Concert Series.
The doors of SAC Ballroom A opened at 8:30 p.m. on Nov. 17, letting the eager crowd inside. The ballroom was almost half full as the crowd waited for the band to take the stage. Most of the crowd, while waiting for the show to start, moved from standing near the stage to the table in the back of the ballroom where a limited number of free Stony Brook Concerts t-shirts and posters were handed out. Khan said he expected around 300 people to show up; the actual number of people in attendance is unknown.
The band took the stage as the lights dimmed and the focus immediately shifted toward the three-member ensemble.
Lauren Haugli, a junior cinema and cultural studies major, attended the event even though she had only vaguely heard of the band. She said she “[supports] all art we have on campus” because “there is such a small fraction; we need to stand up for each other.”
Best Coast played straight through a forty-minute set to an attentive crowd. Bethany Consentino, the band’s songwriter and front woman, said it was “fun to play just to students.” She said she enjoys playing at colleges because “most of our fans are college students,” and that they’ve played college shows where “half the kids there look like they’re like ‘I don’t even know who you are’ and it’s like that’s fine if you don’t know who we are but at least act interested or something.” Stony Brook was “a really fun [show]; there was lots of energy,” she added.
While most of the students in attendance stayed for the entire set, there were a fair amount of people that left the concert, too. Saeet Bhuiyan, an 18-year-old biology major and music minor, said the band was “not [his] cup of tea.” He came to the concert with his friends as a way to expand his horizons but he viewed the band’s music as an “acquired taste.” Bhuiyan said that while “listening to the composing” of the songs, he was “not pleased.”
Consentino said that Best Coast would definitely come back and play at Stony Brook again. “We end up leaving [a lot of college shows] being like ‘What just happened there?’ but tonight we will be like ‘That was tons of fun.’”
According to Khan, USG’s goal is to put on more concerts similar to this throughout the remainder of the school year.