Man, I hate to ask, but where did all these kids go? What happened to prevent the crowds from gradually INCREASING in the future?
Al pretty much took care of this one, but I\'ll throw my abridged version in. One day I\'ll sit down and write 20 pages about this but not for this post:
UMass 99-02 was a very special circumstance that existed in a certain time and place. A lot of things had to go right, and a lot of fortunate circumstances had to come together at the same time for it to exist, and they did. It was incredible but not sustainable.
The biggest factor was a MAJOR hipppie clique of about 250 kids who were all friends, mostly from Baker dorm. I know this may seem impossible, but you have to take my word for it. This was State U networking of the highest order. You could count on ALL of these kids at the same shows and parties every time, and Psychedelic Breakfast was our band. It was great, but it couldn\'t last forever. Kids go their separate ways after college. Everyone went for equal parts the music and for each other, and when you took the "each other" out of the equation, most slowly fell off the Breakfast landscape.
The second biggest factor was the closing of Butterfield. (I made a classic post about this at the old yahoo group that you can read
here.) As the band moved to the clubs you started to get a division of UMass fans: those who had been to Butterfield shows, and those who hadn\'t. Even though the early Northampton club shows were equally epic and constant sellouts, there was no way anyone who hadn\'t been in Butterfield could get on board at the same level of ferocity.
The third factor is the fact that the band was getting bigger and touring wider and you couldn\'t go see them 3 nights a week all the time like we were doing in 00-01.
And the last factor I have to take a hit on. Looking back I feel like I could have done a better job networking with some of the big buzzkids a couple of years younger than me and having them smoothly take over handling Breakfast grassroots and parties and stuff after I left. There was nothing I could do to overcome the three factors above, the scene was never going to last at the level it was at. But if I had done a better job passing the torch the dropoff could have been slower and wouldn\'t have bottomed out at the point that it did.
Like I said, I\'ve got 20-30 pages in me about the rise and fall of this era, but I feel like I owe a brief answer right now.
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Classic photo there: lele, Davepeck, me, Jocelyn, and FrankZappa basking in the afterglow of Camp Creek 2001, #6 on my list.
