Dani Gagnon
A&E Editor
Last Saturday evening, 45 students saw a ghost at the Underground. The Goliard, the College of Wooster’s student run literary magazine, presented the resurrected ghost of Covers with the appropriate theme, On the Road Again.
Covers used to be a well-known and loved C.O.W. tradition when students with various musical skill-levels organized an evening of performances around a given theme. However, within the three years following the leading organizers graduation, Covers has been on the decline and slipped beneath students’ radar. This was a real hit to the music scene on campus for those who remembered and missed Covers. Thus, this weekend marked The Goliard’s revival of Covers.
Editor-in-Chief Aaron Winston ’14, along with Music Editors Maxim Elrod ’15 and Chelsea Frey ’15, remembered the old days of Covers fondly, and in The Goliard’s early meetings of the year they set their sights on resuscitating the event.
The Goliard staff expressed a desire to become “more accessible and open to the campus community… [and to] support Wooster’s creative side throughout the course of the year” said Winston.
Through their production of Covers, they think they can achieve their goal while contributing to the campus. With the help of Kevin Carpenter, Program Coordinator at C.O.W., last weekend marked the first of what is planned to be monthly performances of Covers. Over time, Covers can hopefully rebuild and sustain an excitement for the old tradition as well as evolve into something of its own within this revival.
In the past, Covers was overall regarded in the sense that the goofier the performance, the better the performance. The more inexperienced students singing, the more entertaining and memorable the act would be.
Covers was about students from all musical backgrounds — everything from years of training to never having picked up a guitar — putting together a set list and having fun on stage.
Within the set list of nine acts there was everything from long established student bands to Maria Janasz ’14 playing a dismembered car’s glove-compartment door.
“Covers was something I wanted to perform in since my freshman year … It came across as a fun, light-hearted thing to do when I was a spectator and it was everything of my dreams to perform in” reflected Janasz on her fulfilled entertainment dream.
Saturday night’s performance reflected the essence of Covers well. The revival of Covers and its engagement with students will contribute on multiple levels to campus climate.
In part, it will provide a platform for student bands to perform. In light of the limited venues on campus, this is no small feat. Covers will promote students who wouldn’t regularly perform by providing the opportunity. Winston said that in the past, a common complaint was that there was a lack of interaction and willingness to hear feedback from the audience.
For Saturday’s performance, Elrod and Frey put the theme up for an open vote via the Facebook event and plan to follow the same procedure for all the upcoming events to keep the excitement and involvement with Covers rising.
Covers falls into this category that displays C.O.W. student’s pride for campus traditions and it will hopefully stay there because, let’s be honest, it’s much easier than filling the arch with snow.