Last Saturday, GrooveBoston came to Brandeis for the first time ever as part of their Cohesion tour. After taking a look at a completely transformed Levin, Her Campus Brandeis met with director Bobby Dutton, Production Director Ed Slapik, and Brand Director Chris Dutton to get all the behind the scenes details on this innovative company and their Cohesion Tour.
Cohesion at Brandeis
Her Campus: It’s really interesting how your company is based around creating an experience rather than focusing on a specific artist or DJ. Could you start by telling us a little about that?
Bobby Dutton: Sure! What’s been happening over the last decade is just the sheer quantity of music has skyrocketed. So what happened to the industry to react to the growth and volume of music was instead of having your favorite band, you’d have your favorite DJs. The DJs do the work for you. You don’t have to listen to all that music, you listen to the music that the DJ finds for you. With the whole nature of electronic stuff, that’s good because you know when we find an awesome remix of something we can play that. We’re not covering it, we’re not singing it and doing a worse job than the original artist. We’re playing. In fact we might even have a remix that’s arguably better than the radio edit. It gives us a ton of flexibility. The platform that we built isn’t come listen to this one artist, its there’s about two hundred and fifty artists that need to get squeezed into ninety minutes to make what we think is the perfect dance set. We’re going to find a way to put that all together just right. Our goal with this is to have all the right music and all the right technology and all the right layers to build a really powerful experience. And its all listener oriented. So people shouldn’t leave going “I watched a really talented DJ” they should go saying “I experienced this thing.” I love it when people go “who’s the DJ, who is it, I don’t understand.” This is a little more current than the way you are used to experiencing music. So is GrooveBoston a company, is it a place, is it an artist, a group? The answer is yes.
The experience at Brandeis
Chris Dutton: And that’s a huge challenge especially with new schools. It’s tough to sell something that’s hard to explain. It’s a lot easier to sell Skrillex or Avicii, or whoever is coming to campus because that’s a name that students recognize and can brag about. So what we’ve done is each year we create a new tour. We wipe the slate and start from scratch every year. Every tour looks completely different and has its own theme and brand and design. And because we do that, we’re allowed to do multiple shows at a lot of different schools. So you can make it an annual event because the music changes every single time. The music is new, the production is new, the tour is new. So next year its not that GrooveBoston is coming back, its that this new tour is gonna come on campus. And its powered by GrooveBoston.
HC: That’s so cool! Can you tell us a little bit about how you started? It’s become such a widespread success and we’d like to know how the project formed.
BD: So, ten years ago, I was working with Ed in the production world. I can distinctly remember the summer of 2000 and I was just out of high school and I got to work concerts. And it was just so cool! I was eighteen years old and getting paid to walk around backstage at concerts. So what was happening back then in the beginning of the millennium, was this electronic stuff was still pretty underground. This wasn’t very common, you wouldn’t ever turn on the radio and listen to EDM. Remember Sandstorm? That came out in 1999 and it changed everything. I can distinctly remember being at an arena with one of the biggest sound systems I’d ever seen and thinking if I could plug my disc-man in and play Sandstorm on that sound system it would be musically the dopest thing I could imagine. And that was the epiphany.
“Sandstorm” by Darude
CD: And it started with Bobby DJ-ing at backyard neighborhood parties and middle school dances and it grew very organically from there. We’ve been officially incorporated for ten years now. This is our sixth major college tour, and its just been, the last three years once we nailed down the model, its just been growing like crazy.
BD: It’s been interesting to see how it’s changed to because ten years ago it was hard to even pitch this idea and for people to get it. And now it’s changed completely because now EDM is everything. Now the top Spring Fling artists are the Skrillex and Aviciis of the world. We love them as producers, but if we’re being honest, we think we can do more musically by buying their music and infusing all kinds of other stuff in there.
CD: One thing that keeps it exciting for us is that everything is customized. That’s a huge part of the value that we bring to the table. We don’t just build a set and move it from point A to point B. That would be boring and unoriginal and we can do better. It’s all about working with clients directly and saying tell us your vision and working with them to build it. And that’s Ed’s magic. He takes all the pieces and creates everything from scratch.
Ed Slapik: So, yeah, that’s basically what I do. I design each of the shows and then as the production director, bring all the pieces together. We design it with the client’s input and obviously our expertise. We’re not shipping the show that we’re going to have next Thursday, this will never be done like this exactly ever again. You can’t do the same show that you just did in a gym in a room that’s forty feet wide.
The customized set in Levin
BD: That gets into the whole idea of product. The product is not a dance party, it’s not lights, it’s not speakers, it’s not music. What we actually sell is the experience. Our top level mission is to make people happy. What’s cool about that is the goal is to make as many people as possible, as happy as possible. Every decision we make is based on that. Our other big word is legendary. We try to make legendary events. We have no interest in doing a weekly club night. It would be fun, but it wouldn’t be as magical. And that’s a large part of the way we design these things, knowing that this is going to be your ninety minutes. And it should be the peak ninety minutes of the year. That’s a big challenge! That’s what we’re working for, sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week. The what we do is make people happy. The how we do it is through legendary events.
HC: What kinds of things did you have to know in order to be able to manufacture this just for Brandeis?
BD: Well let’s start with how we got here in the first place. We did a senior week show here so we already knew what the room looked like. Student Events came to our office three times, we sat there with whiteboards, Ed’s like “what if we put this here,” “tell me what are you guys excited about,” “tell me what kind of budget you want to hit.” We had some notes from senior week so we knew what was already here that we could use. We knew that there was power here, a stage, and there’s the mezzanine. We were really able to customize there. Anything else for customization for this room Ed?
ES: No, it’s small. I’m surprised that we were able to fit everything in there. It was one of the few shows where I wasn’t entirely sure how the layout was going to work. You can do so much on paper, but once you get here it’s a different story.
BD: And musically we want the destination to be the same, emotionally. We don’t want to be so versatile that we have no idea what it’s going to sound like tonight. We know where we want you to get.
Testing the lights in Levin
HC: What would you say has been the biggest show you have ever put together?
ES: Tonight!
BD: We’ve done everything. We actually made did an appearance at Atlantis in the Bahamas, so technically we’re international superpowers. That was brief though. Size wise, it ranges from arenas, to stadiums to smaller function rooms. The customization means that we can get that emotional thing to happen regardless of what it’s shaped like.
ES: In the last four months we’ve done everything up to 17,000 person stadiums.
BD: We had this one in Texas that was interesting because it was a little farther. But it was nice to see that this is portable.
ES: Normally you would get all the vendors locally, but it’s important that we ship all the pieces from Boston rather than risk not having all the things that make GrooveBoston, GrooveBoston.
HC: To end, we would like to know your favorite moment or memory from your time with GrooveBoston.
BD: I would say the favorite recurring moment is when we either start warm-ups or when we start the show. We spend so much time on this stuff both in the office and on site.
ES: Yeah I would say there are about five hundred plus man-hours behind every show.
BD: We pour over the schematics of every show. We get in the show for so deep and so long, so to get to the point where everything comes together is very rewarding. We wouldn’t be able to put in so much work if there wasn’t that moment at the end. It’s such a powerful thing, and to be honest it never gets old. We’re all here because that moment is going to be so awesome, it’s worth it.
To see more of the awesome show GrooveBoston brought to Brandeis, click here or visit the GrooveBoston Facebook page.