Camarillo, Edelstein, Wampole, the Harrisons
Glass Wave, the “cerebral rock” group that links great classics to modern music, is continuing to make waves with its new CD. An article appeared in the San Jose Mercury here:
A rakish band of Stanford professors and their cronies is rocking out through tune after tune in a university rehearsal space on a hot spring afternoon. No, this is not your typical rock band — its founding guitarist-songwriters are professors of literature, scholars of Dante and the French Enlightenment. …
As the band huddles to discuss its recording project (available on iTunes and from Amazon with samplings available at www.glasswave-band.com), electric bassist Tom Harrison — Robert [Harrison]‘s 54-year-old brother and a professor of literature and film at UCLA — says, “The literary arts are in decline. People don’t read anymore. So this is a tribute to the culture we teach. It’s an ideological statement.”
“I’d say it’s a salvage operation,” says brother Robert.
“Or a cultural transmission,” Tom adds.
And also in the Palo Alto Weekly here:
The band took the name “Glass Wave” from Ezra Pound’s “Cantos.” It echoes the sea-and-water theme that permeates the album, which begins with the wordless “Balena,” and includes the actual sounds of a humpback whale. The album concludes with “Moby Dick,” which tells Melville’s whale tale from the perspective of the great white.
While they’re not about to give up their day jobs to cash in as rock stars, and they laugh at the idea of making money from the album, the scholars in the band were musicians before they were academics. The Harrison brothers, who are the sons of an American father and an Italian mother, spent their high-school years in Rome. With their blond hair and American looks, they made “decent money” pretending to be touring rock musicians who had just flown in from the States. But if they inadvertently lapsed into fluent Italian at the end of a concert, they had problems getting paid.
Failing that, read my own story, here — or listen to Rush Rehm interview Glass Wave here.
Tags: Robert Harrison