They showed up with a dream and left with a T-shirt, a gutful of chicken wings, and the voices of The Wire’s Jon Nolan and Dave Karlotski gently but persistently urging them to make an album next month: don’t stall, don’t sweat it, don’t expect to make your masterpiece, and don’t be scared to take chances—but make an album next month.
Last Thursday’s kick-off meeting for the RPM Challenge drew around a hundred musicians from the Seacoast and beyond, who heard about the Challenge on the radio, from the newspaper, from posters or from word of mouth at musician hangouts like the Stone Church or Portsmouth’s Daddy’s Junky Music. The response shocked everybody: earlier that day, there were 83 projects on the list, and after the meeting the number passed 100. That’s 100 bands or artists committed to coughing up one CD—10 songs or 35 minutes minimum, to quote the rules—in just four weeks.
“You have made history, honest to God!” Karlotski told the crowd during his brief remarks.
RPM Challenge isn’t the only “make a record in a month” contest in the United States, but none of the others have reached these numbers. And Karlotski promised that the world would take notice. “Part of why we’re doing this is that we want to attract attention to this region.” Or as Nolan put it, “There’s a fucking music community here!”
Karlotski and Nolan explained the Challenge and took some logistical questions, but more than anything, they came to cheerlead. “You can’t write 14 songs in a month and not get better,” said Nolan. He asked the crowd to dream of the album they would make if they didn’t care who heard it. “Don’t wimp out! You have nothing to lose. You don’t have to let a soul listen to it,” he promised. “Throw yourself into this album with reckless abandon.”
The crowd wasn’t diverse—I counted roughly 95 percent white dudes milling around—but their ideas were all over the map, and so were their reasons for signing up.
Keyboardist Keith Sabella was recovering from a recent trauma: he accidentally deleted two years’ worth of work from his keyboard. Since then, he hadn’t even been able to look at his instrument—until he heard about the RPM Challenge. “I see it as an opportunity to come up with something new,” he explained, with inspired calm.
To some people, this is just a one-off—Josh Cyr plans to dust off his saxophone and cut a record of solo improvisations. Others will make their recording debut, like Cold War Spies, a darkwave (i.e., dark new wave) trio that has played for a year and a half but has yet to finish a record.
“We’ve set deadlines for ourselves in the past ... but there’s no accountability,” says the Spies’ Rick Chambers. “With something like this, you don’t want to be the band that says, ‘We started that and we didn’t finish it.’”
The Challenge has even drawn bands from beyond the Seacoast. Scalawag, a Manchester rock band “along the lines of Los Lobos or Bruce Springsteen,” plan to write a new batch of songs and record them live at the end of the month. They were already in the middle of recording an album, but the material dates back as far as three years; as Scalawag Peter Gustafson explains, “Hopefully, with these tunes, we’ll catch that early moment when a song is newborn, when it’s catching its first breath.”
And Jodie Curtis of Amesbury, Mass., brings 20 years of experience writing lyrics and songs for artists from the Seacoast’s T. S. Baker and Stan Moeller to Caroline Horn and Jimmy Landry. But aside from singing in the choir as a kid, Curtis has never sung professionally—until now. “It may be terrible and it may be great,” says Curtis, “but you just have to be unafraid. Just jump.”
That pretty much sums it up—so far. After all, the Challenge hasn’t started. How many of those 100-plus bands will cross the finish line? How many people will quit, only to get pulled back in by their friends and rivals? How many things will go wrong—and what will go awesomely right? The Wire will keep you posted every week, and to check out the artists and their progress in real-time, visit www.rpmchallenge.com.