Events: Yes! Red Tape: No!

Back in October, I booked four bands to play a Sunday evening show in the Eagle's Nest. The bands included Los Angeles' Mae-Shi, which was on tour at the time, and like-minded groups like Fat Day, Ho-Ag, and Protokoll (all of which are from Boston).

It was a small, intimate event, with maybe 60 people coming out to see the bands play. And while that number may not seem large enough to justify all the work that went into it, I couldn't have been happier. For those 60 people, this was an event that mattered.

I hadn't really thought about this until last week's big Kanye West concert.

Kanye was a big event, a huge event, complete with all the necessary trappings and absurdities and awful sound that such a huge event requires. Before you disembowel me for being an elitist jerk, just know that I thought he was great. And from my seat all the way in the nosebleeds, I couldn't help but think that for a lot of people, this might be the concert experience that defines them. I'm still not completely sure whether that was an absolutely good or bad thing.

All of this leads me in a very roundabout way to something that has bugged me about Boston College since the day I first set foot on campus.

While I applaud the UGBC's efforts to bring us quality fall and spring concerts (and Modstock - or as I like to call it, "Gusterstock"), the fact is that it's simply not enough.

Part of what made me excited about college was the possibility of finally being able to set up shows for bands that, while not necessarily well-known, meant something to me and to other people. Yet the fact is that BC makes this near-impossible.

While other schools have seemed to be open about the idea of allowing live bands play on campus (Massachusetts College of Art being my favorite example), BC seems to flee in the opposite direction.

The time and effort that went into setting up that small show in October was jaw-dropping. Every step of the way required not only a signature, but also an explanation as to what we were doing and why we were doing it.

It's almost as if BC doesn't want its student attempting to make things happen for themselves. I remember the unimpressed look I got from one member of the Board of Conferences when we told him what we were doing, and was then told that the event couldn't happen because the Eagle's Nest couldn't handle the power setup required by the sound system. He eventually relented, thankfully.

This isn't intended as a cheap shot attack on BC, the Office of the Dean for Student Development (ODSD), or anyone else, but rather as a broad critique.

And it's also not intended solely as a piece of rabble-rousing for more on-campus concerts. Why can't we have student-curated art shows in classrooms? Why is it that one-act plays always have to occur solely in Robsham? Why can't a band play a show in someone's Mod? When John Legend came to play a free concert in the Rat, that was amazing. Some day I'd like to see a band throwing it down atop Gasson Tower. Okay, that was a little over the top, but you get the point. This campus has so much potential. There are so many other places where concerts and performances could be held.

Does everything have to go through the ODSD? The petition to create a performing arts space on campus, in addition to Robsham Theater, was a step in the right direction, but that effort seems to have run out of gas.

I could just be one voice crying in the wilderness, and maybe I am.

But it seems to me that until BC figures out whether it's a university serving the needs of its donors or its students, this is going to be a problem (one among many, mind you) that won't go away.