Evolution of New Orleans’ Stoop Kids: Part 1

In the Beginning: Leaving for Tour

Katie Sikora

Published in

houseshow magazine

7 min readNov 16, 2015

Words & Photography by Katie Sikora

Behind Schedule

“Tom threw up in this,” Dave says as I walk up the steps of the house that twelve hours earlier was the scene of a raucous going away party, complete with a keg, jungle juice, blaring music, and a long line for the girl’s bathroom. The ‘this’ that Dave is referring to is a large Rubbermaid container that normally holds the band’s merch but the night before was the vessel for the aforementioned jungle juice. Tom plays bari sax, although neither he nor the instrument are anywhere to be found as he and Griffin, the lead guitarist and vocalist, are off an a series of errands, one of which is to fix the saxophone in question from the damages of the previous evening.

The drummer, Joe, is inside the house shooting the shit with two party stragglers while mopping for the third time, and Dave, who plays keys and guitar, informs me that Sam, the bassist and newest member, is apparently packing up the remainder of his belongings and on his way to the house. “We’re going to throw the party, play, wake up, clean up from the party, and leave for tour,” Griffin had expressed to me earlier and, like any great, drunken plan, it was falling apart at the seams. These five boys make up Stoop Kids and the reason for all the runaround was that they were supposed to have left for their first self-produced, full-length tour an hour ago.

The First Step

Stoop Kids’ music is incredibly unique and hard to classify, which may be why I was drawn to them in the first place, and why I practically begged their then-manager to give me permission to shoot photos for their show at The Maple Leaf Bar in November 2014: their first show at the historic New Orleans music club, and my first live encounter with Stoop Kids.

The New Orleans music community is incestuous, and that is sugarcoating it. I moved to “The Crescent City” impulsively and, not being a musician myself, certainly had no knowledge of the path I was blindly leading myself down. My current calling as a music photographer began as an accident, when I agreed to shoot photos of an old Chicago friend’s band and I didn’t hate it. I had been shooting them for two months when the guitarist posted a video to the band’s Facebook page congratulating another local band on the release of their newest music video, the first single off their sophomore album.

I remember watching the video for “17:35” — a video that the boys all now hate — for the first time and being so caught up in it that I spent an embarrassing amount of time watching every video they had out and going through each band member’s Facebook pictures. This eventually led to conversations with the Stoop Kids’ manager, a redhead named Pete who, after three days of trying to explain to me that they did not need any photos, finally relented by putting me “on the list” for the show that weekend. The gig was unpaid of course, but that made no difference, because once this talented band who had a manager and a spectacular music video and was playing The Maple Leaf saw my work, they would want me to keep shooting and I would be raking in the cash. Any musician, or other type of artist for that matter, is most likely laughing out loud to themselves reading this, but we have all been victims of wishful thinking, right? Right? Fine, moving on.

After changing my clothes three times, I showed up to the bar and while I scanned the room for Pete to introduce myself, I was able to make out each member of the band from my hours of Internet stalking. Checking mics, setting up gear, grabbing beers; to say I was excited to meet and shoot for these seasoned rock stars is an understatement. Pete was setting up the merch table when I got to him and he pulled me over to the stage. “This is Katie, she’s going to be shooting photos for us tonight. That’s Tom, Joe, Griffin, Pat, and Dave’s over there,” he said pointing to a smiling Italian who was entertaining every member of his family because, well, he’s Italian. Many articles have described Stoop Kids’ music as “doo-hop,” a mash-up of hip-hop and doo-wop. If “17:35” is the first or only song of theirs that you’ve listened to, that term makes a lot of sense, and at the risk of making myself sound like a complete idiot, that’s what I was expecting out of the entire set — bright, energetic, pop music being played by five attractive older guys.

The pre-show bumbling around ended abruptly and suddenly I was the sixth member of the band. The stage at The Maple Leaf is smaller than some people’s bathrooms (not mine, mind you, I’m a photographer for bands, remember?) and as a photojournalist, you better believe I will stand uncomfortably close to you when all you’re trying to do is be the white kid rapping to a packed club you’ve never played before and not screw up. The performance was thrilling and shocking and humbling. When you go to a show thinking that you get to meet and work artistically with talented, beautiful, older, and more experienced people, the excitement makes sense, it’s logical. But I left dumbfounded because when everything you experience and learn clashes with what you thought when you entered the bar that night, dumbfounded is the only thing to call it.

While talented and beautiful still applied, the boys were all younger than me and all of their experience stemmed from making it up as they went along. All five of them were in their senior year at Loyola New Orleans and even though this newly acquired fact popped the bubble of my Stoop Kids rock star fantasy, I still wanted more. I learned some surface stuff: Tom was the only one in a non-music related major, Griffin writes all his own music, and Dave was not an original member of the band, but it wasn’t even close to satiating my thirst to be a part of it. Despite knowing those things as well as getting to spend an hour on an intimate, packed, sweaty stage dodging Griffin as he danced so much he got tangled in his own microphone chord, I needed to talk with these guys, hear what they were working on, befriend them…all while acting the part of the chill photographer girl that no one knew.

I sent the photos off to Pete with explicit instructions to let me know what they thought of my work “at their convenience” which, in my impatient mind, translates to immediately. And then I waited.