Evolution of New Orleans’ Stoop Kids: Part 3
Meeting The Boys
Words & Photography by Katie Sikora
(Part 1: In The Beginning; Part 2: The Album Release)
You may be curious as to how one goes about getting five people you do not know very well to agree to let you follow them into their homes, workplaces, and lives. The short answer is: get them drunk.
Every year in the spring at a wonderfully eclectic music club called Gasa Gasa in Uptown New Orleans, a mutual friend of both mine and the Stoop Kids named Mariesha hosts a small DIY music festival called Uptown Sounds. The boys have played every version of this festival since its inception, the first of which also happened to be their very first show. Now as a festival organizer and host, Mariesha was incredibly good at her job that year, particularly at making sure the green room was fully stocked with beer and liquor, so much so that every person in each of the five bands as well as everyone working behind the scenes — including myself as the photographer — was lit and not hiding it. This is exactly when I decided it would be the perfect time to pitch my project to the boys. It was devoid of tact, grace, and coherence, and took place outside the venue while they loaded the van following their set. But, miraculously (and probably not realizing what they were getting themselves into) they said yes. I informed them that this would require me to come to each of their homes and shoot photos of them individually and conduct interviews. They were still somehow on board.
Tom was first.
For me, Thomas was the most intimidating Stoop Kid. We still live in a world that assumes if a girl wants to work with a group of men, she must have an ulterior motive that involves her vagina and finding a boyfriend. While the Stoops and I are all very good friends now, in the beginning, I made sure to do everything by the book to fight this stereotype head on. But at the first show, as I tried to balance a fine line between enthusiasm and professionalism, I had this overarching feeling that Tom thought the only reason I was there was because I thought they were attractive. It wasn’t until I sat down with him that I realized I was completely off base.
As we now know, Tom was the only one of the five that was not in a music related major; he ended up graduating with a degree in psychology and philosophy, which makes a lot of sense when you consider that every other member of the band refers to him as “the dad.” He is rational, calculating, and stoic. When something breaks or the van needs an oil change, he is the one to fix it. He is the only member who is responsible for the life of another living being — his dog, Maggie, who coincidentally is the band’s mascot.
“Without Tom, I don’t think there would be a band,” Griffin told me once, adding, “he’s our fucking Han Solo.” When I arrived at his house for the first time for our interview and photo shoot, he had just moved out of the home he shared with his now ex-girlfriend and into a new place. The house was empty and messy and, to him, foreign and cold. It was clear to me that even he couldn’t believe there was a photographer there documenting this transition, as if this couldn’t be an accurate portrayal of what his life was like. But these boys have spent the best days of their adolescence together as well as the worst, so to be present on that day at that time seemed pretty poetic.
The next Stoop Kid I visited was Joe.
Joe lived across the hall from Griffin their freshman year at Loyola and was the only other current Stoop Kid to be featured on the first EP, which “wasn’t the band but is the reason the band was created,” according to Griffin. The degree he got was in music education, so he plays a multitude of instruments, but his favorite is, you guessed it, the drum kit. I sometimes feel like Joe is the human representation of Animal from The Muppets if you dressed him in a white button-down and loafers. During that first visit we drank beer and hung out on his patio, bonding over being from the Midwest and then narrowly dodging a brawl regarding differences of opinions on gender roles. He knows himself better than anything else in this world and while he is capable and cool enough to have arguments about his opinions, if you ultimately disagree, that is just fine with him because he isn’t changing.
The most accurate ways to describe Joe sound insulting on paper, but if you know him, they all somehow seem positive. He has been described as a hedonist, which, once you get past the harshness of the word itself simply means he knows what brings him pleasure and he goes after it. He has also been referred to as the ego of the band. I, however, do not feel that ego in his case refers to the modern English definition that is an inflated sense of self-worth, but the psychological meaning of responding to instinctual drives in realistic ways, which is comical since Tom was the psych major. Joe is the little brother to Tom’s dad. There is even an ongoing joke within the band involving him and a “cougar” that in a year of working with them I still cannot discern as fact or fiction.
It is Christmas Eve as I write this installment and not to channel my inner Mr. Claus too much, but the next house I visited was Dave’s.
If Tom is the dad of the band and Joe is the little brother, then Dave is the mom. In the beginning of my time working with them, Pete, Griffin and I plotted out a photo project that involved stylized versions of everyone waking up in their respective bedrooms. In Dave’s version, he wakes up in a bright, sunny room with fluffy pillows surrounded by puppies. That project never came to fruition but there were some truths in the portrayal. Dave is incredibly optimistic and charismatic. If there is strife between the boys, Dave is going to try to remedy it. He is a yogi and practices poi and will do a headstand against pretty much any surface available.
That said, to me one of the most interesting things about Dave is that he learned how to play keys to be in the band (that, and his favorite band is Incubus). He has played guitar since he was a kid and was just a friend of the band for a long time, letting them use his car to get their gear to gigs and back, but when the original guitar player departed, Griffin switched to guitar, Pat switched to bass, and Dave eventually filled the keyboard void. It was raining the day we had our interview and at one point while we sat on the porch and Dave ate cereal, he explained to me that they “weren’t all friends to start, we became a band because of the music.” Even in a city inundated with musicians, this is rare.
Griffin was my next victim.
I met him at his apartment in the back of someone else’s house where he lived by himself and we talked for three hours. The best — and least helpful — way to characterize Griffin is as one big conundrum. Stoop Kids is his brainchild. To this point, he has written all the music and is the only common thread from the band’s foundation to now. But to know Griffin in day-to-day life is nothing like seeing him onstage. Offstage, he is nervous, sloppy, moody, and gets flustered easily, second guessing himself every step of the way. Sam (you all forgot about Sam, didn’t you? Don’t worry, we’re getting there) told me that on the last day of their two-month tour, they were raising a toast and he spilled all the shots. But once the show starts, he is wild and has no shame. I’ve heard him compared to Bowie and Jagger. The contrast is shocking and while the audience is losing themselves in the show, Griffin is busy reconciling those two personas in his head. He experiences discord in that he does not have the ego or the unadulterated confidence to be the poster child of a pop-rock band, and yet he is the front man and songwriter for a group that he conceptualized and created.
“I love when people listen to Stoop Kids. I don’t want to be in the room when you’re listening to it. I’m cool with being a commodity as long as you don’t have to know me personally, as long as I don’t have to put my personal self into that commodity.”
But that in itself is somewhat impossible. Any artist can tell you that the majority of yourself goes into the art that you create. So how then do you rationalize putting all your time, energy, and emotion into creating a song just to turn around, record it, and try to sell it? If you have the answer, please let Griffin know.
I cornered Patrick for my last interview.
It was in the morning on a Wednesday and I pulled up in front of Pat’s girlfriend’s house. I didn’t know Pat, or any of the Stoops for that matter, very well at this point but I could already tell that his relationship with Julia offered him, among other important things, an escape from the world of Stoop Kids, an escape that he apparently truly needed. To return to our family analogy, if Tom is the dad, Dave is the mom, Joe is the younger brother, then Pat is the misunderstood teenager. Before I interviewed him, the other members told me that he would be the hardest to crack. But once we climbed into his car (he didn’t want to wake up Julia), the amount of pent-up emotion that poured out of him, a near-stranger at that point, was shocking.
One of the questions I asked him was why he agreed to let me start this project and effectively worm my way into his life, to which he responded, “Because I never get to talk.” There was never a doubt that he valued and even loved the other boys in the band, but Stoop Kids has created a very specific world and brand for themselves, which I believe Patrick felt suffocated within. “I don’t feel like it’s a group of friends; it’s a business.” A significant focus of the group is to gain success and, hopefully, some level of fame and that’s where the rift occurred. “I don’t want to be famous or anything, I just want to be important to someone.” My conversation with Pat was heavier than I ever could have expected and provided some foreshadowing for what would happen next.
Part 4, in which the boys take me on tour, coming soon.
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