Evolution of New Orleans’ Stoop Kids: Part 5
The Turning Point
Words & Photography by Katie Sikora
(Part 1: In The Beginning; Part 2: The Album Release; Part 3: Meeting The Boys; Part 4: Hitting The Road)
As a student of Socrates, Plato himself was an impressive man, particularly in his description of the cave, a philosophical allegory that has marked its territory for roughly 2300 years. This includes Griffin’s sophomore year of college, when he wrote Plato’s Cave, a lyrical representation of his personal take on the metaphor that was released as a part of their freshman album, What A World. He was 19 years old.
In the story, Plato describes a cave full of prisoners that can only see shadows cast upon the wall in front of them and those images are the only reality they have ever known.
There comes a day when one prisoner escapes the cave, subjecting himself to the pain of sunlight after being imprisoned in a dark hole for the entirety of life. But after bearing through that initial agony, he adjusts to the new environment and discovers a new world, the actual living representations of the shadowy pictures from the cave. With a new view of the world, he runs back to the other prisoners only to find that they don’t believe a word he says. They cannot fathom what he is talking about as their only life experiences lie there with them in that cave.
While What A World is officially a Stoop Kids album, from Griffin’s point of view, it is less so than their second album and their recent releases. This is not because of a lack of concepts and ideas presented on the album but has to do with the fact that the other Stoop Kids barely play on the album. Pat plays on one song, Tom plays on four, and Sam and Dave weren’t even in the band yet. “It was more me and Joe being in the room. It was definitely not a band album,” Griffin told me. That said, “I think Plato’s Cave is going to stand the test of time,” he added.
Using the elements of the metaphor to our advantage, let’s suppose that in The Mysterious Case of the Evolving Stoop Kids, for them college was the cave. That’s not to say that college is a prison but it certainly can be a pre-formatted existence. We are taught that you must spend the majority of your adolescence working to get into a good college since that is where you will become the person you will be for the rest of your life and if you don’t go to a good college, or god forbid, don’t go to college at all, you’re doomed to a life of guaranteed squalor. Although all of the boys did end up graduating, somewhere in their four years they realized that they could achieve everything they wanted without relying on the institution.
From the inception of the band, it was agreed upon that within a year of graduating, the short-term goal would be to tour so much that none of them would need to get “real” jobs. With this goal in the back of their minds, they spent their senior year playing shows on the road on the weekends and making it back in time for class on Monday. It was admittedly exhausting, but the experiences they gained and the people they met as “weekend warriors” provided them an education no one would have ever received from a four-year university in America. They saw the reality of the constructs they were being taught.
“I think about the fact that I’m licensed to teach and I could be making a real paycheck. That sounds tight but at the same time, fuck that. There’s a reason I’m not doing that,” Joe said. They were brave enough to leave the cave and, in doing so, they overcame the stereotypes of starting a band in college, switching gears from students working towards a job to artists working towards a purpose. That is also why Patrick’s departure did not signify the end of Stoop Kids as we know it. Of course dynamics changed when he left and Sam took his place, but when Pat was confident that the Stoop Kids life was not what he wanted, there were five other guys that knew without a doubt that this was exactly the life they wanted and needed to lead, breathing a new air into the music.
Following their graduation through the end of the summer before leaving for their first full-length tour, I witnessed some of the smoothest transitions I’ve ever seen for college graduates.
I watched Griffin move in with Tom and then watched Joe move onto the couch in that same house. I watched Sam play his first show as a Stoop Kid and later, his first show at the Logon in Beaumont, an unofficial swearing in of sorts. I watched them play their first show at Tipitina’s, a historic venue and benchmark for bands in New Orleans. I watched them in the studio recording their first single following Already Out Of Time. Sam and I even managed to sit down for an interview, much like I had done with the rest of the boys months earlier. “There’s a lot of musicians who do it because they like playing or because it’s a nice hobby but I think even above playing, I love performing for people so much. If I could never have a job and just perform for people forever, I would. I want to die onstage, that’s what it comes down to, because I couldn’t see myself doing anything else.”
He added, “Really, I’m excited to see how everybody takes what we are giving and I’m excited to play with [Griffin] more. I can’t say I’ve respected anybody’s performance level more than his because he’s so good at [letting go]; he’s so good at just saying ‘You know what? I don’t know these people, they don’t know me, it’s time to just let go of my image and just be who I am right now’.” And even though there is a part of Joe, Griffin, Tom, and Dave that wanted themselves and Pat to be the ones to make it through, “[Sam] has filled a void that we didn’t know we needed to fill,” Tom expressed.
The night before leaving for the tour, the boys threw a party at the house where Tom, Griffin, and Joe had been living. It was late September and still oppressively hot in New Orleans. The was no furniture in the house and orange jungle juice filled the cups. Pat even played a song for old time’s sake, as they say. I still don’t know if Stoop Kids have truly realized the ability they have to form connections with other artists, music fans, and humanity as a whole but it is what sets them apart, that will be the reason they survive while others perish in the business we call music. “This tour might be it, who knows? If we come back and fucking hate each other and we hate this band, then that’s it,” Sam said, but I believe I speak for a great many people when I say that won’t happen, at least not from where I’ve been sitting.
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