Tailgate: Now Rocker-Friendly

Punk rockers in skinny jeans will serenade half-drunk, sweatshirt-wearing football fans in an awkward meeting of the campus music underground and the “Crimson Crazies” crowd at the Harvard-Yale tailgate on Nov. 18.

The Harvard College Alliance for Rock and Roll (HCARAR) has snagged a spot at the tailgate, where it will host a five-act battle of the bands, Harvard versus Yale.

Part of the tailgate concert’s appeal for HCARAR is introducing both campus’ scenes to a wider segment of the population.

“It provides a location for visibility in student music that doesn’t normally occur,” says president (and Plan B for the Type A’s drummer) Shirley L. Hufstedler ’07. “[We’re] getting people to hear student music and all the awesome things that students at Harvard are doing creatively.”

Three Harvard bands will be selected by undergraduates based on an online voting system.

“None of us in HCARAR have any objectivity, so we just can’t make that kind of decision,” Hufstedler says.

HCARAR hopes to recruit two Yale bands by tapping into networks of friends, contacts at both the student radio stations and the recently created creative licensing project called the Antennae Alliance, and, of course, Facebook.com.

The two-hour event will be judged by a panel of students from both schools, along with a tie-breaking judge from a local music business to keep the competition fair. The winner will receive not only a gift basket assembled by local music businesses, but what both football teams are fighting for inside the stadium: bragging rights.

Plus, the last guitarist to get hypothermia at the always-freezing tailgate wins.