The best performance the members of Silent Diner ever gave was on the night of their friend "Hippie" Katie's birthday party. Band members Matt Davis and Chris Graffeo, both third-year College students, exchanged knowing glances as they described the memorable show.
More than 100 people came to the party who "really enjoyed our type of music," Davis said. Driven by the energy of the audience, Silent Diner played for nearly six hours.
"We were on that night," Graffeo said. "Our jams were really inspired... We had a strong connection with everyone there."
Luckily, that powerful performance was recorded. On the recording, amid cheers and applause, one girl's voice proclaims, "You guys are so awesome."
Silent Diner, made up of Davis, Graffeo and third-year College students Anderson Gould and Tolga Sursal, is not a dinky college band that just plays buddies' birthday parties.
A self-described "jam band," Silent Diner members term the music they play as rock, but they infuse their songs with elements of other genres such as funk and hip-hop.
The band typically gives at least one show per week, often in bars or at other local venues like Coupe deVille's. They've gone as far as Virginia Beach and Richmond, and they've even opened for the band Sister Hazel.
This weekend, they'll be playing in two University events, Alpha Epsilon Pi's benefit concert Pi Groove and Rock '04 Kerry, organized by the University Democrats and Cavs for Kerry.
But before the bars, and even before the Amphitheatre, Silent Diner started practicing in the humble basement of Hancock residence hall. Sursal and Graffeo had been in the same band in high school and agreed they would keep playing together at the University. Here, they joined with Davis and Gould to form Silent Diner.
Those first-year practices were "interesting," Sursal said.
"We talked to the RAs and worked everything out, but there were still some people who complained about the noise," he said.
Then again, the mysterious sounds echoing from the basement tended to draw spectators.
"People would come in and just sit," Sursal said. "It's not always fun to watch a band practice, but when we started goofing around and playing, people enjoyed it. We would try to be as crazy as possible, to make sounds we'd never made before. People saw that we were having fun, and they would just come and hang out. It was a good time."
Silent Diner broke their silence -- that is, they played their first individual show -- in front of a packed Tuttle Coffeehouse.
By the time the members were second years, Silent Diner had "graduated" to the Corner, and by the end of that year, they had progressed to the Outback Lodge and venues along West Main Street, Davis said.
"We tend to fill up most bars at this point," Graffeo said.
But playing for a full house wasn't always a good thing, Davis noted, especially in the beginning.
"A lot of those are prepackaged crowds," he said, meaning that the audience would come primarily for the bar and not for Silent Diner. Consequently, Davis explained, "It's tough to gauge reactions to songs and base our set list on the crowd."
As the band moved on, however, the same faces started popping up in the audience.
Unlike "prepackaged" audiences, veteran crowd members have enough Silent Diner background to give the band constructive feedback.
"When we're experimenting with something new, we know it's going to catch their attention," Graffeo said. "They're a good sounding board."
The band's own playing experience is also enriched when they perform for audiences who are familiar with and enjoy their music, Davis and Graffeo said. That's what made "Hippie" Katie's birthday party so perfect.
"It's all about being there for the moment of artistic birth . . . what it means for us to create it and for everyone to receive it," Graffeo said, referring to his favorite performance. "Our music was more well-received [that night] than it had ever been."
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to sync climbing the venue ladder with getting this sort of audience reception.
"A big hurdle is when most of the places you're playing are Corner bars, but a lot of your friends are still under 21," Graffeo said. So they try to play at University events, including the ones this weekend, to "give our fans who are not of age an opportunity to come see us."
Graffeo said the band's overall confidence has risen since they began playing together. An essential element of that confidence is the harmony between band members, now that they know each other much better.
Despite all their success, harmony and brotherhood, the members of Silent Diner are still college students, which can be problematic. Most notably, they sometimes have difficulty meeting the band's goal practice time -- they aim for 10 hours per week.
"It's a bummer to be in class all day until 4 o'clock and be coming home, looking forward to playing, and then you get a message on your voicemail that's like, 'Sorry, I have to pick up some extra stuff,' or, 'Sorry, I have to write a paper tonight,'" Graffeo said.
It's not that they're lazy -- the band members showed up at the University 10 days before classes started just to practice eight hours per day. But as soon as classes came into the picture, that number dropped dramatically. Conflicts are complicated by the band members' side activities, as well. Graffeo is on the staff of The Declaration, Davis is in AEPi, Gould is a bus driver and Sursal is a member of PK German, a committee of the University Programs Council.
Yet while Silent Diner members said they get frustrated about these scheduling difficulties, they don't pass around blame.
"It's a feeling that's not rooted in frustration for each other, just frustration for the situation," Davis said. They said they have never had doubts about the band itself.
"It's something really special, especially in this time of our lives," Davis said.
Having moved up from their first-year rehearsing experience, Silent Diner now practices in a back room of Graffeo, Gould and Sursal's house. The upside of this location, they said, is that they can leave all of their equipment in the room. In the past, they would spend an hour setting up and an hour taking down the equipment; a two-hour practice would be needlessly doubled. Now, if they have a spare hour, they squeeze in extra practice time.
But even with this new advantage, the hours don't come close to adding up to the band's ideal playing schedule.
"One of the biggest frustrations is that this is something I know we care about, but it's impossible to put in the time to do things musically and artistically that we want to do," Graffeo said.
After graduation, they will have that chance because they plan to pursue the band full time -- though they haven't yet discussed details. Once they've "finished the business of school," as Graffeo put it, the band members will finalize plans for taking Silent Diner to the next level.
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