Conversations from the Lowell Summer Music Series
Ripe has spent more than a decade figuring out what turns a concert into something more. On August 9th, they’ll bring that approach to Boarding House Park as part of the Lowell Summer Music Series.
There are plenty of perfectly reasonable ways to spend a summer night without dancing in public.
You can grab a beer, find a comfortable spot somewhere toward the back, fold your arms and watch the band. Nobody is going to throw you out. Nobody is going to make you take a test afterward. You paid for the ticket. You can do whatever you want.
Robbie Wulfsohn just thinks you might be leaving something on the table.
“Part of what makes really big concerts feel as good as they are is a bunch of people really excited to be there and riffing off of the moments of the show,” the Ripe frontman told me recently. “It feels like it’s just free serotonin on the table.”
That idea kept coming up during our conversation. Not dancing specifically, but participation. The strange exchange that happens between a band and a crowd when everybody decides to give a little more to the night than simply showing up.
Ripe has been chasing that exchange for a long time.
The band came together at Berklee and stayed in Boston after graduation, spending roughly a dozen years in the city. Before there were national tours and bigger rooms, there was the Middle East upstairs, T.T. the Bear’s, P.A.’s Lounge, house parties and pretty much anywhere else that could be convinced to give them a stage.
“Brighton Music Hall was like the mountaintop when we began, man,” Wulfsohn said. “Literally everywhere in Boston that we could talk into putting us on a stage, we hit at least once on the circuit of kind of trying to sell any tickets.”
Those years mattered.
Ripe developed in front of actual people. They had the opportunity to try things, figure out what worked, figure out what didn’t and come back six months later a slightly different band.
Wulfsohn called it “miles on the pavement.”
“We got very lucky and have been able to consistently be playing shows and figuring out what we are as a band through the live music space with people actually wanting to be there enough that we get to do it again,” he said. “We got to kind of figure out what we wanted to be as a band with the freedom to then go and test that with people that actually wanted to buy a piece of the band.”
More than a decade later, the rooms are bigger, the catalog is deeper and the band has changed along the way. But that relationship with the people standing on the other side of the stage still seems to be at the center of what Ripe does.
If you’ve watched the band perform, that probably isn’t surprising.
There isn’t much distance between Wulfsohn and the crowd. He moves constantly, talks to people, reads the room and, when necessary, gives it a little push.
“One hundred percent,” he said when I asked whether getting people moving was something Ripe consciously works toward. “I sometimes worry I’m an asshole about it from the stage.”
Wulfsohn has been to enough shows where a great rhythm section is doing everything it can while the crowd slips into what he called the accidental comfort of simply “consuming the show.”
That isn’t what he wants from a Ripe crowd.
Especially now.
“Especially as everything gets more expensive,” he said. “You’re going to pay 2.5X what you did like three years ago to stand there and watch this like you’re watching a concert like the movie. And it’s like, if there’s a way for us to put our body in the way to make people do something different there, I would like to do that.”
There’s an important distinction in what he means.
Ripe isn’t demanding that everybody in the room dance. Wulfsohn isn’t interested in embarrassing somebody who doesn’t want to move or telling an audience there is a correct way to enjoy a concert.
He’s interested in the person who wants to let go but hasn’t quite gotten there yet.
“I just don’t want people to be standing there not dancing because they’re embarrassed about how they look,” he said. “If you’re ambivalent about it, but you don’t know where to get started, here’s a bunch of handholds.”
The Massachusetts crowd came up while we were talking, mostly because I joked about how often you can walk into a show around here and find a room full of people enjoying themselves with their arms crossed. Robbie knew what I was talking about, but he was also quick to point out that it isn’t the whole story. Ripe has spent enough time around New England to see plenty of the other side too, whether that’s jam crowds, festivals or some of the reggae scene down on the Cape, where nobody seems particularly concerned about how th
ey look once the music gets going.
“The stand-with-your-arms-crossed vibe is out there, but so is the dance-without-being-told,” he said. “And we can just kind of build a highway between those two places.”
That feels like a pretty good assignment for Ripe
when they get to Boarding House Park, because a summer show in Lowell is going to give them a different kind of crowd to figure out. T
here will be people who have seen Ripe a bunch of times, families coming into the park together and probably a decent number of people who heard a few songs, liked what they heard and decided this seemed like a good way to spend a night. Robbie doesn’t know exactly what that crowd is going to give him yet, and after doing this for more than a decade, he still seems to like it that way.
“I think every show is a little different,” he said. There is apparently still some nervousness too, which surprised me a little considering how comfortable he looks onstage. “From day one to now, there’s always a kind of aw-shucks nervousness that it’s not going to work, but a willingness to do whatever I can to make it as good of a night as possible for everybody involved,” he said. “I can sing all right, but my main job is to build a space and create a moment that allows people to get what they want out of the thing.”
That answer probably got closest to what I had been trying to figure out with him. What makes one night better than another? I don’t think Robbie believes there is some secret combination Ripe discovered after enough years on the road. Most of our conversation pointed in the opposite direction. You can prepare for a show, get very good at reading a crowd and learn when people need a little push and when it’s better to get out of the way, but you still don’t know what you’ve got until everybody is standing there together.
Ripe is still trying to grow, and Robbie talked openly about wanting the opportunity to play bigger shows, expand the production and create things that aren’t possible for them right now. At the same time, he sounded very aware of how easy it would be to spend an entire career looking at whatever comes next and miss the fact that the thing you’ve been working toward is already happening.
“The shows we get to play are awesome,” he said. “I get to live my life with my closest friends off the music that we make as an expression of that friendship and of that musical telepathy. That’s the best shit ever.”
I liked that answer because there wasn’t any fake lack of ambition attached to it. He isn’t pretending Ripe wouldn’t love to keep climbing. Of course they would. He just doesn’t seem interested in treating everything before the next milestone like some kind of waiting room, and that became even clearer when he said, “We’ve been at it long enough that it is very loud to us: A way to fall off the cliff early is to stop enjoying the present moments and focus too much on a future that you cannot predict. I would obviously love for the next thing that we do to be the biggest thing that we do. And if it isn’t, I still want to be very excited to wake up every morning and do my job.”
I asked Robbie what he would consider a successful night when Ripe gets to Boarding House Park. I figured we’d end up talking about the crowd, maybe selling the place out or having a bunch of people singing along. Instead, his answer went back to the fact that Ripe has been able to keep coming to places like Lowell in the first place. Boston was where the band started, but after sticking around and playing all over New England for years, the area outside the city became part of their home base too.
Robbie told me he feels “incredibly lucky” that Ripe has been able to build those relationships around New England. “We stayed in the area and we continued to play these kind of surrounding environs, and these are now part of the regions that we get to exist as a band.”
That history changes what a night like Lowell means to him. Ripe isn’t showing up in a city they’ve never been to, playing the show and getting back on the bus. They’ve spent years coming through this part of the country and watching people come back to see them. Robbie mentioned that one of his friends is bringing his young daughter to the Lowell show for her birthday, and the conversation went in a direction I hadn’t really expected.
I started thinking about some of the concerts I went to when I was younger. I couldn’t give you the setlist from most of them if I tried, and I definitely didn’t care how many tickets were sold. I remember what it felt like to be there. That’s part of what Robbie is thinking about now when he looks at a show like Lowell. Ripe is trying to put on a great show for the people who already know them, but somebody in that park could also be seeing a band for the first time and figuring out why people fall in love with doing this.
“We get to simultaneously be trying to get our regular crowd up and moving and also be formative concert memories,” he said. “It’s just a cool fucking thing.”
Maybe that’s my answer to the question I’ve been kicking around since Robbie and I started talking. I’m not sure there is one version of the perfect night, and after talking to him, I don’t think Ripe is looking for one either. They can get up there, play their asses off, try to get a few of the arms-crossed people to loosen up and give the crowd every opportunity to have a good time. What happens from there belongs to whoever showed up.
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