CU says ‘Hey Mickey’ with fall concert

Breaking with recent tradition, Columbia’s special events club Bacchanal has decided to host a fall concert this year in addition to its annual spring one. The revived installment will feature notorious rapper Mickey Avalon, along with Columbia’s own band Night Eyes, and will take place tonight at 9:30 p.m. in Lerner’s Roone Arledge Auditorium.

Bacchanal Co-President Jody Zellman, GS, hopes the concert will offer students a way to reduce stress. “Seeing as the time in between Thanksgiving and finals is the most stressful, we are putting on a show that will be a stress-diffusing great time as well as an entertaining spectacle,” Zellman said.

Co-President Alex Kirk, CC ’11, added that the club thought that one big event in anticipation of the annual spring concert would put Bacchanal’s budget to better use than a few, low-attended, smaller events. “We aren’t trying to replicate the spring concert,” she said, “but rather create a new event in the fall that will concentrate our programming on a larger and more successful event like when we had Bob Saget come last year.”

Kirk, for one, expects the rapper to be a real crowd-pleaser. “He’s a lot of fun and puts on high energy shows that I think a lot of students will enjoy,” she said.

The opening act Night Eyes, formerly known as SSSEN, consists of Alex Klein, CC ’12, and Anthony Natoli from NYU.

The student band has experienced a recent string of successes—their new EP “Exhale” was recently released on iTunes, and another song is featured in a promotional clip for MTV’s new series “Skins.”

Kirk said that the club chose Night Eyes because Klein is a well-known campus figure and that the club wanted a change from the kind of bands recently chosen for their spring concert. “We haven’t had an electronic group perform in the last few years so we thought we’d mix things up a bit this year,” Kirk said.

Klein said that the Bacchanal organizers originally wanted to hire him alone as a DJ for the event, but he convinced them to hire the band. Klein said that Bacchanal “was looking for a DJ because they didn’t want to start with a rock band, but when I convinced them that we are definitely not a rock band and play dance music, they decided to have us open.”

By having Night Eyes open for Mickey Avalon, the Bacchanal club hopes to help the band gain further notoriety around campus. “We know that by incorporating student performers into Bacchanal events has the potential to open bigger doors for them as performers,” Zellman said.

Night Eyes wants to give a performance worthy of their famous headliner. “We’re really psyched for the show,” Klein said. “We just recently started syncing up lights that flash to the beat when we perform so it should be a crazy visual experience as well.”

Natoli of Night Eyes also added that he is excited to be a part of a concert at Columbia. “Playing for Columbia students is great because they’re open to new and experimental sounds and because they need to thrash their pain away,” he said.

In tune with its spring counterpart, Zellman hopes the fall concert could also become a Columbia tradition in the future. “The fall concert is our latest effort to provide students with a means of enjoyment outside of Netflix,” Zellman said. “If we can get the tradition rolling, the fall concert will turn into an annual pre-game to the wonder that is the spring concert.”