Alumni

STUDENT | EXTRA CREDIT

The Music Man
WMXM booking director Nick Rennis ’08 created his job description — and an indie rock scene on campus — from scratch.

By Cara Jepsen ’86

As the College radio station's booking director, Nick Rennis '08 has brought dozens of bands to campus for free shows. He has built connections and a well-trafficked MySpace page and now has bands contacting him. (Photo by Chip Williams)

Grayslake, Illinois native Nick Rennis '08 chose to attend Lake Forest College because it was close to home — and because he wanted to keep playing with his high school friends in his instrumental ambient band A Promise Made.

"All my friends in bands had to break up as they went to college, and I didn't want that to happen," says Rennis, a guitarist and composer who has been involved in the Lake County music scene since he was a junior in high school. "Also, I wanted a smaller atmosphere where Iíd really get to know the people and the professors."

Rennis was walking across campus one day when former WMXM 88.9 FM General Manager Ethan Helm '07 approached him. "I saw one guy cutting across campus to see me," recalls Rennis, who was wearing a T-shirt for the band Haste the Day. He said, 'you'd be really good for the radio station — you should come to our meetings.' It was sort of awkward, but I'm glad he did it."
     
Rennis started a radio show with another Lake County music scenester. "Shortly thereafter I started talking to my friends at other schools," Rennis says. "Most were at larger universities and would talk about the different bands they'd seen on campus. They'd ask me who I'd seen and I always said nobody. There were small coffeehouse performances, but no bands that would actually play."
     
He asked Helm about WMXM bringing bands to campus, and arranged for A Promise Made to play in Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel with two bands from Arkansas. "A lot of people turned out even though we didn't do the best job of advertising the show," he recalls.
     
The following year Rennis created the position of radio station booking director, complete with a budget from the General Assembly. He started from scratch, calling all the Chicago bands he knew and branching out from there. He also recruited Lake County groups that no longer had any place to play. "Many of the venues I had gone to in high school were shutting down either because the people who ran them were going off to college or because the scene was starting to change," he says.  
     
WMXM's all-ages alcohol and smoke-free concerts feature three bands and are free and open to non-students. This year they will take place every month. The nearly 20 concerts in the chapel have included performances by Chin Up Chin Up, Make Believe and Owen — before they became popular — and averaged an audience of 100 to 150 people, many who come up from Chicago and nearby suburbs.   
 
"He's got his finger on the pulse of the independent music scene in a way that no other student has," says Associate Professor of Music Don Meyer, who chairs the music department. "He's always bringing up to me interesting bands that I've never heard of, so I'm always getting an education from him."
 
WMXM faculty advisor and Gustav E. Beerly, Jr. Assistant Professor of Communications David Park has attended most of the concerts at Reid and calls Rennis intelligent and self motivated. "He's a careful thinker and has a wry sense of humor that comes out frequently," he says. "He's also subtly subversive. He's exactly what I think the best college students are."
     
Park continues, "A liberal arts college is kind of like an indie rock label or band to begin with in the sense that we have autonomy that comes with being small and using some resources the way we want. Nothing reflects that better than the shows at the chapel, which arenít booked by an employee or faculty member but by a student — and for very little money. It just sums up what liberal arts colleges and DIY [do-it-yourself] culture have to do with each other, at their best."

When he's not booking bands or writing music or playing gigs, Rennis is enrolled in music and communications classes and tutorials that relate to his major as an independent scholar in Independent Music and the Media Context. He's also working on a thesis examining how new media affects regional music styles. "At one point there were a ton of different scenes; the East Coast was completely different from the West Coast," he explains. "Now, with the Internet and other media, that's not a factor anymore."
 
Last year Rennis scored an internship at Portland-based Haywire Booking after seeing an ad in the now defunct Punk Planet magazine; it's now a paying part-time gig that Rennis hopes to parlay into full-time work after graduation. "Booking bands with WMXM helped a lot at the internship," he says. "It's interesting because I know both sides of the booking spectrum, from the venue point of view and from the band or agentís perspective. I tend to know what both are looking for, and I consider it an advantage."
 
"Hopefully when I graduate, the job will still be there for me."
 
Eventually, he'd like to start his own record label — preferably in the Pacific Northwest.   

"He's particularly gifted as an electronic composer," Meyer says. "He's a really innovative musician with eclectic taste. I would imagine he'll go places as a musician — if he wants to."

Cara Jepsen '86 is a Chicago-based freelance writer.