Paul DeGeorge loves Harry Potter. Well, everybody loves Harry.
But Paul DeGeorge loves him so much that he started writing songs about Harry Potter. So much that he started writing songs as Harry Potter. And named his band Harry and the Potters. And dressed like Harry Potter. And, when the Norwood, Mass.-based Harry and the Potters got popular two years ago, quit his job as a chemical engineer to devote himself to the band.
And Paul DeGeorge is not alone.
The little band that DeGeorge, 28, founded in 2002 with his brother Joe, 20, has since taken over both of their lives and helped launch an entire genre of music known as wizard rock.
As anticipation grows for the release of the seventh and (sob!) final book (“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” for those of you hiding from the Harry hype), wizard rock is at the height of its popularity. A half-dozen bands are touring the country, a couple hundred have songs on MySpace and are self-producing EPs or entire albums and waiting to see how it all ends.
As H.P. has evolved from book series to movies to breathless blog juice to social phenomenon, it’s inevitable that all the buzz needs a backbeat, an anthem, a soundtrack.
So, in the intensely social world of Harry Potter, when Matt Maggiacomo of Providence, R.I., invited Harry and the Potters to perform at a house party, there was much love in the room. When he invited them back the next year, April 2005, the crowd was bigger.
Then, Maggiacomo’s friends Brian Ross and Bradley Mehlenbacher decided to open for the Potters by dressing up as Harry’s nemesis, performing as Draco and the Malfoys. Maggiacomo joined the action by penning a few songs as the Whomping Willows, a nod to a magical tree that attacks people.
Other odes to Harry had cropped up: In 2000, the L.A.-based pop-punk band Switchblade Kittens penned an “Ode to Harry.” Five year later, Alex Carpenter of the Remus Lupins posted a song about Severus Snape on MySpace, and discovered the online network that is wizard rock when hundreds of fans found him on the site.
At Harvard Square on July 20, Draco and the Malfoys and Harry and the Potters will perform for an audience – the Harvard Square Business Association anticipates 10,000 to 20,000 people – celebrating the midnight release of the final book. That’s an enormous audience for this type of niche band. Then they’ll join the fans queuing up to buy the tome and read the final 784 pages of Harry’s adventures.
The frenzy over Book 7 has propelled wizard rock to these heights. The bands have tens of thousands of friends on MySpace, with Harry and the Potters approaching 100,000. Maggiacomo has released two CDs. Draco and the Malfoys just finished their second CD, and later this month will join Harry and the Potters on a tour of the East Coast, Midwest and Ontario. Other bands, including the L.A.-based Remus Lupins and the Seattle-based Parselmouths, are on tour.
So what’s the difference between those who rock as wizards and your garden-variety, non-thematically-inclined bands?
“I played for 16 years where people show up and the cool thing to do is stand there against the wall with your arms crossed and look down your nose at the band,” said Ross, 32, of his past life in indie-rock bands around Rhode Island. “But with wizard rock, we’re all fans of Harry Potter. That gives us a common ground to start from. There’s an atmosphere where everyone wants to show up and have a good time.”
A love of rocking and Rowling is the only requirement. Most bands have a punk-rock influence, and the genre has spawned everything from the Parselmouth’s techno-influenced “Voldemort Fangirl” (sample lyric: “It’s not personal / What I’m saying is true / Voldy, I’d rather just play fangirl to you”) to the Remus Lupins’ acoustic, lighters-in-the-air-style ballad “Remember Cedric” (“We know you tried / To make Hogwarts proud / So I keep ‘em singing / Yeah, singing out loud / Remember Cedric Diggory”).
“Who here feels like a muggle?” Paul DeGeorge wants to know. He’s onstage in front of an outdoor crowd in downtown Los Angeles. DeGeorge and his brother Joe are dressed in matching Potter regalia: white shirts under gray sweaters, red-and-yellow striped ties, wire-rim glasses.
No one, apparently, feels like a muggle. About 200 people sit on the grass. It’s the middle of the afternoon rush hour; office drones and traffic stream past.
“Who here feels like a wizard?” Paul asks.
“Whoooooo! Yeah!” Hands fly into the air, the crowd jumps to its feet. The brothers and their drummer, Andrew MacLeay, launch into the first song, “Voldemort Can’t Stop the Rock.” Everyone sings along, which is easy, since the title is pretty much the only line.
The venue? It’s not the House of Blues, or even a hip hangout. This is a corner of the lawn at the central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. “Let’s tear it up with our magical dance moves!” Paul says, and the crowd obliges.
The sound is simple, catchy rock – think the White Stripes crossed with Raffi. Joe plunges into the audience with his mic; happy teen-agers high-five him. Everyone jumps up and down, yelling along.
The sound quality is lame, the music is sloppy, but Harry and the Potters are not about fancy guitar work. And this is not a crowd of rock critics or posers. Median age: 18, though some gray-hairs hang in the back, singing along, and a few little kids run in circles, knocking into each other like puppies.
Some are garbed for the Harry Potter theme: here, a wizard cloak, over there, school uniforms. Harry and the Potters T-shirts with owls or lightning strikes or the words “Save Ginny!” are flying off the merchandise tables at the back.
“We’re just really into the books,” Clare Kelley, 18, said. “It’s great how they promote the books and get kids to read.”
Her friend Julia Wagner, 17, whose red T-shirt says “Reading Is Radical,” saw Harry and the Potters the past two summers at the library.
So she must really like the music?
Wagner winces a bit. “They’re really exuberant, that’s what I like about them,” she said.
Kelley added, “I think they’ve gotten better.”
Paul DeGeorge is the first to admit that musicianship is not the strength of the band. He sees this as part of its audience appeal: “They know we’re not the best singers and keyboard players, but we’re OK. … The bands that I like, I look for passion and ability to engage an audience.”
The DeGeorge brothers have vast quantities of both. The combination of their happy, who-cares personalities and Harry Potter fanaticism has cast a spell over book-loving teens across the country.
But Wizard rock is a bit like Puff the Magic Dragon; Harry is growing up too fast. The music will always be there, playing on old Web sites. But in five years, will wizard rock be anything but a footnote in this literary pop-culture phenomenon?
“I think that people are always going to be engaged in this story to some degree,” said Ross of the Malfoys.
For the most part, the future does not weigh heavily on the wizard rockers. They live for today, for the rock – but for the love and the literacy, too.
Talk to enough wizard rockers, listen to their lyrics, and it becomes clear there’s something more in all this than just virtue and inspiration: Wizard rock is an escape into a different world – maybe not Hogwarts, but a world of nonjudgmental fun where grown-ups dress as wizards, evil is vanquished by song, and reading is cool.
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