No mosh pit. No smoke. No vomit. No lo-fi slacker rock. And now, at intermission, the audience of college and high school students heads out to the concert lobby to stand in line at the water fountain.
This is how it is at a Pete Breinholt and the Big Parade concert. Upbeat. Wholesome. Clean-cut kids who stand at their seats and bounce to the music. All of which makes Pete Breinholt both a surprising and inevitable Utah musical phenomenon.Pete Breinholt and the Big Parade play what one local critic calls big band folk, a name that conjures up not only a stage full of musicians but a certain old-fashioned tenderness. " ngs just on the edge of an almost overwhelming sentimentality" is how Private Eye Weekly put it when it almost begrudgingly named Breinholt's latest CD its No. 8 favorite local recording of 1996.
At its most basic it's troubadour music, full of lilting melodies that are both rousing and wistful. It's not what you hear on the kind of radio stations most teenagers listen to, yet local high school and college students have made Breinholt probably the biggest-selling local-music concert draw in the state.
Currently only Clover - a younger, hipper, local folk-rock band - can draw as big a crowd. Breinholt has sold out shows at both the University of Utah's 1,900-seat Kingsbury Hall and BYU's 1,500-seat de Jong Theater. At Media Play in Midvale, Breinholt's "Heartland" album is the store's best-selling local CD, with sales of 20 to 25 a week.
Why Breinholt has succeeded where so many local bands have not seems to have something to do with his music, something to do with his marketing, and a lot to do with his audience.
Breinholt was a Spanish major at the University of Utah and a returned LDS missionary when he began writing songs in the early '90s. His goal, he says, was just to play in a few local cafes. The Big Parade consisted of just three other members in 1993 when they decided to record 12 of Breinholt's songs. Not expecting much, the group recorded on tape and made only 500 copies.
It's a cheery, unpolished album full of simple strumming patterns and not much of a groove - and within a few months all 500 tapes had been snatched up.
In December that year, old friend Jon Schmidt asked Breinholt to open for his show at Kingsbury Hall. Breinholt had the good sense to book another, 350-seat hall for several weeks later, so he could announce the second concert at the first one. He was starting to get some momentum.
By then the group had turned the tape into a CD. By then, too, Breinholt was playing at LDS wards at the University of Utah, for students who then took the music to their younger siblings, who then went to their schools and spread the word. Soon, at Skyline and Highland, and then East and Olympus, Hillcrest and Viewmont, Pete Breinholt and the Big Parade were as big as their name.
At East High, the school's madrigals have sung Breinholt's "You Wore Flowers" as part of its repertoire. Soon a couple of pep clubs began using the song for their routines.
If you were looking for an antidote to, say, Courtney Love, "You Wore Flowers" would be your song. Nearly as upbeat as a polka, it's full of lyrics that are as bright and simple as a happy face sticker.
"I think kids have been bludgeoned by the music and the movies they're exposed to," says Big Parade drummer Rory Carerra, trying to explain Breinholt's popularity. "They need a break."
He didn't set out to have such a young following, says Breinholt. But it turned out to be a lucky break. High school students, too young for the downtown clubs, were happy to buy $5 tickets to concerts. They were excited to have a hero they could call their own. They were relieved, perhaps, that this was music anybody would sanction.
Breinholt says he has gotten letters of appreciation from thankful parents.
Still, despite all the success, Breinholt says he truly intended to do the band thing for just one year, then become a serious graduate student. But a study-abroad in Israel in the summer of 1994 made him change his mind, he says. It was there, after performing solo for fellow BYU students, that teachers told him he had a "gift" he shouldn't ignore. And the BYU students went back to Provo to play his CD for their friends.
By that fall, Breinholt had sold 3,000 CDs in Utah, more than any other local artist at that time. The next year he continued to market his band - booking local concert halls, sending out mailings, then waiting to see if anyone showed up. And nearly each time, at progressively larger and larger venues across the state, he would sell the place out.
Along the way, the Big Parade got even bigger. He added a string section (cello, violins, mandolins in addition to Mike Ensign's bass), piano, more percussion. A Big Parade show these days is a layered, full, energetic sound. But Breinholt thinks the appeal is something less tangible - what he calls a "communion" with the audience.
There are basically two kinds of folk music, he says. There's the darker folk of someone like Bob Dylan. "And the other half, I'm watching my words here, is more of a . . . " (a conversation with Breinholt is often a series of stops and starts as he searches for the right words) " . . . if you listen to John Denver there's an uplifting quality. There's a spirituality to it.
"There's a humility that comes across."
Also a certain amount of baldness. Breinholt is no strutting, posturing rock star. He's a 27-year-old guy who has lost most of his hair, a guy who owns a comfortable home in Sugarhouse decorated mostly by his mother.
"You're my hero!" someone yells out at a recent BYU concert.
"Dear Peter, I really like your music. I like it alot because it's clean, there isn't any swearing and there's alot of variety," writes a 10-year-old girl in a fan letter."
"Can I marry you?" writes another, older, fan.
Whether Breinholt can take this adoration beyond the boundaries of the state and his church is the next test. He is planning a solo testing of the waters in southern California in December at several colleges; then - if the reception is good - he'll return with several band members in January, hoping once again to get the momentum going.
He isn't looking for fame, he says. ("It may sound corny but I feel like I'm the servant here. I'm here to be of service to the people who have paid to see me.") But the reality, he adds, is that eventually he will saturate this market. If he wants to keep playing he has to find a bigger, and maybe older, audience.
How his style will play in Los Angeles or even Des Moines is unclear. Some people, like Scott Wells at Media Play in Midvale, predict national success. Others, like the two California young men who attended a recent Breinholt concert at BYU, are less encouraging. Every song sounded the same, said Jason Smith. Would he sell well in California? "It'll be a bomb," Smith predicted.
But for every detractor there seem to be a hundred fans eager to listen to Breinholt's songs. The lyrics aren't profound - Breinholt admits he writes less to get a point across or tell a story than to conjure up an image - but they seem to speak to his young audience.
His "Heartland" CD is more sophisticated and wistful than the earlier "Songs About the Great Divide." At the heart of most of them is a yearning, in some faraway place, to come back home again.
And there is another subtext, too, that seems to appeal to young Utah audiences. As a friend of Breinholt's once told him about his songs: "It makes me want to go marry a really good girl."