On a late afternoon in December, O.A.R. lead singer-songwriter Marc Roberge runs through “I Feel Home” during a sound check at The Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda. The anthem hardly needs another run-through; the band has performed it nearly 500 times in concert. But an orchestra is backing it for the first time, adding an extra layer of emotion.
“There are few things pure in this world anymore,” Roberge sings in his raspy voice, strings swelling. “And home is one of the few.”
Even without the special accompaniment, there might have been some extra emotional undertow on this particular day. Family members have come to watch the rehearsal. And kids are cavorting in the aisles. All of this is just miles from where the band grew up in Rockville, practicing night after night in a basement as all aspiring young rock bands seem to do.
O.A.R. has sold out Madison Square Garden and had its albums hit the Top 20 in the years since, paving its own path to success almost entirely apart from the machinery of record labels, radio and hype.
In their mid-30s now, several with kids of their own, the musicians still look remarkably clean cut and male model-like for a band whose name stands for “of a revolution.” There’s Roberge, with his pompadour and matinee idol looks; his childhood pal, curly-haired drummer Chris Culos; quiet stealth guitarist Richard On; tough bassist Benj Gershman; and saxophonist Jerry DePizzo, a tall addition the band acquired in college.
In a short while, they’ll perform a benefit concert for Heard the World Fund, the band’s nonprofit that promotes youth, education and sustainable programs in the U.S. and abroad. And they’ll think “how funny it is to see all of our family in the crowd,” Culos says.
The band likens it to that split-second sweep at the start of The Simpsons, where you see the townspeople and recognize them all. It takes them back to where everything began.
“We don’t meet a lot of bands that have the same history we do,” says Culos, who grew up with Roberge on the same leafy block of Falls Road in Rockville.
Playing in a rock band was hardly a rebellious act for the pair. It was more of a family tradition. Culos’ father, Carl, was a professional drummer for touring soul bands, including Edwin Starr. Roberge’s big brother, Jeff, plays in the touring band Foxtrot Zulu.
“Marc and I started our first band in eighth grade,” Culos says. “We had played the eighth-grade talent show.”
“They were very rough around the edges,” says Carl Culos, the drummer’s dad. “It was quite humorous listening to what they were doing. I really had to bite my tongue along the way.”
They recruited someone to play bass, and fellow middle school student On to play guitar because somebody told them he was good. “When we approached him at the lunch table in the cafeteria, he thought we were coming to fight him maybe,” Chris Culos says.
Nobody could have guessed at the time that the two-song set in the Robert Frost Middle School gymnasium—a rock/reggae version of Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight” and Pearl Jam’s “Porch”—would lead to a band that would sell millions of albums. The one thing listeners that day did know was that it was loud.
“At that point it was like the loudest room I’d ever been to at that age,” recalls Gershman, who was in the audience. But “it was cool.”
The eighth-grade quartet drifted apart, as so many young bands do. Richard On left, and so did the original bassist. But eventually the guitarist was lured back, and Culos asked Gershman—a friend and fellow lifeguard who played bass—to stop by the basement. By then, Roberge was already writing some of the songs that would appear on the band’s first album.
“Immediately, the four of us clicked,” Culos says. “That was the original O.A.R. four.”
Rather than play more covers once they hit Thomas S. Wootton High School, “we thrived on creating original music,” Gershman says, “and I think the feeling of that drew our friends in and kept us going.”
From those roots, they developed their own sound, though Gershman calls it “more of an accidental sound.”
It was the loose, mellow vibe of rock and reggae, as led by an acoustic guitar on a set of story songs their friends could relate to: “That Was a Crazy Game of Poker,” “The Wanderer” and “Black Rock” (referring to the regional park north of Germantown).
Culos pulls out the band’s original bio, a kind of teenage manifesto to which the members still cling: “of a revolution is a five-piece, high energy, island-vibe-driven band piecing together jazz, blues, rock and reggae influences…with the goal of representing a new generation of kids who are full of dreams and new aspirations.”
It’s a statement as youthful and idealistic as the band’s name, all ellipses and e.e. cummings lowercase. The band’s name actually was lifted from a short story that Roberge wrote at 16, part of the youthful fiction that gave birth to The Wanderer, the name of the group’s first album, along with the lyrics in some of its early songs (though the band later would become known by its initials, O.A.R., instead).
“It sounded cool—of a revolution…,” Culos says. But “it was nothing political or anything. …It was a musical revolution: We’re 16-year-old kids and we’re making music we wanted to make.”
Others liked it, too. At the band’s weekly, Thursday night gig at the now-defunct Grand Marquis pizzeria in Olney, “I remember driving up and seeing 300 kids in line waiting to get in,” Carl Culos says.
The elder Culos used to drive them to local bars around Rockville and even down in D.C. “As long as I went with them, they were allowed to book these jobs,” he recalls. “They were given some bookings that didn’t go on until midnight.”
The Wootton High School students saved the money they made at gigs to record their first album in the basement studio of Gantt Kushner’s Gizmo Recording Company in Wheaton.
In addition to being fairly good young musicians, Kushner says they had something extra: “Marc was really a poet. He wrote about things he couldn’t have had any idea about, but he wrote them in a way people really believed,” he says. “Marc’s stuff was fully formed.”
As such, the sessions went quickly, and the band sold a lot of copies through CD Baby, an online service that provides distribution for do-it-yourself bands.
All revolutionaries eventually come to a crossroads, though, and for O.A.R., college presented a potential turning point. Would they all scatter to different campuses, as most high school rock bands do, reuniting during school breaks, if ever?
Instead, three made the decision to attend Ohio State, where the student population of about 50,000 was only slightly smaller than the population of Rockville. Richard On would join them there after a year at Montgomery College. And they would add the band’s final component with another OSU student, sax-playing Jerry DePizzo.
“I met Jerry the first day I was at Ohio,” Roberge says. The two hit it off, and DePizzo’s passionate style brought the band closer both to original rock ’n’ roll and to the acoustic horn dabbling of the Dave Matthews Band, which was growing in popularity among college students at the same time.
By now, O.A.R. had attracted fans who clung to the band as faithfully as college students do to their schools.
Allowing fans to tape shows led to a wider dissemination of their music, at first through trading and then through online file sharing. They made it clear that people could record their shows and upload them to Napster, leading to thousands of downloads.
Suddenly the band found it had fans wherever it went on its extensive tours.
Roberge’s brother Dave was enlisted to manage the band, booking it into clubs around the group’s homework, finals and college duties. Even for a band with a rising fan base, “school was the No. 1 thing,” Carl Culos says.
A second album was recorded with Kushner in his relocated studio in Silver Spring. “They were a lot more experienced,” Kushner recalls. “They knew what they wanted to do and how they wanted to sound.”
So that went quickly, as well. “Each [album] only took two days,” Roberge says.
The band was signed to an Atlantic Records subsidiary, Lava, in 2003, and started to make inroads on charts and airplay, although the mainstream media paid little attention to O.A.R. until 2006. That’s when the band sold out Madison Square Garden—a feat it repeated in 2007 and 2009.
For the elder Culos, who spent his younger years as a traveling musician, “I gotta tell you, when I got out of the train and saw that marquee [with] ‘O.A.R. SOLD OUT’ on it at Madison Square Garden, I got a lump in my throat.”
Inside, he saw the band going through its afternoon sound check. “I walked up and said, ‘Chris, I gotta sit behind the drums and play them for just a minute. So I can say I played the Garden.’ ”
Kushner was gobsmacked, too, when he went to see the band a few years ago at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia. It was the first time he saw them play live.
“The place [was] sold out, 12,000 people, and they started playing their first song and everybody started singing. They knew the words to every song. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I was as proud as if they were my own kids,” Kushner says.
“They had become a great rock ’n’ roll band.”
Today, the band’s early adaptation to computer technology continues with an unusually close connection to fans through Facebook (with 448,600 “likes” at press time), emails, Twitter and texts, all of which they check daily.
“At this point, I’ve known some of [these] people for 10, 12, 15 years,” Roberge says. “Some of them I text a set list to and say, ‘What do you think of this?’ Or send them demos. ‘What do you think of this?’ It’s become such an interconnected community.”
As O.A.R. has matured as a band, its members have achieved a work-life balance that’s not always easy in the music world.
“Which means: Tour a little less and pay a little more attention to your studio albums, so your songs can live on a broader spectrum than just on the Internet or trading,” Roberge says by phone from New York after dropping off his son at preschool earlier that morning.
“That’s going to change some people’s view of you,” he says. “They always think you’re the same age you were when you started. But for me as an artist, I need to change, I need to evolve, I need to constantly grow with my life.”
It was while the band was recording its 2011 album, King, that Roberge got a crash course in dealing with change: His wife had a cancer scare. She has since recovered, but the experience taught him something about mortality.
“It really gave a lot of perspective to what is truly important,” Roberge says.
In addition to Roberge spending more time with family, the cancer scare gave more depth to his writing. “At the end of it,” he says, “we realized music is truly important; it does heal, it does help and it does cure.”
As the band works on a new album from the musicians’ various home bases—Roberge, Gershman and touring pianist Mikel Paris in New York; Culos in Chicago; On in Arlington, Va.; and DePizzo in Columbus, Ohio—it has a new sense of purpose.
“The last few years have had a lot of peaks and valleys, and we really all just want to be happy,” Roberge says. “I think that’s what our fans really want.”
To change things up, Roberge has been traveling to Nashville, Tenn., a couple times a month to work on new songs with new collaborators, including pedal steel guitarist Robert Randolph and musician Nathan Chapman, who has produced most of Taylor Swift’s work.
“In Nashville, I find that I’m learning a ton very quickly,” Roberge says.
He and the other band members also have been returning to Bethesda a couple of times a month to record at Mark Williams’ Sucker Punch studio with Jeff Juliano, who has mixed their last few albums, as well as albums by John Mayer and Paramore.
“We’ve been working there quite a bit, developing demos, cutting vocals, anything we need to move this process forward,” Roberge says.
The band wants a few songs out before its annual summer tour, which this year will take O.A.R. from Riverbend in Cincinnati, where it will perform with the Dave Matthews Band on July 12; to Citi Field in New York, where it will perform after a Mets game on Aug. 3; to a number of amphitheaters, including Merriweather Post Pavilion on Aug. 1.
And Roberge wants to release the latest studio album—the band’s eighth—before Christmas.
The goal for this album, Roberge says, is “to push myself further lyrically. …This album, I’m not going to stop writing these songs until I’ve said what I’ve wanted to say.”
When the band is in Bethesda recording or performing—as it did at Strathmore this past December—it “allows us to be happy and put out music that makes people happy,” Roberge says. “Because I think that’s what our fans really want.
“They want to be uplifted, they want to feel good. So we have to feel good when we make this stuff.”
And as he writes in “I Feel Home,” sometimes the best place to feel good is right back among your friends and family.
Well, I’ve been away but now I’m back today, and there ain’t a place I’d rather go. I feel home.
Roger Catlin, a onetime rock critic for The Hartford Courant, is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.
O.A.R. will be at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia on Aug. 1. Doors open at 5 p.m. For tickets—which cost $35 to $174.95—go to www.merriweathermusic.com.
