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| Tuesday, July 03, 2007 |
Green Band: Guster
From our July/August 2007 issue. This article is part of our larger package, the AJL Green List.
It is not uncommon for the indie rock band Guster to pause in the middle of a concert to dispense a piece of eco-friendly advice. Depending on the night, the announcement may come between “Satellite” and “The New Underground”, or maybe “Fa Fa” and “Manifest Destiny”. Given the opportunity, the band will describe how they’ve switched to biodiesel fuel on their tour bus and tried to limit their carbon emissions, and how, for several years now, they’ve tried to get other bands to do the same.
On the spectrum of celebrity activism, ending global warming is a focus for Guster, whose three founding members met at Tufts University in the 1990s.
“Our mission is to green the music industry and educate fans of music everywhere,” Adam Gardner, Guster’s guitarist/vocalist, told me recently. Reached by telephone on his 34th birthday, Gardner says, “I think what’s cool about this is that you can walk the talk and actually display it at your shows. It’s really cool to be able to say, ‘This is what we’re doing and we’re excited about it, and you can join us in our fight against global warming.’”
Since 2004, Guster has been promoting its environmental message primarily through Reverb, an organization founded by Gardner and his wife, Allison Sullivan, another Tufts grad who formerly worked for the Forest Action Network. (Before that, she was an advocate for green space in New York City. “Obviously, a worthy cause,” Gardner says.)
Hoping to inspire musicians along those lines, Reverb helps artists and bands go green. In many cases, this means switching to biodiesel fuel, using biodegradable catering products, recycling and reducing waste, selling eco-friendly merchandise, and using Jumbotron messaging. At concerts, Reverb often sets up “eco-villages” where non-profit organizations interact with fans to teach them about environmental activism.
While Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (with a soundtrack by Melissa Etheridge) cemented environmental concerns on many people’s consciousness, one of the first artists to advocate for the environment was Bonnie Raitt, who coined the term “Green Highway” in 2002. When Gardner and Sullivan first launched Reverb, they worked closely with Raitt, whose “Green Highway” became their model.
Raitt is still involved in Reverb, and today the organization’s client roster reads like a Billboard top 20 list and includes John Mayer, Norah Jones, Sheryl Crow, Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Dave Matthews Band, the Fray, and Barenaked Ladies.
Working with BNL during the band’s Fall/Winter 2006-07 tour, Reverb helped created “Barenaked Planet,” an outreach program where fans neutralized 8.5 million miles of driving. The band itself neutralized 500 tons of carbon dioxide at their concerts, where Jumbotrons projected eco-slideshows and backstage recycling led to a 65% waste reduction rate. (The band also helped collect discarded guitar strings, which were re-crafted into artisan jewelry.)
“This has been an explosion,” says Gardner, who indicated that Reverb grew 500% in the last year. To date, he says, Reverb has “greened” more than 20 tours and 350 individual events. “We finally reached a tipping point, a post-’Inconvenient Truth’ era,” he says. “The debate is over about global warming. Now it’s about what we can do.”
For musicians and bands, the impetus for eco-friendliness is multi-pronged. On one level, their star power gives voice to the issue, and through their fan base, artists have the potential to educate and inspire thousands of music fans.
Music insiders say Reverb is riding a wave of industry activism and interest in the environment. “It’s in fashion right now to be green,” says Marc Ross, the executive director of Rock the Music, an environmental advocacy group that works with the music industry. “Not only do [musicians] have a platform, but I think the music also moves people in an emotional way.”
Increasingly, bands that tour in multi-vehicle caravans realize they can reduce the thumbprint they themselves leave on the environment. Last year, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke (a spokesman for Friends of the Earth) suggested he may stop touring due to the negative environmental impact of concerts and touring.
“You hear statements from people like Thom Yorke,” Gardner says. “There’s measurable impacts we have on the environment, all of us do. As a touring band, we saw it was an issue we wanted to address.”
For Gardner, who is Jewish, activism also may be something of a religious ideal. “My Hebrew is a little off,” Gardner says. “But isn’t it tikkun olam, heal the world? Maybe that conception has seeped its way into my consciousness.”
This article is part of our larger package, the AJL Green List.
-- Text by E.B. Solomont / Photo by C. Taylor Crothers
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