In October 1988, Parousia played at one of the most notable colleges in Southern California, UCLA, in Cooperage Hall (sometimes referred to as “the Coop”), at the Westwood Campus.
It was pledge week for the California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG), “an independent statewide student organization that works on issues like environmental protection, consumer protection, and hunger and homelessness.” Sounds like a noble mission statement, right? Yet, some say that CALPIRG is nothing more than a glorified lobbying group that largely relies on poor college students for funding.
Others say they are a voice of sanity, fighting powerful interests on issues like obesity (serving soft drinks on campus), the environment (responsible for banning the use of plastic shopping bags in CA) and consumer protection (the recall of unsafe toxic toys like the Ninja Turtles Pencil Case).
Parousia was approached by a CALPIRG member at our October 17th show at the Whisky a Go-go and were asked if we wouldn’t mind doing a show for pledge week. How could we refuse such a noble cause (and the pay of course). CALPIRG liked to have interesting eclectic bands perform during their membership roundup in order to attract new young up and coming progressives into the fold.
We rocked the UCLA students with our most powerful songs like “The Weekend Starts Tonight”, “People’s Court”, “Caesar of the Modern Home”, “Turnaround” and “Mary’s Gone”. The crowd appreciated our quirky nerdi-ness, and at the end of the night we felt honored to have been chosen to play in this “collective of open-mindedness” and it reminded us of our New York days when we performed at Calisanctius high-school and the University of Buffalo’s Katharine Cornell Theater.
We were happy to be amongst the many other great bands welcomed to perform at Cooperage Hall during CALPIRG pledge week.
Some of those bands were:
I have no recollection of that, and Robert could never play “Weekend”.