Gred and Forge

Harry Potter and the Wizard Rock Phenomenon

By Julia Reidy

Photos by Michael Traister“

Jarrod Perkins leads a double life. By day, he manages a bank in Asheville, N.C.; by night he’s a musician in an indie rock band called Lewis. Unlike others with secret identities, however, his existence isn’t split into what he does for a living and what he transforms into after nightfall. He doesn’t wear a cape. He’s not a superhero.

What Perkins hides is that he’s in a second band. A band, he explains, that only five people in Asheville (aside from his wife) know he fronts. This solo project, under the moniker Gred and Forge, showcases Perkins’ songs from the perspective of George Weasley, a character in J.K. Rowling’s hugely popular book series, Harry Potter. Drawing from a multitude of influences like Green Day-esque garage rock, pre-Beatles doo-wop, Johnny Cash and Nirvana, Perkins plays and sings all parts. He narrates Weasley’s speculated thoughts, exploring subject matter like the loss of his character’s twin (“Fred’s Dead”) or the unspoken promiscuousness of Harry’s love interest (“Ginny Gets Around”). He doesn’t tell his employees about it; he doesn’t even tell his other bandmates. “This is like my secret life. Nobody in our band even knew about it,” he says. “I told one guy in the band last week, but nobody knows I do this. This is my alter-ego.”

If Perkins has this secret, however, he’s certainly not the only one. In just a few years, the cult musical sub-genre known worldwide as wizard rock (or “wrock”), music inspired by the Harry Potter stories, has seen burgeoning numbers of fans and the bands they spawn. Perkins guesses there are about 450 bands, and those are only the ones he knows about. Though it’s a field defined by its teenage following, people of all ages have been inspired by Rowling’s books and the same holds true for wizard rock. Perkins is 30, and by no means the oldest. The agelessness of the stories translates directly into the music’s appeal.

That appeal makes starting a wrock band something of a sure thing in terms of fan reception. Nothing’s certain, of course, at the inception of a project, but a new wizard rock ensemble of any quality will meet a built-in fanbase eager to accept new and creative retellings of the stories they love so much. For Perkins, the beginning of his stint as Gred and Forge contrasted starkly with his 18 years of previous band experience due to this phenomenon.

“I’ve played music for a while,” he explains. “Everybody’s got a band, and everybody wants everybody to listen to their band. You may have good music, but you’ve got to force it on people. With this you don’t.” He sold a dozen copies of his debut Half the Band I Used To Be (the title alludes to Fred’s death) within an hour after posting it online. “That’s not a huge amount,” he says, “but I know playing in other bands you might play five shows and not sell a dozen CDs.” Gred and Forge fans have been more than receptive as he follows in the footsteps of wrock goliaths like Harry and the Potters, Draco and the Malfoys and The Moaning Myrtles. One particularly ecstatic woman even had the album art from Half the Band I Used To Be tattooed on her leg. “You just put your music out there and people hear it,” says Perkins. “And if you’re making good music, since they already like the content, they’re like ‘Oh my God, you’re so good!’ And you’re just killed with friend requests and comments and people.

Wrock bands share more than content and enthusiasm. The community fosters a type of caring often difficult to come by in the entertainment industry. As a group, wrockers donate to several charities. For example, all the proceeds from Perkins’ record sales go straight to Book Aid International, an organization that donates books to disadvantaged people in over 40 countries and is one of Rowling’s favorite causes. “That’s one of the things I’m impressed by,” he says. “They’re going beyond the books, and not just from the character’s perspective, but from what they can do in the world, through their music.”

A lot of wizard rock humanitarian work is done via the Harry Potter Alliance (www.thehpalliance.org), which fights real-world parallels to the evils explored in the HP series, like genocide, poverty, AIDS, environmental crises and discrimination. One of the group’s crowning achievements is a music festival for wizard rock called Wrockstock which takes place annually at a YMCA facility in Missouri. In 2007, the inaugural festival raised over $4,000 for charity. Gred and Forge played Wrockstock 2008, which occurred over the course of four days during Memorial Day weekend and featured 13 wrock bands and many Potter-related activities.

This month, Gred and Forge will be featured in an installment of the Wizard Rock EP of the Month Club, a series started in January of 2007 by wrock pioneers Harry and the Potters. The club puts out a monthly EP to raise money for the Harry Potter Alliance and for the non-profit First Book. While wrockers’ donations support reading among strangers, the music itself promotes other things.

“I feel like I’m not encouraging fans to read as much, because these people are already reading,” Perkins explains. “They wouldn’t be into this genre or even know about it if they weren’t readers in the first place.” The music plays a different role in the lives of wizard rock listeners. “I’m encouraging people to make music, because this just shows you anybody with a microphone and a little bit of enthusiasm can get in there and make music,” he says. “And that’s what a lot of it is. If you go listen to some of these bands, some of them are even a capella. They’re singing into their computer microphones. Some people are just trying to learn how to play guitar and it really encourages people to hear all these other people do it. They’re like, ‘Oh, I’m going to try it, too.’”

Wizard rock, for the most part, adheres stringently to DIY philosophies, with many of the bands recording and pressing their own CDs and traversing the country on tour via people’s living rooms. It’s a grassroots movement based on a shared love a story, for music and the sense of community inspired by their own culture.

In the books, the characters inhabit two existences — that of their own magical world and the world filled with everyone else. What inspires people about Rowling’s stories is the same thing that makes them come together around wizard rock — it’s what’s shared, what’s more than ordinary. “It sucks you in because she writes in the magical way that you’re in there,” Perkins muses.

As a result, wizard rock’s not for the uninitiated. The subject matter tends to be specific, dedicated and decidedly tongue-in-cheek. Wizard rockers know best that the “coolness” of such a cult genre is up for debate.

“It’s weird to say nobody takes this seriously, because they do, but I don’t think anybody’s like ‘Harry Potter music! You got a problem with that?!’” Perkins chuckles. “They know it’s like, ‘Oh my God, I play music about Harry Potter.’ But at the same time it’s the coolest thing in the world.”

Connecting people to something they love can’t be over-valued. And these songs Perkins creates as Gred and Forge aren’t meant to stand alone. They’re tailored for listening through the lens of the wizard world.

“What I would like,” he says, “is when people are going back and re-reading these books, and they’re reading something that one of the songs was about, that that song would pop into their head and they would get a laugh out of it.” And then they’d share his secret, and live his double life too.