I never thought I’d find myself shaking a tail feather with total abandon to ’80s dance music at a packed-to-the-gills Harpers Ferry. (Yup: that Harpers Ferry, the jam-band capital of Greater Boston.) Yet there I was on a recent Thursday, grooving to Technotronic’s 1989 dance-floor staple "Pump Up the Jam" as if my life depended on it, alongside hundreds of hipsters, hip-hop heads, and hardcore kids. It was surreal. And that seems to be the general consensus on the club’s new weekly indie dance party, "Paper." Since its inception just two months ago, the night has already become something of a phenomenon, with a line that stretches around the block from about 11 p.m. until 1 a.m. every week.
Eric Perini, one of the night’s founders, says that "Paper" was launched with little prior promotion beyond a couple of MySpace bulletins. So when more than 200 people showed up at the event’s inaugural night, he and co-creator Mike Marquis knew they were on to something big. "It was very word-of-mouth," Perini says. "We all invited some friends and the next thing we know, there’s like 200 people in the room. We were like, ‘Whoa. This is something here.’ "
Perini and his good friend Marquis, who together run the concert-promotion company Mass Live Events, had been doing a similar event at Axis called "Lushlife." When disagreements between them and Axis management about the night’s direction eventually led to an amicable parting of ways, Perini and Marquis decided to seek a different venue for a new weekly happening.
"We said, ‘Let’s do this again, but let’s try to find someplace where we can really do what we want,’ " which was to include live bands as well as DJs. Mass Live Events had booked a show at Harpers with local hardcore band Converge last April, and it was a major success. The club’s management, which was looking to bring in new sounds and crowds, expressed interest in working with Perini and Marquis again. So when the two friends and long-time MLE street-teamer Andrew Riker conceived the new night, they approached Harpers. "It ended up working out," says Perini. "And the rest is history."
Though it’s been a short history, it’s been successful enough that Perini has been able to book big-name guest DJs — like the VHS or Beta spin-off Kit Chaps and NYC’s the Bangers — as additions to bands and resident DJ Eric Marcelino.
"Paper" attracts people from a relatively wide range of ages and scenes, but college-age kids with fashionable clothes and carefully coiffed hair definitely predominate — despite Perini’s assertion that "it’s not a hipster night." Comparisons with the über-hip "Start!" are inevitable, but Perini makes a good point: "These kids don’t even know what the hell ‘Start!’ was. This is their ‘Start!’ "
