Ever wondered how the blues-rock band Red Light Blue Light got its name?

“One day all five of us were walking downtown, just holding hands and skipping down the street,” said sophomore Ian Coleman. “I think Matt [Bachmann] was frying on something. And he just started yelling out random colors and seeing random lights. And one of those times, all he said was ‘Red light blue light!’ And we were like ‘That’s perfect, that is the perfect band name,’ so we took it.”

Junior Dan Oschrin revealed the real story. “In 15 minutes I had come up with a list of names, because we needed to put our names on a poster for a gig we were playing the next day. Two of them were ‘The Red Lights’ and ‘The Blue Lights.’ Both were cool, but both names were taken, so we came up with Red Light Blue Light,” he said. “At first we thought it was kind of hokey and dumb, but now it’s grown on us.”

Hokey name or not, Red Light Blue Light has gained enough popularity to regularly play at campus parties and they never turn down a request.

“I wanted to create this band that would take any gig and just be shameless in playing wherever we were offered,” said sophomore Charlie Procknow.

The band members claim that Red Light Blue Light proudly plays for almost any cause, the “most debaucherous” one so far having been the Women’s Rugby Calendar fund raiser earlier this year.

According to Procknow, when the rugby team kept requesting more songs they eventually resorted to winging it.

“We ended up just playing random songs that we’d never played before for 40 minutes. Not all of us had even heard them before,” he said. “We played ‘House of the Rising Sun’ in 4/4 time, which is just not the right time signature. That is as egregious of a musical mistake as you can possibly make! But the beautiful thing about it is nobody said anything to us, nobody noticed.   They thought it was really good!”

Bachmann said that the energy at the end of each show is incredible.

So much so that after their Coffeehouse performance earlier this year, he felt inspired to use his bass as a drumstick for the smash cymbal.

“It ended with me just looking at my bass pegs screwing the wrong direction and all these tiny little screws just lost in the ground. It was pretty sad,” he said. “I had to fix it twice after that.”

But fun times aside, all five band members agreed that finding a space to practice on campus is very difficult and that there would be vast benefits to creating a one.

“The school seems to be really concerned about drinking, and if you can go see a band playing, that’s a viable alternative to going and getting wasted with your friends at a frat house,” Oschrin said.

“A practice room would just improve campus life in general because it would be much easier for events to find bands to play because there would be more bands. And then there would be more competition between the bands so they would get better,” said Procknow.

However, according to the band members Red Light Blue Light was not created with the intention of being popular.

“We didn’t actually expect people to like it, because it’s blues, and nobody really listens to blues,” Oschrin said. “So it’s cool that people at Whitman have an open mind and can get down to any type of music as long as it’s good music.”

On a final note, Bachmann added that despite Coleman’s story, “We don’t actually trip acid.”