Kids Rock as Money Rolls into Mercy Corps

Benefit concert earns 14-year-old big points in world of young bands

By Peter Korn

Eli Hirsch seems a bit young to be speaking about his fan base, or his abilities as a concert promoter. It would be easy to dismiss the 14-year-old would-be rock star’s enthusiasm as a blurring of the line between wishes and reality.

Easy, that is, except for that Friday night in April when 800 people, most of them Hirsch’s age or younger, rocked the downtown Crystal Ballroom listening to four bands, including Hirsch’s band, Blind Einstein. The benefit concert raised more than $6,000 for nonprofit Mercy Corps’ work in underdeveloped countries.

The most amazing thing about the event? It was conceived, booked and even promoted by Hirsch and friends, not a 15-year-old among them.

Hirsch speaks fast, like a born press agent. He’ll wax enthusiastic about playing in a rock band (Blind Einstein had only been together five months before the Mercy Corps concert). He’ll talk your ear off about the rush that comes from playing in front of a crowd of people. But what really pushes him into hyper-speed is when the subject becomes turning ideas into reality.

He says the idea for the April concert came to him after a viewing of Academy Award winning movie “Slumdog Millionaire” – an inspiring rags-to-riches story that detailed poverty among children living in India. He wanted to use his music toward some positive social benefit, and his mother had contacts at Mercy Corps. One conversation led to another until Hirsch found himself arranging Kidsrock4kids. Crystal Ballroom managers became interested once Hirsch mentioned he could get local kid band Still Pending, which had already developed a following among middle schoolers.

Mercy Corps spokeswoman Minda Seibert says the nonprofit has had teens raise money for its work, but usually by putting on bake sales or read-a-thons. This was kid-organized fundraising on a scale she hadn’t seen before.

“What’s amazing is the way they could energize the youth and get them engaged and make them feel they could take part in something bigger than themselves,” Seibert says. “The fact that he was in eighth grade blows your mind.”

Hirsch had some assistance. Lake Oswego resident David Ellman had helped Still Pending, for which his son Grant is drummer, get started at local venues. Still Pending’s members are all 12 and 13 years old. They were 10 when they began performing publicly.

Ellman helped Hirsch with contacts in the local music scene, but says parental involvement was never the driving force behind the concert.

Grant went door to door in the weeks before the concert and sold 75 tickets. He also worked with a Tigard music store that donated a guitar to be auctioned at the concert as an extra fundraiser.

Members of Portland teen band Social Appetite encouraged fans to bring in pennies, and raised an additional $200. That’s 20,000 pennies they collected.

Jimi Biron, director of music programming at McMenamins, which operates the Crystal Ballroom, says teen concerts that involved established organizations such as Rock & Roll Camp for Girls have drawn crowds as large as the Mercy Corps fundraiser, but that this show was different.

“I’ve never seen a show at this level where the kids organized the whole thing,” Biron says.

You might expect the entire experience to have pumped up Hirsch’s 14-year-old ego, and it’s true, he does not appear to lack for self-confidence. But the concert also made him more humble, Hirsch says. Because, despite the success of the fundraiser, and the high of playing in front of 800 jumping, hand-waving fans, there was something else Hirsch noticed that night at the Crystal Ballroom – the music.

“I realized that the other bands that played with us were incredible,” he says. “We were not on a par with them.”

Which has led, naturally, to increased band practice time. Meet Your Monster, Hirsch’s reconstituted band, practices three or four times a week, three or four hours per practice, in the Northeast Portland basement of one of its band members. Hirsch has been out in recent weeks promoting Meet Your Monster’s latest concert, at the Hawthorne Theater June 19. This one’s a paying gig, and Hirsch has been using all manner of Internet tools to drum up that fan base. After all, he says, who else is there?

“No way in hell I’d let my dad do it,” Hirsch says.