Make Rock ‘n’ Roll Happy Again!
WITH THEIR UNIQUE BLEND OF TECHNICAL INTRICACY AND BRAZEN STAGE ANTICS, THE ROCK DWELLERS ARE ON THE RISE
Pictured left to right: David Milliken, Harrison Flagg, Max Schoenfeld, Nick Ewert, and Jordan Grant. Photography by Alyssa Doust
On a Friday last January at the Stone Church in Newmarket, the Rock Dwellers were running through soundcheck for their “Back to School” show to kick off the new semester. Middle-aged couples ate dinner and locals sipped on post-work drinks while the garage rock band – made up of five UNH college students – rehearsed their set. In between songs, a guy in a suit signaled for their attention from the crowd. He asked if they could play “Southern Nights” by Glen Campbell, saying it would mean a lot to his dad. The band obliged, and in the midst of playing 45 shaky seconds of a song they half-knew, the man and his friends began clambering up onto tabletops and chairs, dancing their hearts out. The Rock Dwellers loved every second of it.
As it turns out, the man’s dad had passed only four days prior. “Southern Nights” was his favorite song. The last time the man from the crowd had visited New Hampshire to see his dad, they’d been to a Rock Dwellers’ show at the Stone Church without having any clue of the band’s existence beforehand. Fate may or may not exist—but that’s pretty fucking crazy.
“Having that impact on people is definitely the reason that keeps us doing it,” Harrison Flagg, the band’s frontman and lead singer, says. “When we hear stories like that, it’s almost like there’s a good reason we’re doing it. It’s serving a higher purpose than making sure college students have a good Thursday or Friday night. And now the guy, the son, he comes to all of our shows. We’ve seen him at every one of our shows since that night—and he gets super drunk.”
If the Rock Dwellers had a mission statement, it’d be something like that: To elevate people’s lives with their music, allowing it to become something bigger for those who, through a perfect storm of perspective, timing, and connection, feel some sort of spiritual correspondence radiating from the Dwellers’ seance. And for those who don’t, at least they had fun, with the Dwellers acting as the buckwild driving force behind that fun.
But the Rock Dwellers don’t have a mission statement. They’re a college rock n’ roll band, after all, not a Fortune 500 company. And rock ‘n’ roll bands do crave world domination—just on their own terms.
“I hope that we can take over the world,” says David Milliken, the band’s guitarist. “I just wanna put our music in everybody’s orifices and hope that they enjoy it.”
“We want moisture,” Flagg intones.
The Dwellers couldn’t leave the Portsmouth photoshoot without conquering the Hanover Street parking garage.
It’s a warm early summer evening, and I’m at the Rock Dwellers Compound on Main Street in Durham chopping it up over a few PBRs and hastily-grilled burgers. Only two members of the Dwellers’ band live in this eight-person, pack-them-in-like-sardines off-campus college housing, but it wasn’t always that way. The Dwellers were a crew before they were a band, and it’s a relatively recent development that they transformed from “guys just smoking weed” into “guys that play music,” Milliken says.
He recalls meeting Flagg their freshman year, in 2018, through a mutual friend (“He was in this Mr. Rogers-ass sweater and I was like, ‘That guy looks like a fucking doof!’”) and bonding over not just music, but their inclination to smoke flower. College campuses were rife with carts (i.e. cannabis oil cartridges smoked in vaporizing apparatuses), something none of these esteemed gentlemen were interested in. No, no, no—they were all self-described puritans who smoked the retro version of marihu-huana, technology be damned. Thus a bond was formed, and an unofficial pact was made to meet at a specific rock outside of a specific dormitory under the cover of night to smoke bud the way God intended—nervously, making sure no campus police loomed in the periphery.
Only two members of the current Dwellers line-up (Flagg and Milliken) were part of this original crew, although they did first encounter bassist Nick Ewert at these literal rock-dwelling sessions. Mere ships passing in the night, blowing cannabis exhaust out of their proverbial smokestacks, it wouldn’t be until some years later that Ewert fell into the Dwellers’ fold.
In their infancy, the Dwellers played music the way they puffed kush: at night, when no one was watching. Growing their skills at dorm room jam sessions, the fellas honed their craft as they strengthened their friendships. They picked up drummer Jordan Grant and trombonist Max Schoenfeld at Freedom Café open mic nights, first as pals excited to be grooving onstage and then as band partners heeding the Dwellers’ clarion call. While the line-up mutated with the ebb-and-flow of changing social circles and evolving band goals, the Dwellers really started gaining steam playing makeshift DIY house shows in friend’s basements, yards, and, occasionally, rooftops. It was here they gained a bona-fide following of zealous college kids content to drink, dance, and mingle their nights away—soundtracked by live music vis-à-vis the Dwellers.
“I fell in love with music a very long time ago, but where I actually realized it was at a house show,” Grant says, sitting in a leather sectional in the Dwellers’ living room. “And I kept looking around and it’s like, ‘Wow, a month ago I didn’t know anybody in this room, but I care so deeply about everybody, I feel so connected to this thing, and music was the cause of that thing, or was that thing.’ So to be fortunate enough to play a musical instrument and have the chance to use that musical instrument to provide an experience or make somebody’s day or night or week or however long that lasts, that’s what I really love to do.”
“What I lack in musical ability, I make up for in my complete adoration for the crowd,” Flagg, a charismatic dynamo and rapturous vocalist who admits he has “absolutely zero fucking musical knowledge whatsoever,” says. “I fucking love watching people have fun, and the more fun that we have, the more fun they have, and the more fun they have, the more fun that we have, so it’s a pretty symbiotic relationship.”
If there’s one thing the Dwellers undoubtedly do, it’s have fun. Seeing them live is an electric experience, with Flagg performing acrobatics centerstage, Milliken shredding riffs and waving his shoulder-length hair like a Dwellers’ black flag, Schoenfeld blasting out trombone notes from the nether regions of his soul, Ewert strumming bass with a bop, smirk, and a groove, and Grant banging out purposely off-kilter drum rhythms like his life depends on it. A Dwellers show is like jamming a thousand firecrackers into a barrel, setting it on fire, and then screaming in each other’s faces until the whole thing combusts. You know what you’re getting into at a Rock Dwellers show—and that’s the best part.
If the Rock Dwellers had a mission statement, it’d be something like that: To elevate people’s lives with their music, allowing it to become something bigger for those who, through a perfect storm of perspective, timing, and connection, feel some sort of spiritual correspondence radiating from the Dwellers’ seance.
Underlying the Dwellers’ bombastic stage presence is a deep potpourri of musical knowledge culled from every genre and genus imaginable. Grant, Ewert, and Schoenfeld lean toward jazz and neo-soul inspiration, with Grant growing up playing in his local church band, and Ewert and Schoenfeld idolizing the likes of Anderson .Paak, Tom Misch, and a menagerie of other modern-day groove-sayers. Grant’s a musical encyclopedia, as eager to nerd out about 80’s jazz drum patterns as he is to admit his middle-school fervor for 21 Pilots (“I was an emo boy in middle school, and on my way out, I discovered 21 Pilots”). Meanwhile Ewert is a true child of the internet, learning bass through deep-dive YouTube binges and excitedly holding jam sessions with anyone and everyone who harbors a love for instrumentation. Schoenfeld’s somewhere in the middle, soaking up his dad’s bottomless record collection while embracing Silk Sonic as modern torchbearers of soul music.
“Around junior year of high school,” Schoenfeld says in his never-waste-a-breath Long Island cadence, “I found out about this cool thing called jazz, which was a way that I could play trombone and still be cool, so I was definitely into that.”
As the founding fathers of the Dwellers, Milliken and Flagg are the reason the band is rock-centric. Flagg embraces energy-first, emotion-first music, with a love for the great performers and provocateurs like Jimi Hendrix, Freddie Mercury, and Marilyn Manson. Milliken champions vigor as well, but like Grant, he holds a heavy reverence for nearly every genre he cleaves into, being an alumnus of public-school choir and now playing in his own metal band (Guillotine) when he’s not with the Dwellers. Despite their varying tastes, Milliken and Flagg both espouse modern rock—but not the “sad, lame butt-rock that’s depressing to listen to.”
“Rock n’ roll should be fun and exciting. You can write about sad stuff and still make it fun,” says Flagg. “There are tons of songs that are about horrible things that are so much fun to listen to.”
“Make rock ‘n’ roll happy again!” Milliken exclaims.
“Harry and I wanted to be giga-Chad rockstars and half this band wanted to be nerdy-ass jazz heads. I still have nightmares about it every night—I bully them in my dreams!”
Together, the Dwellers become something unique unto itself. What specific genre they play is up for debate, but as a self-described “genre freak,” Milliken categorizes the band as dad rock or garage rock, with blues and classic rock being major influences. When asking directly about the band’s genre, I received an onslaught of half-serious, half-joking responses, everything from “alternative garage Albanian funk,” to “meta-punk and metrosexual country,” to the grandiose statement, “We’re punk musicians who ironically play punk unironically.”
Which underlies something else at the forefront of the Dwellers experience: as a crew of early-20-somethings raised simultaneously inside and outside the technology age, they’re both always joking and never joking. Growing up with the internet largely in its infancy, and being the first generation to have smartphones as a vital part of their teens, their sense of humor is a blend of instant gratification and slow-burn comedy, appreciative of meme culture, philosophy, and shooting the shit without a phone in sight. The entire group is funny, self-effacing, and genuine. Similar to their technical skill and on-stage exuberance, it’s a tightrope they walk effortlessly.
A Dwellers’ live show becomes an excursion you can appreciate for its intricacy and musical virtuosity, and an infectious romp you can cut up a rug to. Why only have one when you can have both? The Dwellers have their cake and eat it, too. “Being able to make people punch each other in the face and then have their arms around each other, crying on each other, in the same show is fucking electric,” Flagg says ecstatically, leaning in with bug-eyed excitement.
“Something that I’ve been categorizing in my own music recently is music that makes me feel something,” Milliken says. “Now what does that mean? Music has so many different ways of making you feel, but I wanna be able to put moments in our music that gives me chills when I listen to it. Not always having to play the song with the heavy riff and the big ‘fuck’ at the end of it. Getting a more intricate emotional reaction out of music is fascinating to me and something that I’d love to be able to do, and making that work with primal crowd reactions is something that I wish I could maintain. We’ll be playing with whatever the hell we shit out, but I want it to be more—something that I care about when I play it, that I hope will be felt by the audience, too.”
Hanging out with the Dwellers on this late-May afternoon, the fellas are calm and collected, in a musical cool-down phase of sorts. In a few weeks, Flagg will ship off “to the mountains for the summertime, never to be seen again, off to pray to some elder gods in Rothgar,” as Milliken puts it. Or, in laymen’s terms, work as a counselor at a summer camp for a few months (“What the fuck? Dude, I hang out with kids,” Flagg retorts). Coming off a big spring semester that saw them book sold-out gigs at the Stone Church and a handful of UNH-sanctioned outdoor events, the group is getting ready to release their first set of recorded originals, a three-song EP titled “There and Back Again.” Leading up to its release and the following school year, the band’s taking something of a refractory period, a vital step they learned during a pivotal point for the band last winter.
After feeling some burnout from a throng of live shows, Grant, Milliken, and Flagg had a conversation mid-rehearsal that changed the course of the band. At that point, the Dwellers had run the house show gauntlet, playing lawns with hundreds of people, basements that were extreme fire hazards, and rooftops that were another kind of hazard altogether. While they built up a solid following and had a helluva time seeing their dreams come to fruition, playing for free reaps certain repercussions.
“We were losing money and couldn’t afford to keep our equipment working,” Flagg says. “Dude, collectively, we have one of each thing necessary to make a show happen, and if that thing gets destroyed, we don’t have a show anymore. Straight up, if one thing breaks, we have no show.”
“The amount of beer spilled on PA’s alone…” Milliken adds.
It was here that the Dwellers reorganized and restrategized. Everyone loves a people pleaser, but at some point, that good-time-guy has to, you know, do the things that allow a human to function—namely eat, sleep, shit, and take a breather. In other words, the Dwellers couldn’t keep all of their eggs in the house show basket for too long. They wanted to maintain the energy they were becoming known and loved for. That meant starting to play paid gigs at places like the Stone Church, that revered music venue up on the hill that’s seen the likes of Jerry Garcia, Phish, and Aerosmith. It’s granted them great audiences, good money, new opportunities, and chilling experiences, like the one last winter with the dad and his son.
In the process, the Dwellers began figuring out what they want out of the band, what they want out of playing music for the public, and what they want out of themselves. The answer is a little different for everyone, but overall rings to the same tune. The Dwellers want world domination together, after all.
“Harry and I wanted to be giga-Chad rockstars and half this band wanted to be nerdy-ass jazz heads,” Milliken says. “I still have nightmares about it every night—I bully them in my dreams!”
“I feel like my favorite thing about playing guitar are those moments when I’m by myself and I’m improvising,” Ewert adds, “and I’m kinda just shitting my thoughts out and it doesn’t feel like there’s any insecurity or barrier, where I’m just completely in the moment.”
“Being able to channel that emotion really does draw out some of the best in musicians,” Milliken says. “That’s why I think it’s the ultimate form of expression. Better than dance. Better than a picture. Alright? Alright? I can see other people be affected by the sounds I make and they’re also, like, seizing up on the dance floor because they feel the soundwaves I’m throwing at them.”
“Shitting, pissing, cumming, crying,” says Flagg.
“Like little babies,” adds Grant.
Which brings the Dwellers to the present moment: taking another step back, with Flagg headed to Rothgar, and the other members working summer jobs to scrap together a little change before their senior year at UNH starts. And, of course, spending the rest of their time playing music. It’s what they love to do, after all, and why they started the band in the first place.
“I mean, music just means so much to me,” Grant says. “In the grand scheme of things, it’d be stupid for me not to give time to something I care so much about. I literally think about music all day, every day, every minute, and I guess for me, the time I dedicate to the Rock Dwellers is just giving back to that, giving back to myself. I’m okay with all of my free time going to music.”
“If we could do this all the time and get paid oogles and moogles of money, that’d be sick,” Flagg says. “But unfortunately we’re dumping money into the university system and getting paid minimum wage, so…”
They’re aware that making music a career is a long, arduous process, one that’s a lot harder than any sort of traditional career. The revenue from streaming services is beyond brutal and gigging alone won’t pay the bills unless you’re a nationally-touring band. But if you’re doing something you love, it’s never about the destination. How could it be, when you get to pour your passion into an instrument and out to an audience night-in and night-out, perfecting your craft alongside people who, through a perfect storm of perspective, timing, and connection, have become your coterie of close confidants? Fate may or may not exist—but that’s pretty fucking crazy.
“In those moments where we’re on stage making music together and a really nice part of a song hits, a big kick or a big drop or whatever, and it just hits and the crowd picks up on that, it just feels like nothing is wrong for a brief moment of time,” Schoenfeld says. “It literally just feels like euphoria to me, every time. Every time I experience that, it’s a visceral reminder of what I came here to do in the first place.”
“For a while, in my childhood ignorance, I always found it weird looking at older performers, just people with the gray hair on stage in front of an audience for some reason—me just being ageist,” Grant says. “But there was a rehearsal a few months back that we had, where there was a light shining in my dingy attic, and it was shining on David’s hair, and the way that it looked, it made David look like an aged man. And I was like, ‘Yeah, I could do this. We could do this.’”
Find the Rock Dwellers’ new EP, “There and Back Again,” on the streaming service of your choice, follow them on Instagram (@therockdwellers), and catch them at the Stone Church and other local music venues. And maybe excrete something out of your orifices while you’re at it—just so they know you’re having a good time.
