Two years ago, Justin Hopkins made a decision.
After years on the road as a touring musician, he was calling it quits – not to music, but to the music industry as he’d thus far lived it. He’d just become a father and was loving life in the South Bay, so he decided to stay at home. He was going to play music locally and try to make a different sort of music career for himself.
If he wasn’t going to the mountain, he figured, he’d just have to make the mountain come to him.
Hopkins is an optimistic sort, but even he could not have foreseen the size of this mountain. Hopkins earlier this year became a contestant on the popular television show, The Voice, and though he lost in one of the most dramatic early “battle rounds” against former Broadway star Tony Vincent, he gained thousands of new fans and made tight connections with a bunch of far-flung musicians.
Next Wednesday night, shortly after the grand finale of The Voice, at least 16 of the show’s performers will descend on Saint Rocke in Hermosa Beach. The show they will put on, however, will go far beyond the confines of the club – the show, dubbed “The Aftershow”, will be live-streamed via the Internet site Stageit and made available to thousands of people worldwide.
Hopkins calls it the “Woodstock” of the Internet.
“This is where we dwell,” Hopkins said in an interview this week. “When you do The Voice, you almost immediately become tied to your computer.”
After he left the show, he saw an interview with C-Lo Green, one of the celebrity judges on The Voice, in which Green urged contestants to keep going.
“C-Lo made the comment about the falloff after doing something like this can be a real shock, going back to normal life – he said you shouldn’t unpack your bags,” Hopkins said. “Just pick up right where you left off after the show, don’t go back to where you were before. And of course that’s very idealistic from someone who makes a million dollars every time he smiles, but realistically there is a truth to that. We can’t settle back into what we were doing. I was basically trying to figure out how I was going to harness what I have experienced into a career and, essentially, Internet notoriety.”
One of The Voice performers sent out an email to the others suggesting that those remaining in LA for the finale should do something together afterwards, and a light bulb went off in Hopkins’ head. He’s put together songwriters’ showcases at Saint Rocke for the last two years; this time, he’d make the biggest showcase yet.
“Let me take it and run with it,” he wrote back. “I’ve done this before.”
Hence “The Aftershow”, which will feature, among others, Voice alumni Jordis Unga, Pip Arnold, Anthony Evans, Tony Vincent, Naia Kete, Hailey Steele, Jamie Lono, Nathan Parrett, and Angel Taylor. Hopkins hopes they can generate enough viewership online to give each of the artists a parting gift as they embark on life after The Voice, perhaps even enough for some to go into the studio with an established producer.
And he hopes, for himself, that this is just the beginning. He wants to create his own kind of music industry, one that is both local and global simultaneously.
“Music is like when you go to the store, and there’s like 50,000 kinds of bread,” Hopkins said. “Frankly, I want to be the floor cleaner aisle. I want to be a completely separate and different part of the list, a product that is totally new and fresh. And it doesn’t change the kind of music you are making but, in a way, this keeps me from feeling that I have to make big music to reach people — I can keep it small and keep it intimate and yet reach thousands and thousands of people.”
He said at times during the past two years, he has been tempted to go back on the road, but The Voice has given him a new way to stay at home.
“Sometimes I thought about going back on the road, but then essentially I am just homeless – I am just a homeless jester,” he said. “And I am not ready to put my family through that. And now, through The Voice, there are just a million different opportunities, especially with social media, and I haven’t really capitalized on all of them yet. I wasn’t a fan favorite on the show, or anything like that, but for me it’s just purely a matter of brains, and being the first to use these resources that are out there in their baby stages to establish myself as an artist who does that.”
“What is bigger than the mountain? That is what I am going for.”
The Aftershow begins at 7:45 p.m. May 9. See saintrocke.com for tickets, or online, Stageit.com.
