In Edgartown, there are new kids on the dock.
The Dock Street Fight Club are the latest breakout in the Island’s summer music scene. Blending original indie and alternative rock with the classic hits that get crowds moving, the rockers in the Fight Club have been bringing the Island youth out to dance.
Band leaders Atlas Zack and Emmett Athearn have been playing together for years, their first live show taking place in 2018 — at their eighth grade graduation ceremony from the West Tisbury School. The next year, after their freshman year in high school, they took their talents to Dock Dance, the weekly summer concert located on Edgartown’s memorial wharf.
“We love getting a crowd going,” Mr. Athearn said.
Since then, they have been playing gigs all across the Island — from First Friday to Featherstone to the Town MV. Videos from their concerts on Memorial Wharf spread on social media when they were picked up by Barstool Sports, a pop culture blog with a large college-age following.
A recent show at the Ritz had an unusually young crowd at the door, the line stretching down the street and around the corner past Giordano’s. The band kept the music classic: Bill Withers’ Ain’t No Sunshine and the Grateful Dead’s Fire on the Mountain were winners on the set list.
Dock Street Fight Club likes to play all manner of rock and roll, from the indie to the alternative. Where does the name come from? About where you’d expect.
“With the name we paid an homage to the Dock Dance Band,” which has been performing at Dock Dance for well over a decade, Mr. Zack said. “The fight part was an homage to an altercation a friend was in.”
In March, the band road tripped to Mardi Gras in New Orleans to headline a party at a Tulane University fraternity. A “couple hundred people in a backyard” is how Mr. Athearn described it — not all that different from the Dock Dance crowd.
The band’s lineup for this summer includes Atlas Zack, Emmett Athearn and Charlie Flanagan on vocals and guitar, with Jack Holmes on bass and James Murray on drums.
Right now, they are trying to play twice a week and have a strong two-hour set, Mr. Zack said. They practiced hard at the beginning of the season, but now “the gigs are the practices themselves.” As the band gets more comfortable and more recognizable, they hope to incorporate more original music into their shows, he said.
At Dock Dance on Tuesday, the band began to draw a crowd even as they set up for their set.
“I just want to hear some good-ass music,” one Memorial Wharf visitor told the band as they prepared for their Tuesday show.
“You came to the right place,” the band replied.
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