- Jacquilin D., student, Williams College, via our Facebook page.

It’s nice to make new friends.  On Saturday, we headed out to Williamstown, MA to make about a thousand of ‘em.

Nestled in the Berkshires, the Paresky Center at Williams College is a good spot to grab lunch and a coffee, find a cozy nook, and catch up on your studies.  As it turns out, it’s also a great starting point for an EPIC dance party.  That’s where we come in.  (you probably saw that coming, huh?)

Williams approached GB late last year, as their first All-Students Formal was taking shape.  They’re a relatively small school, so they weren’t looking for an arena-sized build.  While our proposal was modest by GB standards, it was more than capable of blasting those studying kids right out of their cozy nooks.  Students were pumped, and  the Facebook event got a FAST response.  As we watched the guest list skyrocket, we said the word that would change their world (at least for one night):

UPGRADE.

It just so happens that we are REALLY into what we do.  And with the success of the Face-Rockers Tour build, we decided to throw in a bit more gear.  Moving lights in the balcony?  Bring it on.  Six thousand watts of strobe?  Hey, it’s not our electrical bill.  Three walls of video around the dance floor?  Sounds cool.  Four more double subwoofers?  You get the idea…

Williams may have made out like bandits on this one, but we can rest easy (after a long load-out of course) knowing that faces in Williamstown were properly rocked.

Welcome to the Club, Williams.

With a HUGE 40-foot-wide stage to work with, we dialed the Face-Rockers stage build up a notch, with a cinema-sized video screen to match. We had all seen Avatar already, and giant rock band has been done (at the office), so we opted for a live-mix VJ video show instead. Based on crowd response, we made the right call.

It’s true, the event saw some changes this year, transitioning to a space more suited to the enormous turnout. After a gauntlet of lines, bus rides, coat checks, and security checkpoints, students joined the masses on the dance floor, while the GB crew unleashed the craziness that Tufts has come to know and love.

In the end, we’re pumped that Winter Bash – new name or not – is alive and well.

Why? Well… they live smack-dab in the middle of one of the greatest cities in the world. Hey, if somebody told us there was a RAGER going on in the student union building, we probably woudn’t believe it either.

The 121 Days Party is a different story. BU brought us in to transform their Metcalf Ballroom into a crazy club for this all-senior-class, countdown-to-graduation blowout. And, we did the crap out of it. Maybe the stars aligned just right, or maybe we were just pounding enough bass to hear clear across the city, but there was a line out the door before opening and over 1,500 kids PACKED the venue by 11pm. It, as we like to say, was on.

While tearing through a killer DJ/VJ tag-team mix, we blasted over 2,000 feet of streamers over the crowd for the first test of our GB Party Cannons. Dope. Keep an eye out for those bad boys.

By the end of the night, even the Dean was jumping around on stage taking pictures. Just saying.

BU Seniors, thanks for taking a chance on the student union for a night. Good luck finding your socks.

The event started getting crazy when 100 glowing beach balls (prepared by our STELLAR crew of student volunteers) were released into the crowd. Don’t worry, they had been subjected to impact testing before use.

After unleashing some hot new jams from the summer, as well as some GB classics, the end of the night was upon us all too soon.  But while summer ‘09 may be but a memory, the FaceRockers Tour is just heating up.

Let’s rock.

OK. Shut it down. We’re talking about the Tufts Senior Gala. Besides, we’d never be on after NCIS.

Tradition dictates that the Tufts University Senior Gala is held in the fabled Imperial Ballroom of the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. We’ve rocked those arching ceilings and majestic balconies many-a-time, and we’ll be the first to admit that the ballroom is quite imperial indeed. It’s the kind of place where a medieval prince could walk in wearing full robes and you’d just be standing there like, “Oh, what up, Prince… you totally belong here.”

However, that information matters less than a cow’s opinion because this year Tufts decided to move the Gala to the Boston Sheraton — still a great space, but slightly less fancy in its own right. So, for our last show of the Spring Tour season, Jamie Engle and the Tufts senior crew gave us the challenge of going a little above-and-beyond to make up for the change of venue.

We love it when that happens.

The GB team rolled in that morning with a 24′ truck packed to the gills with gear. After a long build, that gear had turned into a Mobile Club that would have crumbled the Park Plaza to the ground: full stage lighting set with truss verticals, massive audio, and a blue glow with GrooveBoston logos around the entire perimeter of the room. Even the Sheraton was worried that things would start falling off the walls once the party-hungry Tufts Seniors got going.

I bet you can guess what happened next. Tufts sure can tear it up. Let’s just say it left me here for the night:

Thanks to all of our awesome Mobile Clubbers out there for another CRAZY Spring Tour. We hope you had as much fun as we did.

Rest up for the Fall — we’ve already got some new tricks up our sleeve.

According to hushed wHispers (be sure to pronounce that ‘H’) of the hotel staff, some of the guests of years past remain there in spirit.  While we didn’t cross paths with any spectral partiers, I daresay they would have had a blast.  Your loss, ghosts.

As the Roger Williams University Seniors emerged onto the seventeenth-floor Grand Ballroom, perched atop the city itself, we were ready for them.  Matt “The Hamma” Duhamel — GB’s newest resident DJ and the winner of GrooveBoston’s “Golden Hammer” Award — was ready to rock when the fancy chandeliers dimmed.  United in dance party spirit, we embarked together on a journey of dance music.  As Pjanoo guided us through an emotional peak,  we just wiped the tears away and pressed on, letting the soothing words of House of Pain ease us back down to a manageable euphoria.  “Jump Around,” they urged, “Jump Around.” And we did.

What a night.

As we checked out the next morning, we thanked the woman at the desk, and mentioned that it had been a great party the night before.  “Party?” she replied, “our ballroom was closed in 1959… fifty years ago this week.”

Just kidding… the party was real.  I think.

The drive was a long one to be sure — we’re talking rest stop calisthenics, junk food treats, and Ben’s new favorite game, Let’s see what’s on this old mix CD! While we were down in the Bronxville area, we figured we’d drop by Sarah Lawrence College to show them what the Mobile Club is all about.  Rest assured, they’re now officially up to speed.

Club SLC featured one of our biggest tent builds to date.  The original design featured the “PowerCube,” a spin-off of the “Light Cube” design we used at Tufts Winter Bash.  But sadly, it wasn’t meant to be:  Hills can be great land features  (I mean, where would we be without Zorbing?), but the 30° slope in the dance floor was a little too extreme for a proper Cube build.  Luckily, we had three truckloads of dance party puzzle pieces available, and a green room with a Knights-of-the-Round-Table-style setup for brainstorming.

A few hours later, Club SLC was up and running, with a VERY cool rock-concert stage build, nestled under a tent roof that had been turned into a 50-foot video screen to complement the plasmas.  This was about as tricked out as tents get — Xzibit would be proud.

After a few hours of bass-pounding, video-plastered, towel-swinging crazy dance insanity, I looked up at the figurative oil painting of school namesake Sarah Lawrence. Maybe it was the long hours, or the blurred vision from sweat that GB-ers wear like a badge of honor after every show, but I could have sworn she winked at me.

SLC, welcome to the Club. You deserve only the highest of fives.

A few hours later, dawn approaches and the venue has transformed back into whatever it was before we started that morning: a field house, art gallery, parking lot, Denny’s, this guy’s house, the offices of Jason Slomovitz, D.M.D.* — really anywhere — and the event is reduced to a flurry of memories and pictures. Finally, after a 20-hour, full-circle transformation, the crew heads home to catch some Zs.

But on Megaweekends, we’re just getting started.

After rocking Mass College of Pharmacy’s Greek Week “Heaven & Hell” party on Friday, we packed up at the Epicenter, and prepped the gear for Saturday night’s double header. One GB crew would head north for the University of New England’s Spring Formal, while another would head into Eagles territory for the legendary Middlemarch event at Boston College.

By Saturday night, GB was rocking two dance floors simultaneously, seperated by hundreds of miles, but united in the unbreakable spirit of GrooveBoston Badassity. [Cue Somewhere Out There from the Oscar-nominated, animated-mouse emotional powerhouse An American Tail]

Maybe it’s the pallate of energy drinks that our crew pounds relentlessly every weekend; maybe it’s the fact that mixing I’m On A Boat into a hot down-tempo set gets Ben giggling like a Japanese Anime character; or maybe it’s because we traded in neckties and cubicles for crazy, sweaty, fist-pumping dance floors…

Whatever the reason, we LIVE for weekends like this.

And from what we can tell, you do too. Rest up.

*Congrats to GB crew all-star Jason, who is now officially a professional dentist in addition to a professional face-rocker-offer