Most of their students and colleagues know Steve McCornack, John Sherry and René Weber as professors, and Jayson Dibble as a graduate student.
But on Thursday night, they will become Pug Muckfe, Johnny Pustular, Kärl Messer and Gurgle McPhestus, as their old-school punk band "Stooge City Liberation Front" takes Harper's Restaurant & Brewpub, 131 Albert Ave., by storm.
"We call ourselves a punk rock band, but we really play stuff from before there was punk to after there was punk," said Sherry, an assistant communication professor. "We're more in the vein of what I would call anti-establishment rock 'n' roll."
The anti-establishment cause requires staying a step of ahead of the CIA, which is where the stage names come into play, Sherry said jokingly.
"The thing is, he's not an American citizen, and he also hasn't earned tenure yet," Sherry said of lead singer Weber, a French-German and assistant professor of communication. "Because this is such a crazy, underground endeavor, we have to be careful that we protect our identities because we don't want the CIA looking too closely into his background."
Sherry said he goes by Johnny Pustular, which is "sort of like Johnny Rotten, but even more, so it's pustular," while Weber said he needed something German and cruel-sounding for his stage name.
The group got its start when Sherry learned he and Weber share a similar taste in music.
"René and I were looking at his record collection, and I noticed he had some Clash CDs," Sherry said. "I said, 'Oh, you like The Clash, I love The Clash.' And he said, 'I love The Clash, I was in a punk band in Berlin in the early '80s.' And I said, 'I was
in a punk band in Detroit in the early '80s.'"
McCornack, an associate professor of communication, signed on to play drums and Dibble plays bass.
"Our colleagues thought we were insane," Sherry said. "They thought it was a big joke, that we were putting them on. The first time we played at a Halloween party, and they thought it was just a part of the Halloween party joke.
"And then we blew their faces off."
The band is hoping for a similar effect at its fundraiser show at Harper's on Thursday. It is raising money for the communication department to go toward scholarships and cancer research, in honor of a communication professor who died of the disease.
The band doesn't actively seek out gigs, Sherry said, with Dibble adding, "We only have a few more live gigs than Spinal Tap."
"We have the advantage that we don't have to go out and tour and raise money because we have jobs," Sherry said.
But having those jobs also can wreak havoc on rehearsals.
"We found out why the Rolling Stones don't have a day job," Sherry said. "Meetings and classes and conflicting schedules chews up a lot of practice time."
Communication department Chairman Charles Atkin said the music is not the same as what he listens to on his "oldies station" but is good quality for the genre.
"I don't know of any other punk bands made up of Ph.D.s," Atkin said. "I think more often it tends to be younger people who have not been sitting in classrooms for 20 years of their life.
"It gives them a unique perspective on life."
The band, which will play mostly covers, counts The Stooges, MC5, The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, The Clash and Rage Against The Machine as some of their influences.
"Through the history of rock 'n' roll, you've had the very commercial kind of music — what we think of now as the Britney Spears and Ashlee Simpson — the kind of people that are all about the money," Sherry said. "Then you've always had this kind of underground sort of roots rock movement, people into music for music's sake … These bands really didn't care about making money, and those are the bands we like."
Weber, who will sometimes switch from German to English and back again when he sings, brings a European influence to the group.
"As far as Europe is concerned, Berlin is the capital of this type of music," Weber said. "Berlin has this really fantastic underground scene. Forget France; France sucks.
"You can't sing punk in French — it has to be English or German."
The band isn't trying to get people to pull commercial music off the shelves, but remind them they have choices when it comes to music.
"We're not trying to judge people's choices as much as we want to say, 'Think about your choices and don't forget that you still have a choice,'" Dibble said. "If you understand why you're buying out of L.L. Bean, then more power to you.
"That's what the essence of liberation is all about."
McCornack said his purpose as drummer in the band is to move people in a culture that doesn't always encourage audience enthusiasm.
"People at our gigs should dance, jump, dive, slam and do whatever feels right — freeing themselves from who they normally are and embracing personal liberation — as long as they're not harming themselves or others," he said. "More than anything else, music is about liberation of the soul — and so are we."
