Small-crowd-pleasing acoustic rocker Sadam Richmen chose to forego the financially secure future a college degree promises and instead go on tour around the country playing small crowds of undergraduates.
Last seen at GW’s Fuck Fest, where he performed for a record crowd of 13 people, Richmen was a campus mainstay, forcing his pleasant, poppy folk-rock onto students at under-attended campus event after under-attended campus event. Riding high on his imagined campus popularity, Richmen chose to drop out of GW, thus giving up his last chance to earn more than minimum wage plus tips ever again and hit the road.
“The dozen or so fans I have here at GW have been really supportive,” said Richmen, during a recent on-tour interview. “Everytime I talk to them, they can’t tell me how glad they are that I’ve taken my act away from GW and on to other schools. I couldn’t ask for a better handful of fans.”
GW music lovers can not get over their success with Richmen. “Now if we can just get Waterstreet out of D.C. and on tour, I can dare to go to a concert again,” junior Kelly Manzarin said.
Although his fanbase may not have grown as much as he had hoped, Richmen is enjoying some of the perks of the rock star lifestyle.
“Some of the prostitutes in the motels I stay in might give me a little of their coke,” said Richmen, speaking from No-tell Mo-tell in Peoria, Ill., where he will be playing on the corner of Main Street and Honeywood Drive from 10 tomorrow morning until he has enough bus fare to go home.
Though he has faced a few troubles on the road to rock stardom such as losing his guitar twice and finding his body a hotbed of writhing white lice, Richmen expresses optimism about the future of his career.
“If the pop thing doesn’t work, I can always try other genres,” Richmen said. “I could always play Christian folk, or maybe just kill myself. Yeah, maybe I’ll just kill myself.”