By Jasmina Nogo
Carrboro Commons Staff Writer

They met in ninth grade at a Halloween party and became best friends. He was the guy from “Scream” and she was Slash. A leap of faith and their passion for rock ‘n’ roll brought them to Chapel Hill in 2006, where they wait tables by day in order to be musicians by night.

Playing their first private show at the Lofts at Lakeview in Durham, Ryan Franceschina (far right) and Liz Sullivan (far left) rock out on their guitars with their band, Our Velvet Revolution, at a residential pool party.

Staff Photo by Jasmina Nogo

Liz Sullivan, 28, and Ryan Franceschina, 29, from Pittsburgh, Pa., are the lead guitarists and vocalist of the four-member band, Our Velvet Revolution.

They postponed everything, including their wedding, to come to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro area for a few years.

“This just felt like the right place to go,” Sullivan said. The music scene in Pittsburgh wasn’t for them and it was hard to keep a band together, she said.

Sullivan and Franceschina have worked at Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe on Franklin Street since they moved here. They wake up at 5:30 in the morning in order to be at their job by 6. Their shifts are over by 2 p.m., which leaves their evenings free for practice and shows. They get up and do it all over again the next day.

“This is the best job we could have at the moment,” Sullivan said. “And the fact that we work together is just an added bonus.”

“It’s a weird thing – your interactions with people,” Franceschina said. He said waiting on customers is a stark contrast to playing in front of an audience. The way an average person looks at a waiter is as though there is nothing else there, he said. “They don’t give you much credit.”

“It’s not the type of thing you’d ever want to do forever,” he said.

“We’ve put in a lot of work at that job. So it’s like a ‘scratching each other’s backs’ situation,” Sullivan said. The managers work with them when it comes to requesting time off for their music.

Finding the balance between their day jobs and their music is tough, Franceschina said. “When we came here we made that commitment – that it’s going to be miserable at times – but after a few years we’ll see.”

“We 100 percent made the right decision, no matter what happens,” Sullivan said. “There are so many people here that are doing the same thing we are.” They agree that Chapel Hill-Carrboro is the place for musicians looking to break into the scene.

“It has everything you look for when you’re starting out,” Franceschina said. It’s a step above other towns because musicians here are more dedicated, he said.

“The fact that there are a lot of other musicians that you can talk to and they understand, is very encouraging,” Franceschina said.

Our Velvet Revolution plays an average of one to two shows per week, which are mostly public. They play at the smaller local venues, like The Cave, Jack Sprat and Hell. They recorded their first six-track EP with Track and Field Recording in Carrboro and are planning to do another set in the next few months.

“I think a lot of the people that end up coming to our shows do happen to be other musicians,” Franceschina said.

“But there’s the saying that an audience of ten musicians is better than an audience of 100 non.”

The type of music they play is influenced by various rock artists from the 1990s, he said.

“We really strive to do something that’s different.”

“We gravitated toward anything that was guitar-driven rock ‘n’ roll,” he said.

They announced in unison that The Velvet Underground is their favorite band of all time.

“Velvet Revolution” refers to the non-violent revolution in 1989 in Czechoslovakia that led to the overthrow of the Communist regime, he said. They came up with the band name in 2005, during the second year of the war in Iraq. They started writing mostly political material then.

“You didn’t hear much criticism coming from the media,” Franceschina said. He wanted to use music as a form of political protest. “Nobody else was saying anything.”

“We can use this band as kind of our velvet revolution – to say whatever we want to,” he said.

Their music is still rooted in politics but they haven’t felt compelled to write material that is politically charged in this area because people here are already so vocal, Franceschina said.

The atmosphere is more inviting than in Pittsburgh for people to express their political beliefs, he said.
“People tend to wear their politics on their sleeve here.”

Their next goal is to play a few shows out of town and maybe to do a small tour.

“Next year will be the real indicator of whether or not we can sustain this,” Franceschina said.
“You have to do it now. You’ve got to know. You can’t spend the rest of your life wondering what could’ve been,” he said.
“You either go and you find everything you’re looking for, or you get tired of the sacrifices that you’re having to make.”

“It means so, so much to be able to share every bit of it with one other person,” Franceschina said. “She’s the glue that holds it all together.”

“We were best friends before anything else and we still are.”