When the band took the stage, they encouraged the crowd to come to watch Sanders speak later in the evening-”that’s what this is all about,” lead singer Ezra Koenig said-but the crowd mostly saved its applause for Vampire Weekend’s hits. Getting handed out at a Vampire Weekend For Bernie concert in Iowa City /YbCDD0zYkO Nearby, a woman wearing a zebra-patterned-bear backpack was handing out buttons and stickers emblazoned with a Donald-Trump-as-fly-covered-feces design. But if it goes Hillary, I don’t really care.” “Something about Bernie I just really like. “I just like his stance on a lot of issues, especially the environmental stuff,” she said.
Zoey Mauck, an Iowa-native familiar with the caucusing process, said she would be in Sanders’ camp Monday night. The friends he had roadtripped with were more definitive Sanders fans, though. Well, would he at least be caucusing for Sanders? “I don’t know what caucusing is, I’ve been explained a thousand times, but I don’t know,” he said with a laugh. So a big Bernie supporter, right? “Well, more Vampire Weekend and Foster the People,” Sogard said, mentioning another band scheduled to play at Sanders rally. Joey Sogard, a sophmore at Iowa State University, made the two-hour drive for the rally.
Was the young crowd there for Bernie, or just a free show? Mostly the latter from my vantage point. Pressed into a corner in a packed room, it was difficult to get a good head count, but the wall-to-wall crowd easily numbered into the several hundred. Turns out the indie band Vampire Weekend (joined by a member of fellow Brooklyn hipster band Dirty Projectors), scheduled to play a major rally for Bernie Sanders later this evening, had announced on Twitter that they’d be playing a pre-show warm-up set at the coffee house, and the college kids from the University of Iowa had quickly flocked. As I walked into a coffee shop in downtown Iowa City on Saturday afternoon for a writing pit stop between campaign events, I noticed a growing crowd in the far back of the room. Caucus season in Iowa produces weird, unexpected scenes.