CityView Magazine

“No matter what your problems are, you just come out here and forget all your troubles,” he said. The band broke for intermission, and the busy chancellor stopped to talk about music – and work. But as he marks his first year as chancellor, he has discovered that the two aren’t all that different. “It’s all happening in real time,” he said. “That’s the thing about music. In management, it’s more like you’re an ER physician than an academic. Somebody’s trying to recruit one of your deans, there’s a protest, and it’s going to snow – and it’s all happening at the same time. In music, and in jazz, everything is happening at once. And I’m making sure on the keyboards that the harmonic fabric stays together. You can’t think about anything else while you’re doing it. You’ve got to focus on it completely.” A small group of UNC students used the break as an opportunity to meet Thorp and shake his hand. They were surprised to see their leader in such a casual, and dare they say it – cool – setting. Others stood by, watching the show in a mild state of disbelief. “I am so impressed to see him out here,” said Nancy Smythe, who works for the university and was shocked when Terri Houston, the band’s lead singer, announced Thorp’s name following a keyboard jam. “It’s wonderful to see that side of him.” In Thorp’s mind, it doesn’t take such a stretch of the imagination to see a musician serving in the top job at Carolina. “Eventually, someone from the rock ‘n’ roll generation was going to become chancellor,” he says. His manner is simultaneously casual and direct, revealing a bit of who he is as he speaks. Administrator and scientist, teacher and chancellor, musician and entrepreneur, each describes a piece of Thorp’s life and myriad accomplishments. Two threads have stitched all of his experiences and roles together: his wife, Patti, and music. And they share Fayetteville as a common point. The Thorp name is a familiar one in Fayetteville, where few would be surprised to see their native son behind the keyboard – or the guitar or bass, for that matter. Holden Thorp began his musical career as a teenager watching his mom, Bo Thorp, run rehearsals at the Cape Fear Little Theater, now the Cape Fear Regional Theater, where she still serves as artistic director. The theater is also where he met his childhood sweetheart and now wife, Patti, at age 9. Thorp was already a budding musician by then, picking up the piano at age 8, mostly teaching himself. “I didn’t make it to all my lessons,” he confesses, more than 35 years later. He migrated to the guitar and bass as a teenager. His first real gig was in the band at the Little Theater, performing in the pit for the show “Hello Dolly.” He was 15. Meanwhile, Thorp became enamored with the idea of a rock band. Enter the guitar. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cream, Ray Charles, Elton John, Pink Floyd, all became major influences on what would become his high school band, The Hang. The name was an acronym, each letter standing for the first names of the band’s members: Holden Thorp, Alan Williams, Nick Robinson and Greg Porter. They recorded a few songs together and even played some gigs. Their first, he recalls, was at the Gaslight Lounge on Fort Bragg Road. The stage at the Little Theater even became a de facto rehearsal venue, where the boys would play to a hall full of empty seats. But they felt every bit like a rock band. Thorp’s music career came to a crossroads during the summer of 1981, when he, Williams and Porter went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston to study jazz theory. Like every endeavor in his life, Thorp wasn’t content with simply playing the music – he needed to understand it on a deeper level and push the limits of his own knowledge and skills. “I’ve got as good a knowledge of jazz theory as anyone, but I just realized that I wasn’t as good on my instrument as others were,” he says. Of his three instruments – piano, guitar and bass – he says the story may have turned out differently had he focused more on the bass, which he says comes a bit CityViewNC.com | 23 Top | It’s not unusual to find the chancellor jamming at university events. Middle | Thorp and Terri Houston play a rousing rendition of “God Bless the Child” at Fallfest 2008 at UNC-Chapel Hill. Above | You can find Thorp playing keyboard, guitar or bass. Photos courtesy of Dan Sears

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