This paper was originally presented at the 2007 Experience Music Project Pop Conference.
Thanks to Daphne Carr, Jon Hiltz, Scott Shields, Maria Sciarrino, Adam Rizer, Alap Momin, Ben Lord, Bryan Sheffield, Charles Maggio, Chris Vaglio, C.T. Ballentine, Jason Gnewikow, Josh Grabelle, Liam Kimball, Mark McCoy, Mike Pace, Norman Brannon, Rich Jacobs, Ronen Kauffman, Steve Aoki, Jesse Woghin, and Tracy Wilson.
“Could it be a stranger night? The basement’s full of kids I don’t know/ Not beautiful like your songs but all awkward and alone and don’t belong.”
-Lifetime, “Theme Song for a New Brunswick Basement Show”
“Free beer and basement shows don’t mean you’ve made it.”
-Owen, “Bad News”
>>FROM A BASEMENT SHOW ON A HILL
by Tobias Carroll
I was seventeen when I saw my first basement show. It was the third hardcore show I’d attended overall; three bands touring together – Louisville’s Endpoint and Falling Forward, and New York City’s Shift – were playing in a basement in my hometown. We parked a few blocks away, the sheer number of cars having filled the nearby streets. Friends and acquaintances from bands and previous shows milled around outside. We paid five dollars at the door and walked downstairs into an air-conditioned basement. The room we entered was packed: bands with their merchandise, local distributors – distros – with cases full of LPs, singles, and CDs before them. I could smell the homemade vegan pasta that was a standard dining option at many a central Jersey hardcore show. From there, we moved to the next room, the central one in the basement, where the show would be taking place. Endpoint, the main draw for most of us, were on what turned out to be their final tour; their set ended with a drawn-out finale, vocalist Rob Pennington delivering a lengthy soliloquy on punk rock and his own experiences with it. Though I had seen them a few days before at City Gardens in Trenton, the feeling of this set was nothing like their previous one. I didn’t know it yet, but I was getting my first taste of what basement shows were all about.
The basement show has become an almost archetypal occurrence for those who follow punk rock and its offshoots. A 2005 New York Times article on the New Jersey scene referred to the basement of a New Brunswick house at the time that it was occupied by Thursday vocalist Geoff Rickly as “considered” by some to be “New Jersey’s answer to CBGB’s”. Lifetime, recently reunited and signed to Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz’s Decaydance Records, released “Theme Song for a New Brunswick Basement Show” on their 1997 album Jersey’s Best Dancers. And in his book Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo, Andy Greenwald describes the Utah band The Used setting a music video from their debut Warner Bros. album at a basement show located somewhere in “a suburban wasteland”. All of this raises the question: what about the basement show has rendered it as a stand-in for a certain aesthetic? And what caused the basement show to get there in the first place?
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Over the course of interviews for this paper, a number of the interviewees referred to basement shows and house shows interchangeably. Living rooms and garages were often cited, as well. While I would argue that there is something distinctive about the basement as location, the sense of confinement and intimacy is not all that different from a living room to a basement.
In practical terms, the basement is one of the few rooms in a house capable of holding a large number of people; basements and garages are both generally used for storage, worn-out furniture, auxiliary items. Even if the house itself was well-adorned – generally when it belonged to someone’s parents– the basement was not. If the basement was in a punk house, generally the neighborhood itself would be more run-down relative to the surroundings. Punk and its offshoots have always had a feeling of the underdog; that these underrated, quasi-legal spaces served as an incubator for them feels entirely natural.
In their book Dance of Days, Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins examine the roots of the Washington, DC punk and hardcore scene. In it, they introduce us to the Bad Brains, a seminal (and sometimes controversial) hardcore band who formed in the late 1970s. Unable to secure a booking at any of the city’s established venues, the group simply set up show after show in the basement of the house where they lived, through them establishing their reputation as an outstanding live band.
Decades later, the basement show was still going strong. “Growing up in Jersey, 9 out of 10 shows I went to were in basements,” says Josh Grabelle, owner of Trustkill Records, who booked shows in his parents’ basement for several years. This began in 1993, when California’s Still Life was in need of a show. “Iconoclast were friends of mine so I called them to have them play as well. Mean Season and Unbroken were on tour and I found out they needed a show the same night, so they played also. John [Hiltz] brought down his PA and that was my sound.”
Bryan Sheffield, who would go on to act as label manager for Doghouse Records, was also inspired to put on house shows, in his case by a living room show: “The Van Pelt, The Billy Crosby’s, Chisel and The Promise Ring played. I sat on the stairs and was blown away by the passion put into the music played to the small amount of people that had gathered in this little room.”
Ronen Kauffman, who along with his housemates began booking shows in their New Brunswick basement in 1998 (and is readying a book about these experiences), described how they came to book shows: “I was so compelled to find a housing situation that accommodated live music events because it was at such shows that I’d had my most powerful experiences with music. It doesn’t get much less commercial than playing in a shitty basement, and that was the attraction. I loved music that didn’t have a business tie-in, and having an event in a living space is about as intimate as it gets.”
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Two factors made the basement show an attractive prospect: intimacy and low costs. DIY shows generally took place in basements or halls. For both, you needed a PA; for the latter, you also needed enough money to rent the space. In a basement, you were answerable mainly to your housemates or – depending on the nature of the house – your parents. If you happened to play in a band that rehearsed in the basement, the PA was also taken care of.
Steve Aoki of Dim Mak Records described the setup for and diversity of the Pickle Patch, the living room venue that he and his three roommates maintained beginning in 1996: “We charged a $5 cover at the door and gave it all to the bands. On that same floor that everyone bounced around on, the bands usually slept on. We had all kinds of bands playing in our living room from At The Drive In to Cave In to The Rapture to Ten Yard Fight to Discount to Locust to Saetia to Planes Mistaken For Stars to !!!.”
Especially in the days prior to the omnipresence of the internet, the presence of distributors at shows created a way for attendees to be exposed to new music and zines from across the country. Fliers for upcoming shows would also be available. “It was everything but the music that I really remember best,” says Tracy Wilson, vocalist for Dahlia Seed. She discusses the house of John Hiltz in Westfield, New Jersey, as “a second home to many of us” during that time. “[A] great deal of us spent more time upstairs being social, buying records from local vendors set up on tables in the front room, snacking on whatever Jon had cooked up that day… I wouldn’t really call it a community at the time because most of the kids were too snobby to interact with people they didn’t know but it was a definite scene for a lack of a better word.”
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For some bands, the difference between basements and more formal spaces such as clubs or halls affected their approach to playing. Chicago musician C.T. Ballentine explains: “I think the quality of sound is usually different and that changes the way you approach the set. Obviously the sound won’t be as crisp or clear as in a venue, so there’s a lot more emoting, a lot more creating atmosphere.” Liam Kimball, of the Chicago punk band New Black, puts it more bluntly: “The sound is usually horrible, and the space is usually cramped, so you have to make adjustments. …To me, basement shows mean that you play sloppy and loud, and the songs are usually twice as fast.”
Musicians have taken the lack of a stage in different ways. Mark McCoy, vocalist for the hardcore bands Charles Bronson and Das Oath, expressed admiration for this situation: “When everyone’s confined in this tiny filthy space with water dripping on your head from filthy pipes above you, there’s just this intense energy that makes you all want to go crazy.” Kauffman, whose hardcore bands have played venues large and small, elaborates: “I still get more excited about music in that small and intimate setting. It’s arresting, if you are open to the experience. It’s like a dumbed-down sweat lodge. …You can really push yourself into other people’s personal space; maybe you can even make someone genuinely uncomfortable for a moment. The way I feel about music, it’s good art to fuck with people a little bit.”
By contrast, Norman Brannon, guitarist for a number of notable hardcore and post-hardcore bands, observed that “[w]hen I’m on a stage, elevated from the audience, I’m totally able to look out into the crowd. I’m bolder for some reason. When I’m eye-level with everyone, I tend to stare at my shoes a lot. Playing in a basement makes me act the same way I’d have been had I walked into a basement party: awkward and seemingly antisocial.”
Even when a band had grown to the point when a basement wasn’t necessarily the most practical place to play, the attraction of it was hard to resist. Part of the 1998 documentary Release covers the final show at 67 Handy Street, a New Brunswick punk house. Among the bands playing were New York’s Sick of It All – at the time, one of the largest hardcore bands in the country. Brannon recalls a Texas Is the Reason tour in 1996, at which time the band was booked by the William Morris Agency: “I remember going over the routing with our agent and when we got to Minneapolis, he suggested playing at First Avenue, which is where I guess you’d expect an up-and-coming indie rock band to play. But both ourselves and our tourmates, The Promise Ring, felt that we owed our friend Fang the respect of doing the show. He had booked our bands when nobody else would, he knew everybody in town, and we figured we’d have a better time playing for him. Our agent asked me what kind of venue it would be in and we told him it was likely going to be a basement show. He was a very cool guy, mind you, but I’ll never forget the tone of his voice that day. He was like, ‘Why in the world do you want to play a basement show at this point in your career?’ And I just remember saying, ‘Because that’s the kind of band we are.’”
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It makes sense that music born out of a do-it-yourself aesthetic would thrive in a do-it-yourself space. Not every band that played basement shows became seminal; not every basement show was a memorable one. (In the course of our interview, Wilson argued that local basement shows were much more memorable for her band than those taking place elsewhere.) Some of the musicians I spoke with remembered basement shows fondly. Others made no distinction between shows in basements or clubs.
I can remember standing in a backyard in New Jersey in the late 1990s. A group of us were milling around after one of four or five bands scheduled to play that day had finished their set. The guy putting on the show walked over and made the case for watching the next band. And that’s what we did. I’ve never seen a club’s promoter do that. I went to dozens of hall shows, and I can’t remember that happening there, either. But when it came to basement shows, it always felt more personal, whether you were standing in a friend’s kitchen, watching a promoter’s parents talk to a band, or handing five dollars to a friend, bandmate, or zine editor.
The towns in New Jersey where I saw basement shows were not generally places with thriving music scenes. While the Bad Brains shows described by Jenkins and Andersen were set up as an alternative to Washington’s clubs, by the mid-90s, basement shows (and DIY shows in general) had led to what was essentially a distinctive touring circuit for a certain style of band. The Canadian emo band 2 Line Filler played four shows in the span of a week in New Jersey during the summer of 1996.
Basement shows were, almost without exception, all ages. Given clubs’ dependence on alcohol sales, the typically younger crowds drawn to punk, hardcore, and emo also made it harder – in certain eras – for bands in those genres to secure club bookings. Kimball describes the audience at basement shows as “young kids, excited to see live music because they are too young to get into the clubs, and the old dreadlock and tattoo hardcore kids that are ‘keeping the scene alive’.”
Punk rock and its offshoots generally value energy over precision, and basement shows provide an environment in which limitless energy can be provided. That intimacy often led to memorable shows, whether you were observing or playing. The principle that leads larger bands to play smaller venues every now and then applies even more to basement shows. It’s impossible to quantify what made one basement venue more seminal than others, but the lack of boundaries between artist and audience created conditions for a genre to find its idea location. And the memories of those who had played their best shows in basements, of those who’d seen memorable shows in basements, may well have created an archetypal, idealized version of the basement show.
Basement shows are still thriving – Ben Lord of the indie rock band Up the Empire (and, over a decade ago, Falling Forward) pointed to Philadelphia as one city where a DIY culture is “vibrant”, citing its Danger Danger House in particular. A recent entry on CMJ’s website trumpeted “The House Show Is the Future”, and the DIY touring resource Book Your Own Fucking Life lists a number of basement venues. While specific clubs may rise and fall, it’s hard to imagine that the basement – the most DIY of venues for the most DIY of music — will elude us any time soon.
Works Cited
Andersen, Mark and Mark Jenkins. Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation’s Capital. New York: Akashic, 2003.
Glastetter, Jason. “The House Show Is the Future”. CMJ.com. 7 February 2007.
Greenwald, Andy. Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin: 2003.
LaGorce, Tammy. “Finding Emo”. New York Times. 14 August 2005.