DIY House Shows and Music Venues in the US

Ethnographic Explorations of Place and Community

David Verbuč

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000460025
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

DIY House Shows and Music Venues in the US is an interdisciplinary study of house concerts and other types of DIY ("do- it- yourself") music venues and events in the United States, such as warehouses, all- ages clubs, and guerrilla shows, with its primary focus on West Coast American DIY locales. It approaches the subject not only through a cultural analysis of sound and discourse, as it is common in popular music studies, but primarily through an ethnographic examination of place, space, and community. Focusing on DIY houses, music venues, social spaces, and local and translocal cultural geographies, the author examines how American DIY communities constitute themselves in relation to their social and spatial environment. The ethnographic approach shows the inner workings of American DIY culture, and how the particular people within particular places strive to achieve a social ideal of an "intimate" community. This research contributes to the sparse range of Western popular music studies (especially regarding rock, punk, and experimental music) that approach their subject matter through a participatory ethnographic research.

Part I

Physical Place and Social Space of DIY Music Venues in the United States

1 Physical Place and DIY House Shows in the United States

10.4324/9781003201090-3

Introduction

“I like house shows better. They are more fun, and more relaxed, […] and cheaper than bars,” says Josh from Virginia during a break at a hardcore punk show held in the basement of the Ranch, a punk house in Northeast Portland. Around 20 people are in the backyard of the house, most of them standing around a fire, holding and drinking beer from cans and 40 oz. bottles. “People are not judgmental [at this kinds of shows],” continues Josh, “and a party has a direction and a purpose to it” (personal communication, February 7, 2012). About two months later, I am at a house show in Southeast Portland, at a place called Void, which features mostly garage rock and indie-rock bands that night. During the event, I talk to Adam, who claims house shows are better, because they are not “controlling environments,” and not about “profit”; they are also “cheaper,” and allow for “overindulging” behavior (personal communication, April 19, 2012). During our conversation about house shows Marge, a friend who at the time lives at the Garfield house in Northeast Portland, contemplates that one of the reasons why she likes house shows, is that “the intimacy of the setting seems to allow people to express themselves more freely” (personal communication, December 16, 2012). Finally, when I attend the very last show organized at the Dental Den house in Sacramento before they close it, Chris from Religious Girls, who is playing that night, tells me:

House shows are better. They’re smaller, more intimate, your gear is at stake because of this, but it’s worth it because we’re fucking punk […] It’s louder, you’re in the crowd, it’s in your face. Quality often does not matter as much as community and fucking family and the ways, like being emotional and playing, and could be one of the band. [Chris’s friend adds:] You could be naked, and no one will arrest you.

(Personal communication, January 23, 2011)

These observations about DIY house shows not only demonstrate a primary role these kinds of places hold for the American DIY participants over other possibilities for concert organizing, but also reveal associations that are made in this way between place/space, cultural values, and types of social interactions. The physical place (intimate, small, crowded) and social space (non-controlling and non-commercial space, non-judgmental audiences) of house shows seems to enable in this way not only relaxed, fun, and free interaction but also creativity (“being emotional and playing”), community, and meaning (“purpose”). The above opinions of American DIY participants about house shows also introduce the main issues I discuss in this chapter: characteristics of American DIY venues (particularly house shows, but also other), how they affect social and music interaction in them, and how they reflect and generate the values, experiences, politics, aesthetics, and sounds related to them (see also Chapters 7 and 8 in regard to the latter two). I therefore argue in this chapter that American DIY communities seek and create particular kinds of physical and social music places which they find necessary for the establishment of an ideal and intimate DIY community.

I rely in this way on diverse social theories that elaborate in various ways on the relationship between place/space, and culture/society (Bourdieu 1977; Foucault 1993, 1995; Small 1998; Latour 2007), particularly the ones that show the complex interrelation among multiple physical, social, and cultural, or material and discursive, factors involved in the processes of articulating and rearticulating the relations between place (space), music (sound, aesthetics, genre), and community (identity, values, social interactions) (Feld and Basso 1996; Stockfelt 1997; Born 2000, 2011; Bennett 2010; Brackett 2016). I primarily focus in this chapter on the physical aspects of place (which can include architecture, furniture, lighting, and decorations), but I also discuss their relation to micro-social aspects of social space, that is, on “intimate socialities of musical performance” (Born 2011: 378), while I consider other dimensions of social space (particularly class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, as well as private/public aspects) in Chapters 2 and 3.

I start the first section of this chapter with a short vignette from a 2011 show at the Villanova house, in Davis (cf. “Villanova House” n.d.), which introduces the main ethnographic concerns of this chapter. I continue with a theoretical and ethnographic consideration of the physicality of DIY house shows in the United States, followed by sections on recontextualization of sound and experience through place, and the subversion of normative spatialities at DIY house shows. After that, I examine socio-spatial musical interactions at DIY house shows, and finally, the relationships between DIY houses/venues, sound, and community.

Experiencing a DIY House Show

In December 2011, I attended a show at the Boiz house, in Sacramento, where I have also met and talked to Craig from Davis’ Villanova house. At the end of our conversation, he told me that for their upcoming show, three days later, he wanted to arrange for special lighting and to find carpets to suit the mood of the music. Carpets, he said, would mitigate the floor’s coldness for those sitting on them (cf. Fergus 2011). Three days later, when I entered the Villanova house, a one-story suburban (“Tract Ranch”) house, at around 7:30 p.m., I was greeted by a warm odor of baking cookies that Craig was making for the guests. He was simultaneously helping performers set up their gear, while there were still only a few participants in the audience. Sharmi, who also lived at the Villanova house at the time, asked me to help them with setting up the fire outside. Perhaps they were trying to engage me into an activity and thus prevent me from just standing around alone and waiting for the audience to fill the room, and for the performers to start playing. They got other people to help them also, so after ten minutes I sneaked back inside, and went to check the “merch” (merchandise) table managed by the performers themselves. When I looked around, I noticed that the room had slowly filled up with mostly younger students, many of whom I was seeing for the first time at a Davis house show, and with some visitors from Sacramento.

Figure 1.1Christine Shields with Phil Franklin, at Villanova show (December 8, 2012).

Christine Shields, the first performer, required she wanted to have “lamps off,” before she started with her set (Figure 1.1). She explained she desired to create a more “mysterious ambience.” The first song, which she named a “spooky winter song,” featured fast 16th notes on the guitar, drone textures, and her quiet singing voice, accompanied by her music partner Phil Franklin who provided for delicate percussion sounds, while using padded mallets. The cozy, warm, and homey atmosphere, enhanced by dimmed lighting coming from the side of the performing area, inevitably added to the experience of “spooky” and “mysterious” sounds. The audience was sitting on couches and on the carpeted floor. Some of them were drinking beverages that they brought with them, as they listened quietly and attentively. After the second song, Christine Shields ruminated: “another winter song—it’s not really winter, really, officially.” Then somebody from the crowd sarcastically responded “Oh shit?” which sounded more like “Oh really?” after which many people laughed, acknowledging how cold it already was outside.

After the first set ended, Craig started collecting donations in a special bucket that Villanova residents always used for that aim. Sonny Smith performed next, with a mix of humorous but poetic songs and stories, accompanying himself on a guitar. Audience was now mostly standing up. After the first or second song, he reached for his handkerchief, and said, “Really got the sniffles here. I am really afraid of losing myself in a moment, and a bunch of snot just coming out” [audience laughs]. Somebody from the crowd interjected, before he ended the sentence, “Don’t worry about it!” with another person overlapping with the first one, “It’s good man!” An audience member standing in front, helped him unpack his tissues. Smith turned around, blew his nose, and exclaimed “So rude! Gross! So inspiring!” He then continued with a couple of more songs and at the end took one song request from the audience.

During the break, people smoked and talked outside, some around the fire in the backyard, and some on the front porch. Tom Greenwood and Brian Mumford from bands Sunfoot and Dragging an Ox Through Water performed next. They used two electric guitars, pedal effects, and voices, for a quiet but intense 13-minute psychedelic piece. A lamp light projecting from behind them painted big shadows of their heads and bodies on a dimmed ceiling. Delicate singing sounding over two slowly alternating chords (on I and IV degrees) on the first guitar, hovering above the drone notes of the second guitar, and a constant loosening of the tremolo bar on the first guitar, with addition to rich pedal effects, and a brief atonal solo in between, all contributed to a wavering and unstable but soothing and immersive atmosphere. After the duo finished, Greenwood exclaimed to the audience “I will just stop right there [brief silence], unless people want more, but there is a lot of people [performers] tonight …” The audience enthusiastically responded “MORE!” so the performers decided to play another long song to finish their set.

During the last break, Paul and Ed from KDVS radio appeared in front of the audience and asked everybody to support KDVS’ “Tower Action.” This included next day’s court hearing, which could provide the local college radio with a permit to build a new and more wide-ranging radio tower. Last to perform was a band Sunfoot. Even though the show already lasted for almost three hours, and a few of the audience members already left, the spirit at the Villanova living room was still high, and the music was energetic and inspiring. After two songs, Brian said hesitatingly: “We have a few more songs tonight,” to which the slightly more sparse audience responded with exclamations, “All right!,” and “Whoop! Whoop!” Brian, obviously energized by that response, replied in a happy tone: “Buckle up!” as he initiated a new song. After the band finished it, the main singer asked the drummer “What do you want to do now?” at which point the audience reacted playfully, one saying, “Yes, what do you want to do now?” and the other encouraging the performers with “Do it!”

A DIY house show, as described above, is a...