Terminal Youth. Photo courtesy of Al. |
It's nine o'clock on a Sunday morning. I exit my bedroom, which empties out into the living room, to go to the bathroom. On my futons, four longhaired, middle-aged Finnish men are awake and finishing off their individual cases of Natural Ice from the previous night. They raise their cans and grunt hello. I squint and point to Jypi's Motörhead T-shirt, giving a thumbs up. He smiles and raises his can a second time before killing it. I return to my bedroom and go back to sleep.
The insulation around some of the pipes in my basement is asbestos, but it’s the least dangerous kind. “White” asbestos, as it’s known, poses no real health risk unless it’s agitated.
Unfortunately for my lungs, then, bands play my basement roughly once a week. Some are from Finland. Some are from Long Island. Some live upstairs.
The Finnish guys: they’re a band called Kohu-63. They’ve been together since 1981. They played about fifteen feet as the crow flies from my bed and the show attracted about fifty people. I don't know what "Kohu" means and until they played my house I had only heard one of their records once. Why, then, my basement?
Within weeks in either direction of me moving into my house, nearly every small, independent-minded concert venue in the city of Boston was shut down. Art spaces, a record store, other houses, and even a small bar ceased hosting bands. Allston’s Reel Bar, Re: Generation Records, the Lilypad in Cambridge, and a house known as the Cuntree Club were all casualties of the same period of under three months. Necessity, as it turned out, was the mother of five Finnish men as old as my parents playing Discharge-inspired hardcore at my house.
When the dust settled and the information about my basement started to reveal itself, the various operators of some of the venues began to come to us with show proposals. A friend who booked shows at the now-showless record store knew a band called Diswar, who were on tour with Kohu-63. It evokes the sequences in old sitcoms where split-screen telephone conversations would go on and on, with each new person hanging up and calling someone else.
Even when the venue climate is relatively barren, bands from Boston can always get local shows — it’s not so easy for bands from a few states away to keep their finger close enough to the city’s pulse to know who to ask and, for the time being, my roommates and I have no problem hosting them.
The long and the short of it: I like basement shows and I like music — that’s why I’m willing to enter this situation and go to bat for all these people. I think a lot of my friends and a lot of their friends are doing interesting and fun things musically. I’m more than willing to break the law so my friend Brian, his high-pitched voice, and his acoustic guitar can sit on a PA speaker and cover “I Wanna Be A Homosexual” by Screeching Weasel.
