I was first introduced to the Bronx Underground when I started college and made friends with some people who invited me up to a club in the Bronx. “What for?” I asked, innocent as Red Riding Hood trembling with fear and anticipation. “Well” they said, grinning like the savage wolves they were, “it’s a punk rock show”. It’s been a little while since then and I’ve met a ton of great people and seen a lot of great shows put on by the Bronx Underground. I’ve even helped out whenever I could at the doors. The brains behind it are Dave, Adam, and Anita, and I recently got a chance to talk to Anita about the highs and lows of running an all-ages DIY venue and collective in New York.

Alright, how long have you Dave and Adam been doing shows under the Bronx Underground moniker?

Seven years now, we started in October of 2000.

That’s cool. So what exactly did it stem from, the starting of this sort of collective?

Sure, basically, Dave, Adam and I were all in bands around that time, Adam and I were in a ska-punk band called What’s Your Problem Brian and Dave was in At A Loss. So we were playing all these shows all over the Tri-state area in places like CT that had teen centers and whatnot and I witnessed all these amazing DIY shows where bands would come to play in an empty space and tons of kids would come and rock out, have a good time, and stay for all the bands. It was also that the Bronx didn’t have anything like that. All we had at the time was this place called the Blackthorn where a lot of kids weren’t allowed to go because it was a bar, but more importantly, kids would just go for their friends’ bands and then leave. So, if you’re in a band the whole point is to play to new people, not to your friends, and it would just be the worst when like, you’re going on next and the whole audience would leave before you went on. So I said “Dave, you know the scene in the Bronx is pretty weak and I think there’s a lot of potential here and a lot of kids that want to see this kind of music, underground rock, punk, and ska.” I said we could do shows a lot better than what was going on now, let’s do it DIY style, let’s find an empty space and do it.

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Tags: DIY, Interview, show promotion by Costa
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The sounds vaguely drift up the block. There’s a milling of people around, a few vans and trailers strung out, parked in front. The music gets louder as you get closer and there are a few kids here and there, huddled in groups against the early winter cold, smoking. One of them looks up at you, smiles and waves. You nod back. It’s an old neighborhood church, with the train two blocks away and an empty elementary school across the street. The entry to the freeway and the bridge over the river is a few blocks in one direction. It’s quiet, almost deserted on a weekend night like this.

At the door there’s someone behind a makeshift table, dolling out singles for change, slapping cheap neon bracelets on wrists. NO BOOZE NO SMOKES NO FIGHTING is thickly scrawled in black marker on a big sign posted on the wall above the table. The music’s stopped for a while, and a flurry of kids, blue-haired, pierced, scruffy, tattooed, stream out past you to escape the wave of heat from inside. Down the stairs.

There are still a few kids down there, leaning against the walls, helping the band break down their gear. A few chat in groups, some buy home-printed shirts and demos from a smiling kid with a backpack and a box against the far wall. He’s with the band, thanks them, slips them a few free stickers and a flyer. The next band starts to set up, a simple three-piece. Somehow, a hidden signal causes everyone from outside to come back in. You struggle against the flow to grab some fresh air and say hi to someone. You see the last few smokers and stragglers out front. In the bathroom, you can hear laughter and yelling. Someone missed the toilet.

Cars come and go outside, some slowing down as they maybe hear a few strands of the setup or see the mass of black and leather-clad kids, but all that matters now is back getting downstairs. This is the band you came for, so you head towards the front. Well, it’s the front of the crowd, since there really isn’t a stage. Just a cleared area where the PA is set up. There’s a pause, a few strummed chords and a drumline rolling, playing, not really any song, just a warm up. “Check, one two, one two. Hey, we’re…” Their name is lost as you and about 30 other people scream the first line of the song they begin.

Hearts beat faster. Sweat pours down faces and on the singer’s face; it’s like a waterfall. There’s no lights, no smoke, no stage show. Just two guys and a girl, singing and playing their hearts out. The vocals are almost impossible to hear since you and a few others eventually start to out-sing the mic. You yell at the singer. He’s a coworker, and he stops and says hi while bullshitting with a pretty girl up front between songs. They continue on, and you scream louder and louder before, at the very end, storming near him and grabbing him. The crowd goes nuts as the two of you sing together into the mic. It’s a cover song, some old 80’s punk song from a jukebox in a bar on the other side of the city.

As oddly as it started, it ends with a bang. “Thanks a lot, go buy our shit guys! We’ll be at…”, some bar you know in the coming weeks. You’ll be there, drinking and singing along from the front. Not the same as this though. You step up to help out a bit with clearing stuff so the next band can set up and go on. Rinse and repeat this for the next two or three bands, though you know that none of them can match the one you came to see.

You’re outside later, as the kids head out. It’s almost over, but something’s changed in the air. People are tired, sweaty, even though the air is cold. There are new pairs of held hands and fists clutching new t-shirts, new songs and words filling heads. For at least a few people there, maybe that girl walking alone towards the bus stop in a daze, or the two young kids, looking barely 14 with green and blue hair, it’s their first real all-ages punk show. You remember the feeling, the sense of leaving knowing that you just took part in something magical and incredible that you can’t really describe, but you know it when you’re singing it and you can’t wait to do it again.

A few hours have gone by, you and your friends are in a diner a few blocks away. It’s past midnight and the whole thing took about an hour to break down. You pitched in. The doors are locked, the bands paid whatever they could get, the floors swept and bathrooms cleaned. The lights are out. Church basements and VFW halls and old houses and community centers from all over the country go back to doing whatever they’re usually doing hosting VFW events and bar mitzvahs and whatever else.

Do it yourself.

Tags: DIY, story by Matthew
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I was hanging out with my friend Genevieve a few days ago, as she was going through her music collection to find stuff she didn’t want anymore. One album she came across was a split EP in CD form from a little no-name label, from two obscure bands that probably aren’t around any more. Four of five songs from each band. On vinyl, each band would have had a single side of a 7-inch record to themselves here. CD technology allows us to put it all on one disc the size of a coaster. Which is great for those of use who don’t have room to spare to store records.

Now, in looking at this EP, I noticed a few things. One was that the album had no bar code on it, not even as an added-on sticker after production. Whoever had done this was expecting to only sell them perhaps through the mail, or at shows. The second thing was that, going through the linear notes, was the surprising lack of any sort of “real” internet presence for these bands or this small label. There was contact information posted in the form of personal e-mail accounts, but that’s about it. No label site, no Myspace.com account or Purevolume site, nothing.

Nowadays, you can surf a site like Myspace and find hundreds, if not thousands, of small-time independent punk rock record labels using Myspace to have a solid online presence, to say nothing of the thousands upon thousands of bands that form every day and put up a Myspace page for themselves to establish an internet presence, sometimes without even having any recorded music. The rise in general “computer-savviness” of younger people these days has also brought about such labels and bands finding their own regular websites and domain names on their own, thanks to cheap internet site hosting and a growing level of knowledge in how to create websites. It seems almost impossible for bands to exist in 2006 without some sort of internet presence to showcase their music, to allow for getting contacted for booking, and even for potential label A&R people to seek them out as the “next big thing”.

Even five years ago, such a phenomenon would have been impossible. The long tradition of punk and hardcore traces itself back to DIY and non-mainstream press. Independent zines, newsletters, and catalogues, flyers, and word-of-mouth networks go back to the days of the infamous Black Flag criss-crossing America, playing anywhere that would take a chance on a punk band, and letting their friends know that such venues existed. The Internet boom certainly helped in expanding communications, allowing for an internet version of the book Book Your Own Life (www.byofl.org), and websites for bands so that they could get their music out to people who had never heard of them before.

In 2005, members of several long-running and defunct East Coast hardcore punk bands such as Ensign, Ex Number Five, Mouthpiece, and Lifetime, banded together to form The Fire Still Burns. The Fire Still Burns have, so far, released a 7-inch single on Koi Records, as well as an EP on Blackout! Records. This is just in their first two years of existence so far. TFSB owe much of, if not all of, their rise in popularity thanks almost exclusively to Myspace. Epitaph Records band Matchbook Romance, formerly known as The Getaway, were “discovered” when Epitaph head Brett Gurewitz heard an mp3 posted on the internet punk news site punknews.org. He flew to the East Coast to see them perform and signed them to his label, arguably the most well-known independent punk label today. Another newer Epitaph band, I Am Ghost, proudly boast on their Myspace profile about having only played 4 local shows before getting noticed and signed, selling, as Myspace states, over 20,000 copies of their Epitaph debut .

And yet, in comparison, you can find bands such as Tragedy. The infamous Portland, Oregon, hardcore punk band formed in 2000, and is known for rarely giving interviews, putting their material out on their own label (Tragedy Records), and maintaining no internet presence at all. They have no label site, no blogs, no Purevolume site, no band site, no Myspace (beyond several fansites). They have rarely given interviews and even the contact information listed for Tragedy Records on their releases is sparse. And yet, despite all of this, they still tour and have a dedicated fanbase, having toured as far as Europe.

Beyond their label, Jade Tree Records’ profile on their own website, the only place to find out information about Toronto’s Fucked Up is their blog site, found at http://lookingforgold.blogspot.com. An unusual site, in comparison to other bands, but until recently, it was the only place to find out any information about Fucked Up. Even then, the blog has only been active since November of 2005. Like Tragedy, Fucked Up, who formed in 2001, has a solid fanbase thanks to a slew of vinyl EP releases over the years and constant touring.

How could this happen? As I’d sat there on Genevieve’s couch, staring at the poorly-drawn cover of this EP, I was reminded of what it was like when I first began to dip my toes into punk rock, looking through catalogues and linear notes of albums, and finding almost no information on the internet about punk rock at all (this was back in 1997-1998, when I lived in Athens, Greece, and punk rock was strange enough to frighten the Greek shopkeepers on my block to avoid me as I walked around). I depended on paper mediums and word-of-mouth to find anything out at all, from new releases to tours to basic info on where my favorite bands were from or if they were even still active.

It makes me feel incredibly old and jaded to think this way, but the almost constant overflow of digital presence that the punk rock culture now has seems to deaden it. On one hand, it can make it easier for kids to access and find out about, which for young, alienated and misunderstood kids in the middle of nowhere, far from bustling culturally-overflowing places like New York, is incredible. However, it also does seem to reflect an expectation of almost instant recognition. I remember thinking that a band that could get the money to afford internet hosting and post tour dates outside of local clubs (you can’t flyer the whole nation!) had really “made it”. Now, anyone with a modem and some badly-done promotional pictures can create a website for their band, and they expect that someone will hear or see them and make them big, the next AFI or Green Day or Matchbook Romance.

The internet has almost taken all of the work out of independent, DIY culture, out of the constant touring and, in a way, of the personalization of independent underground networks of contacts and bands. And in the end, sometimes the work itself is all that we have left to set us aside from the mainstream ideals that we’re all about not being a part of.

Tags: DIY, essay by Matthew
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