THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
The last venue I hit is Solidarity at 1119 Massachusetts St. After parking my car, I walk past the crowd outside of its Brothers Bar & Grill, 1105 Massachusetts St., and find my way to the radical library. There's no music — the first bad sign. The lights are off; also bad. Finally I see a sign on the door that says the show has been canceled. Later I was told that the show had been canceled because the band had broken up — no guarantees in DUI, but then, even mainstream venues are subject to cancellations.
Solidarity does double duty as both a radical library and a music venue. Volunteers Kat Randolph and Katy Andrus say that the venue does about two shows each month, packing people into the deceptively large space. Originally they were worried that they'd have problems with the police, being right across from the station, but Randolph and Andrus say that's Brothers and the dance studio next door tend to make much more noise.
The DIY scene actually works mainly by word-of-mouth, friend-to-friend communication, Vaeck says. With her punky hair and multiple piercings, Vaeck sticks out in the typical Lawrence crowd, and she seems to know everyone. She says that she and her roommates never had trouble finding enough people to fill their house for shows. When it comes to organizing on a national scale, DIY venues and the bands that play at them turn to a higher power: Book Your Own Fuckin' Life. BYOF began its life as a page in Maximumrocknroll
Magazine 15 years ago. Venues, bands and anyone who had a couch for traveling punk musicians to crash on posted their contact information. The page quickly became an independent book, which came out once each year. The problem with this was the considerable cost of putting out such a publication sans advertising, which would be counter to the generally anti-consumerism bent of the DIY scene — made it expensive to produce. The original editors also grew frustrated that much of the information would be outdated by the time it made its yearly run. Eventually the book went on the Internet at www.bvofl.org. Today it's run by Ernst Schoen-Rene, a self-described "computer guy" who took over after a devastating computer crash that wiped out a lot of information three years ago. It has 17,000 listings for bands, venues, labels and promoters and gets 15,000 hits every day. In Lawrence, the Haunted Kitchen is listed on the site, the guys from 1331 Vermont haven't even heard of it and the volunteers from Solidarity say they should really get around to listing themselves on it one of these days.
Schoen-Rene says the DIY scene started about 25 years ago, mostly as a result of how small and connected the punk rock community was. People would pass lists of who to call to find a venue or a couch to crash on. Because no one back then got into punk rock to make money — this was before the days when bands like Blink 182 made punk rock into
pop — everyone was more or less in it for the love of the music, Schoen-Rene says. During those early years, there were venues aplenty and tons of donation money. Bands could pay for all of the gas and food and make a little on the side too, Schoen-Rene says. Now, he says, the money's tighter, and a lot of the bands are in it with a delusion of making it big. The golden years are over, he says.
The scene is far from dead, however BYOFL is still going strong and Bruce Haring, founder of the DIY Convention, says it's only continuing to grow. The DIY Convention started in 2000 and drew more than 1,000 people this year. Haring says that with the rise of digital tools like the Internet, DIY has gotten huge — for better or for worse. "You have a ton of people producing out there now, which means you get a lot of really great stuff and a lot of shit," he says. Also, DIY has branched out from punk to other genres, to an extent changing the types of people associated with the scene.
Locally, despite the loss of venues such as the Pink House, the Pirate House and the Kremml, there are still places like the Haunted Kitchen, 1331 Vermont and Solidarity that plan to continue having shows. In addition, ex-Kremml resident Emily Elmore says she is planning to start a new DIY venue with her friend April Flemming and anyone else they decide to live with. The Springfield, Mo., senior says that she and Flemming are hoping to find a place in the student ghetto — a welcome change
for Elmere, who moved to Eudora after leaving the Kremlin — and plan to start having shows as early as this May.
I drive past the Haunted Kitchen on my way home. I see a quiet crowd smoking on the porch — probably unaware of all of the work that has gone into the evening they're enjoying — just waiting for the next band to go on.
rperkins@kansan.com
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