KULIFE
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Thursday, March 11, 1993
7
A ticket taker observes the Outhouse's patrons from the entryway of the venue.
Jason Auld / KANSAN
A patron heads for the remains of an outbuilding behind the Outhouse. Although beer is prohibited inside the building, it is present outside. But some finds its way inside.
Lawrence's musical underground
Continued from Page 1.
money in the world."
Wicker spent much of the concert in the front row, the forward rim of the pit. And she did not escape unscathed. She was kicked in the head about four times and repeatedly was used as a ladder for stage divers. She also learned a primary rule of concerts at the Outhouse:
"If you want a good place to see, you have to put up with some flailing around," she says. "It was everything I could do to hold onto that one spot."
About a month later, the Skatekens, who warmed up for Fear, kept the pit churning for 30 minutes. The Austin, Texas, group featured a guitarist with his face painted red, a singer in a dog collar with a chrome leash hanging from his neck, and a bass player in a yellow chiffon dress and a Dolly Parton wig he later doffed for the Sinead O'Connor look.
As they cleared their instruments from the knee-high stage to make way for Fear, the pit emptied.
Ed Gibson, Lawrence senior, came out looking the worst. Blood saturated his left sideburn and trickled down his nose from a half-inch gash behind his left eyebrow.
it until I looked down, and there was blood on me. I thought it was someone else's blood. I touched my nose, and there was nothing there. I touched my head, and it was me."
"I turned around and ran into someone's elbow," Gibson said. "he was malevolent or anything. I didn't even notice
But he soon forget the wound and re-entered the pit as Fear took the stage.
Part of the allure of the Outhouse, and hole-in-the-hill. Like it in its leather. In its silver. In its
He says Outhouse concerts are the property's biggest income producers. The venue has regularly been known as the Outhouse since KJHK, the campus radio station, invented the name about seven years ago for alternative music concerts held at the building. But while the name of the blue cinder block shell has stayed the same, its renters have varied over the years.
willingness to cling to the underbelly of underground,
untested and uninhibited music — to wave the flag
of anarchy. But the Outhouse seems an unlikely setting for
such musical mayhem.
"Usually, when somebody steps down, somebody else steps in." Mellenbruk says.
He says the latest renter to step in is Jeff Fortier, who for nearly four years has promoted concerts in the building.
Cornfields surround the building on three sides. Deposits of cobs litter three edges of the property. But a stroll through withered stalks turns up more than the occasional ear of corn. A guitar pick here, a drum stick there and a scattered set of worn, bent, punctured plastic drum heads, all show signs of an underground music industry in the neighborhood.
nearly four years has promoted concerts in the building. Fortier discovered hardcore music in the streets of New York City and has tried to bring part of the scene to Lawrence.
"I was in the underground scene when I was 15," he says. "It was cool. It was an alternative lifestyle. I chose that kind of culture over my friends". It's just a point of how you want to live your life — how you want to set your standards."
Schaake attended Kaw Valley School, a one-room, brick school house that once stood on what is now the Outhouse's parking lot.
one road turns to gravel at the farm where Larry Schaake has lived his entire life. During the day he works his cattle, often on a four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle. On clear nights, he can tell when a concert is in progress one-third of a mile away at the Outhouse.
"When the music is pretty loud it vibrates the windows of our house," he says. His primary objections to the Outhouse are the noise, traffic and litter it has brought to his neighborhood.
The investigation of the American Indian's death made the pages of the Wall Street Journal and led to the questioning of more than 50 people who had attended the concert that night.
The Outhouse site still shows signs of the school. Behind it, to the east and west, stand the school's two crumbling privies, no longer in service.
industry in the neighborhood. The drive to the Outhouse, four miles east from 15th and Massachusetts streets, divides fertile Kaw River Valley crop land.
"Have you ever heard of the term 'she's built like a brick shit-house?' " Donald Mellenbruch asks. "Well, that's what they are."
Fortier made weekend trips to New York City from his home in Waterbury, Conn., which he left at 17. He plans never to return.
Near one farm, a utility pole with a board nailed horizontally to it marks where, after a night at the Outhouse, Christopher Bread died more than two years ago in a hit-and-run accident.
Mellenbruch, an east-side Lawrence landowner, is the Outhouse's landlord. The Harley-riding entrepreneur has owned the establishment for nine years and rents the building out for private parties and concerts.
"Not unless somebody puts a gun to my head and makes me," Fortier says. "Even then I'd seriously consider taking a kick at them."
Fortier first went to the Outhouse while he was in the Army, and when he left the military about a year later, he started booking bands at the venue by calling numbers on record labels so that he could see the New York hardcore bands he liked. The latest was a Sick Of It All concert Feb. 24.
Now bands like
Fear call him. But he thinks many people do not appreciate his efforts to keep underground music alive in Lawrence.
"People think it's just one big money-making scam," Fortier says. He says that the money does not always add up to a profit but that he does not mind as long as he can still be a part of his favorite music.
"Music is great," he says. "That's what it's all about. It's all about sex, drugs and rock and roll."
But Fortier claims he never allows beer inside the squat cinder block structure. And he breaks up fights as soon as he sees them, including three that broke out the night of the Body Count concert despite the 40 people working security.
But Fortier passes off the violence as one of the things that accompanies the venue and the music.
It's a hall, you rent it, he says. "I can try to control it, but it doesn't mean I'm going to. It is just a part of the culture."
Mellenbruch rents the blue cinder block building with the stipulation that no alcohol passes within its walls. But at least one Black Label beer box decorated an arm inside the building the night of the Fear concert; and crushed beer cans usually dot the pit floor.
bett can't say anything.
"If they got it inside, it's probably a private party or someone ain't doing their job." Mellenbruch says. "If I'm there, I'd sure do something about it."
But Mellenbruch is not always there.
"I mean it's not my place, if they lease it for the night,
right?" he asks.
Mellenbruch says violence at the venue in years past was mostly due to skinheads, but most have moved away or have been banned from the building. He says others, including Fortier, have grown hair.
"Me and my wife used to treat them like they were 10 years old, because that's how they acted," says Mellenbruch. "But we turn our backs and they're thumping somebody on the head."
Some of them skinheads were Jeff's best friends. One of them was his roommate. Jeff just said: "If you guys are going to be troublemakers then get out."
But for Fortier, nearly four years in the business has made such incidents simply the by-products of another show at the Outhouse.
"This is punk rock," Fortier says. "Punk rock is not like normal music. People who listen to punk rock are not a part of society."
Above, patrons sometimes express their ideas on their clothes, as on this jacket. At right, violence flares in the pit during a concert.