Live Free Or D.I.Y. Episode #02: Sustainability and Resilience
Episode Description
In this episode, hosts Dana Bollen (Two Week Notice Podcast / Piebald Tour Manager) & Andrew Mall (Music Professor - Northeastern University) are joined by eight of our Season 1 panel members to discuss factors that impact the sustainability and resilience in D.I.Y. music scenes, as well as the importance of adaptability in a society that is constantly changing and evolving.
Panel members for this episode include:
Norman Brannon (Thursday / Texas Is The Reason / Anti-Matter Zine)
Luke Garro (Piebald / Fastbreak / In My Eyes)
Ace Enders (The Early November / I Can Make A Mess)
Joey Chiaramonte (Koyo)
Chris Wrenn (Bridge9 Records)
Brandon Davis (Vanna / Fever333 / Lions Lions / INSPIRIT)
Jeff Apruzzese (Passion Pit 2008-2014 / Drexel University)
Matt Dunn (DIY promoter - Syracuse, N.Y. / University of South Carolina)
PLUS a cameo from Vinnie Caruana (The Movielife / I Am the Avalanche)
Episode Links
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Credits
Thank you for your contributions to this podcast:
Anthony Robbins (Research Assistance)
Ioanis Pintzopolous (Production Assistance)
Kira Burr (Graphic Design)
Todd Pollock (Cover photo)
Casey & Iodine Recordings
Piebald (podcast theme music)
Aaron Stuart (cover photo talent & legend)
Northeastern University (funding)
Episode Transcript
Norman Brannon: Hardcore does not live in a bubble. And as much as we like to think that we're so disconnected from the outside world, ultimately the outside world affects us.
Dana Bollen: Welcome to Live Free Or DIY. On today's episode, we are going to discuss sustainability and resilience in the DIY music scenes. My name is Dana Bollen, I am your co-host and along with me is Professor Andrew Mall. Professor!
Andrew Mall: Hey Dana.
Dana Bollen: How's it going?
Andrew Mall: I'm doing great. How are you?
Dana Bollen: I'm great. What do you got for me today? What are we talking about?
Andrew Mall: Well, I want to start with thinking about where we've come from, you and I, and also a couple of the folks we interviewed. So, do you remember when you first started going to shows some 25 years ago, how did you find out about music?
Dana Bollen: Of course. I remember. I had a couple friends in high school that were in bands, and they'd be like, "Yo, there's a show this weekend at the Salem Elks Club. Come through!" And that was it, really. I mean, there were flyers around and stuff, but we weren't allowed to post them in the school. But, how I found out about music itself, I would go to--I was not a great student as you know this, professor, you know me as a student at this point, okay. I used to skip school every Tuesday, or I would show up late at 11:00 AM or something. I would walk, pretend I was walking to school. Instead, I would keep on walking over to Strawberries Music in Lynn, Massachusetts, because that was CD release day. They had the headphone listening stations and I would check that stuff out or I would just go to the CD section and just flip through.
And I remember Boys Night Out, there was a big buzz about them. And I picked up the CD case and I liked the artwork. I turned it around. There were Adam Sandler references and the track listing and I was like, "You know what? I'm going to buy this." Because I heard good things through the internet a little bit. That was when--I don't even know, how did I find out on the internet back then? I don't even know. I would just go on websites, I guess, or people--you know what it was? People on their AOL Instant Messenger away messages would leave lyrical quotes or in their profile, and just talking to people: "Yo, did you hear the fucking new Boys Night Out? It's sick." So I would sometimes buy CDs blindly. What about you, professor? How did you find new music?
Andrew Mall: I started going to DIY shows in high school also. I'm a little bit older than you, so I'm talking early- to mid-nineties. And it was a situation where we were going to the Knights of Columbus kinds of halls in suburban northern New Jersey and seeing mostly local bands and I was buying 7"s and people were handing out flyers, and then I just talk over with friends of mine from high school and we'd just go the next week. And it got to be a situation where it didn't really matter who was playing. It turned into, like, this is just something regular that I do with a small group of friends that really enjoyed the music. That was way fun.
When I got to college, I got to college in 1997, so I'm dating myself here, but one of the first things that I did was I joined the college radio station. I kind of loved the idea of sharing the music that I was really into with more folks, and that was the way to do it in 1997. I had a college roommate that was really into indie rock in the mid-nineties. I grew up in North Jersey. My college roommate grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago, so he had a different perspective and he had been more involved in learning about indie rock. But being involved in that college radio station, I met folks that had been doing it for a while that were going to shows in New York and Philadelphia, and it exposed me to this much larger world of touring bands. Most of whom we would still say are DIY and indie. And some of them were hardcore, but most of them were post-hardcore or emo, what we would call emo or just, I don't know, indie rock stuff.
Dana Bollen: I love all that, Professor. I remember when I first started going to shows that were bigger than just the VFW Halls and stuff, I would go to Access and Avalon on Lansdowne Street in Boston. And it wasn't social media, but they had websites. So I would go on the website maybe every day, refresh that website and see what shows were coming up. And you would go to buy physical tickets, you would buy at the record store. Sometimes you would buy tickets at Filene's Basement, at Ticketmaster. That was always weird. Another big thing for me was, and still is--maybe the most powerful--is word of mouth. I remember I used to trade headphones every day in high school. I always had my discman with me. Always. I would get in trouble for it sometimes, but some teachers, they didn't care, especially if you got a substitute or whatever. And I remember Diana Ring, she was one of my best friends in high school, and she was always trading headphones with me. I'd give her rap and she'd be like, "This sucks." But she would give me From Autumn to Ashes and Poison the Well, I'd be like, "Who is this?" And she would tell me, and I would go to Strawberries and I would buy that Poison the Well CD or that From Autumn to Ashes CD. And she also, I remember, worked for WFNX as an intern while we were in high school. It's like, wow. She was so cool. And she would get me tickets to these shows. She would get me comps for the Palladium or for Axis.
Andrew Mall: My college friends and I--and I think we're kind of talking around the same period, so 1998, 99, 2000--we would drive down to Philadelphia a lot. We were at college in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which is in eastern Pennsylvania. We'd drive down to Philadelphia to go to shows at the First Unitarian Church, to go to shows at the Rotunda and at 4040. Stalag had closed by the time we started going to shows there. And this was around the time that a guy named Sean Agnew really started putting a lot of work into promoting DIY shows. He was a big deal in the Philly DIY scene for a while, but going to shows and seeing bands, that was my life. And the thing is, you mentioned buy the CDs or the records at the shows. Sometimes that was the only place you could do it. When I was in high school in Jersey, you go to the CD store at the mall, none of those bands were there, they just weren't.
When I got to college and I started expanding my world through people that had been involved in music or excited about music for a little bit longer, that's when we started going to the record and CD shops that were on South Street in Philadelphia near the TLA. Relapse Records was over there. They took me down to the Princeton Record Exchange, which was huge and is still around, an amazing place. And that's really where I started looking up to people for recommendations and also really looking forward and cherishing those trips to stores that were maybe the only place to find music and to bring it back and listen to it. And the situation today is so much different. I'm not sure that it's better or it's worse. And listening back to a lot of the interviews that we've conducted, I think it's kind of both, but it's just different to have such immediate access to music that bands that aren't on a major label, that don't have a lot of financial support, maybe don't do this for a living, but they love creating. They have something to say and they're putting it out there. And then listeners like me and you and people older than us and people younger than us, people's kids who are now getting into the scene, we can listen to it right away, which is great. And also we can ignore it just as quickly because there's always something else to listen to, which is maybe not so great.
Dana Bollen: Professor.
Andrew Mall: Yes, Dana?
Dana Bollen: I have a question.
Andrew Mall: Dana, what's your question?
Dana Bollen: We have friends who are joining us today in this conversation. Who should we listen to first?
Andrew Mall: I want to turn to Luke. I want to turn to Luke Garro next because in your conversation with Luke, he was really getting into some of the similar things that we've just been talking about.
Dana Bollen: Let's do it. Luke Garro, Piebald.
Luke Garro: Getting music out back then was very different from the way it is now. You had to press a physical copy, and that was a rite of passage for a band. You had to have your cassette demo. I don't know why. That was it. And then from there, if you were lucky enough to get on one of the indie labels, or you were willing to fund your project even more, you could get a seven inch and that was kind of the next step, was having a seven inch. So that was the only way that your music existed. And then once you had those, you hopefully can maybe get some mail orders, but even that, you needed to promote where and how people were sending money to you to order one in the mail. Really, you needed to be playing shows. And then there were physical distributions, distros.
It was like, people that showed up to events with all their boxes that they brought in, and they would buy a couple copies from every band in the scene and you could buy them from them. So you would hope that you could get some of your records into distros. That was if you were very much on a small indie label. Then you could graduate to one of the more substantial indie labels in our world. In the hardcore world, it was like Revelation Records or Victory Records or something like that. If you did that, then they'd be able to service all your records to different alternative record stores. You weren't going to get in the mainstream record stores, but they would make sure that Newbury Comics had some years, and all the other places like Newbury Comics around the country in the world for that matter, could have yours.
Dana Bollen: All right, Professor.
Andrew Mall: Dana, you have some thoughts?
Dana Bollen: Do you mind if we just take a time out real quick?
Andrew Mall: Yeah, yeah. What's going on?
Dana Bollen: I love what Luke said right there. This physical copy thing, I couldn't help but think back when I used to buy a CD. I would go home, sit in my beanbag chair in my bedroom, and I would lock the door for whatever reason, I would lock the door and I had that stereo, the three piece, it had the two speakers in the middle console with the three- or five-disc changer, and the two cassette decks, and the radio. And I would listen to the CD, sit in my beanbag chair, I would read the lyrics along with each song and listen to the whole album all the way through. And I would also learn the lyrics. Nowadays, I'm going to be honest, I'm bad at learning lyrics. I don't do that practice anymore. It is what it is. But also I would read all the liner notes and all the thank yous, and I remember Say Anything's Is a Real Boy, Max, he thanked so many people, and I checked out all those bands. A lot of them I knew, but a lot of them I didn't. So I would do that constantly. I would just go to the CD store and take a chance on buying a couple of those CDs who my favorite band just thanked. So that's interesting. And something--I don't think it's lost. I just think it's different now. Maybe you go on Instagram and see who else your favorite band is following or posting with and stuff like that.
Andrew Mall: Yeah, I think it's different now. I think you're right. The experience of listening today, if you're listening on your phone or on your computer, your tablet or whatever, you don't have easy access to those liner notes. You're not opening up the CD or pulling a record or seven inch out of a sleeve and having to look at that as you're playing the CD or the record. So the experience of listening to music is different, and I often wonder how that difference has been experienced by musicians. So we're going to turn to Luke again because he talks a little bit about that too. So he was talking about what it was like before and now what it's like in the 2020s.
Luke Garro: A lot of changes have happened in the DIY scene, some good, some bad. I don't know that there's an overall it's worse or it's better. It is just evolved and it's just different. The main things that stick out to me as being differences, the barrier for entry. Not that there used to be a high barrier before, but you used to have to really be out there in the scene. And you used to definitely have to produce this physical thing--going into a studio, making a cassette demo, making your T-shirts, and then the next step above that was getting signed to one of the local labels. All those things are true and still exist to this day, but the barrier seems a lot lower in the sense that you can record in your bedroom and it can sound really well, you can put it out that day on SoundCloud or wherever else. So it seems like there's a lot more, and you don't really have to leave your bedroom or leave your smartphone to be able to access all of that. So the market seems much more crowded than maybe it was when you lived in a suburban town in Connecticut and had to go out to a show to see the things that were part of that. And that's for better or for worse, like I said, there's no real, it's better now or it's worse now. There's just a lot more. And you can get stuff out a lot quicker. So that's a pro.
Revenue's got to be another tough thing. If you're taking a DIY approach and you still need to either cover your expenses or make enough money financially that you can actually afford to go out and do this, whether it's touring or whatnot, people are paying for less things. So in the nineties and early two thousands, you could press a record, and even though you were only going to sell maybe between 500 and a thousand over the course of a year, you still could make some money from that. There was still dollars to be made, and there was no such thing as streaming. And when you were fortunate enough to be on a label that could press CDs for you, you could still make money on CDs. And I just know revenue streams have gone down. Now that being said, you can get paid for people to streaming digital music if you're getting a lot more, but that's where I think the crowded market starts to work against you because people can go and listen to a lot of stuff, and the chances that they're going to listen to your stuff a lot enough for you to collect revenue means you got to be a really, really good promoter and stand the test of time and keep pushing and keep hustling to get the promotion and exposure that you need to actually achieve that.
Andrew Mall: So in today's episode we're talking about sustainability and resilience in DIY scenes. And for me that's rooted in the kinds of changes that we've experienced in DIY music. I'm going to come back to this later in the episode, but I think it's really important to state upfront that the changes we experience in DIY music--that we have experienced in DIY music--they're tied to the changes that we've experienced in our culture and in our society more generally. So, Luke's talking about the technological changes that have decreased the barrier to entry for musicians and band members who are recording. We're going to hear from Jeff in a moment who also talks a little bit about how much easier it is to set up shows if you're a band, how to book shows for you to play at if you're a promoter, how to get in touch with bands and have them come play. And I think it's a really important point: really important to think about the changes that DIY music communities have experienced, because that points us directly to how to ensure that they're going to be available in the future. I talked about this in the prior episode, about how significant DIY music scenes have been and how I want them to be significant for future generations, for future fans, for future musicians. But if they are struggling in the face of change, if they cannot adapt, then we're in real trouble.
Dana Bollen: Well said, Professor. Up next, we're going to hear from Jeff Apruzzese, former bass player of the band Passion Pit and music professor at Drexel University.
Jeff Apruzzese: There is a lot of positivity to come out of things like having Bandcamps and SoundClouds, and the ability to get your music out there is such a welcome opportunity. You can find out more things. You also, you can book shows--you can book DIY shows through these inner networks that exist online that were so hard to discover before. But at the same time, I think then that also answers the question of authenticity. Because I think there was so many authentic relationships that were forged when bands were touring up and down the East Coast, and it was kind of through these informal networks of peers. Those were such strong connections versus it's a lot easier to get in touch with people now. So I think these are really opportune times for DIY bands to be able to--ease of access to recording, right? You could do it on your iPhone if you had to. You can get your music out there, you can connect with fans a lot easier. You can network with other bands in terms of figuring out opportunities for performance and things like that.
Andrew Mall: So we just heard from Jeff talking about lower barriers to entry for people making music, even for people listening to music. And I love what he had to say there.
Dana Bollen: Couldn't agree more. Professor. And you know what, Chris Wrenn of Bridge Nine Records, he has something similar to say, but a lot of value to add on top of what we just heard from Jeff. Let's hear it.
Chris Wrenn: Things have changed in some ways. Obviously the technology has changed. Ways for people to be DIY have changed and have increased the number of ways that you can do it yourself. There's more ways to do things on your own now than there ever have been. There's people recording their own albums in their bedrooms now. That certainly wasn't the case or available 20, 30 years ago. You can create your own fanzine on a laptop in a way that you could do something in 30 minutes that might've taken me or somebody else three days. I mean, I remember when I was doing fanzines, it was photocopying everything and then cutting and pasting, and in order to change the size, you had to change the percentage on the photocopier and make it smaller and then cut it out and put it in place. And of course, you lose some of the resolution or some of the--it kind of degrades the image. But in a lot of ways, I think that was part of the charm of those fanzines back then.
So I think there are a lot of ways that people have tools that have been made available to people to enable them to do things on their own, which I think is incredible. One thing is, I guess, and I don't know if this is a popular opinion, but if everyone can do it themselves, then there's a lot more crap that's out there. And obviously the good stuff rises to the top a lot of times, but it's harder to cut through and find the gems and the things that you might be excited about. So I think that's probably one thing that has become more difficult I think now.
Andrew Mall: Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about what Chris was just talking about, but let me start with this, Dana.
Dana Bollen: Professor.
Andrew Mall: Is DIY supposed to be difficult? Is it supposed to be hard to do stuff yourself?
Dana Bollen: It's a great question, Professor, and I don't think so. I think sometimes we overcomplicate things. Sometimes, at least personally, I can be maybe stubborn, but I do know that when I ask for help--speaking, say, for the Two Week Notice podcast. I'm really bad at graphic design, for example. And if I need a logo or some sort of artwork, episode, artwork, whatever it is, I'll go on Instagram and post a story and just be like, "Hey, does anyone know how to do this? Can you help me out?" And--I'm very grateful for this--I get flooded with DMs of people who want to help me, which is so beautiful, and these people can do it way better than I ever could. So to answer your question, I would say sometimes we make it too hard for ourselves.
Andrew Mall: It sounds like you're talking about doing it together and not so much doing it yourself. And I'm totally on board with that, right? Like DIY is, well, it's a community. It was never meant to be an individual pursuit. At least that's my sense in the music scene. But at the same time, there's this mythology of bands like Black Flag suffering, living literally hand to mouth in order to make this music and get it out and tour in the van. They're just beating themselves up over it. There's this mythology of Ian Mackaye putting out the first seven inches at Discord and doing something similar to what Chris was talking about with the Xerox machine in order to create the seven inch sleeves and then to paste them together. And now today, we're doing it together, we're doing it in community, but the technology that we have access to just makes it so much easier. And so I wonder, does that diminish the value of what it is we're creating when we can just knock it out? And I think that's one of the things that Chris is talking about at the end there. DIY has become a little bit too easy, so that anyone who has some kind of idea can make something happen. But that doesn't necessarily mean that everything has an audience or that everything counts as DIY. I'm not really sure where we go.
Dana Bollen: Well, those are great points, but first of all, I would say no one's keeping score. I think if it's authentic and you have people around you who bought into your idea because it's authentic, it is a digital world out there. And there are people who I consider, maybe we're not friends by definition, but at least homies because we've connected on Instagram and we've exchanged messages via the DMs, people who have helped me, and I think it's a case-by-case thing. I know when I meet that person in person, for example, at Furnace Fest, there were countless people who I met who will just come to my table and start talking. And I have to do this little, "Wait, timeout, timeout. We haven't met in person yet, right?" And they're like, "No, no, we haven't." And I'm like, "Okay." I did it even with you, I wasn't even sure if it was you when we met, I was like 90% sure when you came over to me and said hello, right? I was like, I think that's Professor Mall right there. But it was just a quick hello. So I think it's adapting to the changes because my old brain or your old brain--no offense--it's a lot to take in, especially if you're buried in your phone like we all are. But the authenticity is still there, and I think it's just kind of adapting to that, if that makes sense.
Andrew Mall: It totally makes sense, and I don't want to sit here on this podcast and tell people that the relationships that you have with people that you haven't met in person aren't sincere and aren't authentic. I don't actually believe that. But if we're talking about changes in DIY music scenes, if DIY music scenes used to be local, used to be, you knew everyone by sight, even if you didn't know them, you saw them at the shows, you bought records from the distros that Luke was talking about, or you made zines like Chris was talking about and handed them out to people that you just saw regularly at shows like that? That community is different if DIY is also a virtual space. Maybe that's my hangup, right? Maybe my hangup is, I can't get over this idea that--like I said already, I can be on board with the idea that we can have authentic and sincere and significant relationships with people that we don't know very well in person or have only met a handful of times. I get that. But can we have a full community that never comes together? That only exists in virtual space? A community that used to exist principally, primarily in a 20 mile radius where people saw each other at shows every weekend? That to me is a really huge change to DIY music scenes. And the theme of this episode is sustainability. If the scene isn't locally situated, then where's the incentive to be involved in your local scene? Where's the incentive to invest in your local community and the people around you, the businesses around you, the bands around you, if your whole life is on the screen somewhere else?
Dana Bollen: I love what you said there. I think there's a lot to it. I can only speak for myself and my experiences. And you make a great point, but there is some sort of magic. Going back to Furnace Fest, because this is a big online community. You're in the Facebook group, I'm in the Facebook group. There's 11,000 people in that Facebook group, or maybe more now,
Andrew Mall: Like 12 and a half thousand.
Dana Bollen: Right? So I mean, while I'll never meet that 12 and a half thousand people, that's impossible, we were all there together and I talked to hundreds if not thousands of them over the last four years. Some of those relationships I know are now friendships for life. That would have never happened if it wasn't for--I think the combination of both the constant staying in touch via the socials, but also that once-a-year, meeting up, watching sets together and just bonding over this thing that we all love so much.
Andrew Mall: Alright, Dana, I love what you had to say there, and it made me think of two things. The first is that these online communities that we're all a part of on all these different platforms, they're enabling us to get over the first bumpy levels of getting to know someone. Maybe quickly, maybe not, but so that when we do meet face-to-face, when we do have a chance to hang out for longer than 10 minutes at a festival or whatever, we can kind of jump right into being friends, being cool, instead of trying to feel each other out, Because that feeling each other out, are we into the same kinds of things? Do we have similar values? That, we've done over DMs and over Zoom and on Facebook and so on and so forth, right. So yeah, it's like accelerated friendships, maybe.
The other thing I'm thinking about, I'm thinking again about resilience and I think I'm coming around to the idea that the changes in DIY music scenes, some of these changes like wrought by technology that facilitate us to connect easily and quickly, those forms of digital communication and connecting with people are key to building sustaining relationships, relationships that themselves are sustaining. That the relationships last in part because we're more in touch with folks and also sustain the scene, enable people to build something to do it together because they have relationships, not necessarily with people who live close to them or within a 20 mile radius, or they know they can expect to see at a show every week or every other week, but with people that contribute to the same online community, whether it's on Facebook or whatever. And I think maybe that's a great thing to come out of these technological changes that Jeff and Luke and others have been talking about.
Dana Bollen [FF ad read]: Hey folks, just want to take a minute to talk about the best festival of the year: Furnace Fest in Birmingham, Alabama. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, October 3rd, 4th, and 5th. Headliners are Jimmy Eat World, Dropkick Murphy's, Knocked Loose. But that does not even scratch the surface of the insanity that is this year's Furnace Fest lineup. I'm just going to rattle off a few: Saves the Day, Mom Jeans, Texas Is the Reason, Drain, Speed, Kublai Khan, Comeback Kid, Citizen, Biohazard, Microwave, Madball, Spanish Love Songs, Less Than Jake, Say Anything, I Am the Avalanche (my dudes!), Ten Yard Fight, Converge. There's like a hundred bands, not to mention the plethora of pre festival shows and afterparty shows. My favorite, I will absolutely 100% be there: Unearth, On Broken Wings, and Chamber. It's going to be a ripper, dude. You do not want to miss this festival. Three day passes starting at just 300 bucks. This is an insane deal. Prices will go up. So get your tickets at this price while you can. Plus there are VIP options, parking options, and so much more. Go to Furnacefest.us for tickets and more information, and make sure to join the Furnace Fest Community Facebook group.
So just to reinforce what we're talking about here, Professor, the biggest change definitely is--I think we can agree--the internet and the socials and whatnot, but at its core, I think it's still a lot of the same. Let's hear from my dude Brandon Davis of Inspirit and Vanna and Lions Lions.
Brandon Davis: When I went to a show in 2004 that was at a VFW Hall or Knight of Columbus, and then fast forward to last year when I went to see the band Vein at an American Legion in Hingham, Massachusetts, there was no difference. It was exactly the same. Kids just set up their stuff and played a show. I'll say there's probably more people at the Vein show than there were at VFW Hall shows in the early 2000s because we have more access to people knowing about your music now. Back then we had physical flyers that we had to drop off at Hot Topic, but now you can just post that you're playing a show on the internet and people will come to it. So as far as technology, it's better now, but as far as the actual shows themselves, smaller shows, the DIY stuff, it really hasn't changed much.
Andrew Mall: Yeah, I love what Brandon has to say there about how he goes to these shows--we go to these shows, those of us who've been going to shows for decades--we go to shows and oftentimes they feel like this could have been a show a decade ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. The atmosphere is the same. But at the same time, it's definitely bigger. It feels bigger. Even the small shows feel bigger. We're going to turn to Ace in a moment because he's talking about similar things and one of the things that it's not so much a concern of his, but one of the things that he's really thoughtful about and intentional about is these communities. It's still imperative. It's still hugely important that the values that are central to do-it-yourself music communities remain at the forefront. And to me, that's one thing that I worry about. As we get new people in, whether they're young people, whether they're people excited about stage diving because they saw it on TikTok, whether they're people excited about loud, aggressive music that is vastly different from what they've been hearing elsewhere on the internet, are they also taking away some of the values of community, of supporting each other, of picking each other up? That's something that Ace starts to talk a little bit about.
Dana Bollen: Let's kick it to Ace Enders, The Early November
Ace Enders: Everything has changed so quickly and so much. Really trying to maintain that idea of where it all came from, I think, is really important to hang on to that, to all of these lessons that we've talked about and morals that we've talked about, and the ability to pick people up and really just keep that in mind. At the heart of it, that's what this whole thing is, is about picking people up. That's why it started. That's probably why we all got here. So, definitely staying connected to that and not letting the number of views you have or don't have skew how you see it too much. That's the biggest challenge to me, is how social media evolves and becomes even more present in this DIY ethos that we have and whatnot, and how it could potentially impact it even more because it has changed a lot.
Dana Bollen: Love what Ace Enders had to say there. And I think there is a through line here. And Professor, you were talking right off of the end of that Brandon Davis clip before we just heard from Ace Enders about how things are much bigger now. And I love what Joey Chiaramonte, frontman of Koyo, had to say, especially someone who's a bit younger than some of these people we've heard from, but he's in it right now. That dude is ripping shows and ripping festivals and ripping tours. And what he had to say as far as the changes that he's seen in these DIY music scenes is very encouraging. And he also talks about how everything's just bigger now.
Andrew Mall: He also talks about how everything is faster now, and this got me thinking yet again, is DIY supposed to be hard? And I ask because if everything is faster now, when do bands pay their dues? If you can get thousands of followers based on a demo and a couple of TikTok videos and now you're packing clubs and you're doing it instantly, I can imagine seeing elders--maybe not me because I'm not so gatekeepy--but I can imagine seeing elders being like, "Man, these bands come out of nowhere." And there's actually--that's been a lot of the pushback against the success of not necessarily of Joey's band, but it can turn into a gatekeepy exposure/overexposure argument too, which I think makes our scenes less resilient.
Dana Bollen: You also can block that out. To me, that's all noise. What matters is the music and then that band coming through with that live performance. And they're going to pay their dues. I mean, I've toured with Koyo. I know they've slept on floors. So I think the cream rises to the top. When you go to a show and you feel that magic of a band like Koyo, they're undeniable. And I think at the end of the day, that's always going to persevere.
Andrew Mall: Don't get me wrong. I think gatekeeping is the antithesis of scene resilience. I think it's the antithesis of scene resilience because gatekeeping is working to keep people out of your scene. How can you ensure that your scene is there for future folks if you don't let them in? So don't get me wrong about that, and I've seen Koyo play. I got a lot of respect for that band, for him, for his bandmates. Man, they're good.
Dana Bollen: I know you weren't picking on Koyo in particular. I'm just trying to hype up my guy about to hear from him. So let's hear from Joey Chiaramonte of Koyo.
Joey Chiaramonte: don't think it necessarily is a matter of better or worse, but things are certainly bigger right now, broadly speaking. People have way more--it's a way more accessible avenue in. I think the thing people get confused about to a degree sometimes is underground music being big or popular or explosive. There's different levels of it historically, but it's happened a million times. Bands get big, bands coming from a small music scene blow up, and it brings more young people in. And then cue all the discourse on, "Should it be gate kept? Should it not?" Whatever, whatever, those things are fairly irrelevant to me to a degree. But, it feels bigger right now, for sure, than my point of entry. Inevitably, it is, broadly speaking, bigger. Music that is underground, or considered underground, artists that would be one-to-one at my point of entry to now, the scale and scope is in fact, bigger. Things get hotter a little faster. People know about things a little faster. Just the way social media goes now compared to my point of entry. A band could be made overnight off a demo without even playing a show. That happened before--I'm not saying that's never happened, but it happens more consistently and faster now, I would say. I think that's the biggest thing that jumps out at me, personally. It's just the speed of things and the size and scale. But I don't want that to be misconstrued as--I think people talk about it in a way as if it's never happened before, and that kind of leaves me scratching my head. This stuff happens periodically over time in music.
Dana Bollen: Love Joey so much. Such a great frontman, he's so well-spoken, he's a gentleman. He's so stoic, he knows how to hype up a crowd.
Andrew Mall: So I love this idea of these bands, the singers really taking initiative in helping the fans and the listeners and the people of the show understand their responsibility, understand what it means to participate, to be there. What are the expectations? I love this idea for a couple reasons. One, because it's so important to recognize that the atmosphere at an event often starts from the stage. That the people up there, they have a huge responsibility not only to give you a fun show, but to set the right tone for the event. So if hardcore, if DIY is supposed to be a supportive community where people learn that they can rely on each other and do things together, then to have bands and singers talking about those values and demonstrating those values from the stage, that goes a long toward ensuring that those values stay present in the scene. I love that. I love that about hardcore and about DIY music.
There's this idea in sociology that we learn how to behave in public situations by being in public situations, by doing them over and over again. And through repetitive exposure to what other people are doing we learn what's expected of us, what appropriate behaviors are. But at a hardcore show where people are crashing into each other, the longer it takes for you to learn how to be safe at that show, the higher likelihood there is that you actually get hurt before you know how to be safe. We need people to get on board real fast to ensure the vitality of the show by not being sued out of existence because someone got hurt.
Dana Bollen: Well said, Professor, I just saw Drug Church the other night, and Patrick, what a frontman. What a conductor. He was literally teaching people and giving lessons and giving feedback in between songs on the stage diving, how to act If you're in the crowd. He's like, "Hey, if someone is jumping off this stage, you catch them. If you're up here and you're stage diving, don't have so much faith in your fellow man because I see people jumping off the stage, turning around, trust-fall style with your arms up. Your hand should always be on someone's shoulder. Take care of each other." It's just a beautiful thing.
[Two Week Notice excerpt] Hey folks, if you like this podcast, then you will definitely dig the Two Week Notice podcast. For those of you who don't know, I host another podcast where I interview musicians in the DIY hardcore, punk, emo--the scene. That show is called the Two Week Notice podcast. You could find the link to the Two Week Notice podcast in the show notes of this episode that you are listening to right now or go on your preferred podcast platform and type in Two Week Notice. It's the one with the peace sign. And I think it would be very fitting to play a few clips from Two Week Notice right now on this show to give you an idea of the vibe that is Two Week Notice. This particular clip is very pertaining to this discussion on sustainability and resilience that we are having right now. So here's a clip from my interview with Vinny Caruana of The Movielife and I Am the Avalanche.
Alright, I want to pick your brain, Vinny, because the state of the scene right now, it seems to me maybe this is the best time ever. The scene has really been thriving, dude, I can just feel it. This is a very special moment, I feel like, right now. Because you've seen these peaks and valleys, since the nineties you've been doing this, man. So based on looking back on trends and whatnot, from your experience, how does one pivot someone like you has been around for a while or a newer band even if you have advice, say like a band Koyo?
Vinny Caruana: Yeah, I mean, I think doing your own thing and staying the course, people will eventually catch up to you and love you. I think it's important to remember that a lot of bands have gotten popular without that kind of music being in fashion or anything like that. You mentioned Koyo. I think a band like Koyo and a lot of bands like them are all watching this next wave start to build, and the bands that are ready to be legit are going to rise to the occasion and they're going to be part of that wave. I watched it happen with Movielife. Drive Thru was exploding. We released Movielife Has a Gambling Problem. We released Forty Hour Train Back to Penn. We were on a wave with a bunch of other bands that were ready to do it. When that wave comes and you're still a year behind, you might not catch it. A band like Koyo is fucking perfectly primed. I'm sure that they're going to do really well and have an incredible year, a year or two of just touring on this record that I've heard, and it's awesome. They're the next Long Island band for sure. They're already arriving as we speak.
But yeah, it's fucking fun to put in the work and know who you are and write music and enjoy playing live and enjoy touring and traveling with each other. If that's all happening and there's a ton of open doors, because there's a lot of new people getting into the scene and they don't know that many bands, you could be their next favorite band. That's constantly happening. And yeah, bands like Koyo, Drug Church, Drain--I could list a million bands--but you're just seeing it happen. It's a beautiful thing. It's fucking rad. And hardcore crosses over into that and the fact that hardcore is bigger than it's ever been and there's tons of new hardcore kids just transforming into hardcore kids overnight, that's crossing over into everything too. Because we're all related to hardcore, and certainly Drain and Drug Church and Koyo. And to an extent, I Am an Avalanche and Movielife where we just, we'll always have our ties to hardcore. But yeah, things are bigger than ever. It's fucking cool to see. I love it.
Dana Bollen: It's a beautiful thing. So you would agree, maybe bigger than ever right now?
Vinny Caruana: Right now, bigger than ever. There's more bands touring than ever as well. My first tour was in 1998. It would be a very rare thing to bump into another band on tour at a truck stop.
Dana Bollen: Really?
Vinny Caruana: There wasn't that many bands touring. I know that sounds like, of course there were a lot of bands touring, but not like now. Yeah, bigger than ever right now, for sure. Punk, hardcore, the emo nostalgia. My Chemical Romance playing arenas, that kind of stuff is still in full swing. The When We Were Young festival. That's a big staple that is like, yeah, well, we're going to sell 50,000 tickets or whatever it is for two days with every band, many of which we toured with in the early Movielife years, or at least played some shows with.
Dana Bollen: Make sure to check out the Two Week Notice podcast on most podcast platforms or just follow the link in the description of this current podcast episode.
Up next, we have Norman Brannan of Thursday and the author of Anti-Matter.
Norman Brannon: The community sort of changes in response to the things around it. This has always been an important part of my paradigm with hardcore is that hardcore does not live in a bubble. And as much as we like to think that we're so disconnected from the outside world, ultimately the outside world affects us. So when global politics is on fire, hardcore reacts in some way. When technology changes, hardcore reacts in some way. Even when we talk about the distribution of music and what DIY means, hardcore has had to adapt. Because back in my day, when I did my first fanzine, my first fanzine, I literally did it in a lithography class because I was a fuck up and my high school sent me to a trade school because they were like, you can't do regular high school apparently. And so I went to this trade school and I picked lithography because I thought, well, maybe I can make free fanzines. But at the time it was like, you didn't even have desktop publishing. I had to use a typesetting machine to type in all of the text, print it out on this laminate paper and then lay it out with exacto knives onto a thing, burning plates, sending it to the press. It was an entire thing.
At this point, now I just literally press a button and I send a fanzine out to over 7,000 people every other day. So that's pretty crazy. Am I doing it myself? Not in the same way. I have the platform of Substack that essentially created this entire backend for me to do that. Is it more righteous if I had to create my own platform? That would never happen, and then Anti-matter would never exist. So there are certain concessions that we all are making all the time. We have to decide for ourselves what works for us and for the projects that we're trying to make into reality.
Dana Bollen: Professor!
Andrew Mall: Yes, Dana?
Dana Bollen: So being open to change is essential, yeah?
Andrew Mall: Absolutely.
Dana Bollen: Agreed. You have to, because this world is always changing. We are always changing.
Andrew Mall: If we're talking about resilience, that's part of the thing. That's one of the things that resilience is, is adaptability. Norm wants us--he's encouraging us to go with the flow. We shouldn't resist changing. We should be open to adapting in part because if we don't, the world's going to move on without us. I think we're going to end here with my friend Matt, who teaches at the University of South Carolina, but also used to be a DIY show promoter in Syracuse. Because he feels very strongly that if we don't change, if DIY doesn't change or isn't open to changing with the times, then it's going to get left behind.
Matt Dunn: You have to find a way to bend with the time. If you say that the ticket price is too much for a DIY space, well, it's like, well, where exactly is the money going and how is it sustaining when a loaf of bread is no longer a dollar, it's $5? So it's like, you've got to be able to find a sense of understanding, understanding market value and understanding economic structure in that sense. Obviously growing up, a lot of DIY points in my youth were very anti-establishment and the like. Great! You have to understand the how and the why of something if you want to institute change. You can't just point and say, "That should be different." You have to ask the question, "How different? Why different? What can you do to make it different?" So I do love the ethic behind a DIY idea, but at the same point as life has progressed, there's got to be some evolution with that to some extent and not some expectation of "This is only the only way that it's going to be," because those societies will get left behind, because life will just move past them.
Dana Bollen: All right, and that wraps up this episode of Live Free or DIY, sustainability and resilience. On the next episode, please join us as we discuss exposure. Is there such thing as too much exposure in the DIY music scenes? We're going to dissect that and so much more.
Andrew Mall [Credits roll]: So join us next time on Live Free or DIY. Live Free or DIY is co-hosted by myself, Andrew Mall.
Dana Bollen: This show is also co-hosted and produced by Dana Bollen, editing assistance from Ioanis Pintzopolous.
Andrew Mall: Research assistance and production assistance by Anthony Robbins. Funding provided by Northeastern University.
Dana Bollen: Graphic design by Kira Burr. Cover photo shot by Todd Pollock. Podcast theme song brought to you by Piebald and Iodine Recordings. Head on over to Iodinerecordings.com for very special anniversary vinyl represses from bands such as Piebald, Fastbreak, Quicksand, Further Seems Forever, Stretch Armstrong, as well as incredible new artists signings, The New Scene podcast, and so much more. That's Iodinerecordings.com. And lastly, if you enjoyed the show, make sure to rate, subscribe, and follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Instagram. You can find links to everything in the show notes of this very episode.