On an external hard drive stored in a closet somewhere at home, I have a photo from the first concert I set up, a moment captured on a roll of film and later scanned and sent via email. Fifteen years old in the shot, I stood on the side stairwell leading down to the basement of the chapel at Merrimack College, half an hour’s drive north of Boston. My teeth are studded with braces, weeks before their removal. The image is timeless in my mind, but also a timestamp marking June 1998 as squarely within the third wave of ska. I’m wearing a burgundy Less Than Jake baseball cap and an oversized white undershirt silk screened with caricatures of the Supermarket All-Stars, a Houston band whose horn-tinged punk I’d heard blistering on a cassette compilation that came packaged in a Chinese takeout box. I’m not sure if the file of this photo is a GIF or JPEG, but it’s low resolution. Not exactly lost, it still would take hours to find.
When I mentioned the term D.I.Y. as a teenager in the company of adults, they seemed to assume my interests lay in carpentry rather than in the ethos of music I assumed most of them wouldn’t have liked. Or they asked with a smirk and a play on words: Do-it-yourself? But what are you actually doing yourself? This, something, anything—it’s all possible, I said and believed.
My parents didn’t object when I asked to set up a benefit concert. I helped myself to the telephone directory on the top shelf of their coat closet and flipped through the index to find the main phone number for the closest university to see if I could secure a hall for a few bands to play the first Friday of my summer vacation. I brought a quarter to school the next day and placed a call at lunchtime from the payphone down the hall from the library. I didn't reach anybody, so tried again with another quarter the following day and hung up having secured the stage in the basement of the campus chapel with an intention to raise funds for a local charity.
My preparations were mostly analog: walking through the woods to a friend’s house and, while skating in his driveway together, asking if his band would like to be on the bill. I’d listened in his bedroom to recordings of their originals and covers of bands like the Misfits and Operation Ivy, owned both of their demo cassettes and a few silk-screened patches, and had seen them perform at youth group events and battles of the bands. He agreed to ask a few other local bands to play as well. I emailed around to find a couple of headliners willing to come up from Boston, and much to my surprise a melodic pop-punk band agreed to travel all the way from New Jersey, which was, I would have argued, the world’s epicenter for melodic pop-punk.
Flyering was an art form in its own right. I emulated the handmade handbills I’d collected at other shows and taped above my bed, clipping different photos and graphics out of magazines and sheering them of their original context by cutting and pasting them into a collage interspersed with an array of logos photocopied from CD covers and website printouts. The lineup—Kicked in the Head, Drexel, Humble Beginnings, The Carpet Patrol, SPIFF45, PYL, five*o*five, and Argyle Socks—sat in an array of Microsoft Word fonts alongside handwritten descriptions and directions. I made roughly a hundred copies at the local printer, pinned them to the community notices boards at my favorite bagel shops in town, and carried a batch in my backpack for weeks in case I noticed anybody carrying an instrument or wearing a band t-shirt or lapel pin, dead giveaways of potential interest. My mom drove me up to Salem, New Hampshire to staple these printouts to the bulletin board at Newbury Comics and other record stores. She fronted me the cost of renting a PA system, and we loaded up on bottles of water and cans of soda in bulk. As a minor act of promotion, I set up a simple website on a free hosting platform, detailing the basics of my show and including a short table of other upcoming concerts in the surrounding area.
The night itself went off without trouble. Friends helped set up a couple of collapsible tables for merchandise and took turns collecting cash at the door. We relocated the drum kits and sound system from the elevated stage to create a more intimate performance space on the linoleum tiling of the floor. Just shy of two-hundred people, mostly middle- and high-school students, showed up over the course of the night, paying five dollars each to clamor along with one band after another. After covering the venue security fee, reimbursing my parents for out-of-pocket costs, and providing gas money to the sole out-of-state band who had a four-hour drive each way, the show raised $826 for a nearby nonprofit. While I could hardly wait to organize another, I turned my attention in the meantime to maintaining the website I had started.
From local bands playing church basements to sold-out arenas, I compiled a list of shows scheduled all over New England and made that grid accessible online for others—featuring everything from folk punk to dreamy indie, from upbeat ska to metalcore. A snapshot of the simple frames I managed at the time still exists out in the Internet’s untended wilderness, the imperfect but functional code rendered consistent formatting, with occasional typos. Within months, I expanded my coverage to include local radio, record labels, and other regional information. Usage grew by word of mouth, and more musicians, venues, and bookers reached out via email to add or update their details. I verified each request as well as I could, fit the listing chronologically, copied and adapted the HTML from the previous line in the table, and uploaded my edits and additions, a blunt yet tedious process that seemed like the vanguard of innovation. What might have appeared to others as a collection of obscure calendar entries I understood as a roadmap for community and creativity, simple text imbued with meaning.
I was reminded of this particular stage in my life and era of the internet many years later when, in 2015, T.T. the Bears’ Place announced it would close after more than four decades as a mainstay for live music in Greater Boston. Dozens of other venues had closed or changed ownership over the years, so the loss of another long-standing space was significant but not altogether unanticipated. I hadn’t been inside for at least a decade, but I immediately noticed how its website remained an anachronism in an era of responsive design. Mostly unchanged since I used to browse the site with regularity, the main page failed to load on mobile devices. With Adobe Flash enabled on a desktop browser, insecure as it was, old animations still burst with jagged edges, explosions of primary and secondary colors, and wonderfully outdated iconography. “Live Music 7 Nights a Week” splashed at the center of the screen. A link led to a listing of T.T.’s final events. Then, the doors shut once and for all and the online calendar gave way with a muted finality to a row of repeating cells: “No performances are scheduled.”
With nothing to look forward to, I clicked backward. Hidden within the failure to evolve lived an accidental archive: a history of the venue documented one month at a time for nearly one-third of its existence. Dating as far back as August 3, 2002, an early error included a non-existent $6 show featuring Alexander McGregor, the Gunshy, and Jeffery Simmons, an alum of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. The listing reappeared a month later on the correct date. To me, the double entry was not only an old typographic mistake but also a subtle nod to the person responsible behind the scenes for the unheralded task of transcribing each night’s lineup.
Browsing the end times for T.T.’s, and the years of life that preceded them transported me back to my teenage years scrambling to sit in front of the family computer running Windows 95 in my childhood home to scour those exact listings and other such familiar destinations on the so-called world wide web. Amongst the T.T.’s listings I revisited, one show stood out: Cave In, At the Drive-In, Bluetip, and Eulcid on Saturday, August 7, 1999. I was sixteen then, my first time stepping into a rare all-ages matinee in the 18+ venue. It was a mild summer afternoon, no sign of rain, the temperature not quite hitting 80 degrees, as I lined up waiting for the doors beneath an awning adorned with a bear’s paw print. I had been next door at the Middle East, a neighboring club, maybe a dozen times. There I had climbed on stage at fourteen to sing along with Goldfinger after an older cousin chaperone ducked out for another show, Swans, three subway stops away. Another time a friend’s dad waded through a basement full of leather, plaid, combat boots, metal studs, and cigarette smoke while wearing his pastel V-neck sweater to make sure we were okay after he missed a call from an unidentified number at his home nearly an hour away. As I waited beside the Middle East and stepped into T.T.’s for the first time, I felt like I had passed into a sanctum of local rock’n’roll, a space until then known but never seen, closed to me on account of my age and only briefly open.
The first band on the afternoon’s bill was by far the most mispronounced: Eulcid, whose mathematically inclined indie impulses were often mistaken as an homage to the namesake of Euclidean geometry. My shifts as a bagger and cashier at an organic grocery store sometimes overlapped with the band’s bassist. After their set, I fell into conversation with a college-age attendee who mentioned my website in passing. As the site I built for my own show evolved into a vaster resource, I had given it a name: Just Another Scene, meant playfully and a bit provocatively to question what made our local scene in New England so special or whether it was just like any other. The fact that we were witnessing an all-ages set of indie darlings spanning El Paso, Texas, Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts in an iconic dive bar talking about the site a few weeks before I started my junior year of high school filled me with a sense of pride and purpose. He asked why I continued to use a convoluted web host instead of registering my own dedicated dot-com. I thought about the suggestion as we stood watching At the Drive-In hurl themselves back and forth across a small stage and Cave In introduce a shift in their sound from emotive metal to exploratory space rock. Days later, my new acquaintance from the show helped move my site over to an independent hosting company. I enlisted another friend’s help in sprucing up my web design and drafted a mission statement to accompany the new domain, envisioning the online undertaking as “an attempt to integrate the diverse sounds from the six New England states, encourage musical and artistic creativity, and bring recognition to the vibrant bands and individuals existing on all levels.”
Extending from southwestern Connecticut to northeastern Maine, JustAnotherScene.com was far from alone as a regional resource during its run between 1998 and 2005. Undergroundhiphop.com started in a Northeastern University dorm as a platform for local rap and hip hop. Bostonpunk.net and Bostonska.com were rather self-explanatory. Tonyandpals.com surfaced the poppier tendencies of both genres. XadamX.com tended toward indier, artsier, and screamier sides of the scene, whereas XmulletX.com was the place for straight-edge and hardcore punk. Well beyond New England, like-minded properties popped up as well, similarly founded and grounded by individuals who cared about the community they sought to serve. In California, OC Ska kicked up two-tone touches in Orange County and The List’s exhaustive text-based treatment of the Bay Area extended from Salinas to Sacramento. Angry Potato grew out of Idaho. Colorado burned with Hellfire Revival. Louisiana resisted labels with No Cliques, No Trends. Many of these sites included message boards, an embedded reimagination of Usenet forums and precursors to subreddits and social media, where new users burgeoned with new ideas and newfound information, friendships and flame wars, and no shortage of opinions.
The controlled environments of early portals like AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy gave way to greater self-determination with the advent of the browser—Netscape in 1994, Internet Explorer in 1995, and Firefox in 2002. With some tinkering, any personal interest could suddenly find a home as a standalone website. As much as hosts like Angelfire, GeoCities, and Tripod offered standard templates for starters, a sort of trial and error easily led to custom creations and new connections. In my case, I learned HTML by studying and testing the source code from other pages until something broke on mine, then tried again. The major dot-com companies and their funders may have run madly into boom and bust, but they seemed at best only tangentially connected to the building blocks we were figuring out on our own where to place.
A new, imperfect, and irrepressible era of discovery was born. Promotional floppy disks that once featured download instructions—select RUN; type A:\INSTALL or B:\INSTALL; press ENTER—and risk-free trial periods for getting online began promising access to “the entire Internet.” Monthly subscriptions with limited hours extended upwards until packages defaulted to unlimited usage. With the arrival of Ethernet and wireless connections, dial-up modems released the phone lines they had taken hostage with a connecting hiss. CD-ROMs became writeable as well as readable. Musicians both large and small turned to online outlets to tease new releases. After hearing bands play live in-person, there were suddenly places to learn and share more. Websites documenting local music scenes carved out their own digital territories, mile markers charting local happenings in community centers, skate parks, and town halls with as much respect as mainstream events. They projected a certain precision and sense of pride amongst kindred spirits, in turn shaping and being shaped-by real-life communities.
After my high school classes, I rushed to make sure my modem was turned on and waited for my email to download using the Eudora client. Once my homework was done, I verified, transcribed, and coded updates to concerts and other music listings. I knew the layout of venues’ websites far better than their interiors. I included 18+ shows for three years before I could attend. When it came to 21+ events, the wait extended three years longer. Preferring comprehensiveness to my own attendance, I cared about others being able to go even if I couldn’t. I set up a few more of my own shows, again in the chapel basement of Merrimack College, in a local Knights of Columbus hall, and in a former textile mill where we needed to lift the bands’ equipment up six flights of stairs in a hand-crank elevator shaft, but found through the surrounding scene a constant reflection of greater possibilities: that any of us in spaces like these might meet new friends, discover unknown outlets and opportunities, and know the value of our voices, both alone and together, and that artists might find it that much easier to reach audiences and book shows in or around Boston, elsewhere in New England, perhaps New Jersey someday, or elsewhere in the greater beyond.
I wrote my college application essay about the community benefit I saw in running my site, though the interviewer at one particular Ivy blanched at the prospect that I would spend any amount of time on something that didn’t have an obvious financial benefit. “But I read an article that people are making a lot of money on the internet,” she said. “Why wouldn’t you?” I argued that the world online was at its best an avenue toward connections that would be impossible offline. During my senior year of high school, the Boston Phoenix featured my site as the “best ecumenical local rock site” in its best of Boston issue, which felt like the best possible rebuttal.
Recently, on the morning I turned 41, I broke out Kid Dynamite’s cover of “Birthday,” a track first released by Token Entry when I was six years old. During a moment between making oatmeal for my children’s breakfast and walking them to school, I belted the singalong to myself:
I’m not gonna retire, ’cause I’m still young at heart.
And time will tell, in the future, who has done their part.
And if you don't agree with me, well then you can sit home until your grave.
Because, at any age, we’ll be on this stage playing fast, smart, strong, and brave.
I thought back to seeing Kid Dynamite play for the first time in early 1999 alongside Saves the Day, Piebald, and All Chrome on a bitter winter evening at a former footwear factory in Worcester, Massachusetts. The space, then known as The Space, has long since shuttered, redeveloped into residential condos that I last read were up for sale in a foreclosure auction. But what struck me was the sheer energy that filled the room, the fact that a live set bursting forth in scarcely 20 minutes could remain etched in my mind for more than 20 years. I never imagined I would relive those moments once they passed, but then a self-identified “hardcore archivist” uploaded a video from the show to YouTube. In the footage I can see myself, sixteen years old, standing in the front row sharing the experience with one of my best friends from high school. By any measure, the recording is awful, a wall of noise hitting the input all at once, lyrics unrecognizable, lighting dim. But the scene is set, as I remember and yet how much has changed.
Music venues were never meant to be museums or mausoleums. Many weren’t even designed as venues, but within their walls they shaped the environments around them and held certain histories. So too have the artists, labels, radio stations, and record stores that also came and went over the years, those in New England of course and everywhere else where they fought to bring independent music into the world. Most of the online properties that captured these moments have likewise disappeared, perhaps preserved in part through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, but their legacies linger not so much in their technology as in the connections and communities they brought together. As Kevin Driscoll, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia whose band Argyle Socks opened my first show, argued in his book The Modem World, “the history of the internet could be a thrilling tale inclusive of many thousands of networks, big and small, urban and rural, commercial and voluntary.”
In my case, I kept up my network of Just Another Scene through college, but sometime around my junior year I found myself conceding in early adulthood to the constraints of time. Even with another redesign helping pull data more efficiently from a database built in PHP instead of continuing to manually code every listing, I struggled to keep up with the site’s maintenance while managing the demands of my undergraduate coursework in global development, communications, and conflict resolution. Bands were also beginning to rely more on MySpace as a primary platform for their promotion. Eventually, when I graduated, a gradual decrease of updates regretfully gave way to none—a slow drift rather than a sharp break. After I overlooked an annual payment for my domain, a squatter seized the URL to drive any clicks onward to spam. I kept my hard drive with the listings and related correspondence for years, unwilling to relinquish this private archive. But what to me held a treasure trove was also a disused machine amongst a small stack of outdated hardware left in my parents’ basement. When my dad dropped it off one day years later at a donation site, my hopes of holding on were gone.
In the scheme of things, my site was a relatively simple resource that for several years accomplished far more than what I set out to achieve as a teenager. A while ago, the founder of another local site reopened a message board after former users began to resurface a flurry of reminiscences in a Facebook group, but a conversational lull quickly set in. And as if to warn against the allures of nostalgia, a site known especially in straight-edge circles whose domain registration also lapsed—XmulletX.com—now features a note on its main page: “Every 6 months for the last 12 years I would check the availability of this domain. Last year it became available and I now own this thing once again. The question is, what the hell do I do with it?”