Hardcore Harvard

The Elks Lodge in Central Square, with its cheap paneled walls, dinged-up wood floor, and grey concrete basement, looks like a mausoleum for the 1970s. But it was full of life three weeks ago, when a group of about 60 people—with plenty of tattoos, scruffy facial hair, and bobbed haircuts between them—milled about in easy, friendly chatter.

Closed just a few years ago after some particularly rowdy hardcore punk shows, the Elks Lodge was open again on this night for a different assortment of DIY (do-it-yourself) music, including the frenzied punk rock of Foreign Objects and Libyans—whose singers pinballed back and forth among the assembled audience—and the heavy sludge of California’s In Disgust, who set the entire building vibrating and part of the crowd slam dancing.

Between sets, Catherine P. Humphreville ’10, the rock director of Harvard’s WHRB, flitted from person to person, distributing flyers for the station’s Record Hospital Fest and urging each one to come to Harvard. It’s a trip that many of them have made before.

“Boston is kind of unapologetically hardcore,” says John Bogan of the band Daniel Striped Tiger. And though Boston hardcore is sometimes associated with violence and insularity, there is also a more diverse and welcoming community of DIY punk, hardcore, and post-hardcore bands like Bogan’s that has long been open to a small group of Harvard students like Humphreville. These punk rockers, despite occupying a peripheral position on campus, have been central players in the scene.

TUNING IN TO BOSTON



“I feel like I would describe my college experience more as a resident of Boston and Cambridge who goes to school at Harvard than as a Harvard student who goes to Boston,” says Christa M. Hartsock ’10, the president of WHRB and host of “Dischord and Dynne,” a Friday night radio show that features live performances by local DIY bands and provides a free recording for them. Since the inception of Record Hospital—WHRB’s underground rock department—many of its other DJs have felt the same.

RH began in the late 70s as Plastic Passions, playing a mix of music that included reggae and new wave, though its focus soon shifted to indie rock. In the early 90s, as bands like Nirvana and record labels like Matador garnered mainstream attention for college rock, RH, which had been loosely linked to the local Boston scene in the past, began to emphasize it.

“We kind of reacted against that, that the music had gotten too commercial and lost its punk roots,” says Peter F. Rojas ’97, now an internet entrepreneur who helped create both Engadget and the independent-minded RCRD LBL. “We were more interested in bands that weren’t trying to cross over from college rock to MTV.”

Along with New Yorker staff writer Kelefa T. Sanneh ’97, Rojas self-consciously pulled RH in a DIY direction. “We wouldn’t play anything from a major label,” he says. “We wouldn’t play anything with a barcode with it.”

But that dedication to local punk music—most of Rojas’s friends, he says, came from Boston, not Harvard—had begun to fade by the time Zachary I. Baron ’04-’05 arrived at RH, which he says was then in “a wussier phase.” “It was kind of a nerdy, stand-offish, hostile group that kind of looked down at other people,” says Baron, now an editor at the Village Voice. For him, that group represented “a real low in terms of the station’s interface with the greater community.”

With people like Rojas and Sanneh in mind, Baron organized the first Record Hospital Fest in 2002 in part to create a greater connection with the Boston scene. (He also hoped to give RH a bigger name and “just wanted to see these bands play.”) Though Baron held the first RH Fest at Tufts, the Harvard campus has hosted it—and several other shows—since then. Thanks to Baron, influential Boston screamo band Orchid played their final show at The Harvard Advocate. So many people showed up that the band ended up playing two separate sets to two separate audiences.

Today, venues like The Advocate and The Democracy Center at 45 Mt. Auburn remain key sites for shows. But keeping Harvard involved in the scene has required a constant stream of new, enthusiastic students, which RH has been able to provide.

“It’s just exciting to see a scene that’s small, that can feel somewhat isolated from other students here, can continue finding other people who support it, who seek out that sense of community, build the community with each other and bands, and keep the community alive,” longtime DJ Grant M. Damon ’09 says of RH.

The RH comp plays a large role in nurturing and maintaining Harvard’s small group of DIY devotees. Largely based around punk and hardcore music, the intensive comp process involves weekly lectures about different genres as well as a weekly listening assignment of about 10 albums. “You learn about this from a very historical perspective,” former RH director Baris C. Ercal ’10 says. “It’s all contextualized. Everything is just put together in a way that’s very interesting, and I feel like, in particular, academically-oriented Harvard students would like that.”

Though students like Damon and Ercal got involved in local scenes in high school, many RH compers arrive with a more general interest in indie rock and punk. For them, the comp process is an invaluable learning tool. “If you don’t really have a context for it, you might find it abrasive or you might not understand where it’s coming from, why it might be important in the genre,” Humphreville says. “But I think the way the comp process works, you build up to that.”

“For me, it’s really rewarding to see someone come in liking [indie pop band] the Unicorns and start liking really brutal hardcore,” Hartsock says.

DO-IT-YOURSELF, TOGETHER



RH’s focus on and involvement with local bands is due in large part to the importance of community in the DIY scene, which RH attempts to foster and preserve. “We try to pay special attention to the local scene, both in what we play on air and in putting together RH Fest, just because what constitutes a DIY community is so much based on local scenes,” Humphreville says.

“It’s really neat that you have this really old Ivy League school, and they’re more active [in the scene] than any other university in Boston,” Daniel Striped Tiger’s Bogan says. “It’s just funny that every year they consistently hold what I would consider to be the best punk show in Boston for the entire year,” drummer Dan Madden adds.

While DST tours outside of both the region and the nation, the band continues to play a mix of local clubs like the Middle East and local basements, though they say they have more fun at the basement shows, where the tight-knit DIY community is really felt.

“The basement, it’s more of a community-based thing, ’cause it’s the same people,” Madden says. “You see them there whether they’re playing the show with you or not.”

“Everyone’s contributing in some sort of way,” guitarist Jay St. Claire says. “People are making zines and handing them out at shows. Everyone from the band to the audience is doing something.”

“I think that for us, going to shows that you’re not playing, it’s a thing like when other people go to bars,” guitarist Sean Yeaton says. “It’s just become part of our routine, or just our general interest, or where we hang out.”

According to Angela Sawyer, the owner of Central Square’s Weirdo Records and singer of Exusamwa—a band that is led by former WHRB president Doug M. DeMay ’94—this sense of a true community is what sets Boston apart from places like New York. “To me, it’s the best combination of small town and big city,” she says.

Though Ercal says the hardcore scene is now more of a hobby than a main focus for him, he still sees value in its community aspect. “It’s just a ton of energy,” he says. “Probably the best thing about those types of shows is you can always talk to the musicians, you can always just go up and say, ‘Hey, this was awesome,’ and ask them what you want. You’re watching other bands with the headlining bands in those concerts.”

RH FEST



Saying that the DIY community is centered on hardcore music can be misleading, because it masks the diversity of bands within the scene. Asked to describe his band’s sound, Bogan calls it “post-hardcore art-rock jazz indie.” “I think it’s best keeping it to punk,” St. Claire interjects. “It’s punk. It’s loud.”

“I tell people [Exusamwa is] a hardcore band,” Sawyer says. “Not because it sounds hardcore. Some of the songs are fast and loud.”

That diversity was on full display two weeks ago at this year’s RH Fest. Around 100 people circulated through on each of the nights, the first of which was held at The Advocate, the second at Holden Chapel in Harvard Yard. Appropriately for a DIY show, the only monetary compensation the bands received was to cover the costs of transportation.

The Fest opened with the three-chord garage rock of Thick Shakes, which quickly gave way to the long, intricate, feedback-heavy compositions of Life Partners. Exusamwa combined manic punk with a performance art aesthetic—Sawyer spent the entire set in a wheelchair, her face bandaged and her voice howling, while her bandmates all wore red-stained OR scrubs—and Quits played experimental noise music. Daniel Striped Tiger played a cleaner, jazz-infused brand of post-hardcore, while L’Antietam’s heavier, more distorted songs featured complex tempo changes and polyrhythms. The audience had no difficulty moshing during the sludge hardcore of Connecticut’s Iron Hand before sitting down to take in the melodic finger-picked folk of New Hampshire’s Redwing Blackbird.

“It was definitely the best time we’ve played Boston,” says Brian Thompson of the Connecticut band Dead Uncles, whose Friday set got the crowd slam dancing and moshing with enthusiasm. But this wasn’t the brutal, violent moshing featured on the notorious DVD “Boston Beatdown,” which focused on a different hardcore scene that many on RH deride as “bro-core.” RH comper Jacob N. Augenstern ’10 spent the set moshing with and leaping on a local punk rocker, but afterwards, the two patted each other on the back and introduced themselves. “It’s not necessarily overtly violent in nature, even though it’s this really aggressive music,” Augenstern says.

Augenstern would know the difference. The Hull, Mass. native was introduced to Boston’s hardcore obsession in high school. “In the same breath I found out about The Clash I found out about [iconic D.C. hardcore band] Minor Threat,” he says. Augenstern threw himself into Boston’s more hard-edged hardcore scene but was eventually driven away by the violence. Finding RH and the DIY scene it supports has brought him back. “There is definitely a different sense of urgency, of passion, of spirit to it that isn’t there in this fake hardcore, this tough guy stuff,” he says.

Humphreville draws a “larger distinction between different approaches to punk: people who want it to be positive and create and people who just want to fuck shit up.” For her, the tendency of some at Harvard to stereotype all punk rockers as violent anarchists is problematic, and it can make setting up shows difficult. “I think the administration too easily puts an emphasis on more traditional forms of expression sometimes at the expense of more alternative shows that can be a really positive thing,” she says. “I think the majority of people just want to create, want to get something out there, want to have an alternative form of expression that’s not mediated by the mainstream.”

And though RH has often had difficulty expanding this alternative form of expression across the student body, it continues to fill an important role for the local DIY scene and its essential community element. “That’s really the closest it gets to a religious experience to me, where a whole community comes together to celebrate whatever it is that a certain band is going on about,” Augenstern says. “[RH is] about preserving that community and that sense of community.”