CW: Testing…testing..ok, it’s picking up.
JB: Ok, that’s good.
CW: Yes. Could you start just by telling me your full name and when and where you were born?
JB: Ok. My full name is Jess…do you want my middle name too?
CW: If you want to give it…
JB: Ok, my full name is Jessica Mary Sanchez-Brown and I was born in Woonsocket, RI on November 11, 1979.
CW: So you grew up in RI?
JB: Yes.
CW: Ok, I guess…we try to get a little background on people’s early lives, like their parents occupations and stuff, would you be comfortable sharing that?
JB: Yeah, that’s fine. My father is in insurance, and my mother stays at home. We…I spent my early childhood in a house on Gaskill St. in the north end of Woonsocket and then when I was seven we moved to a house literally a couple of blocks away on Harris Ave, also in the north end, but it was the house that my father grew up in. My father had seven brothers and sisters and was raised by only his father and his grandmother, because his mother died in childbirth with his youngest brother. So its neat…the house that I lived in had like, carvings of my aunt and uncle, and my Dad’s initials and some other woman’s, like not my moms. And I could look at pictures from when my Dad was a kid and see trees that are like, thirty feet tall now as shrubs, and shit like that. That’s where I grew up. My Dad, when I was really little, he was working his way up in the company, and I think when I was about 15, 16 he actually managed to become part owner, he was one of three.
CW: Cool, so that’s your early childhood, I guess could you talk a little bit about, or a lot, however much you want, about your first exposure to the like, punk culture.
[2:06]
JB: My very first exposure to the punk culture is actually pretty funny. I was in like, third grade or something and I was going to the Woonsocket High School to do a dance recital and there was a punk standing out front with this gigantic Mohawk and spiked jacket, smoking a cigarette. He was like after school because he had detention or whatever and was waiting for his ride, and years later I ended up meeting him and we became really good friends. So that was the first time I ever saw a punk. But, my oldest brother is twelve years older than me, and he was into like, The Sex Pistols and stuff when they first came out so I found like a Sex Pistols tape that he had and I was listening to that at the same time I was listening to classic rock other stuff when I was like, ten to thirteen, fourteen. That’s when I was just doing lots of drugs. I came home drunk for the first time when I was eleven, and then by the time I was twelve I was smoking a lot of pot and then at age 14, I had this experience with mescaline that made me stop eating meat. And then from there, when I was a freshman in high school….at that point I was really weird, because I had been doing a lot of drugs. And I was like, wearing clothes from the salvation army, like plaid golf pants and whatever. And this kid in my high school who was a senior when I was a freshman saw me and thought that “Oh, this girl is really weird, maybe I can get her into punk.” And so he made me a mix tape, and he also brought me to my first show, because his mom used to go to shows with him, because he never had his license. So she used to drive him to shows, and she would bring me, and my parents would allow it because even though I was 14 and shouldn’t be staying out until two in the morning, I was with an adult, who they had met. So my first show was Schlong at The Living Room.
[4:12]
CW: Was that a local band?
JB: No, Schlong is actually members of Operation Ivy, when Operation Ivy split it went to Schlong and Rancid. Schlong, they’re just really really goofy, and really fast.
CW: Ok
JB: So that was my first show. And then after that, I went to various shows at like Babyhead….like over that coming summer I went to shows at Babyhead here and there, I saw Slapshot there.
CW: Where was Babyhead?
JB: Babyhead is where Club Hell is now, over on Richmond Street, at that point. Prior to being Babyhead, that club was The Rocket. I don’t remember exactly when it closed down, but I was very unhappy. They used to have a lot of matinee shows so as a kid, you could go to the matinee shows and not get in trouble.That his i was talking to you about earlier, his mom brought me to my first Dropdead show, which scared the fucking shit out of me. And it was actually in the loft space on Mathewson Street that was recently having shows again, but that’s where the show was.
CW: Oh, wow.
JB:…and I met some older punk dudes which was really funny because the guy didn’t believe me that I was 14, and he started like calling me all the time, and he was like, 27, I’m like, “I’m 14,” it was just ridiculous. But, from there I just started, I got more into like, the riot girl movement, so at first, so when I started getting more involved, it was more on the female empowerment side of things. And then, by like the end of my 14th year, I started a band, with that kid, that kid Josh who got me into punk and this other girl that was friends with Deana. I had never played bass before in my life, and like, one night I was at his bandmates house, who played bass, and I picked up the bass and he showed me how to play “I love double chex” on the bass, and I picked it up right away and he was like “You have to play bass, you have to be in this band.” So, I started my first band with Deana, and Josh, and we were called Whisper a Threat.
[6:36]
CW: About when was that, how old were you?
JB: That was when…we started when I was almost 15, and by the time I turned 16 we had played….well we had played our first show in a practice space in Woonsocket with this band whose name I can’t remember right now. And then we played our real first show when I had just turned 16, it was the end of November, and we played with Huasipungo (sic), Ulcer and I can’t…oh Fedaykin at the Harvest Food Co-op in Allston. So that was our first show, and we played Lupo’s and shit, and we played The Met Café and we played some peoples backyards, we played a bunch of shows. And then that band broke up over the summer of ’96. Because I graduated high school when I was 16, I skipped my junior year of high school, graduated, and then went traveling cross county. And then when I got back I lived in my parents basement for like a year, until I was 17, then I moved out. So yeah, that’s me getting into punk.
CW: Sweet. So at this time were you going to shows at like, Fort Thunder, and things like that.
JB: Yeah. The…when did I first go to a Fort Thunder show? I was probably, I was still 16, but it was over that summer, no, fuck, it was earlier than that because I left my senior prom early to go see Man is the Bastard at Fort Thunder which was when I was 16. It was like Man is the Bastard, Disassociate and Dropdead, I think. I have the flyer somewhere. Yeah, so I left my senior prom early for that. So I had been to Fort Thunder, maybe even when I was 15, and I used to go a lot, I’ve known all of those guys for a really long time. When I was….there also used to be this show space on Brown campus, umm, I cant remember what the fuck they called it, but it was the house on the corner of Young Orchard and Brook.
CW: Yeah, actually they had a Mahi Mahi show over there recently.
JB: Recently? They used to have shows there all the time, and Xander from The Dirt Palace, she used to live there, and Matt Obert lived there, he was the one organizing all of the shows and we went…because, my friend who got me into punk, his band was Shotgun Flu, and so his band has played there, and we went with his Mom to pick up the recording and But yeah, I spent lots of time at Fort Thunder, I actually have old video tapes and lots and lots of photographs from the Fort Thunder era, but I never played there in any of my bands.
CW: Were there any other like, small DIY spaces around besides The Fort and that house on Brown campus?
JB: There was another house on Hope Street, 84 Hope Street. They used to do more like, pop-punk shows in the basement. Umm, there was another place on Smith Hill that had done shows, then the Anton Bordman house showed up. In Woonsocket we were doing shows in peoples basements. I had a Halloween show at my house in ’96 that ten bands played, in my parents basement. My parents were on vacation. And, this kid Matt who used to play drums for this pop-punk band from Woonsocket called The Toss-off’s, he used to have shows in his basement all the time. And there was this coffee shop in downtown Woonsocket that somehow got overtaken by the punks, and we were allowed to have shows there as well. Yeah, there were a lot of shows going on in Woonsocket. And Josh booked shows in general, so a lot of the bands from out of town would go back to Woonsocket and stay at his house and he lived in my same neighborhood, so I would just go and hang out with the bands.
CW: Wow, so there was kind of like a scene going on in Woonsocket, almost.
JB: Yeah at one point there was like a separate scene in Woonsocket. Of like, kids from Woonsocket, and kids from outside of Woonsocket, because there were a lot of punks who came from like, weird suburbs and stuff. Like the kids from The Degenerates, was Jonas in The Degenarates? No, Jonas used to hang out with The Degenerates but he’s now in The Midnight Creeps. I know him from back then, because they were all from northern RI.
CW: Ok, wow.
JB: Yeah there was a whole crew. Josh Gravel was actually mentioned in Spin Magazines “Guide to the Underground” it said “godfather of the Woonsocket noise scene.”
CW: Whoa
JB: But Guy Benoit wrote the thing so…he just knew Guy.
CW: Was it more like hardcore, or more like noise based stuff going on back then?
[12:08]
JB: It was all different kinds of stuff. There was a band called Bad Karma that was Josh’s cousin and they were more like chugga chugga hardcore. And in Whisper A Threat we had no fucking clue what we were doing, it was just really short songs and like, punk with female vocals. We’re actually on the Repopulation Compilation on Load. And then, Shotgun Flu I cant really describe, they were just bizarre. And then there were The Toss-Off’s, they were pop-punk. And then after Shotgun Flu broke up, Josh started getting more into noise stuff. And he had always been more into noise stuff than I had been. He tried to start a band called like The Woonsocket Noise Collective or something, I think they played the Halloween show that I booked, as did my other in between band called Kia which was called Kia before the car came out. It was embarrassing because the car came out right as we had picked a band name and we were like “Fuck.” But, we were stuck with it.
CW: Was that, the Kia band, was that more female-oriented as well or….
JB: No, actually that had Josh singing, me…I was the only female in the band, I just played bass. I did back-up vocals on occasion but…. We had Ted Rao from The Double Nothins playing drums and this kid Matt playing guitar. And it was always funny to have Ted playing drums, he played drums for Shotgun Flu for awhile. And um, every single fucking practice, like the second I put my bass down he’d pick it up and just play it. Because, he could play drums but he was more so a guitarist.
CW: Ok. So what other… so could you talk about any other bands you played in. I mean, all I know of is Get Killed.
JB: Yeah. I played in Whisper a Threat, that was my first band, that’s where I got my punk rock nickname, people call me Jessthreat, that’s why. Then I was in Kia. Actually, really weird, I quit smoking when I was 17 and all of my musical equipment was in my parents basement, and my parents let me smoke in the basement, and when I quit I had like five friends living with me at my parents house and they all smoked. And so I was the only one not smoking. So I stopped hanging out in the basement, and that’s where my bass was. And then my boyfriend started playing my bass all the time and he got better at bass than I did and then I got really pissed and just stopped playing for awhile. And then, when I met Alex of Get Killed, he somehow…he knew everything about me, which now that I think about it really creeps me out. He somehow knew that I had played bass in a band. I think it was because Dan, who lived at The Sickle and later moved up to The Bakery, I had actually known since I was 15, 15 or 16, he saw me play at that Harvest Food Co-op show in Boston and he was living with them and I think he told Alex that I should play bass in the band. And so then Alex was just on my ass about starting this band, and I was like “I haven’t played in a long time” and then we just, we started jamming and got a drummer, and hand picked Phil as our singer, and then I begged to bring Dre in as a second guitarist and then decided we wanted Mike Riley to play drums instead of our original drummer and that’s what made the final line up.
CW: So when you….
[15:48]
JB: You’re like “Whoa, she’s talking really fast.”
CW: No, no its just a lot to keep track of but um, so you went to URI, right? Did you live there at all?
JB: For two years I lived in Jamestown and commuted to URI. My first semester at URI I lived in Providence and went only to the Providence campus, but you can really only do Gen-ed’s at the Providence campus. So my friend that I grew up with, this kid Dave Brown, he has the same last name as me but we weren’t related. We got babysat together from like age 2 on so we knew each other really well, to the point where growing up I thought I was Jewish, because all of my friends were Jewish and they’d bring me to the synagogue with ‘em and stuff, but anyway, he…his parents had bought property in Jamestown when he was a little kid and built a house on it, before all of the property value fucking skyrocketed. And he was going to URI and I knew that, and so I called him and was like “You know, I’m gonna go to URI, and I know your parents got that house in Jamestown” and he was like “Yeah, I’m actually going to be living there next year” and so I was like “How about I live there with you?” and so I was paying like $300 a month for this fucking gigantic room in this house where I could look out the window and see the ocean, it was amazing. But, my roommate and I were very much so the odd couple. I mean, he was a republican, he loved eating meat, he was like, pro death penalty, and we would like….it was awesome because we knew eachother for so long we could get into full forced screaming matches about politics and just laugh and walk away and not harbor any hard feelings about it at all. So, yeah, I lived there for two years and then in the summers we had to get out because they rented it for really expensive in the summers, like $2000 a week or something, so during the summers I would live in Woonsocket with my boyfriend. So I went for two years full time and then took a year off. And during that year I went cross country again in the summer and then I spent that year in Sweden, going back and forth from Sweden to the states. And then when I came back I moved back to Providence and commuted from URI to Providence.
CW: Did you seek out the punk scene in Sweden at all?
JB: Yeah. I actually moved to Sweden because I was going out with a Swede at that point, and he was the bassist in a band called DS 13 who were really big at that point and so I was heavily connected to the punk scene in Sweden, almost immediately because he booked shows. He actually got a job running a culture house in Sweden, in Umea, which is where I was, because they are pretty much a socialist democracy and they have a lot of money put into youth organizations and things like that. So he did that, there was a place called Hamnismagasinet that had shows and had a café and all this stuff right in downtown and so I would run, I couldn’t work, and I would stay at home and run the distro. So that’s essentially all I did, was stay at home and ship records and stuff like that. I also helped with a few shows. I somehow got roped into helping with a Fugazi show, because my downstairs neighbor Axel was on the board for that show. That’s how all of those big youth house shows were run, was by a board and all the people on the board….like two people would make the food, one person would make the accommodations like where the band was gonna stay, and one person would just be band help, in charge of walking the band around, showing them around town, picking them up at the airport, and hanging out with them the whole time. Somehow that became my job because they were like “You’re American” and I’m like “ok.” I had never driven in Sweden before, I had to go pick them up at the airport and drive them back to where they were staying. I was shaking, I was like “Please don’t let Ian MacKaye get in my car, please don’t let Ian MacKaye get in my car” and of course he gets in the van and I’m just like “If I fucking crash this, everyone’s going to kill me.” I was so stressed out over the whole thing.
CW: Killing a punk legend.
JB: Yeah, exactly. But it was really cool, they were super sweet and at the end when I dropped them off at the airport the drummer told me that I was awesome, which I was so excited about because I hadn’t heard that word in so long, because nobody says that in Sweden. And then Ian MacKaye says something really weird like “I’d love to see you in the states sometime and hear your thoughts on things” and I was just like “Ok” and that was it, that was the oddest experience there. But, I also got to go to Stockholm a couple of times, theres a showspace in Stockholm called Café (sic), which is like Café Forty Four and its been around for years, since like the ‘70’s. And I got to go to some shows there, and I got to go to this big festival called (sic Oltzverg) festival, DS 13 played. My boyfriend was also a music journalist, so he got…I got to go to like, weird Viking metal shows and stuff for free because he had to go review them because he wrote for the biggest metal magazine in Scandinavia.
CW: It seems like it was a lot more open there, just shows in Café’s…we don’t really see that much around here.
JB: Yeah, well Café Forty Four wasn’t like…part of it was a Café and part of it was a show space. And like, the youth house in Sweden, to the right….during the day you could only get into the café area. And you could get food and there was an internet thing upstairs. There was all kinds of vegan food, awesomeness, and then when you came for a show, you went in the other door to pay but then you could go into the café and then there were classrooms and stuff like that. It was a huge fucking building and it was right on the river, it was really cool. Umm, I guess it is kind of…it’s pretty open there, everyone was super nice to me. The Umea scene is odd, its an odd place in Sweden, like, all the punks… there’s not often something going on, so all the punks will go to dance clubs and stuff just to go drink, and hang out, so its kind of weird in that aspect. Stockholm is much more…..Umea is like a lot of straightedge hardcore kids and Stockholm is much more like, old punks, like, dirty as….still all punk looking.
CW: I was actually really curious about your thesis you were talking about, your linguistics thesis, could you talk about that a little bit.
JB: Yeah, I actually have a copy in my car but it originally I wanted to do….I got on this whole idea when I was in Sweden, because I picked up on the fact that even though these people were speaking another language, when they were talking about things that were in regards to punk or hardcore they used English. Like, they still said “seven inch” instead of like sju whatever, I don’t even remember how to say it.
[23:27]
(At this point we paused the recording to eat)
CW: Ok.
JB: So I came up with the idea when I was in Sweden because I noticed that the punks in Sweden would use words in English to describe things regarding punk and hardcore. And so originally I wanted to do a comparative study between the dialect of punk and hardcore in Sweden and the dialect of punk and hardcore in the United States. Because, not only did Swedes use American words, but when Americans were referring to certain styles of Swedish punk, we’d use Swedish words. And so I just thought that was really interesting and then I applied for something, and didn’t get it, so just kind of threw that whole idea out the window. It was for some school in Sweden, because I wasn’t fluent in Swedish yet and I needed to be in order to do the project. And so, what was I saying, oh so that all happened and I was meeting with my professor in general because we were talking about how I was going to have to do my honors thesis and all this stuff and he was like “Well, do you have any ideas” and I told him about….this is when I was back at school, after Sweden was done with. I told him about the original idea and then I said jokingly “Oh, I could do a project on the language of punk, that would be funny” and he was just like “That’s brilliant” and I’m like “Fuck you, it is not.” We would swear at each other all the time, we had like a great relationship. But, he’s like “Nobody has ever done it before, you should do this” and I’m like “Ok” and so I started looking into it and decided to go ahead with it and did all the I.R.B. bullshit. And then I compiled a six hundred word lexicon of words used in the punk and hardcore dialect of Rhode Island. Like, when you’re doing linguistics research, you have to try and narrow everything down as much as you can. And so the only way I could really narrow it down, since I was narrowing it down with the punk and hardcore already I just did it location wise, because it was the only way to do it, because I wanted to have a range of broad types of punk, you know. And then I collected all of my information, made the gigantic lexicon and then basically just did a literature review and did my analysis. So yeah, then I just wrote…I was actually really disappointed with the information that I came up with, like the conclusions that I reached I was kind of upset with but afterwards I turned it into a zine. The zine that I made isn’t as highly edited as the actual version I handed in, it still has typos and stuff in it, but, I sent it out for review to a bunch of places and it got really awesome reviews. The guy from MRR sent me a three page letter in response to it, which was amazing, like a three page handwritten letter. And, I got yelled at by a lot of people for it. I did a reading from it last year at The Dirt Palace and got some backlash for it.
[27:32]
CW: What was your conclusion.
JB: Oh, well honestly its been awhile since I’ve read it but, umm, basically all of the words that I could come up with, that I came up with, were, on the whole revolved around commodity and dress and all these….nothing really to do with politics or…it was just really sad and I was just really disappointed. And that was kind of like, it made it seem like punk wasn’t a counterculture, but a subculture, essentially a microcosm of the mainstream culture, so that was disappointing.
CW: Yeah, I can see that.
JB: When I first realized that was my conclusion that I was coming to, I almost started crying.
CW: That’s interesting research though.
JB: It is. I love cultural linguistics and dialectology, I love it.
CW: Do you wanna do anything with that, or do you now?
JB: I wanted to get my Ph.D. in that but I have a 19 year old cat, and I can’t move her, she almost has a heart attack after ten minutes in the car. I couldn’t move her anywhere far away and I refuse to part with her because I’ve had her since I was 7. So I’m kind of just putting everything on hold. I might….at this point now I’m going back and forth between going to Vet School or going to get my Ph.D. in Sociolinguistics. The best school in the country for it is UPenn because William Labov invented Social Linguistics and he still teaches there, he started the department at UPenn.
CW: Would you want to pursue your research in that further, or….
JB: Yeah, that’s exactly what I would do. I would start like….I thought it would be really interesting to actually get to do similar research in different countries. Like in countries where the punks are actually fucked with on a daily basis and where life actually sucks and see if the dialect, the punk dialect is any different, to see if it does deal anymore with politics and less with commodities. That was my idea, I don’t know if it will ever happen. I started learning Arabic so I could go see what was up with it in Arabic cultures, plus I’m a quarter Syrian, so I wanted to learn it for….everyone kept thinking I was Swedish, because I’m super pale and I bleach my hair and whatever. Finally I was just like “I’m not fucking Swedish. So I was like, I’ve gotta learn a language I’ve actually got cultural identity with, so I tried to learn Arabic. I didn’t get very far.
CW: Yeah, I actually gonna start it in the fall, it seems to be hard though, from what I’ve heard.
JB: I learned the alphabet. I was actually taking an adult education course at Brown but it only lasted one course and she…they couldn’t do the continuation of it for some reason so I’ve only got the first course under my belt and never got to continue, which kind of sucks. I know how to say “door” and “my name is Jessica” but that’s about it.
CW: That’s something.
[30:56]
JB: Door is like the first word you learn because it’s the easiest, it’s the first two letters of the alphabet, just put together.
CW: Um, so being a woman in punk culture, is that difficult, or do you find that difficult in Providence?
JB: I’ve gone through phases with it. 2001 I think…when the fuck was that? I don’t remember what year it was but I specifically remember being really pissed just about the way I was treated in general. Because, I, for the most part have always hung out more with dudes than I have with girls. I remember sitting there with a few dudes that I was friends with and they wouldn’t let me get a word in, and I started getting so fucking mad I was just like “Ugh” and then I flipped out, nobody understood why. But, things like that. But, I also hate the stigma of like, being in a band, just like me being in a band, it automatically becomes a girl band just because there’s a girl in the band.
CW: Yeah, right.
JB: I hate that. But, at the same time it is really empowering to be active in the punk scene and be a woman, I think you get a lot of respect for it. Especially when you start ending up my age, the older you are and still in the scene, the more people are like “Wow.”
CW: So as far as I know, you didn’t move into The Sickle until after it had been open awhile, right?
JB: Mhm. I’ll give you the background on me and The Sickle, is that where you were going with that?
CW: Yeah…actually before you do that, could you give background on the origins of Oak and Troy spaces in general. I know The Munchhouse was first…
JB: Actually The Minchhouse wasn’t first. No. There was a space in the very very top floor of Troy that was a bunch of dudes that nobody really knew until we started getting evicted. They’re awesome. They were there in the ‘90’s, like the mid ‘90’s and they used to have raves and shit there all the time. And that’s how their space started, and they had been there forever, before we got evicted. And their fucking…none of us had ever been in their space, because none of us knew them that well, you know. And when the eviction thing started we decided to have a meeting in their space and everyone was just like “Holy shit.” It was so nice, it was like a fucking loft in downtown. The way that they built it was fucking amazing. They had a dishwasher, they had a washing machine. Everyone was just like “What the fuck” and they were like “Dude, we’ve been living here for eight years, do you expect us to keep living in shit the whole time?” But that was the first place, and Munchhouse had been around for a long time. Then Chippendale moved in and he was using….at that point….what later became known as The Box of Knives, prior had been called The Candle Factory, and Chippendale was using that space to have shows. And then, somehow, this crew of kids from fucking RISD found this space, and them and The Bakery crew, I think, took the spaces at the same time
CW: Yeah, that’s what they had said.
JB: Yeah. So they…both spaces opened at the same time and then I think Pink Rabbit came next. And the whole time there was a church on the first floor. And then the second floor, the space right below The Sickle showed up, and then I think 2R and then Valhalla, which was the space next to The Sickle, and that’s the order that it went into. And every space had about, anywhere from four to eight people living in them. That’s in Oak Street. Troy Street there was….Troy Street confuses me so much. There was Chippendales place and then Box of Knives which had a couple people living in it. And then The Providence Civic Center and then the space where the other dudes lived on the top floor. I think that was it, as far as Troy Street.
CW: Sorry to cut you off, the battery is about to run out, I’m just gonna change it.
[35:50]
CW: Alright, we’re good.
JB: Ok. So yeah, that’s the spaces that came about, I don’t remember the order exactly.
CW: Yeah, it seems confusing.
JB: It is kind of confusing. Ok, I was living by myself in an apartment in the Crayola building, which is on the corner of Westminster and Parade and I went to….at this point I was like, refusing to go to Lightning Bolt shows because I used to go to them when they were at Fort Thunder and whatever, but then they just got so fucking popular, and all this secret show bullshit and I was just like “Fuck this band.” Like, not them as people, but just the whole idea of all the kids who loved them…I dunno, I just got really angry. And I also got really bitter at one point, because I was friends with all the kids who started that movement, but the kids who came afterwards looked at me, because I still dressed all punk, like I still had my spiked vests and stuff and they looked at me like “You haven’t advanced to noise yet.” They just gave me so much shit that I got really turned off from it. And like, it was just really weird.
CW: Are you still….
JB: I’m not like that anymore. I was. I got over it, but for awhile I was really angry about that whole thing. So, my best friend Natalie dragged me to this Lightning Bolt show. She really wanted to go see them, she went to Brown so she lived on the East Side and she didn’t have a way to get there. I had a car so I went and got her and then went to the show. And we were just sitting there and this kid with a unibrow comes up to me and was like “Hey, you’re Jess, right” and I’m like “Yeah.” And he’s like “Cool, I’m Alex” and just starts talking to me. I’m like ok and then he’s like “Me and my friends, we just got this space nextdoor, do you wanna come see it?” And I was like, “Ok.” And so we go outside and climb up the fire escape and into the space and he was just like “There’s gonna be walls here and here, this is gonna be this persons room and this is gonna be this persons room, this is gonna be my room.” And I was just like “Cool.”
CW: At that point was it just one big open….
JB: Yeah they had started putting up the frames for the rooms but nothing had been built securely yet. And he was like “Yeah, we’re gonna move in soon and we’re gonna do shows and its gonna be awesome, this is gonna be the show space.” And he’s like “you book shows so you should book shows here.” And I’m like “Ok, well give me your phone number or something and I’ll keep in touch.” And so my friend Tony contacted me about getting a show for his band and at that point I had been doing shows with Ben and Anne of Armageddon Shop. And we kind of…..
CW: Where were you guys doing those?
JB: No, this is what happened, let me…I have to explain this. I was doing shows with them and Anne started doing really big metal shows which I totally wasn’t into. And then also started laying down these laws about, like, who could play the shows. And at that point there weren’t that many bands and so they were just kind of like “No, they can’t play, because they played two shows ago” and all this shit. So for this show in particular, I had in mind bands that I wanted to play, but they were bands that I knew Ben and Anne were gonna be like, “No.” So I was like “Fuck it, I’ll just do it on my own” which caused a huge falling out and they got really pissed at me but that’s all over and done with. I live with Ben now so its like, that doesn’t matter now and I do Armageddon Shop shows again. Yeah, so they had moved in and settled and it was a couple months later that I was working on this big show. And they had had a couple of tiny shows, like friends bands, that I had went to and I just started hanging out with them more, especially in preparation for the Rambo show. Because I had this…..like, we’re gonna do a potluck before hand, and we’re gonna get a bunch of cardboard and have kids make shit with cardboard before the show, that’s like, a thing that Rambo does. And so they were helping me collect things, and helping me flyer because they were all super psyched about the show. So I just became friends with them all through that. And the show was a smashing success. There were well over a hundred people there and everybody had a fucking blast.
[40:30]
CW: Which show was that?
JB: It was Rambo. It was like the first big show. Everybody had like fake swords and shields and were lining up on opposite sides of the pit and attacking each other. And somebody came out, they found an old wheelchair and they built like, a tank around it, and rolled into the middle of the pit with this giant cardboard tank, and there was this gigantic buoy that people were trying to balance on, it was just a lot of fun. So after that Alex was like “You can book more shows” and I was like “Ok.” And that was when he started getting on my ass about the band, and then with the band and all that, I was just spending a lot more time there, and at that point my best friend left to go away for the semester and so I didn’t have any…I had to fend for myself. I was like “I don’t know what to do with myself” and so I was just like, I would go there at 10 o’ clock at night when I needed a break from studying, I would just go there for a little while, get some social interaction and then go home and go to bed. So I started hanging out a lot and became really good friends with all of them and then people started moving around.
[41:43]
CW: Oh, like between spaces?
JB: Yeah. Then Dan decided he wanted to move up to The Bakery and Lee decided he wanted to move downstairs, out of The Bakery and then Nathan decided he was gonna move out. And he moved out…Gus lived….Nathan lived at The Sickle and Gus lived at The Bakery, as did Chip. And Gus and Nathan and Chip all moved out and got their own apartment on like Charles Street. So then Lee moved into Nathans room and I moved into Dan’s room because my lease was about to run out and um, and I wanted cheaper rent because I was gonna graduate, and then when I graduated everything was on me. So I was just like “Yeah, cheap rent sounds awesome.” My brother came and helped me build my room, my room was like the most, the most room room of all of the rooms. Like at our eviction hearing…oh somebody turned the music up. At our eviction hearing they, the cop said that we,our space was like a miniature indoor shanty town, because there were so many like weird, hidden doorways and shit like that in all the rooms. But my room was just like straight up, door, you walk in, there was an office on the left, my living room and then my bedroom was a loft above the office. And I had a closet and shit, like, my brother and I built it properly, like with sheetrock and insulation and shit. So, yeah.
CW: So when was that that you moved in?
JB:
I moved in over the summer, I don’t remember, years are all
blending….yeah I moved in in like July and we got evicted in like
January.
CW: Oh ok, so that last year.
JB: Yeah it didn’t last very long, but I mean I spent a lot of time there previous to that anyways, I was sometime sleeping there and stuff.
CW: So, I wanted to know about how like The Sickle was run, was it like a collective or sort of like, free for all….
JB: ::Laughing:: Alright. You have to understand that I was living with seven dudes, that’s the first thing I have to say. Secondly, they were kind of immature. That’s kind of what…I can pretty much live with anybody, and be fine, I’m really easy going as a roommate. Um, but, like at one point two of the people hated each other and everybody started doing this shit where they were marking their food and we had serious mice problems. And so we had this gigantic safe that we kept all our food in, and everybody had a shelf with their name or whatever. I was like the only person who cooked, so like, I would cook and they would all eat it. Some…at one point they started calling me Mom, and I also at one point got the nick name Big Momma Threat. And then that got shortened to BMT and before I knew it my shelf, my food said BMT on it and it was just bad. The fridge was pretty much a free for all. I was pretty much the only person who regularly kept food in the house. Like, James lived off ice cream, Alex ate out all the time, Chris kind of would keep some stuff in the house, Steven barely lived there at that point ‘cause he would sleep at his girlfriends house all the time. And Jack lived off cereal. And they all drank milk and I didn’t have to worry about that ‘cause I was vegan so I had soymilk. And me and Kline were the only people who drank soymilk. He and I got along well enough that it wasn’t like “You drank my soymilk,” nobody cared. Umm, so yeah. It definitely was not run collectively. At one point Lee and Chris Kline tried to install a chore wheel which did not go well. They were essentially the only….they would clean, sometimes I would help. But they were the two who would do the like, massive cleanings. Umm, I would do the dishes and stuff, my dishes. I would always make sure one half of the sink was empty for me to do my dishes in. That’s the only reason I can be like a calm roommate, because if I have a double sink, and I can keep one half clean for me, then I’m fine. Umm,yeah. So, it wasn’t run collectively. Shows were… sometimes people wouldn’t even know we were having shows. Like I came home once and La Fraction was playing and I was like “Oh sweet.” Oh no, did you drop something, is it ok?
CW: No, yeah, I got it……Yeah, so did you guys talk to each other at all about doing like this show….
[47:06]
JB: Yeah, there was one day where I came….I was home and I got a phone call from Steven and Steven was like “Hey, so I’m picking up the band” and I’m like “What.” He’s like “I met the band, I’m at the gas station with them, they got lost and, um, can you start working the door.” And I always got stuck….I was the only person who could actually do the door well because they were all complete wusses and I was just a complete hardass. So I always got stuck doing the doors and yeah, I had no idea we were going to have a show that night. Stuff like that happened a lot. There wasn’t very much communication between those kids, especially since like, like I said some of them were never even home because they like spent the time with their girlfriends. Or Jack would always lock himself in his room and just do paintings. Lee would just watch TV all the time in his room. At one point we were all….we had a projector, it was fucking awesome. Two of the roommates, I’m not gonna name names, two of the roommates stole if from RISD. And so we had this gigantic projector, so on occasion we’d have like movie nights and stuff like that where everybody, we also had a double…we had a lofted couch above our regular couch so we had this gigantic fucking living room. So like people would come from all different spaces and we would watch movies and stuff. We used to watch Twin Peaks like once a week.
CW: That’s sweet. Yeah. Could you talk about…actually I guess you’ve already coved what was happening there on a day to day basis, like besides shows, people were just….
JB: There was a lot of skateboarding, there was a lot of boys will be boys bullshit. Like jumping off a trampoline and drop kicking a punching bag. Like, going out and just….I think that summer was the haunted summer. Like, we kept trying to find haunted places. That was also the summer that Krispy Kreme donuts opened so there were many trips to Krispy Kreme because they were throwing out like all their donuts. Because they weren’t selling them yet, so everyone was eating them. We would just go into the area where the dumpsters were until they caught on and started locking them. There wasn’t very much….like during the day there wasn’t very much hanging out, but like on any given day, there were people working on art. Like, I was usually locked in my room working on school work, but I would come home and James would be spraypainting things for like, little wooden marionettes and Lee had his painting studio. Alex painted in his room, at one point…like sometime they would do stuff in the show space. Like Stephens senior project was really big and he started it in the show space. There was a lot of just sitting around the kitchen table, just a lot of that.
CW: Were there bands practicing there at all?
JB: Oh yeah, oh god yeah. We had Get Killed practice in there. It’s a Fucking Trap, which was the house band, which I was not a part of. Because that band broke up while I was moving in, while they were on tour, that’s when they broke up. That was also when Brambo freaked out and moved out.
CW: So those guys lived with you…
JB: Mhm. Those….that was the house band, it was all the dudes from The Sickle….yeah they were always masked, so I could see how you would not know who they were, they always played in masks, I forgot about that. Um, yeah. And, there was us, them, Tiny Hawks used to practice in our practice space because they didn’t have one for a long time. And then other various…James had a side project….oh, The Body practiced in our practice space, sharing a practice space with The Body is just fucking hell because….no its hell because they have so much fucking…so many Cab’s. There’s just no room to put anything. And then Lee and Jack started a band called The Glorious Monster which was just the two of them playing drums, like face to face, it was actually really cool.
CW: Yeah, I remember they played at the Q and Not U show right?
JB: Mhm. Yeah. Um, yeah so there were a shitload of bands practicing, but there wasn’t very much conflict with practice times, that didn’t come up very often.
CW: That’s cool.
JB: Yeah, that was good.
CW: So as far as living, would you say living at a place like that would be some sort of political statement or…just as far as being a punk and like, living in an old warehouse.
JB: I dunno.
CW: Yeah it’s a complicated question.
JB: It is. I mean, in a way you’re saying….I mean we essentially had a little mini society, we had sixty people in two buildings. Like, granted we couldn’t survive just…. It’s not like we could have a garden because all of the ground was poisoned and like the closest place for us to get food was Price Rite which is hell to anybody because the lines were always so fucking long, it was horrible. And, at times…I couldn’t leave the house on foot at night by myself, that really bummed me out. Like if I wanted to go get something at Sam’s, I had to have somebody walk with me, and if nobody could walk with me, I would drive. It’s a block away, but it's so sketchy that I just refused. I guess yeah, we were kind of, we were sticking it to the man. Especially by living illegally in a space that we’re not supposed to be in. Getting really, really cheap rent, doing whatever the fuck we wanted.
CW: Yeah, how cheap was it, if you don’t mind me asking.
JB: All the spaces were different, but we were paying $1000 a month and we had eight people living there
CW: That is nice
JB: So it was $125 a month, each. And we never turned the heat on, so we didn’t have to pay for that, and electric was included. Oh no, electric wasn’t included, so we had a couple of bills, it was electricity and phone we had to pay for. We even had cable and internet because Chris from The Pink Rabbit had this major hub set up because he’s like a computer dude, so he had this major hub set up and then, he shot a wire…he drilled a hole through the floor and shot a wire down to us, so we had cable and internet. It was pretty funny.
CW: Do you have any shows that stuck out to you as like, really memorable? You talked about the Rambo show….
JB: Yeah, the Rambo show was extremely memorable. The last show ever at Oak Street ever was at Pink Rabbit and it was….we realized that it was gonna be the last show. And at that point, three of the members of Get Killed lived in the building because Alex and I lived together and Mike Riley moved in at Valhalla and so….I don’t even remember whose idea it was, but suddenly someone was like “We gotta play this show.”
CW: Was this the day you were being evicted?
JB: It was like the night before the shit really hit the fan. Um, I cant remember exactly what day it was. That whole….it was just so complicated it became a blur. My cat died that week too, my cat that I’d had since I was….my other cat that I’d had since I was 7. It was horrible. We realized that it was probably gonna be our last show in the building and they kind of hunted everybody down. And I was hiding in Dan’s room, in Dan’s room at The Bakery because I was just really depressed. I just realized that shit was like, ending or whatever. And Dre calls me and is like “Um, we’re playing” and I was like “What do you mean we’re playing, the show is almost over.” And she’s like “No, we’re doing it.” I’m like “Ok.” And so we played. We were the very last band to play the very last show at Oak Street.
CW: Nice, that’s cool.
JB: Yeah. It was ridiculous.
[55:50]
JB: Yeah, so those two shows were really memorable. The DSB show was fucking awesome because I had friends from all over the country there. Because DSB was this band from Japan and they only played three or four east coast dates and they were like…they’ve been around for like twenty years and they were obsessed with their hair and their sunglasses and their jackets and um, Dan can actually speak a little bit of Japanese and he took them next door to The Bakery and got really high with them. And then they kept screaming stuff at him in the middle of their set. And all these punks from out of town were like “Why are they talking to this non-punk looking dude.” It was just hilarious. And they were like jumping off of stacks of cabinets, the place…there were like three hundred people there or something, it was fucking packed. It was so much fun. I usually actually had more fun at shows that were like at The Pink Rabbit, where I didn’t have any responsibility. And as far as….there was one more. Oh, the La Fraction show was awesome. Except for I got mad at Born Dead Icons, they opened. But I was just so psyched to walk into my house and have this awesome fucking band be playing and to be like “Wow, I never would have heard them if it wasn’t for them playing my house” you know.
CW: Could you talk a little bit more about the evictions and what happened.
JB: Ok.
CW: If it’s a sore subject….
[57:22]
JB: No, it’s just hard to place it all together, that’s the thing. It’ll become a blur at one point, I’m just warning you. The….oh Jesus Christ…..was it that morning? My cat died and then that night we were told that officers had shown up at the Troy Street building, saying that they had gotten a complaint and wanting to come into The Box of Knives and they told them “No.” And then they came and told everybody what was going on, and then we had a meeting. And then after the meeting, we went out and got shit faced. Yeah, after the meeting we went to go get food, like me and Yvette and Dan and Muffy, who was in the process of moving into The Bakery when all of this stuff started happening. Went and got food, and got drinks, and then the next morning I was woken up by Lee banging on my door saying “The inspectors are going to be here in a half hour, everybody has got to get the fuck out.” And so, I jumped up and what did I grab? I grabbed my cat, my bass, and my computer, because I had a laptop and I was still in the middle of finishing my thesis. So I grabbed that stuff and then I grabbed James’ dog Asa, Lee had already taken Nico and I just fucking bolted. I called my friend Kara, I had keys to her apartment, I called her and I was like “I’m gonna be at your house, blah blah.” And so I just sat and waited to find out what was going on. Nobody else left their spaces, we were the only people stupid enough to leave our spaces. And we thought that we were being smart, but we apparently didn’t lock the back door, so that’s how they got into our space. And since we weren’t there, they went through everything. And the spaces where there were actually people there, they didn’t get to do as much stuff, to actually look at as much stuff. But because there was nobody there, they just went hog wild, which sucked. Um, and so once I finally got the phone call that we could go back, I went back. And then we started having meetings and stuff. And that was on….that was a Friday night. And so we knew that we had until at least, like, the Monday or whatever. And we started looking at apartments. And we were starting to get all these….these different pieces of information, and nobody really knew what to believe. And I think it was like a week or so later…I wrote a piece about it for MRR and I wish I had it, because I don’t remember, like I had the exact timeline in that MRR piece. And I think….is your battery dying again?
CW: No, no, its good, I’m just making sure its recording.
JB: Oh, ok. Yeah, I think a week later or something was when…the inspectors came again and we were told that we would have like, a night to get the fuck out. And that was when we decided to call the news team, that was just when the shit hit the fan. And I had already, because we had that time inbetween, I had already packed all of my books and my records, everything that I knew would be heavy and hard for me to move and brought them to my parents house. So that was easy. Then, when the shit actually hit the fan, we had people…so many people that we didn’t even know just coming and helping us pack, and I was lucky enough to have the whole Dropdead crew, plus Anne, specifically focusing on me. Because I had so much shit because I lived by myself prior to moving in there, so I just had so much stuff. They like…Anne like packed all my clothes, they like packed my shit up while I was just running around and going to meetings and doing all this stuff and I didn’t have to deal with it as much. And when the shit first hit the fan, I brought….yeah, I called Natalie. She had a guest room in her apartment, which is really funny because the house that she lived in was 84 Hope Street, which is where I used to go to shows when I was kid. And I moved my shit into that basement. And I remember walking in for the first time, like with all my shit and just being like “This looks really different.” It was just weird, there was chicken wire everywhere and stuff, when there used to not be. So I moved my cat and my bass and my computer to her house, got the keys…everybody was gone because it was winter break, so none of them were there, except for Shannon, who actually is from Rhode Island, and so she gave me the key, and told me to just make myself at home and whatever. And then….yeah, I went back later, packed up all of my stuff. Ben had a van, Dropdead essentially moved me in two moves with the van. Put everything into the basement except for my bed, which went up into the guest room and then that night we stayed….and that was like our last stand, we stayed in the building and then woke up early in the morning to try and stop the demolition crew that was supposed to come in the morning, who didn’t end up coming. And then after that it kind of like a last minute scramble to just get everything that we had left behind. We were like, we have some more time, lets try to get more stuff, and helping everybody else and then we finally went to the meeting, the housing hearing, at like noon that day. So we had been up, like I hadn’t slept at all, and we went to the housing hearing and then afterwards we were told that we had until Thursday or something, and that was like on Tuesday. So we had a couple of days, or until the end of the week to get our stuff out. But at that point we had already fucking flipped out and moved half of our stuff out anyway, or the majority of it. And at that point it had been all over the news so people were coming and just taking our shit, acting like they knew us. Like people, people caught wind of it and people were just taking stuff, acting like they were moving it out. And nobody knew who anybody was, and people were just stealing shit. Like, almost all of Lee’s DVDs got stolen, James’s bike got stolen from being locked out front, it sucked. But yeah, so I stayed with Natalie on the East Side for awhile and then I moved into an apartment in the West End with Art and Sara T. I was very happy because they had an extra room and they just called me up “Do you wanna move in? We think we’d want you to move in.” And I didn’t know them that well so I was like, totally psyched that they had asked me to move in. Because they originally just wanted to stay as a two bedroom apartment, like just the two of them, so that was very nice of them.
CW: So I mean, do you think the evictions and all of those spaces being shut down really like, fucked over the Providence music scene for awhile?
JB: Totally, yeah. We had nowhere to have shows. Especially when AS220 was being renovated over the summer, so fucked. And then we had the, that space….and then at that point Redrum wasn’t doing shows, The Dirt Palace has stopped doing shows. Then we had that space on Smith Street, that Knights of Columbus Hall. We were doing shows there for awhile.
CW: That got bought out, right?
JB: No, no the city councilman called the fucking cops and got them shut down for not having a license to have events. It was actually a show that I had booked that the shit hit the fan, it fucking sucked. Because the neighbors were apparently complaining, and they decided that it wouldn’t be worth it to get an entertainment license because they wouldn’t be able to make enough money off of it. So, that’s what happened with that.
CW: Its better now…(sic)
JB: It sucks. I really wish that we had a larger scale place to have DIY shows. I love AS220 but sometimes….when I think about the fact that we have to have $8 shows for foreign bands, just because AS220 takes $2 per person, if we wanna pay the bands, we have to charge that much for door. And everybody complains about it, it fucking sucks. And then there’s Okie Street but…I dunno, I like Okie Street too but if you actually wanna charge at the door it’s impossible. If you have a band from out of town…..yeah so its really hard to have a show if you actually wanna pay the bands at Okie Street.
CW: I saw Get Killed at a loft last year in Pawtucket, what was the deal with that, were you guys looking to (sic)
JB: That’s what I call the sequel. That’s where all the rest of The Sickle moved when we got evicted. That show got shut down by the cops, which is why it never happened again.
CW: So that was just that one time?
JB: Yeah, I don’t really remember much, I blacked out that night. It was bad.
CW: I guess just…have you been involved, or are you trying to get involved with starting a new venue?
JB: When I first got evicted, we started, I think it was called The Providence Music System, Providence Music something. It was me and Ben and Anne, Ben McCosker, Lee Berman, Shauna, Laura….I can’t remember who else. We met with Cliff Wood and stuff. We were trying actively to find a warehouse space that we could turn into like, a club.
CW: Like a legit space?
JB: So then we were like, “We’ll still have to end up doing $8 shows.” And so it kind of…and then it all fizzled due to other reasons that I really shouldn’t talk about because it’s not my business. So that all just kind of fell apart. That’s the problem. You do it illegally and you risk getting shut down, you do it legally and then you still have to charge a lot, and it’s a lose-lose situation, it sucks.
CW: I mean, do you think Olneyville is going to suffer now, because I mena, there are a couple venues, but as far as Streuver who just bought all those….
JB: Is that true? I heard a rumor about that.
CW: Yeah, it was in the ProJo, I saw.
JB: Because the Oak Street building still has the for sale sign up.
CW: Yeah, I don’t think it was that one specifically, but it just seems like they’re buying up all kinds of property.
JB: Yeah, its gonna be a mess. The whole area is gonna be gentrified within…I don’t even know how long, it’s scary, I don’t understand it. I don’t…. I mean it might just all fizzle, because I don’t think that they can get yuppies to move into that area, no matter how hard they try.
CW: I think that…yeah but then what do you have, empty warehouses with luxury condos and no one to use them. It still kind of fucks over…
JB: Everybody. Yeah. Like Rising Sun still isn’t full, nobody....Somebody tried convincing me that the restaurant inside Rising Sun Mill was good the other day, and it was somebody that I went to high school with and she started working there, and I just wasn’t about to….I ran into her at a show. I wasn’t about to be like “Yeah, I wont step foot in that place.” I didn’t want to get into it with her so I was like “Yeah, that’s cool” and just walked away, couldn’t handle it.
CW: I guess that’s all I’ve got in the way of questions, I dunno if you wanna add anything at all, about any of it or wanna just wrap it up.
JB: I can’t think of anything, I don’t know, we can wrap it up.