When I was in high school, my friend Dan Johnson opened a DIY music venue in his mom’s basement called Revival House. All of my friends pitched in to help the place run with my contribution being to chronicle the shows with my camera. I took this job seriously and photographed nearly every show during the venue’s 18-month tenure. When it was eventually shut down, I found myself reviewing the gallery of images I had created. Even though I had posted hundreds to my blog, it seemed like the photos only told part of the story: something was missing.
It wasn’t immediately apparent what I felt like I missed, and, even if I had known, there was no way to fix it – the venue was closed for good. However, nearly a year after Revival House saw its end, Hipster House, one of Rockford’s original DIY venues, re-opened. So, in the summer after my freshman year of college, I began, once again, attending DIY shows religiously in an effort to document the experience.
Unsure of what exactly I wanted to focus on, I made sure to take pictures of everything: the road in front of the venue, people standing outside, details of the venue itself, moments between the shows, the list goes on. But, most importantly, while the bands were playing I made sure to turn my camera away from the music being performed and instead focus on the people surrounding me.
What I quickly realized is that the band is only a single part of any DIY show. Without them, all you have is a bunch of people standing around talking. And without a good crowd, all you have is glorified band practice. During all of my prior attempts at capturing the experience of attending these shows, I failed to recognize this important interaction.
This collection of images is my best attempt at showing what it felt like to be a part of those moments– yelling, screaming, jumping around to bands known and unknown, singing only a few correct lyrics. The frenetic energy you experience is hard to describe. There’s nothing quite like moshing to a song one minute as the lead singer screams into their microphone mere inches away from you to then standing in the same spot in contemplative silence during an acoustic set.
Even if you don’t know the people around you during a show, after the set is completed, and you’re catching your breath and wiping the sweat from your face or hugging the band after some sad slow songs, you feel just a bit closer to those around you. Like now that you shared this experience, and maybe didn’t even say a word, you understand each other just a bit more.
If you’ve attended DIY shows in the past, I hope these pictures bring you back, just for a moment, to those sweaty, tinnitus-inducing performances and the range of emotions they invoke. And for those who have never attended a show, I hope that at the very least, while you flip through these pages, you imagine what it feels like to be one of those faces in the crowd.