“The music industry is dead, and this is what’s real,” Dylan Widick, lead singer and bassist for local pop-punk band Edd Party, said.
He was referring to Portland’s DIY music scene, which takes place in auto shops, houses, warehouses and bridge underpasses.
The events, referred to as ‘renegades,’ underground shows, or just ‘shows,’ are evening performances by a handful of bands who independently produce countercultural music.
In Portland’s queer-friendly underground scene, the shows provide a space for queer youth, regardless of their age and income. Attendees say while mainstream concert audiences tend to spend their time drinking and taking videos, DIY show audiences are there for music and community.
Shows are advertised with ‘posters’ — collages of barbed gothic band logos posted to Instagram — which have little information other than the time and date. Some posters include an address, but more often than not, audience members must message the organizer for the address if they haven’t been to the venue before. Many DIY shows are open to all ages, and audiences include middle schoolers and aging punks alike.
Portland’s DIY music community is organized by low-income people, for low-income people, according to Widick. Crammed into the corner of each poster, next to the $5-15 cost of attending, is an acronym that speaks to the spirit of renegades — NOTAFLOF, or “no one turned away for lack of funds.”
Many of Portland’s popular underground artists can be loosely categorized as punk bands, but organizers distort the notion of discrete music genres, booking upbeat pop punk and electronic noise sets in the same shows.
Inclusive spaces
Although their sounds are eclectic, their values are cohesive. Artists who make music outside of the mainstream are dedicated to building community, and to do that involves looking out for one another and standing up to prejudice, Widick said.
At age 12, Edd Party’s Dylan Widick had more energy than any other kid he knew. He began attending all-ages shows in his hometown in Kentucky.
“I just had so much energy I had to get out,” Widick said. “When I would go to shows I would just be running around and being a goofy kid.”
By the time he was in high school, he was attending three shows a week and performing whenever he could.
Growing up in the scene, he watched the adults around him take care of one another and learned that making shows a safe space sometimes meant kicking people out. Though racist skinheads were allowed at some places in town, they were banned from the shows Widick went to and would be removed if they showed up.
“I just did the things that the people I thought were cool did. That's where I learned a lot of the etiquette,” Widick said.
He applied those values years later when he ran a house venue. When during one of the first shows, an audience member tried to harass a drummer, the crowd forced him out, and the house gained a reputation for having a zero-tolerance approach to nonconsensual behavior.
When crowds are moshing, safety in the pit is paramount. As a sophomore in high school, Widick fell down in the pit, surrounded by dozens of much larger men.
“One of the singers from one of the biggest local metal bands grabs my shirt and just pulls me up immediately,” Widick said.
Since then, Widick has always made it a point to look out for smaller people in rowdy crowds.
“He was somebody that I wanted to emulate,” Widick said.
Making shows an inclusive environment also involves letting people in regardless of what they can pay, Widick said. At the house he runs now, people of all incomes are welcome. If too many people can’t pay for a show, they are asked to help clean up after the show in exchange for attendance. Some audience members prefer to help with cleanup because they can collect discarded cans to take to the canning center.
Going to more traditional queer spaces, like gay bars, can be an isolating experience for someone like Widick, who is low-income and trans.
To feel comfortable at bars as a trans man, Widick said he is intentionally less friendly than he is at shows, to avoid being sexualized by other patrons. “It’s almost like I’m a commodity,” he said.
At underground shows, he feels safer and finds that crowds are less likely to scrutinize him. There, it doesn’t matter what brand you’re wearing or what your gender identity is, Widick said.
“You get to be around more people that you wouldn't generally be around at a bar and a lot of sober people,” Widick said.
As a sober person, he finds that there is less of a focus on alcohol at all-ages shows and in DIY venues.
The mostly substance-free pop punk group Middle Aged Queers agree. Josh Levine, the group’s bassist, has been sober for 32 years.
“I'm 58 and I'm having a great time,” Levine said. “I'm partying and I don't have a beer in my hand. Whether your path is harm reduction or whether your path is abstinence, just being able to see that someone is partying without drugs and alcohol is a win for the night.
“The all-ages show scene isn't centered on drugs or alcohol.”
In his experience, many all-ages audience members are substance-free or sober, and are there for music and community above all.
When vocalist Shaun Osburn first got sober at 27, years ahead of his peers, he was at a loss for how to navigate his social world. Being queer, and punk, he already didn’t fit into mainstream social life, and he worried that once he was sober, he would no longer fit in at queer and punk spaces.
“I felt so alienated from the majority of my gay male peers,” Osborn said. “I did not feel like I, as an out punker, had that much community at the time.”
Though he initially stopped going to shows, he soon found that when he did go, he forgot about drinking entirely. As the years went by, he saw many friends get out of rehab and begin playing music.
More mainstream punk and metal shows can attract a very different crowd. It’s common for audience members to spend a show “knocking people, myself included, in the face, and spilling beer everywhere,” their guitarist, Fureigh, said.
When the Middle Aged Queers see behavior like that, audience members typically intervene, and if they don’t, the band will pause their set to intervene.
Queer role models
As a proud, visibly queer band, the Middle Aged Queers can offer audiences something they didn’t have growing up. “There weren’t middle-aged queer men by the time I came of age,” Osburn said.
As a high school student in the late 80s in San Francisco, he found piles of belongings on the curb almost every day, with entire collections of books and records being left out for free.
“It wasn’t until later that I realized that that was dead guys’ stuff. That I was picking through an estate pile because their families didn’t want it,” Osburn said.
Being a visibly queer band offers hope to young people who are coming out and unsure about their future.
“For me, it's important to play all these shows to be, like, look, you can be a grown-up and it's not going to be boring. It's going to be joyful,” Osburn said.
Watching them play, young audience members can see that substances aren’t their focus.
“People, queer people especially, are connecting with and having fun together without alcohol being a necessary element of it,” Fureigh said.
Creating safe spaces for queer youth is a crucial part of their work.
“If nothing else, we’re creating a space; we’re making a container for people,” Fureigh said.
This involves making sure the bands they book with will steer clear of homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny, behavior typical of ‘brocore’ bands.
Once, an audience member came out to friends and family after seeing one of their shows.
“Sometimes seeing a group of people just having a good time and being themselves as they are can mean a lot,” Fureigh said.
Audiences do what they can to make a safe space for the band too.
When the band plays in small towns, “people come out specifically to make sure that we have safe passage,” Osburn said.
One night in a small town in California, a biker gang stayed close by all night to make sure they stayed safe.
A new generation of DIY music
In the past 20 years, technology has made it easier to gain a following and produce music, allowing more queercore bands to enter the scene. When Levine came of age in the early 80s, none of the queer bands that took him under their wing were publicly out. When they came of age nearly 20 years later, Fureigh would pick through show listings in OUT magazine, and copy the sparse offerings into their calendar for the month.
Today, most DIY shows in Portland have audiences populated with queer and trans youth, and on any given night, at least one show will have a set list full of queer bands. Queercore groups have become so common that the Middle Aged Queers have been booked in lineups that were entirely queer with no intention on the part of the organizers.
As the queer DIY scene continues to grow, Widick hopes it will stay true to the values he learned at an early age.
“The pandemic set us back so far,” he said. Many young people entering the scene today haven’t had the kind of role models he grew up with, who taught him to dance respectfully and keep prejudice out. Since the pandemic, he’s seen fewer young people picking each other up when they fall down, and he’s seen less of a focus on community.
As this next generation of audience members and musicians come of age, Widick hopes they’ll come to realize the importance of taking care of one another.
“I wish that everybody understood that they were part of a community of DIY music,” he said.
In a time where social life takes place online or in commercialized mainstream spaces, the DIY music community needs each other more than ever, Widick said.
“This is how we change the world, by playing music and including as many people as we can,” Widick said.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
© 2023 Street Roots. All rights reserved. | To request permission to reuse content, email editor@streetroots.org or call 503-228-5657, ext. 404