North End DIY scene in a post-COVID Tacoma

– by Harry Gers

Tacoma sits in a unique and strange place culturally. Colonized relatively late (at least in comparison to the entrenched settlements of New England), the Pacific Northwest has carved out its own distinct corner of the modern musical landscape. Tacoma hit the scene with a boom after the railroad was first built, but the City of Destiny soon had a sharp decline which it never fully recovered from, leaving it in the shadow of Seattle. Big plans like being “the New York of the west” gave way to a city characterized in many ways by the sobering reality of dreams not fulfilled. As Tacoma artist Neko Case describes her hometown in her song Thrice All American:

Buildings are empty like ghettos of ghost-towns,
There was hope in the trainyards that something inspired
It once was Ionic, but it’s been painted shut
There was no hollow promise that life would reward you
There was nowhere to hide in Tacoma

Case paints a vivid and startlingly accurate portrait of Tacoma. One that I would almost characterize, ironically enough, as “the New Jersey of the west.” The younger siblings of Seattle and New York respectively exist on a sort of coastal mirror with, at least in spirit, parallel journeys. And just as New Jersey is known for its Springsteenian (if I can use that as an adjective) heartfelt angst of a hometown that dreams bigger than the boarded up storefronts allow for, I would argue the attitude of Tacoma comes from quite a similar place.

But things have evolved far past the turn of the century beginnings, all the way to the turn of yet another century. While Tacoma may have won the battle for 3 out of the 6 letters on the airport, it’s mostly settled into a much smaller role on the larger musical stage of the PNW. But being overlooked by the eyes of the larger music industry leaves space vacant for independent artists and DIY venues and organizers to carve out corners for themselves. As someone who moved to Tacoma for college, my experience stems mainly from the North End, and even more specifically, localized around the University of Puget Sound.

“Tacoma people are weird, and it’s so dope. There’s a kind of
humbleness with being from here that’s really nice.
It’s cool to see all the combinations of people in this quiet, funky culture.”
– Avi Graf, UPS student and member of the band Dirt

As a small liberal arts college (roughly 1800 students as of 2023), the campus community is relatively tight knit. It’s difficult to run into someone you’re more than 2 layers of separation removed from. Even if you don’t know somebody, you almost always know somebody, who knows somebody who does. This seems to extend beyond the campus, and be somewhat emblematic of Tacoma at large. While it’s not a small town, it has a sort of small town quality of inescapable interconnectivity. While in a city like Seattle you could perhaps cast a wider net, in Tacoma things seem to have a gravitational pull. Attempting to distance yourself too much almost has a Pac-Man effect of trying to move off of one side of the screen only to loop right back to the other. This is both a curse, in that getting away from things feels impossible, but a blessing as well, as familiar connections are always nearby. In the case of the local DIY music scene, it’s often a blessing. Due to the small social web, it was also a relatively straightforward task for me to interview people involved in the local scene.

“I like the Tacoma scene, there’s a really unique combination of
genderqueer and redneck vibes that come together here. It’s hard
to get into sometimes, so it’s been slow since covid with having
stuff happen. People seemed resistant to it for a while, but stuff has
been coming back more and more recently.” – Avi

On many weekends, student bands can be found playing at houses scattered throughout the North End. The only criteria for a house to become a venue is having proper space, residents willing to open that space up, and bands (and crowds) willing to occupy it. Venue houses often become notorious over time, ending up with their own names, quirks, and history. I was able to speak to two previous residents of Psych Ward, an iconic party house on 3115 N 11th Street directly next to the UPS campus. While (as is extremely common from my experience) the name’s origins are unclear, the house is known for its massive backyard, and spacious basement covered completely in scrawled graffiti, making the basement more than just a venue but also a sort of intergenerational communal art project. By having shows in the basement the blasting noise is often somewhat muffled, while leaving the yard a slightly quieter option for overflowing crowds or people just stepping out of the pit to get some air between sets.

“At first we did a lot of smaller stuff, but by the time Halloween
came around I said ‘okay, we need to have an actual party.’ I had
pictures from Psych Ward basement on Halloween as a freshman, I
was like ‘this is happening again, it’s a tradition, we gotta keep it
going. I wanna continue the show culture for a lot of the kids who
started during covid and didn’t have that experience. I didn’t want
that to die out.” – Anne Marie

While finding your way into this scene can look vastly different for different people, one thing that stands out to me is the casual, and almost even unintentional-ness to it. As is so common with a small community like Tacoma college students, it’s about who you know or happen to run into. You may be at a show, and recognize a friend from class in one of the bands, or a coworker in the crowd, and things start to stumble into place from there.

“Here I am in this random house for the first time ever, watching
somebody perform in this basement that looks like it’s gone through
at least fifty years of damage, and I find out some of my friends live
here too without me even knowing. That was just so crazy. Then I
started getting involved in the house shows, and going there more
and more. I got to know the people better, and we just all kinda
became really good friends until I was over there all the time.” -Caitlin

“It’s really interesting that there’s this microcosm of local bands that
are all within the campus. So you know them because you go to
class with them, and see them around, and it’s cool to appreciate
your classmates’ talents in that way.” – Anne Marie

While a social bond is often the catalyst for things to get started, there’s still a massive amount of work that goes into making a show happen from both the house residents and bands (and any various friends willing to pitch in.)

“An artist would reach out, say ‘hey, my name’s so and so, we’re
looking to perform, can we get set up in your basement?’ So we’d
all come together as a house, find a date that we could maybe
propose to them, and then hear what they’d wanna propose. And if
we can find one in the middle, or on the same day, then boom, it’s
sold.” – Caitlin

“It was really weird because I had to learn how to wire speakers
into a receiver and shit, I had no idea what I was doing. I was
literally in biology class on ChatGPT like ‘how to wire speakers?’
and when it worked I might have been the most proud I’ve ever
been” – Anne Marie

“Probably about 2 weeks leading up, the band starts to move their
stuff into the basement. So we have a little area to put everything,
they come to practice maybe 2-3 times a week. If it was multiple
bands we try to just use one set and have everyone share, unless
they need something specific. We get beverages, supplies, make
sure everything’s good. We didn’t really do pay-at-the-door but I
know in previous years people had.” – Caitlin

“I think just seeing so many close friends, and having those
experiences of people telling you ‘this is so much fun! I’m having an
absolute blast!’ The payoff of putting in a lot of work, we’re opening
up our house and our space, but also putting something on that’s a
community event that people don’t have to pay for or anything,
where people have a really good time, that was so rewarding.”
-Anne Marie

“We’ve had people asking ‘can I show you my snapchat memories
of me jumping out your window because the bathroom was
locked?’ and were like ‘absolutely!’” – Caitlin

An obvious concern to anyone looking inwards at the DIY scene would be the risk of opening your home up to a massive sea of rowdy strangers.

“The bands were always great. They’d bring big crowds of course,
and the place would be trashed, but they’d always come back the
next day and help us clean up the yard and basement and stuff. I
never had anybody play who I didn’t want to come back.” – Caitlin

“I don’t know if there are a lot of places where you could open up
your home the way we did, and have such a respectful community. I
think part of it was that I felt okay because there might be some
kinda shitty people that could steal stuff from you, but at a school
like UPS people are kind of watch dogging each other. If you have
at least one person who would be like ‘hey, maybe let’s not do that’
it goes such a long way. It almost made me more trusting of
people.” – Anne Marie

“We didn’t really have many problems. The worst problem we ever
had was when somebody peed in the fridge, and even that was
like, alright, bye. There was only a few people we ever had to kick
out for stealing. One person stole 3 bottles of Vodka from our
fridge, and they brought it back the next day with a cute note, it was
the sweetest thing. They promised to bring bottles for us next time,
and they did! The community is just fabulous.” – Caitlin

In the digital age, posters on wooden telephone poles have (mostly) become a thing of the past, leaving social media and word of mouth as the prime spaces for marketing upcoming shows.

“We’d just kinda make flyers, post them on our instagram stories,
people would repost and it would spread. And the bands would post
too which would get a big draw.” – Caitlin

This kind of marketing also spreads shows much further than old analog methods were able to. Given the Psych Ward’s proximity to campus you might assume that it was sort of ‘UPS territory,’ but that was far from true. In 2022, Anne Marie Ring was the only UPS student living there, the rest were students from PLU, as well as Caitlin Habenicht who was attending UW Tacoma.

“It was like people from UPS, and then oh, people’s friends that are
friends with people at UPS. Oh now the friends of the friends of the
people at UPS are bringing their friends from say, WSU, and now
their friends from UW, and then their coworkers, and so on.
Everybody was coming through.” – Caitlin

“It was fun because I’d be in class, and hear the people in front of
me saying ‘are you going to the Psych Ward party later?’ and I’d be
like ‘yay!’” – Anne Marie

The crowds can pull from a mix of various groups around Tacoma, but artists can also come from all over.

“This guy Max lived in Psych Ward for his junior and senior year,
and he kinda got it on the map a bit more. There weren’t any
campus bands there, it was mostly artists that were coming through
Seattle would also stop by Tacoma and play Psych Ward. He was
pretty proud of that, and I think it got passed down to a guy named
Marshal, but then covid hit and it all sorta dissipated.” – Grantland
Unterseher, UPS student and member of the band They Exist

“Bands would reach out and be like, ‘hey, can we play in your
basement?’ We had people that were reaching out to use it as a
venue, and that’s kind of why it stuck. Because we had people
finding us to be like, ‘can we use your house?’ We were like,
‘absolutely, it’s a treasure!’” – Caitlin

“We had a lot of people that would reach out to perform that weren’t
in the college web whatsoever. Some of them were like 27, and we
were saying “sure, hell yeah, you can of course come down!” – Caitlin

As students graduate or move out, it’s common for the houses to be passed down to a new generation planning to keep up the tradition. But as with countless aspects of campus culture, covid sent everything into disarray and the passing of the torch was disrupted.

“When my friends before I moved in first got there, they were told
‘by the way, this is a very important house to the UPS community,
don’t fuck this up’ basically. They found the house on Facebook
marketplace actually. I think around COVID, nobody really
preserved the house for the next generation, because to get in you
kinda had to know somebody, so the chain broke.” – Caitlin

“Hopefully that landlord hasn’t painted over the basement since we
left, because there was so much cool graffiti. Some of it was us, but
also a lot of it went back generations and generations. It’s weird
that there’s not gonna be that passing down of the house, because
it’s always been ‘hey, our lease is up, we need 6 new people to fill
it, who’s getting it next?’” – Anne Marie

Covid was the most obvious culprit, but the barriers to a thriving scene are always complicated and multifaceted. I was also able to get insight into the perspective of a lifelong Tacoma local by speaking with UPS student and musician, my friend Brook Jones (also known as Fantastic Fogman.)

“Really early on I think you realize whether music is something you
do or whether it’s the only thing you can possibly do. And once you
subconsciously decide that, it’s gonna be your life. And you and
your friends start having idols, even though that’s kind of a naughty
word. But people you want to be like, people who feel so
unattainable to you. You wanna be the Beatles, you wanna be
Nirvana, you wanna be Kendrick Lamar, Mac Demarco. But at least
for us in Tacoma, there were just people older than us in highschool
who seem just as unattainable as Paul McCartney. It’s a different
feeling having your idols be someone you just see around town.
There’s so many brilliant musicians in Tacoma who are for the most
part still here, and sort of inactive in one way or another.” – Brook

For Tacoma locals with dreams extending beyond Grit City, there can become a complex tension. Having a passion for artistic expression can feel incompatible with remaining in a place that doesn’t seem to be able to foster it. This push and pull of both a connection to your hometown, but pull towards your aspirations is a powerful piece of the Tacoma experience.

“There’s some adamant ‘I am so for Tacoma, and I have stay here
to make it good’ and there’s also passive ‘I’m gonna stay here
cause this is just where I’m from.’ And there’s the people who feel
like “I need to get out of here. And probably come back, but I still
need to leave.’ Which is interesting, because the people who are
going to influence Tacoma the most are probably the ones staying
here, but it’s such a difference between the people who are just
staying because ‘that’s just what it is’ versus the people who are
actively trying to do something.” – Brook

“What’s weird is that the scene I’m involved in at least, it’s almost
like, we’re gonna all be in LA or New York, and people will start
saying ‘what the fuck is with everyone being from Tacoma? You
guy’s all went to high school together? What?’ It’s like a sort of
mass migration to big cities from Tacoma.” – Brook

Sources for vague and almost inevitable seeming problems like this can be difficult to pinpoint. There’s countless factors at play dating back centuries sometimes, but that doesn’t mean we should stop trying to untangle the knot.

“Not as many people are going out and spending money, because
we don’t have any fucking money, y’know what I mean? And also
businesses don’t want to pay people to play music, people can’t
organize open mics, it’s hard. There’s a tiredness.” – Brook

“I think the crowd I ran with, kinda from ‘the olden days’ who either
moved away or became regular food service workers, it’s all very
passionate people who are also super anxious and depressed at
the same time. Everyone who I think of as ‘Tacoma music people,’
it’s like everyone wanted this community but everybody is so tired,
and it’s so hard to make it happen.” – Brook

“It’s interesting, you go to the bar and you have no idea that your
bartender, if you had been in college 6 years earlier, you woulda
been freaking out that this guy is in this band. But now nobody
would know.” – Brook

But this kind of foggy fatigue that can spread over the community can also result in an inverse effect. At least in the case of college students, that fatigue can bottle up artistic expression until it needs to find a new way to burst out.

“It’s bored college kids in a place where there isn’t that much else to
do. I mean there’s some bars on 6th, but if you’re not 21 then even
that’s out. There isn’t a big scene in Tacoma. I think other colleges
don’t have the house show vibe that we do because they have
other places to go and things to do. And while obviously I want
more stuff to do in Tacoma at night, it definitely pushes the creativity
of artists to have to figure out things to do.” – Anne Marie

“There’s a ‘boredom drives curiosity’ or a ‘why not?’ element to it.
Having venues that do five dollar shows where the music might not
be good and it doesn’t matter, it opens doors for artists too. People
who are like, ‘okay, I have a few friends and we can all kind of play
an instrument, let’s put a band together! The stakes are really low.’”
– Anne Marie

So while covid was a large blow to an already tired community, there’s hope with things brewing into 2024.

“I hope it can be in full force this year. It’d be nice to see a lot more
bands, a lot of the UPS bands were cover bands. Which is cool, but
I don’t love Bruno Mars that much y’know. I want to hear people’s
own music, and what they’ve got to say!” – Avi

“There’s murmurs of old bands being revived and things like that,
so I think people are also getting tired of being tired.” – Brook

While Tacoma may be filled with boarded up businesses and big dreams that fell short of the mark, art and expression continues to thrive. While it may seem like there would be a positive correlation with the bigger and louder a city is, the richer the artistic expression, but the opposite is true more often than not. In places like Los Angeles, New York, or even Seattle, the overwhelming size of the music scenes can often either drown out people with something to say, or homogenize them into what the industry demands. The bright side of playing music in broken down houses, graffiti coated basements, or abandoned train yards is that people can express themselves on their own terms above all else.

People who built it, they loved it like I do
There was hope in the trainyards that something inspired
It once was Ionic, but it’s been painted shut
I found passion for life in Tacoma
– Neko Case, Thrice All American

“I think Tacoma is a really special place. And something you would
say to counter that, is ‘well everybody thinks about everywhere’ but
that’s just not true. Not everywhere is a special place.” – Brook

“There’s no other option. We’re doing art and music and that’s the
only thing that there is. You can’t really kill it. It’s gonna be what
we’re doing forever, even if no one’s listening.” – Brook

About the Author

Harry Gers prepared this article as his final project for MUS 227: Musical History of Tacoma, at the University of Puget Sound. At the time he took the class in Summer 2023, he was a junior majoring in English.