E-Mail This Article to a Friend It came from the basement (continued)

IF BASEMENTS are the high schools of live-music venues, then Fat Day don’t want to graduate. Twelve years and counting as the hardcore band most likely to bounce on trampolines while grunting like they’re on the receiving end of enemas, the art-geek veterans are often referenced as the granddaddies of the current basement music scene. It’s not that Fat Day were the first band in Boston to book house shows — musicians have been entertaining their friends in cellars since Peter Wolf wore diapers — it’s just that they’re one of the only outfits that the twentysomething architects of today’s DIY scene actually remember.

That’s partly because the foursome still materialize in Boston-area basements, always accoutered with a clever gimmick like musical hardhats, Afro wigs, or light-up jumpsuits. Having performed in such random settings as a derelict strip mall and a Navajo-reservation pizza shop, Fat Day’s members prefer all-ages DIY venues to traditional clubs — so much so that half their dates on a recent tour were DIY spaces. "The [DIY] community is tighter," explains guitarist Doug DeMay. "People are more excited about the music than they are at a club, where they’re preoccupied with the scene."

Back in 1993, Fat Day rented 12 Wyatt Circle, "a dirty little hovel" in Somerville. At the time, DeMay recalls, there was a DIY drought: "It was a quiet time in Boston." The Allston Harvest Co-op sponsored shows in its community basement; Toxic Narcotic, a local metal-punk mess, also had a house in Allston, but they had a reputation for booking strictly punk shows. Beyond that, there wasn’t much else. "There was no regular house venue that people could go to see weird, small punk-rock bands from weird, small places," says DeMay.

Fat Day’s Somerville shack had a scary little cellar that the band intended to use for practice. The ceilings were so low, most visitors had to crouch. A stage dive meant belly-flopping off the washer-and-dryer set. "It had a real dangerous feel to it; there was always a whiff of gas," recalls DeMay. But after they’d rehearsed a bunch of times, they noticed the neighbors weren’t grumbling. The punk-rock homestead already served as a kind of nomadic crash pad, with "strange wanderers" sleeping in the attic. So Fat Day started to hold shows in the basement on the weekends, once or twice a month.

The first show featured Hickey, a Bay Area punk band with songs like "Her Prosthetic Hands" and "Basic Tips for Squirrel Hunting Success," and a group called Fuckface. People packed the basement; the show was a success. Over the course of the next three or four years, the Fat Day house became an outpost for "strange bands that couldn’t get a show at the Middle East or wanted to play an all-ages show in Boston." Noisy, punk performers flew in from Georgia, California, Canada, Israel. Obscure outfits like Flap, Lesion, and Bullroarer made cameos.

This was before the Internet became widely available. So the only way to publicize a DIY house (in addition to passing out fliers and talking to friends) was through the annual Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life, a national rock-and-roll handbook that listed homes across the country known to be doing shows. Such inaccessibility made the scene more mysterious than it is today. "You’d gather in this very dangerous basement and rock out with college kids, local Somerville residents, old guys, young guys, strangers, friends, countrymen — it was a weird scene," DeMay reminisces. "We were kind of like, ‘We don’t know who these people are. But they’re in our house and they’re rocking out, so all is good.’"

Early on, Fat Day wisely ingratiated themselves with their working-class neighbors, inviting local denizens over and filling them with copious amounts of booze and food so they wouldn’t grumble. An elderly couple living next door were indifferent to the noise — too deaf to hear the racket. When residents did grouse, it was only about bass lines shaking their toilets.

But in 1996 or ’97, something fractured the house’s relationship with the community, and the police became regular visitors. One night, during a Harriet the Spy show, the Somerville Police Department ambushed the party 15 minutes into the opening set. Two bands on the bill didn’t even tune up. That’s when Fat Day stopped having shows; they decided that it wasn’t fair to drag musicians into town with tentative gigs.

DeMay is thrilled to see the younger generation keeping the DIY scene alive. "In the last four years or so, we’ve seen a lot of different houses pop up and do shows and be willing to put themselves out there," he says. "I know what it’s like to open up your house to the whirlwind force that is punk rock. Sometimes your neighbors hate you, sometimes the cops hate you, sometimes the bands even end up hating you. But it’s worth it."