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The thing that really distinguished the HOSS was that it booked bands during the week, often Sundays and Mondays. Even Doug DeMay from Fat Day was in awe. "The HOSS played it like no place I’ve ever seen in my whole life," he says. "The fact that they had shows during the week for more than a week is a victory unto itself."

"With other houses, it’d be like, ‘The kids from a band are having a show in their basement,’" says Ben Sisto. "But HOSS was really the only place that was known more as a venue, rather than a place where people just lived."

"Even when the shows were bad, they were good," adds Jamaica Plain resident Matt Mitchell, who lived at the HOSS for seven months. "This band from Houston — NTX and Electric — they had the tackiest table with a really ugly tablecloth set up.... They had a guy on the other side of the room play stand-up drums. And then, out of nowhere, this really, really anorexically thin dude wearing tighty-whities and a Native American headdress comes out waving around sparklers. He waved them dangerously closely to the acoustic foam [on the ceiling] and almost lit the place on fire. He was freaking people out. The whole room filled with this dense, white cloud of smoke; it billowed into the upper floor, until you couldn’t see anymore. Everyone was coughing and having trouble breathing and had to go outside into the yard. But this band kept playing. The inside of this house looked like a cloud. The band sucked, the show sucked, but the fact that we let stuff like that happen was really awesome."

"Those guys didn’t know what was happening down there sometimes," remembers Jonah Rapino, electric violinist for instrumental-rock alchemists Devil Music. "You’d show up, they’d be like, ‘Oh, there’s a show tonight? Everyone stole the mikes, so we don’t have any mikes.’"

Theft was a problem at the HOSS. A pair of $200 microphones, on loan and past due, mysteriously disappeared. Other instruments were pilfered from an upstairs practice room. Someone stole a synthesizer. Personal mail vanished. Shea had planned to release a highlight-reel DVD of HOSS shows he’d filmed with a roommate’s digital-video camera, but a thief filched the expensive camcorder — with all the footage. "That was the worst thing," grimaces Shea. "We’re doing this, we’re carrying the cross. Don’t steal our $200 microphones."

Reflecting on the HOSS’s run, Shea says he definitely started to feel a loss of control over who or what was entering his house. Last June, Mission of Burma’s Clint Conley, who by day toils as a television producer for WCVB Channel 5’s Chronicle, inquired about filming a benefit that would be held at the HOSS. Shea agreed, mostly because it was Clint Conley asking, on the condition there’d be no exterior shots of his house. Four months later, Shea still had no idea if the film crew ever came. (They didn’t.) "Whatever happened with that?" he wonders when asked about it. "I never knew if they came or not."

Shea admits he was burned out by the end of his tenure. "I would never wish on anyone to do as many shows as we did. It’s too much."

Like the HOSS, DIY venues like to adopt names, such as the X Haus. Or the Stable, an aptly named Allston residence where the Mules, a now-defunct band described as "garage B-52’s," once bashed out tunes. Or the Disaster House, another Allston abode where Providence’s thunder-noise demigod-duo Lightning Bolt once played. Others, like the Amory or Ashford Street, become known just by their coordinates.

There is a kind of random community that naturally evolves out of the DIY scene. Once, at Bloodstains, a whole group of Japanese students showed up one afternoon. "They were all wearing leopard-print, bright-green spandex, oversize SOD shirts, and slap-shot hats," says Dan Wars. "They had really crazy teased hair. They’d come to Boston for a summer course, and they found out about the show on the Internet. So they had their teacher call and get directions."

"That’s what’s amazing about DIY, period," says Wars’s housemate John. "A band from Sweden can be playing in a basement in Somerville, Massachusetts. A bunch of kids from Japan see on the Internet that a band that they like is playing and come. That doesn’t happen anywhere without promotion."

DIY kids wear hoodies, rock-and-roll T-shirts, Chuck Taylors. They have tattoo sleeves and facial piercings. The guys tend to be unshorn, cultivating mossy beards, nappy dreadlocks, unkempt Afros, floppy haircuts, long bangs flapping over one eye. They often dress like hipsters, in too-tight T-shirts, tracksuit jackets with racing stripes, and Saucony sneakers, while the girls match sneakers with skirts, wear fake fur, wrap their hair in kerchiefs, don glasses, and pierce their noses. But it’s difficult to generalize about the circuit as a whole. The black-clad Bloodstains crowd, for example, is a sea of pierced noses, dyed Mohawks, studded leather, and heavy bullet belts.

Many basement dwellers are in bands, have been in bands, or are in the process of forming bands. In a sense, that’s a big motivation for repurposing the boiler room as a rock-and-roll space — giving your band or your friends’ bands a venue. Like Clickers, a post-punk Allston band who evolved playing basements, who opened for the Rye Coalition at the Middle East Downstairs last week. Or the Mules, who used to live in the Stable.

"In the last six months or so, there’s been a lot of push to take these bands that traditionally play house shows and bring them out of the basement," says Sisto, who’s been booking bands like Clickers, Transistor Transistor, and Night Rally at Allston’s Great Scott. "It’s like going from high school to college."