E-Mail This Article to a Friend It came from the basement The most intense scene in town lives in the cellars of Jamaica Plain, Mission Hill, Brighton, Allston, and Somerville BY CAMILLE DODERO

IF LEGENDARY New York punk club CBGB had a baby brother, it might look something like the three-month-old basement venue Bloodstains Across Somerville. Spray-painted phrases drip from every visible surface: CLASS WAR, warns an overhead air vent; CLEAN KIDS GET SICK AND DIE, prophesies a stairwell wall; SPEED KILLS, screams styrofoam insulation, quoting a lyric from Agent Orange’s "Bloodstains," an underground punk anthem that helped inspire the cellar’s nickname. The room resembles an alley. Drinking stuff is strewn around the perimeter: a green malt-liquor bottle rolls around the top of an empty beer keg, discarded malt-beverage cans litter the floor. Feathers made sticky from syrup — props in a fetish film shot here recently — flutter in dark corners.

Bloodstains Across Somerville is one of a handful of rental-house basements in the area that moonlight as live-music venues. Some of the rawest rock shows in town are performed in DIY places like this, beside dusty furnaces, cylindrical water heaters, and laundry hampers. They’re accessible only through crawlspaces and creaky back doors, down peeling-paint bulkheads and wobbly wooden staircases. The best, most frenetic, in-your-face shows in town sometimes happen quite literally underground, sometimes only for an audience of 30 — in craggy-walled, cramped, dingy cellars situated in cheap-rent districts like Mission Hill, Jamaica Plain, Brighton, Allston, and Somerville.

If you’ve never heard of shows like this, there’s a reason why: the hosts want it that way. DIY bookers promote their events discreetly, through word of mouth, photocopied fliers, and the Internet. That way, only a small number of kids know about them, the sort of young, hip, music-obsessed people who peruse grainy fliers taped to streetlamps, know the tenants having the shows, or post to DIY-minded message boards.

People who hang out at these sorts of houses call each other "kids," even though many are over 20. As in: "Everyone was jigging at the Can Kickers show — it was all kids dressed in black with Mohawks and tattoos and shit." Or, "There’re kids who come to Bloodstains who’re on the verge of blackout drunk, but there’re also straight-edge kids who come here too." Or simply, "I don’t like that kid."

The audience does tend to be young: high-school and college students (usually MassArt, Boston University, Northeastern, or Emerson), and mid-to-late twentysomethings. Gray hair is scarce. Case in point: when one booker describes the garage-rock demographic that came to his house to see a Portuguese outfit called Les Batons Rouges, the 25-year-old describes the turnout as "an older crowd — 35 and above." The commingling age groups sparked some humorous interactions. "There were all these older women hitting on these young dudes in the kitchen," he laughs.

It’s difficult to calculate the precise number of houses that are actively booking basement shows. Some host a single show, and never have another; others may have three or four annually, not enough to be considered regular venues. And even the ones operating regularly shutter abruptly. Two weekends ago, three Boston-area basements had events planned. One in Allston, a Dopamine Records showcase, was pre-emptively busted after cops found the address on promo fliers. Another, also in Allston, saw unknown guests toss a stereo out a window, urinate out a second-floor window, and hacksaw a toilet seat off the bowl, annoyances that have made the residents wary of future events. The third, a Saturday-afternoon matinee at Bloodstains, provoked not only a phone call from the landlord, but a subsequent stopover by an incensed neighbor who threatened to kill the six tenants if they ever had another party.

"There’s almost an understanding at this point that any space has at best a year," says Bloodstains housemate John Flax, a 21-year-old with an uncanny resemblance to Jack White. "And that there’s going to be new basements popping up constantly. People move around. There’s a transient nature to it that I think everyone sort of accepts."

Which is why basement spaces are like terminal patients — at best, they have one-year life expectancies. They crop up fitfully, kicking and screaming, then vanish just as unpredictably, usually triple-teamed by cops, neighbors, and landlords. Some have managed to survive nearly a decade, like the Amory, in Jamaica Plain, a house where Omaha macabre dancers the Faint first played in Boston. Others have expired sooner, but lived at a thunderous, breakneck pace, like the much-beloved House of Suffering Succotash (a/k/a the HOSS), a Brighton basement that became like a club, booking nearly 80 shows in 11 months, where cops responded to the noise 36 times.

Few people really want to deal with these headaches. It’s just that they don’t have many other options. "Everybody I know that does basement shows would much rather have a legitimate, alternative space," says 23-year-old Ben Sisto, an independent promoter working under the rubric Honeypump Productions. "But those spaces don’t really exist in Boston."

Nevertheless, some people like having basement shows just for the fun of it. "It’s fuckin’ awesome," says Dan Wars ("That’s my professional name"), a 25-year-old punk from Cape Cod. "It’s great being able to get really drunk the night before, wake up at three o’clock, have a bunch of people over, have a show an hour later. And I don’t have to go anywhere. I can walk out in my underpants to the bathroom. I still get to see a great show and not even have to leave the house."

"In a perfect world," adds Crusty Tim, another Bloodstainer with a metal thorn through his septum, DUMPSTER tattooed vertically on the back of his left arm, and LOVE inked to match on the right, "all the shows would be in basements."