Eugene’s house shows made Claudia Santino a rock star. The UO junior is the lead singer for GrrlBand, a punk group which formed in May. She said the DIY music scene made it possible to land gigs and build a dedicated audience with no prior band experience.
However, as GrrlBand prepares to reconvene after a summer break, Santino is uncertain about the coming year. She said the local scene is feeling the effects of an ongoing shortage of house venues, and she doesn’t know what will be available for her audiences.
As DIY organizers have tried to rebuild after the pandemic, noise complaints from neighbors and ensuing police visits have stalled them. This has forced high-profile locations to shut down, including The Alder House and Blue Dragon.
By municipal code, amplified music is prohibited in Eugene after 10 p.m., with repeated offenses punishable by fines. In response, house venue operators pushed end times forward, but they have still faced shutdowns. According to city documents, police can intervene at any point if they deem a sound would “disturb a reasonable person of normal sensitivities.”
Many of the pre-pandemic venues, such as the Tiny House, have disappeared. Santino said the scene currently operates out of unnamed, one-off locations. Jack Keith, a member of the band Common Koi, said these places lack the security and infrastructure of experienced venues.
“The thing that’s missing is having an established place to play loud noise –– and that aspect of permanence,” Santino said.
This deficiency isn’t new. Instead, it is a historical factor in Eugene’s 40-year-old music underground. As long as the DIY scene has existed, it has been trying to accommodate demand.
Jeffrey Cellars runs Panic on 13th, a blog dedicated to Eugene’s underground music. For 11 years, he has been reconstructing the history of the scene, one demo tape and ‘zine at a time. He said the alternative underground dates back to 1980.
“It was super healthy; it was vibrant,” Geoff Unger, a former scene member, said. He lived in Eugene throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, playing in multiple bands.
As Unger describes, early Eugene artists bounced between small venues that would accept them and basements under landlords’ noses. The artists were college students and a core group of graduates that stayed, attracting audiences into the hundreds.
“If they could create a sound that the college students liked, that would pack venues,” he said.
Cellars said there was outside interest in Eugene’s underground scene, particularly after grunge exploded in the Pacific Northwest. In 1998, veteran scene members rode onto the Billboard album charts as the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. But there were also setbacks, including a conflict with WOW Hall that Cellars said left some bands informally banned during the late ‘80s.
“In Eugene, there weren’t really venues at the time,” Cellars said. “It was impossible to say who was developing a following, because shows were just too sporadic.”
There were some prominent DIY spaces, including the Animal and Monkey Houses. But organizers there faced the uncertainty of police intervention.
“House parties got shut down pretty routinely because of noise complaints,” Cellars said. “So a lot of times, if you were in a band that was playing there, you were perfectly fine going on first.”
Some exceptions emerged based on the neighborhood and organizer decisions. Cellars points to one location by Bijou Theater which was particularly untouched.
“I don’t know if they had somehow soundproofed better or what, but I remember seeing a few shows there,” Cellar said. “And never, ever once did we get run out by the cops.”
Unger said the scene persisted for decades, even as some graduated and moved away. He lives in Corvallis now, but when he visits Eugene, he sees familiar faces who have transitioned to playing local bars.
When UO graduate Austin Crabtree arrived in Eugene in 2013, the underground music scene had moved further from campus, toward warehouses and The Whiteaker. Today, he runs The 552, one of the only pre-pandemic venues to re-open.
The Social Host Ordinance passed in Eugene in 2013, holding property owners and occupants responsible for “unruly gatherings” in which alcohol is served and noise disturbances occur. However, Crabtree said police presence was less prominent overall.
Still, he said available houses plummeted between 2017 and 2018, as existing showrunners burnt out and moved away amid issues screening bands for misconduct. With primarily bars remaining, those under 21 were cut off from watching or performing in the city.
Then, in 2019, a new generation of UO students took matters into their own hands.
“There was kind of a dearth and a demand, and a wave of students starting bands at the same time, with some of them actually being really good,” Crabtree said. “The need sort of begot the spaces.”
For nine months, established venues with prominent social media profiles popped up close to campus. Common Koi formed that fall, playing their first show at The 552, and it found a consistent home at the Tiny House.
“Our freshman year, it was all house shows,” Keith said. He was aware of some venues getting shut down by police during this period, but he hadn’t heard of fines levied against them.
This peak was short-lived, as COVID-19 prevented further gatherings and scattered UO’s student body. Crabtree waited through lockdowns and surging variants, but he said many of his generation disengaged from the scene during this time.
In May, shows resumed at The 552, with Crabtree aiming to keep performances small and in the good graces of neighbors. He said attendance hasn’t matched pre-pandemic numbers, but he is hopeful for the future of the scene.
“I’ve seen newer spaces, or at least new to me, popping up every weekend,” Crabtree said. “It seems very fresh — like another iteration.”
Santino said her peers are getting houses, and she hopes they can hold shows there. She wants to ensure scene safety through working with those she knows and trusts. Still, Keith said there is still some trepidation from students to host hundreds.
“It’s new blood,” Keith said. “It’s anybody who has the courage to host right now and risk getting noise complaints, or who’s talked to their neighbors.”
Keith encourages new organizers to be responsible to mitigate fines, which he doesn’t expect to go away. He said it is important to communicate with neighbors in advance, rather than asking for forgiveness, and to have a plan when a complaint comes in.
Crabtree said his location near a busy street has discouraged any complaints so far. But he acknowledged that he could have gotten lucky, and he said he is doing everything to keep it that way.
“There’s always kind of that natural anxiety of, hypothetically, what could go wrong?” Crabtree said.
Unger believes Eugene will continue to foster a DIY scene — as it has for decades — as long as playing live music interests the next generations.
“Universities provide a steady stream of young creative people, although there’s not a lot of reward financially,” Unger said. “It has to all just be for fun in Eugene.”
Representatives from the Eugene Police Department did not respond to requests to comment for this story.
GrrlBand’s guitarist, Kayla Krueger, is a member of the Emerald staff, hired after the story was written. She had no role in the sourcing, writing, or editing of this article.
