Basement Shows and Lost Music

2024-03-14 3:05 PM

#music #teenage #band #archives

I'm feeling a bout of nostalgia this week because Spotify decided to play some music I haven't listened to since the early 2000's.

I'm a 90's child who did what many teenage boys did in the early 2000's: got crappy instruments and made a band. Over a couple of years, we made a lot of noise in basements. Home basements, church basements, youth center basements...lots of basements. Rochester, in particular, had a huge music scene during that time and we were constantly going to and playing in shows.

The Internet was a thing, but we hadn't been exposed to much - MySpace wasn't around until our senior year, so plans were made via word of mouth and handmade flyers. We would convince teachers to make some copies and we would frantically pass them around the school ahead of time.

I don't have any memorabilia from those days. We had a website our friend Kyle put together that died a quiet death when we all left town after 2004. The Wayback Machine was collecting sites way back then, so a couple snapshots exist, but there isn't much there.

At least one sticker remains.

We scraped $800 between the four of us to make a demo album recorded at Belly of the Whale studios in Canandaigua, NY. We each had master copy that we could burn at home. I came across my original disc when we were moving but I was so embarrassed by how earnest we were at the time that I think I it away. I didn't want it to come back to follow me around.

I think that was a mistake. Our music wasn't great, but it was ours. We made it.

---

This isn't new, but sometimes I think about the quantity of music from that time that's been lost. There's a wiki page dedicated to lost bands from Rochester, which is pretty cool. None of these are ones we played with, so we're at a lower tier than even "lost bands." Maybe I'll come back and archive some of the ones I remember in particular. Maybe not.

This put me on a search of archived stuff, so I went to the early 2000's social hub - Myspace - in hopes that something might exist in a buried link somewhere. Apparently, they lost everything from before 2016 several years ago, so that's a dead end.

I have a couple of old iPods which have some local music from the time that probably doesn't exist anywhere else. I'm not really sure where I got my copy from, but it exists and I think that carries some meaning. Other things that I thought were lost have been uploaded to YouTube, so someone out there is thinking about this, too.