Underground Work

Leading a pack of scrappy clandestine clubs, the huggable men running Tacoma’s Warehouse promise a bright future for their city’s music fans.

Photography by Andrew Waits for City Arts

The rebel image of underground music promoter does not fit Adam Ydstie or Doug Stoeckicht. The live-in managers of the Warehouse, Tacoma’s official unofficial art and performance space, are soft spoken, articulate and polite. Amidst the colorful crowd at the Acme Tavern, where we met to talk last month, the two were conspicuous only for their inconspicuousness. Ydstie is balding and wears glasses; despite a few piercings, you might take him for a history teacher. Stoeckicht, with a long nose and a shock of curly hair, would look right at home goofing off in a Judd Apatow flick. Both could be described as huggable.

Ydstie, Stoeckicht and roommates Julie Rex and Emily Nollmeyer moved into the Warehouse last September when Motopony front man and Tacoma arts mainstay Daniel Blue moved on to a quieter life in a more traditional abode. Under the guidance of Blue, former owner of the Panamonica art and music club, Rob Anderson and the Nightgowns’ Cody Jones, the Warehouse had become ground zero of the local DIY scene over the past several years. Bands like Paris Spleen, Mamma Loves Daddy, Please Give Blood, Umber Sleeping and Friskey cut their teeth in the high-ceilinged hall near the courthouse – as did the Nightgowns and Motopony, now two of Tacoma’s fastest-rising bands. The Warehouse’s history of nurturing good local music isn’t lost on Ydstie and Stoeckicht. That’s why they moved in. That’s why they’ve kept the doors open.

It’s unclear when the Warehouse first began hosting shows. As with many underground spaces, its history is fragmentary and obscure, a ragged chronicle of comings, goings and happenings, with months and years blurring together. Jones, as near as he can recall, arrived in the spring of 2003.

“A guy who was a co-worker of my girlfriend's – he's the one who rented it directly from the owner and turned it from a dust bowl into a livable space,” he recalled in a recent e-mail. “He built the kitchen and bathroom and a lot of the walls and rooms.”

The 1890 building’s residential section – the top two floors – burned down in 1961, leaving only the commercial and industrial spaces below. But gradually walls and amenities have been added to the smaller of two back-alley storage spaces, transforming it from a dump into an odeum and a four-bedroom apartment.

Entering the space from the alley, one passes through an anteroom full of bicycles and scooters, and then through a cozy kitchen into the “big space,” an indoor urban courtyard complete with a four-square court and graffiti. Bedroom windows look down from the lofts above. Stairs lead from the kitchen to a living room with postcard views of downtown, the Sound and Mount Rainier.

The funky flat in Friends has nothing on the Warehouse, but Ydstie, Stoeckicht, Rex and Nollmeyer have more planned for their stay than just hip living. Since October 30, they’ve hosted three big shows, beginning with a Matt and Laura Eklund production called Night of the Living Dub, for which the Eklunds constructed an indoor forest. With the trees still standing, local folk-rockers Goldfinch played on Halloween night along with San Francisco’s Birds & Batteries. Then, on November 13, the seventh installment of the popular Tacoma Round series packed the house. Portland singer-songwriters Drew Grow and Kelli Schaeffer, their mutual backing band the Pastors’ Wives and Tacoma solo artist Luke Stevens split the bill with poet Tom Llewellyn, artist Lance Kagey and a team of SOTA students. The musicians turned in a dazzling collective effort, while Kagey, Llewellyn and the students staged a multidisciplinary commentary on the 1885 expulsion of Tacoma’s Chinese population.

The shows allayed worries among some Warehouse fans that the new tenants wouldn’t keep up the venue’s tradition. While the Ydstie-Stoeckicht Warehouse might be a “slightly less punk-esque incarnation,” as one Warehouse old-schooler described it, it seems a no less ambitious one. And by pursuing their own vision, rather than trying to recreate the Jones-Anderson-Blue years, Ydstie and Stoeckicht embody the independent underground as well as anyone.

They don’t look like rebels, because they’re not rebels – because underground art, as they see it, isn’t rebellion. It’s a reaction to consumerism and philistinism, sure, but its purpose is to promote, not provoke.
“I think at the root of things it’s about creating a community and cultivating the arts, not breaking the law and pissing off the neighbors,” says Ydstie.

But if rules and patience sometimes get tested, so be it.

The Warehouse, in its quiet way, is at the vanguard of a trend that is breathing new life into the Tacoma music scene and may well define it going forward. Nontraditional, all-ages venues like the Warehouse, 808 House, the Den @ UrbanXchange, the Viaduct, Fulcrum Gallery and Urban Grace – not to mention the short-lived but influential Helm Gallery – are building the scene from the underground up, a formula that has earned cities with similar attributes stars on the indie map.

In Oakland, California, a thriving warehouse scene has created an arts and music culture to rival that of nearby San Francisco. Oakland, like Tacoma, is known more for its crime than for museums, and more for blue-collar workers than for blue-chip companies. Like Tacoma, it’s less expensive and more relaxed than its more prosperous neighbor. Like Tacoma, it occupies a geographical and dispositional middle ground between the college scene and the Big City. There, as here, the territory abounds with warehouses, dive bars and empty garages, the natural habitat of independent artists. But unlike Tacoma, where that habitat remains largely unexploited, Oakland has made the most of it.

“We didn’t play Tacoma for a long time because the scene was so crappy,” says Hozoji Matheson-Margullis of Tacoma metal duo Lozen. Starting out, she and drummer Justine Valdez went to places like Oakland to play, finding their hometown less hospitable to underage, experimental acts.

“The reason we love Oakland is just for the whole warehouse scene,” says Matheson-Margullis. “They’re relentless. They just keep it going. So they always have those venues.”

Over the past thirty-plus years, beginning with early ’80s South LA punk, nearly every important national scene, including those in Olympia and Seattle, has begun underground where age and salability don’t impede experiment and innovation. Nowhere is this more evident than in Brooklyn, New York, which over the last decade has become home to the nation’s most prolific underground scene and, not by coincidence, is now the on the cutting edge of indie rock. Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, like Oakland, has carved out a niche as a funky, more affordable alternative to the baron up the block – in this case, Manhattan. (This relationship has become less marked since 2005, when new zoning laws went into effect that encouraged gentrification in Williamsburg.) Much of the credit for Brooklyn’s rise is due to guerrilla promoter Todd Patrick – aka Todd P – the subject of the new documentary film Todd P Goes to Austin, which Ydstie and Stoeckicht plan to screen at the Warehouse in February. Lugging PA gear in and out of basements and lofts, avoiding and sometimes clashing with authorities, Patrick helped build the scene that has produced more ambitious indie music than any other this millennium, spawning such bands as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, Animal Collective, Beirut, Dirty Projectors and Grizzly Bear.

“But ultimately it’s because Brooklyn has become a place where young, college-educated people want to live bohemian lives,” Patrick told the Web site Gothamist in 2007. “Because of that there’s this possibility of being able to live in New York City and being able to sort of afford it without having to hold the most serious day job in the world.”

In the late 1980s, Tacoma played an important role in the nascent grunge movement, hosting scores of now-legendary bands in underground venues like Industrial Noise and the Community World Theater. That scene was eventually absorbed by and then relocated to Seattle, where it played a large role in establishing the Emerald City’s music scene. Today, Tacoma provides the same alternative to Seattle that Brooklyn provides to Manhattan and that Oakland provides to San Francisco, if on a smaller scale. But it hasn’t produced a comparable scene.

Ydstie and Stoeckicht, along with their roommates and a cast of volunteers, hope to help change that. They want not only to give artists a place to develop, but to develop an audience for the art.
According to Sarah Moore (formerly of Head Bangs), who books basement shows at the well-known 808 House, they’ve got their work cut out for them.

“I think that the main problem with Tacoma is people don’t give a shit. People don’t show up,” says Moore. “I’ve had to work so hard to get people to come to 808 shows. In Olympia that would never happen; people want to go see shows every night.”

The seeming ambivalence of Tacoma audiences baffles Ydstie and Stoeckicht too. The passionate mosh-pit culture that fueled Community World Theater shows seems to have all but disappeared, like the language of some lost tribe. The Warehouse managers hope to revive that language, knowing it is best learned at a young age.

“When I was sixteen, I could go to a bar in downtown Minneapolis and see a show,” recalls Ydstie, who grew up in the Twin Cities area. But with Washington’s strict liquor laws, many people don’t start going to shows until after they turn twenty-one, by which time they have more to do than just see bands. The earlier young people get hooked on live music, the more likely they’ll be to make and support it, Ydstie and Stoeckicht argue. They plan to host shows from across the indie spectrum, from hip hop to punk to pop to folk to whatever, in hopes that they’ll inspire new fans and artists. They hope more fans and bands will lead to more venues, better music and maybe better living in Tacoma.

“It’s just fun to be a part of something you feel is central to the growth of the city, even if it is underground,” says Stoeckicht.

Or, perhaps, especially if it is. •