VIDEO-Playing House | Pitchfork
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Damien Juradoleans back in a wooden chair, eyes closed, in the berber-carpeted basement of a ranch duplex in the Westwood neighborhood of Cincinnati. To his left, a swirly peace-sign banner covers part of the white cinderblock wall. To his right, beer-bellied friends of the homeowner teeter on stools next to a built-in bar. Red-and-green ceiling lights give the room a holiday glow even though it’s February. Occasionally, water flowing through the pipes overhead sounds like rain, but it’s too cold outside for that. And while the orange electronic flickers coming from the fireplace behind Jurado don’t provide any warmth, it’s a cozy spot nonetheless.
Jurado, who has released a mix of solemn and psych-tinged albums on Sub Pop and Secretly Canadian since the late ‘90s, is playing an unadorned tune called “Medication”. The song involves a narrator’s mentally ill brother, and he prefaces it by offering insight on how the recording came to be. “I would sit in a chair, like I am now, but with a microphone in front of me,” he tells the 50 or so people seated in front of him. “I never play this song live, by the way. If I’m in a crowded club, and it’s super noisy, and someone’s like, ‘Hey! Play that song “Medication”!’ I’m like, ‘This is not the right setting.’”
But as Jurado plays tonight, the only noises other than his voice and guitar are the occasional crack-pop of a beer can and the fussing of a baby girl who will not be appeased by breastfeeding. “Lord, do me a favor/ It’s wrong but I ask you/ Take my brother’s life,” he softly sings. “‘Cause he’s sick of the suffering/ The pills he’s inhaling/ The cross he is bearing/ That is his troubled mind.” There’s applause, prompting barks from the homeowner’s tiny dog, Jacque. When the clapping subsides, a fan sitting near the front wants to know more.
“Is it all autobiographical?” he asks Jurado.
“No, it’s fiction,” says the singer. “Every song I write is pretty much fiction.”
“There’s so much feeling to it…” the fan trails off, sounding a little disappointed. Jurado tries to reassure him. “They’re not my shoes, but I’m really trying to fit into those shoes,” he says. “I think that’s the feeling and emotion you hear.”
“When that record came out,” the fan responds, “my dad was like the brother in that song, and that was kind of my thought—take away his pain. I still don’t listen to that song very often.” The fan chuckles nervously, catching himself in some undefined nether region between public and private. “I didn’t expect to pay $25 and get a therapy session,” he says. “This is the cheapest therapy I’ve ever had!”
The audience laughs, releasing some of the emotional tension. “Thanks for sharing that,” Jurado says. “That’s really cool to hear.” The basement bursts into applause, completing the group-therapy circle.
It’s rare to witness this kind of interaction at a rock club, but it’s not unusual at house shows like these. The lack of barriers between artist and audience is a main reason more and more musicians—many of whom, like Jurado, could sell out larger venues—are choosing to play in living rooms and basements. The economics aren’t bad, either. Without venue and promoter fees or other band members to pay, most of the money goes directly to the artist.
Fans, too, love the direct access to their favorite songwriters, not to mention the early start times and lack of sticky floors. Perhaps emboldened by the sharing-economy business models of Airbnb, Uber, and other companies built on trust, these concertgoers are fine with walking into unknown homes or even hosting strangers themselves. Some fans have become so smitten by the concept they’ve turned their homes into regular venues. Others have been inspired to turn the alt-venue model into businesses like Fanswell, Sofar, and Concerts in Your Home.
In one sense, house shows are as old as music itself, from orchestras playing in opulent parlors to Appalachian bluegrass jams on porches. And networks of DIY venues with names like Legion of Doom have provided literal homes for the hardcore, noise, and punk-rock scenes for decades. But the fastest-growing segment is at the more genteel end of the spectrum, with singer/songwriters and their followers taking the underground concept of loud, sweaty house shows and bringing it into a calm, carpeted environment.
“For people who’ve been playing shows in basements for decades, it seems like, ‘What’s everybody so excited about?’” says K Records alum Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn. “But at the same time, I have met a number of people at [house] shows for whom it’s the most awesome new thing in their life.”
Most of the money from house shows goes directly to the artist. Photo by Michael Wilson.
Toward the end of 2008, David Bazan—best known as the former frontman of Seattle indie rockers Pedro the Lion—learned that the release date for his first solo record, Curse Your Branches, was getting pushed back. That wouldn’t have been a huge deal, except that his label, Barsuk, didn’t want him to do a club tour until the record came out. “It was going to be about 11 months with no income,” Bazan says.
Aided by some beer, the singer and his manager, Bob Andrews of Undertow Music, started brainstorming in the basement of Andrews’ home in Champaign, Illinois. Andrews was in a tight spot, too. “At that point, [Bazan] was my primary source of income,” he says. “We were both like, ‘What do we do now?’”
Bazan told Andrews he was up for anything that involved playing his music for money—even house shows. Andrews was hesitant at first. He wondered if a house tour would look bad for an artist who was previously playing for hundreds of fans in rock clubs, but Bazan quickly sold him on the idea. Andrews first tried to tap into a network of people who host house shows regularly, but few were interested; they were more into rootsy, Americana songwriters. So Andrews and Bazan went directly to the fans.
“We put an email out to do 30 shows, and we had 300 offers back in two days,” Andrews says. “So we put those together, and they all sold out in two days. It was crazy.”
Even with the great response, there was some trepidation. Would the model work? Would it be awkward? Would a crazy fan kidnap Bazan? “For the first few shows, I was waiting for the phone call: ‘I’m in the basement, somebody send the cops,’” Andrews says. “But it worked out fine.” Bazan’s booking agent and former Pedro the Lion bandmate, Trey Many, suggested early on that Undertow brand the gigs “Living Room Shows” to communicate the difference between these low-key acoustic performances and a typical rock gig. “You don’t want people to think there’s a keg and you bring a cup,” Andrews says.
Bazan enjoyed the shows so much he became an ambassador for the concept, inspiring his friend Will Johnson of Centro-matic to try it. Undertow has since added more artists to its Living Room roster each year: Califone, Mirah, Laura Gibson, Tim Kasher of Cursive, S. Carey, Richard Buckner, Alec Ounsworth of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, John Vanderslice, and others. The list includes a lot of musicians who’ve been touring with indie-rock acts since the ‘90s, and these Living Room gigs allow them to age gracefully while getting a break from neverending bar shows; they’ve grown up, but they don’t want to stop—or, even worse, devolve. Their fans are often of the same generation. They rocked out to Clem Snide in bars back in the day, but now that they’re married with children, it’s more appealing and convenient to see that band’s frontman, Eef Barzelay, at 8 p.m. in someone’s house—possibly with their kids—before hitting the sack a couple of hours later (see also: Netflix vs. movie theaters).
Andrews has tweaked the process over the years, but he still runs the tours in much the same way as those first Bazan shows: Undertow and the band request hosts near certain cities, vet the hosts over email, and look at photos of the spaces. Once the tickets go on sale, only attendees receive the address of a house. All the other relevant info for hosts and guests is on Undertow’s website (e.g. “Put on some background music at moderate to low volume so people can meet each other and chat before the show”).
It’s a replicable model. Jurado, also an Undertow alum, put together his most recent house tour with his booking agent, Seth Fein, who credits Andrews and Bazan for blazing the trail. Jurado rarely tours with a full band, but even when touring solo, he says rock clubs make things more complicated and costly than they need to be. The sound and lighting crews, promoter, venue owner, door guy—they all take a cut. These days, even a percentage of the band’s merchandise often goes to the club.
In the Undertow system, PayPal gets 4%, the booking agent gets 10%, and Undertow gets 15%, meaning an artist goes home with about 70% of the ticket sales, plus merch money. At the very beginning, some fans objected to the ticket prices, which range from $15-$25. “People were like, ‘20 bucks? It’s a house show! It’s supposed to be $5!’” Andrews says. “But once we called them ‘Living Room Shows,’ nobody complained about the price.” Bazan says he recently increased ticket prices from $20 to $25 without any gripes from fans.
Still, just as Andrews was initially skeptical of house tours, others in the industry remain resistant. For one, Undertow bands are playing primarily to their core fan bases, while labels and managers want to see a band growing its base. Plus, there’s the stigma: Doing a tour of only houses can be seen as a fall from grace. “There seems to be this weird misconception that if you play a private house show you’re downgrading yourself,” Jurado says. “But what’s the upgrade? Playing a giant venue where they’re taking your money?”
Much of the appeal of these shows is, of course, the intimacy—for both the fans and the artist. “It’s a special experience to these people, but it’s also a special experience for me,” says singer/songwriter Zeitlyn. “It’s not scene-y at all. All the people gathered here tonight, they like listening to my music, and that’s the thing they have in common. It’s not because they’re the same age, or go to the same school, or have the same fashion sense or political ideas.”
The ticketed, fan-hosted model works best for artists who have a fan base large enough to support a tour but not so rabid that things could get weird. “If Sufjan Stevens or Justin Vernon did a tour, word might get out,” Fein says. “They might be too famous.” Lesser-known artists would likely have trouble using Undertow’s model, too. But that isn’t the only way to do living room shows. In the last several years, entrepreneurs have tried to capitalize on the trend by launching house-show companies, each with overlapping goals but different emphases.
Musician Fran Snyder fell in love with hosting and playing house concerts around 2006, but there wasn’t a good website to promote the idea at the time. To solve that problem, he launched Concerts in Your Home, a network of 250-300 artists and about twice as many hosts; artists pay $45 to apply and, if accepted, pay another $300 annually to access the website’s network of hosts. The site’s artists tend to be of the folk/singer-songwriter variety (nothing with a full drum kit), and all are paid through suggested donations at the gigs. Attendance ranges from 10 to 50, with the occasional larger concert.
While both Undertow and Snyder rely heavily on the generosity of hosts, Snyder’s concept differs quite a bit. An Undertow artist doesn’t usually stay the night at a host’s home (“You need an exit strategy,” Andrews says), but Snyder estimates that more than 90% of his network’s musicians crash at a host’s place. “For a lot of our hosts, it’s their favorite part,” Snyder says.
Snyder and his team screen potential hosts by making phone calls part of the activation process. Like other businesses partaking in the sharing economy, trust is a prerequisite in these transactions, which means liability issues could arise. Undertow includes a disclaimer with all tickets (categorized as “donations”) and sees its living room shows as private events; no money changes hands at the door. Concerts in Your Home takes it a step further and makes the events invite-only. “It’s one thing to invite a friend who brings a friend you don’t know,” Snyder says. “But to have complete strangers buying tickets online and going to your living room, that’s a liability.”
Snyder says most of his site’s artists wouldn’t be able to tour if it weren’t for house concerts, which can serve as weekday stopovers between weekend shows at larger clubs. But the network has been transformative for hosts, too. “It often turns a bored, middle-aged couple into the talk of the town,” Snyder says. “We had one host in Arkansas who said, ‘My wife was gravely ill, and when the doctors let her come back home, they said to keep things interesting for her or she’s not gonna be with you long.’ So he started a house concert series and invited the neighborhood over, and she sits at the door when everybody comes in. It’s her social event of the month.”
“This is like bringing the punk ethic into the acoustic form,” says Jurado. Photo by Michael Wilson.
Musician Graham Colton felt the touring industry change in recent years. To play the right club in the right city on a weekend, he had to book the date six months in advance. And weeknight gigs were stressful; he never knew if he could sell enough tickets. So he started playing more nontraditional gigs to fill out his schedule.
“The more I started to embrace going directly to my fans, I had these magical shows,” Colton says. But as more and more requests came in, working out the details was uncharted territory. “Do you tell them how much it costs? Do you send it to your agent? Do you tell your manager and let him work it out? It got very sticky,” he says.
Colton and his team built Fanswell to help both artists and fans make one-of-a-kind events possible, whether it’s in a living room, backyard, or the backstage area of a larger venue. In less than a year, about 500 artists have signed up. Creating an account is free; all the shows are booked by credit card, and the site takes 7.5% of the artist’s cut.
Fanswell does a lot of the same things Undertow does, but in a streamlined, contractually binding online platform, and usually for artists who might not have a fan base as large as someone like Jurado. But in this model, Colton says an artist only needs one motivated fan in a city to make a show happen.
“People think that if they play a show in Columbus, they need to get 30 of their superfans all under one roof, but that’s exactly the opposite of what we want to do,” he says. “I would rather have 30 shows in Columbus, all of which are hosted by one superfan, and have that fan invite friends and family.”
“Artists have to connect with their core fans,” he continues. “Those are the people that are gonna support you forever. If you don’t engage those people, you’re not going to survive.”
The genesis of Sofar came not from a beleaguered musician but a frustrated fan. “A friend and I were at a gig, and half the room was talking,” says Sofar originator Rafe Offer, who’s based in London. “Other people were buried in their phones, and you could hear the clanging of beer bottles in the background. We launched into a long discussion: Why do people pay to go hear bands and talk so much? There’s gotta be a better way.”
Offer decided to organize a small show at a friend’s house, and it was everything he wanted live music to be. “It was so quiet you could hear the clock ticking in the background,” he says. Once Offer began organizing monthly house shows in London, the lines were out the door. Before long, Offer secured investor money and expanded Sofar to 110 cities worldwide.
Like the other hosting services, the location of Sofar’s shows are secret. But so are the lineups. Showgoers have to trust that the artists Sofar chose will be worthwhile. A concert typically has several artists on the bill, and while Offer says there’s no headliner, the shows have attracted a few big names, including Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Hozier, and Bastille. Offer prides himself on the teams who curate Sofar lineups in each city. “We became really obsessive about selecting good music,” he says.
Unlike the other house-show business models, Sofar artists don’t necessarily walk away with money in their pockets. They have to choose whether they’d rather pass a hat around and get a cut of the donations or have Sofar create a professionally recorded video of the performance. Offer says most of them go for the video. “It’s really about getting unknown or less-known artists and giving them more exposure,” Offer says. “If you have 50 people sitting in a living room, that’s great. But if you can have 5,000 more watching it [online], you’re gonna give them more of a boost.”
Of course, artists and fans don’t need a network or a website to do a house show. Some fans are hosting islands, operating on their own terms. Doug Hacker lives in southern Vermont and found it hard to travel to larger, nearby cities for shows after he had kids, so he started the Billsville House Concert series in 2011, hosting bands like Strand of Oaks, Field Report, Anais Mitchell, and Zammuto in his living room for about 65 people. Hacker’s 15-year-old son runs the sound (a full PA with monitors and 16-channel mixer) and his other son works the door. Tickets run about $15, and the band gets 100% of the door, minus $75.
Then there’s the vibrant house-show scene in Indianapolis’ Fountain Square neighborhood, which has just the right mix of artists, cheap rent, and cops who overlook loud volumes. If you crack a window on a weekend night in the summer, you’ll often hear multiple house shows—usually of the raucous, basement/garage variety. But it’s not limited to just punk rock and hardcore. Local rapper Oreo Jones has played houses alongside touring acts like Cave and the Soft Moon. Bands like Jimmy Whispers, Meatbodies, and Obnox come through town to play Debbie’s Palace of Noise and Laundry, the home of Indy house-show guru Jake Gardner, who used to put on a music festival consisting of 40 bands all playing house shows.
Those sweaty, feedback-laden, DIY shows may seem far removed from hushed, acoustic living room shows, but the idea is essentially the same. “My greatest teachers in music were people like Beat Happening and Fugazi,” Jurado says. “I remember going to see Fugazi multiple times when either Guy [Picciotto] or Ian [MacKaye] were working the door as people came in. Five minutes later they were on the stage, and you saw them after the show! So for me, this is almost like bringing the punk-rock ethic into the acoustic form.”
Back in the Cincinnati basement, Jurado closes his set with “Ohio” (naturally) and mingles with the crowd, just like his Fugazi forebears. Showgoers chit-chat and finish their beers. John Lee, one of a handful of fans who drove hours for the concert, says the evening started awkwardly—“It’s kind of weird walking into someone’s house”—but now he wants to host shows himself.
I make my way into the tiny upstairs kitchen of homeowner John Maddux, a 65-year-old English professor at the University of Cincinnati. This was his first time hosting a show—his friend, a longtime Jurado fan, helped him put it together with the booking agent. “I was nervous,” Maddux says. “I didn’t know what to expect!”
Dick Smith, 58, rents one side of the duplex from Maddux. He was initially rattled, too. “It’s a bunch of strangers!” he says. But the housemates were more than pleased with how the evening went and would love to host again. “I’m going to work on Conor Oberst next,” Maddux says.
Jurado is sold on the idea, too—so much that he has no desire to book a full-band club tour any time soon. He remembers one of his more traditional tours from a few years ago, where he was playing with some of the best musicians he’d ever shared a stage with. “But at the end of the night,” he says, “the crowd couldn’t wait for the encore, when it was just me and my guitar.”