If you've ever lived with a roommate, you've probably been in a situation where your musical tastes tend to cross-pollinate. It's a great learning experience, turning each other on to music you wouldn't ordinarily listen to, especially when there are shared reference points. Try multiplying that by nine roommates (and often times more), and you have a hard time soaking it all in..
For roughly a year and a half, I lived in a seven bedroom house, with what started as eight roommates. That varied wildly. With rent at $135 a bedroom, there were instances of up to four people splitting one room, and there were a lot of extended stays by couch crashers. It was a mob scene. The core group were people in and around the punk scene, but it really wasn't a "punk house". We were pretty smart kids, almost all had pre-punk histories with varied musical, artistic and literary interests. So, what to most of the punk scene seemed like a party house, was actually a melting pot of culture.
There were records, literally, everywhere in that house. There was one closet, between the kitchen and the living room, that had a pile of records just thrown in it, a couple feet high (some with covers, some without). Just about every room in the house had some sort of record player in it. (One friend told me his first impression of the house was a hanging out in the kitchen, while people ate mac and cheese with knives and Johnny Cash played on a portable record player on the sink...) Because the majority of the records were freely shared there was a lot of exploring going on, and it wasn't uncommon to have a roommate's interest in one of your records prompt a reevaluation.
The breadth of taste in the house was wide, and looking back, surprisingly good. And, more often than not, there would be music blasting simultaneously from different rooms. A trip through the house might bring snippets of the Clash, Eddie Cochran, U-Roy, Eno, Howlin' Wolf, Abba, Pete Seeger, the Injections, Kraftwerk, and the Stones. And it played constantly. Because there were so many roommates, with varying schedules and levels of employment (many had neither), there was always someone up and around. (In the time that I lived there there was not one minute in which everyone was asleep.) So, musically, you had the best of situations: a multi-room, 24/7 record party with thousands of titles, and an abundance of taste.
The house, without any prompting from the residents, got tagged by people in the scene as "the Mod House," despite the fact that there wasn't one mod who lived there. Thirty years later, there's still theories floating around about the source of the name (one is that it was because there was a lot of early Who, Kinks and Stones played), but, nevertheless, it stuck. Oh, did it stick. All anyone had to do was open their mouth and say "party at the Mod House" as they were exiting a show, and the house would become flooded with a hundred or so of our closest uninvited guests. This, of course, would sometimes lead to bad scenes involving fights, cops, bad raps and thoroughly pissed off neighbors (not to mention a few stragglers that would be "recovering from their hangovers" for days on end, without ever vacating the house).
There were quite a few musicians and wanna be musicians among the residents and visitors and, depending on what else was going on, there might be a band playing on the back porch, or in the basement (more like a storm cellar) that had been converted haphazardly as a "practice" room (when conditions were damp, it wasn't uncommon to get shocked if you weren't standing on something off of the floor). One roommate, through his reggae connections, offered up his room, a large converted patio, for a pre-tour rehearsal studio for Leroy Smart, a reggae artist whom most of us were familiar with due the Clash name-drop in "(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais." So, for roughly a week, we had a bona fide reggae icon (and/or his band) playing in our house. The same room was used for a no-bones recording studio, producing the backing tracks for two albums, one by A Doeman, and another by Mohamed I. (I have fond memories of falling asleep to the sound of thumping reggae bass lines seeping through the floor of my second floor bedroom.)
It's been thirty years since we moved into the house. My first memory is from right after we were handed the keys. Roommate Suzie, spinning around, arms outstretched, in the large empty living room exclaiming "I can't believe this is all ours!" My last memory is returning to the same living room through an unlocked and wide open front door, post eviction party. No one else was there and the house was eerily quiet. A bashed up acoustic guitar was sticking out of a hole in the wall (that it had been used to create), choice words were scrawled on walls, and shit was strewn everywhere, including, yes, many records.
Suffice it to say that living there has had lasting effects on my musical tastes and interpersonal relationships. As with any big household, the bad shit was magnified, but then again, so was the good. I'm just thankful to remember the good, and even more thankful that, in hindsight, I can laugh at the bad.
These songs are for Margaret, Suzie, Lisa, Kathleen, Lou, Bruce, Gary and Peter, all the later roommates, and, of course, our "guests." If someone would have told me that most of us would still be around, let alone some with families, I most assuredly would have asked for some of what they were smoking (and a generic beer or two to wash it down with). .
2/25/2010 NOTE: Due to a notice from Blogger, all links have been removed on this post. I do not yet know which was the offending link, but I know enough to play it safe until I have more details. Sorry for the inconvenience.
