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This past weekend, Baltimore Showplace celebrated five years of existence at the Ottobar with sets by Muscle, Kotic Couture, Infinity Knives, and Super City. It is fitting and proper that they should do this, and that the bill was as varied by genre as the diverse events they unfailingly list for each month and then update each week (and even day).
Muscle
Infinity Knives
Mike of Showplace with Super City
The creeper-in-chief
The folks behind this have kept alive an underground tradition that goes back many years, before the Internet. When I first entered the scene in the early 1990s, I might have been lucky enough to stumble upon a flyer that looked like the one below.
Essential info included: show dates, some of the bands scheduled to perform, the address/ detailed directions to the venue (no GPS yet) and an explanation of the venue’s situation. All was crammed together on one piece of paper. It was a sketch of the hopes and plans for a successful summer of house shows, a message in a bottle floating along in touring vans, dropped off in record stores, coffee shops, and health food stores near and far.
However, if I could, in 1993, plan on being at a certain address in Arnold, Maryland on a certain date weeks in advance based on the above flyer, there was no resource like Baltimore Showplace back then to tell me the bands had changed, that the show had been canceled, the venue had been moved… It was a roll of the dice and, for me, it was close to an hour drive. One time at a house show in the same region of Maryland in 1994, Unwound got so turned around trying to find the venue that they were rolling up waving and hollering out the window of their van, while most attendees were leaving, that they had, in fact, made it and would be playing the show. No one could be texted with an update to push out as the band searched for “Czar’s House”.
So, yes, the Tech has improved. However, keeping these updates going, the “missed this one for Saturday” updates in their Stories, the listing of “ask a punk” underground venues… that all takes time and attention. And it is all done for free. If the listings of the week’s events in a free alt-weekly of yore were paid for by advertising, these listings are paid for in sweat equity. It is a thankless task but a vital one and more involved than ever before.
For Baltimore Showplace to keep this all going for five years, becoming a reliable scene resource in the process, is a great continuation of those pre-Internet “schedule flyers” and other online predecessors. If you are not too careful, you can take what is being done for granted. I was glad to celebrate Baltimore Showplace this past weekend and thank all who have labored, now and then, in this great chain of communication.
See you at the next show! If you need more info, I know a place to check.
[find Baltimore Showplace on tumblr and instagram]
