Boston UnsceneAlthough band overpopulation may breed tension, it's never actively "exercised against someone in a bad way," believes Mary Timoney of Helium. And the competition is more likely to occur "between bands that don't know each other." Heavy metal, hardcore, ska and indie pop rarely merge their talents on the same stage. But among their own tribes, bands are supportive of each other. Fuzzy, whose album was recently released on Seed Records, adopted a rehearsal space at the urging of their drummer, who was touring with his other band, the Lemonheads. Hilken of Fuzzy returns that favor in kind to her friends: "We want to make people do it. Everyone's afraid, and everyone thinks they can't, and that's how we felt. Whenever I know someone's trying to start a band, I want them to get it together, and make them play with us."
The abundance of multiple subcultures coexisting under one city roof is a recent and localized phenomenon. Abroad, the image of a town fuses together. While touring in Europe, Chris Brokaw of Come remembers, "People would ask, 'Do you know J Mascis? Do you know Buffalo Tom?' And we actually do know those people, but it was funny that they expect that, because it is a disparate scene."
This disparate quality is distinctive in its deviation from perceptions of the past, when there was greater overlap between bands. Roger Miller of Mission of Burma (among other endeavors) remembers a cohesive Boston: "This gig, it was like early '79, the Contortions, from New York, and Le Peste, the Girls and Ground Zero, all of which were pretty innovative Boston bands, played in a loft two nights in a row, and everybody that was on the music scene was there, all pulled together by this bizarre idea which was punk."