JOB Interview: Dan Shea

Dan Shea has been advocating for mutant sounds, psychedelic riffs, and the support of local, working-class artists for nearly two decades. Based in Boston, Dan’s white whale has been opening a legitimate and sustainable venue, but along the way he’s lost some rooms to police raids and others to partnerships turned sour. I’m sure at times Dan’s felt like Sisyphus, but his actions have been anything but meaningless. His telethons and festival lineups are stuff of legend, and he’s helped show countless volunteers, future-bookers, and cool weirdos that you don’t just push the boulder, you *really* fucking push it. Below is a recap of our conversation on March 22, 2020.

A note: Dan’s current project, Boston Hassle, is fundraising for core staff, writers, contributors, and volunteers who have been negatively affected by the COVID-19 crisis. Please check out their GoFundMe page here.

Ben: Hi Dan. How are you doing? 

Dan: Well, my family's fine so far, I'm fine so far. That's all good. I'd say we're [Boston is] pretty typical as far as a level of obliviousness paired with people taking it [COVID-19] seriously. We’re not sheltering in place yet.

Ben: Have all public events been canceled there?

Dan: Yeah. Everything's canceled. There's digital style events popping up, some people have started to go that route. On The Boston Hassle website we usually have a pretty detailed calendar for upcoming films, music, and events beyond that and I mean, we had to flush that down the toilet completely. I had things booked through June, personally. But through a stroke of luck, we didn't have to cancel that much in the way of like, heavy stuff. Had to cancel DJ nights, our bimonthly market, and a few art projects. 

Ben: What’s the overall venue scene there right now like? 

Dan: I mean, almost all the traditional venues in Boston are hard just to begin with. It's a corporate venue town and very difficult to open a venue. It's my quixotic quest. I'll get more to that ‘cause last time you were in town I had a venue...

“…honestly dude, we didn't know what we were getting into.”

Dan: For now we're focusing on doing interviews with working class individuals. People in the service industry, working artists and musicians. Basically people who have to work a “real job” in addition to their art. These are people who are going to be hardest hit with venues closed. There's a lot of worry about the very few alternative venues that exist in Boston. It’s the story you're hearing everywhere, obviously. Music, art, and film venues...are they going to be opened up again? 

Ben: Even spots like the Middle East, which while not corporate, it's more of an institution?

Dan: I bet this is probably the nail in the coffin for The Middle East. I don't know how much you stay up on that, but one of the brothers was involved with a sexual assault charge and they never really responded. The Middle East has been going downhill since before you left town. 

Ben: Oh, really? I thought they had expanded and took over the old T.T. the Bears space.

Dan: Expanding doesn't necessarily mean they're not going down hill. They opened it up as an all ages venue, the former T.T. the Bear’s venue. That’s been open for two years and I've never gone. I haven't been to a show in the Middle East in five years, or at any of their spaces because of their conduct and their lack of openness in responding to the sexual misconduct charges. But also, they opened up this all ages venue and to use the space was an arm and a leg...

Boston Hassle Market [FKA “Black Market”], a recurring DIY-retail / swap event organized by Boston Hassle. Photo provided by Dan Shea.

Ben: The overhead? No door deals?

Dan: Yeah, ridiculous. I mean, the same story as any place in town. New mid to small music venues just don't open in this town. 

Ben: You’re originally from just outside Boston, in Weymouth. What was that city like? What were you getting into growing up there?

Dan: It was the punk scene. That punk bubble in the mid-to-late-nineties, following up in the slipstream of grunge. There were these South shore bands, bands from Cohasset, The Nothings from Weymouth. I was starting a punk band and we somehow found our way into these horrible fucking dens of inequity that are Weymouth and... 

Ben: Was “Dens of Inequity” the name of a local punk venue?

Dan: No, it was not. There was a spot called The Garage. But I mean, it was a den of inequity. I tell you, people still talk about drugs and bad people from there. But I didn't get into that, thankfully. I didn't get into any of that, though I was present for it. I was just playing shows, doing the recordings, and different bands were living with us. It was just a classic type of thing, pockets of people, and this was all pretty much pre-internet.

“ Thinking back, a lot of the venues were not…like not at all safe.”

Ben: What were the local record shops, or where were you going to even find out that there were other bands and shows to begin with? 

Dan: You know, hopping a bus to Boston, going around town. Going to spots like Newbury Comics or maybe Quincy Records. There's nothing in Weymouth. So I think it was just being in Boston and roaming in the streets, finding out stuff. The South Shore bands would go into Boston and play shows, so we saw that happening. Then in the city they mixed with all the other punk bands from all of the other pockets in and around Boston. I never hung out in The Pit [a small community performance / bench area popular among punks in Harvard Square] or anything, to be honest with you. But I was definitely like, “Hey, look at the punks...where are they going?” Not ‘cause I wanted to be a punk, but I knew that...I knew that the punks were on to something. 

Ben: Eventually you started planning your own concerts? Where was the first? Do you remember when?

Dan: I didn't really book shows until I got to college at Suffolk [University]. I don't know if the first show I booked at Suffolk or if it was over on Mission Hill, at Matt and Tim’s house [known as The X-haus]. They were all K Records bands and stuff of that ilk. A Boy Named Thor...indie pop stuff. I’d kind of burned out on punk ‘cause I thought there was no more to punk that I needed to know about. 

Some images taken from the old HOSS website, via the Internet Archive.

Ben: I remember a Mirah show at The HOSS, it was so packed in that basement. There's one exit through a bulkhead and my back is up against a furnace and nobody's moving...just so, so hot. 

Dan: Thinking back, a lot of the venues were not…like not at all safe. All all dude. Credit to you though. It was a lot of your shows over at Mass Art. It was the shows that the Berwick, and the hardcore shows Crusty Craig did. I started getting into more art punk, and got into doing shows from there.

Ben: The venue I mentioned, HOSS, that was your spot.

Dan: I went on a five month trip around the country with a friend. We bought a car together out of someone's backyard and it got us all the way to Washington state. Tacoma, that's where it died. We continued on Greyhound and I mean, we went to every town. We didn't have any money and were pretty much just like, vagabonds. One thing I was doing in every town was checking out the DIY venues. My plan was to open our own venue when we got back, and that's what we fucking did. We opened up a place. That dude totally bailed on the project..he became a hermit and then moved out. The other buddy involved, Tyler, he dropped out of it too. He met a girl and they're still married and have two kids, so I can't really blame him for that one. But I was pretty much left alone [with the HOSS]. 

Ben: I want to be clear: when you opened up a space— for people who aren't familiar with the Boston basement venue scene —I mean, this was basically a suburban-style house that a bunch of punks lived in. You lived under a stairwell.

Dan: I lived in a closet. I built a wall in the middle of the hallway outside the closet to extend it a bit. We had a couple of ramshackle rooms built in that house. 

Ben: The basement, what was the setup?

Dan: It was a basement. Eventually we did get shut down; about three weeks before our lease was up.

Ben: When the cops came by, what would you do usually? 

Dan: Everyone would bail. That was how we dealt with it. Everyone involved with the show just left the property. That worked for  months.

Ben: The cops are walking around, asking who is in charge of the show and you’re just...gone?

Dan: Gone.

Ben: Hah. Okay so when HOSS wrapped up, is this when you started doing Bodies of Water Arts and Crafts?

Dan: Yeah, direct transition. The reason to open up the DIY space was because I wanted to get things happening. What I wasn't seeing happening. So with Bodies of Water Arts and Crafts, I wanted to broaden the horizons and didn't want to call it “Dan Shea Presents”. I had high-falutin’ ideas, but didn't understand how the world worked. I thought I could just run shows, run a record label...I thought I could conquer the world. I didn't realize you couldn't without any money. 

Ben: The label did put out records for Tunnel of Love, Steve Brodsky of Cave-In. And the Hassle Fest...you did a lot.

Dan: Hassle Fest did start as a Bodies of Water thing yeah. I mean, we put out a bunch of great records, but you went down that road yourself, trying to do a label. 

Ben: Oh yeah. I think I sold so few records that I just gave you all of them and said “Good luck!” I remember Newbury Comics wouldn't carry any of my releases because I had already put the mp3s online for free under a Creative Commons license. 2005 was a different time.

Dan: Oh God, dude. Yeah. We did not do it at the right time.

Ben: You mentioned Boston Hassle. That started as a Bodies of Water project, yeah? 

Dan: The Hassle still exists. So Bodies of Water was my solo entity and Boston Hassle is what I began to call my event booking project and some other related projects when I started working with Sam Potrykus. My website was running as a blog and Sam was doing a print newspaper called Boston Compass. We formed a nonprofit to house both called Brain Arts, but hung onto different company names for whenever we did shows in elicit venues or whatever. So you know, people would know what the vibe was gonna be like.

Poster for Hassle Fest 6 by Mimi Chrzanowski

Ben: Got it. Now Hassle Fest, kind of your big annual thing, has been going on for a decade right?

Dan: It reached a decade. It may be over. It was set up to be an underground music festival where we brought musicians in from all over and paired them up with musicians from here. At first it was called Homegrown and was in a recording studio above City Feed in Jamaica Plain. It was a three day festival that year and we were flying by the seat of our pants. 

Ben: Who was playing? 

Dan: That one was Ty Segall, Keith Whitman, Marissa Nadler and others. Who were those guys down in Nashville? Jeff the Brotherhood...

Ben: I remember an amazing Blues Control set from the fest when it was at Church. You said it may be over after this last year?

Dan: It was the most ambitious fest we ever tried. We worked with different booking partners, provided financial support for their shows, and we tried to sell a multi venue pass as opposed to a single place. Like the model we tried for N.E.S.T. which…well we learned some hard lessons and I had avoided that model for a long time. Anyhow as a nonprofit it’s hard to do year after year and I don’t want to just bring in some fucking pop rock band because they’ll bring X amount of people.

Ben: What do you prefer about a one-venue model from a curatorial standpoint? 

Dan: It's just crazy. It's cross genre pollination. Whether you're a punk or a psychedelic person or a hip hop head or whatever, then you're forced to...to endure all of these other different kinds of music. But the approach has its limitations. In Boston there's only a certain number of people who are open minded and have open ears. This last year man, there were really two things that crushed us. A couple of headliners we paid a good chunk of money to...it didn't work out. Not there fault and it just is what it is. So that, and the first night there was a torrential downpour. That hurt us pretty badly. 

“We’re getting more political, and giving more coverage to…all of the systemic, underlying inequities that exist in Boston. “

Ben: And in Boston where public transit is…not great, I can see a bad storm really messing things up. So the fest is a lot of energy and, I assume personal financial risk?

Dan: Well the nonprofit lost money. But I’m no longer covered by that organization. I spent years building up this thing and it was taken from me. Moving forward, that’s going to sincerely affect how I'm able to book. I can’t offer guarantees [payments to bands], that's for sure. I’d like it to be otherwise; I’d like to be running a venue but the whole dynamic has just changed.

Ben: This nonprofit you started with Sam, Brain Arts, while you were involved you guys did start a DIY venue, the Dorchester Art Project.

Dan: So I've been trying to build a space since the HOSS ended. I've run or co-run a number of different unlisted or warehouse venues...four or five over the years. It's always been about working towards that goal. So we threw a fundraiser, a live telethon for Brain Arts, and we raised $25,000. The crux of that fundraiser was, “We're going to open a space.” We got really serious, keeping logs of different spaces and checking out spaces on lunch breaks. All over town. Somerville, Cambridge, Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, all over the place. Then, lo and behold, there was a space a bunch of SMFA students had taken over in Fields Corner, and it was available and that’s where we put DAP. My old band, Needy Visions, actually played an acoustic set there once. Our original plan was to have a sustainable thing. This was the point we'd been talking about the whole time...to have a radical place that also had a working bar and gave people real jobs. DAP wasn’t going to be that, but it was like an intermediate step.

Ben: Yeah I’ve only been once, but it felt very DIY. Organized and everything, but not like a proper venue.

Dan: As you saw, it's on the second floor. It's not handicap accessible, you know? There's capacity issues...we knew it could never be the space that we were trying to open but, how could we pass up this opportunity? We could create an amazing space and then we could open up the other space down the line. Either way this will be a hell of practice run. 

Ben: And what was the scene like in Fields Corner? I lived in Boston for I guess 8 years, but never went there. I didn’t even realize it was right off the Red Line train.

Dan: Right. There was not nothing. I mean, honestly dude, we didn't know what we were getting into. The former tenants had never pushed it as hard as we were gonna be pushing. So we just pushed it as God damn hard as we could and nothing was problematic, ever at all. 

Mike Simonelli performing at the Boston Hassle telethon. Still taken from a Boston Hassle video.

Ben: People were just fine with it? 

Dan: The train is elevated there and it runs through essentially a few feet away. There's already a constant baseline of noise that people were used to...worse than anything we're doing. So we took off and for the first year and a half I was the main booking contact for the room. Then I passed that on to a woman named Sophia who also organizes our Boston Hassle Market [FKA “Black Market”] events. Sam was the facilities person. He’s keeping everything running. Emma ran the galleries and there are so many volunteers who were helping out in many other ways. 

Ben: How many events did you put on there? Not just you personally but, in general? 

Dan: I mean, a God damn million events happened. An incredible amount of events. Me personally at least two a month but, a lot of people do things there.

Ben: Now that nobody can do gatherings due to COVID-19, and the staff is volunteering...do you think it's just going to fold? 

Dan: I don’t. They have money in the bank from various fundraisers that they can use to wait out the storm, I think. They have great standing and goodwill in the community. 

Ben: You mentioned you recently parted ways with DAP. Are you going to take a break? What do you want as a next step for yourself?

Dan: Yeah. great question. Well, as I said The Hassle lives on as a medium for you know, amateurs, professionals, and anyone in between to come together, spit some knowledge about good art or music going on in Boston. For me, no longer being a nonprofit with all the red tape…I think the silver lining is we can be really radical and progressive. We can be positive in other ways for underrepresented communities. We’re getting more political, and giving more coverage to things like the housing crisis, the woes of the service worker, and all of the systemic, underlying inequities that exist in Boston. We're really able to fully weave our communities and our politics into one for the first time via The Hassle. So we are going to be continuing into that front, trying to mature.

Ben: I want to go back for a minute because earlier you mentioned doing a telethon. What’s that about?

Dan: We did three telethons, the idea was taken from my infatuation with the Weird Al movie UHF. I love the format. We did our first two at Somerville Cable Access and the third at Dorchester Art Project. It was my idea but, really was the work of many, many people. Especially the one at DAP; we had some tech savvy people basically set up a studio for us after Somerville Cable Access stopped having us.

Ben: They gave you the boot after two successful events?

Dan: We got the boot because they got inspired and decided they were going to do a telethon of their own. They just took it.

Ben: Uncool! Well, what were some of the unique challenges of doing a telethon? I imagine it's very different from concerts? 

Dan: Very different, but I've put on a bunch of marathon events and festival type things with multiple stages, no downtime in between acts. So it's like a multistage festival that goes on for 24 hours straight. There’s also the technical difficulties. 

Ben: You’re embracing the aesthetics of technical difficulties though, right? That’s part of it, the vibe of cable access? 

Dan: Of course, that’s baked into the recipe. You create extended bumpers and have extra videos you can cut to for when things go wrong.

Ben: Were you there for the full 24 hours? I imagine that with set up in striking. Were you there for hours or were you taking breaks from doing it and shifts? 

Dan: I was there. For the third one, I think I actually did go home maybe four hours before the end of it.

Ben: What’s your mood during the final hour?

Dan: Mood has been washed away. It's just a hazy mix of wanting it to end, and extreme gratefulness for everyone who made it happen. And also packing up so you can get the fuck out there.

Ben: Speaking of getting the fuck out...we gotta wrap this. Final thoughts. What’s next?  

Dan: Well, I'm not going to open a music venue through a nonprofit, that’s not going to be my livelihood. I think being a good father and good husband matters right now. And for what I deem important and necessary in Boston...just trying to keep it alive and working. I get to meet and collaborate with a lot of great people. That’s what I’m doing. And who knows, if the conditions are ever right which you know, is saying a lot considering where I live, we might just see another Boston Hassle brick & mortar space in the future.

One more time, please check out Boston Hassle's GoFundMe page here.