The “Golden Era” of the Muncie Scene, 2003-2006

Written By: Graham Watson

The Birth of the Muncie Scene (dot com)

On September 6th, 2003, I ascended the stairs of the MT Cup, a coffee shop in Muncie, IN near Ball State University’s campus, and arriving at the second floor I found a crowd of thirty, ranging from musicians to record producers to concert-goers, all there to discuss an idea that I had for a website. I had a sense that I had just stepped into something profound, but not that it was the beginning of a new chapter of my hometown’s history.

Fresh out of high school and starting my first year at Ball State, I thought that it would help my chances of landing a web development job by building up a portfolio of free websites developed for local groups. The easiest people for me to approach were local musicians, since I was already tenuously connected with the local music scene, having spent some of my childhood as the token out-of-place youngster at punk shows thrown at the Flying Tomato. 

From roughly 1986 to 1996, the Flying Tomato operated as a pizza restaurant in the near-campus Village area with unusual, multi-level architecture, and on weekends it cleared away tables to host local bands and crowds of their rowdy fans. Dewayne Pettiford was a co-manager of the Flying Tomato at the time and reminisced to me, “There were a lot of young, talented musicians that started there. We gave them an opportunity, and all of their friends and family would come and support them and their dream. And it was also fun for the college crowd to enjoy local talent. It was probably the most interesting and fun job that I’ve ever had.” My sister Keely would bring me to shows there while babysitting me, often to see friends like Giles Davies of punk band F.O.N. (Freaks of Nature) play, and this gave me an early awareness of and appreciation for live, local music.

I found immediate and unsurprising enthusiasm from bands and art community organizers for the offer of free websites, given that in 2003 the prestige and unique value of having a personal website had not yet been supplanted by social networks, with Facebook still being a year away from being founded and MySpace only being a month old. However, this led to a realization. Everyone needed a website. So what if we made a single website for the entire community?

If I were to do this, it needed to be with the blessing and involvement of the local scene. So I announced the meeting at the MT Cup and was shocked by the speed with which word spread, with one of my professors even bringing it up in class and asking me if I knew about it. Arriving at the meeting to a daunting crowd, one figure stood out, sitting in a high-backed chair in the corner of the room, with the rest of the attendees fanned out around him. This was my introduction to Deric Shannon, guitarist and vocalist for many bands (at the time, The Lou Reeds), staunch anarchist, and owner of the Muncie label Wooden Man Records.

Deric effectively chaired the meeting that day, acting as the de facto head of the community, or at least the person most prepared to speak about its composition and needs. Hearing that I was planning to pay out-of-pocket for the website’s expenses, he insisted that the community should raise money for it instead, and told me that he’d take the lead on planning a fundraiser concert.

However, Deric’s suggestion that I help him out by finding the concert a location was followed by a request to find bands, then a PA system, then to design flyers, and before I knew it, I had produced the concert on my own, having been hoodwinked into self-sufficiency. In fact, enough bands expressed interest that I split it into a series of three concerts, the first of which was headlined by Archer Avenue, the Richard-Edwards-fronted group that preceded Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s. Still enthralled by childhood memories of packed punk shows at the Flying Tomato, I got the skeptical management of the building’s new Greek restaurant to agree to let me host shows there. Following the well-attended three-night fundraiser, I found myself suddenly flooded with requests to organize more shows and cast in an unexpectedly central role as a resource for the community.

On September 11th, 2003, I started TheMuncieScene.com, which served as a resource for information about art, music, and activism in Muncie, as well as a message board that quickly became that community’s central communications hub. Deric described it as “A really brilliant intervention… because it was broader than any single group would have done.”

To accompany the new website and the concerts I was producing, I introduced a sort of mascot for the scene called Bernard the Surly Rhombus who started as a running-gag Easter egg to hide in flyers for many dozens of events, but eventually found himself on hand-stamps, in album art, on street banners, in a considerable amount of graffiti, and most astonishingly, in one tattoo.

A Rising Tide

2003 marked the beginning of a few simple but transformative changes. With the internet now being utilized more effectively for promotion, crowd sizes increased, leading some bands to see real potential for commercial success in their music. I spoke with Chris Wendt, a musician, recording engineer, and owner of former Muncie venues Circle D and Fractions. At the time, Chris saw the Muncie music community not only grow in size, but develop greater emphasis on polish and professionalism.

“[Before 2003] it was more common for there to be less people at shows… And I existed in this transition more towards like 2003-2004 with [TheMuncieScene.com], for example. You could post your shit online ‘Hey! We're having a fucking show!’ and you hit a much bigger audience. And it created more motivation for people to be musicians. So you started having people that never even thought about doing music venture into music because it was not so much just a passion per se, or just getting drunk with your buddies and screaming and yelling and having fun. It was like, ‘Maybe I could make money off this.’”

“That motivated us more, because we didn't really have a whole lot of spare time to throw our money into something that was sort of a hobby. Justifying it as, ‘Hey, this is a moneymaker’. A lot of the people that were in our lives, our significant others, our kids could accept that ‘Okay, Dad’s doing something that's maybe actually helping us out.’”

Affordable access to quality recording equipment at a time when more people were listening to music on the internet also changed the landscape of local music. For example, before playing any live shows, Muncie band …revel in the morning recorded several tracks and distributed them to promote their debut concert. Member Travis Harvey told me, “The CD was used as a flyer, and that first show brought a ton of people to [campus venue] the Tally. A ton of people could sing along with a few of the songs. That’s unheard of. Our debut live show, and people were already singing along to the songs.”

House and Campus Venues

The Tally was by day a campus food court and by night an often chaotic and raucous venue at the mercy of whichever Ball State students had booked it for a concert. Despite it having all of the comfort and acoustic qualities that one would expect from a college cafeteria, the Tally served as one of the most important gathering places for people who were interested in low-cost, all-ages shows and was pivotal to allowing a growing social network and its emerging artists to thrive outside of the bar scene.

Before Mary Ogle co-managed the venues Doc’s Music Hall and The Launching Pad with me, she was a teenager venturing out of her small hometown of Matthews, IN in 2004 to see shows at the Tally. For her, those concerts were her introduction to “the idea of community”. 

“Seeing musicians on tour have a place to stop and have an audience... I don't think I understood at the time how important it was for artists to have an audience, and that honestly, that was most of my role. It was just being around and enjoying it, and meeting people. [The Tally] was a conducive environment for the types of connections that I wanted to see in the world.”

Musicians took over the Tally like an invading army, often making it unrecognizable in the transformation into our own musical mecca. Highlights included my Halloween “Concert From Hell”, which saw Silly String and smashed pumpkins covering the floor under the haze of fog machines, and the “Mother of All Shows”, a series of concerts where we challenged ourselves to book as many bands as possible to play back-to-back on alternating stages.

In these events, even before Mary became a community leader in her own right, she began to see the threads of community being woven together in interactions between musicians, promoters, and supporters.

“The timing of that was pivotal. I think that there was this really cool combination of a lot of talented musicians that work together often. You know, they shared band members and everything, which happens a lot with musicians, but still there was a sense of collaboration and teamwork that extended outside of the bands.”

During this period, a collection of houses also hosted concerts on a regular basis, forming the bedrock of the off-campus half of the growing all-ages music culture. Usually, but not exclusively, it was members of prominent bands (or their significant others) who would offer up their houses to host concerts, deepening the connection between their music and the community. Musician and recording engineer Frank Reber described a house near campus that had been rented by the girlfriends of Everthus the Deadbeats members Dan and Allen as “a basement venue that was probably more popping on weekends than most music venues.” 

For college students venturing into their newfound world of early adulthood, local bands were the catalyst for gathering, networking, discovering new perspectives, and discovering the roles they could play in the ecosystem of live entertainment and the world at large. These experiences birthed hobbies, careers, talents, friendships, and even families, sometimes thanks to a chance encounter in a crowded basement or to the post-show idle conversation shared among smokers on a back porch.

Frank Reber had been playing music in Muncie since 2000, most famously with his band Charlie Don’t Surf, as well as running a home recording studio called Reber Recording and operating a website called TheFrizzle.com with humorous articles and content documenting local music events. He started co-producing house shows with Everthus the Deadbeats drummer Dan Fahrner in 2003 and spoke to me about how the culture supporting these shows grew to the point that people would approach him to volunteer their own houses.

“We would just show up, set it up, get everything ready, get some bands on the bill… It'd be that easy. Like, ‘Hey. [Everything, Now! frontman] Crafty. We're doing a show, man. You guys interested?’ You could just throw it down. So like, you had the person with the PA. You had the person with a little bit of lighting. We had the system in place, so then it was just plug-and-play wherever we wanted to go.”

Frank also saw how the large number of house shows and limited number of local bands led not to creative stagnation, but to incentives for further growth.

“We're gonna go watch the same five bands, but then they have to bring something new, because it can't just be the same shit every weekend. It gave you something to push for. ‘Okay, well, let's write some new music. Let's make something more fun. How do we engage the crowd in a different way this time?’ There was the sense that everything was on the up and up. There was a recognition that, at the time, Muncie had a class of musicians performing in basements that was probably elevated beyond what you would pay to go see somewhere else.”

Everthus the Now!

Everything, Now! and Everthus the Deadbeats hit Muncie like a hurricane, often co-headlining shows with their compatible brands of accessible, strange, inspired, and ecstatic indie rock, and with their throng of fans who enthusiastically participated in whatever costumes, dances, or esoteric rituals were planned for any given night. Both bands served, as many popular local bands do, as beacons in the social landscape of the time, gathering like-minded people around them and forming a miniature community in their periphery. Erick Sherman, who became a prolific drummer for seven bands in Muncie from 2001 until he moved to Chicago in 2006, said that “Everthus the Deadbeats and Everything, Now! were definitely the nucleus of that whole scene. Definitely the longest-tenured, for sure.” and that the spark that lit the fire of the Muncie scene in those years “comes down to the friendship and creative partnership between John Muylle and Crafty”.

John Muylle was the charismatic frontman of Everthus the Deadbeats who, dripping with stage presence, would don flamboyant and strange costumes and fill a room with an atmosphere of wonder and triumph with his voice and keyboards, accompanied by Allen Bannister, Dan Fahrner, and (later Jookabox members) Benny Sanders and Lisa Berlin. John “Crafty” Rogers was and remains the frontman of Everything, Now! and one of the only consistent members in its rotating lineup, the current incarnation of which has absorbed Muylle and Bannister and is still performing 22 years after its inception. The wide assortment of musicians who have counted themselves as at least brief members of the band became a running joke, with Erick remarking “I think if you were a part of the scene for long enough, you eventually found your way into [performing in] Everything, Now!.”

The effect of these two popular, compatible, and collaborative bands on the community can’t be overstated. Mary Ogle described it like this: “The people kind of steering the scene in my eyes were the promoters, musicians, and especially the bands. Everything, Now! of course. They were not just one of the biggest draws for a local audience, but some of the best energy, and the people that came with them carried that energy, too.”

As a newcomer suddenly inspired by the profound effect of simply giving a group of people a place to be and a song to sing together, I wanted in.

The 525

My introduction to Muncie house shows came in the fall of 2003 when I followed a flyer to 525 North Wheeling Avenue. I arrived to find a quiet house, aside from a few people congregating in the kitchen and chatting. When I inquired about the concert, a colorfully-tattooed and authoritative woman roughly my age told me that the show had been canceled. Crestfallen, I turned to walk back to my dorm, but she called out, “Hey, you can still stay and hang out, if you want.” This striking gesture was extended by Jilly Weiss, known to many as Jilly Turd of (at the time) Days and Nights in the Skeleton Crew, and later Ari Ari and We Are Hex. I assumed for many months that her stage name was her actual birth name and was one of those embarrassing, obscure foreign names that was spelled something like Tîrde, then eventually realized was derived from the band that she performed in with Deric Shannon, The Three Hour Turd. That night, I was given a tour of this chaotic, artsy punk house and an introduction to the other musicians who lived there, seeing with the fresh eyes of a teenager in his first month of ever living on his own this space that felt like a magical nexus where creative and community-minded forces converged. Within a year, I was asked to move in and take part in the next generation of residents operating the house as a de facto community center.

When I was introduced to The 525 House, it housed members of the bands The Lou Reeds and Days and Nights in the Skeleton Crew, along with a basement stage and a recording studio run by Tyler Watkins. Tyler stood out among the many indispensable contributors to the success and vibrancy of the scene at the time and was referenced by nearly everyone I interviewed for this article. …revel in the morning’s Travis Harvey referred to Tyler as the Muncie community’s “ace up our sleeve”. Referring to his peers’ hunger for musical success, Travis said,

“We wanted it. We were striving for it. But if Tyler weren’t there, we would have never been able to bring it to fruition. He was a little bit older – not by much, I think, maybe just a few years – but he had a kind of wisdom that was something for us to look up to and recognize, like ‘We're gonna do this ambitious thing we can do. We can do it right because we have him here helping us’.”

Tyler himself spoke very similarly about Deric Shannon, who used a cassette four-track to build the house’s original basement recording studio in the late 1990s that Tyler would later inherit and use in hundreds of recording sessions with local bands. At the time, Tyler was trying to save as much money as he could to go to Full Sail University in Florida, so Deric let him sleep in the basement for free in exchange for recording. And despite the accommodations being dirty, drafty, and often intruded upon by mice, Tyler says “What other broke college kid could have a place to crash for free, where he could also record music day and night? Even if you're sleeping with mice, it's a dream come true.” That studio was the springboard that launched Tyler’s considerable fame as a recording engineer and musician. Recording sessions in the 525 House with Richard Edwards during his tenure fronting the band Archer Avenue led to some of those songs becoming Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s tracks and Tyler himself becoming Margot’s bassist, touring with the band nationally, and appearing on Conan O’Brien. Today, Tyler operates out of Postal Recording in Indianapolis.

The 525 House offered more than concerts and recordings. Erick Sherman described it as “like holy ground”, with history as an “incubator for creative stuff before our scene even existed”. “All roads converged at 525, and everything happened there.” It would often host meetings where plans were discussed over drinks for projects, events, albums, and the establishment of new performance venues. The house also served as a veritable buffet for the city as the host of Muncie’s chapter of Food Not Bombs, a global anarchist project to redistribute surplus food to those in need. Every week, the house would advertise its address to the public and open its doors for anyone (though usually poor college students) to come in and get a hot, home-cooked meal and as much packaged food as they could carry. Erick spoke to me of the “sense of responsibility to the community” that the house had, calling it the “nexus of the community for sustenance and for a creative outlet”. “It was not just a house and just a venue. It was a place that had a greater expectation to be a community, to provide for people. It was a support thing.”

Carrying on a tradition started by Chris Wendt and his venue Circle D, the 525 House offered itself as a tour stop to any band in need of a show, or even just a free place to stop, eat, and sleep. Living there and being on the radar of the national network of tour managers, I would often get contacted with requests for crashspace or a last-minute show to try to scrounge up some gas money for a group looking to fill a weekday gap between their bigger shows in Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, or Chicago. In fact, Muncie’s reputation as a place that treats touring bands well, coupled with its location on the way to larger cities, resulted in not only a wide variety of very talented acts passing through, but occasional valuable cross-pollination between the local scene and wandering national-level bands.

Travis Harvey saw Muncie as an important component of the success of bands in other larger nearby cities as well. “A lot of folks in the central Indiana region were coming to Muncie to perform, even if their hub wasn’t Muncie or they weren’t from Muncie, because they didn’t want to be oversaturating their own city. And the symbiosis of having a lot of really creative musicians in town also made [Muncie] attractive for other musicians to come to.” This resulted in Muncie musicians developing more connections with bands and venues in larger cities and finding easier access to a wider market and larger audiences.

…revel in the morning, Anarchism, and Mutual Aid

On September 13, 2004, the film Ashes of Rhetoric premiered at Pruis Hall on Ball State’s campus. This documentary (available to watch on YouTube) was created by Julian Dalrymple and Travis Harvey to chronicle the period from January 2003 to November 2003 in which Travis, drummer Erick Sherman, bassist Eric "Doog" Alexander, and guitarists Ryan Reidy and Justin K Prim formed the band …revel in the morning, a captivating post-punk/post-rock act that married the despair of feeling powerless in an oppressive world with the volatile power of a “creation through destruction” ethos and raw, barely-contained, passionate rage. In a matter of months, the group had recorded two albums, played extensively, and toured nationally (playing in New York City’s legendary CBGB music club) before their painful dissolution. In their wake, they left business cards with a wooden match attached, as if to suggest the recipient engage in their own “creation through destruction”.

…revel was one of several bands who exemplified the perception that there was something in the water that was producing groups of college-aged kids who were punching well above their weight class in terms of marketing, recording, and sheer artistic guts. They were also one of the bands who created some of the load-bearing structure of a community that stretched beyond music. 

This topic can’t be explored without a dive into the anarchist punk traditions kept alight in the afterglow of Muncie’s strong punk scene of the 80s and 90s by, principally, Deric Shannon and those of us who picked up the torch from him after his departure. Those in the orbit of …revel were pulled into our subculture’s anarchist sense of duty to one’s own community and mutual aid, which nurtured Muncie’s chapter of Food Not Bombs for several years and a short-lived chapter of Anti-Racist Action that was ultimately broken up by armed white supremacists invading a meeting at a member’s house. When an ice storm took down trees and power lines in January of 2005 throughout Muncie and caused a several-day blackout for some parts of the city, we hosted the “Post-Apocalyptic Jamboree”, which invited everyone in need of food, shelter, and company to gather in the candlelit 525 House, be fed by Food Not Bombs, and join in a defiant acoustic jam session.

Somehow, this spirit also led to the Muncie scene falling in love with a downtown restaurant called the New York House, an ineffable cluttered mess of a thrift store with an elderly Chinese immigrant named Chao Zhang who would approach newcomers with the simple question “Vegetarian or no?” in lieu of a menu. With no further negotiation, Chao would then disappear into a kitchen to make you an absolutely formidable meal with no specific price tag, happily accepting as payment whatever you could or cared to pay. Having declared Chao and the New York House a part of the cherished Muncie scene family, it took only the mere hint that it was financially struggling for us to volunteer to host two benefit shows inside the restaurant.

After humbly providing innumerable poor college students and touring musicians with full bellies and his own charming company, Chao passed away peacefully in 2015 in his public housing apartment downtown, sitting in his recliner, next to a freshly made cup of tea.

Having struck up a friendship with the members of …revel in my freshman year, I spent time at their “Revel House”, which hosted wild parties, “naked fight nights”, and crash space for anyone who needed it. When most of …revel arranged with Crafty of Everything, Now! to jointly inherit the 525 House in the fall of 2004 (and begin calling it the “Revel Compound”), Erick invited me to move in with them and use it as the new headquarters for my community work, which soon came to include co-running Food Not Bombs with local activist Mikey Brooks. The mutual aid that our ragtag clan of idealists participated in took many forms, one of the more interesting of which was a revolving loan fund for struggling artists that was started with the surplus money raised for TheMuncieScene.com. This fund ended up financing the production of local albums by all-female rock band Killjoy Confetti and Eric “Doog” Alexander.

The Fall

Frank Reber pointed to Ball State’s crackdown on house party culture and its infamous “Police Yourself” campaign as the mortal wound that ultimately ended the scene’s golden age. Describing “Police Yourself”, WTHR wrote in 2004 “The near-zero-tolerance campaign begun in March was established in response to the shooting deaths of two Ball State students who had been drinking at parties or bars”, one of whom was Michael McKinney, whose killing by a university police officer while unarmed and attempting to enter the wrong house after a night of drinking sent shockwaves through Ball State.

Frank Reber described the impact felt by house shows:

“[Ball State] wanted to crack down on house shows and parties because they wanted to be seen as an academic institution. That led directly to a keg ban. So hosting parties became more problematic.”

“[Then] what they did was enforce a massive sound ordinance… where anytime a band played at a house, the police would show up, and you'd get slapped with a $500 to $1,500 fine. And in the beginning, we started a fund to save enough money [to cover any fines], except the next five shows all got fined, and we didn’t have any money left. The sound ordinance thing really put a hurt on everything, because after that you just couldn't keep it going. It was just not sustainable.”

The stewardship of this community was thought of as a generational responsibility, with key players burdened with finding younger organizers to pass the torch to before their graduation and departure from the city. For a period from 2006 to 2008, all-ages venues like Village Green Records and The Launching Pad led the scene with the support of a new wave of high school bands and volunteers.

The emphasis placed by this era of promoters on all-ages events was in part to help inspire the younger generation to feel a sense of inclusion and ownership in local music, one which would hopefully result in talented people remaining in Muncie instead of moving to bigger cities with greater prospects. Multiple interview subjects for this article cited local music as the reason why they chose to live in Muncie, demonstrating the feedback loop wherein the culture attracted and retained the kinds of people necessary to sustain and grow that very same culture.

As time passed, TheMuncieScene.com narrowed its focus and transformed into MuncieEvents.com. The Tally was remodeled and has, to my knowledge, never been used as a concert venue since. We closed The Launching Pad after being demoralized by continued theft and property damage by the new generation of younger concert-goers. Village Green Records moved to Montgomery, Alabama. Doc’s Music Hall, after carrying on a 20-year legacy of being one of the pillars of the music scene and successfully transforming into an all-ages venue under the leadership of country/Americana musician Mike Martin, was purchased by a rival bar in 2012, lost its mojo, and eventually closed.

By the summer of 2005, after its Everything, Now! / …revel in the morning era, most of the residents of the 525 House had moved out, and its activity was dwindling. Tyler’s recording studio was passed to Justin Prim to run Perpetual Motion Records out of it for a time before moving out. Eventually none of the original core musicians remained in the house and no new bands emerged to take up the reins, and after hosting the house’s final concert on August 27, 2005, the last few residents moved out.

Shortly before the closing of the 525 House, filmmakers Julian Dalrymple and Joshua Wyss created a short documentary about it, which is available to watch on YouTube. The film combines older footage of packed concerts with newer footage of an empty, idle house with sparse inhabitants in a last attempt at capturing the fleeting magic that had all but faded. (Speaking of faded, I was quite regrettably drunk during my interview, unwisely inspired by stories of the members of …revel in the morning being intoxicated throughout all of the interviews filmed for Ashes of Rhetoric.)

The change that was underway in the community was felt by Ball State Daily News writer Matt Erler, who wrote in 2006 while covering the horror-themed “Concert From Hell III”, one of my last on-campus concerts,

“Despite Watson’s single-minded determination to make the Concert from Hell III his best yet, Watson is looking to the future. He’ll graduate in May and will likely leave Ball State University. Just like when Watson replaced Shannon four years ago, Watson expects younger students to continue the tradition Shannon started and Watson continued.”

“‘David Chastain and Josh Caldwell are both younger students that are doing a lot to organize events like these,’” Watson said. ‘I trust that they’ll continue doing that after I leave.’”

“If Chastain and Caldwell follow Watson’s lead, the Muncie music scene should live to see another day beyond the Watson era.”

The Afterglow

It’s not possible to write a comprehensive representation of this part of Muncie’s history with any less than a book, and there are many important elements that I had trouble working into a narrative. During this period, the post-hardcore/progressive band Brazil exploded in popularity, signing with Fearless Records in 2002 and later with Immortal Records in 2006 while touring extensively and releasing albums like The Philosophy of Velocity to national critical acclaim. A skirmish broke out between the perceived leaders of conservative and leftist students, with TheMuncieScene.com and the 525 House being identified as the city’s “leftist headquarters”. In 2007, a couple other promoters and I started an annual music festival called Muncie MusicFest to spotlight a huge number of Muncie-connected bands and local venues and continued running it for ten years. The revolving loan fund that I started for local musicians found new life after evolving into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called the Vore Arts Fund.

All cultural moments are, by their nature, fleeting, but it can be said that nothing ever really ends. The legacy of that instant in the Muncie music scene lives on in the professions that were started, friendships that were forged, stories that are still told, and the enduring inspiration to regard our world as a hopeful, malleable place, saturated with potential and waiting to be sculpted by those with dirt on their hands and passion in their hearts. Despite the constant ups and downs of the scene, I suspect that Muncie will always remain fertile ground for those who want to change the world, one show at a time.

In 2004, the Ball State Daily News gathered together a group of some of the most prominent local musicians for a photo shoot and, in a move that was deeply touching for me and understandably perplexing for some, they asked me to be the sole non-musician in the group. The resulting photos stand as a testament to our awareness that what we had was special, fleeting, and worth preserving. My thanks go out to Jeb Banner for seeing this too, and for suggesting that I write this article.

Kati Taylor