By Anna Marden, News Staff
At first glance, it looks like the typical Allston house party, but it’s not. Attendees have to walk around the back, avoiding the path leading toward the front porch, then snake through a crowd of smokers and into the latched basement door. Inside, a huge mural of a green reptile bursting out of the Boston skyline greets everyone who enters.
The residents of Wadzilla do not host house parties, they throw homemade music shows. They treat their basement like a nightclub, but without a bar. For them, it’s all about the music. All types of music genres play at Wadzilla, they have metal nights, hip-hop shows, electronic acts with projected visuals, singer-songwriter showcases and everything in between.
“We’re doing a lot of things that venues ignore, like actually putting together a coherent lineup and caring about how the bands sound,” said Socrates Cruz, a Harvard graduate who lives at Wadzilla.
Six musicians in their 20s live at Wadzilla Mansion and they work together to run the shows in their house in a personable way.
“The reason [most venues] have acts coming in is to get people to buy at the bar. That’s basically why they operate. That’s not why we’re doing this,” Cruz said.
Because Wadzilla Mansion is an underground venue as well as a private residence, the address is not publicized. The website and Facebook page claim it is “Allston’s best kept secret.” Those who wish to attend a show that’s listed online may contact the bands or the venue for the address.
Wadzilla Mansion usually charges $5 at the door and hosts two shows a week. When the organizers first started booking shows in February 2009, they held just two concerts a month, but Cruz said they stepped it up in September.
“Sometimes we do three [shows in a week],” said housemate Karen Reddy, a Merrimack College graduate. “It kills us but it ends up being rewarding.”
Wadzilla has more than a decade-long history as a punk venue, but it will celebrate its one-year anniversary under the current management on Saturday. For the birthday show, Cruz’s band Moniker will play, along with Red Bellows, a Boston band they’re about to tour with, and a touring Chicago band, Finley Knight.
Cruz said Wadzilla is a place where many bands and people from different Boston music scenes come together.
“It’s spiraled into a lot of bands coming here to see other bands that are playing. It’s definitely become a hub, a music hub in the city,” Cruz said.
Dua Boakye, the lead singer of the band Bad Rabbits, who played Wadzilla Jan. 28 and 29, talked about his experience at the show.
“We like playing parties like this, it’s like a venue within a party, within a venue, within a house,” Boakye said.
The lead singer of The Shills, Bryan Murphy, who played a show Feb. 5, also said he enjoys working with the crew at Wadzilla mansion.
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“I love this place, the guys [who run the sound and the door] are very responsible adults,” Murphy said. “They also pay us, and touring bands get a better cut of the split, which is the right thing to do.”
The residents of Wadzilla Mansion said they work together to make sure shows go well. They share the many duties required to run the basement venue: talent seeking, show booking, flyer/poster design, set-up, band relations, sound engineering and clean up.
“We all rotate, [but] we all have different things that we tend to gravitate toward,” Cruz said.
Reddy said booking solid lineups for shows is one thing the Wadzilla crew cares about, but that it’s not as easy as it sounds.
“You have to figure out how to place a touring band with a regular local band that has a good following,” Reddy said. “It’s an art.”
On show nights, the organizers have to stay on their toes and multitask, making sure everything runs smoothly, said Marchetti, a housemate at Wadzilla and Northeastern graduate who studied music technology.
“I help out with the door, generally – load in, clean up, make sure the bands have what they need. I’m sort of a utility kind of guy. A jack of all trades,” Marchetti said.
One challenge Wadzilla faces is keeping a balance between the work it takes to put on a show and maintaining a happy, peaceful home.
“Finding that work/life balance is tricky, but I think we make sure the space is clean quickly after the show and that helps a lot,” Reddy said. “[We always make] sure there’s some sense of normality in the house after the show.”
In addition to the mechanics of running the show and achieving balance between home and work, the residents at Wadzilla have to worry about some other inevitable issues like crowd control.
“At some shows we’ve had security,” said Elias Bouquillion, a Wadzilla resident and Northeastern graduate who studied music technology. “We’ve also had more people showing up who are helping us out and keeping an eye on things.”
Bouquillion said they try to set a culture at their house that promotes respect. They post signs warning guests not to enter certain rooms, not to go out front, not to smoke inside and not to go upstairs.
“Everybody gets it eventually, and the more people who come in regularly, [the more] it gets taken care of by our friends being around … stepping in when it needs to get done,” Bouquillion said.
The residents at Wadzilla have never had a noise complaint or been shut down by the police, Cruz said. He said police have come in three times while making nightly rounds in the neighborhood to tell people to get a move-on, but it was always after the show was over.
Matt Arielly, a middler communications major who attended the Bad Rabbits show Jan. 29, said he loved the bands and thought the venue was cool.
“It’s a very good vibe here,” Arielly said. “It’s the first time [I’ve been to Wadzilla]. I feel like I’ve missed out because this is a great, sort of chill venue. I’m really liking it.”
