The ultimate college experience has differing rules and checkboxes for everyone. However, a college pillar most agree is a classic is live music: everyone’s favorite local band and a roommate or two up on stage playing the blues.
The music scene in Boston, still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic that pushed live musicians to play at home, lacks a notable reputation. Many college bands are left without a reliable venue to play in, leaving their music unheard. Meanwhile, music lovers float around the idea of a perfect music scene — to no avail.
Enter *junkyard.
Here, audiences are dazzled at every show. Attendees are greeted by actors who play clowns, giants or yetis; bands that play their hearts out to loving fans; and a team of students from Northeastern University and Emerson College to deliver everything music lovers could hope for.
The Boston-bred live music venue started Sept. 30, 2023, by Northeastern student Jeremy Serbee, a fourth-year politics, philosophy, and economics major. Serbee and co-founder Owen Silleck, a fourth-year film major at Emerson College, came up with the idea of *junkyard while in Serbee’s backyard shed, where they theorized of a music venue different from the rest.
“I had ideas about what I wanted to be doing in college, the environments I wanted to be in and the people that I wanted to be surrounded with. And I just didn’t feel that,” Serbee said of his initial foray into live music.
At Northeastern, Serbee often felt lonely, hoping for more than the vacuum he felt existed in the live music scene.
“It’s a bit shielded,” Serbee said. “When I first got to Northeastern, I had trouble breaking into it [the music scene].”
He traveled to other colleges around the Boston area with friends, curious to see if they had what he was missing. When visiting a friend’s show, watching them perform in their college’s dining hall, Serbee was inspired — he knew the music community was what he needed to be surrounded by.
“It’s less about giving people a place to perform and more about giving a general audience more of a place to just be and thrive — really meet people and hang out,” Silleck said.
What followed was months of careful planning and research, networking with bands and putting the *junkyard name out into the very vacuum they hoped to fill, and soon, the venue was up and running.
In an August 2023, Instagram post with the words ‘*junkyard now booking,’ Serbee, Silleck and a passionate crew showed social media they were ready to put on a show. Featuring artists Dejima, the camgirls and JOBIE, the very first show less than a month after the initial post amassed an unexpected turnout of around 150 people, all of whom only brought more of their friends to the next one. *junkyard’s shows as of 2025 hold attendance numbers of around 450 to 500 people, Serbee said.
Each show works to highlight and uplift a Boston band, picking from dozens of submissions through its booking form. Bands are chosen based on their general aesthetic and the theme of a particular show.
“I want bands to see us as something that’s reliable. Being communicative with the artists that we work with is really important to me,” Serbee said. “It’s always been a huge team effort. Everybody plays a really important role.”
The *junkyard team, composed of students with film, music and various media-related backgrounds, cultivates unique aspects of live music that most people have never experienced before.
A trip to *junkyard may include 6-foot-7-inch actor Quinlan Harp, a fourth-year visual media arts major at Emerson College, standing on stilts — resulting in Harp’s rendition of an 8-foot-tall figure — looming over audience members and performing comedy routines at *junkyard’s Halloween show: “Graveyard.”
Harp shares Serbee and Silleck’s passion for storytelling and music. Self-labeled a “wildcard,” Harp plays many roles for the *junkyard team, living up to his zeal for interacting with people and embodying the surprising and “odd” nature of *junkyard.
“This past year, I’ve realized that surprise has been my favorite flavor,” Harp said, adding that the creative freedom to take an idea and run with it has been extremely fulfilling. Harp and the rest of the team bounce ideas off one another regarding goals for the shows and what they want it to look like. Silleck, now studying in Los Angeles for a semester, looks forward to the team’s so-called “Sunday Round Table,” where the *junkyard family of around 15 people meet up virtually to talk about goals, projects and future “bits.”
“Our crazies match each other very well,” Harp said. “We are providing a space with an odd air to it that you feel safe, and you feel like something could come out of the corner that just makes you smile.”
*junkyard hosts around six shows every year, each with a unique theme, music genre and antics from everyone involved.
“We put a ridiculous amount of time and effort — and like Zoom meetings — with all 15 of us into each show, And so, that’s kind of why it happens so infrequently,” said Serbee, who finds that the infrequency of the shows only makes them all the more special. In addition to finding bands and designing sets, the team obtains permits through the city, specifically in Cambridge, and allocates outdoor spaces where they can build a stage.
A musician himself, Serbee is familiar with the lack of resources in his field. “I definitely want [bands] to feel like they have a partner,” Serbee said, when considering what his hope for *junkyard is. “I want them to think of us as people who care.”
“It’s definitely one of the highlights of doing *junkyard, is being able to highlight these smaller bands that might not get platformed in this specific space otherwise,” Serbee said.
As the creative director at *junkyard, Silleck designs the website, posters and collages for each show, playing an enormous role in *junkyard’s branding. Silleck enjoys every part of what he does in curating the venue’s aesthetic. Aside from the work he does for the venue, he holds a deep love for its members and their impact on his life.
“The amount of friendships and seriously meaningful and beautiful relationships I’ve been able to form through *junkyard and around *junkyard — I really can’t overstate it,” Serbee said. “It has really made my college experience.”
