
Sleet guitarist Parker Hippe jams out at The Tollbooth on Feb. 23, 2024, in Lawrence. Maura Dayton / @twistedmauraphotos
Rising seniors Zack Black and Teddy Tran began hosting shows at their DIY venue, The Tollbooth, during the 2023-2024 school year. The prevalent music scene in Lawrence, especially among the college crowd, results in a lack of venues to perform at. As a solution, students like Black and Tran created DIY venues at various locations around town.
Do-It-Yourself or DIY music venues are community-oriented spaces designed to focus on underground and emerging artists with an informal atmosphere. These venues rely on word of mouth and social media promotion allowing the venue to form a more dedicated audience.
While DIY venues offer an intimate space for independent artists, DIY record labels support these artists in recording and distributing their music. It also allows for better collaboration and support opportunities on the artist’s terms, something that normal record labels can lack.
“We were pretty late to get into the really cool music scene here,” Black said. “When we were finally able to and we started going to DIY shows. We started going to shows around Lawrence, just wanting to contribute to that culture somehow, be a part of a really cool scene.”
With Black and Tran’s mutual love of music and the desire to contribute to the culture, it seemed natural to form a venue in their college house.
“We had gone to a house show and then we really started talking about it in the summer before we moved in,” Tran said. “We just got excited you know, you’ve finally moved into your first college house and it kinda had a perfect set up in the basement for it so that’s when we really started talking about it.”
When deciding to create a DIY venue, factors such as roommates on the property, landlords, neighbors and band availability need to be considered. To make scheduling easier and ensure no one steps over others, Black and Tran have cultivated relationships with those in charge of the other DIY venues in Lawrence.
While Tran and Black run The Tollbooth and the accompanying DIY record label Turnpyke, they also have personal engagements. Tran manages several small musical artists while Black is in several bands and serves as an assistant producer on Jayhawk Jukebox — a student-run music show in the journalism school. Despite all of their prior engagements, Tran and Black make time for their venue.
“I think it really helps that this is something we both love to do,” Tran said. “And I don’t think we’d be able to manage the same amount of work with something that wasn’t.”
DIY venues are often BYOB and when pairing alcohol with large amounts of people, situations can arise.
“Of course when you get 150 people in a house and there’s drinking involved, people do dumb shit,” said Tran. “We had someone open our cabinet and start searching through it right in front of me right after they walked under caution tape into our kitchen so that was really weird.”
When deciding to create a music venue safety was a priority for Black and Tran, who have navigated this by recruiting friends to watch over the crowd and “babyproofing” their basement. Before allowing shows, the seniors went through and made sure there were no errant nails and covered the exposed brick with pool noodles to prevent injury if the crowd got too rowdy while moshing.
Odd situations aside, Black and Tran are proud of the inclusive and safe environment they have created and the support they have received. A community where people help others who may have fallen while moshing and passing out water to keep everyone hydrated.
“When you get 150 people in a space, you know, there’s just bad people and bad things can happen,” said Black. “But we’re lucky enough that nothing like that has happened. I think that being involved in the scene longer and just listening to people who have gone through, people’s experiences, it becomes very important to make it an inclusive environment.”
Since Black and Tran are seniors, The Tollbooth may not always be around. But they are confident that, despite The Tollbooth having an expiration date, DIY venues will likely continue appearing.
Black encourages students to start their own venue if interested. He explains that college towns are unique in that they go through four-year cycles, making them ideal for venues like these.
“Do it because we’re going to need another venue once the kids who are doing it now graduate,” said Black. “The reason that these were started was so people could just throw shit together and make a cool performance.”
Black and Tran have much planned for The Tollbooth and Turnpyke with new releases and something special planned for the end of August. The Tollbooth shows will start back up during the 2024 fall semester and will ideally happen monthly.
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