On May 14, 2011, I was one of 100 or so people who squeezed into the tiny basement performance space in the back of Logan Square DIY venue Summer Camp. We stood shoulder-to-shoulder, and condensation from the low-hanging pipes dripped on us—or onto the floor, where it mixed with sweat, rainwater tracked in from the downpour outside, and God knows what else to make treacherous slick spots. As the four bands on the bill—Brighter Arrows, Raw Nerve, Cloud Mouth, and Grown Ups—tore through their sets, the room grew progressively hotter and nastier.
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Next month, nearly a year later, the Summer Camp: Final Show package finally comes out. There’s not just a live audio recording but also a DVD of the whole concert. For now the four-song seven-inch is available only to people who paid for it last May, plus members of the bands and former Summer Camp residents, but all 30 songs have been online for free download since March 7 at summercampchi.bandcamp.com. The DVD is online for preorder (it’s $5 too) and will soon hit the shelves of a record store near you.
Summer Camp started when six guys moved into a four-bedroom house in August 2008—they made “bedrooms” out of some other spaces too. Not everyone had moved in thinking they’d host shows, but the idea appealed to Harrison Hickok, a Michigan transplant who runs the label Kid Sister Everything. “I got to a couple shows and saw how easy it was to do it and what I did and didn’t like and met a couple other people who felt the same way,” he says. “It was really easy to be like, ‘Five dollars, no drinking, and give all the money to the touring bands, live in a slop bucket for four years.’ It’ll be worth it.”
Summer Camp had a bit of a revolving door—Hickok figures 16 residents and plenty of couch surfers passed through over the years. The house itself was in disrepair, and their landlord was unresponsive. Last February, when the final seven tenants decided to move out, they were dealing with heat outages, peeling ceilings, and water leaking into their rooms.
For Hickok and his old roommates, it’s not a matter of who deserves credit for what role in the scene—it’s a matter of keeping the scene alive. “The real thing that we wanted since we started Summer Camp, since we were interested in music at all on this level, was that we just wanted people to keep doing new things,” he says. “If this record makes people find a new band or start a new house, then it’s paid for itself far more than the amount of effort that went into it for us.”
