Whatever your musical vision, it was welcome at the old Flywheel, and no cigar-smoking club owner was waiting around to give you a hard time for only getting your three closest friends to show up. Flywheel, which was on Route 141 in Easthampton, was always a relaxed place to play. Booking a gig there was never hard: make a few calls, line up another band or two you’d like to play with, and that was about it.
There was no bar and all ages were welcome, so most regulars were deeply enthusiastic about no-compromise, do-it-yourself artistic endeavors, and deeply jacked up on caffeine from the small café up front. It was a small, no-frills joint with one stage in a small room. A perfect place, in short, to see if what you dreamed up with your bandmates in some dungeon of a basement was worthwhile in front of an audience.
Every place that’s neck-deep in musicians, artists, writers and every other variety of creator needs a place like Flywheel. Absent the pressure of generating income for club owners, all sorts of unusual things flower, and fans of the arts get to see the unfettered results.
If there is hope for hipness, it resides in its purest form at Flywheel. I once played on a bill there with an act consisting of a trombonist and a drummer. As the slow honk of trombone built to something resembling fever pitch and intricate jazz beats echoed from the bare walls, it seemed clear that most venues would never dream of booking such un-pop material. Nor would they expect an audience to do what this one did: watch intently for an entire trombone-tastic set. Whether trombone duos prove the wave of the future matters not: this kind of friendly, interested reception is a necessity for an arts community to thrive.
Last March, Flywheel shut its doors on Route 141, and ever since, it’s been raising money to get into a new space in the old town hall in downtown Easthampton. Though it’s not there yet, this vital venue could (and should) be back in business soon. Here is the story of Flywheel in the words of some of those who make it happen:
Will Bundy
co-owner of Eastworks, director of Cityspace
The reason that I’m excited about Flywheel coming into town hall is that it’s a membership-driven organization that’s open to the general public. It puts front and center the idea of people producing programming that is relevant to themselves and their community. I think it’s a good public model for the town hall, so I’m very excited that they’re coming. Right now people don’t fully understand how powerful that concept is—I think people in the know are aware of the significance to the region of Flywheel in terms of cultural offerings. But for Easthampton, it means that people from the library can participate, people from the high schools—I can’t even tell you where that might go. But that’s a very exciting element.
We are cobbling together our budget as we go. We’re hoping what it takes to get Flywheel in will be under $15,000. My sense of old buildings is that you should never underestimate the surprises that can come your way. I’ve had 10 years of having that lesson thrown in my face again and again. But I think I just had the good sense to know Flywheel was a good idea. We’re optimistic that we can bring it in for that amount.
With the non-profit Cityspace, we thought it was important town hall remain a public building, a building for Easthampton that was focused on the arts. It’s a modest undertaking—3,000 square feet on the first floor. There were offices that were the police department, then the planning department, but before that there was actually a great room of about 1,600 square feet—once it’s sprinklered, it’s got potential to host performances Flywheel couldn’t do at their former space, and that makes it a very interesting addition to Easthampton.
Jeremy Smith
boardmember of Flywheel
We’re providing a venue for artists that don’t necessarily have drawing power elsewhere. Or it’s uncharted, experimental territory, something a for-profit venue wouldn’t do, a training ground or a tech lab of sorts for new ideas. If someone, say, approached the Iron Horse and said, “We haven’t been to Northampton before and we want to play there,” the Iron Horse is not likely to book them without a proven draw. It’s harder for bands like that to drum up an audience. If they play the Iron Horse and don’t draw, chances are they won’t be coming back and they won’t build up an audience. We’ve had bands come through a few times and build an audience—Ted Leo first came through Flywheel in 1999, then last time he came through he played upstairs at Pearl Street and there were several hundred people there. He’s sort of outgrown our space and developed an audience.
On the flipside, if someone did come through and there were five people there every time, it doesn’t matter—there’s not that pressure to deliver numbers. The five people can have a good time. It’s a supportive environment. Bands can have fun, and people at Flywheel will support them, maybe make some food for them, and they’ll have a good time. Bands say they really appreciate what they get at Flywheel. It’s more of a home environment here.
The Bindlestiff Family Circus came to Flywheel—an alternative circus kind of thing. There’s been a return to vaudeville and burlesque that’s become hip. But at that time, this was a pretty unusual idea. I don’t think a commercial place would have booked it. We were into it. We’re into unique things, and a broader palette of styles and genres. Not just in music. We had a fermentation workshop with an author, too. He came and brought fermented foods, talked about how to do it and had taste tests. I don’t know that the Iron Horse would do that.
The fact that there’s no bar there really puts a focus on the events. The music isn’t background, it’s the focus. That’s another thing bands appreciate. People aren’t sitting at the bar occasionally glancing back. There’s more of an intense focus on what’s going on there.
We did these Pancake Mountain events—Pancake Mountain is a Washington, D.C.-based cable show, a hip kids’ show that hearkens back to the ’70s regional kids’ variety show. They have things like Ted Leo and Henry Rollins guest shots, puppet skits. We thought that would be cool to show on Saturday morning—make some pancakes, have our own dance party. The support for that has been huge. It’s brought tons of people into Flywheel, even people that used to come but who have kids now. That really grew, and we made a lot of connections with parents’ groups, including the Easthampton Family Center. That’s resulted in a collaboration with them in our new space. They’re going to use Flywheel during the day. It’s a real community connection that came out of the Flywheel events. We also got some kids’ bands to come through, and some Easthampton Arts Council grant money.
For our new space, we need to raise money for demolition and construction. Our main focus is raising as much as possible for that. We’re going to have to do some electrical work, get the floors sanded, some walls knocked down, build a stage, install lights. We need to raise $10,000 or so for that. We’ve raised about half that.
The city is installing and paying for sprinkler systems. That would have been required in any case, so the city paying is a real help. The city is also going to put in an elevator. The upstairs will become a usable venue in the not-too-distant future.
Getting into the new space was a timing issue. Dr. Kanazi, our prior landlord, was planning on selling the building. He needed to raise the rent to make it a more appealing property. The way Flywheel runs, our budget was dead even—raising the rent would have been a burden. Then the city put out requests for [usage] proposals for town hall. Will Bundy submitted one saying he’d like to make it a community space, and performances were part of that. That’s not his expertise, so he approached us and said, “Would you like to be part of this?” We moved out in March.
We’ll be back hopefully at the beginning, or as close as possible to the beginning, of the New Year. That will all depend on how much money we can get and the timing of construction work.
Rick Pierik
owner of Nine Mile Records
Compared to most regulars at Flywheel, I came in through the side door. As a working musician and head of a small record label in Boston, I had known about Flywheel for years, but somehow never managed to play there or book a show for any of my artists there. When my wife, daughter and I moved to Easthampton in 2004, we began hearing about this great kids’ event called Pancake Mountain—essentially rock shows for the under-six set, complete with pancakes. We started attending those and soon realized what unique events they were compared with other kids’ stuff in the Valley. I began volunteering and catching actual rock shows in the evenings. Pretty soon I decided to get more involved and join The Hub.
There are two main things that make Flywheel different than other venues: 1) They are non-profit and supported entirely by donation, so they can take chances on programming that other venues who have to pay staff people and owners can’t. And we’re not just talking music. Remember that over the past nine years Flywheel has hosted film series, cabaret, art openings, spoken word events and more. What other area venue can say that? And the fact that they are drug and alcohol free, all-ages events, means Flywheel is making all of these diverse cultural experiences available to people of all ages. It’s pretty incredible, really.
And 2) they are volunteer-run and consensus-driven. This means anyone with a vision for artistic expression and the desire to be a “producer” can use Flywheel for their purposes by simply attending meetings and abiding by the space’s basic principles. Ideally, in the new space we’ll see not just a continuation of cutting-edge art and performance, but true community involvement from all angles of Easthampton: Polka Night, for example, or yoga classes. We’ve already got the Easthampton Family Center and a couple of community groups lined up to use the space regularly once it reopens, and we’d like to see more.
Flywheel as a venue is in a dormant phase while we plan the renovations of the new space at the old town hall and while the city brings the building up to code with some new fire safety measures. We’ve used this downtime mainly to fund-raise and help defray the costs of the new space. We’ve raised a few thousand dollars, which will go a long way, but we truly need more if Flywheel is to remain viable and grow into our original mission. We’re essentially doubling the footprint of the old space, adding dozens of aesthetic improvements and hopefully hiring a staff person in the near future to manage the space and coordinate volunteers. All of these things cost money, so donating is the biggest priority. People can go to the website at http://www.flywheelarts.org and donate securely there. Soon we’ll also need people to help bring the new space to life: painting, moving stuff, etc. And finally, when Flywheel reopens, we’ll need volunteers.
Chris Dooley
Flywheel president
My involvement with Flywheel began when the organization was in its infancy and the space was about to open. I stopped by the 2 Holyoke Street building and helped paint some walls. [Since I was] living in Holyoke at the time, I was excited for a venue/arts space in the Valley that wasn’t in Northampton or Amherst. I volunteered at some shows here and there, and became more actively involved in 2002. I’ve since been on the Flywheel board of directors, booked a lot of great shows with musicians, helped manage the art gallery, and am currently holding the title of “president” of Flywheel, but that’s just a title, since we’re a collectively run organization.
Flywheel differs from other venues in this area since we’re a collectively run, not for profit, community arts space, not just a place that has musical performances. We’re always open to new folks getting involved with our organization and becoming active contributors to what Flywheel does. In our mission statement, we state, “Flywheel believes that art and information should be equally accessible and affordable to all people.” I think by doing events that are all-ages and reasonably priced, we give people access to some things they might not be able to see in this area. Another great thing about Flywheel is that we don’t have criteria for who can perform at our space. We have a group of people who book events, and it’s up to them to decide what should happen at Flywheel.
I think one of the most unusual and inspiring things I’ve experienced with Flywheel was that multiple times throughout the Flywheel’s history at 2 Holyoke Street, it was transformed either by creative minds doing a work party fixing the space up, a new art installation, or a haunted house to look like something completely new and different. It always amazed me, walking into a space so familiar, but totally redefined.
There have been a lot of performances that Flywheel has been able to host over the years that I don’t know would’ve been able to happen at other places. In 2001, this band Foot, which featured Thurston Moore, Don Fleming, Jim O’Rourke and Tom Verlaine, performed outside of Flywheel in and on Thurston’s car (the Footmobile). I think they ran it through Flywheel’s p.a. system somehow. Killswitch Engage played one of their earlier shows at the Flywheel. Nobody had really heard of them yet, and they had a different singer back then. Connor from Bright Eyes played Flywheel one time back in ’99 or 2000, and no one knew who he was yet either.
Right now, Flywheel is doing a big fundraising drive to get everything rolling for our new space in the old Easthampton town hall building to open as soon as possible. It seems like we’re just waiting on permits and contracts to be finalized and then the construction can start in the building. If people would like to donate money to us, there’s an area on the website (www.flywheelarts.org) for donations. If people have any experience with fundraising and would like to help us plan a event to help us raise money, that would be great! I hope to have Flywheel up and running as soon as possible.
Andrew Kesin
general manager, Ecstatic Peace Records and Tapes
My involvement started because I was going to a lot of shows and shooting a lot of videos we use on our website. A lot of what we’ve done is shoot videos in the community and post them almost immediately. I’d go shoot three or four bands and have them on the site for people around the country, around the world, actually, to look at. The Flywheel was a huge part of that because so many of these shows were happening there. Artists who were touring around the country, that would be the place they would play. It was a natural camaraderie between our label and Flywheel, because we had a lot of the same interests in terms of the particular music that was coming through there. … We have maybe a couple hundred videos up, and maybe half of them were shot there.
They always were the sort of venue where you could pick up the phone and call someone and they would figure out a way to make it work. Everybody had an understanding of what the Flywheel was about. If five people were there for a touring band, it wasn’t like the Flywheel was going to make the band feel like shit about that, whereas a lot of venues would.
The people over there have always been very supportive of us as a label, and consequently, there’s a nice back and forth. There’s that sort of dialogue that exists between a venue and a record label and the community that just doesn’t exist with any other venue in the area. I think the reason Flywheel is such an important venue to us is because Ecstatic Peace has been about avant garde music and punk rock music and places where all those things meet, and they’ve been supportive of all those different things.
Thurston [Moore] is a partner in this label, and Sonic Youth has always used Flywheel as a staging ground. When they were getting ready to record or getting ready to head out on the road, a lot of times the band would come up to town to rehearse and they’d want to play to work out some new material. And Thurston has, in the process of preparing for his solo record, worked out material in this sort of singer/songwriter setting. The full band has played at times. The beauty of Flywheel is that there’s this understanding of what the gig is, and that Flywheel isn’t going to go around pasting up flyers. They wouldn’t even announce these things, and they’d be sold out anyway.
The point is that they really got it—they always have understood that a venue can have a larger understanding rather than just trying to get people in the door that particular day. Artistic goals can go beyond just the single artist on the stage; an organization can have artistic goals, like Flywheel or our label. That’s really where the camaraderie exists—our mission, their mission, at the end of the day, is to push creativity without boundaries and create an environment for that. … That’s what Flywheel asks of its artists, that they try to become part of the fabric, and I think everybody tries to do that as best they can.
