26 Take!—!June / July 2016 thetakemagazine.com 27IMAGE COURTESY OF SOUTHPAW © 2015 THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY

The home of Vermont m u s i c t u r n s2 0

28 Take!—!June / July 2016 thetakemagazine.com 29PHOTOS BY JAMES LOCKRIDGE

T he Big Heavy World office in Burlington, Vermont, has barely an inch of unused space. There’s a pile of amplifiers, speak-ers, and sound equipment in one corner, a

hidden vending machine in another, and a computer workstation that is two Macs set underneath stage light-ing in the middle of the room. Concert posters and por-traits of musicians cover nearly every inch of wall space. Old furniture circles in the middle of the room, swallow-ing anyone who sits in it. In a far corner is a separate office the size of half a dorm room. It’s used as a DJ booth.

It’s “crew night” for Big Heavy World, and two crew members, or volunteers—Ian Corcoran and Mitchell Bergeron—edit video of a spray-painted demolition derby car on the computers. An intern sits in the middle of the furniture emptying new picture frames of their stock photos, and James Lockridge, the director and founder of the all-volunteer enterprise, runs around the office working on too many tasks to count. He has graying hair cropped close atop a strong face. He looks more like a subtly aging 20-year-old than 48, his actual age, in his dark jeans and a black band T-shirt. He has tattoos on his forearms that read “Live for something” on his right arm and “Or die for nothing” on his left. It’s hard to see what Big Heavy World is exactly when watching Lockridge move swiftly around the office, because there’s so much happening at once.

Big Heavy World calls itself “the home of Vermont music” and will celebrate its 20th birthday with a concert on June 9 at Higher Ground. What started out in 1996 as an online directory of Burlington bands has evolved into a dizzying array of projects, including a radio sta-tion, a Vermont music archive, a record label, a tour van for bands to borrow, streaming concerts, and the Vermont Jukebox Project, which plays Vermont music in the state’s welcome centers. But what’s probably clos-est to Lockridge’s heart is how Big Heavy includes every-one. Its T-shirt slogan reads, “Hate makes you weak.” And

A welcome sign made with glitter letters on torn cardboard r e a d s “Come Hang.”

it’s especially geared toward working with young people in search of a place to explore their passion for music.

While Lockridge has had stints as an art director at the local alternative paper Seven Days and as a freelance designer, he’s also worked closely with youth outreach in the Burlington area. He spent five years as the direc-tor of a teen center in Bristol, and now he’s helping coor-dinate Vermont’s distracted-driving task force. It’s easy to see that experience in how Lockridge brings in col-lege-age kids and high schoolers to work on any project they want under the Big Heavy World umbrella, giving them an outlet to express themselves and develop cre-ative talents.

“There are kids who are at a really interesting point in their life where, if they don’t find something to chan-nel those energies and intellectual curiosity toward, they might end up missing it,” says Casey Rae, the CEO of Future of Music Coalition in Washington, D.C., and a Big Heavy World board member. For those kids, he adds, getting involved with Big Heavy World “can be incred-ibly enriching. It’s that part of the mission that I think is absolutely vital.”

PREVIOUS SPREAD: Verse performs at Big Heavy World’s IndieCon, 2012, at the punk club 242 Main

↙ Voices In Vain perform at 242 Main, 2016 ↑ CBRASNKE (“Cobrasnake”) performs at 242 Main, 2016

“ L i v e f o r s o m e t h i n g ”

“ O r d i e f o r n o t h i n g ”

30 Take!—!June / July 2016 thetakemagazine.com 31

L ockridge grew up splitting his time between Vermont and Hawaii. During the school year, he could be found in Kailua on O’ahu, just over the mountain from Waikiki, crawfishing

in the Pacific. But when summer came around, he’d hop on a plane and head to Springfield, Vermont, to spend time on his grandparents’ farm. When he arrived in Vermont, he’d buy a few chickens and sell their eggs to the local country club and then sell the chickens when it was time to go home.

By the time he was a teenager, his parents split and the migration to the northeast began. He found himself gravitating to Vermont. There was a short stint at the University of Nevada in Reno, which only lasted a year before he moved to Burlington to attend the University of Vermont. Later, he’d hitchhike to Boulder, Colorado, and Los Angeles to see if those cities suited him. But he soon returned to, and found himself immersed in, the do-it-yourself culture that permeates the Green Mountains.

“No place fit. Burlington kind of always brought me back,” Lockridge says. “Burlington is a comfortable place, and I mean that in a healthy way. It’s not comfortable because you can be lazy. It’s comfortable because it’s interesting, people are engaged—it’s mostly healthy and respectful of different people.”

The alternative rock scene in the 1990s sprouted from cities across America. Seattle had Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and grunge. Chapel Hill was a breeding ground for bands like Archers of Loaf, SuperChunk, and Ben Folds Five. In the 1980s and 1990s, Athens, Georgia, was alive with the B-52s and R.E.M. To Lockridge and others, Burlington looked like it could be the next music city. It had the hall-marks of the other alternative-rock meccas: a strong base of college students, plenty of live music venues, and an artistic and welcoming scene that made the city a melt-ing pot of styles and creativity.

“The mid-’90s in Burlington were high energy,” Lockridge says. “There was a lot of absolutely, emphati-cally unique music being made and [the community] was

very mutually supportive. The bands would share mem-bers and form supergroups for one night, and there was a lot of cross-pollination and a lot of being a music com-munity and everybody benefitting from that.”

Big Heavy World began as fun way for Lockridge, a designer by trade, to explore the beginnings of the Internet through the local music scene. But quickly he started expanding his idea’s scope and reach. He started collecting as much music from the Green Mountain State as he could, started planning events and hatching plans to go beyond the reach of the website.

At the time, Lockridge was living a sparse existence in a band house that looked like a haunted mansion. The home was seemingly forgotten by its landlord—“I don’t recall ever signing a lease,” Lockridge says—but that made it a perfect breeding ground of creative artists like himself. The alt-rock band Chin Ho! practiced on the dirt floor of the basement, and its singer, Andrew Smith, put out Good Citizen, a ’zine exploring Burlington’s bur-geoning music scene. One night when the band was practicing, Lockridge was upstairs building his music website with the help of his friend and roommate George Webb, an engineer. The pair were exploring domain names when Chin Ho! played its song “Big Heavy World.” Lockridge wanted the song title as the name to the web-site and had to persuade Webb it was a good idea. The name stuck.

It’s easy to forget just how infantile the Internet was when Big Heavy World launched. In 1996, only 20 mil-lion American adults surfed the web, and they mostly did so via their phone lines. They averaged less than 30 min-utes a month on the Internet. That’s less time than people today spend checking their Facebook feed in an hour.

“Jim has always been very technology focused,” Rae says. He met Lockridge when he moved to Burlington in the ’90s, and the two became close through their shared passion for music. It was always Lockridge who was introducing Rae to the newest technology like the MP3 player. Being an early adopter has simply been a way for Lockridge to get Vermont bands heard.

“Burlington is a comfortable place, and I mean that in a healthy w a y . It’s not comfortable because you can be lazy. It’s comfortable because it’s interesting, people are engaged—it’s mostly healthy and respectful of different people.”

← James Lockridge

TINTYPE PHOTO BY JEFF HOWLETT, HOWLERMANO PHOTOGRAPHY

32 Take!—!June / July 2016 thetakemagazine.com 33IMAGE COURTESY OF SOUTHPAW © 2015 THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY

“I think his ultimate goal,” Rae says, “is to have Vermont music felt and understood by all the decision makers in the state and all the people who are residents in the state so more of them have an understanding of what an amazing artistic tapestry there is with music. And then, of course, any kind of ambassadorial stuff out-side the state.”

What is the music for which Lockridge is the ambas-sador? Vermont is a state filled with musicians and dif-ferent styles of music, from Americana to hip-hop to hardcore to classical. Lockridge is collecting all of it, and Big Heavy crew members embrace many genres. But the Big Heavy World philosophy most closely aligns with hardcore music and its DIY ethics.

“Big Heavy has a lot in common with Vermont’s hard-core punk rock scene, which is: Everyone looks out for each other, and everyone is respectful of everything,” Lockridge says. “It is a positive, world-building mes-sage, and a thread among all of that is that everybody is empowered to make their own critical decisions and to make them be positive ones for themselves. That is the default position of Big Heavy World: to [help] people feel that they matter, to feel empowered, to take action on behalf of their own success.”

building its own sounds as amicable musicians crossed over to every other side. Music in the city was a large, limitless family. Some examples of its artful singularity:

Rocketsled, in frontman Casey Rae’s words, “antic-ipated practically every heavy sound that was to become fashionable in the metal world in the next decade—from start-stop riffbombs to stoner sludge to atonal chaos.” Their intensity was from a darker place, and members went on to lead other prescient and pioneering bands.

Starlight Conspiracy’s sound was like a very large engine with its throttle barely engaged, threaten-ing to explode from an artful hum. Hypnotic femme vocals overlaid the merging karmic centers of indie rock and shoegaze. They were a driving, romantic vortex.

Wide Wail stared music down, tell-ing it what it should be, as poets with instruments, with delicate force. Their lyrics, like their melodies, stepped smartly from raw to haunting. Wide Wail was our alt/indie muse.

Lindy Pear was the café racer of the city’s indie pop—spare, revved-up, and taking the corners of their oeuvre tighter than physics was comfortable with.

I n t h e 1 9 9 0 s , music in Burlington transcended genres, B y Ja m e s

Lockridge

On the night I visit Big Heavy World, Lockridge is setting up a photo shoot for a new DJ for the radio

station, the Radiator, as a couple of new people show up to see what Big Heavy is all about and possibly become DJs. The room fills up quickly as Lockridge takes a seat in the middle of the circle of furniture with a laptop on his lap. In his distinctly quiet voice he begins telling the newbies about what it means to join Big Heavy World and start DJing on the Radiator, which broadcasts via a make-shift system composed of donated parts from other radio stations in the area, including those at Saint Michael’s College, the University of Vermont, and Vermont Public Radio, which even sends its engineers to help install and monitor the system.

“[Big Heavy is] welcoming of any non-hateful opin-ion,” Lockridge tells the group. “What we expect is all our DJs will be civil and respectful of anyone listening, even if they have a different opinion.”

It’s easy to see why so many people connect with Lockridge when you watch him talk through the rules for the radio station. He talks with people instead of at them. His tone is restrained and personable, as if he’s telling each person a secret meant just for them.

After the meeting, Lockridge goes back to the hun-dreds of small tasks at hand. There’s a video to be edited and a radio show with a live performance going on, and he needs to make sure photos are taken. It begins raining outside. Lockridge rode his motorcycle to the office, but he isn’t worried about it. He lives just up the street and, right now, there’s too much to do to worry about getting wet on the way home.

← Photos of (from top to bottom) Rocketsled, Starlight Conspiracy, Wide Wail, and Lindy Pear

↑ Chin Ho! in the 1990s

PHOTOS ON THIS SPREAD BY MATTHEW THORSEN