Our punk party scene is totally underrated

At a frat party, if you bump into someone, you’re kicked out of the house and called a “fucking GDI,” at least in my experience. At a punk party, if someone shoves you, you shove them right back, because you’re probably in a mosh pit.

We descended upon Mushroom House for one of UConn’s “punk parties.” Admission for the general public was three dollars, but for the plus ones, the band members, friends of the hosts, and your aforementioned correspondents, it was free.

Over 100 students crammed into the Mushroom House living room, threatening the aging infrastructure of the classic UConn party stop, to groove to the punk styling’s of four local UConn bands.

These venues are little-known, and pop-up sporadically throughout the semester, but when the talent of UConn musicians galvanize at one point, usually in someone’s basement, the result is explosive spectacle of music, booze and moshing.

Carl Strum, a solo act, and members of the band “Fat Randy,” Connor Lucey and Stephen Friedland, all spoke of their adventures involving Mushroom House.

The artists spoke to the punk rock band scene at UConn, and explained why it really is one of Storr’s best, and most underrated, party options.

“Most UConn parties are like, it’s a party first and music kind of comes second, and the music isn’t like, you know, you have dudes with laptops, you have DJs,” Strum, a UConn senior said.

“This is, some people will come in and be like ‘Oh, I didn’t expect what this party would be like.’ It’s a show first, really, and it’s also like, if you wanna drink you wanna drink, typical punk show.”

Friedland, a seventh-semester psychology major at UConn and a singer/guitarist/drummer for Fat Randy, explained the punk party appeal in his typically tongue in cheek manner.

“It’s a good way to enthrall college students who have come to expect sweaty, claustrophobic places that center around drunk assholes singing loudly to Taylor Swift,” Friedland said.

The night contained all that the musicians promised. Girls with piercings in dresses, skirts, and flannels mingled with bearded boys in flannels and khakis.

But it was not as uniform as that – it’s just that everyone there felt comfortable.

Bottles of beer, wine, and whiskey were in every hand, cigarettes between every pair of lips. The most condensed crowd of people was on the top floor of Mushroom House – an abode seemingly built for a concert/party like this, with ample room upstairs for instruments and amps, as well as a popular balcony area to hang out on the top floor with a couch facing the road.

When no one is invited, everyone feels welcome. We spoke with people from outside the UConn music scene before and during the concert. A writer from the music website Loudwire was there, and so were certain friends of band members, but the large majority of attendees were UConn students with a desire for something realer and rawer than your cookie cutter UConn party.

It’s not necessarily a mistake that the punk rock scene is somewhat underground – at a school like UConn, parties of 90 can turn into 400 in no time, and underground is the nature of punk – but before his set, Strum voiced a desire to coalesce the many musicians on campus, pointing to a tradition of rock and roll in Storrs.

“At UConn there’s been stuff before…but someone who has never met Connor [Lucey, part of Fat Randy] ever, goes to UConn, that lives off campus or whatever, and they have their own punk scene and little shows, you have WHUS kids, it’s the whole idea that UConn’s big enough for enough degrees of separation that these are actually separate things which, I think, would be cool this year, if we could combine those things,” Strum said.

Punk rock at UConn was vibrant as ever last year, with a slew of shows played at student favorite concert-venue: the basement of the house “Shaq Efron.”

Friedland was a resident of Shaq Efron last year, and he and bandmate Connor Lucey said that hosting concert parties at the house was just a way of getting their music out.

“We pretty much had two or three songs to our name and a couple covers so nobody would want to book us because we hadn’t recorded music so we were like, hey, let’s host our own shows so people could come listen to us, and invite bands that people know in the area, like Dangerous Animals, Dr. Martino, Carl [Strum],” Lucey, a 7th-semester marketing major said. “We were able to get some traction from that, so we cranked out that EP as fast as we could, just so people had something tangible to remember who the fuck we were.”

Although the punk scene remains homeless for the year, Strum and Fat Randy promised The Tab that shows have been booked well into November. Anyone is welcome to book the misfits for weddings, birthdays, funerals or some combination of the three.

The night degenerated into drunken revelry, with Sten & Alban “dancing” (flailing is more accurate) like they were at a Doors concert and (allegedly) inciting a mosh pit to the classic Dr. Martino song, “Clean Plate Club.”

If UConn students are looking for something different, these types of parties are perfect. The camaraderie fostered by the music continued after the show, even through Alban puking before he fell asleep.