Forget the Prom, Bring the Noise

A glimpse inside the thriving teen cultureof Redmond’s Old Fire House

All week long, Andy Lawrence, 19 (below), works at a Radio Shack tucked into a strip mall in Sammamish. But that is just his daytime identity. At night, the teen sheds his black and white uniform to become a rock promoter.

Photography by Caleb Plowman for City Arts

By now, the gig is almost routine for him. Before Lawrence was old enough to vote, he had already produced two money-making concerts with bands from around the Pacific Northwest (he is at work on a third) and made several thousand dollars for the Old Fire House teen center, where he has been hanging out since seventh grade.

A former fire station, the Fire House in downtown Redmond has become an anchor for this high-school-dropout-turned-impresario. He’s just one among thousands of other arty kids who aren’t about to join the soccer team and haven’t been able to find many like-minded friends at school. Part community center, part teen hangout, the unassuming building with sixteen years of rock-star pedigree (it’s the birthplace of numerous bands, including Modest Mouse) is now taking itself seriously enough to offer full-service programming. Dozens of kids come by each night for college preparation, job support and fitness and film classes. Once a week, area churches serve dinner, and most days there is a crafts project — recently, it was melting vinyl records into kitsch-art bowls. Graffiti decorates the walls, old couches line the common areas and posters from rock shows past decorate a former engine-room-turned-concert-hall. “My child is an honor student at the punk rock academy,” reads a bumper sticker plastered over the door.

Not that all Fire House kids identify as punks or misfits. While recording her senior project there — it’s a compilation CD featuring sixteen teenage bands — Whitney Ballen, 17, takes a few minutes to explain that she has her school friends at Redmond High and her Fire House friends from all over the Eastside, and that each group has a role in her life.

“I always really liked music but my friends at school were never really into that, so I have different friend groups,” she said. “The Fire House has really expanded my horizons. Everyone can kind of be themselves here because everyone’s so different that it doesn’t really matter.” Though Whitney migrates easily between mainstream and “alt” worlds, she appears far more excited about the upcoming Fire House anti-prom — where kids dress in vintage and ditch the limos — than about the traditional gown-and-corsage affair at her high school.

High school student Whitney Ballen in the Fire House’s state-of-the-art recording studio. Behind her, Richest Duck in the World members rehearse.

Founded in 1992, when a bunch of underage kids complained to the City of Redmond that there was nowhere for them to hear live club music, the Old Fire House has become the longest-running all-ages venue in the Pacific Northwest. It serves about nine thousand kids each year, runs on $270,000 from the City of Redmond (plus generous grants from heavies like Microsoft, Paul Allen and Bear Creek Studios) and has inspired similar programs in Kirkland and Bellevue.

But the kids who hang there after school don’t talk much about that history — except as it pertains to some of the major rock acts who got their start on the same stage — the late folk singer Elliot Smith was a regular in his teen years, as were bands like Death Cab for Cutie and Fleet Foxes.

“The kids here are the ones who are going to be making the big bucks in a few years,” said program director Christopher Cullen, gesturing toward the newest crop of musicians listening to each other’s demos in the Fire House recording studio. “We’ve seen it time and again. This is where the excitement is. I’ve seen a lot of bands when they get big reminiscing about their days at the Fire House, the good old days when they just got together to play music.”

On a recent Wednesday evening, Mercedes Silva Avery, a sophomore at Redmond High, was playing a track from her band Electric Foot for ten other musicians (and two curious parents) who had gathered for the weekly Band Pool meeting. (The group voted best of the bunch gets to book a show.)

Electric Foot, with seven members and ambitious vocals, has a multilayered, almost orchestral sound, and Cullen, guiding the discussion, was clearly impressed. The other bands agreed, voting Electric Foot onto the stage for its own show on February 13.

“These kids are really at the forefront,” said Rana Shmait, a former Fire House kid turned staffer. “Their music is more cutting edge than the music people are making in their twenties.”

Mercedes absorbs the affirmation with a mix of determined cool and barely concealed teenage joy. For her, the Fire House has become a refuge — from the awkwardness of being a new kid at school, the confusion of shifting family arrangements, all the things that might lead a teenager to feel less than enchanted with her life. “It’s a good place for the kids who aren’t preppie to come,” she said. “They have a lot of respect, like, from everybody.”

Parents may have nagging worries about the place — sure, teens have been spotted outside smoking cigarettes, though they’d probably do that at school too — but during the past sixteen years of operation, there have been only three serious incidents at Fire House shows, staffers said.

“Actually, we’re amazed that parents don’t come down more often, because when they do, they’re really surprised,” Cullen said. One mom walked in to see her son cleaning a common room. She’d never seen him use a vacuum before.

For Lawrence, the young promoter in training, the Fire House provided one of the few islands of stability in an otherwise chaotic adolescence. Growing up he lived in five towns over seven years and bounced through countless schools. But he always came back to the Fire House, where staffers managed to nudge the lonely kid looking for friends toward a budding career in music.

“It’s made me a little bit more responsible,” said Lawrence, who finally dropped out of school at sixteen and soon earned a GED. “The Fire House helped me experience more of the real world. It got my name out there. I was talking to venue owners and musicians. This is definitely more than just a hobby, it’s a career builder.”

Academia never meant much to Lawrence, but that didn’t mean he was without ideas for a future. When he suggested that the Fire House sponsor a classic Battle of the Bands to raise money, Cullen plunged him into a crash course on concert production and promotion. A crowd of other, younger kids has followed and next year, Lawrence will pass the torch to them.

“Basically, it was ‘How-to-Produce-a-Major-Event-101’ — from A to Z,” said Cullen, a forty-one-year-old sometime drummer himself. “There are actually a lot of similarities between producing a huge stadium event and a small teen-center concert.”

Audiences for Lawrence’s Rock-a-Thons grew steadily — to the point that last year the event made seventeen hundred dollars and drew nearly three hundred people to its three final showdowns. (The winning band covered Johnny Cash, Iron Maiden, Aretha Franklin and Michael Jackson.)

“It was difficult and it was challenging, but in the end Andy was onstage, announcing the winners, and it had a huge impact on him,” Cullen said. Preparing for his third annual Rock-a-Thon, Lawrence now affects an air of experienced cool.

In the meantime, Whitney Ballen, pretty, pert and vaguely reminiscent of a young Stevie Nicks, is getting ready to debut her senior project at the anti-prom in April. It will be called “Pop 425” (a homage to their Eastside area code), though Whitney would rather title it “Pop Punk 425.”

“That sounds more rebel-ish,” she says with a grin. “I need that sometimes.”

Yet when she strums an acoustic guitar and sings the words, “It’s dangerous,” she sounds like a honey-sweet Suzanne Vega.

Halfway through her senior year, Whitney is already taking college courses, has applied to Cornish and is angling for an internship at either KEXP or Sub Pop. In other words, she is hardly the picture of disaffected youth. Her plan is to work in the music business, perhaps in radio broadcasting, and she is building steadily toward that goal.

“I’ve grown up with the Fire House, really,” she said, sitting at a microphone, guitar in her lap, preparing to do yet another take of her song “Little Secrets.” The studio exudes cool with its curved white vinyl banquette and recessed lighting. But for all the rock-star trappings of the place, these are still kids.

A young drummer walks in making fart sounds. Jeff Stillwell, sixteen-year-old leader of the band Schoolboy Gut Buster, identifies the culprit before even turning around. “There’s only one guy I know who would enter a room [like that],” he says, getting back to his work at the sound board before Whitney’s next take. During the day, Jeff attends high school in Sammamish. At night, he goes home to Issaquah. But several times a week he sheds suburbia and heads for the Fire House where he is no longer on his own; he is a member of a real live band. •