This is Underground Rhode Island

In 2001, students in Professor Paul Buhle's course "Theory and Methods of Oral History" began documenting the history of Rhode Island's underground culture through oral history interviews. By 2002, the project expanded to include musicians, performers, artists, activists, and organizers who have lived and worked in Rhode Island. In 2004, an Undergraduate Teaching and Research Assistantship (UTRA) group exhibited a collection of artifacts and interviews at the Newport Art Museum under the title, "Lost and Unknown: Stories from Rhode Island's Underground." In the winter of 2005, as work on the project continued, another exhibition, entitled "Intimacy and Isolation in Providence," was displayed at Brown University's John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization. As the wealth of research grew larger with each successive class, the need for a comprehensive database became evident. Thus, in the summer of 2005, another UTRA group began developing this website for use by a broad public, including educators, students, scholars, and anyone interested in Rhode Island's vibrant artistic culture.

Our research, which has predominantly focused on Providence, offers a view of the rich and diverse artistic culture that characterizes the "Renaissance City." The oral history project focuses on individuals operating within the underground setting and covers such diverse genres as theatre, dance, art collectives, co-ops, the Deaf community, bars, restaurants and venues, and the jazz, rock and roll, grunge, punk, and noise of local musicians. While there is no single subculture or movement that connects our interviews, there is a general theme of resistance to and movement away from the mainstream. Our interviews represent voices in a struggle for the creation of space and the preservation of community, people working both within and outside of the system to change and make meaning of their society. Interviewees such as Bert Crenca, Susan Clausen, Jose Piñera, and Xander Marro have worked to create and maintain alternative community spaces like AS220, the Dirt Palace, the Brown Co-ops, and Sol Gallery. Their stories convey intimate feelings of alienation and isolation, both involuntary and self-imposed, but also of joy and hope.

The Underground Rhode Island website is unique because it includes biographical information, artifact images, full-length transcripts as well as audio recordings and videos of interviews. Reproducing the words, sights, and sounds fulfills a key objective of oral history by giving historical authorship over to the people. The listener has access to more than just the interviewee's words. You can hear the tone and timbre of the narrator and see them express their feelings.

The interviews here were each influenced by specific tensions between interviewer and interviewee including differences in status, age, and sex. Younger students interviewed older subjects. Lynn Ho's interview is one of the few interviews of a female subject by a male student. In some interviews of male subjects by female students, the highly gendered interaction is evident. Brown University's uneasy relationship with its neighbors also influenced some interviews who resented the process of gentrification to which Brown has contributed. As such, none of these interviews is an uncomplicated remembrance of Rhode Island's past. Rather, they are themselves historical productions rooted in the conflicts and tensions of the present, including the circumstances in which these stories were collected. These interviews must be read critically as serving the needs of the interviewer and interviewee as well as a dialogue imbued through and through with power dynamics.

The interviews in this collection represent a range of individuals who participated in Rhode Island's arts and cultural scene that we have broadly grouped under the term "Underground Rhode Island." Perhaps the American poet Walt Whitman had individuals such as these in mind when he wrote, in Song of Myself:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

These oral histories speak to just some of the multitudes of Rhode Island's culture, providing a glimpse into the possibility of creating meaningful, alternative ways of life. "Underground" is used here not to define a cohesive alternative community, but to include cultural innovators whose art and activism have taken place in opposition to or on the margins of mainstream culture. For instance, on the surface, the Deaf community seems to have little in common with the Black Repertory Theater; however, the interviews suggest an underlying theme: alienation from and frustration with mainstream society which necessitates the creation of an alternative community.

In an area as small as Rhode Island, these impulses have created a loose but distinct Underground; a "community" with transient and tangential members as well as mainstays, local heroes and icons. This "community" is a series of intersecting subcultures and individuals, which share a geography and a regional identity. Their idiosyncratic circumstances and collective experiences are captured in these interviews. What has kept much of the Rhode Island's culture "underground" is its locality. Many of the artists have not achieved recognition on a national level and many have not sought to participate in the national corporate culture industries. Their art and values come from a resistance against commodification and commercialization. In the case of Providence's noise music scene, this resistance is a defining feature as their music is meant to be heard live in the Olneyville mills, their natural venues. The interviews allow us an insider's perspective to an intimate intersection of subcultures that have been seldom glimpsed and rarely documented.

The importance of this website is inextricably connected to the importance of oral history as an exercise. Oral history aims to give voice to those that have otherwise become lost in the process of historical documentation-voices that are usually found in the margins of society. Oral history tells the story of "history from the bottom up." Underground Rhode Island offers a way to bridge the gaps between the subjective, lived experiences of everyday people and the static textbooks privileged in the world of academia. Some of these interviews are candid, while others are self-edited. They are at times enlightening and are always deeply personal and intimately connected to the wishes and memories of those who tell them. While reading or listening to these stories, a picture of Rhode Island culture, rendered with personal anecdotes and meaningful memories, is painted. Although the intention of this project is not to definitively portray Rhode Island's arts and culture, it is a starting point (and continual work in progress) for providing a history which include key figures that composed it. The project simultaneously seeks to foster an understanding between generations and aims to preserve unknown ways of life. Thus, "Underground Rhode Island: Lost and Unknown Stories" is an intersection of artists, activists, musicians, members of the Deaf community, story-tellers, gallery and club owners, and key players of a larger Rhode Island community that has existed under the radar of mainstream culture.

Underground Rhode Island is a sampling of the ongoing story of everyday people trying to make sense of the contradictions and conflicts surrounding them, whether gentrification, immigration, economic success or failure. It is the story of everyday people taking action to affect change in their society.

In the future, students in Professor Paul Buhle's class will broaden this study of Rhode Island's underground artistic community, fleshing out the interests of past classes and developing new ones. As this project continues to develop, we welcome comments, concerns, corrections, and additions to the website. Additionally, if you are interested in being interviewed or know someone else who would be, please contact Paul Buhle at the Department of American Civilization, Brown University.

—2005 UTRA students Yesenia Barragan, Sarah Bird, Fokion Burgess and Nolan Shutler

About the project

"Underground Rhode Island" is a website using a term convenient to describe many phenomena under one rubric. But it is also living thing, so to speak, because it has been created through the energy of young people developing their skills and their areas of interest, learning about new avenues of investigation and documentation. It is also very much ongoing, in the infancy of a long process of discovery by generations of students ahead, and the infancy of using the web in a variety of ways, as an interactive source of information on the life of a community.

This is, so far as can be known, a unique venture within the field of oral history as well as an effort to connect the historic record with the rising interest of younger generations in what may still be called "counter-cultures" (a term borrowed from the 1960s), but might better be called the creative cultures outside the mainstream. That Rhode Island, and Providence in particular, offer this site is perhaps a curiosity, one more curiosity in a regional culture given to recalling Roger Williams, Ann Hutchinson, Thomas Dorr and more recent rebels at odds with existing customs and laws. It also marks a fresh way of thinking about the rebellious liveliness in the late twentieth century and beyond, a period of cultural retreat and political conservatism. Whatever it is that draws today's young people to Providence, or induces them to stay there after graduation, is in any case powerfully interesting, and above all a contribution to American culture at large. That students and other young people should have formulated the project themselves--with my own guidance and encouragement--is entirely logical. Perhaps it could not have been created any other way.

Underground Rhode Island, the web site, contains a great deal more than oral history. The visual documentation of art work and of performance art alone would extend its reach beyond the usual oral history collection. But it is also true to say that the project began with oral history and reflects the character of the field, past and present.

Oral history itself can be viewed as a relatively recent scholarly innovation. The earliest oral history collections, as such, go back to the 1950s, the creation of both the earliest presidential libraries and prominent university projects (notably at Columbia University) for the recording of prominent individuals without written memoirs, from politics, business, labor and the arts. The perceived archival need to fill in certain blanks within the public record, to learn who influenced whom at the highest levels of institutional importance, was presumed to be the source of useful, if distinctly secondary, evidence for the future scholar.

Then came the 1960s, and a new kind of constituency for oral history, reshaping the way that it was practiced and even imagined. Underground Rhode Island is most definitely a child of this dramatic shift. The still-small field of oral history was transformed by the direct and indirect influence of progressive social movements, likewise by folkloristic impulses towards discrete community histories.

Younger scholars inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, the Peace Movement or the Women's Liberation Movement, to take well-known examples, sought to probe the origins, personalities and less known local stories, through the lives of leaders but also of the otherwise forgotten rank-and-file. A new intentionality could be found in formal oral history projects, even more so in the work of individuals determined, with little or no financial backing, to record, to learn, and if possible to make available to others some crucial area of hitherto unrecorded knowledge and insight.

Oral history thus grew into a distinct field of study bearing, in large part, a mission sometimes described as "history from the bottom up." The shift of interviewing from the source of data to the creation of interpretive texts soon had its counterpart in the shift of the interviewer from supposedly objective viewer to active participant in the creation of meaning. One of the most famous of all oral history volumes, titled Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, characteristically grew out of a long-term community history project in Buffalo, New York. Its signal accomplishment was the sympathetic identification of a cross-class and to a lesser degree cross-racial world of lesbian networks in mid-century. These fieldworkers, with their subjects, had "discovered" what had previously been invisible to those outside this world, and unthinkable in any conventional history of Buffalo.

This study, like a number of others concerning small town and rural life, had the special intent of rescuing the human story at a time when the community itself was in the process of disintegration. In the case of Buffalo's lesbians, the liberation movements of the 1960s-70s had removed the barriers that had kept the participants in place. More usually, the spread of automobiles, the absorption of an erstwhile village into a nearby city, the closure of an industry (factory or mine), even the abandonment of a non-English language by the new generation signaled the closure. One could only look back.

It was also now possible to look back with considerable insight, because the ending customarily sharpened the minds of past community members. In the usual oral history technique of the "life story," the recollections of an earlier phase of youth and early maturity gain a piquancy mixing happiness and sorrow, family and friends. Most commonly, the life before the ubiquitous automobile and air conditioning was a life spent far more outside, often in conversations with other community members and coworkers, or in clubs and assorted institutions from bars to church groups that were likely to play a far larger role than they would among generations to follow. Not only, but especially, for minority groups, it would be seen as an era of less money but more sociability.

The Providence of the 1950s that serves as setting for Underground Rhode Island has often been seen as a city in severe stagnation. Industries that had picked up one last time during the Second World War were now, very often, on their profit-line last legs, with ready contingency plans for either moving elsewhere or shutting down entirely. Outward migration, small by the standards of faster-growing American cities, was nonetheless traumatic for Providence, with an unprecedented drop in population, most visibly of the prosperous middle class en route to Cranston, Barrington or elsewhere. It was widely admitted, decades later, that "urban renewal" had leveled vast quantities of valuable historic architecture, a move half-rationalized at the time with the sentiment that "something had to be done" and that federal funding might not be so readily available again.

This view, largely from the top and the middle, entirely obscured the view from below, effectively captured in the only way possible: through oral history. Racial segregation, formal but mainly informal, was under pressure and on the wane, even--in grand and painful irony--as the dispossession of African Americans from the neighborhood they had occupied for more than a century was being carried out. Historic segregation within the city's nightlife yielded sporadically, under conditions very different from housing or employment.

Rhode Island's live music scene, for instance, a source of pride throughout the twentieth century, was naturally a site of youthful exuberance and social experimentation. Bohemianism associated with the Rhode Island School of Design and an insular crowd of East Side hipsters connected in large and small ways to the African American community, for the first time, thanks to the Celebrity Club and its clones. The hostile response of officialdom, the police in particular, was in no way surprising: not much earlier, some of the best music clubs had also been speakeasies, in a city where the reputation of organized crime was large and well-founded. The Celebrity Club, moreover, lacked the customary power of the payoff that had kept sin mostly safe elsewhere in town for decades. So it closed, after less than a decade. The very neighborhood was also wiped out by a badly misguided "renewal," most of a historic neighborhood of Free Blacks going back at least a century and a half pushed out, into overcrowded and inadequate housing in South Providence. Perhaps for this shameful reason among others, the Celebrity Club story has remained little known until the issue of Rhode Island History that has grown out of the larger project.

If the Celebrity Club is a sort of foundation, then the backstory and the rise of AS220 as a premier counter-cultural center in Providence might provide a symbolic superstructure for our story. Bert Crenca, a North Providence homeboy, RISD dropout, cultural avant-gardist and manifesto-writer offers documentarians a veritable planet around which so many moons and satellites have whirled for decades. Many of the early interviews feature, in one way or another, artists and intellectuals who intersect with AS220. This narrative might read as one from rebellion to successful institutionalization, but that would surely be short-sighted, because the rebellious impulses around AS220 only increase in size with the sentiment of its varied constituents.

Here, symbols might be described as turning geopolitical or at least geocultural. Olneyville, the epicenter of Providence industrial life from the Civil War era to the early Cold War, saw strikes and unions, blue collar cultural institutions of every kind, and of course some of the largest and most modern textile mills in the world. Until that age came to an end with the Northeast's own early-budding rust belt, highway construction through the residential district, and so on. Decades pass and the mills close, with flea markets in their shells the height of neighborhood activity.

Then several surprising things happen, all crucial to our story. The delayed effects of the 1965 change of immigration law sees a startling shift in the social demography of Providence. Its South side and Olneyville give birth to new communities, most notably Latino and among those residents, immigrants from the Dominican Republic first of all. They and other immigrants, along with a fringe of oldtime residents, now share space with yet another new population: young people bent upon creating a culture of their own, somewhere within a distressingly consumerist, self-involved, suburbanized and conservative middle class America.

That RISD students and graduates would become part of this community was no special surprise. For generations, all the way back to the turn of the twentieth century, RISDites and their professors had been seen as suspiciously free-minded, given to experiments in life as well as art. That Brown students and former students would join them was a far greater surprise. The deeply conservative and WASPy Brown of the 1950s, best known in some circles for its future recruits to intelligence agencies (and for a president who maintained his own shadowy presence in one particularly ominous agency), had only a mild burst of 1960s-style radicalism, compared with comparable universities. Over the subsequent decades, the drift towards a greater liberal-mindedness continued through the appeal of a wide-open curriculum. Some erstwhile Brown political leaders, widely admired on campus, found their way into community reformist activities of many kinds during their school years and after graduation.

But these numbers of determined idealists were always small, and the developments during the final decade of the twentieth century marked something different. The sense of Providence as a center for experimental arts and artists grew more certain, and out-of-staters seeking cheaper digs and a circle of supporters, friends and lovers began to make their way here (and to Pawtucket) in larger numbers. So did youngsters of many different kinds, including musicians and artists who had skipped college or were scraping along at making a living, considering their options.

Providence was becoming in a small way like those counter-cultural centers like Portland, Oregon, a place where those definitely outside the Red State consensus (and many of the Blue State assumptions, as well) knew they would find others like themselves. If San Francisco and Montreal boasted Anarchist Bookfairs, then why not Providence (naturally, at AS220)? Why shouldn't innovative comic art and music happen here (according to the Comics Journal and Spin magazine, respectively)? Why-to make a larger point-should ruthless developers be able to milk the lure of deindustrialized Providence for all the worth that generations of residents had put into making decent lives there? Why not a different future?

These were the kinds of questions that residents and visitors to "Olney" (it had by now acquired a new nickname, seven generations after being dubbed the "Terrible Tenth" War by the Providence Journal) asked themselves. They answered with bicycle and other cooperatives, cultural events of many kinds, forums and other presentations of a mood and sensibility that brought life and vitality.

A new community being born? That was a grand expectation, but not a terribly unreasonable aspiration, within a nation whose military, economic and social leadership seemed to drag society ever downward. Underground Rhode Island coming to the surface? Perhaps not, in the nature of things. But certainly coming to stand for something ("If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything"). The future was open. And the task for Underground Rhode Island was not to prescribe or applaud but to document the presence of lives and of hope.

—Paul Buhle

 

About the Rhode Island Underground

Jean Jacques Rousseau's notorious declaration in his Confessions, "I am made unlike anyone I have ever met," is considered a fundamental statement of modernism, the creation of the autonomous self. Several generations later in Paris, those young men and women who came to be called "Bohemians" could be found in certain districts, artists and those drawn to the arts, living and coupling freely, dressing colorfully in old clothes, made up a gathering of cultural rebels. Such rebels have been found in many places during the last century and a half, but as relatively few outsiders recognized until recent years, they have been a vivid part of Rhode Island history and culture.

We might trace a line of descent all the way back to Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, but it is more likely that the early decline of a historic textile industry found a twentieth century, polyglot Providence and vicinity more lively for its culture than its economics. The Rhode Island School of Design and its neighbor, the Art Club, had seen denizens of bohemia from early on (so had Newport and its artistically-inclined summer crowd). To the setting of the most immigrant and most Catholic state in the nation came the Second World War, the almost overwhelming presence of the Navy and its heavily partying servicemen and servicewomen. If the modern legal definitions of homosexuality dated to Newport cases of the 1920s, gay and lesbian settings flourished—under cover of closet—while jazz provided a reason and space for interracial crowds hitherto forbidden or punished by civic authorities. By 1950 if not before, the already famous live music scene of the city half-way between Boston and New York emerged as memorable Rhode Island, Underground Rhode Island.

Generations of arts-inclined Rhode Island natives, and those drawn to school here, thus threw themselves into the fun of one low-cost (formerly factory or commercial) district after another becoming an unofficial arts center—until gentrification drove them elsewhere. By the middle 1960s, when college students in other parts of the country invaded presidents' offices for damning documents and faced off against National Guardsmen by putting flowers in rifle barrels, Rhode Island (the now-vanished Rocky Point in particular) was deep into the concerts of Janis Joplin and what came to be known as "Art Rock," a self-conscious satire of form, in groups like The Fabulous Motels (featuring the totemic local figure who by then had renamed himself Rudy Cheeks). Trinity Theater, in its own ways, made an effort to stay on the cutting edge when another company of its kind might have stuck with Fantastics revivals.

Unknown Rhode Island documents what can only be described as the non-emergence of an underground that remained, by its own lights, determinedly underground in the decades since. The totemic Mad Peck poster of 1978, deepest Providence (where "the rich live on Power and the rest of us live off Hope") suited the dj, cartoonist and vernacular-items hustler who created the poster, as the collage of publicity items suit the assorted theater companies (most come and gone) of the Scitamard Players, Art Ship Project, Star Theater, Silver Sun Ltd and the hardy survivors Rites & Reason, Perishable Theater, Providence Black Rep and of course Trinity. Meanwhile, the Living Room, the Rocket, the Met Café, Club Babyhead, Lupos and others hosted determinedly underground rock, with the emerging stars like The Talking Heads (from RISD) and familiar stop-overs like Rash of Stabbings, Neutral Nations, The Replacements and others added to the ongoing excitement recorded in the counter-culture New Paper and occasionally (but only occasionally) in the Providence Journal. The Meatball Fluxus doings that offered local (North Providence) drummer and painter Bert Crenca a way forward with his multifaceted talents turned out to be a glimpse of the future.

By the early 1990s, the scene was taking on a new geopolitical dimension with the shift of hipsters into Olneyville, significantly known from the 1870s to the 1940s as the toughest working class district of Providence with the biggest mills and the most militant, strike-prone workforce. Lodged in empty mill buildings, often living under code, youngsters set out to rework the mix of (loud) music and (non-narrative) comic strips, make communitarian institutions like bike co-ops and local fairs and circuses—and above all resist the threats of the wrecking ball.

Oldtime Rhode Island bohemians, inhabitants of a lesbian nightclub in Woonsocket or the locals who became artists after attending RISD on the GI Bill after the Second World War, would not likely have been surprised. The Northeast Anarchist Family Reunion and Carnival in 2000 and the connections made with the militant community group DARE, the Pan-Twilight Circus, the Hive art collective, the bands Lightening Bolt and The Purple Ivy Shadows all made sense, Rhode Island sense. Fort Thunder and the surrounding Eagle Square, where the community made a stand (ultimately futile, but nevertheless heroic) against the developers inspired a notable outbreak of dangerous art with reverberations that have not ceased.

—Paul Buhle

The Scholarly Technology Group

This website was implemented as a Brown Scholarly Technology Group faculty grant project during the 2004-2005 academic year. The STG faculty grant program is an opportunity for Brown University faculty in the humanities and related disciplines, to work on projects that integrate digital technology into their research.

Kerri Hicks, of STG, collaborated with Professor Buhle to develop the project, both conceptually as well as materially. A cadre of able students did both technical and research work over the 18 months that the various phases of the project were in development, and Erik Resly '08 created the design asthetic for the web site.

STG worked closely with Patrick Yott and Anne Caldwell in Brown's Center for Digital Scholarship, in the Brown University Library's Digital Services Department. With the insight of librarians, we were able to catalog and preserve materials used in this project, and maintain them as part of a greater digital collection.

The web site was designed to be accessible to users of all abilities, with any user agent. Due to the nature of recorded material, certain users who are challenged by hearing or listening may not be able to use the MP3 files. However, all recordings have associated transcripts, and some interviews are text transcripts only. All transcripts are encoded in standards-compliant XHTML.