Heavy music, humid nights: Kalamazoo’s RunOff brings the noise — and the heart

Editor’s Note: Welcome to Curtain Call — your front-row seat to the unique, lively, and memorable performances shaping Kalamazoo’s arts scene. Supported by the I.S. Gilmore Foundation, this series highlights the creativity and community that make each show something special.

KALAMAZOO, MI — The three-car garage was like an inferno.

No kidding, it was warm and humid that Friday evening in Milwood, Aug. 15. The RunOff, a house show venue, was hosting a couple of nights of heavy music to help raise donations to improve the facility. Top of the list would be better insulation, ventilation, heating for winter, and cooling for summer. 

For the benefit of their two neighbors, the owners of The RunOff shut the garage up tight when the music plays. This gave the effect of being trapped in the presence of extreme sounds.

We’re all “sealed in” now, Ben Boggs of Kalamazoo’s Drink Their Blood announces as the garage doors shut. He intros, “This is a song about The RunOff, it’s called ‘Shiver.’ It’s so cold in here right now.”

He blew a haunting refrain on his sax. A fog machine added to the heavy, humid atmosphere. The band built up a slow, ominous, metallic backing. Then they hit the gas, merciless guitars and drums driving the audience into a submission of head-banging and hair-swinging, Boggs set the sax aside and erupted in vocals of roaring torment, releasing damned spirits from his large frame.

Then the sweating frontman, paying tribute to the old gods with his “Bark at the Moon” era Ozzy t-shirt, led the sweating audience to clap along for another haunting sax solo. Every damp member of the audience, damned souls steaming in a sulfurous chamber, clapped.

They clapped as a community, despite the heat, as lovers of loud and heavy music, a culture that has a lot of heart under all those black t-shirts. 

Heavy music, safe space

House shows have been a part of Kalamazoo’s culture since at least the 1980s — DIY, make-your-own-fun, below-the-radar performance spaces. Second Wave covered the scene’s rebirth after COVID in 2021. 

This venue mainly showcases heavy sounds, punk, metal, and combinations of noise. One might imagine it’s a lawless and chaotic scene, but The RunOff has its rules.

Volunteer doorman/bouncer Marty Burgess tracked a guy passing by him without a glance at the donation box, smoking a non-tobacco cigarette, headed for the garage.

“You can’t smoke that in there!” Burgess says. He also points to the money box.  

The guy walked away, but returned later without his joint and put a few dollars in the box.

“Some people think this is just like some party,” Burgess says to us, “that you can just walk in here, doing whatever.”

He points out that he’s not most people’s perception of the bouncer type, being gay, 50-something, and without an imposing build. Luckily, since starting with the venue in 2021, he’s only had to eject two patrons because they thought the genre of music permitted them to misbehave. “They think, ‘Ooo, punk rock!’” There was some moshing. “I hate that word! They were belligerent, and I said, ‘You’re out of here!'”

This is an open, welcoming-to-all, all-ages, safe space, but there are rules. 

You should put some money in the box — though this night the donations were going to improve the venue, most nights, all of the money goes to the bands. While there were some BYOB beers being consumed, extreme inebriation is discouraged. 

Free water is provided. There’s NARCAN on hand. Patrons can use the family’s bathroom, which also features a bidet — a joking argument erupts about whether that’s “bourgeois” or not. 

The family running The RunOff is Garrett and Rachel Yates. The couple were outsiders to the scene when they got to Kalamazoo in 2018. She was from Upstate New York, and he was from Southern California. 

Garret says that he grew up going to shows in California before doing a stint in the Navy. He met Rachel and, attracted by the Kalamazoo Promise, moved to Michigan. 

Where are the shows in Kalamazoo, they wondered? He was also a musician (and is now part of local duo Bronson Arm), so how to meet other bands?

The Yateses say that when they moved to their first Kalamazoo home in Westnedge Hill, a neighbor spotted them as “punks” from across the street and invited them to a house show. That neighbor was Burgess.

It clicked for Garrett that all they needed was space and a PA, and “you can throw a show.”  He tried it, liked it. They purchased an old dance studio in Milwood, put up lights, a fog machine, and a stage in the garage, and used the dance studio space as a room for touring bands to overnight. (Rachel noted that the house is cinderblock, so with the bands roaring in the garage, their children can sleep.)

The shows grew. They’ve frequently had up to 100 people in attendance. They also attracted national touring bands, such as Child Bite, who’d played Madison Square Garden with Pantera within just months of performing in the Yates’ garage.

Family vibe

Many of the bands that Friday night were from around Michigan — Phantom, Iron Sharpens Iron, At water, and Flood the Desert. The night closed with Kalamazoo duo Lucius Fox.

But first, Drink Their Blood and opener, local ‘anti-comedian’ Derek Lee Feltner. Feltner portrays himself as a comic who is horrifically bad, nervous, and clumsy. He got laughs, but his impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s nude scene in “Terminator,” ripping off his clothes to reveal a white bodysuit with drawn-on muscles, killed.

It was to be a long, brutal night of entertainment inside a sauna/garage, so much of the crowd hung outside. 

Before sunset, Rachel’s mother, Holly Hulfish, stopped by to return her grandkids, Effie, 8, and Addie, 13. She also brought her little dog, “Simba, the toothless wonder,” and the Yates’ dog Penelope, who immediately got picked up and snuggled by large metal musicians.

“It is a family vibe, that is for sure,” Hulfish says of the home/venue. 

“Obviously, when they first started this, I’m thinking about the kids and safety and all that,” she says. 

Most of the volunteers, audience members, and bands know each other. “Effie knows all these people; they know her and Addie. So I don’t worry about them, they’re safe,” Hulfish says. 

She adds, “And if anybody were to try anything with them, everybody would shred ’em.”

Hulfish tells of a punk birthday party for Effie. The family was new to the area during COVID, and Effie wasn’t able to meet friends her own age. 

So in 2023, for Effie’s 6th birthday, Kalamazoo punk band Thee Elder Gods “put on a concert. ” They wore shirts printed with, “Effie the Punk Rock Princess.”

Hulfish says, “How cool is that, that they’re all her family and they’re all her friends?”

Addie and Burgess join the conversation.

“She (Addie) made me this,” Burgess says with some emotion, a bracelet that reads “GUNCLE,” for “gay uncle.”  He’s the doorman/bouncer, and when Effie and Addie are out among the crowd, babysitter.

“I think it’s a very welcoming place,” Addie says. “I’m not just saying it because I live here. Genuinely, I think this is a very welcoming community.”

“Everybody knows everybody,” her grandma adds.

Later, Rachel says, “My kids have been treated so sweetly by the biggest, meatiest-looking guys. People come through and are so kind, and love what is going on here.”

A community of “AAAHHHHGGGRRR!!!”

This writer had to go home, take a break, and rehydrate. But then returned.

Six very heavy bands are hard to sit through. Or stand on concrete and sweat through. Even if I’ve got Motörhead and even Napalm Death on my iPod. 

I’ve heard it on records, but never stood close to someone expelling demons into the microphone, an “AAAAHHHHHHHGGGGGRRRR!!!” backed by bursting double-time rhythms. How does a human make that noise, I wonder.

I like it, but in smaller servings. I’m such a poser. But the true fans stuck through it, in an atmosphere that was bestial and corrupt and evil with this summer’s heat. Hopefully, The RunOff raised enough money for that air conditioner. 

Detroit’s At Water’s sound was aggro, lead singer pacing about like a Charles Manson looking for a family. Flood the Desert, from Grand Rapids, was a bit more musical and had a nerdy side with their song about young Anakin Skywalker (who later became Darth Vader), “The Chosen One.”

People kept telling me that the last act was not to be missed. Kalamazoo’s Lucius Fox, described in the press release for their upcoming album, “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes,” as a “maximalist instrumental duo” with elements of “prog metal, math rock, post rock… from Americana to black metal.”

And Jeremy Cronk (guitar/synth/many pedals) and Paul Drake Jr. (drums) threw it all together in a sonic cyclone that’s hard to describe. No vocals, but a vocal-like roar seemed to come out of the electronics. As if Rush was boiled down into a concentrate, then fed to Tasmanian devils, who’re then given guitars and drums….?

They lived up to the hype. Bonus points: They were smiling, clearly enjoying the ride on their wave of controlled chaos and melodic noise.

The handful of survivors in the audience were smiling, too. 

Perry, a RunOff volunteer who was there since the beginning of the day when he was vacuuming up spider webs in the garage, came up to me to rant about how great the band was, and says, “This is why we do this!” 

Do what? Simply, to make a stage — make a home — for crazy noise, beloved by its community.

To see who’s playing at The RunOff, go to their LinkTree. To attend a show, DM them for the address.