The door opens a crack immediately after I knock on it. From inside the house, a figure lurking in the shadows peers out at me.

“Hello?” the figure asks.

“Um, this might sound like a weird question, but is this where the Haunted Kitchen is?” I ask. I know full well that it is, but I don’t want to alarm my barely visible host by making any accusations.

“Just a second.” The figure leaves the cracked doorway to consult someone behind the door. It is early afternoon on a Wednesday, and I’m hoping to talk to the guys responsible for the Haunted Kitchen, one of Lawrence’s underground music venues. The Haunted Kitchen is run out of the house that I’m standing in front of, whose address the owners have asked me not to publish. The guys in charge have a reputation for being secretive, which has helped them avoid the trouble with the law that other similar venues face.

From behind the door I hear a barely audible “...wants to know about the Haunted Kitchen,” followed by a murmured response. Just as my eyes begin to adjust to the darkness behind the sliver of doorway that I’m peering into, the door swings open, and two guys with long hair and black T-shirts invite me inside.

Suddenly, I’m face-to-face with Jeff Milner and Daniel Noakes, the guys who do most of the work for the Haunted Kitchen. When they’re not at their day jobs or practicing with their band, the two spend their time booking bands and setting up shows.

They’ve been friends since they were kids together back in Oklahoma City and have been running music venues for the better part of a decade – yet they’re both only 22 now.

When we met later for an interview, I discovered that I had stumbled upon a world unto itself, a world I hadn’t even imagined existed: DIY. DIY, which stands for Do It Yourself, is an anti-consumerism counterculture that exists not only in music but in film, art and anything else that people have gotten fed up with buying from corporations and want to make for themselves. DIY music venues are pieced together by music lovers who build stages in their basements, build or buy their own sound equipment and host their own shows — usually free of charge, as they tend to exist in areas that aren’t zoned for commercial activity. On Saturday, Feb. 19, I set out to experience the world of DIY by hitting as many underground shows as I could in one night — starting with one at the Haunted Kitchen.

The Haunted Kitchen is really the basement of a decrepit old house near the student ghetto, which is just east of campus. The first thing you notice when you see it — after the flaking yellow paint — is the porch, which sits precariously like the deck of a sinking ship. Somehow it manages to support a stained couch by the front door, where a half dozen people hang out to smoke during the show. I get there painfully early, so the porch is empty when I arrive. The flier had said that the show began at 8 p.m., which actually meant 11 p.m., as it turns out.

Inside, old couches held down by silent, half-awake guys wearing black hoodies make up the bulk of the living room’s furniture, and a hefty stereo system on the wall blasts a hardcore punk CD. While the house’s tenants tend to be into punk and metal, they say that they’ve booked all kinds of bands, including local indie rock groups.

The Kitchen’s décor matches the musical tastes of its occupants. Posters from a couple of bands and random artwork — some of it Noakes’— patchily cover the walls. Beyond the kitchen at the back of the house lies the door to the real Kitchen –– the basement. As small as it is, the basement is impressively well laid-out. Milner and Noakes have been doing DIY shows since they were 15, so they know how to set up a basement venue. When they first got the house, it already had a short stage built in the corner. They added a merchandise bar in the adjacent corner and a slew of decorations, like a plastic head hanging from the ceiling by a hook. Pillows sit in all of the window cases with foam eggcrates scattered around on the walls to muffle sound to the outside. They say that their neighbors never complain about the noise, and the only time they had any real trouble with the police was when someone accidentally left the back door open, which they now keep locked shut.

The basement holds about 30 people, though when I get there — way too early — there are only a couple of people milling around. Noakes is the first to greet me as I walk inside, offering me a beer and the spot where he’d been sitting on the broken futon against the living room wall. He apologizes for the quality of the beer (Milwaukee’s Best) as he presses the warm can into my hand. He frets a little about the lack of people at first, but about 40 more people will show up before the show starts. Though the Kitchen relies entirely on word of mouth and fliers to advertise, their shows tend to draw enough people to fill the basement.

As the night wears on, I find myself talking to an orange-haired girl who is a bit tipsy from pre-partying and a diminutive guy who seems to know everyone in the house. The girl is a freshman at the University of Kansas, and both are veterans of Lawrence DIY shows. “I just have to see the Roustabouts,” the girl gushes, talking about the headlining band. She turns to address the other guy, whom she knows from before. “Did you see them last time they came through?” she says.

He laughs. “Uh, sort of. I was on mushrooms at the time,” he says, “and I kind of freaked out and had to leave.” Eventually the two leave me to go have a smoke on the porch, so I join a couple of other guys in helping the Roustabouts to carry in their equipment. The guys in the Roustabouts tell me that though they don’t play a lot of DIY shows — they’re still in high school, which makes touring difficult — they know Noakes and Milner from the old days when the two used to run DIY venues back in Oklahoma City. They have come up specifically to see them. Some bands, however, tour the DIY circuit almost exclusively. Milner and Noakes say they’ve brought in bands from as far away as the Netherlands, which is amazing considering that the bands don’t really get paid.

The money issue is a big one for DIY venues. Because it would be illegal for residents of a house to charge money for holding shows in their basements — the houses are in residential, not commercial, zones — the people running DIY venues almost always ask for donations to pay for the bands’ gas and such. The line between “donation” and “entry fee” can be a thin one for police officers who want to shut down a continual noise problem or landlords who want to protect their property from the damage that is associated with running a DIY venue. Meredith Vacek, who graduated from the University last May, used to live at the Pink House and now lives at the Horror House, both DIY venues, and says that a misunderstanding about money was one of the things that got her first venue shut down. She and her former roommates at the Pink House used to run shows in their living room until, she says, a couple of articles published in the Lawrence Journal-World reported that, among other things, the Pink House was charging admission. Pete Berard, who also used to live there, says that he and his roommates did shows only as a “labor of love,” but that the landlord shut the venue down shortly after the articles ran.

The Pink House was just one of the DIY venues to pop up in Lawrence during the past five years. Seniors at the University also might remember shows at the Halfway House, the Pirate House, the Horror House and the Kremlin. The residents of these houses formed a network for underground music in Lawrence. They all knew each other; the residents of the Pink House and Halfway House in particular used to hang out together all the time, and sometimes they both used the same guy as the Pirate House to book bands. And almost every member of each house has been involved with KJHK at some point. Despite their closeness, the houses booked a wide variety of music. Vacek says that while the Pirate House focused on punk and crust metal, the Halfway House and Pink House pulled in all kinds of bands: punk, pop, screamo, avant-garde post punk, you name it. Neil Mulka, Kansan staff writer, Leavenworth senior and former resident of the Kremlin, says that his house would take in whoever was willing to play there. With DIY venues, availability of bands often determines a show’s content more than the musical tastes of the house’s residents.

At about 11 p.m. the opening band, Öroku, goes on. Öroku is the Haunted Kitchen’s house band. All five of the members live in the house; Milner is the lead singer and Noakes plays guitar. As soon as they assemble on the stage, the incandescent lights are replaced with red ones, and the collection of long-haired, black-wearing guys rip into a set of crust metal songs for an audience of about 20 people. The environment is as relaxed as the music is loud. Dylan Desmond, a former resident of the Pirate House, happens to be in the crowd that night. Desmond, Overland Park senior, lived at the Pirate House for a year when it was still a DIY venue. He says he still tries to hit DIY shows every now and then. The community was and is tight, so it isn’t surprising that the guys from 1331 Vermont — my next stop for the evening — know all about the Haunted Kitchen and had even been to a couple of shows there.

The only thing the Haunted Kitchen and 1331 Vermont have in common, aside from both being DIY venues, is that they’re both yellow houses. While the Kitchen is the embodiment of secrecy and organization, 1331 Vermont has an open, haphazard feel to it. It doesn’t even have a name; it’s just “1331 Vermont.” And while Milner and Noakes of the Haunted Kitchen have asked me not to publish their address, the residents of the other yellow house are more than happy to see their address in the paper, saying that they hope it will attract more people to their shows. Despite the lack of an address on the outside of the house, I have no problem finding it. Loud music blasts from the door as a swarm of people spill out of it, covering the porch and the lawn. With a crowd of easily 60 people milling about holding plastic cups, it lookes more like a house party than anything else, which is roughly what the residents are going for. Patrick Struebing and Kevin Thompson, two of the four people who live at 1331 Vermont, say that the events at their house aren’t strictly shows or parties, but more a combination of the two.

In a tiny living room sandwiched between the kitchen (filled with kegs) and the foyer (filled with people looking for kegs) is Ike Turner Overdrive and at least 30 cheering people. I elbow my way around, trying to find a good spot, but eventually give up and resign myself to getting bumped into continuously by the stream of keg traffic. As I stand there, mashed in a crowd of people wearing hipster clothes and thick black-rimmed glasses, the lead singer and guitarist of Ike Turner Overdrive rip their shirts off and decide to deafen me with driving, high-energy rock. Thompson says that he and his roommates don’t have a specific musical preference for the bands they book. They usually just ask their friends’ bands to play their shows. In this case, at least, they seem to have lucked out and been friends with a band that the crowd likes. The audience screams and cheers at the end of every song, completely unlike the relaxed, Zen-like enjoyment of Öroku at the Haunted Kitchen. Near the end of Ike Turner Overdrive’s set, the guitarist starts spraying whatever he was drinking at the crowd, nailing us at point-blank range.

Struebing and Thompson say that 1331 Vermont tends to have some crazy parties/shows, which can be expensive for them. The night that I went to see them, Kevin got a $70 ticket from the police because of a noise complaint from an unknown neighbor. While the Haunted Kitchen has homemade soundproofing to prevent problems like that, 1331 Vermont has a broken window that does nothing to stop the music from leaking out. The tenants at 1331 Vermont also got a bathroom door kicked down by a member of the band Vibralux, who claimed he thought there was an orgy going on inside. Add that to the lovely pencil mural of random people’s outlined faces that someone left on their wall, and that they’ll have to explain to their landlord and all of the personal belongings that always get stolen from any DIY venue, and you can see that they aren’t making any money on this deal. But when I asked if they were going to stop having shows because of the expenses, particularly the ticket, I got a laugh and a “fuck that; no,” from Thompson. “We’re having a party five days after I have to pay the fine,” he says. Struebing says that they continue hosting events because, after years of going to great parties in Lawrence, he and his roommates want to give something back to the community. That, and they just really like to have huge parties.

The last venue I hit is Solidarity at 1119 Massachusetts St. After parking my car, I walk past the crowd outside of It’s Brothers Bar & Grill, 1105 Massachusetts St., and find my way to the radical library. There’s no music — the first bad sign. The lights are off; also bad. Finally I see a sign on the door that says the show has been canceled. Later I was told that the show had been canceled because the band had broken up — no guarantees in DIY, but then, even mainstream venues are subject to cancellations.

Solidarity does double duty as both a radical library and a music venue. Volunteers Kat Randolph and Katy Andrus say that the venue does about two shows each month, packing people into the deceptively large space. Originally they were worried that they’d have problems with the police, being right across from the station, but Randolph and Andrus say that It’s Brothers and the dance studio next door tend to make much more noise.

The DIY scene actually works mainly by word-of-mouth, friend-to-friend communication, Vacek says. With her punky hair and multiple piercings, Vacek sticks out in the typical Lawrence crowd, and she seems to know everyone. She says that she and her roommates never had trouble finding enough people to fill their house for shows. When it comes to organizing on a national scale, DIY venues and the bands that play at them turn to a higher power: Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life. BYOFL began its life as a page in Maximumrocknroll Magazine 15 years ago. Venues, bands and anyone who had a couch for traveling punk musicians to crash on posted their contact information. The page quickly became an independent book, which came out once each year. The problem with this was the considerable cost of putting out such a publication sans advertising, which would be counter to the generally anti-consumerism bent of the DIY scene — made it expensive to produce. The original editors also grew frustrated that much of the information would be outdated by the time it made its yearly run. Eventually the book went on the Internet at www.byofl.org. Today it’s run by Ernst Schoen-Rene, a self-described “computer guy” who took over after a devastating computer crash that wiped out a lot of information three years ago. It has 17,000 listings for bands, venues, labels and promoters and gets 15,000 hits every day. In Lawrence, the Haunted Kitchen is listed on the site, the guys from 1331 Vermont haven’t even heard of it and the volunteers from Solidarity say they should really get around to listing themselves on it one of these days.

Schoen-Rene says that the DIY scene started about 25 years ago, mostly as a result of how small and connected the punk rock community was. People would pass around lists of who to call to find a venue or a couch to crash on. Because no one back then got into punk rock to make money — this was before the days when bands like Blink 182 made punk rock into pop — everyone was more or less in it for the love of the music, Schoen-Rene says. During those early years, there were venues aplenty and tons of donation money. Bands could pay for all of the gas and food and make a little on the side too, Schoen-Rene says. Now, he says, the money’s tighter, and a lot of the bands are in it with a delusion of making it big. The golden years are over, he says.

The scene is far from dead, however. BYOFL is still going strong and Bruce Haring, founder of the DIY Convention, says it’s only continuing to grow. The DIY Convention started in 2000 and drew more than 1,000 people this year. Haring says that with the rise of digital tools like the Internet, DIY has gotten huge — for better or for worse. “You have a ton of people producing out there now, which means you get a lot of really great stuff and a lot of shit,” he says. Also, DIY has branched out from punk to other genres, to an extent changing the types of people associated with the scene.

Locally, despite the loss of venues such as the Pink House, the Pirate House and the Kremlin, there are still places like the Haunted Kitchen, 1331 Vermont and Solidarity that plan to continue having shows. In addition, ex-Kremlin resident Emily Elmore says she is planning to start a new DIY venue with her friend April Flemming and anyone else they decide to live with. The Springfield, Mo., senior says that she and Flemming are hoping to find a place in the student ghetto — a welcome change for Elmore, who moved to Eudora after leaving the Kremlin — and plan to start having shows as early as this May.

I drive past the Haunted Kitchen on my way home. I see a quiet crowd smoking on the porch — probably unaware of all of the work that has gone into the evening they’re enjoying — just waiting for the next band to go on.

rperkins@kansan.com