Locals Only: : Cellar Dwellers

“I don’t want to entertain people while they drink, I want them to come see us play,” says Lost Hands Found Fingers bassist Danny Graham. It’s one on a long list of reasons LHFF has for preferring house shows to bar gigs. They were birthed on damp concrete like most bands, but are in no hurry to “graduate.” Instead, they’ve found that basement touring is generally more satisfying and lucrative than the club circuit, particularly playing the heavy Punk/Metal hybrid they do.

“Out of 15 shows we played on our last tour, only three were venues,” recalls drummer Patrick Cost. “All the kids that are going to be in the front row, you’ve hung out with all night. It’s close. Then you do a venue the next night, you feel like a marionette up there, just watching people get their bar orders.”

“Kids are just begging for a reason to go off and have a good time,” agrees guitarist and vocalist Jon Weidenbacher. “We’ve had kids crowd surfing in basements with a foot of headroom.”

Aside from the level of interaction, there are plenty of concrete reasons for a growing band to eschew bars. For one, the fact that you’re not competing with alcohol sales means that you’ll almost always sell more merch. Add to that the all-ages factor and the likelihood of driving away with gas money (or better). Also, there’s no question where you’re parking the van overnight. And speaking of overnight, forget about sniffing around for an after-party … you’re already there.

“Even on the ride home, I was already missing it,” laments guitarist Chad Graham (who is also Danny’s twin brother) about their last tour.

The basement that spawned LHFF was one of the more popular ones in the area, the Warner House, where Weidenbacher lived at the time. He and the Graham twins were in KDKO, a local band on the dirty side of the Pop Punk. They played some out of state shows with Cost’s old band, Agent Starling, and when KDKO parted ways with their drummer, he was eager to step in. The deal was nearly sealed, but Jon and Danny wanted to go in a slightly different direction, and were concerned that Patrick and Chad’s playing was not up to snuff.

“My own twin kicked me out of the band!” says Chad. “But Patrick and I both got better, so a couple of band interventions and front-yard brawls later, we were in.”

As Weidenbacher explains, the new direction was diving head first into some of the influences that KDKO had been flirting with, such as Post-Hardcore and ’80s Metal. “People were telling us we were doing things that sounded like Iron Maiden, and we’d really never heard it. We had some ‘guitarmonies,’ but we weren’t doing gallops or anything like that. It was secondhand influence, I’m sure,” he says, adding that “since then, I’ve gone through a Maiden-freak phase.”

While the guitars focus on interplay and progressively more complex riffing, the rhythm section supports with plenty of energy, but keeps things foundational.

“I’d rather keep a groove going, just AC/DC it instead of playing riffs along with the guitars,” says Danny. “I’m not one of these ‘Look at how well I can play my bass’ guys.”

This was all around the summer of 2002, and since then, LHFF has become a well-oiled machine. Weidenbacher is the primary songwriter, Cost handles booking and promotion and the Grahams are the masters of the open road.

“The twins are fucking tour machines,” gushes Cost. “One drives, one navigates, and you don’t even bother poking your head up there into the twindom.”

The band has another tour coming up in March (with Mosquitoes Can Kill), followed by more and more of their grassroots approach. Their debut full-length (Live Hard Hold Fast, due out this summer) is a raging slab of Rock that will suck in fans of anything between Thrash and Emo.

“I want to stay out on the road as long as possible,” vows Cost. “We have a 10-year-old van named Buttercup Urine Storm. The captains command it, the trailer follows, and I’ll keep booking gigs until all these guys lose their jobs and apartments and maybe instead opt for a nice storage space.”

This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2006.