For drummer Jeff Buffmyer, his band Cult Therapy’s performance at the Capitol Theatre on March 18 (Editor’s note: the performance on March 18 has been postponed, check the FIM website for a future date) won’t technically be the first time he’s been on stage there, but it will be the first time it happens when the venue is open.
“I shot a music video on stage at the Capitol years before it was reopened, it was when it was shut down and boarded up,” Buffmyer said. “But that’s the closest I’ve got. So this will be a cool one.”
For many local bands and artists, the Capitol is a dream venue to get the chance to perform in.
“It’s definitely special,” said Jason Duncan, lead singer of Cult Therapy. “I didn’t imagine playing any other place in Flint (growing up) except for there. So this is pretty cool.”
Cult Therapy officially formed around 2022, and put out their first full-length album last year. But as veterans of the Flint area music scene for years, performing at the Capitol as part of the Flint Institute of Music’s monthly ‘Flint Under the Stars’ series is an opportunity they’ve been thinking about for about as long as they’ve been performing music. Flint Under the Stars concerts feature local talent in a wide range of genres, providing a chance for area musicians to perform in one of Flint’s iconic spaces. The show starts at 7 p.m., and tickets are a minimum of $5 donation to the KidsTix program.
Along with Duncan and Buffmyer, the band’s lineup also includes Jess Duncan, Nick Mayberry, and Jacques Doucet. The band’s sound is a throwback and homage to 1990s punk, rock, and alternative music that Duncan says provided an escape for him. The group’s music tackles themes that include religious trauma, personal loss, addiction, and the long process of recovery. Their work explores how those formative experiences can leave lasting psychological impacts, with the band using music as a way to confront and process those things.
“We always say we’re like an angry Weezer,” Duncan said. “The message of our album, I mean, it’s offensive. It’s called Get Fucked Sinner. It’s all about my story of growing up in the church, and releasing what I consider a lot of trauma from those experiences and putting it in song form. For me, playing the songs is super cathartic. It’s the style of a record that I probably would’ve listened to in the 90s. I felt like I never really fit in (in school). And then I would just come home from school and just put on CD after CD and play NHL ‘94 for days on end. And to me, this record, the way it sounds and the way our band plays, sounds like something I would’ve put on coming home from school, and it just would’ve been my comfort music, you know?”
Cult Therapy might be relatively new as an entity, but long before the band took shape, its members were part of a tight-knit ecosystem created by Flint Local 432, a famed all-ages venue that has served as the backbone of Flint’s grassroots music culture for 40 years and counting. For many musicians in the area, The Local wasn’t just a place to see shows. It was where they formed lifelong friendships and learned how to be in a band. Teenagers hauled in gear, figured out stage etiquette, booked their own gigs, and built a sense of identity alongside peers from across Genesee County. And now they’ve grown into adults who are not only still in bands and playing music, but also used those skills in other professional realms.
“Just from a performance standpoint, The Local is where you learned how to do everything,” Duncan said. “They taught you where to load in, where to put your gear, how to get on and off stage quickly because there were always five or more bands and it’s a lot of gear. So being trained as a musician how to operate at a music venue, how to interact with the sound guy, how to set up merch and leave room for other bands and interact with other bands on any given night, all of that stuff translated to every other part of my life too. Just the work ethic of all of that and setting up and booking shows. It’s literally how I got my current job. I’m a design engineer, but I put that I played in a band on my résumé thinking, well, that’s pretty dumb to put on a résumé. But the guy who hired me also played in a band and had the same work ethic, so he just got it and I got hired.”
That environment created a kind of musical pipeline that still defines Flint today. Dozens of artists who first stepped onstage at Flint Local 432 as teenagers are still active, now playing in established regional acts, touring projects, or newer bands. It’s not unusual for a lineup in Flint to include members who have been crossing paths since high school, their histories tracing back to early weekend shows.
“Right around the time I got my driver’s license, somebody turned me on to this band called The Hot Flashez,” Buffmyer said. “Someone took me to a show to see them somewhere, and I quickly realized the Flint Local was where they’d play, so I went there and then it just became kind of like an instant home base every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.”
In fact, one of the members of the Hot Flashez, John Duffy, helped Cult Therapy with some of the recording of their album, Buffmyer said. Those types of long-term connections that started at The Local are common. Duncan describes it as attracting like-minded kids from schools and communities all across Genesee County into a space where they shared a passion for music and also gained the knowledge to continue the craft into adulthood.
“I grew up in Montrose, and there was like 10 of us there who listened to the same kind of music,” Duncan said. “But you’d go to the Flint Local on the weekend and then like the 10 people from every single school in the area were there. So now these shows feel like class reunions.”
Another band with Flint area ties, FinalBossFight!, is also performing on March 18. The band performs pop-punk/emo music and was founded in 2020 by John Coote and Sage Denam, with Billy Cosmo eventually joining. They are known for high-energy shows and emotional songwriting. They’ve built an audience through regional touring and festival appearances while sharing stages with notable punk and emo acts. They’ve released three LPs, available on BandCamp.
Cult Therapy performs approximately 20-25 shows per year, with news about the band available on Instagram. Their music is available on BandCamp and their music videos are on FreakBabyZine YouTube channel.
Beyond just being excited to play at the Capitol, Cult Therapy members are also just thrilled to see a live music scene re-emerging in Flint.
“It just seems like all of a sudden, maybe it’s a post pandemic thing, but people are coming up to shows again and there are a lot of new young bands popping up and it really feels like, whether or not we’re currently having like a new scene popping or not, like we may at least be on the verge of something like that, which is awesome,” Buffmyer said. “The music scene has a lot of rich history here. There’s a lot of really cool things that have happened in Flint. There’s a lot of amazing bands that have started here. I’ve seen it thriving and I’ve seen it almost non-existent. It’s nice that we’ve kind of got to the other side of something. There’s stuff happening all the time now. It’s a really nice thing.”
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