Joel Rash has an admission that is hard to believe coming from someone who has booked concerts and music performances for more than 40 years.
“I never really cared about the music,” said Rash, founder of Flint Local 432, who announced earlier this year he was stepping aside from his position overseeing the beloved facility, which is now housed under Factory Two, Flint’s nonprofit makerspace.
That confession seems ridiculous on the surface, because Rash is a walking encyclopedia of music history who can rattle off famous bands who played at various venues in Flint before they made it big and usually remember right down to the specific date they were here. He can also tell you about local bands who were as good or better than bigger name bands in the ‘90s or ‘00s, they just didn’t get the same national breaks (For example, “Put the Rugby Mothers tapes and the first Green Day albums next to each other, and Rugby Mothers hands down were better songwriters and had better music,” he said.). He has a collection of punk rock recordings, flyers, and other historical artifacts that would be the envy of any museum (and he’s working on a plan to make sure those are preserved and available publicly in the future). He’s even slept on the roof of the Capitol Theatre before.
But for anyone who has been a part of Flint Local 432’s family in its four decade history, the reasoning behind his statement makes perfect sense. The Local has sustained because no matter what music is on stage, the two most important attributes of the space are simply community and courage.
“It was always about the people,” Rash said. “Everybody in the world can love music. Every culture has it. Every town has their music. For me, it was the community that came together (at the Local) that made it. I love music. I listen to it continually, but if Flint had had the worst bands in the world, I still would have done the shows and I still would’ve had a blast because when you’re 15, you don’t know if your friend’s band sucks or not. Because it doesn’t matter. You’re there because they’re your friends, you’re part of it. You want to wear their t-shirt. You want to put their sticker on your skateboard.”
Over time, the genres of music on stage at The Local have been wildly different. Rash himself was connected into the punk music scene. He credits people like Chris Everson, a former owner/manager and board member for The Local, with introducing more metal acts into the mix, and musicians like Brady Gozza and his group the Artfull Dodgers, for connecting Rash and the team at The Local into Flint’s rap and hip hop community in the late ‘90s.
“In part because of Chris Everson and the bands he was in, we started meeting all these people in the metal scene, and they wore a lot of jean jackets and had long hair,” Rash said. “But they were in it for the same reason the punk kids were, and so the punk and the metal scene just kind of came together. And then, far too late, embarrassingly late, it wasn’t until the ’90s when Brady Gozza and his group, the Artfull Dodgers came through, then we’re like, oh the hip hop kids are just the same as the metal and the punk kids. The only difference is the music. The kids were the same. The reason to be there was the same. The Local has always existed to book the music that nobody else is booking and the music kids are listening to. Well, kids listen to hip hop the most now, so that’s the single most represented style of music at The Local in terms of the number of shows and performers because that’s what people listen to. Whatever’s next, if young people in Michigan are playing it, Maiya’s (LeGardye, the director of Flint Local 432) gonna put them on stage.”
The only common denominator that has existed is rewarding people who created something and wanted a platform to try and share it.
“We’re not gatekeepers,” Rash said. “We never told anybody their band sucks, and if we thought that, we kept our mouths shut and kept booking them. Because if you’re brave enough to practice a few songs in your basement, get up on stage in front of the world, and see what people think, then we’re here to make that happen.”
Is the Capitol Theatre Haunted?
Rash was born in Flint, and then his parents moved to Grand Blanc in the early 1970s. Rash says he “moved right back to Flint like an hour after I graduated high school.” He lived in places on Avon Street and Grand Traverse, but eventually secured one of the more unique housing situations in Flint’s history around 1990.
“I moved into the Capitol Theatre, and for seven years, I was downtown’s resident population,” Rash said. “There were no loft apartments down here. The apartment I lived in, the second floor of the Capitol, was not legal. The building owners had put in a test apartment to see if they could make residential work there. A couple friends of mine who worked at the Capitol Café moved in and were living there in the summer. The apartment had a little kitchen but they never figured out how to get a bathroom into it, so it was the public bathroom down the hall, and they never figured out how to get heat into it. So the girls moved out. I found out about it, and I was putting on shows there and helping out around the building. And I basically said, ‘Well, I’m not gonna pay rent for an apartment that has no heat in the winter, but I will absolutely move in and help out in the building in return,’ and I was there for seven years.”
Rash estimates that he’s probably in the top five for people who have spent the most time in that building in its history, and he has fond memories of having post-show parties on the roof or sleepovers on the stage looking up at the stars on the ceiling to impress a few of his dates and generally just exploring the building’s weird depths.
“It had an old boiler system,” Rash said. “There were two old giant boilers, 10 feet tall. The system that filled them with water and turned the gas on to heat the water to power the radiators, the automatic system had failed years before, and they had to be filled by hand. You had to manually throw a switch to turn the water on, let it run for 15 or 20 minutes, and then turn the water off. So, for seven years, every night, I worked a lot of bar jobs and would get home at 2 in the morning. I’d go back to the Capitol, down in the basement, next to the coal chute, turn on that water, just wander around for 15 or 20 minutes before I shut it off, then I went up to my apartment.”
That deep knowledge of the building’s quirks equips him to answer a question that many have long had: is the Capitol haunted? He says he never saw evidence himself, although he did participate in a haunting experience.
“I never saw a ghost, I’m gonna say it’s not haunted,” Rash said. “Although Fugazi played there in ‘91 or ‘92. And a friend of mine had come from Canada for the show and stayed with me at the Capitol. And Ian (MacKaye, from Fugazi) was somewhere else, but the rest of the band was down exploring this dilapidated basement. It had all these worn out rooms, a bunch of, like, civil defense supplies, a bunch of storage from decades when it had tenants. And there was a beat-up old water damaged piano down there. And my friend, who was classically trained, finds this piano and just starts pounding out Bach or Wagner or something on this out of tune piano. Well, here comes (Fugazi members) Brendan (Canty) and Guy (Picciotto) running out of the basement at full speed, their eyes this big, because they thought a haunted piano started playing next to them. So they almost certainly think it’s haunted.”
Building a Career in and Out of Music
The first show Rash booked occurred when he was a student at University of Michigan-Flint. He was friends with members of a Flint band called the Guilty Bystanders. The band had built a following, but was having trouble getting booked on shows because a lot of places weren’t focused on punk music at the time.
“There were some amazing hardcore shows happening in Flint, Suicidal Tendencies, Black Flag, Slayer, like that first ‘80s wave that got on tour and got in a van, played shows,” Rash said. “And they (Guilty Bystanders) were not playing very often. They said we’re more of a punk band and the people that put on the shows book hardcore bands. But I wanted to see them play. I was like, ‘Why don’t you put on your own show?’”
That’s when Rash started learning all of the elements that go into putting on a show beyond just having bands on stage. It includes finding a venue, sourcing a PA system or audio equipment, making flyers and promoting the performance, security and crowd management, and other tasks that Rash was naive enough to be willing to take on.
“I said, well, that doesn’t sound that hard,” he said. “They, being older and wiser, were like, then why don’t you do it? I marched down to the UM-Flint events folks, and there was a bar on campus then, so I wanted to rent the brewery for a night and have some bands play, and they foolishly agreed. We booked a show, five bands on the bill, halfway through the show, I thought to myself, get through the night, never do this again. Maybe a month later, I had forgotten the hassles, the headaches, the mayhem, and instead, I remembered the joy of kids singing along, the handful of folks that I met that night who I’m friends with to this day, 40 years later. So a month later, I only remembered the good stuff, and I booked another. And then another, and another, and another.”
Eventually, those shows coalesced into what became The Local, an all-ages, substance-free venue which has occupied several physical spaces downtown but has always existed more as an identity than a place. Rash booked shows in the Capitol Theatre basement and then in 1994, acquired a permanent downtown space in what was formerly a shoe store. The Local has been in its current space on 1st Street since 2010.
At different points in its history, Rash was barely hanging on – “I remember one of the early goals we had was to be current on our water and Consumers bills. Because we were literally doing that thing, like, which one do we have to pay to keep the lights on? Or the water on? Which ones can we kick the can down the road?”
There were some periods of time when The Local wasn’t operating due to other career and life obligations. He also sold The Local to Everson around 2001 (“for $1,” Rash said) and Everson ran the facility.
“It honestly was almost never a good time to run a punk rock concert venue,” he said. “At the very beginning, I was broke, I was in college, I was working as a janitor to pay bills. I did a show every couple or three months. And then the shows were fun and we kept doing more and more. We’re proud of lasting 40 years, but it’s not like we were open for 40 years straight. We got kicked out of more than a dozen different venues for various reasons. Some undeserved, some probably very well-deserved. But it was just that itch I had to scratch because I missed my friends coming to the shows. I missed seeing bands in Flint. And so we would start it up again.”
Professionally, Rash had opportunities from his booking experience that materialized in other cities. He was connected in the music industry and could’ve worked for larger venues in Detroit or other places. He’d briefly lived in New York at one point. He’d spent some time in San Francisco and had an opportunity to work at the Gilman Street Warehouse, a legendary punk venue. But he found Flint professionally satisfying, at least from a music perspective, because of the uniqueness of The Local.
“I passed up multiple opportunities to move to other places and do things on a bigger scale in the ‘80s and ‘90s,” Rash said. “But one of the things I loved about our shows is they were never so big that you couldn’t talk to the band after the show. When there’s 150 or 250 people at a concert, the band is at our level, the set gets done, they run right for their own merch booth, they’re selling records and t-shirts themselves or they’re hanging out after, and you can literally walk up to a band member and say, ‘Hey, you guys know The Torch is down the alley if you want to get a burger after the set,’ then go hang out with them after and get to ask questions about the album that changed your life or how the tour’s going and be part of that. When there’s 500 people at a show or 1,000, you can’t do that. (In larger venues) You just get to be in the space with them. And that just never was enough for me.”
But outside of The Local, Rash was also working on his education and trying to find a career. After selling The Local to Everson, Rash needed to get away. He spent “a couple of months” hiking along the Appalachian Trail, assessing what he wanted next in his life and career. The Local had become one of the few places consistently attracting people downtown Flint at the time, and Rash was a part of several local committees and organizations as a result.
“I was in this weird position where I’d seen all these meetings where I was the volunteer and everybody else at the table was getting a paycheck,” Rash said. “Eventually it just started wearing on me. These guys have health insurance and a pension plan. And I’m just this sucker coming in and giving it all away for free. So I resigned from every committee. I came back to kind of reassess what’s next for me.”
When he came back to Flint after hiking the trail, he was open to new opportunities even if they took him outside the city. But something inevitably came up that kept him here. He’d spent a week in Washington D.C. doing a placemaking workshop through the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and suddenly, that experience would become handy.
“I went to D.C. for a week, and I thought this might be my next career, sort of like placemaking, urban development, economic development,” Rash said. “I had a great week, met a bunch of people, had kind of a soft job offer from one of the people that I’d met there. I got back to Flint, and it was just one of those weird things where I had this huge crush on a woman who happened to be staying at a sustainable farm in Columbiaville as the on-site gardener. She said, ‘Hey, the guy that owns this farm is back in Flint doing some work, and he wants to talk to some people about efforts to kind of get downtown going again.’”
Uptown Reinvestment had just begun purchasing some of the buildings downtown, and the Community Foundation was funding a downtown facade improvement program to help property owners fix up their buildings. Rash owned buildings downtown at that point, so he was interested in the grant. But he found out they also needed someone to oversee the program and expressed interest in the position as well.
He found himself among three candidates for the job, but the other two had significantly more experience than he did.
“I manage bars. I book concerts. I did a lot of janitorial work,” Rash said. “I had no experience, but I had just completed the National Trust Preservation Placemaking week so I had all the language, all the words at the tip of my tongue. I went and interviewed and they obviously noted my lack of experience, and I said, Vic (Papale, who was then the Community Foundation president), here’s the thing. I want to be in this town working for a long time. This is my first opportunity. If I screw up, nobody’s ever hiring me again. If these guys screw up, they can say, ‘The program didn’t really fly, but I got three or four years of paychecks out of it, and besides, it’s Flint. Nothing works here.’ And Vic hired me on the spot. I ran the downtown facade improvement program for a few years and learned a lot on the job from people like Lynn Williams, who patiently showed me how to be a program officer. And that’s really what sort of changed gears for me.”
Eventually, Rash took a position at UM-Flint where he was able to help develop programming and support for local entrepreneurs and small businesses. But around 2010, he had what he calls his “country music year” – his longtime girlfriend dumped him on New Year’s Eve and he was laid off from his UM-Flint job on his birthday. “Thankfully, my dog was okay,” Rash said.
That series of events, combined with wanting to remain in the area for his parents, are what led to him restarting The Local and also using his professional experience in program management, grants, and other skills to create a sustainable path for its future.
“I always had a great relationship with my folks,” Rash said. “Being in Flint all this time means I saw them every Sunday for decades on end, but they were slowing down a little bit. By this time I was 45 years old, and I just thought, like, yep, this will work (to be in Flint). It was really gratifying going through that journey with them, the frustration of the health struggles, but also me getting older, hearing the stories from them I’ve never heard before. For somebody who’s single that doesn’t have kids it really kind of helped cement where I’d come from and where I am. So I don’t regret any part of staying in Flint.”
A Pragmatic Decision to Step Away
For someone whose vision, passion, and tenacity stewarded The Local through 40 years of ups and downs, Rash’s decision to step down earlier this year was pragmatic and thought out.
“The right person is running The Local, and has been for a few years now,” Rash said. “Maiya LeGardye is wonderful and doesn’t need my help. She has the passion to keep The Local rolling, but also a much broader skillset. Maiya is a skilled sound engineer, which I could never do. She is a better graphic designer than I was. She has this great rapport, because she’s still in her 20s, with young acts that I used to have. And I lost somewhere around 2002, right? So it was the right time with her being the right person.”
The Local’s funding is also stabilized, as an arm of Factory Two. There is a board, fundraising, and other institutional functions and resources that will ensure its long-term viability. Rash also cited the fact that he turned 60 and The Local turned 40 as numbers that made the time feel right.
“Those are both milestones,” he said. “I was joking with Mike Wright (Factory Two’s founder), and I said I’ve had 40 years. If I haven’t been able to implement the changes and see my vision through, how many more years is it gonna take?”
But his retirement also might be Michael Kelly’s fault.
“Michael Kelly, who was at Mott College (Kelly was Mott’s longtime communications director) years ago, would introduce me in events as the ‘grand old man of Flint youth culture,’” Rash said. “I thought that was funny when I was 40. But it’s been 20 years since then … so it was just the right time.”
But there’s a deeper, more thought-out reason that also factored into his decision. He wanted The Local to be about The Local, and not just about Joel Rash.
“I’ve seen organizations where the founder doesn’t know when it’s time to leave,” he said. “Most people stay too long rather than leave too early. It’s tough to admit to yourself – the thing that you started or the thing that you’ve cared about for decades might be better off without you. I have definitely complained about people who don’t know when it’s time. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t one of those people.”
Rash cites influential women like Sybyl Atwood, whose community-mindedness resulted in an annual award given to Flint pillars, as people who truly understood that leadership also means knowing when to step aside, and his own aunt as people he learned that lesson from.
“She was a skilled, beloved, leader, community resource, mentor, for generations of people,” Rash said. “And one day she said, ‘That’s enough. I’m gonna put somebody else in charge.’ And when she did that, she let the new people do their thing. My Aunt Bobbi started a school in the early 70s. She ran the school for 35 or 40 years, and then she resigned as the executive director and founder and became the cook making the lunches and snacks for all the kids and then had a ball doing that for a while. So I had two women I know, who set a really good example for me. The (large) number of middle-aged white dudes running organizations in Flint can afford to lose me and probably a few more to give way for a young generation of leadership. I was 19 when I did my first show. In some of these well-meaning, nonprofit directors, they got their chance to be an executive director when they were 30 or 35. And now they’re 55 or 65, 75, and they’re still there. Take a look around. There’s not a 35 year old in your organization with skill and hunger that can take it to the next level?”
A Career of Influence
During its 40th anniversary celebration, Flint Local 432 welcomed back several musicians from different generations of its history who are still playing music. And beyond just crediting The Local with supporting them as musicians, it is also where many started their lives.
Future spouses met each other at The Local and eventually started families. Jason and Jess Duncan started dating as teenagers. Now, they have three kids, are in a band called Cult Therapy, and give immense credit to Rash for creating a space like The Local, where kids like them could learn about themselves through music.
“Our first handful of dates were going and watching bands at the Flint Local,” Duncan said. “I remember Joel – and I’m trying to figure out how to say this right now because I got my kid in the car – (Jess and I) were making out on one of the couches there, and Joel had to like tell us to sit up straight and knock it off. But just from a performance standpoint, The Local is where you learned how to do everything. 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.”
Julie Hugunin, a Flint musician and director of the annual Flint Rocks Youth Empowerment (FRYE) camp for kids, hosts the camp at The Local. Her and her team teach teenage musicians about everything from songwriting to music to marketing in a week-long experience culminating with a performance at Factory Two. They also get to learn from professionals who run and have played in The Local over the years.
“You’ve gotta see a kid’s face when you tell them, ‘Do you know who performed on this stage back in 2003? My Chemical Romance,’” Hugunin said. “Their jaws just drop, and it is the greatest thing. To show them that it’s not just any venue, it’s a venue that was a launchpad for bands that they still listen to is really unlike anything else.”
Hugunin also noted that some of the parents of FRYE kids even performed at or went to shows at The Local themselves in the ‘90s and ‘00s.
“They get to see their kids on the stage that they were seeing shows at or they were playing when they were kids,” she said. “And just the cycle coming around again, knowing that those good old days, they’re coming back around for our kids. It isn’t dead. It’s recycling. And in a time where everything kinda feels sorta hopeless, boy, is that nice to hold onto.”
Hugunin also noted that Rash, despite being officially retired, sprung into action when a scheduling mishap had the FRYE performance at Factory Two in peril.
“Joel’s just a character in downtown Flint that everyone knows and everyone has a good story about,” Hugunin said. “He’s about the greater good in everything he does. He has a unique skill, from people who are way older than him all the way to people who are way younger than him, of just being able to build genuine connections. In everything he does, it’s all about how we can connect the right people with the right opportunities. He’s willing to take chances on younger people. He’s willing to see the potential and cultivate that potential. Even during camp, we had a wee bit of a snafu, and when they realized what the problem was, they all worked so hard (at Factory Two) to make sure that there were no problems, that they could help us, and Joel actually happened to be on site, I’m not even sure what for, I think he was just visiting. They realized that nobody had cleared the calendar for us (for the concert). So people were gonna come in to try and do classes and stuff overlapping with FRYE. Here’s retired Joel helping fix it. And not only did he fix it, but anybody who was impacted, he made sure to compensate in some way. He is all about making everybody as whole as he possibly can.”
Andy Lenox, whose new band The Headless, just played The Local this year, also performed there with other bands when he was younger. He said a constant, no matter who runs The Local, is how encouraging they are to performers.
“It’s amazing that it’s exactly the same vibe (as when he was younger),” Lenox said. “It’s a different crew running it now, but I used to reach out to Joel and he’d be like, ‘You’re playing next Saturday.’ And now I reached out to Maiya, and she doesn’t know who I am and doesn’t know who my old band is, but I reached out and said, ‘Hey, we’re looking for a show,’ and she’s like, ‘Yep, you’re playing in a couple weeks.’ It’s really like an open invitation to get on stage and perform that’s always available to the community, which is just incredible. There’s so many gatekeepers everywhere else and that’s what made the Flint music scene and The Local really special, like, anybody could do it and everyone was encouraged to.”
Gozza said that he feels “blessed” to be among the first hip hop acts to play The Local, and still looks back fondly on being able to win over crowds accustomed to punk rock music.
“When we first played The Local as the only hip hop group with a whole lineup of punk rock acts, they were ready to boo us, they were ready to throw bottles at us, kick us out,” Gozza said. “And we won them over with our passion, and our talent and our skill and our energy, and we became regulars there. We played a few shows with us as the only hip hop act, and then went on to Metropolis once we started playing there, where we’d be the only act doing hip hop on these rock bills. The energy didn’t fall down when the guys with the guitars and the loud sound systems stepped off the stage. We went up there with our hard-hitting beats and spit our hearts out, and were really embraced by that scene.”
LeGardye first met Rash when she was an 18-year-old college student. She credits him for being willing to take her under his wing and teach her about a wide range of topics.
“That’s my teacher, that’s sensei,” LeGardye said. “He’s that person that lets you know you’re ready for something probably before you even know it yourself. He’s constantly teaching people. If you are someone that Joel knows is on the up and up, he will do anything for you. Just being around him, seeing how he treated people he didn’t even know, there were unhoused people in our community that he knew everything about, would invite them in to grab a drink or some snacks. He’s always led with integrity, and he’s one of those people, to me, there needs to be a statue put up for him. He’s made that much of an impact not just on the music scene, but on the city in general.”
Still a Presence
The many bands and friends from previous eras of The Local who returned for shows during the past year’s 40th anniversary celebration provided a great and nostalgic opportunity to catch up with people he loves. At the culmination of those festivities, he made a Facebook post announcing his departure. And then after catching up on the number of people who reached out after, was emotional at the response.
“There have been times where it has been tough to look around at my peers, sort of my cohort, in the careers they built, and the families they raised, and the lives they led, on more traditional paths and I say, ‘What in the world have I spent my life doing?,’” Rash said. “It just seems so ephemeral, like, really, you put on concerts? It (his retirement post) was almost like when a fake rumor of somebody’s death comes out on social media, and everybody rushes to say nice things about them, all these old friends of mine said really nice things about me, except I was alive to hear that. And that was so gratifying. I’m incredibly touched and grateful, reading those comments brought tears to my eyes, over and over again. And it really sort of felt like slamming that book shut to pick up the next one.”
That next one doesn’t include actual retirement. He and good friend Jessica Revoldt co-run a marketing company called MSG MFG (“Message Manufacturing”) that he intends to devote more time to building.
“Retiring as a punk rock concert promoter does not include a pension or a 401k,” Rash said. “I was also kind of retired through my 20s and 30s. So now I have to work until I die.”
In one moment, Rash jokes that, being younger than him, Revoldt needs to keep working hard while he “coasts a little bit.” Then in the very next, he admits that, “By nature though, I always need to be doing something.”
MSG MFG also allows him to continue pursuing another passion, since he can work remotely: traveling. He said that part of why he’s remained content in Flint his entire life has been excursions and adventures around the country and world. He has a map in his office of the more than 400 U.S. National Parks and monument sites around the country with pins in the ones he’s visited, and he wants to see as many as possible. In the past year, he’s hiked Hadrian’s Wall, an ancient Roman remnant in northern England. He also road tripped through the Great Plains. He’s spent time in New York and Atlanta, where he has family.
“I’m a 60 year old orphan,” Rash said. “I’m single. My only brother is in Atlanta. I have some scattered cousins around. I feel unanchored in a good way. If I’m lucky enough to live into old age, there’s gonna be a time where all I can do is pull over at the scenic view, and read the plaque, and admire the mountains. But for now, I can park the car, get my backpack, and start hiking. And so hopefully in the next 10 or 12 or 15 years, I can do those hikes. I can climb those mountains, I can paddle those rivers.”
Rash also fondly remembers a line his dad used to recite: “You’ve got to have adventures when you’re young, so you have stories when you’re old.”
Rash says he’s still working on the adventures part.
“My dad had it for a family man, adventures when he was young, and he had stories when he was old, and that’s a man I’m trying to live up to,” Rash said. “And at 60, I still feel like I’m young. It’s not time to just tell stories yet. I’m doing those adventures.”
Or, to close a story out that started by professing “it wasn’t about the music,” let’s make it about the music.
“To paraphrase a band that I love, The Dismemberment Plan, this is a life of possibilities,” Rash said. “And at 60 and good health and lucky enough to have a couple dollars in the bank I want to see what I can do with those possibilities.”
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