Bloomington played an important role in the early days of punk rock in Indiana.
Gulcher Records was a DIY record label and a zine that Bob Richert started in 1975. Richert was an IU graduate student in geology, but he found himself spending more time spinning rock music at WIUS (now WIUX) than studying rocks. In 1973, he discovered zines, and it didn’t take long for him to start Gulcher Magazine. That might be the first association in print of Bloomington and the word “gulch.” But Richert didn’t coin it. People had been calling Bloomington “the gulch” already. He doesn’t know exactly where it came from. He thinks it might be the terrain, but he admits he might be biased, since he arrived as a geology grad student.
Some people think Gulcher Magazine and Gulcher Records were named after a book that came out the year before. Gulcher, by rock critic Richard Meltzer, is a collection of his sprawling thoughts on rock music and culture of the previous decade. Bob Richert insists he didn’t name his zine and record label after Meltzer’s book.
One of the bands on Gulcher Records was The Gizmos. They put Bloomington on the map as an important place for DIY rock. Formed in 1976, The Gizmos have been called Bloomington’s first punk band. They sang “The Midwest Can Be Allright.” That came out on the compilation album called “Red Snerts: The Sound of Gulcher” in 1981.
By the early eighties, the word “Gulch” had taken on its first life in Bloomington. “The Gulch” had become a space for punks, weirdos, and freaks to be themselves. It graduated from just a word to be thrown around to almost a badge of honor. Then, it disappeared for a few decades.
By the mid-2010s, college student Miles Grimmer was fronting the hardcore punk band Laffing Gas, playing tons of shows around town. Grimmer wrote the song “The Gulch”.
The title was inspired by his uncle who was around during the origins of the word in the ‘70s. It’s a song about how he feels living in Bloomington during this time in his life. Having feelings of frustration and stuckness but eventually having a change of heart. The song was recorded on the Laffing Gas’s debut album “It’s a Beautiful Day in The Gulch”, later released in 2020.
At the same time that this album was being recorded, Miles and local poet Alex Swartzentruber started up a podcast of the same exact name. Swartzentruber explains they wanted to start a podcast loosely based on life in Bloomington, almost like a “friendship simulator.”
After the pandemic, a new wave of punk and hardcore bands started to pop up around Bloomington. Chance Allen is part of today’s DIY scene. He started the DIY label RTR Tapes in 2022. He plays bass in Velocity, and he fronts the bands What Counts and Full Stride. Chance was inspired by the scene that came before him. He was the next person to take the word “Gulch” and run with it.
In October of that year, Full Stride released their debut EP which has the song “Gulch Brigade”. The term today takes on a broader meaning about community in the hardcore scene. It goes beyond Bloomington’s city lines to Indianapolis or even other cities in the Midwest as a whole.
It can feel like there’s nothing to do in the gulch. But that’s exactly what’s given people like Miles, Alex and Chance an opportunity to figure themselves out creatively and make the most with what they do have. An opportunity to make the music, the poems, the podcasts, that they want me to make. An opportunity to build community from the ground up and learn what it means to make art in this part of the country.
For these guys, at least, the Midwest can be alright.
