For Bellingham bands, affordable, soundproof rehearsal space can be tough to find — and a new nonprofit hopes to change that.
Mikel Perkins has a video of himself and his friends playing music from 1997. He’s 14 at the time, rehearsing with his rock band, Anonymous, in his parents’ Oak Harbor garage. Halfway through the video the music stops and the voice of a disgruntled older man cuts in from off camera.
“What in the world are you kids doing? The rest of this neighborhood has some rights, you know, and it’s not to listen to this crap on a Sunday afternoon.”
The scene is so stereotypical of suburbia that it sounds almost scripted — but Perkins said that was his actual neighbor, caught on the recording by accident. The man eventually called the police, and Anonymous switched to rehearsing at a different friend’s house before eventually breaking up when a band member moved away.
“Practice space has always been a problem,” said Perkins, who moved to Bellingham three years ago after over a decade in Seattle and a brief stint in Skagit County. Now a seasoned musician — his band Maklak has been featured on KEXP, and he’s co-produced records with grunge legend Jack Endino — Perkins is on a mission to make rehearsal space more available to local bands, while simultaneously increasing access to lessons and instruments for those who might not otherwise have the means to play.
The nascent nonprofit, Bellingham Helps Access Music, or BHAM, plans to rent out monthly rehearsal rooms and fund sliding-scale lessons for students interested in genres that are underrepresented in public music education, like rock, pop, electronic and hip-hop. They will also encourage live performances, with support for booking, sound, promotion, concert recordings and photography.
In other words, said Perkins, over email, it’s about “the complete journey of someone interested in music.”
BHAM incorporated as a nonprofit in May and has already secured a space downtown — the former home of the Fraternal Order of the Eagles on Forest Street. BHAM will occupy the basement space and include at least seven month-to-month rehearsal rooms which will be fully sound-proofed. Should the organization grow, Perkins says, he would love to offer up to 30 rooms someday.
The geography of local sound
The exact number of bands in any given city is impossible to calculate — a band can be a somewhat nebulous formation, after all — but several local musicians agree that Bellingham has quite an impressive catalog of musical artists, especially for its size.
“Bellingham reminds me a lot of early ’90s Seattle in its excitement for music and the amount of talent all in one place,” Perkins said. He credits the city’s vibrant music scene, in part, to the university, but also to its particular geography.
The farmlands of Whatcom, Skagit and San Juan counties offer a thriving bluegrass and folk scene that feeds the city, but Perkins says rural areas are often home to a robust counterculture as well.
“The more rural and conservative certain areas get, the stronger the counterculture gets,” he said.
And then there’s the mountain.
Decades ago, when many ski areas shunned snowboarders, Mount Baker welcomed them. And with events like the Banked Slalom, the mountain continues to be a draw for snowboarders today.
“That brings in snowboarding culture which brings in skate culture and surf culture,” explained Perkins. “And that brings in punk, metal, hip-hop and reggae.”
The noise problem
Historically, new, local musicians in the DIY scene could cut their teeth at house shows in the neighborhoods around Western Washington University. But according to those familiar with the informal venues, the number of house shows has started to decline.
“My freshman year I thought (the music scene) was really awesome,” said A.J. Bernstein, a rising senior at Western and drummer in the band Aefect. “And then it started to die down. There’s no house show venues and there aren’t a lot of new bands either.”
Martijn Wall, one of the founders of the Blue Room, has also noticed several “staple house show venues” shutting down recently, a trend he attributes, in part, to noise complaints and police presence.
“I’ve seen the DIY scene really go away in the last couple of years since we started the Blue Room. And I’ve seen that really impact the formation of large instrumental bands,” he said. It’s common for bands to break up, of course — people graduate, they move away or find new jobs — but Wall says he’s seen fewer new bands forming to take their place.
Wall’s intention with the Blue Room was to serve as a “stepping stone” for bands between the casual, DIY scene and scoring shows at larger venues.
“I noticed that there was a really strong DIY scene serving as the foundation for the initial spark. And then there was no bridge into an actual professional gig,” he said.
The Blue Room can provide that bridge, but the foundation has to come first. With disappearing house shows and a dearth of rehearsal rooms, would-be bands might become discouraged before they’re ever ready for the stage.
Bernstein and Wall, like Perkins, are keenly aware of the problem of practice space. Bernstein has an agreement with his neighbors about when his band can rehearse and sometimes lends his space to other bands who need it. Still, neighborly relations aren’t tension-free. Wall says he’s occasionally offered the Blue Room as a practice space to bands he knows are struggling to find a place to rehearse.
As a member of the group Cuttlefish, Brett Strizich performed at Downtown Sounds, the Blue Room and other local venues. Despite their success, Strizich said that conflict with neighbors led the band to cut their practice time in half. Cuttlefish sought out alternate rehearsal space but had a hard time finding month-to-month rentals.
Make.Shift Art Space in downtown Bellingham has 11 practice rooms rented out monthly, but the space is in high demand — Strizich said Cuttlefish spent over two years on the waitlist and never got a room. Kelly Sorbel, Make.Shift’s Operations Director said there are about 200 names on the waitlist stretching back to 2018, though not everyone on the list is responsive or still interested. From 2022 onward, the list has about 50 names.
A few other options for practice space exist: Bellinghome School of Music and The Joy of Music, both on Meridian Street, have rehearsal rooms that bands can reserve for specific timeslots, either as-needed or on a regular, weekly, basis.
Make.Shift also offers hourly rentals for practice rooms, but bands who rehearse more than a few hours a week will end up paying a lot more than they would with their own, dedicated space.
“It takes an hour to set up and it takes 30 minutes to break down. So you’re paying for all that time. And then loading all your stuff out of your house, loading it all into the car,” Strizich said.
BHAM plans to offer rehearsal rooms with unlimited access; bands who rent a room can store their own instruments in the space and come and go as they like.
“If you’re a musician that gets your best ideas at midnight, you can play at midnight. If you work all day and the only time you can play is at nine and you don’t want to wake up your new baby, (you can) hit up your rehearsal space on the way home,” Perkins said. In addition to the monthly rentals, BHAM plans to have one room available for hourly rental (catering to traveling bands) as well as a recording studio and an isolation booth that can be rented for voiceovers or podcasting.
The next generation
BHAM plans to use the money earned from room rentals to offer affordable, sliding scale music lessons — they’ll offset the cost for students while continuing to provide a fair wage for teachers.
“What you have,” said Perkins, “is a seasoned musician who’s paying for a service that they already need. That (money) is going to the next musician who’s learning, who’s also paying for the teacher’s time.”
Those students might later form bands and move into the rehearsal spaces, “and then the cycle continues.”
Eventually, Perkins said, he hopes to partner with the school district to provide after school programming as well — like a rock band club — funding programs through grants and donations. While districts vary widely in the funding and time they allot to music education, Perkins said there’s a common disconnect between the music students learn in school and the music they’re excited to listen to. By focusing on contemporary music, BHAM hopes to bridge that gap.
Marca Kidwell-Babcock, a lifelong Bellingham resident and retired teacher, took bass lessons from Perkins at Guitar Center. She’s now serving on BHAM’s board and looks forward to possible connections with the schools.
“One of my concerns is with the pandemic and social media, (is that students) are missing out on a lot of social interaction,” she said. “What’s cool about being in a band is you learn all kinds of social skills. You have to learn how to collaborate and listen to one another. You’re being stretched out of your comfort zone. It’s team building, you try new things, you have to be open to suggestions.”
Kaida Stull, another former student of Perkins, will start her first year at Anacortes High School this fall. She grew up going to all-ages punk shows with her dad at Geez Skateshop in Oak Harbor and began playing bass in fifth grade. A member of BHAM’s startup committee, Stull’s helped organize a benefit concert for the nonprofit on Aug. 23, at their downtown space. The show featured a bevy of local punk bands, including Oak Harbor’s Potbelly, a fixture of the local punk scene since the 1990s.
“I feel like the punk scene is very kind,” Stull said. “At the lowest points in my life, when I went to those shows, it always brought my spirits up.” She hopes that increased access to music can do the same for others.
Perkins doesn’t doubt that Bellingham and surrounding communities will step up to bolster the local music scene.
“It’s just a matter of supporting what’s here, while also fostering growth,” he said.
— By Christy Carley
Also read in Salish Current:
• “Mentoring musicians in Whatcom County,” Aug. 6, 2025
• “Mark Hunter and the sound of innovation,” Jan. 23, 2025
• “Rocking out on a rock: Lopez festival spotlights sounds of the Northwest,” Aug. 7, 2024
• “Recognizing folk in the Salish Sea: Lopez Uncovered Music Festival,” July 29, 2024
• “Jazz Center of Bellingham finds a new groove and growth,” Oct. 30, 2023