2. 26 Take — June / July 2016 thetakemagazine.com 27IMAGE COURTESY OF SOUTHPAW © 2015 THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY
The home
of Vermont
m u s i c
t u r n s
2 0

3. 28 Take — June / July 2016 thetakemagazine.com 29PHOTOS BY JAMES LOCKRIDGE
T
he Big Heavy World office in Burlington,
Vermont, has barely an inch of unused
space. There’s a pile of amplifiers, speak-
ers, and sound equipment in one corner, a
hidden vending machine in another, and a computer
workstation that is two Macs set underneath stage light-
ing in the middle of the room. Concert posters and por-
traits of musicians cover nearly every inch of wall space.
Old furniture circles in the middle of the room, swallow-
ing anyone who sits in it. In a far corner is a separate
office the size of half a dorm room. It’s used as a DJ booth.
It’s “crew night” for Big Heavy World, and two crew
members, or volunteers—Ian Corcoran and Mitchell
Bergeron—edit video of a spray-painted demolition derby
car on the computers. An intern sits in the middle of the
furniture emptying new picture frames of their stock
photos, and James Lockridge, the director and founder
of the all-volunteer enterprise, runs around the office
working on too many tasks to count. He has graying hair
cropped close atop a strong face. He looks more like a
subtly aging 20-year-old than 48, his actual age, in his
dark jeans and a black band T-shirt. He has tattoos on his
forearms that read “Live for something” on his right arm
and “Or die for nothing” on his left. It’s hard to see what
Big Heavy World is exactly when watching Lockridge
move swiftly around the office, because there’s so much
happening at once.
Big Heavy World calls itself “the home of Vermont
music” and will celebrate its 20th birthday with a concert
on June 9 at Higher Ground. What started out in 1996
as an online directory of Burlington bands has evolved
into a dizzying array of projects, including a radio sta-
tion, a Vermont music archive, a record label, a tour
van for bands to borrow, streaming concerts, and the
Vermont Jukebox Project, which plays Vermont music
in the state’s welcome centers. But what’s probably clos-
est to Lockridge’s heart is how Big Heavy includes every-
one. Its T-shirt slogan reads, “Hate makes you weak.” And
A welcome sign
made with
glitter letters on torn cardboard
r e a d s
“Come Hang.”
it’s especially geared toward working with young people
in search of a place to explore their passion for music.
While Lockridge has had stints as an art director at
the local alternative paper Seven Days and as a freelance
designer, he’s also worked closely with youth outreach
in the Burlington area. He spent five years as the direc-
tor of a teen center in Bristol, and now he’s helping coor-
dinate Vermont’s distracted-driving task force. It’s easy
to see that experience in how Lockridge brings in col-
lege-age kids and high schoolers to work on any project
they want under the Big Heavy World umbrella, giving
them an outlet to express themselves and develop cre-
ative talents.
“There are kids who are at a really interesting point
in their life where, if they don’t find something to chan-
nel those energies and intellectual curiosity toward, they
might end up missing it,” says Casey Rae, the CEO of
Future of Music Coalition in Washington, D.C., and a
Big Heavy World board member. For those kids, he adds,
getting involved with Big Heavy World “can be incred-
ibly enriching. It’s that part of the mission that I think
is absolutely vital.”
PREVIOUS SPREAD: Verse performs at Big Heavy World’s
IndieCon, 2012, at the punk club 242 Main
↙ Voices In Vain perform at 242 Main, 2016
↑ CBRASNKE (“Cobrasnake”) performs at 242 Main, 2016
“ L i v e f o r
s o m e t h i n g ”
“ O r d i e
f o r
n o t h i n g ”

4. 30 Take — June / July 2016 thetakemagazine.com 31
L
ockridge grew up splitting his time between
Vermont and Hawaii. During the school year,
he could be found in Kailua on O’ahu, just
over the mountain from Waikiki, crawfishing
in the Pacific. But when summer came around, he’d hop
on a plane and head to Springfield, Vermont, to spend
time on his grandparents’ farm. When he arrived in
Vermont, he’d buy a few chickens and sell their eggs to
the local country club and then sell the chickens when
it was time to go home.
By the time he was a teenager, his parents split and
the migration to the northeast began. He found himself
gravitating to Vermont. There was a short stint at the
University of Nevada in Reno, which only lasted a year
before he moved to Burlington to attend the University
of Vermont. Later, he’d hitchhike to Boulder, Colorado,
and Los Angeles to see if those cities suited him. But
he soon returned to, and found himself immersed in,
the do-it-yourself culture that permeates the Green
Mountains.
“No place fit. Burlington kind of always brought me
back,” Lockridge says. “Burlington is a comfortable place,
and I mean that in a healthy way. It’s not comfortable
because you can be lazy. It’s comfortable because it’s
interesting, people are engaged—it’s mostly healthy and
respectful of different people.”
The alternative rock scene in the 1990s sprouted from
cities across America. Seattle had Nirvana, Sonic Youth,
and grunge. Chapel Hill was a breeding ground for bands
like Archers of Loaf, SuperChunk, and Ben Folds Five. In
the 1980s and 1990s, Athens, Georgia, was alive with the
B-52s and R.E.M. To Lockridge and others, Burlington
looked like it could be the next music city. It had the hall-
marks of the other alternative-rock meccas: a strong base
of college students, plenty of live music venues, and an
artistic and welcoming scene that made the city a melt-
ing pot of styles and creativity.
“The mid-’90s in Burlington were high energy,”
Lockridge says. “There was a lot of absolutely, emphati-
cally unique music being made and [the community] was
very mutually supportive. The bands would share mem-
bers and form supergroups for one night, and there was
a lot of cross-pollination and a lot of being a music com-
munity and everybody benefitting from that.”
Big Heavy World began as fun way for Lockridge,
a designer by trade, to explore the beginnings of the
Internet through the local music scene. But quickly he
started expanding his idea’s scope and reach. He started
collecting as much music from the Green Mountain State
as he could, started planning events and hatching plans
to go beyond the reach of the website.
At the time, Lockridge was living a sparse existence in
a band house that looked like a haunted mansion. The
home was seemingly forgotten by its landlord—“I don’t
recall ever signing a lease,” Lockridge says—but that
made it a perfect breeding ground of creative artists like
himself. The alt-rock band Chin Ho! practiced on the
dirt floor of the basement, and its singer, Andrew Smith,
put out Good Citizen, a ’zine exploring Burlington’s bur-
geoning music scene. One night when the band was
practicing, Lockridge was upstairs building his music
website with the help of his friend and roommate George
Webb, an engineer. The pair were exploring domain
names when Chin Ho! played its song “Big Heavy World.”
Lockridge wanted the song title as the name to the web-
site and had to persuade Webb it was a good idea. The
name stuck.
It’s easy to forget just how infantile the Internet was
when Big Heavy World launched. In 1996, only 20 mil-
lion American adults surfed the web, and they mostly did
so via their phone lines. They averaged less than 30 min-
utes a month on the Internet. That’s less time than people
today spend checking their Facebook feed in an hour.
“Jim has always been very technology focused,” Rae
says. He met Lockridge when he moved to Burlington in
the ’90s, and the two became close through their shared
passion for music. It was always Lockridge who was
introducing Rae to the newest technology like the MP3
player. Being an early adopter has simply been a way for
Lockridge to get Vermont bands heard.
“Burlington is a comfortable place,
and I mean that in a healthy
w a y .
It’s not comfortable because you can be lazy.
It’s comfortable because it’s interesting,
people are engaged—it’s mostly healthy
and respectful of different people.”
← James Lockridge
TINTYPE PHOTO BY JEFF HOWLETT, HOWLERMANO PHOTOGRAPHY

5. 32 Take — June / July 2016 thetakemagazine.com 33IMAGE COURTESY OF SOUTHPAW © 2015 THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY
“I think his ultimate goal,” Rae says, “is to have Vermont
music felt and understood by all the decision makers
in the state and all the people who are residents in the
state so more of them have an understanding of what
an amazing artistic tapestry there is with music. And
then, of course, any kind of ambassadorial stuff out-
side the state.”
What is the music for which Lockridge is the ambas-
sador? Vermont is a state filled with musicians and dif-
ferent styles of music, from Americana to hip-hop to
hardcore to classical. Lockridge is collecting all of it,
and Big Heavy crew members embrace many genres.
But the Big Heavy World philosophy most closely aligns
with hardcore music and its DIY ethics.
“Big Heavy has a lot in common with Vermont’s hard-
core punk rock scene, which is: Everyone looks out for
each other, and everyone is respectful of everything,”
Lockridge says. “It is a positive, world-building mes-
sage, and a thread among all of that is that everybody is
empowered to make their own critical decisions and to
make them be positive ones for themselves. That is the
default position of Big Heavy World: to [help] people
feel that they matter, to feel empowered, to take action
on behalf of their own success.”
building its own sounds as amicable musicians crossed
over to every other side. Music in the city was a large,
limitless family. Some examples of its artful singularity:
Rocketsled, in frontman Casey Rae’s words, “antic-
ipated practically every heavy sound
that was to become fashionable in the
metal world in the next decade—from
start-stop riffbombs to stoner sludge
to atonal chaos.” Their intensity was
from a darker place, and members
went on to lead other prescient and
pioneering bands.
Starlight Conspiracy’s sound
was like a very large engine with its
throttle barely engaged, threaten-
ing to explode from an artful hum.
Hypnotic femme vocals overlaid the
merging karmic centers of indie rock
and shoegaze. They were a driving,
romantic vortex.
Wide Wail stared music down, tell-
ing it what it should be, as poets with
instruments, with delicate force. Their
lyrics, like their melodies, stepped smartly from raw to
haunting. Wide Wail was our alt/indie muse.
Lindy Pear was the café racer of the city’s indie pop—
spare, revved-up, and taking the corners of their oeuvre
tighter than physics was comfortable with.
I n t h e 1 9 9 0 s ,
music in Burlington transcended
genres, B y James
Lockridge
On the night I visit Big Heavy World, Lockridge is
setting up a photo shoot for a new DJ for the radio
station, the Radiator, as a couple of new people show up
to see what Big Heavy is all about and possibly become
DJs. The room fills up quickly as Lockridge takes a seat
in the middle of the circle of furniture with a laptop on
his lap. In his distinctly quiet voice he begins telling the
newbies about what it means to join Big Heavy World and
start DJing on the Radiator, which broadcasts via a make-
shift system composed of donated parts from other radio
stations in the area, including those at Saint Michael’s
College, the University of Vermont, and Vermont Public
Radio, which even sends its engineers to help install and
monitor the system.
“[Big Heavy is] welcoming of any non-hateful opin-
ion,” Lockridge tells the group. “What we expect is all
our DJs will be civil and respectful of anyone listening,
even if they have a different opinion.”
It’s easy to see why so many people connect with
Lockridge when you watch him talk through the rules
for the radio station. He talks with people instead of at
them. His tone is restrained and personable, as if he’s
telling each person a secret meant just for them.
After the meeting, Lockridge goes back to the hun-
dreds of small tasks at hand. There’s a video to be edited
and a radio show with a live performance going on, and
he needs to make sure photos are taken. It begins raining
outside. Lockridge rode his motorcycle to the office, but
he isn’t worried about it. He lives just up the street and,
right now, there’s too much to do to worry about getting
wet on the way home.
← Photos of (from top to bottom) Rocketsled,
Starlight Conspiracy, Wide Wail, and Lindy Pear
↑ Chin Ho! in the 1990s
PHOTOS ON THIS SPREAD BY MATTHEW THORSEN