ABSTRACT
Early one evening in the spring of 2007, I found myself in the basement of a building tucked down a side street at the small, but well-known, livehouse1 called Heaven’s Door, in the Sangenjaya neighborhood of Tokyo. The hallway leading down to the entrance was plastered with fl yers of both past and upcoming live events, band stickers, and dirty scuffmarks presumably made by the gig bags and boxes toted in and out of the space on a daily basis. A young woman sat in the vestibule: a tiny transitional space large enough only to hold her, a small desk, and one or two patrons on the way into the livehouse proper, which was of course couched between two heavy soundproofi ng doors. She collected the required entrance-plus-drink-ticket fee, placing the money in separate envelopes designated for each band performing that night. When a patron arrived without a connection to a specifi c band, she paused, thought a moment, and then placed the money in the pouch belonging to the fi nal band that would perform that evening, essentially designating them as the headlining group. Armed with a fresh stack of fl yers featuring the upcoming live2 schedules of that night’s bands at a variety of other livehouses throughout Tokyo, one could fi nally slip into the one-room livehouse.
