Surrogate Mom Looks Out for Fledgling Bands

It's 5:30 p.m. on a Saturday, and rock promoter Barbetta Jones needs milk. For perhaps the hundredth time -- she's lost count -- she's putting on a show.

In her basement.

BlondeShows, the DIY concerts Jones and her 19-year-old daughter, Charlotte, produce in the basement of their Silver Spring home, is underground rock at its most literal. It is also the way Jones gives aspiring musicians a venue, a home and a second mom.

Jones, 52, has been mothering musicians for the past four years. Her causes are artists chasing the promise of a new model for musical success: offer your music free online, build a fan base around the country, forgo the music label and then just wing it on tour. Most of the time, these musicians are turning out pockets and looking under sofa cushions for gas money, so they end up spending tour nights in their vans or the occasional motel. But Jones is part of a small network of fans around the nation helping these musical lone rangers make it work by offering her basement as a place to perform and sleep. She is also a board member for the Institute for Independent Music.

Jones -- known in the music community as Mrs. Jones -- devotes most of her time to trying to help her bands succeed. She subsidizes her efforts with her family's income and the $5 donations she takes at the door. She owns several rental homes and has served as a Cub Scout leader, a Sunday school teacher and a home school instructor. She said she and her husband, who works at an exotic-automobile dealership, still haven't broken even from the first concert she hosted -- and probably never will.

The bands she's fostered -- roughly 300 in all -- recall fondly the cozy couches she's offered them and the gas money she's "loaned" them with the unspoken assumption that most of it will never be repaid. They speak of the tens of thousands of miles she's driven in her white band-stickered van to see their concerts in Baltimore, Toronto or North Carolina, and of the soft-edged scoldings she dishes when they don't eat properly or visit the doctor.

"When you're a struggling artist on tour, her home is an oasis," said Christy Darlington, 35, a musician based in Dallas who has performed at one BlondeShow and stayed in the basement many times while touring.

Each Tuesday, Jones's basement also hosts an Internet radio show for the Institute for Independent Music, which hopes to do for independent music what the Sundance Institute has done for independent film. The institute is attempting to create an alternative music distribution system so that bands who have an online fan base can also get their CDs in stores without having to go through major labels. From Jones's basement, IFI Music recently held a 48-hour "net-a-thon" -- a telethon broadcast over the Internet -- that raised $2,150. The group is also working to persuade musicians, not known for taking good care of themselves, to get health insurance.

Jones said she's always wanted to help young people, and in high school, when her friends dreamed of becoming movie stars or athletes, she decided to become a juvenile probation officer. In college, when she learned what kinds of kids she'd be working with, she changed her plans. "Guns and violence are things I don't understand, and so those are kids I couldn't help," she said.

Today her basement is papered with fluorescent thank-you notes, posters, salsa stains and the occasional hole in the wall from a rowdy (and subsequently apologetic) mosh-pitter. The home's previous owner taught ballet in the cellar, and the long mirror where the barre once hung remains.

It is a place neighborhood kids go to consume punk music and Coke -- the soft drink only. Jones makes sure there is no drinking, no drugs and certainly no making out.

"We never have to worry about someone calling the police on us," Jones said. "The only time cops came is once when their friend was playing here."

Sure, the musicians who come through sometimes sing of sex and swear words, but few can hear the lyrics. Instead, the 40 or so fans bob or jump around, their ears dotted with bright orange earplugs or wads of toilet paper to damper the drum set, while young musicians scream songs about commercialism, racism and bad boyfriends. When the bands are not playing, the basement rings with the squawks of the Joneses' 18 birds, most of which were abandoned by previous owners.

"We've tried to get booked somewhere in D.C., but no one will give us a chance," said James Berbert, 19, singer for Germantown-based The Reese Witherspoon Disaster, the band that closed a recent BlondeShow. "That's why we love Mrs. Jones."

Jones also stocks the food herself. In addition to Twinkies and soda, she also has a fresh supply of raw carrots and milk. At concerts she prepares a vegan or vegetarian dish. When she hosted the Author -- a local band headed by convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff's son Levi, an observant Jew -- she said she bought a new set of pans just so she could prepare a kosher meal.

In addition to the occasional D.C. quasi-celebrity, a few bands who've performed in her basement, such as Valencia, have cultivated relatively large national followings. Others are local cult heroes. When Chevy Chase performer Brandon "Jimes" Ivey breaks out into "0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1," many of the kids chant along in binary code because they've heard this song -- titled "Robot Porno" -- dozens of times at dozens of BlondeShows.

If things do work out for any of these musicians, they say, they'll have BlondeShells -- the team name Jones and her daughter go by -- to thank.

"If we get big," said Robby Tyson, 24, lead singer of Bowie-based The Rockvilles, "we will always, always come back and perform at Mrs. Jones's house."