To Youth
Speedway burns rubber in the basement of Cambridge Community Center on Monday, 28 July 2025.
Burning Lord and NYC’s Square One sandwich the triplestack punk bill.
The audio got fucked up on the video recap so we dubbed in sound from an old Speedway gig in Stockholm, plus some turkey FX.
Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix
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Hump Nights
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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️ Hump Nights 〰️
Hump Nights
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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix
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Hump Nights 〰️ Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️
Punk at 5 Callender St.
“To youth, who can dream dreams and with courage turn its dream into action.”
So says the inscription for the mural at the Cambridge Community Center, painted by John S. Coles at some point in the 1970s, a far distant past when Americans retained more than trace amounts of optimism in government as a tool for the cultural enrichment of the people. Has that belief gone the way of Big Bird?
The mural pictures a diverse body of young children, crammed joyously along the length of a slide, having a ball on a sunny afternoon. Adults always love to picture children this way: smiling, content, blissfully unaware of the awful choices that adults have made to ruin the world children are about to inherit.
The mural was the last thing you saw last Monday before descending the winding staircase to the basement where the youth were turning dreams into action. Inspirational stuff, except the dream on this particular occasion was a triple stack of bands playing loud, fast, hard punk rock in a room that smelled like a used gym sock. Locals Burning Lord welcomed Square One from New York City and Speedway from all the way from Stockholm for an evening of entertainment with an international pedigree.
Images from CCC
The major fallacy that sleeps in the hearts of most adults who fancy themselves proponents of youth culture is that culture is a gift that can be given to youth the way you leave a present underneath a Christmas tree. Hence the preponderance of local arts and cultural opportunities for children that are mediated, to greater and lesser degrees, by the magnanimity of adults, who, unsurprisingly, have very adultlike ideas about the who, what, where, when and why of art.
The truth is that culture can’t be gifted – you’ve got to reach out and make it your own. That’s what the Boston hardcore scene was doing in the basement of the Cambridge Community Center. The center provides some great youth programming, but it also demonstrates the good grace to step out of the way and let youth (and adults) rent its space at affordable rates for whatever they can dream up.
The punk show series in the basement at 5 Callender St., creates the kind of safe, sober, all-ages venue space that is vanishingly rare in Cambridge. Even rarer since Ian Simmons (Foundation for Civic Leadership) pulled the plug on the Democracy Center last year, interrupting the roughly two-decade run of DIY shows out of that building. A prosperous community that loves the arts, such as Cambridge, should be gaining, not losing, these spaces.
Let me wonder aloud about the greater goods that could be realized by providing more of these spaces where youth can drive programming and participation doesn’t hinge on cover charges, drink minimums or a boardroom full of adults deciding what sort of cultural enrichment the children will be subjected to next.
Youth have the courage to turn their dreams into action. Hats off to Cambridge Community Center for having the courage to get out the way and let the magic happen.
Photo Gallery
Speedway burns rubber at Cambridge Community Center.