For years, local musicians and bands have struggled to find safe, secure, moderately sound-proofed, and remotely comfortable rooms in which to rehearse. The carpet-padded garages, busy storage units, blanket-lines laundry rooms and drafty backyard tool sheds - band practice spaces come in all shapes and sizes.

Practice spaces can be mysterious too. Musicians and bands hide from the outside world in order to find the perfect sound through undisturbed collaboration - most of the time.

The Weekly Volcano respects the secret spaces - kind of. We dispatched our scribes Nikki McCoy and Rev. Adam McKinney for a look behind the scenes at an epic space in Olympia and a couple eerie concealed spaces in Tacoma.

OLYMPIA

Born in 1991, The Phoenix House in Olympia is legendary. In its early years, it served as a punk house to play music and f--- s--- up into the bleary oblivion of grunge and riot grrrl that help put Olympia on the map.  Witchypoo - featuring Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl and Joe Preston - and Bikini Kill are a couple of the early bands to leave its mark on the four bedroom, two bathroom house with an unfinished basement. 

In recent years, the basement has held dozens of other shows - Christian Mistress, Mt. Eerie, Funerot - and became a recognized "venue" on the Internet.

"I've gone through the yard and driveway at least eight times," says Joel Shillander, who now lives and practices with his band in the house. "The other day my neighbor was here and was like, ‘What's this?' And she pulled a $10 bill out of the grass. There are tons of party artifacts.

"And sometimes, at night, when I look out over my driveway," he says with a hint of admiration in his voice, "it looks like the ocean sparkling because of all the glass shards."

The Phoenix House's basement now hides a gothic jubilation tribute to The Cure performed by Shillander and his bandmates Allison Stewart, Mark Rentfrow, Ian Hedlund and Stevie Benge. 

Renamed Box Canyon - "we're dark wavers, not punks" states the band, half-joking - the practice space still has graffiti covering the walls, beams and ducts and even sports a tag from the final party, "Trashhouse Fuck Fest 2011."

As The Cure, the five-piece blew it out of the water at the sold-out Night of the Living Tribute Bands concert at the Capitol Theater last month. and the band plans to play an intimate show with a Scorpions cover band Sunday, Dec. 23 at The Brotherhood Lounge's 10-year anniversary party. After its run with The Cure, the band members plan to continue making music, writing and performing original new and dark wave cuts.

And of course, practicing it all in the historical Phoenix House/Box Canyon basement. - Nikki McCoy

TACOMA

Personally, I've always found practice spaces to be rather haunted. Whether they're crawling with the comings and goings of mismatched bands, scary neighborhood weirdos or freeloaders like me who know where the party ends up after the bars close (in my hazy recollection, the Fun Police furnish its practice space with a kegorator), there's always a level of underground activity.

Sometimes, this environment can end in tragedy - as was the case when the Nightgowns and the Wheelies had their practice space invaded, losing about $20,000 in equipment to some shitbag thief - but the most often result is a sensation of strange bedfellows gathering in and around the same building and partaking in cigarettes and ear-splitting, concrete-entombed rock.

"Most of the stories I have to tell about the practice space are gross," begins Patrick Galactic, of Tacoma electro-rock outfit Death By Stars, referring to the band's practice location at Maxi Space in Lakewood. "I was there, and I was recording an acoustic guitar track - doing some overdubs for a demo we were trying to record, at the time, somebody's yelling something in the hallway."

Galactic tries to press on, but the yelling persists, and keeps ruining his takes. Slowly, he realizes what the voice is shouting.

"He's saying, ‘Biscuits! Biscuits!'"says Galactic.

He shakes it off, like anyone might when confronted with the reality that an adult is wandering through the building yelling about biscuits. Suddenly, though, there's a knock at the door.

"I open the door, and it's just a big homeless-looking dude. He's like, ‘Have you seen Biscuits?' I'm in complete shock at this point. I just said, ‘What? No. I don't think so. Are you looking for biscuits, like food?' And he says, ‘No!'" Galactic says.

Well, the man walks off, and Galactic goes back to recording. Later, he goes out for a cigarette.

"About twenty minutes later, I go outside and he's hanging out with a little dude that he was calling Biscuits. I ended up having a smoke with them. They were nice guys once they were reunited, you know?"

I referred earlier to practice spaces being haunted. Miles VanMatre of bands like Apache Chief and the Pine Street Clam Slammers let's me know that his old practice space - his dad's house - was literally haunted.

"There was a lot of poltergeist activity," says VanMatre. "Loud noises that were impossible to recreate came from that room." - Rev. Adam McKinney

Isn't that the story of a lot of practice spaces? From Box Canyon to downtown Tacoma and beyond, these strange loud noises, impossible to recreate, emerge from within mysterious concrete walls.