The Nation: Going Underground

On certain nights over the past two years, residents along a street in downtown Tulsa, Okla., have heard puzzling, ghostly wisps of guitar music floating up from beneath the pavement. For a long time, no one bothered to investigate, thinking perhaps that a sewer worker was listening to a transistor radio.

In fact, Tulsa's young were literally going underground. In groups of twelve to 25, they have been meeting regularly on Friday or Saturday nights in a small gallery of the city's labyrinthine storm sewers to play their music, smoke and relax. "I do my best playing down there," says Guitarist John Southern, 18, a student at Tulsa Junior College.

The countercultural cave—twelve feet high and 15 feet wide—has the virtue of eerie acoustics: a single guitar chord can echo for 15 seconds. It is an adventurous, unlikely place for a party, reminiscent of that late-show sewer epic, The Third Man. Some older Americans might say, reflexively, of the rock-loving young: "They belong in a sewer." But as one participant explained: "There's no other place we could get together like this without being hassled."