ALL ABOUT THAT BASS

By ANDREW MCGINN a.mcginn@beeherald.com

You can spell it Bassmakers or you can spell it Bass Makers, but it’s all the same to the kids who now frequent the Webb House.

The name no longer rings a bell.

“I thought it was a fishing group,” explained Gabe Fincel, 16, the Greene County High School student who has become Jim North’s right-hand man at the Webb House, the perennial teen hangout at the corner of Wilson and Madison.

At least some things never change: Mr. North is still ever-present at the Webb House, making him something akin to the Dick Clark of Jefferson — the community’s oldest teenager.

So when the retired middle school English teacher got word that the Bassmakers were willing to come back and DJ a free Webb House dance for grades 6-8 the weekend of Bell Tower Festival, he jumped on it faster than a Nelly album on Napster.

“I was ecstatic,” North said.

The Bassmakers haven’t been in the house since the early ’00s — but it won’t be long Friday night before some kid realizes he brought a fishing pole for nothing.

“We always have a tendency to rattle windows,” Bassmakers co-founder Andrew Woodley said.

“I like that,” Fincel piped up, grinning with approval.

Since opening as a youth center in 1997 — initially in the basement of Catherine Webb’s old home — the Webb House has been many things to many people.

It’s been a safe place to have fun. It’s been a place where some have met future spouses. And in the case of the Bassmakers, it’s been a business incubator.

As teens during the Y2K era, Woodley, classmates Jon Merrill and Chris Wind, and younger brother Dan Woodley seemed to naturally just gravitate toward DJing, becoming the house DJs and the “Webb House Bassmakers” in the process.

More than 20 years later, Bassmakers DJ and Sound Service is still available for weddings, dances and parties near and far.

“We didn’t know it was going to last this long,” confessed Woodley, a 2002 Jefferson-Scranton graduate who also runs a local appliance repair service.

Woodley, who now has two kids of his own, said he recently realized that he was going to be in town for Bell Tower Festival. With COVID beginning to abate, he saw it as the perfect time for the Bassmakers to return to the place where it all started.

By his estimate, they haven’t DJed a Webb House dance since 2004.

“We don’t even carry a CD player with us anymore,” he said, explaining that their music library is now entirely digital.

At other times, Woodley, 37, is perhaps starting to sound his age.

“Honestly,” he said, “I don’t care for a lot of the new music today.”

The Bassmakers, he said, have always used cleaner, radio-edits of songs. But Woodley was frankly thrilled that when Bassmakers DJed this spring’s Paton-Churdan High School prom, nearly every request was something from the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s.

For his part, North just wants to make sure they still have “YMCA.”

Friday’s dance is slated to be held in the Webb House parking lot — something the Bassmakers once tried doing back in the day, only to have it rained out. In case of rain this time, the dance will move inside.

The Bassmakers clearly occupy a special spot in North’s heart, in part because they and their friends advocated for a new Webb House to be built as the old one became more unsound.

“It may or may not be how the old Webb House broke, from dancing,” Woodley said, half-joking. “We literally broke the floor trusses in the old Webb House.”

Catherine Webb’s house had been one of several old homes the First United Methodist Church bought for a parking lot — and the only one the church retained. By the time the house was razed in 2002, teens had moved up out of the basement to take over the whole place.

North only learned later that there had been a “makeout room.” 

The new facility — built ecumenically — opened in January 2003.

Since the late ’90s, middle school dances at the Webb House have raised tens of thousands of dollars for local causes.

For the Bassmakers, the feelings are mutual. The Webb House came to mean so much to them that they persuaded North to let high schoolers hang out there on Sunday nights. Initially, the space was reserved solely for middle schoolers.

“There were a lot of friendships made,” Woodley said, adding, “We didn’t want to leave.”

With many of them going into the trades, they happily stuck around and helped build the facility.

“A lot of the stuff in here,” Woodley said, looking around, “we did.”

North still talks about the very last time he saw Ben Carman, clearing a tree from the property. A classmate of Woodley’s in the Jefferson-Scranton Class of 2002, Carman was eventually killed in 2004 while serving with the Marines in Ramadi, Iraq.

North also considers it a matter of pride that several former Webb House kids now contribute financially to the house as adults. The Webb House has gotten by all this time only on donations.

When the music begins again Friday night, it will mark the umpteenth middle school dance Jim North has chaperoned. It’s entirely possible, actually, that no human has endured more middle school dances in one lifetime than North.

And he wouldn’t miss it for the world.

“I feel like I need to be here,” he said.