The moon—a striking glitch within a picturesque black sky—no longer serves as your singular guiding light on Halloween or other dark, cold nights. When breath begins to jump from your mouth just to freeze, and goosebumps prickle the nape of your neck with ease, you should know which venue to head towards when walking down the street. When the wind whispers without reason and your bones take up the leisurely rattle of the season, it's time to walk yourself down to the right place in town: The Beehive on State Street.

The Beehive has been a working DIY venue for the better part of a decade, but since Andrew Earley's takeover around the advent of the pandemic, it has haunted its way right into even the most hardened of Salt Lake City hearts.

What started as a decades-long dream to create a safe community space for good, vegan comfort food and alternative art burned itself into a bright reality when Earley received a phone call. "My friend said, 'Hey, I'm looking at this space, you should stop looking at that other building for your restaurant and come do it here,' and I said, 'What's the address?' and he said, 'It's 666 South State Street,' and I said 'Let's go in the morning!'" And the rest was only the beginning.

Earley and his friend built out a restaurant in the front of the venue, the beloved all-vegan Mark of the Beastro, and re-vamped (get it?) the Beehive venue with ready and eager fangs. When his friend moved on from the project, Earley took over, and joined forces with the Beehive's technical director to start the Alternative Arts and Music Program (AAMP Utah), a creative way to help fund The Beehive, and a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on supporting, well, you guessed it, alternative arts and music in Utah.

Earley, now the executive director of the program states, "The focus of AAMP and The Beehive from the get-go has always been building a space for community, a place where we could go, and have shows that we liked, and celebrate the art we like, organize, and create this space that had been really important to us [hardcore kids] growing up." As the saying goes, the devil finds work (lots and lots of work, it seems!) for idle hands to do.

AAMP "prefers to do a little bit of everything as much as possible," using The Beehive events space to also support other SLC-based art and activist organizations, including Misrule Theatre, Salt City Slam, Bleached and Bewitched-led markets and performances, among many others.

Most recently, AAMP was approved for a low-power, non-commercial FM radio station, which according to Earley, will specialize in "stuff that other radio stations wouldn't ever be caught dead playing ... the more unique and the more DIY, and the kind of stuff you have to hunt down. That's what I want to put on the radio. That's my goal. And that's kind of what we try to do at The Beehive in general."

With approximately 250+ events each year, The Beehive sees quite the lineup of music, including favorites such as DARE (the hardcore outfit, not the guy in the suit), SCOUT and Academy Order.

"It's seeing these bands come through, that you're like 'Oh, this is magic, this is something to remember, you're gonna go on and see them later.' And there's been lots of those bands," Earley asserts. "It's a lot of these really unique events that are very special in so many different ways, rather than name-dropping these crazy bands. And that does happen, but to me, spaces like this do better when it's these memorable experiences."

Ah yes, the music. It's why you flicked your spellbound fingers through the pages of our beloved City Weekly towards this section in the first place. And lucky for you, dear reader, within the deep red walls and among the villainous action figures and Halloween decor lined up year-round upon the shelves, is a venue known to be the best—and most inclusive, and activist-oriented—venue for underground music this side of hell.

"I know punk and hardcore kind of have this reputation of being scary, and sometimes violent, and bad guys in '80s movies," Earley acknowledges, "but to me it was the thing that taught me how to express myself, and be who I wanted to be, and find values I could resonate with, and find like-minded people who were there to support and build that community, and I wanted to create a space that I could continue that."

Which is why amongst the Universal Monsters figurines and hardcore scene posters, you'll also find Black Lives Matter and Queer Pride prints, community theory bookshelves and a welcoming space to be 100% sober. "So yeah, it gets a bad rap, but it's mostly righteous anger," Earley opines. "If you get involved in the right scenes, it's mostly people who want to get involved and change things for the better." See? It's just like The Clash always said! Public service announcements—with guitar!

And, as all things go, what would be truly scary this Halloween is not the monsters under the bed or The Lost Boys aesthetic (even if some of us are still looking for a dupe of Marko Thompson's patchwork bomber jacket) which coats the history of the hardcore scene, but rather, not taking a chance on a deviously good time at a venue that's only frightening if you hate bloody good fun.

Find information on The Beehive and AAMP Utah on their Instagram and Facebooks, @beehiveslc and @aamputah.