Underground music & performance in Memphis
Underground music and performance in Memphis: 8 rooms including Goner Records, Hernando's Hide-A-Way and Growlers. Basement venues, warehouse shows and stages that hold forty people, where you stand close enough to hear the amp buzz. Every entry is hand-vetted against real sources — not scraped off a top-ten list or averaged out of crowd ratings.
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Goner Records
Goner started as a label in 1993 to put out records nobody else would — Tokyo's Guitar Wolf, the Oblivians, the Reatards — and opened the Young Avenue storefront in 2004, where it has since shipped something north of 30,000 orders to 15,000 customers. The shop is small, the crates are deep, and they buy as aggressively as they sell: LPs, 45s, CDs, tapes. Touring bands play free in-stores here on short notice, announced on the shop's own front page with the immediacy of a bulletin board — a recent one read simply "Sweeping Promises instore tonight 6pm." Every September the whole thing metastasizes into Gonerfest, four days and forty-plus acts drawing people from across the country; the 2026 edition, Gonerfest 23, has Man or Astro-man?, Death, Horsegirl and Jack Oblivian on the bill. Tourists working the Beale Street circuit essentially never find their way here.
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Hernando's Hide-A-Way
Hernando's sits at the end of a residential dead-end road in Whitehaven, holds about 200 people, and carries a genuine claim to Elvis, Johnny Cash and Charlie Rich having worked the room. It went dark for years and is now demonstrably back: 564 past concerts logged and sixteen more already on the books running into 2027. The programming is a real roadhouse mix — ticketed touring acts at $10 to $40 depending on the name, with JD Simo, Joshua Ray Walker and Willis Alan Ramsey among the fall bills — sitting alongside two standing weekly nights that cost nothing. Wednesday is an open jam, Sunday is Chicken Sh*t Bingo with Hillbilly Mojo, both no cover. Doors are usually 6 p.m. for an 8 p.m. show, which leaves a long, comfortable stretch of nothing much happening at the bar.
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Growlers
Growlers sits in a low brick building at 1911 Poplar, a few blocks east of Overton Park, and books like a room that has nothing to prove: 1,431 shows logged on Songkick and 22 more already on the calendar between now and December. Most nights are ten-dollar local bills — a rap showcase Thursday, a four-band metal package Saturday — with the occasional outlier that sells real tickets, like The Faint on Nov 5 ($28-32) or a TVBOO dubstep night at $30. The genre spread on a single month runs pop, hip-hop, indie, post-punk, deathcore and stand-up comedy, which tells you the booker's rule is simply whether the act can fill the floor. There's a kitchen, a bar, and no pretense about either.
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Hi-Tone (the downstairs Small Room)
Hi-Tone runs two rooms out of one address on N Cleveland: the Big Room upstairs, all ages unless flagged otherwise, and the Small Room downstairs, which is always 21+ with the sole exception of the performers. The downstairs booking is where the club's actual personality lives — a free comedy open mic every Tuesday from 7 to 8, Neil Hamburger on Sept 13, Dungeons & Drag Queens on Oct 2 — the kind of calendar that assumes you'll show up for something you've never heard of. The venue also runs Yokai Sushi Gang out of the building, doing made-to-order sushi and dumplings with Grab 'n' Go on Mondays and Wednesdays, 5 to 10. It is not a pretty room, and the schedule already stretches to a Colour Revolt date in December, so it's not going anywhere.
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The Green Room at Crosstown Arts
The Green Room is a purpose-built listening space on the second floor of Crosstown Concourse — the 1927 Sears mail-order distribution tower that sat empty for two decades before reopening in 2017 as the largest LEED Platinum historic reuse project in the world. Crosstown Arts describes the room plainly: acoustically treated, reconfigurable, run with high-end audio and video gear, and deliberately built without the distractions of a bar or restaurant around it. What that buys you is a program where a Modern Jazz Masters date with Jon Cowherd ($25-35), a chamber flute-and-harp evening called Wind & Wire ($18-25), and a $7 open jazz jam session all get the same quiet. Doors generally open thirty minutes before the music, and a free 6pm series called The Mystic turns up on the first of the month.
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B-Side
B-Side is a 200-capacity bar tucked into the Minglewood Plaza strip at 1553 Madison, and its entire pitch is three words on its own homepage: local live music every night. Every set gets pushed to the venue's YouTube channel, so a Tuesday in a half-full room is also a broadcast — which is either charming or slightly unnerving depending on where you sit. The bar is full-service with local beer on tap and a happy hour, and the booking skews toward Memphis bands you won't find on a national routing sheet: Fruited Planes and The Sheaves with Chris Burns And His Going Concerns is what's on for Sept 26. Songkick has 74 shows logged here, which for a bar this size means the calendar is doing real work.
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Wild Bill's
Wild Bill's is a low cinderblock building on Vollintine with long communal tables, meaning you don't get a table so much as a seat at somebody else's. The Juke Joint All Stars — a rotating pool of pro players who also work Beale — hold the room down, and the beer program is refreshingly unsubtle: 32-ounce cans run $6 to $8 and a bucket goes for $22 domestic, $25 import. The kitchen is not an afterthought; catfish platters land around $10 to $15, wings scale up to a 30-piece, and every other Sunday brings a soul food menu with chitterlings, ox tails and pot roast plates. The venue bills itself as a bar, restaurant and blues museum in roughly that order, and the walls back it up.
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Murphy's
Murphy's sits at 1589 Madison in Midtown and has been quietly absorbing Memphis's loud end of the spectrum for two decades. Setlist.fm has 182 setlists on file here going back to 2003, and Songkick counts 177 concerts — the overlap is heavy on garage, punk and indie, with Nots, Negro Terror and The Queers among the most-repeated names. In September 2019 the bar took a Gonerfest 16 day session and ran nine bands through in an afternoon, half-hour slots starting at 2 p.m. The booking has thinned considerably since; the most recent show on record is Joecephus and The George Jonestown Massacre in May 2026, and nothing is currently listed ahead.
Underground music & performance in Memphis — FAQ
Which underground music & performance in Memphis are the strangest?
Ranked by how strange they actually are: Goner Records, Hernando's Hide-A-Way and Growlers. Goner Records — Goner started as a label in 1993 to put out records nobody else would — Tokyo's Guitar Wolf, the Oblivians, the Reatards — and opened the Young Avenue storefront in 2004, where it has since shipped something north of 30,000 orders to 15,000 customers.
Is this a good weird date in Memphis?
That's what the list is built for. Every entry has a specific move rather than a vague recommendation — at Goner Records, for instance: Get to the shop before 7 on a weeknight, check the front counter and their site for whether there's an in-store that evening, and dig through the crates until someone plugs in — if there's no band, buy each other one record apiece on a fifteen-dollar cap, then walk the two blocks into Cooper-Young for dinner and argue about the picks.
How were these underground music & performance chosen?
An agentic research system digs for the genuinely obscure — the spots even locals miss — and every one is verified against real sources before it makes the list. We deliberately skip the landmarks already on every Memphis guide.