PASSIONS OF THE PIT FROM HARDCORE CLUBS TO VAST VENUES, FROM INTIMATE TO IMPERSONAL, THE RITUAL AND THE EVOLUTION OF MOSH.(LIFE & LEISURE)

Byline: CELINA OTTAWAY Staff writer

The music starts -- tattooed lead singer howls into microphone, guitars wail.

The crowd leaps forward in the dark room. Seven rows deep, they press against the stage. Boys and girls lean into each other, pack tight, bounce when they can move to the hardcore song.

The beginning of the pit.

Next come the guys with the swinging arms. They move back and forth behind the crowd at the stage, staking their space. Some jump back and forth as a circle clears around them.

Then the song slows for a minute and the bass drives in, pounding. The dancers respond to the signal -- called a breakdown. A ring of men and women form the outer edges of what is now a cleared circle. They face the middle, most have one arm extended ready to block an oncoming body or a flying fist.

Some of the men are shirtless, sweat dripping down the middle of their young torsos. Others wear combat fatigues and T-shirts with the names of their favorite bands. Most have short hair, long hair is mostly spiked or dyed.

In the middle of the circle the moshing starts. Three guys claim their space, thrusting their arms into the open air. One hunches over, his torso twisting, throwing punches to the ground. Another swings his arms around in circles like a windmill with fists.

This is Friday night at Valentine's, an Albany club -- small, intimate and intense. A few hundred people, mostly teenagers. It's the kind of environment that gave birth to mosh-pit dancing in the 1980s and from which it spread, morphed and transformed into standard behavior for large-arena concerts.

These days, people mosh to everything from Metallica to Melissa Etheridge.

``The meaning of it has become so watered down that it's just what you do at shows,'' said Rickey Wright, a veteran rock critic in Seattle who has spent almost 20 years covering music for both national magazines and daily newspapers. ``It doesn't even relate to the music. That's how you have people getting passed over each other's heads at something like a Dave Matthews show.''

But the intimacy of hardcore club shows -- where many moshers know each other and the pits are easy to leave if …