I had been living in Brooklyn since 2002, and the local music scene in NYC was firing on all cylinders throughout those years. I took full advantage of it—it was a great time and place for any music fan to spend their 20s. The neighborhood, Williamsburg, was the hub of all this, with a million great bands and a ton of venues. Whether it was a local band playing a bar or fairly massive acts playing an outdoor venue in the warmer months, there was never a lack of options for seeing shows.

However, around 2010 or so it seems things slowly started to change. One by one, the smaller clubs I frequented started to close down, replaced by condos, or banks, or chain stores. The changes really accelerated around 2013 with a wave of clubs like Glasslands, 285 Kent, and Death by Audio all shuttering in quick succession, and while there were still some spots left, the casualties started piling up and it couldn’t honestly be called a neighborhood for live music anymore. It was part of the natural 10 to 15-year cycle that NYC has been going through for decades—my time here came just as the previous East Village/Lower East Side era was coming to a close and things were moving across the East River. Fast-forward another few years and it happened again, with the center of gravity moving east again, out of Williamsburg and into Bushwick.*

So I thought I was done, or that the scene I knew was done. I stopped going to shows and didn’t make the extra effort to head farther out to check out the new spots and new bands—an act of convenience and getting older more than anything else. But specifically, I took a break from going to smaller shows. Instead, for about five years I only went to big-ass stadium and arena concerts. The Stones. The improbable Guns N’ Roses “reunion.”** AC/DC.*** Bob Seger. You get the idea. I liked the absurdity of it, the spectacle. It was so different from all the shows I had been to for the past decade. It was maximized rock n’ roll; it could not get any bigger. Maybe it was that I could finally afford the ticket, the beer, and the T-shirt, but being able to see the songs I heard on the radio as a kid performed live just felt really good. Nostalgia is a motherfucker.

And it goes both ways. Sometime around 2016 I started checking out smaller shows again. There were some venues that had survived the wave of changes and become local institutions, like Union Pool. Or had carved out a niche to improbably become an institution, like Saint Vitus in neighboring Greenpoint. At the time, CREEM’s now VP of Content, Fred Pessaro, and I were working together at another company, and he was promoting shows on the side. He’d invite me to the ones he knew I’d like—the rock ’n’ roll shows with bands like Vanity, Hank Wood and the Hammerheads, Royal Headache, Giuda, Sheer Mag, the Marked Men, and Reigning Sound. A lot of these shows felt like the ones I had been going to 10 years prior and, unbeknownst to me at the time, would lead to both of us getting involved with CREEM.