It’s 9 o’clock on a Friday night, and the crowd is just starting to file in. Guitars and microphones are being sound checked, fans are casually sipping on cans of beer and Dixie cups full of mixed drinks. The band mates have just started to show up, and are warming up a bit before their set.
No one had to wait on a velvet rope line, though. There was no neon sign in front of the place, telling fans that they had arrived. They didn’t pass their ID off to a surly, 300-pound bouncer either. Their drinks didn’t even come from a long, wood paneled, stool adorned bar.
The first band of the night starts playing, a slow, simple beat of guitar plucks and the singer’s moaning permeating through the heads of the audience. The band isn’t sitting on a stage, however, they’re in someone’s kitchen. The audience is mingling and listening on couches and chairs in a living room, a TV and Nintendo in the background. A pair of guests, eager to hear the music from a slightly closer vantage point, are resting on a washing machine.
The fans of live music here didn’t go to a swanky Manhattan super club like the Knitting Factory or Irving Plaza, they rode ten stops deep on the L train to Ridgewood, on the far border of Brooklyn and Queens, to the Silent Barn. They walked on a siren-soaked street, stopped across the way from a scrap yard, and entered a metallic door with a broken handle that looked as if it might have fallen victim to a SWAT team battering ram not so long ago. The only sign telling visitors that they had come to the right place was a 12-point font sized “(…)” and stick-figure style picture of a barn, both written in black sharpie. A scrawny kid in skin tight jeans with a hairdo spanning the stylistic accomplishments of the Mohawk and the mullet was the one looking at IDs and collecting the cover charge. Cocktails were mixed and served inside a makeshift closet, prepared by one resident of the barn while another tore off the tops of twelve-packs of Budweiser.
“The difference between the Silent Barn and some of those bigger Manhattan super-clubs is, well a couple of things,” said Todd P, the guy who pretty much put the night’s entertainment together. “There’s no artificial divide here between audience and performer. You go to one of those clubs, and the bands are cloistered away. You never see them.”
This is just the beginning of a long list that can be compiled on the difference between the Silent Barn, a so-called “underground” venue, and those places that are more likely to appear in TimeOut New York or the back of The Village Voice. The audience experience is tailored, in what Todd would have one believe, in an intentional way, completely opposite to that of a regular bar or club. Visitors are allowed, and quite possibly encouraged, to mingle and socialize into the morning hours, well past when the band has already packed up their equipment. Not to say that the band has left – quite the opposite. Most stay to drink a $3 Bud can or smoke a cigarette on the roof with the rest of the crowd.
“The only thing I can say about the Silent Barn against other places is that it’s much more tastefully done,” said Josh Brown, one of the former roommates who still helps put on shows there. “The people who run this place are very respectful. They aren’t trying to screw anyone over.”
This mentality, in fact, seems in direct opposition to the New York, and let’s be honest, Manhattan nightlife scene. Most clubs and bars in the city have been engineered to engage their patrons in a pure business transaction throughout the course of their stay. Money is gruffly taken at the door, one is shoved through the front door into a mob congealed around a bar serviced by underpaid and typically underachieving bartenders.
Bands are normally treated in two ways. If they are big enough to warrant a green room, they stay there for 90 percent of the time, and then play for a cookie-cut extent of time on the stage and leave. If they aren’t that big, they still play the same cookie-cutter kind of time (although slightly abridged), but are relegated to a corner of the house, where the acoustics suck and their equipment is never properly sound checked. People like Todd and Josh just can’t seem to understand the point of going to places like that.
“You’ve got friends, you’ve got equipment. Find a place, charge a couple bucks at the door and there’s your show,” Josh said. “That’s all DIY is.” This thrown together quality of a DIY show at a place like the Silent Barn is exactly how it gets its appeal. The doors open at 8:00pm typically, but the first band could play anywhere between ten minutes and two hours from then. That would be frustrating, if it wasn’t kind of the point.
“With the bigger clubs, it’s just a business transaction,” Todd said. “The minute the band stops, the lights turn on and the big bouncer goons tell everybody to get the fuck out. Why? Because they are employees getting paid, and they are doing what they think they are supposed to.” The point at DIY shows is that people are supposed to mingle, communities are supposed to act themselves out in public spaces. The drinks are cheap, and half the time given away for free. Audience members ping pong between discussions with people they’ve never met before to talk about the bands, the area, or the giant wall mural of a seagull eating a bowl of spaghetti in front of them.
The decorating is an incentive in itself here. The barn’s interior is an insane amalgamation one would never experience at the typical New York venue – adorned with relic player pianos, arcade machines from the 1980’s and wall illustrations that defy explanation (upon entering the main living room, headless monsters in hooded sweatshirts are the first greeting a guest receives). The furniture and artworks on the walls are in fact just another way for visitors to break the ice; at the first time there, one can’t help talking to somebody else about the unicorn that’s riding a rainbow in space right behind the drummer.
