BROOKE BAXTER

By Emily Easley

Photos by Sam Fleischner

Brooke is the co-owner of Glasslands, my favorite venue and the best place in Brooklyn to dance and see bands. I first got to know Brooke at a birthday gathering for my boyfriend – she helped me figure out how to make sorbet and birthday candles into the prettiest possible presentation and later we drank prosecco-sorbet floats and made ink drawings together.

I interviewed Brooke at the Pencil Factory in Greenpoint in April, 2009. She told me some hilarious stories about her wild teenage years in Manhattan, and shared some moving memories of her standup comedian father, who passed away since the time of the interview. I feel honored to have participated in this remembrance of him.

EE: I think you’re the first person I’ve talked to who grew up in New York like me. I was curious about what that was like for you.

BB: I think a big part of what I’m doing is because I did grow up here, so I have a certain love and appreciation and this really big romance with New York – like, I LOVE New York. You know, my boyfriend’s mom comes around, and I’m like, “Okay, we’ll go to the Statue of Liberty and Central Park and the Dakota and the Met.”

I don’t think I’ve ever been to the Dakota – that’s a good one. Did you grow up on the Upper West Side?

Yeah. It was awesome. I spent a lot of time hanging out with my friends, smoking weed in the park, and I had quite a few high school dates in Central Park. I was always at Riverside Park or Central Park.

Was it like, blunts and forties?

Yep. It was blunts and forties. Definitely.

And pre-Giuliani?

Yeah, Dinkins was mayor. Actually, I was born in the city, and then when I was seven, my mom and I moved to Stamford, Connecticut, and I was in Stamford til I was fourteen. We moved back to New York because my mom got a job working for Dinkins, planning his parties. As a special favor, he got me into what I guess they thought was one of the best public schools, Humanities, which was not a good school at all. Like, “Ooh, go to Humanities, it’s a special favor!” Haha.

I don’t even know what that is.

Humanities is on 18th Street, all the way on the West Side. It’s across the street from Hiro Ballroom and Maritime – which actually used to be a Covenant House, which was for homeless pregnant girls. Which is so weird to me because I remember hanging out in front of school, and those girls were like, fucking tough as hell, and they would be hanging out, smoking cigarettes and stuff, and now it’s this really chi-chi, you know – I think it’s so weird that people are out drinking super-fancy cocktails and looking out into the projects. But I actually only went to that school for one year because I got kicked out.

Why’d you get kicked out?

I just never went to class.

What were you doing?

Smoking blunts with my boyfriend.

Did he go to that school?

No. I became best friends with a girl in my class, and she’d known him since he was a little kid. They were friends, so that’s how I met him. He was my first serious boyfriend.

Had you already started smoking weed by then?

Yeah, I think I started smoking weed when I was like fourteen, the summer before I moved to New York. But not as seriously as when I moved to New York.

The thing I always remember that was really cool is that you could page drug dealers to payphones.

Oh, yeah. I used to use pay phones all the time. I had a beeper –

What was your beeper? Mine was pink!

Mine was hot pink! And it was so funny because I was the first one of my friends to get an afterschool job, and I got a job around Astor Place, at this clothing store called Rubber Soul, and I started making money and I got a beeper. I showed up to school with my hot pink beeper and all my girlfriends were like, “Ooh, you think you’re all that now, cos you got a beeper!” And I’m like, “Yeah, I am!”

Were you kind of tough?

I thought I was.

It seems like you were very independent at an early age.

Yeah, definitely. I had a single working mom and she didn’t have a lot of time to keep tabs on me, and she raised me to be very independent. It kind of backfired on her, cos I was fifteen and I was like, “I’m my own woman! You can’t tell me what to do!” Cos she’s been telling me my whole life, “You can’t think you’re gonna grow up and get married and somebody’s gonna take care of you, you have to have your own passion, your own life, your own interests.”

That’s great though. Cos a lot of girls don’t have that sense of themselves.

Yeah. My best girlfriend got pregnant when she was fifteen and had a baby at sixteen, and all my girlfriends were having babies. And they were like, “When are YOU gonna have a baby?” But I knew I didn’t want a baby, like I knew – even though I was so immersed in hanging out and having fun and kind of doing what I wanted –

And that culture of having a baby being a kind of status-symbol or developmental landmark.

Exactly, it was. And I remember, at fifteen, we weren’t allowed to go to clubs yet, and I knew when we turned sixteen our parents would start letting us go to clubs. I told my friend, “We’re gonna be sixteen soon, and we can go to this club and this club and this club. We can’t have a BABY!” And she was like, “My mom doesn’t let me go out anyway, I don’t care!” And I’m like, “But she WILL! We will!”

But I just did tenth grade at that school. I had like, straight F’s, and at the end of the year they were like, “You’re here on favor, you can’t come back. You’ve gotta go to your local high school” – which was Martin Luther King. My mom called my dad and was like, “Dude, your daughter really fucked up. She didn’t go to school, she’s gonna have to go to Martin Luther King and she’s gonna get her ass kicked every single day, cos she thinks she’s really tough, but she’s not.” And my dad is British – you know, he’s like, “Oh, my! Oh, no!” So he coughed up the big bucks, and I repeated tenth grade at a private school.

Which one?

Birch Wathen Lenox. It was a great way for me to see two sides of growing up in the city: I had that public school experience, and I was with a lot of kids whose families were really struggling, and a lot of them were on welfare, and most of them were living in the projects. And then I go to private school and my new friends are living on like, on Park Avenue in penthouses. Totally different.

And they’re still smoking blunts and drinking forties.

Exactly. It’s so weird because now I watch stuff like Gossip Girl, right? And all those kids, it’s like the more money you have, the cooler you are. And I don’t know about the rest of America, but I know in New York City, when I was in school, kids who came from rich families were embarrassed by it. It was like, NOT cool to flaunt your money. Like the kids in my school that could buy the most expensive clothes and have the most flashy lifestyle, would NEVER –

They were like, pro Salvation Army shoppers.

Yeah, all Salvation Army, and all that shit. I think about rap music and how influential it is on kids, and I remember there was a shift – cos at that time, it was like, Wu Tang, and everything was about being from the hood. That’s what everybody listened to – white, black, everybody. Then Puffy came out with, “I’m minted, I’ve got money, I’ve got Lexuses.” And kids were like, “Wait, it’s cool to be rich, and that’s awesome because my family – ” 

And then they were like, renting the bulletproof BMWs.

Exactly. And that became cool. Hip-hop made it cool to be flashy.

So you were mostly just into rap?

Yeah, I listened to a lot of hip-hop, and then I listened to Freestyle music. Do you remember like, really bad Freestyle songs? Like, "Diamond Girl"? It was kind of a Latin thing. Dance-y, really cheesy lyrics. Like an En Vogue song would be considered almost Freestyle. It was just a genre, and it was a very short period of time. George Lamond and TKA, Little Suzy. They were all part of that scene. I know all those songs by heart. 

How did you know that you wanted to go to clubs?

I just knew – that was like the thing to do. My best friend is gay, and he came out when he was fifteen, and I think we went to a club when we were maybe sixteen – it was one of my first times going out.

What clubs did you go to?

This one was an underground gay club called Sting Ray’s. It was super, super seedy. And there were two hardcore butch women at the door, and we never had any money, so he’d always make me flirt to get in for free. I’d be like, “HEYYY! Me and my friend over here are so broke!” We’d go in and it was basically like, a hardcore hip-hop and reggae club, like all gay men dressed in huge baggy clothes – everything looked like guys on the street that were totally thugged out, but they were all gay.

How would you find out about the underground scene?

He would find out. Like, the gay scene he had on lock. And that’s how I learned how to dance, is gay hip-hop clubs.

Wow, I really want to see you dance now.

I dance like a gay hip-hop guy! But I learned how to vogue.

Were there straight clubs that you went to, too?

Oh, yeah. I went with my girlfriends to the straight clubs, and it was funny because we never had any money, I don’t know how we did this. But I’d wait for my mom to go to bed, sneak out, get on the 1 train downtown – it’s one o’clock in the morning – go to like, the meatpacking district. I’d go out, be done at four in the morning. Four-thirty, five, I’d be on the train, and then walk home. I mean, I lived on the Upper West Side, it was pretty safe, but I would like, NEVER do that now. I don’t even take the train past midnight!

I realize looking back, it’s like, “Yeah, teenagers do make really stupid decisions.” We used to hop cabs – like, my friend and I, we’d always stay at her house, so we had this plan worked out. It’s horrible now, when I think about it – we’d take a cab home, and then she’d be like, “Oh, my mom’s waiting to give me money.” She’d go, and I’d wait, and when I’d see the door open, I’d jump out of the cab, and just run as fast as I can into the building.

And they wouldn’t follow you?

She lived in the projects, so they wouldn’t get out of the cab.

It’s interesting the way teenage girls think they’re so innocent-seeming that they know they can get away with the worst shit.

I know. Now, as a person who works hard for their money, I would never think about doing that. But when you’re young you’re like, “What’s money?! What’s working hard?!” You’re just a kid and it doesn’t matter.

But then I started going out with my friends from private school, to more like, scenester kind of parties, and there were celebrities and models. I stopped going to the more hard kind of clubs, and was getting into that scene. Like Lot 61, and Bowery Bar.

Did you have boyfriends?

I always had a boyfriend but I never would go out with them, to party and stuff. I was a little player. I was probably a disappointment to a lot of guys because I just liked going on dates and having like, nice dinners. I think it was the creative part of me – I just loved meeting as many types of people and absorbing all of these different lives.

Were you creative? I mean, did you write, or make music?

Yeah, I was always writing poetry. I was always writing. I was a terrible student but in my creative writing classes I was always getting good grades.

Did you say your dad was a standup comedian? Can you tell me about that?

Yeah, he is a British standup comedian. He came over to the States when he was thirty-five, and he was nearly fifty when I was born, so there was always a really big gap between us. Like with school, he never really disciplined me, because he would see my report card and be like, “What’s a D-mark?” And I’d be like, “Yeah, it’s DYNAMITE!” And he’d be like, “GREAT!!!”

He grew up in London, and his parents were British vaudeville performers, so they were constantly moving around, and my dad  didn’t even go to high school, he finished school in eighth or ninth grade.

My dad was so immersed in that culture that he started performing. He was the youngest comedian to perform at the London Palladium at the time. He opened for Danny Kaye, and he went on tour with the Beatles. Since the age of eighteen he’s been able to make his living as a standup comedian, and he never had another job. He’ll show me his hands sometimes, and be like, “You see that? Never a hard day’s work. Beautiful hands, beautiful hands!”

Do you have his stories on tape?

I do, actually. My dad’s in a nursing home now, and StoryCorps came and recorded my dad’s life story, and I interviewed him. So I have that, which is very difficult for me to listen to, because he’s in a different state right now where he can barely communicate.

But I grew up watching him on stage. My parents divorced when I was two, and I’d go with my dad every summer and every other weekend. He was working in the Catskill Mountains, and he would perform with Tom Jones and Eddie Fisher, and all these people that – I don’t know, people my age probably don’t even care about. I would watch him perform from the side, and by the time I was seven I knew his entire routine by heart.

He was larger than life to me. It’s an amazing thing to see your parent make so many people laugh. And because all he ever knew in his life was imagination and creativity, that’s what he would tell me the most important things were.

He had me doing routines when I was five and six years old. He’s like, “Okay, I’m gonna come in the room, and I’m applying for this job, but then there’s like this weird um – this weird hippopotamus that I have, and then you have to keep a straight face and you have to do this. Ready? Okay, go!” And then he’d be like, “Okay, do it again, your timing was off, bad timing.” 

It sounds like he really connected with you.

He did. And most dads work during the day. When I spent time with my dad, since he worked at night, it was like, all day playing – he just showered me with love and attention and time. He gave me a ton of time. 

His friends were all standup comedians, and it would never be like, “Okay, Brooke, the adults are talking.” It would be like, “What do YOU wanna do?” And I’m like, “I wanna play Wizard of Oz! And I want you to be the scarecrow, and you to be the tin man!” And they’d all be drinking, and be like, “Alright, get the video camera!” And I’m like, “YES!!!” They would all play Wizard of Oz with me.

Wow. That sounds so special.

Yeah. I think that’s why I have lots of guy friends now. When I was younger, I was with my dad and his friends all the time, so I was like, comfortable.

Well it seems like a really easy transition to like, hanging out with guys in bands.

Yeah, totally! See, when I was little, I thought that everyone’s dad was a standup comedian. I’d be in elementary school, and I’d ask, “What does your dad do?” And it was like, “Oh, he works on Wall Street.” And I’m like, “My dad’s a standup comedian. What? That’s weird?” I didn’t even know.

Tell me what you did after you left high school.

After I left high school, my mom asked me to leave, or kicked me out.

Were you not getting along?

No, it was pretty bad. I was eighteen, and I just got an apartment with my friend on the Upper East Side. And I just started working. I worked as a receptionist at a comic book company. And that was awesome. I mean, it was a totally nerdy environment, because everyone who worked there LOVED comic books. The executive would have “shoot the intern” day, and he’d have squirt guns –

It sounds like You Can’t do that on Television.

It was like You Can’t Do that on Television! It was the most awesome job. We got squirt guns, we could run around at lunch, and like, play video games.

So were you still going out a lot?

Yeah, oh my God. I lived with my best friend Jaime. We’d go out every single night. Mondays we’d go to Lot 61, and Tuesdays was Veruca, Wednesday we’d go to Sway and then Thursdays was Don Hill’s. We’d go out til like, six in the morning. And then I’d come home and I’d sleep for three hours and I’d go to work.

Do you have any good stories about that time?

I have a good high school story. When I was in high school – it was senior? Or junior year? When do you take the SATs?

Junior year.

Okay, it must have been junior year, cos it was the PSATs. And they were having them at my school – it was like, Saturday morning you had to be there at eight and take the PSATs. And I went out Friday night and I went to the Tunnel. 

I was with my friend, and we were dancing, and I’m like, “Oh, man, I’ve gotta go do something. I’ve gotta go take my PSATs!” And she was like, “Oh, really?” I was like, “What time is it?” She’s like, “It’s seven!” And I was like, “Seven?! I’ve gotta GO!!!” And she’s like, “You’re gonna go?” And I’m like, “I gotta go!”

So I left, and I got on the train. And I’m in like, the sluttiest going out-outfit ever. I looked like a mess, my eyes were like – I’m wearing tons of makeup – and I show up at school at eight in the morning, and I got there, and it was like, super serious, and I didn’t have a pencil. I was like, “I don’t wanna take my PSATs, I wanna go home.” And they were like, “No, you have to take them.”

I’m like, “I’m not going to college, I don’t care, I’m not taking them.” And my school was a really small private school, and they had a certain reputation, and like, that’s blasphemy to not go to college. 

They were like, “Just sit down and take the test.” And I was SO fucked up. I sat down and tried to write my name, and like – I spelled my NAME wrong. I just took the dots and drew like, a picture, and I was done in ten minutes, and I was like, “I finished! I’m a genius! Here ya go!” And I left.

Then a month later, I get called into the dean’s office. They’re like, “Okay, we got your PSATs. You scored the lowest that anybody’s every scored in the school, and state law, you need to take a competency test to make sure you’re not borderline retarded.” So this woman comes in, and she puts up a picture. She’s like, “Okay, Brooke. What is this?” And I’m like, “CAT.”

And my friends were looking through the window, and they were like, “YOU’RE RETARD-ED!!!” And she’d hold up another one, and I’m like, “DOG.” “What color is this?” “BLUE.”

That’s hilarious. How did you know you didn’t wanna go to college?

I knew for what I wanted to do I didn’t need a degree.

What did you want to do?

I knew I wanted to do something creative. My mom was a real estate broker. She did really well for herself, and she and my dad could have afforded to send me to college. But I didn’t want to waste their money.

It sounds like you were really mature then.

Well, with that, I guess I was. My mom and I fought but I loved her and I respected how hard she busted her ass. I didn’t want to be that kid who goes to college and smokes weed all day and kind of fucks around. 

When did you first start hanging out in Williamsburg?

I started getting really bored with the Manhattan scene. It was the same thing every night and it kind of seemed like a vacuous existence. I wasn’t meeting anybody of any substance. 

At that time I had this real need to educate myself, and to travel and study art history. I didn’t have a job and I got unemployment for six months, and I just went to the Met every day and study my favorite paintings and go to the library and reference them. I was starting to develop this fascination with music and art and poetry.

So I was having my own personal artistic Renaissance, haha – and I was like, “The Upper East Side sucks!” And then – this is really funny – I got Time Out New York magazine, and on the cover, it had a picture of these kids in a bar, and it said: “Williamsburg: Where all the artists are.” I was like, “What? What’s this Williamsburg?”

What year was this?

I was twenty, twenty-one. This was 2000. I was like, “Where all the artists are?! Musicians and painters and all these people? And this is where they all live and there’s this growth and this energy and this creativeness and it’s like, really happening?!”

So I took the magazine to my roommate, and I was like, “Jaime! We have to go here.” She was so cute – she was like, “I don’t know, I don’t want to go live there.” And I was like, “Brooklyn! We have to do it! We’re dying here, we’re dying on the Upper East Side!” And she was like, “Okay.”

The only thing I knew about Williamsburg was that when we would send our rent checks, we sent them to Bedford Avenue. So I called them, and I was like, “I live on the Upper East Side now, but I wanna live in Williamsburg. Can I switch apartments?” And the guy was like, “Sure, come down.” We went down, we got a place on North 8th and Roebling, two bedrooms for eleven hundred dollars.

Holy shit. That story’s amazing.

That’s how I moved to Williamsburg. Cos of Time Out. It’s pretty embarrassing, but whatever. It’s true.

And what happened once you got there?

It was awesome, I loved it. I was like, so happy. And I was like, “We have to go to that bar that we saw on the cover!” The Abbey. It’s still around. And Jaime hated the Abbey.

Wait, so she just moved with you?

Yeah. She was my roommate, and my best friend. We’re still best friends. But anyway, we moved out together. And then we started meeting people and started going out, going to see concerts.

What concerts?

We would go to Black Betty, where we saw Reverend Vince Anderson. We saw Howard Fishman. I started dating this guy and he was in love with Vic Thrill, so he took me to see him. We went to a lot of parties, a lot of loft parties.

Was Glasshouse the first space that you had?

No, I had a place before that called Glass Mafia House in Downtown Brooklyn. That was a total fucking shithole.

How did you decide to open it?

I was leaving Manhattan because I was sick of the same kind of parties, the same kind of scene. I wasn’t really having any experiences. I was dancing a lot – I loved to dance – but that was it. And THEN I was living in Williamsburg, and I was at PS 1, and there was this bus, with a clown – this guy had a big clown nose, and he was taking people down the street to some party. And my friend said, “Come on, we’re going to go to this party, and it’s gonna be awesome.”

So we went, and it was one of the most amazing parties I’ve ever been to. It was like, HUGE warehouse space, and it was four different rooms. One of the rooms, all the walls were covered in canvas, and there was tons of paint. This sounds really hippie-ish, but at the time I was really blown away – it was like, people painting on the walls, and there was a drum circle in the middle and people playing drums.

Another room was a theater, and there was some sort of avant-garde theater performance happening. Then there was another room, and there was a DJ, and there was a mic getting passed around, and people were singing and rapping. And the other room was a lounge, and people were just sitting and talking. I was like, “This is what going out should be. Like, I want to go out and I want to make something, I want to feel like my night was worth it.”

That’s what prompted me thinking, “This party needs to be happening all the time.” And my boyfriend at the time was in a group called Freestyle Arts, and they did a lot of street art performance, and their whole philosophy was art without judgment – being creative for the sake of being creative and not for the final product, and being collaborative and communicating with other people in this really beautiful and natural way.

So I joined that group, and I’d go out into the street with them and I’d wear canvas, and let people paint on me. We’d perform at different places and pass out instruments, get people to participate. We were trying to spread this idea of, “Artists should not be so competitive, we should be supporting each other and collaborating.” I had this philosophy and I really thought I was gonna change the world. I thought we were just going to have this amazing party forever.

So I got a space in Downtown Brooklyn and we called it Glass Mafia House. But the neighbors ended up calling the cops on me every time I’d try to do anything. And there was a bunch of crackheads that were just homeless living in the building that would come and play music with us. And then it turned into like a real kind of dark, scary place.

Like, how?

Just a bunch of homeless crackheads hanging out, banging on drums and smoking crack!

Your dream place. Talk about a dream deferred.

Yeah, I was like, “Hmm. This wasn’t what I had in mind!” And then my friends that had nowhere to live started living there. So it was all these people, just crashing on the floor, sprinkled with crackheads like, banging on drums. It was bad. But it gave me a valuable lesson about never opening up a space around a residential area. I was like, “My next place will be absolutely nowhere near a residence, I don’t want to deal with fucking neighbors ever again.”

That’s really smart.

It gave me that experience. So then Glasshouse.

Where did the “Glass” come from?

Well, I had a poem, and in my poem I had something about glass shoes. And I was like, “Glass Shoes? That doesn’t sound like anything.” And then I was brainstorming with my boyfriend, and he was like, “Well, it’s gonna be like a house. Glass House.” So he liked Mafia, so it was Glass Mafia House. So then our new place – I don’t like the Mafia, so I was like, let’s just take out “Mafia” and do “House.” So when we went our separate ways, I felt like half was him, half was me, so I had rights to half. And I brought the glass, so I took it with me, and that’s why Glasslands.

And what was your experience with Glasshouse?

We started out really amazing, and it was a really great place. And then my ex-boyfriend and I started having this psychological warfare. We were both doing experiential art but I had different ways of wanting to do it than he did. He wanted total freedom, he wanted total chaos, and I thought that was alienating to people.

We had this Friday night where anybody could come. It was free, and you could go on the typewriter, you could paint on the walls – which sounds like a beautiful utopia kind of thing, but he was letting in some very violent people. I wanted a space where if you’re a lawyer, or a doctor, of if you’re like, a homeless artist, you can still exist in the same space and be creative together. Or, if you’re the kind of person who’s totally shy and you don’t feel comfortable being in a club or a bar, you can come here and we’ll accept you. 

Those people would show up, but there’d be these other people there that were expressing themselves “freely” in chaos. These people had a very warped sense of punk rock, or what they think is punk rock. They think it’s punk rock to break something, but the most punk rock people I know are some of the most kind and respectful people. They’re not into breaking shit, they’re into community.

So I was like, “You know what, keep your Friday nights, and do whatever you want, I’m stepping out of it.” He did, and it became like, absolute insanity. I wouldn’t even go anymore because it was so hard for me to watch. It just broke my heart.

But I had to start doing bands at that space because – going back to the beginning of when I first opened it, I was like, “People are gonna want to come, and make art and be at this awesome party, and they’ll buy drinks and that’s how we’ll survive.”

But people didn’t want that as much as I thought they wanted that, and I couldn’t pay rent, and my friend Derek came over to visit – he’s in Awesome Color, Derek Stanton – and I was like, “Derek, I’m freaking out, I can’t pay my rent, people don’t want this utopia as much as I thought they would.” And he was like, “Dude, ya gotta book bands, people wanna see bands.”

And I was like, “I don’t wanna be a fucking music venue!” And he was like, “Dude, ya gotta book bands.” He’s like, “I’ll help you, I’ll book bands.” So he did, and that’s how we got into the whole band thing. And I started working with Todd P, and he makes it very easy for you, he does all the booking, brings his own PA. So Lev had his Friday nights, and the rest of the week I paid the rent by having bands.

So how did you do Glasslands?

Well, I knew everything I wanted and everything I didn’t want. I met Rolyn at a party and we kind of became instant friends, and when we started talking, it became clear we had very similar goals and philosophies. Working with her has been a totally different experience than Glasshouse, because we get along so amazingly. 

And I wanted a legal space. I was getting too fucking old to be standing on the streets, watching my back, worrying about the cops, every night getting scared I could possibly get arrested. I wanted a real, legal business. And I also wanted to do afterschool programs with kids, and it had to be legal, to do that.

How did you decide you wanted to do that?

The afterschool program? Because we wanted to have a real community art-space. And the community wasn’t just, you know, hipster kids, it's the Spanish community and the Polish community. It’s all of Williamsburg. So we wanted to include the people who were there before us, and give back to that community, so we wanted a free afterschool program where kids could make art and learn how to DJ and all this other stuff. That was like really, really important to us.

Were there any bands that were kind of born at Glasslands?

Well, Awesome Color and Dragons of Zynth had their first show at Glasshouse, and then they played at Glasslands all the time. Amazing Baby had their first show at Glasslands. I remember they emailed me and said, “We’re from these other bands, and we have this new band.” And I was like, “Okay!” It makes me really happy to see all those bands go on and do big things.

What’s it like to see the Times or MTV say there’s like this new rock scene and it’s at Glasslands?

I feel like they’re catching on a little late, you know. Like, when did you guys discover Williamsburg?

It's weird because there have been bands here for so long.

So long. The originals were like, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and TV on the Radio. They were the first bands that were playing locally.

We were featured on MTV but they never mentioned Glasslands. That was the one where they had Yeasayer and MGMT and Grizzly Bear. And they filmed MGMT and Yeasayer at Glasslands, and I saw that and I was so happy for the bands. I sent Andrew a message, like, “Dude, I saw you on MTV, congratulations!” Then a couple weeks later, I was like, “Wait a second. They didn’t even mention us!” They’re talking about everything else and they don’t even mention the venues.

And I think that’s such an important part of it!

And there are some really cool places. Like at the beginning I got a lot of flack for maybe going legal or something – like oh, you know, you’re not doing all ages anymore. But New York is so big and they’re so many awesome, underground, all ages places – like what Glasshouse was – I don’t feel an obligation to be that.

But I feel like it’s such a big part of understanding where Yeasayer and MGMT came from – there’s like a place where there’s such a kind of communal-feeling interaction, and people who are playing are always hanging out.

Well that was our idea. I worked at a venue, the Cutting Room, and I was their main booker, and they had a style of booking that was very “cattle call”: the bands all had nothing to do with each other, they weren’t friends, they had a time slot. They’d come on, their people would come to see them, they’d leave, and the next band would go on. I was like, “This is bullshit! People should be hanging out and  making friends, and it should be like a party.”

That’s a big part of our booking style – when a band wants to play Glasslands, we're like, “Okay, ask three other bands you’re friends with on the bill with you.” And that’s our sneaky way of making it so that that competitiveness is gone, because if you booked the bands on the bill, you wanna see them having fun, you wanna see them have a good show.

And if you get this one person to book the show, they’re gonna book their friend’s band from college and maybe their other band, they met at their rehearsal space. They’re all gonna be the same aesthetic, because this one person is choosing the other people. Then those bands become friends, or they play together. I really wanted to change that standard style of booking, and I still get bands that email me and they’re in that mindframe. Like, “Do you have any slots open?” I don’t do slots, it’s an archaic way of booking, I think. I do full, curated nights. 

It’s amazing how much all these bands that are getting successful support and work with each other. That’s something that is naturally inside of them, I think, and then they come to Glasslands and they play there, and I think that’s why they like it: because they’re able to do that and be the kind of people that are supporting their friends.

Looking back, how did you make the transformation from being someone who spent all her time clubbing to being a business owner?

When my dad got sick, I was twenty-four. I had to become his legal guardian, hire a lawyer, get him into this assisted living home – pick him up and move him and do this application that was ten times lengthier than any college application.  

I was living my life in a really self-centered way with very few consequences. And when my dad got sick, I started thinking about consequences, and really thinking about how you live your life, and that it’s up to you to do something great, something that’s gonna matter. And I didn’t really think about that before then.

I also didn’t realize I had a business sense, because I had to deal with so much business all of a sudden. Taking care of him, I was responsible for his estate, I was responsible for selling his house. I went from no responsibilities to being responsible for a human being – all his money, his home, his future, his health and all of his decisions. And when I saw that I could do that and I could handle that, I knew that I could handle anything.

menu

© Copyright 2009 FAQMagazine All Rights Reserved.