It was mine in the way it was personal to everyone. Was?
The week I moved to New York I went to see Adam Rodgers’ DICE band at a bar downtown. I was living in Queens. Soon enough I was taking the train every other week downtown to a bar called The 55 Bar. I was a regular to see Mike Stern. I gave him my first record which had just come out. To my absolute honor, he listened to it and called me to tell me so. Several months later I thought, I should move downtown even if just to save time and money on the train I’m taking to The 55 Bar. I moved to E 9th St – which, when followed West, turns into Christopher Street, where the 55 lives.
The M8 crosstown. It was a Thursday. January 18th. I was steeping in melancholy and anxiety. Nothing abnormal. I forced myself out of bed after I had already resigned myself to it and walked to the M8 crosstown bus stop. I was going to see Wayne Krantz for the first time. At The 55 Bar, of course. As dramatic as it may seem and definitely was, life was never the same.
Within days of that night the 55 and the musicians I observed there became my standard of how to approach music, my career, the world, and even love. I wrote many of my songs within those walls. I even played there 20 times completely by myself.
It was one of the only places in town that felt like it had anything to do with what I thought would be in New York: a thread connecting life now to the old bohemianism of the village, of Manhattan, of music. Grit. The evidence of this was dripping from each individual bulb on the string lights that lined the room. It was a place to watch people be stunned by what they’re hearing. A place to take your friend who’s in town to see something they never have. A basement in a towering city where people knew my name and I knew there’s.
My relationship with 55 is much shorter than many who’ve been playing and listening there for half or more of their lives. However, I feel its impact is no less significant in my life. If there’s one thing I know about dying its that it makes room. Things die and things are born which could not exist before. And nothing, no matter how great, has ever managed immortality in this town, yet New York is still New York.