Ever notice how it's really easy to find cool shows to in New York. Well, thank Joe Ahearn and people like him (and us, actually) for busting his (our) butts. Joe has been putting together shows and parties for years here in New York, mostly with a combination of friendliness, a love of music, ingenuity, and elbow grease. He spoke with us recently about how he got started and how much he loves this business.

Chief Magazine:  So, Joe, you were born and raised in New York?

Joe Ahearn:  Yeah, I grew up in Manhattan.  My family used to live in Times Square, actually, off 43rd St. and 8th Avenue.  It was really seedy, like gross crackhead shit back then.  My dad made a cool movie of little home videos out our apartment window, which I think he made mostly for my sister and I to watch later.  It was like people beating the shit out of cops and crazy people on the corner, screaming stuff about the apocalypse, and people getting nailed and mugged in broad daylight.  It was not the same sort of Disney, highly idealized Times Square that it is now.  Then, they moved back to Tribeca, where my parents still live.  They moved back there right in the beginning of the 1990’s.  Tribeca was also a totally different place than it is now.  It’s weird to see how fast neighborhoods change in New York, all the time.

What do your folks do?

My mom is a painter and my father is a filmmaker.  He made this movie called Wild Style.  It was the first movie made about hip-hop, in 1983.  Technically, it’s fictional but all of the characters are sort of based on MC’s and DJ’s that were actually doing the same thing that they’re acting in the movie as.  So, it’s a nicer slice of time.  My mom is awesome.  She’s probably far more prolific, I would say.  She has an enormous body of work.  Right now, she’s actually doing a piece for the MTA, in the Times Square connection, I think between Broadway and 8th Avenue, in that super long hallway.  She’s doing almost 100 full-size figures.  It’s one of the biggest MTA-sponsored wall mural projects that they’ve ever done.

That’s awesome.

I’m really, really proud of her.  She’s been working on it for like 4 years.

Holy shit.  When is it going to be up?

If you went now, you’d see a lot of the figures already up.  Obviously, it takes months and months to install them all.  It’s not like they close off the wall; you can go at anytime and see it being put up and in progress.

That’s cool.  So, what about your own art?  You were going to school, right?

I’m back in school.  I went to art school for a little while in Vancouver.  I dropped out and ran away to Alaska.  I basically just dropped off for about 2 years, trying to figure out my own shit.  It was one of those silly, art existential crisis that I assume most people come up against when they go to art school and they’re like: “Oh, wow, there are so many people trying to express themselves.”  Maybe not that many people come up against it but I felt like suddenly it felt really silly and selfish that I was spending all of this time and energy in my own head.  The reaction to that was to go further away from that and more cut off from society, for a little bit.  Eventually, I came back to New York and now I’m back in school at Pace University in downtown Manhattan.  I’m still an Art major.  It’s cool because, in the Art department, the students outnumber the professors.  It’s a weird situation.

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What were you doing in Alaska?  Just pitching tents in the wilderness?

No.  I hitchhiked around a little and hung out with a bunch of kids in Anchorage that I found when I was on the way up.  I was around the Northwest for about 2 months and then went up to Alaska during the Winter Solstice, maybe 3 or 4 years ago.  I was up there for a few months.  It was really cold and I got a tattoo.

What’s the tattoo?

“Between here and there is better than either here or there.”  It’s in my own handwriting, on my back.  I like my own handwriting more than any other font.  

I kept coming back to New York periodically, but I was just sort of traveling around the country, bumming it, for almost 2 years.  You know, I’d run out of money and stay somewhere and find a dishwashing job for a little bit.  I was touring, but without anything to really provide people.  I got sick of that.  It felt like that, also, seemed really selfish.  I think I would’ve felt totally differently if I had been a musician and if I had been providing something to somebody.  The reason I was traveling around is because I wanted to, like, do it on my own and not have to answer to anybody.  And then, I would meet so many nice, supportive people, who went above and beyond.  I think a lot of people who travel, realize that.  Of course, there are assholes and there are nights that you’re gonna sleep on the streets but most of the time, you’re blown away by how many people you meet who you don’t know, that don’t know anything about you and who are just like: “Yeah, totally stay at my house and come to this show. I’ll cook you food.”  So, I almost ended up in the situation where, once again, I felt like I was taking a lot from people and didn’t feel like I was giving back enough.
 
That’s how I started throwing shows… I came back to New York and I had met all of these cool musicians while traveling around, none of which are particularly big, but that’s all the more reason they’d need my help.  Suddenly, I was like: “Oh, here’s this great way I can give back to all these people who I barely knew at the time, but had helped me out.  When I first started doing shows, I emailed as many of the musicians and kids I was still in touch with from traveling.  I told them if they came to New York, I would totally set up a show and get some of my friends out.  If you get 30 kids out, that would make them really psyched and then you give them a place to stay at the end of the night, then I feel like I’ve returned the favor. 

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That’s wonderful, man.  So, was this Rats of Nimh?

I was originally booking at this place called Bubby’s Pie Company.  I booked there a straight year.

Where is that?

It’s in DUMBO.  They didn’t have music before I was there and they definitely don’t have music since I’ve left.  But, one of my friends, like from high school and that I had been staying with, was bartending there.  The week I got back, he told me I could get a job there.  I started bartending there, but I was only there for like a week or 2 weeks.  It’s a family but it has this giant catering hall type space with big, beautiful windows that look towards the Manhattan skyline.  The restaurant is at that park between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges.  I was like: “This restaurant is so dead all of the time. I could totally get people in” and they were like: “Well, if you think you could get people in, we could let you set up a show a week or something like that.”  From that point, for the next year, I did, like, a show every week.  It wasn’t Rats of Nimh, yet.  It was still Bubby’s Pie Company.

Were you making any money?

Hell no.  I’m still not making any money.

So, then you started going back to school and settled into New York a bit more?

Yeah, I was doing that for like a year but it was taking up all of my time.  I would organize shows at night and then I had the shitty bar shifts during the day.  Basically, towards the end of that, we kept getting noise complaints, constantly, from the neighbors upstairs, who happened to be really rich and powerful.  We pushed a lot of limits and I did a few really crazy shows there but not that many.  Mostly, they were a lot more of an acoustic anti-folk, psych-folk scene.  I kept getting putting in this weird position where I’d tell the bands “hey, this place is kind of a low-key situation so you can’t really play that loud.”  So, sometimes a band would come in and the show would be mellow for most of it but then for some sort of emotional effect, there’d be this freak-out moment.  Then, I’d have to be the dick who was like “yo dude, you can’t do that.”  I don’t wanna have to fucking tell the musician how to perform.  That’s shitty.  It got kind of ridiculous, too.  The last couple of shows I did there, it would literally be a guy with an acoustic guitar and no PA, yet we’d get noise complaints.  
During those last, like, 2 months there, I was trying to figure out anything, and I had been going to a few of Todd Patrick’s shows.  In retrospect, now that I’m friends with Todd, I remember even going to his shows in high school.  One of my friends was like: “you should talk to Todd if you wanna keep doing music, but not in this space.”  So, I sent him an email, which is really funny to look back at, and it took him 2 months to get back to me.  I’ve worked for Todd for a while so now I know how the whole email thing works.  Some intern kid probably read it first.