Something you should know about Brandon Zwagerman: Dude likes to talk.
“I just ramble,” he says on the phone from New York City. But it’s that gift of gab that’s endeared him to the many musicians he’s booked, first in the backyard of a rental house in Ann Arbor, Mich. and now at Creek and the Cave, a bar in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens. “If there’s a band you really love, you’ve got to go talk to them after their show,” he says. “Go talk to them and tell them you book shows at this venue, and tell them you’d really love to have them play some time.”
Zwagerman found himself stranded in Ann Arbor in the summer of 2003. He had just graduated from the University of Michigan, and the best job his History B.A. could get was a campus groundskeeping gig. All of his friends had left town. A fan of “just music in general,” he began to explore the sounds being made by artists in his locality. At an outdoor festival, the self-professed history and geography buff fell hard for the progressive folk of fellow history and geography buffs The Original Brothers and Sisters of Love. Officially hooked, he attended local show after local show, checking events listings and the wall of fliers at used vinyl emporium Encore Records for anything that sounded interesting. To chronicle his new discoveries, Zwagerman started a blog, Past the College Grounds, which managed to make regular readers of the acts he covered.
“People Google themselves,” Zwagerman says, self=deprecatingly referring to the way most artists discovered Past the College Grounds. “I didn’t realize at the time.” He now spends his weekdays as the marketing manager for an architectural and urban design firm and his Friday nights putting on rock shows at the Creek and the Cave. He’s still blogging, now at LICpop, though it’s mostly to promote his upcoming shows. “It spiraled from fandom to accidental promoter,” he says of his experience.
That spiral made a decisive twist in May 2005, thanks to a MySpace bulletin from Dustin Krcatovich, the one-man noise machine who performs under the name Actual Birds. En route to Ann Arbor on a Greyhound bus after a tour of the West Coast, Krcatovich asked his Internet friends for a venue at which to play a homecoming show. “I said, ‘Well, I guess you can play my backyard,” Zwagerman says. “We don’t have anything; we don’t have a PA. It was Memorial Day weekend, I asked my roommates if it was cool, and they were fine — most of them were out of town anyway. House shows were the coolest thing in the world to me. Just such an intimate, personal thing.”
Thus began two summers of un-mic’d acoustic shows behind the 1920s Dutch colonial at 106 W Madison St., affectionately referred to as “Madison House” by the cadre of musicians and fans that frequented the shows (which were, unsurprisingly, documented by Zwagerman on the Madison House blog). “I was really inspired,” Zwagerman says. “I really liked the feeling of bringing people together to experience this art in this setting. So much of what I try to do is about connecting people — connecting bands, with other bands and artists that they might have compatibilities with, connecting fanbases. It’s a giant mulit-stranded web, and you’re just trying to have more and more strands between everyone so it becomes a stronger structure.”
By the time he left the Mitten for the Big Apple, Zwagerman had organized two benefit shows, booked an entire season for U of M’s East Quad Music Co-op, and thrown himself one hell of a going away party at Madison House and its sister venue, the West Park Band Shell, working with acts like Saturday Looks Good To Me, NOMO, The Hard Lessons, Canada, Chris Bathgate, Jim Roll, Patrick Elkins and Great Lakes Myth Society, which grew out of his beloved Original Brothers and Sister of Love.
Zwagerman’s New York booking experience began the same way it began in Ann Arbor: helping out artists he loved. When Patrick Elkins came through the city looking for a place to play, Zwagerman offered up the apartment he was subletting. When Chris Bathgate (“Who I’ll do anything for, ever,” Zwagerman says) was looking for places to play during the 2006 CMJ Music Marathon, Zwagerman took the streets of his new hometown. “Half the venues were filled up with day stuff at that point; I only had a month’s notice,” he says. “But I contacted every obscure cafe in every obscure neighborhood, and eventually got him three shows.”
The last of those shows was at Dominie’s Hoek, a tavern in Long Island City, and its respectable turn out led the bar’s owners to offer Zwagerman a once-a-month opportunity to book shows. He eventually moved to Long Island City, finding Creek and the Cave in early exploration of the neighborhood. “It had this big theater room, this black-box theater space to do little plays and stuff,” he says. “And they had music every now and then and comedy, but it wasn’t like a regular, scheduled thing.”
Following a discussion with the owners, Zwagerman’s Friday night residency at Creek and the Cave was established. He says he now spends approximately 20 hours a week coordinating the shows. “There’s no average day,” he says of his routine. “Some days I’m so busy at work or I go out to some event afterwards and don’t touch the thing. Other days, I’ll hunker down and catch up. It’s a time commitment if you do it as often as I do. I have only myself to blame for any stress or time I spend on these things, but it’s rewarding.”
Though he admits its popularity is dwindling, Zwagerman relies heavily on MySpace for promotional efforts and for communicating and building relationships with artists. Nonetheless, he recommends meeting a band in person first and then following up with them on the Internet. It’s also important, Zwagerman says, to talk up a venue and give the artists a reason to want to play there. He tries to sell Creek and the Cave on its unique location. “No one ever plays Queens, because there’s no music venues here,” he says. “I’m really one of the only indie rock venues in the whole borough of 2.2 million people. It’s kind of an adventure in some ways for people. Also, my part of Queens is only one stop from Brooklyn and one stop from Manhattan on the subway, so it’s actually not remotely far, despite the weird geo-political psychological barriers.”
The shows at Creek and the Cave remain a hobby for Zwagerman for the time being, though he says he’d love to find a way to turn booking and promotion into a full-time job. Still, this relieves him of the tremendous financial investment many in the field make in their shows. If a Creek and the Cave show’s a total wash, only the bar takes a hit. But if it’s a huge success, all Zwagerman is taking home with him is a belly full of free beer and burritos. “I could take a cut from the door or something, but I keep the cover at five bucks, which, even if it’s pretty full the bands aren’t making that much money, so I’d feel bad about taking that,” he says. And besides, it’s really about giving back to the musical community, not taking from it. “Anyone who’s a music fan who still wants to get more deeply involved without any artistic skill or technical know-how, booking and promotion is the place for you,” he says. “It was fun. It’s been fun. It still is fun.”
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