Interview With Anita Colby Of The Bronx Underground
I was first introduced to the Bronx Underground when I started college and made friends with some people who invited me up to a club in the Bronx. “What for?” I asked, innocent as Red Riding Hood trembling with fear and anticipation. “Well” they said, grinning like the savage wolves they were, “it’s a punk rock show”. It’s been a little while since then and I’ve met a ton of great people and seen a lot of great shows put on by the Bronx Underground. I’ve even helped out whenever I could at the doors. The brains behind it are Dave, Adam, and Anita, and I recently got a chance to talk to Anita about the highs and lows of running an all-ages DIY venue and collective in New York.
Alright, how long have you Dave and Adam been doing shows under the Bronx Underground moniker?
Seven years now, we started in October of 2000.
That’s cool. So what exactly did it stem from, the starting of this sort of collective?
Sure, basically, Dave, Adam and I were all in bands around that time, Adam and I were in a ska-punk band called What’s Your Problem Brian and Dave was in At A Loss. So we were playing all these shows all over the Tri-state area in places like CT that had teen centers and whatnot and I witnessed all these amazing DIY shows where bands would come to play in an empty space and tons of kids would come and rock out, have a good time, and stay for all the bands. It was also that the Bronx didn’t have anything like that. All we had at the time was this place called the Blackthorn where a lot of kids weren’t allowed to go because it was a bar, but more importantly, kids would just go for their friends’ bands and then leave. So, if you’re in a band the whole point is to play to new people, not to your friends, and it would just be the worst when like, you’re going on next and the whole audience would leave before you went on. So I said “Dave, you know the scene in the Bronx is pretty weak and I think there’s a lot of potential here and a lot of kids that want to see this kind of music, underground rock, punk, and ska.” I said we could do shows a lot better than what was going on now, let’s do it DIY style, let’s find an empty space and do it.
