NG2BC Slips Into New Haven Music History

Dust Control’s ​“Your Idea of Success” starts with a churning guitar, a growling bass, before the drums begin to propel everything forward, and the singer hollers out his truth. It’s the kind of music that needs and finds a home in every city, and as the title of the album — ​“Live” at Never Get To Be Cool — Dust Control found its home at Never Get to Be Cool, or NG2BC, a DIY music space in the Wooster Square neighborhood that gave up its lease at the beginning of December, about a week after ​“Live” was recorded.

Dust Control’s album thus marks the end of a run for NG2BC, of over two years, about 150 shows, and who knows how many recording projects.

For space organizers and twin brothers Dan and Joe Katz — who, with Dan’s wife Maggie, also form punk trio Spit-Take — it’s the end of a personal chapter, but also one that’s just part of the ongoing saga of New Haven musicians finding space for their voices.

Dust Control ​“recorded it the last weekend we had the keys to the space,” Dan said. ​“We were in the process of moving out.” They weren’t the only ones under the wire; Mightymoonchew, a new indie project fronted by New Haven hip hop favorite Mooncha, also did a recording project ​“in the last few weeks of the space,” Joe said. Mightymoonchew announced that it will release an album at the end of the month.

“It’s nice that stuff of significance happened there because we couldn’t do shows” due to pandemic safety concerns, Joe said. It’s safe to say that Covid-19 tipped the Katz brothers over into giving up the space, but in a broader sense, ​“it was never going to last forever,” Dan said. ​“It’s conceivable we might been shut down,” Or, of course, moved on to other projects.

“We lasted two years and were on our third lease,” Joe said. He recalled he and Dan saying ​“are we really going to do this another year?”

But they did, and in so doing, added another link in the long chain of New Haven’s DIY music spaces that have come and gone. That chain includes the various iterations of the New Haven Clock Company building, starting in the 1970s; the long-running artist studios (and illegal living space) at Daggett Street until its closure in 2015; and a constellation of smaller basements, apartments, houses, warehouses, and other spaces (in recent years, Taco Hut and Popeye’s Garage) that have hosted house shows for a time. House shows can be legal provided, for example, that everything is run as a suggested donation to the performers only and no food or alcohol are offered for sale. It also requires good relations with neighbors, or no neighbors. But the gray area the spaces inhabit means their existence is precarious even if they’re safe. They don’t tend to last forever. But new spaces continue to emerge because they serve a perennial need, providing space for artists to experiment and build community.

NG2BC had its origins in December 2017. ​“Our band had a practice space because we were all living in apartments,” Dan said. As they were already paying for the space, the brothers saw they could pursue something of a dream they’d had ​“even going back to when Dan and I were kids” growing up in North Branford, said Joe — a dream pretty common to ​“anybody who does music in our world.” They could try their hand at hosting shows.

When they were in high school, Dan and Joe Katz played as a duo as well as in bands with others. They also started going to shows in New Haven, often three each weekend — which, because they were under 21, meant mostly house shows. ​“In New Haven there’s a pretty pervasive culture of bar shows, but they can’t be all ages, which is a bummer, and it’s nice to have had an alternative to that,” Joe said. They went to shows at the New Haven People’s Center, and also to Daggett and a spot on Dwight Street, and to Popeye’s Garage on Goffe Street, which was ​“formative,” Joe said. ​“It showed you what was possible with a small, disused space and a small group of people who are really committed.”

The brothers also ​“started booking shows in high school,” Dan said. ​“Once you play shows out of state, you meet people, and you want to bring those bands to your state.”

The brothers then attended UCONN and got involved in more musical projects. ​“It was tough to get bands together,” Dan said. ​“We’d be in bands where we’d make a demo and play some songs, and write two or three good songs, and then break up.” Spit-Take proved to be the exception. They met Maggie, who was a year ahead of them at UCONN. ​“We’ve been a band for 7 or 8 years now,” Dan said. In 2014, when the brothers graduated UCONN, the band even did a quick national tour.

“Touring around the country, you see what touring bands have to put up with. It can be a nightmare sometimes,” Joe said. ​“That’s always figured into the way we book shows.”

The brothers started hosting shows in the NG2BC space in June 2017, when they were 26 — ​“just old enough to say ​‘I don’t want to do shows at my house anymore,” Joe said. ​“The first month of June we were in the space, we had six shows, and they were all great, and I was turning down people left and right. We could have had a show every night if we wanted to,” Dan said. Both of the brothers were working full-time jobs, so they kept shows restricted to the weekends. They also all ended before 11 p.m. — especially as Joe faced an early-morning commute to New York City. Early on, the brothers hosted a band from Australia with local psychedelic heroes The Mountain Movers opening. That was ​“maybe the most people who had ever come,” Joe said. ​“It feels good to have played some small part in making that happen.”

Between June 2017 and the beginning of the Covid-19-related shutdown in March, the brothers hosted about 150 shows at NG2BC, ranging from bands on national tour to local musicians looking for a place to experiment. The brothers took their tasks as host seriously, feeling a sense of personal responsibility to make sure everything was safe and working well. They hosted a Halloween show, when ​“everybody’s looking for something to do and it can get wacky, and that show did get extremely wacky,” Dan said. But he also recalled ​“afterward, hanging with friends from around the country and basking in the community you have.”

The onset of the pandemic put a stop to those shows, as it did for all the above-ground music venues in town. The brothers know better than most the financial pain those venues are going through — especially as they understand how difficult it always was to make money as a club owner even before the shutdown.

“Both of us have regular, straight jobs, and sometimes that’s a bummer,” Joe said. But ​“if my livelihood depended on whether or not people came to show, I would be a nervous wreck. You can never predict who’s going to come out and when.”

“When you’re booking shows and it’s your livelihood, you have to make choices based on economics,” Dan said. ​“We could have local freaks who want to do a show, and 10 people are going to come, and that’s fun and cool.”

The brothers were busy enough booking shows that sometimes it was hard for them to tell what the effects of their work was. But in the last week of having the space, when they announced on Instagram that they would be closing NG2BC, ​“hundreds of people chimed in,” Joe said. ​“I got emotional reading it. It meant a lot to a lot of people.” Still, they’re philosophical about closing NG2BC. ​“In a small city like New Haven, there are natural ebbs and flows as to what spaces are out there,” Joe said. He recalled the DIY spaces he went to in high school. ​“Then they closed and it felt like there was nowhere, and then there were new spaces,” he said.

“I am anxiously looking forward to being able to play shows again,” Dan said, though he said he has ​“no clue when it’s going to happen, or what it’s going to look like. A lot of smaller places are gone.”

But the desire to organize shows remains. ​“Back in February, I was feeling a little burnt out on shows, but now that it’s been a year, I’m down,” Dan said. Even if they don’t have a space of their own, he said, ​“you see little spaces and think, ​‘something could happen there,’ or a restaurant — ​‘here’s where something could work out.’ It’ll be fun, in a way, to try to find the next spot, when shows are safe again.”

“Everything we do,” Joe said, ​“exists in this continuum in New Haven of weird people making weird music.”