Billy Jones, Baby's All Right Owner and Key Player in New York Music Scene, Dead at 45
Anyone who frequented the live music scene in New York over the last decade has a favorite story about Baby's All Right, the 280-seat club in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood. There was the night Billie Eilish, then 15, played songs from her first EP and a cover of Drake's 'Hotline Bling.' The time Mac DeMarco, with the help of some wine, wrote a 'theme song' for the club. Or the night Zoë Kravitz's band Lolawolf played a set to an audience that included her dad Lenny and Anne Hathaway.
All those memories, and many more, are the legacy of Billy Jones, the club co-owner who died Saturday of what a spokesperson for the venue called 'a highly aggressive case of glioblastoma,' a malignant brain tumor. Jones was 45.
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Jones arrived in New York in 2002 after earning a degree in media arts at Salisbury University in Maryland. As Jones and others saw, a new generation of indie and dance artists was rising up and hungry for places to play. 'Chris from Grizzly Bear worked at a cafe on Bedford, and so did Kyp from TV on the Radio,' Jones said in an interview in 2023. 'It would be like, 'Maybe that was Karen O that walked by? I'm not quite sure.' … Whatever band would come out that week was like the best band ever.'
Jones himself was lead singer in his own band, Other Passengers, in the 2000s and was a DJ. Looking back at those years, and the burgeoning Brooklyn music scene, he said in the same interview, 'There was a feeling of calm before the storm.'
Jones established himself as a booker at city clubs like Pianos NYC, the Dance, and Sin-é (which, in an earlier incarnation, had fostered Jeff Buckley). In 2013, he and a business partner, Zachary Mexico, opened Baby's All Right, a combination bar, dining room, and performance space. With its astrology charts and shiny lighting, the club always felt a little otherworldly but quickly became a gathering spot for the Brooklyn and New York music community. Dev Hynes played a New Year's Eve party there, and the club also hosted early shows by SZA, Beach House, and Ariel Pink.
Jones himself looked the part of an indie entrepreneur; one report described him as wearing 'denim bell bottoms with the messy haircut of a 20-something.' But he was also admirably ambitious. Just before the pandemic, he was hoping to open a Los Angeles version of Baby's All Right and also owned the recently closed Billy's Record Salon, a record store near the Brooklyn space. He also recently opened two new clubs in the city's East Village neighborhood: Night Club 101 and the jazz-leaning Funny Bar. As he told Rolling Stone in 2020 as the lockdown began, ''Everyone throws around the word 'resilient' right now. But there's got to be a way to do it.'
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