Billy Jones, Impresario of New York's Indie Music Scene, Dies at 45

New York Times

15-07-2025

As a recent college graduate in the early 2000s, Billy Jones lived with his parents in Richmond, Va., but his fantasy life was elsewhere: in Williamsburg, the Brooklyn neighborhood that had become the world capital of indie rock. The closest he could get was visiting his local Barnes & Noble, where he would read magazines covering New York's music scene.
Then one day in 2002, he made the leap: He was leaving home, he told his father. He and the high school friends who made up his band, Other Passengers, had decided to try to make it big in New York.
In Williamsburg, Mr. Jones began working as a barista, with dreams of indie-rock stardom. It wasn't so far-fetched. At a cafe down the block, another barista, Kyp Malone, would soon gain renown as a singer and guitarist with the group TV on the Radio.
There was passion in the moans of Mr. Jones's singing, but he did not become a rock star. In time, the Williamsburg concert venues that had launched some of his peers — clubs like 285 Kent, Glasslands, Death by Audio — all closed. Rents in the neighborhood had skyrocketed. Aspiring young musicians left.
And instead of achieving his own dreams, Mr. Jones wound up doing something else: He made it possible for other people to keep dreaming.
In 2013, he and a friend, Zachary Mexico, opened Baby's All Right, a club at 146 Broadway in Williamsburg. It became, as The New York Times wrote in 2015, the 'nightlife preserver' of the neighborhood. It was a small enough venue to offer major acts an indie spirit that they could no longer find elsewhere in New York City, yet big enough to make unproven musicians feel that they had made it.
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