Wow, sorry for the incredibly long delay in coming back to the hideout... and thanks for the plug!
Charles Gaskins (Mystery Action), Blair Buscareno (Speed of Sound) and myself (Shimmy) launched this site October 1.
I want to make clear we do
not intend to compete with GaragePunk.com -- instead, we're just trying to rally the NYC scene... the GarageNYC Yahoo Group was a good start but not everyone knows about it... and we can't just let
Chicago and
Memphis have all the fun, now can we?!
It's also kind of a question of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing... Charles and I would meet people here in Brooklyn & Manhattan, more than a year after starting the
Hullabaloo! series of shows, and these people would have no idea that there was any kind of Garage/Punk activity in town. We realized it was because there's no central source of info, so we started GaragePunkNYC to try to cover everything happening in our area.
Since October, I've been blown away by two things: one, there was even more events to cover on our
show calendar and
garage punk blog than I realized (something to do EVERY night of the week, excepting maybe Sunday) and second, that the response would be as positive as it is. In just three months we've accumulated over a thousand repeat users (and growing rapidly!) who bookmarked us and are checking us multiple times a week to plan out their swingin' lifestyles.
The result is that all kinds of people including longtime scenesters, newcomers and tourists alike, are finding the Garage/Punk shows they're looking for and
it's bringing more audience to the bands and DJs who deserve it.
We are of course open to suggestions and show listing info-- please contact us at
garagepunknyc@gmail.com if you've got gigs in the greater NYC area (that includes JERSEY!) and we'll do our best to post it accurately.
We've just started a Garage Rock Reviews section called "Gut Music" and we're enlisting local area talen to write about NYC Garage/Punk releases (and reissues) as well as (inter)national stuff.
AND I've just created a slideshow for the site's homepage which will feature shots of NYC area shows from over the years (and will be constantly updated).
Anyway, long live garagepunk.com and thanks for the love!
SHIMMY
ps) on the downside, our forum kind of sucks in comparison to... pretty much any forum out there.