Alex Bleeker (Real Estate, the Freaks, Taper's Choice)
"I remember there being jokes around the city that, if it’s Saturday night, isn't there a Real Estate show somewhere?"
As with last months’ Jordan Michael Iannucci interview, there’s a personal connection here: I’ve known Alex Bleeker since we were both in college. We were at different schools, but were part of a loosely-connected network of musicians from Northeastern liberal arts colleges who’d book regional DIY tours on Myspace and periodically gig at each other's schools (Alex was performing under the name Dinosaur BBQ at the time). We didn’t know each other well, but I was a fan of his music and found him to be a friendly, interesting dude.
There was enough mutual admiration that, a few months after we both graduated in 2008, he sent me a Myspace message telling me about this new band he was in called Real Estate, and how we should totally play a show together some time. When we did, in the basement of the Silent Barn, I was stunned. Even in that tiny space, with maybe 30 people in attendance, I could sense that this band was going to blow the fuck up. And they did.1
I saw Real Estate a few times over the course of 2009, including at a pivotal SXSW showcase which Alex discusses below. After he unveiled his Dead-indebted solo project later, the Freaks, we played a few more shows together, but gradually lost touch, as people who only know each other in specific social contexts often do. Still, we remained connected on social media, and I was always glad when our paths would occasionally cross.
When I started working on my book in the summer of 2020, Alex was one of the first people I reached out to for an interview. I wanted to talk to him primarily because he’d participated in some seriously pivotal shit in Brooklyn indie rock, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also relish the opportunity to reconnect with someone I’d always really liked. Generous guy that he is, Alex even took the time to connect me with several other people I interviewed, including Kevin Morby, Vivian Girls’ Cassie Ramone, and Woods’ Jeremy Earl.
And now, he’s an author too! Along with Frankie Cosmos drummer Luke Pyenson, Alex co-authored Taste in Music: Eating on Tour With Indie Musicians (Chronicle Books), which collects food-oriented anecdotes from bands like Pavement, Animal Collective, Sylvan Esso, and Hüsker Dü, among many others. In celebration of that book’s publication on September 24th, I’m sharing our 2020 interview with you.
You grew up in Ridgewood, NJ, which is what, 40 minutes outside of Manhattan?
It takes maybe 90 minutes on the train, which was the timescale I had to deal with in high school when my parents were letting me go in by myself to see shows. It's funny, because at that point in my life, the music that felt deeply underground or esoteric, looking back on it, was just very popular indie rock. But going to see Built to Spill at Irving Plaza or Sonic Youth, that was the beginning of my feeling like part of a show-going community, because it was so far outside of my suburban high school reality. It felt like my own secret world, and it definitely fostered this sense that I do this thing, it involves music, and it's sort of an outsider community.
When you started playing in bands in high school, did you play in the city at all?
That was really foreign. We were mostly playing in our parents’ basements and our high school cafeteria. When the band that became Titus Andronicus got their first show [in New York], I think it was maybe at Brownies or Lit Lounge, that was a huge deal - like, oh my gosh, they're playing in the city! [The audience] was the same suburban kids that would have gone and seen them in somebody's parents basement, and we all just drove into the city - those were the only people that were there. Still, it was definitely the beginning of something.
Do you remember the first show you played in the city?
It was in college, so probably the summer of 2005. It was Julian Lynch's music - that's who we were rallying behind as the chief songwriter from our crew. It was at the Charleston on Bedford Avenue. It felt like a huge deal, and I invited all my college friends to come who were summering in Williamsburg.
We were terrible. I was really nervous, one of our suburban friends got really drunk and got on stage and just started saying things, and there was technical equipment malfunction. The show was a total disaster, but it was memorable.
After you graduated, did you initially move back to Jersey?
I moved to Jersey for the summer right after, and then I took a room in Philadelphia because it was cheap. But that was the same summer that we started Real Estate. Real Estate was just playing in our parents’ houses that summer after college, and then we started to book shows in New York. So I was technically living in Philly, and I would sometimes drive from Philly and back after a show. I think I paid rent there for a year, but I definitely can't say that I've lived there, because I was basically commuting to New York.
I moved back into my parents’ house after paying rent for a year in Philly, because I was like, all right, I have to be around New York, so I'll just live at home again. I lived there for about a year, and then I took the leap to move into Brooklyn. I found an apartment at 163 Nassau Ave in Greenpoint, where I got a windowless bedroom for $700 a month. I think I had $3,000 in my bank account, which felt like a ton of money. I was like, I think I can do it!
By that point, were you already playing a lot of shows?
I think that may have been the period of my life where I was playing the most, weirdly. I guess touring is one thing, because you play every night, but this was in a hyper-localized way. Real Estate's tactic was to just play any show. I remember there being jokes around the city that, if it’s Saturday night, isn't there a Real Estate show somewhere? We were playing every weekend, if not two or three times a week.
The very first Real Estate show happened at a very short-lived place in Bushwick called Video Gallery. We opened for Ric Leichtung, who’s [now] a promoter. He was playing a solo set of very heavily Animal Collective-influenced material, which was very common at the time. That was in October 2008.
We were looking to break into this new, blossoming community of venues. The places that I really wanted to play, and eventually did end up playing, were Death by Audio, Silent Barn, Market Hotel, and Tommy's Tavern. Basically, we can't have this conversation without talking about Todd P. Anywhere Todd P. was booking shows was where we wanted to be. We were really lucky, because we were kind of, if you can use this word, anointed to that sphere pretty quickly.
I'm trying to think about where we played before that… I remember playing at Matchless with the Beets and Oneohtrix Point Never - he opened and was sitting on the floor with a [Roland] Juno Six. We played in Harlem at some venue [the Shrine] that I never returned to ever again, but it was super cool. We were peripheral to the “cooler scene” that was happening around us in Brooklyn, and we were knocking on that door. But we were just putting our names out there and doing a lot of outreach on MySpace, and we would get show requests on MySpace.
MySpace was the roadmap. You would go to people’s pages that you respected or looked up to, you would look at who their top friends were, and you would go through there and figure out what was happening or what shows to go to. Even prior to this time in New York, we were going on these little DIY tours, and I distinctly remember looking at Japanther's MySpace page to figure out where to play, because they played every DIY venue that ever existed. When I moved to Philly, I was sending direct messages to Kurt Vile, being like, “Hey man, do you want to play a show with me?,” and he was like, “Nah.”
There were these two punk show houses right next to each other in Williamsburg, the Woodser and Dead Herring. I remember seeing a show at the Woodser, which was Woods and Kurt Vile. This was right around the time Woodsist [Records]2 was becoming a really cool thing. [I remember] watching these bands play and having this strangely intense drive of, We could do this. People who like this music could like our music. This is the scene that we should be a part of.
We made that jump from playing really random spots to places that were becoming more established because we were doing a ton of MySpace outreach. I was emailing Edan [Wilbur] from Death by Audio and Joe Ahearn [at the Silent Barn]. At the time, everyone knew these guys were trained by Todd P., but now they were doing their own thing, and if you couldn’t get Todd to write back to you, Joe still might write back to you. They were probably getting flooded by tons of bands [too].
When were you finally able to get Todd's attention?
Two of our band members were living off the Halsey stop in Bushwick, which felt like the middle of nowhere. But the Silent Barn was there, and we were going to shows there, so at some point one of my bandmates asked Todd if we could practice there, and he said yes. We ended up practicing in the basement of the Silent Barn. Maybe we paid him money, but if we did I don’t think we really paid much.
Because we were practicing there, we got asked to play a couple of shows that happened there. That opened a door, not to Todd directly, but to people like Lucas Crane, who was playing in Woods and does Nonhorse and was living there at the time, and Joe Ahearn, who I mentioned before, who was doing Showpaper out of there. It felt like we were plugging into the scene that was really taking shape just by practicing there.
We started getting more and more show offers, and in 2009, weirdly, South by Southwest really did its job for us. Just before South by Southwest, we had been able to convince Jeremy [Earl] to put out a 7” on Woodsist, which was a big deal for us. He put us on his South by Southwest showcase at Mrs. B’s, but we still didn't have the gravitas of the other bands on the roster. We were first on the bill, [alongside] Kurt Vile, Wavves, I think No Age headlined, Woods, Fresh and Onlys… so that was more of a national community coming together. I remember meeting and feeling like I was becoming peers with the guys from Woods in particular at that show. I remain friends with Jeremy and a lot of people from that community to this day.
Around that time, it went from me or somebody else in the band constantly begging to play shows, to getting a bunch of offers to play all around the city all the time. All this stuff happened through MySpace. It was maybe the last gasp of truly democratized music on the internet before the internet got co-opted and turned into this horrible thing, because we didn't have a record out - this was all based on playing around the city and [demos] that we put up on our own at MySpace.
We got a writeup on Stereogum because of our MySpace, and then Pitchfork wrote it up. It felt like [the scenes] in those cheesy dramatized movies where the band hears their song on the radio for the first time - this was our 2009 version of that. For better or worse, [Pitchfork] were so powerful. I think we literally got an email from Jeremy the next day [saying], “Hey, I'll do the record.” We’d played enough shows and got in enough people's ears that some blogger checked us out, and we were really fortunate to get the attention of somebody at Pitchfork. That changed our entire landscape, but it definitely continued to be a local landscape for a while.
Were there places in Brooklyn that weren’t venues that still felt central to your music community at the time?
Daddy's. Daddy's was the bar for that scene, plain and simple. You could always pop into Daddy's with no plans to meet anybody there and run into somebody you knew from the music scene. It was also the go-to after pretty much any show.
But really, the venues were the chief places of socializing. Even if we weren't playing, I was at shows almost every night. I usually knew somebody who was playing or had heard of something, but even if I wasn't really excited for the music, I’d show up just to socialize.
I have one memory that really sticks out: The first drummer of our band [Etienne Duguay] moved into the Market Hotel. There were these really crappy rooms that sat [parallel to] the elevated subway, and I think he wound up paying $400 bucks a month or something to live in one of these rooms, which basically doubled as the green room for the Market Hotel. It was USAISAMONSTER’s last show, and it was this huge celebration where maybe 10 bands played - bands whose names I was used to seeing on all these bills in New York.
I remember being in the green room and not really watching the show or paying attention to the music at all. It was that slightly older scene of New York people out there celebrating their thing, and a bunch of people around my age in the green room just hanging out. That was the very first time I had that feeling of like, “I'm in the green room, in the interior of this thing,” but it [also felt like] this torch passing. This particular moment of this scene in New York is ending, and a new one is starting.
To be a band that was getting attention in New York at that particular time was almost a golden ticket to national attention. Because of the internet, a new band would pop up in New York, and all of a sudden you'd be reading about them on the internet, and then all of a sudden they'd be given a national or international opportunity because people were excited and interested. Obviously, there were innumerable bands that that didn't happen for, but it felt like we were a part of something that was happening that people were paying attention to, which is really the only time I've ever felt that way.
And maybe it was not for the best, you know? It felt really good at the time, but it was incestuous. Maybe it didn't give enough people an opportunity, I don't know. Because it was definitely a nepotism kind of scene that you had to work your way into.
And all of this was during the early gentrification in Williamsburg and Bushwick. This scene felt really good at the time, but it's definitely a complex thing. My participation in it started around 2009, and Williamsburg had already been pegged to become the next gentrified neighborhood. But then the real estate housing market crashed, and so there were all these warehouses and condos that sat empty. I can't shake that landscape from my mind of being at some party or something on a roof and seeing these massive buildings with only construction lights on, or all the lights were off [because] they weren't rented.
It's unfortunate that artists and musicians are often the first wave of gentrification in neighborhoods. That process is so rapid in New York City, but at that particular moment in time, it was slightly elongated, [because] we had this period of five or six years where everything just got put on hold. We were hanging out in these warehouses that were worth a ton of money, that investors had their eye on probably the whole time, but [the owners were] still willing to rent to this sketchy promoter guy Todd P. That opened up this opportunity for bands to be there and this particular creative scene to develop.
Once the economy started to rebound, Williamsburg was nationally, if not internationally known and almost made fun of as this new hipster neighborhood, and that made it more desirable. Flash forward to Vice opening their offices on that corner that we haven't really even talked about that was very central to this whole scene [South 2nd and Kent Ave], where Glasslands and Death by Audio were, and eventually 285 Kent.
I feel kind of conflicted about it, because there were so many people in that scene who were decrying the gentrification of the neighborhood when that was happening. A lot of these kinds of spaces disappeared, and a lot of the bands from it (ourselves included) went a more music industry establishment route: sign with a record label, get a booking agent, get a manager. Capitalism did kind of take over, because it was really exciting to be like, oh, you could grow as a band. You get older and you want to spend less time in sweaty basements. I hesitate to say that this particular thing that I was a part of ended, but I’m also very aware that I got older and started following a different trajectory. It took a different shape and continued to exist elsewhere.
As more money started pouring in, Williamsburg as a music and arts neighborhood became less possible, and that decentralized things. We were definitely a part of [why that happened]. I think it's silly to look at ourselves as not a gentrifying force. I'm not laying blame on anyone, but when there were people screaming about the Vice offices coming in, it rubbed me the wrong way when all of these predominantly white kids who were hanging out and choosing to be artists were screaming about gentrification.
You brought up that corner on Kent with Death by Audio, Glasslands, and 285 Kent - do you think the proximity of those spaces to each other helped them individually?
Definitely, because you would just show up on that corner and you could go to any number of events. But by the time 285 was happening, I was already growing tired of [the scene]. I’ll go on record saying I never liked 285 Kent. When 285 Kent went down and Pitchfork and a bunch of other publications really glommed onto it and heralded it as our CBGBs or something like that… maybe it made sense as a symbol of this greater scene in New York wrapping up.
I have a good factoid about 285! Real Estate played a show - it's still one of my fondest memories of the band. We became friendly with Todd eventually; he's sort of a polarizing figure, but we worked with him a lot. We approached him and we said, “We want to do an ‘old school Todd P. show’ with you,” because his [choices of] venues had become more established. It was always either Monster Island, Market Hotel, or Silent Barn, and then eventually 285, but he’d been known for throwing shows in unconventional spaces in his earlier days.
There was a Chinese restaurant called K&K Super Buffet in Queens that, for whatever reason, he’d had this idea of throwing a show in, and he convinced them to hold our show there. The restaurant was open while the show was happening, but it was really, really packed. It was us, Black Dice, the Babies, and Dog Leather, so two noise projects and two poppier things. It was packed and probably really dangerous, but it was really fun. I remember showing up to the show to load in, and they were still building the stage in the dining area. But that stage that was built for that show eventually became the 285 Kent stage.
285 Kent felt almost abandoned, [because] it was this massive warehouse. All these [venues] sounded bad, but it sounded particularly bad. You couldn't hear anything on stage. I know it's near and dear to a lot of people, and respect to them, but to me, it was sort of the beginning of the scene-y part of things starting to overshadow the music part. All of a sudden you started to have some of the bro culture taking cabs over from Manhattan to go there to hang out.
Really, all this [success] had happened for us [during] a very brief window of time when guitar music became cool again. The New York scene had been deeply Animal Collective-influenced, super noisy, really prog-y, and less focused on sweet melodies and guitars, but then there was this moment in 2009-2010 where people wanted to hear that again. Once 285 came around, tastes were evolving out of that, and what was hip was already getting closer to dance music and dance culture. Not that I don't like dance music, because I do, but there is also a clubby adjacent-ness that comes in with that, and that started to happen around that time that 285 became the go-to venue for a lot of people.
When did you move away?
2015. It's funny, because I was probably only 28, but I remember feeling like so much of my New York time had been based on being in my early and mid-20s and wanting to go to an event every night. My entire social scene, with a few exceptions, was rooted in this music/show culture. I made a lot of really good friends through it, but it also was very scene-y. I remember making this comment at the time that it felt like the game that I very willingly played was, how many people in the room do I know? And then it was like, okay, I won the game: I know everyone in the room, and I don't care. I felt this weird push-pull where everything was based on going out, and I just wasn't as inspired by the idea of going out every night and living in New York City.
Plus, Real Estate became more of a touring band and less of a localized band. It's funny and kind of a bummer that you go from playing in New York City or wherever you're from as much as possible, to all of a sudden we're having conversations about how we really have to limit how much we're in that market, and we’re playing New York once or twice a year. Our relationship to it changed, and I'd be touring so much that I was less interested in going out to a show as soon as I got home from playing one every night. So I moved to California, just like everybody else.
I still really love New York City, and I miss it, and I think about it fondly all the time, but now I live on the beach in Northern California. I have this very different lifestyle now. I don't even know if this will last forever, but it was appealing because it was the opposite thing, and that felt like something I wanted to explore.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity, brevity, and context.
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Amid all this effusive praise and discussion of the band’s early years, I would be remiss not to mention that another founding member of Real Estate, guitarist Matt Mondanile, was later credibly accused by multiple women of some truly abhorrent sexual behavior. He was kicked out of the band in 2016 after the other members reportedly became aware of the allegations against him.
A record label run by Woods frontman Jeremy Earl.