Jordan Michael Iannucci (Silent Barn, JMC Aggregate, Showpaper, Termporary State University)
"I never wanted to be a big show promoter, I never wanted to be super influential, I just wanted to be somebody that everyone knew on their way coming up that they didn't feel negatively about."
Image via JMC Aggregate
I approach most of the interviews I post here strictly as a historian, but in this instance, there’s some personal baggage attached. I met Jordan Michael Iannucci for the first time in 2009, when he came to a show that my band at the time played at the fabled Ridgewood, Queens DIY venue Silent Barn. But I didn’t really get to know him until the following year, when he began booking and promoting shows of his own at Silent Barn and other simpatico all-ages spaces, at which I and many of my friends frequently performed. In as much as I was ever really part of a “scene,” Jordan - who booked shows under the handle JMC Aggregate - was right at its center.
Jordan was part of a larger network of DIY promoters in the city in the late ‘00s and early ‘10s that was spearheaded by the groundbreaking booker Todd Patrick (aka Todd P.), and also included Jordan’s mentors Joe Ahearn (who’d booked that aforementioned show at the Silent Barn), Edan Wilbur at Death By Audio, and Ric Leichtung at 285 Kent/AdHoc. They all had phenomenal taste and booked consistently excellent shows (and were all interviewed extensively for my book), but what made Jordan unique in my mind was the sense of showmanship he brought to the act of booking and promoting shows: he notoriously agreed to book any band who could beat him at the video game Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and incentivized teenagers to come to weeknight shows by promising to do their homework for them.
But even when he seemed to be doing a bit (which was often), it was always in service of the noble goal of getting people to actively participate in the DIY show ecosystem. To that end - and the reason I’m sharing this interview now, even though it was conducted in December 2020 - he recently teamed with Ceci Sturman and Hannah Pruzinsky (who both run the show listings zine Gunk) to found Temporary State University, a non-profit organization that aims to teach and provide resources to people who want to book and promote DIY shows of their own.
I strongly believe in TSU’s mission and give it my wholehearted endorsement. I encourage you to check it out, and if you feel so inclined, donate and/or preregister for their workshops. These people are doing the Lord’s work.
You grew up just outside of the city, right?
Monroe, the town that I'm from, is kind of the last town that you can feasibly call a suburb and not an exurb. Like, my town has a Walmart, a Kohl's, and a Home Depot, and then immediately past my town, it's just literally dirt farms.
Were you coming into the city to see shows?
Senior year of high school is when I started regularly coming into the city for shows, but even that was hard because so many of them were 21+. So many of the shows I wanted to go to were bands that were still at the tier where they were playing bars. So a lot of [the shows] I would go to were at Sound Fix, this [record] store on North 9th and Bedford.
So when did you get involved with DIY stuff?
I went to Bennington in fall 2007, and I got kicked out of Bennington in spring of 2008. I moved back in with my parents, and then I found a job at a print company in Midtown. I moved to the city, and I had that job for about a year. I would just go to shows alone. I didn't know anyone my own age, because I didn't go to college, and it's really hard to meet a 19-year-old if you're not at a college.
I had a few months of rent saved up, so I quit that job right at the beginning of the summer. I had this summer where I was applying to jobs and going to tons of shows, and a friend of mine had interned for Showpaper1 and knew Joe Ahearn. They were like, “If you’ve got free time, you should email Joe, and he'll give you shit to do.” That began a ten year course of Joe telling me to do things.
He originally had me distributing Showpaper, which was just walking up and down the blocks around L train stops, going into cafes and bars, and putting Showpapers down. It’s crazy to think how shy and insecure I was at the time - it was so hard for me to just go into a bar and be like, “Hey, I'm dropping these off,” and then leave.
The first time I did it, [Joe paired] me with Edan from Death by Audio, who would also do this. Edan was trying to make small talk with me, and he asked me what I was listening to. I said that I really liked this band called Snakes Say Hisss. Then I went home and looked at that CD, and I looked at the liner notes, and they had thanked him in it. That really cemented in my head that you can have a relationship with the people that make things you like - even though I was starting to get involved, it still felt like they were two separate worlds.
At the point that you hooked up with Showpaper, had you been to any Todd P. shows or any of those DIY venues like Silent Barn or Death By Audio?
Oh yeah. The first time I went to Silent Barn was to see Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. It was one of those upstairs/downstairs shows. The basement is where they had the bar, so you would have to go downstairs into the basement to buy a drink, and a lot of times they would have a show happening down there. So instead of there being 15 to 20 minutes in between bands, it was just nonstop music, where once a band on one floor ended, a band would immediately begin playing on the other floor. It took me an hour to figure out what the fuck was happening.
I thought something was a bathroom and I was waiting on line, and when the door opened, I saw that it was somebody's bedroom. And then at some point, I realized that there was a refrigerator right next to where the bands were playing, and I was like, Oh my god, people live here. These people are idiots. Why the fuck would you live here? This is disgusting.
And then, of course, I ended up living there.
Your role at Showpaper eventually expanded.
I ended up doing the listings, which basically involves spending 20 hours every other week just checking every band's MySpace page, going through every email newsletter, checking every venue’s website, emailing every weirdo off-the-grid show promoter that did all-ages shows, and making a giant listing of all the all-ages shows for the next two weeks.
How much of the stuff that you were finding for Showpaper did you end up getting into that you wouldn't have known about otherwise?
In the beginning, I would honestly go to a thing [every] night. But it wasn't too long before I was booking my own shows or working other people's shows, where the things I went to really became dictated by if I had direct involvement in it.
That honestly kind of ruined my being a fan of music for a little bit, because it was a thing that I [previously] did as a form of fandom and escapism, and then it became the main way in which I interacted socially. If music is your main form of socializing, you can't listen to contemporary music as a fan anymore. It's really hard to listen to a band that everyone else is excited about when you're like, “I took that guy's ID at Death by Audio six months ago, he was a total dick.” It makes it so you can't enjoy new music. So for basically all of my twenties, I only listened to, like, Britney Spears and Elvis, because I was like, “Well, I'm never gonna fucking meet these people.”
What venues did you consider to be the core of the Brooklyn DIY circuit, and did you feel like there was a hierarchy to them?
To me, it was always broken up in how many degrees removed from Todd P. they were. There was Todd’s shit, there was the children of Todd, there were the grandchildren of Todd, and then there were people that were descendants of him, but they were like Olive Garden Italians who don't even speak Italian.
Like, for a very long time, the way people would format event information on the Facebook page for their events was just a slow evolution of how Todd used to format shit on his website.2 There's weird shit like that, that is undeniably from him in a way where I think a lot of the people who did it didn't even know where it came from. It's the type of thing that’s so self-evident, you’d never think it came from one person. But if you [were someone who used to] check Todd's website twice a day, that formatting is burned in your brain.
And there's other things, like how you do the door, what you tell the door person who's never worked a shift, how they count the money, how you pay bands. The percentage breakdowns where the venue takes 20% and bands get 80% - that is a totally arbitrary number that comes from Todd, but that’s how so many venues did it for years.
So there was the shit Todd ran, and then there was the most inner circle - Joe, Edan, Ric [Leichtung] - and then there's the people that learned from those people, like [me]. Shea Stadium was also in that third circle; those people learned a lot of shit from Joe.
And then there's the second iteration of Silent Barn3 - at that point, none of those people worked for Todd. A lot of that infrastructure for shows came from me sleeping in that main room the first three months it was open, and then I put a system in place that other people ran with. They definitely left their own mark on it and changed it from what I had originally set up, but it's all a direct lineage. I think Todd used to get too much credit for a lot of things, and now I think he doesn't get enough credit for things.
But to answer your question, to the average person, Glasslands, Death By Audio, and Market Hotel were all the same thing. I try not to lose perspective and forget that most people going to a concert think Madison Square Garden or Radio City Music Hall, they do not think Glasslands. It was only because I’m in this small myopic world that I think I can see the vast chasm of difference between Market Hotel and Shea Stadium.
[For example,] Death By Audio was not run by music industry people in the way that Glasslands was, where they had more relationships with booking agents. At Death by Audio, Edan would gleefully tell agents to go fuck themselves all the time, because he knew that people wanted to play there enough that they would have to deal with him anyway. He was getting the shows from the artist, not the agent.
Once you started booking your own shows, how long did it take to feel like you really had a handle on it?
Honestly, the first show. My bar was so low that just interacting with people who wrote songs that I liked felt like enough where if I never did it again, I would have been satisfied. That sounds like a super corny cop-out answer, but I did very consciously want that to be the only thing that I needed to get out of it. I was aware that if I tied it in any way to my ego, it would never work out for me. I could only tie it to an admiration for other people, that's the only way I know for sure I am going to get a return on my investment.
I never wanted to be a big show promoter, I never wanted to be super influential, I just wanted to be somebody that everyone knew on their way coming up that they didn't feel negatively about. [The first show I booked was] Mr. Twin Sister, and I remember they got interviewed for their big Pitchfork feature, I think it was the day before that show. So I felt like I was already doing the thing that I set out to do: I am touching the thing that I admire before it gets out of my grasp.
One of the things I always found fascinating and admirable about you was this P.T. Barnum sensibility you applied to booking and promoting shows. I'm thinking of the Tony Hawk challenge, or doing homework for high school kids on school nights.
If I ever intended to do this professionally, I would not have been able to do any of that. I realized, the more shows I was booking and the longer I booked, that I was never going to be able to do it for a living. If I wasn't able to do it for a living, then it was just about the quality of the relationships I made. When I started doing things like the Tony Hawk challenge, or the homework thing, that was me intentionally being like, how many people can I develop a weird relationship with through booking shit?
That's also why I started dressing kind of weird. A lot of shows [were full of] dudes who had this Doug Funnie/Hey Arnold aesthetic - the “frumpy little boy” style of dressing. I intentionally didn't dress like that because I wanted to be able to be visually described at shows. I wanted to be like Waldo or Dr. Zizmor.
Can you describe the homework thing?
I didn’t do that for long, but basically: I did all-ages shows, but most of my shows take place on weekdays and are late, so feasibly young people can't go to these shows. If you couldn’t go to the show because you had homework, if you [came to the show anyway and] brought your homework, I would do it. I wasn't agreeing to do it correctly, but I would physically do it if you brought it.
I did it twice before I stopped doing it, because it became super weird really quick. The first person who did it was super cool and normal, and then the second person who did it was a very lonely teenager that started texting me and made me feel very weird.
The Tony Hawk thing was different. I was like, “Yeah you fucking weirdos, come to my apartment and be my friend!” I’d say fifty different strangers came to my apartment and played me at Tony Hawk. The best thing about it is they all thought it was a joke where if they showed up to my apartment and just did it, I would book them a show. No. If they didn't beat me, I would not book them a show. The bet was if they beat me, I would book them a show, and if I beat them, they would have to go to my favorite bodega and buy me a sandwich and watch me eat it.
Your involvement in the second iteration of the Silent Barn was much more in depth than the at the first. Can you describe your role there?
My role in the second Silent Barn was basically, there was a five member LLC that did the lease and the loans. I was one of them, and they were personally guaranteed in my name.
And you wound up overseeing the finances.
Yeah, what a bad idea! Why didn’t anybody tell me not to do that? That was just a thing where nobody else was doing it, and I was living outside of the city because my father was sick. The only way I could really work on [the Silent Barn] remotely was by doing the bookkeeping. So it was me trying to find a role for myself, and then having to learn how to actually do it.4
Can you explain Silent Barn’s financial structure in layman’s terms?
We spent more money than we made. We borrowed money to open, and at first, the shows broke even and rentals broke even. And then shows started losing money, but rentals broke even. And then, shows were losing money and rentals were losing money. So we borrowed more money. Then the original money we borrowed came due, and then we closed.
How would you break down the money made at a show at the end of the night?
Originally, I think it was 75% or 80% of the door got paid to the band, and then 25% got paid to the staff. Pretty soon after, we realized that that was not a sustainable way to pay staff, and was in fact an illegal way to pay staff. We started paying staff minimum wage from the checking account every other week, and 20% or 25% of the door just went to the venue. So a lot of shows started losing money.
At one point, you were putting Silent Barn’s financial statements online for people to see.
That was both an offense and a defense. It was an offense in so much as we were incapable of making money on our own, so we had to beg people for money. The most effective way to beg for money was to be pathetic, and there was nothing more pathetic than looking at our finances.
It was a defense in so much as there was a lot of internal conflict about how our money was spent, and I realized that people were way more critical when they just assumed that money was getting spent liberally on things that weren't their thing. If I showed the actual money and was like, “Here, tell me how you think this would work better,” they would just be like, “Oh, we're fucked. And not only are we fucked to the point where I can't get the thing that I wanted, but we're fucked to the point that I no longer think this can work. I'm just gonna back off from this conversation.” More often than not, they would come to that conclusion on their own.
So when it finally closed in 2018, that was something that you saw coming a mile away?
We were constantly trying to prevent it from happening, but it was in such immediate danger for most of the time we were open that it didn't feel like a thing that happened in the present, but rather a thing that we had to acknowledge had happened a while ago. I didn't feel like I was saying, “We're closing,” I was saying, “We had to close a year ago, and now I'm telling you.”
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity, brevity, and context.
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You can buy a signed copy of my book This Must Be the Place here
Learn more about Temporary State University here
To learn more about Jordan’s work, check out JMC Aggregate
A free bi-weekly publication founded by Todd P. which listed every all-ages show in the NYC area.
| [HEADLINER]
|| [DIRECT SUPPORT BAND]
||| [OPENING ACT]
[Venue name]
[Venue address]
[Closest subway stops] | [start time] | all ages | [price]
The Silent Barn’s initial location at 915 Wyckoff Avenue was shuttered by the city in 2011, and subsequently vandalized and robbed. After a successful Kickstarter campaign, it reopened in late 2012 in a new location, 603 Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn, where it was reimagined as a three-story complex with a venue, apartments, artists’ studios, a recording studio, and a barber shop/record store. That location closed in 2018.
Iannucci currently makes his living as a freelance accountant.
thanks for the AdHoc shout-out!!! :)
I got a big stack of old issues of Showpaper preserved if anyone ever needs them. Got them at a free showing of Empire Records in a Willie B parking lot a few years back. Great artwork and historic document of a special moment in time living there.