New Brunswick Music Scene Archive

New Brunswick, New Jersey, is an historic city with a rich and diverse connection to music, from the days when Rutgers students no doubt sang tavern songs at the Sign of the Red Lion, which was, in the 1770s, the first meeting place for Rutgers University classes. Throughout the 19th century, the Hub City boasted numerous theaters, an opera house, music shops, local and traveling musicians, musical associations such as the New Brunswick Band, and the largest musical string manufacturer in the world, the National Musical String Company. In the early 1900s, the multi-talented Paul Robeson sang for spending money in cafes and taverns throughout New Brunswick. In 1964, Lenny Kaye of The Patti Smith Group played his first gig with his band The Vandals at a Rutgers fraternity.

The New Brunswick Music Scene Archive (NBMSA) was established in September of 2015 to act as a repository for the vast amount of ephemera generated from the ever-changing music scene, including various formats of music releases, show flyers, and zines. It also serves to address a gap in documentation of musical life in New Brunswick from the late 20th century through the present day, and to demonstrate the value and reach of independent, local music.

In the 1980s, New Brunswick was home to several live music venues including The Court Tavern, The Melody, and Patrix, as well as several spaces around Rutgers including The Ledge, now the Student Activities Center, the Student Center Multipurpose Room on College Avenue, and Scott Hall’s large lecture rooms. As the sounds of “college rock” began to grow in popularity with the help of college stations such as Rutgers’ WRSU, bands such as The Smithereens, Crossfire Choir, The Blasés, and Spiral Jetty began to grow in popularity and help put New Brunswick on the map. Additionally, the New Jersey hardcore scene emerged and bands such as Pleased Youth, Bouncing Souls, and Headstrong, began to call New Brunswick home, and “house party” shows for all ages began to develop.

In the early 1990s, more venues began to open throughout New Brunswick including the re-opening of The Roxy, The Bowl-A-Drome, Down Under, Club 357, and Café Newz. However, as the 1990s went on most of the New Brunswick venues began to close as the city’s landscape began to change with the growth and expansion of healthcare and corporate entities in the city and the redevelopment of the downtown. During the 1990s the price of replicating CDs, cassettes, and vinyl records became more affordable and many labels centered in New Brunswick began to form including Well Primed Records, Chunksaah Records, Model Rocket, Powerbunny 4x4 Records, and Da Da Records. Well-known bands of this time included Lifetime, Deadguy, Buzzkill, Bionic Rhoda, and Seething Grey.

By the end of the 1990s the New Brunswick basement shows, held in off-campus student rentals, began to take off and the 2000s ushered in the “New Brunswick basement scene” and brought national attention to The Hub City with bands like Thursday, Screaming Females, and The Gaslight Anthem. Don Giovanni Records, founded in 2003 in New Brunswick, became the label of choice for many New Brunswick bands, is the most successful record label the city has produced, signing bands beyond New Brunswick and New Jersey.