Anyone who frequented the live music scene in New York over the last decade has a favorite story about Baby’s All Right, the 280-seat club in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. There was the night Billie Eilish, then 15, played songs from her first EP and a cover of Drake’s “Hotline Bling.” The time Mac DeMarco, with the help of some wine, wrote a “theme song” for the club. Or the night Zoë Kravitz’s band Lolawolf played a set to an audience that included her dad Lenny and Anne Hathaway.
All those memories, and many more, are the legacy of Billy Jones, the club co-owner who died Saturday of what a spokesperson for the venue called “a highly aggressive case of glioblastoma,” a malignant brain tumor. Jones was 45.
Jones arrived in New York in 2002 after earning a degree in media arts at Salisbury University in Maryland. As Jones and others saw, a new generation of indie and dance artists was rising up and hungry for places to play. “Chris from Grizzly Bear worked at a cafe on Bedford, and so did Kyp from TV on the Radio,” Jones said in an interview in 2023. “It would be like, ‘Maybe that was Karen O that walked by? I’m not quite sure.’ … Whatever band would come out that week was like the best band ever.”
Jones himself was lead singer in his own band, Other Passengers, in the 2000s and was a DJ. Looking back at those years, and the burgeoning Brooklyn music scene, he said in the same interview, “There was a feeling of calm before the storm.”
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Jones established himself as a booker at city clubs like Pianos NYC, the Dance, and Sin-é (which, in an earlier incarnation, had fostered Jeff Buckley). In 2013, he and a business partner, Zachary Mexico, opened Baby’s All Right, a combination bar, dining room, and performance space. With its astrology charts and shiny lighting, the club always felt a little otherworldly but quickly became a gathering spot for the Brooklyn and New York music community. Dev Hynes played a New Year’s Eve party there, and the club also hosted early shows by SZA, Beach House, and Ariel Pink.
Jones himself looked the part of an indie entrepreneur; one report described him as wearing “denim bell bottoms with the messy haircut of a 20-something.” But he was also admirably ambitious. Just before the pandemic, he was hoping to open a Los Angeles version of Baby’s All Right and also owned the recently closed Billy’s Record Salon, a record store near the Brooklyn space. He also recently opened two new clubs in the city’s East Village neighborhood: Night Club 101 and the jazz-leaning Funny Bar. As he told Rolling Stone in 2020 as the lockdown began, ““Everyone throws around the word ‘resilient’ right now. But there’s got to be a way to do it.”
