Nostalgia & History: L'Amour Show February 2009
As part of our Nostalgia & History series, in this essay, Will Gallagher revisits Staten Island’s early 2000s punk scene through the eyes of a South Shore kid discovering his voice. From the quiet streets of Rossville to the life-changing night at L’Amour’s Battle of the Bands, this story captures how one night of local music transformed isolation into belonging—and how Staten Island’s underground culture continues to shape lives far beyond the stage.
I spent a lot of time by myself in early high school. All of the kids I was friends with on my “block” had moved away, and the kids that were left were kind of rough-and-tumble. I wasn’t super close with anyone in my neighborhood, and I was going into high school with the intention of really putting myself out there. I was kind of a lonely kid, and I spent a lot of my early adolescence ‘tolerated’ rather than liked. To illustrate this point, one memorable Friday night from this time was when I walked down to the deli down the street from my house, ordered a cheesesteak, ate the cheesesteak, and came back to my basement to play video games. I remember feeling like a little bit of a loser because that’s what I was doing. I wasn’t at the mall. I wasn’t trying (and failing) to talk to girls at the ice skating rink. It was me, my cheesesteak breath, and Counter Strike. It’s not like I didn’t have any friends - I did, they just lived outside of my immediate neighborhood. If I wanted to see them, I needed to get a ride from my parents or take the bus.
The neighborhood I grew up in, Rossville, is a strange neighborhood. It was once a collection of small farming communities–home to Sandy Ground, a stop on the Underground Railroad and the oldest continuously inhabited free black settlement in the country. At one point, a cooperative farm run by the anarchist group the Catholic Worker provided care, food, and housing for the poor and indigent of New York City there. Their co-founder, Dorothy Day, now has a ferry named after her and is being considered for sainthood by the Church—probably the two biggest honors a Staten Islander could ever receive. However, I didn’t grow up in this bucolic, picturesque Rossville—brush fires in 1963 destroyed over 100 homes, and the opening of the Verrazano the following year spurred a wave of new home construction that continued well into my young adulthood—the farms replaced with a mix of semi attached houses, condos, and McMansions that all look just the same.
Photo of a crowd at L’Amour in 2009
Growing up in a maze of identical townhomes, under the shadow of two massive natural gas tanks, cut off from my friends due to the lack of a train line, I felt like I was in a sub-suburban wasteland. It’s no wonder that as soon as I got to middle school and made friends in other neighborhoods, I stopped hanging out there. Not like Tottenville or Eltingville had anything better to do, but at least they felt like actual neighborhoods—they had towns, they had homes older than the 90’s, they had a sense of history.
That isn’t to say I spent this time of my life in total isolation - I had friends, but I wanted to be a part of something. To feel like I belonged. At this point in my life, I was starting to figure out what that particular “something” was - music. I had been playing drums for a few years, and was a member of Tottenville High School’s marching band. Even though marching band provided me with a “home,” friends, and a sense of community, I was still seeking more - I wanted punk rock. For years, I had been absorbing punk music via the internet—reading about bands, watching whatever content had been uploaded to Youtube at that point, infecting my family computer with a million viruses, downloading Dead Kennedys songs on Limewire. Through peers, I also found out that Staten Island had its very own all ages punk scene - kids my age were building their own community of bands on the North Shore, in venues like Dock Street, The Cup, and Martini Red. I wanted so badly to be one of them. There was one “problem” - the North Shore problem. Ask any resident of Staten Island about the borough’s North/South divide and you dive into a complicated topic, involving race and class politics, gentrification, white flight, and a healthy amount of paranoia. The point being: I was a South Shore kid. My parents didn’t want me going up all the way to (gasp!) Stapleton, for “whatever” reason, let alone a punk show. It took me a solid two years convincing them before I was allowed to go to Dock Street, but I eventually made my way up and began involving myself in Staten Island’s local punk scene.
For a while, this was great, but it meant that I was always trying to find my way into a car of people headed up to the North Shore or begging my mom to drive me one way. It meant taking a half hour to 45 minute trip and crossing Staten Island’s unofficial Mason-Dixon line just to see some bands play. Wouldn’t it be great, I used to think, if a venue opened up on the South Shore? So many of the bands were from this end of the Island, anyway.
Enter L’amour, the Rock Capital of Staten Island. Formerly a metal club in Brooklyn, it hosted bands like Slayer, Iron Maiden, and Metallica when they worked the club circuit. The Brooklyn club closed down in 2004, and then a Staten Island outpost opened up in 2006 - right on the corner of Rossville Avenue and Arthur Kill Road. As much as I wanted it to be the next hot spot for all-ages punk on Staten Island, it was never going to be that, unfortunately - the club didn’t stray far from its hard rock/heavy metal roots, and catered, understandably, almost exclusively to an over 21 crowd.
Until one evening in February 2009, when they hosted a battle of the bands.
For the first time in my life, my hobby - my thing - was coming to me, and not the other way around. I could walk to this show. Finally, something to do on my end of the Island that wasn’t “teen night at Rollerjam” or “getting into a fight at the Atrium” or “wandering around aimlessly while drinking Arizona and lamenting the fact that this is what you were doing on Friday night.” Rossville finally had something worth staying for. I didn’t have to leave to have fun. I am by far not the first person to nostalgize or memorialize this particular show, but the reason I am doing so is because it was one of the most transformative nights of my life. It was a turning point - I can divide my life into “pre-L’amours show” and “post-L’amours show.” That is how monumental it was.
A lot of this night is a blur to me now, sixteen years later, but there’s a couple of standout moments:
1. I went to the bathroom and saw what I am pretty sure were human teeth in the sink.
2. The bouncer—an older biker-looking dude—asked my two friends and I if we were ready for the show as we hung out before it started. We enthusiastically were like, “yeah! We can’t wait!” A few days later, I realized he must have confused us—two tiny kids with bowl cuts and a bigger kid with shaggy hair—for members of Ballz, who played the show that night.
3. That same security dude was kind of being a dick the entire night. The entire place was packed wall to wall with kids, and we were getting rowdy (read: push pitting). The L’amours staff was not having it, and they definitely didn’t have enough people there to handle a hundred or so kids. This would prove to be a problem later on in the night.
4. This was the first time I ever heard a Wu-Tang clan song, and it was because Kids Carry Germs opened with the chorus of “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nothing To Fuck With.” Immediately after I heard my first Wu-Tang song, I saw a hardcore band play live for the first time. I barely remember it, but that’s probably because I got bonked in the head several times.
5. It feels strange to talk about them like this, because I became close with them over the years, but Curious Volume were the local band back then. As close to rock stars as you could get while still having to do homework. After a solo acoustic song from dNo, Cole and Trotta joined him and the crowd responded like the Beatles just took the stage— then the room proceeded to go batshit. They played “I Need You,” a song that my then 8 year old brother knew by heart because I played it so much off the desktop computer in our “computer room.”
Curious Volume played for another half hour or so and ended with their song “Bigtime,” in which the audience storms the stage to scream the chorus: “I fucked up big time/yeah I know.” To this day, it’s one of my favorite songs because sometimes, you don’t need metaphor or rich symbolism to really get your point across—sometimes you just need a simple admission of guilt. I had been going to their shows for a few months at this point and hadn’t yet felt comfortable to run up and sing it with everyone. I felt like a poser. I had only been going to these things for a little while and it seemed like half of the people there were these grizzled scene veterans. Looking back at the video, it’s so evident that we were all just a bunch of goofy kids. I got up there at the very end of the first chorus — that’s me in the bowl cut and white Operation Ivy T-shirt. I felt like I had made it. I had been following these bands online for years and going to their shows for a few months, but I didn’t feel part of “the scene” yet. Getting up on stage—even if only for a couple of seconds—made me feel like I was finally a part of this community that I had wanted to be a part of for so long. I was in.
The second chorus came around and we all rushed the stage again, but this time, if you watch closely, you can see me on stage, bent over, arguing with someone. The security had grabbed me by the leg and was trying to pull me down from the stage. This moment has stuck with me for a long time, and I’m not sure why. Now that I’m a grown-ass adult, I do get it - the guy was legit just doing his job. L’amours was not a punk club, they were not used to having a bunch of kids there, and having them rush the stage was not something that they wanted. However, from my adolescent standpoint, I finally felt comfortable to participate in this ritual that I had observed for so long, and this guy was ruining my moment! In true punk rock fashion, the increased activity from security didn’t stop Curious Volume or their audience. My absolute favorite part of this video is that same security guard trying to tell Trotta something (stop letting people on the stage, maybe?) as Trotta shrugs his shoulders and plays a walking bassline. Like “I don’t know what you want me to do, man, I’m up here shredding.” People rushed the stage for the last chorus, but I didn’t. I was scared I’d get physically yanked off the stage and hurt - or worse, kicked out.
Curious Volume finished their set without incident, and we all went home. I’m not sure if any of the other attendees of this show feel the same way, but the fact that Curious Volume broke the rules of this place three times and faced no consequences for it felt like a major victory for us kids, who were constantly being told what to do and when to do it. A group of adults set a boundary, we broke it, and they threw up their hands and said “you know what, fuck it. Not worth my time.”
Despite my security scuffle, that night was the first time I finally felt like I was part of this thing that I had been a passive observer of. Punk rock now is as much a part of my identity as being from Staten Island is: it is intrinsic, it’s automatic, it is something that, even at thirty, I define myself as. If I am two things, I am a punk from Staten Island. That night was the first time that happened. Until that point, punk had been far away. It was something that happened at 924 Gilman Street in the East Bay, where Green Day, Rancid, and countless others cut their teeth. It happened in CBGB’s in the city. It happened all the way up in Stapleton, at Dock Street, The Muddy Cup, and Martini Red. Now, it was happening right in front of me, walking distance from my house. And I was a part of it.
As much as teenage me wanted L’Amour to be a permanent fixture on the island, it wasn’t meant to be. L’Amour, even though it had a great stage and a great sound system, would close less than a year after this show. Punk, to me, was always about the DIY, do-it-yourself mentality - and as monumental as this show was, it also showed why a place like L’Amour was not the place for punk on Staten Island. This show was billed as a “Battle of the Bands” - already the least punk thing possible, if you’re going off my definition of punk. A Battle of the Bands is typically judged largely on pre-sold tickets - in short, how much money can you make for the venue before you even play a note? It’s exploitative. While other venues on the Island were definitely more tolerant of our adolescent antics, L’Amour was decidedly not chill about it, and tried (and failed) to stop kids from rushing the stage three times. Hell, dNo is outright encouraging people to come up to the stage at the end of the song, even though the venue made it very clear it wasn’t cool. Punk is a lot of things - doing things yourself, speaking up for what is right - but sometimes it’s just rebelling against “the man,” even if that particular man is a club that is out to make money off of you. And is there anything more punk, any more perfect act of rebellion, than doing your own thing in a place where it is not wanted, where it isn’t hurting anybody?
As counterintuitive as this may sound, I can draw a direct line from my punk rock adolescence - and this show, specifically - to my current career as a social studies teacher. It sounds ridiculous - punks hate school! Teachers are authority figures! I have become the man I sought to stick it to! Maybe I’m rationalizing my own “squareness” a bit here, but teaching, especially social studies, isn’t just drilling facts into kids’ heads anymore. My day to day is spent teaching critical literacy skills - forcing students to examine who wrote something, why they wrote it, and how their circumstances influenced what they wrote. Teaching students to question the world around them and not accept things at face value? Punk as hell.
All that is to say, I was talking to some students about music this past school year, and I brought up punk music. I showed them a few videos that I thought exemplified punk rock: This old clip of The Clash, a video of Turnstile at The Wyman Park Dell, and a video from Bomb the Music Industry’s final show. They were struck by a few things, namely, that a) there was a lot of yelling, b) how close the audience and the performers were and c) the music was pretty sloppy. I explained that that’s kind of the point—it’s inherently accessible. Punk breaks down the barriers between performer and audience, sometimes to the point where the audience gets on stage and sings along with the band for a moment—whether you’re a band of teenage kids or one of the most established bands in the entire genre. Being that close, that involved with the performance you paid to see makes you realize “I can do this too, if I want.” Punk represents what is possible, what can happen if you take ownership of your life and your circumstances. You can go from attending your first punk show to playing your first punk show to running your own punk shows in a year’s time. Four years from that show at L’Amour, my band was booking a tour to promote the EP that we had just recorded. As a kid, my number one complaint was that I lacked agency; so much of my life was controlled by my parents and school. Punk rock was something that was entirely for me, and could be whatever I wanted it to be.
I became more and more ingrained in the Island’s punk scene throughout high school and college. I started my own bands, booked my own shows, recorded, and toured. Even though these things never really “went” anywhere, I got to achieve childhood dreams because of them. I didn’t make money off of these ventures - I probably lost some money - but they were done purely because I wanted to do them. That sounds selfish, but in a world where so much art and media is made for commercial consumption, creating because you want to is one of the most radical acts of rebellion there is. If there’s people that like what you’re doing and want to pay to come see and support it, all the better.
People who are on the outside of punk often see it as destructive and reactive, but it is truly one of the most constructive experiences of my life. Punk forces you to truly “do it yourself,”. While this one show at L’amour wasn’t my introduction to punk music, it was my induction into my punk music, and the larger Staten Island scene~. Punk made me love Staten Island, partly because the music forced me to get out of the South Shore bubble. Ironically, punk is the reason I also stayed here instead of leaving—I’ve put roots down on the North Shore. I had—have!— agency in a world where I felt I had none. And all because a group of kids did what they wanted in a place that did not want them to do it.
This piece was written by Will Gallagher, a Shaolin Art Party contributor, as part of our ongoing effort to spotlight Staten Island’s evolving arts and culture landscape.