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Cannonball at Goodbye Blue Monday

Goodbye Blue Monday was a performance space in Brooklyn, NY that was around for much of the 2000s and the early 2010s – it was founded and run by Steve Trimboli, who’d previously run the similarly legendary NYC venue Scrap Bar in the 1980s.
I performed at Goodbye Blue Monday quite a bit from 2011 until its closure in 2014, and got to know a lot of the community that formed around it – people often talked about Goodbye Blue Monday and the scene around it as being our generation’s version of CBGBs and the early punk scene, but this place really stood on its own and had something to it that didn’t really exist before or after.
Like Sidewalk, Goodbye Blue Monday was a place where anyone could go any night of the week and see affordable (almost always free, in fact) live music and find themselves as part of a real live artistic community, befriending and collaborating with any number of brilliant and talented artists – and it was an indescribably incredible place.
The first ever Cannonball Statman gig was Goodbye Blue Monday! As was the first ever Dick Jokes gig!
Goodbye Blue Monday also provided a space for some of my experimental performances that I couldn’t have gotten away with anywhere else – including a performance of experimental music inspired by The Scarf and a performance of music I wrote during the recording of Lullaby Screams.
Countless artists played their first NYC gig at Goodbye Blue Monday – I saw plenty of those gigs myself, and even booked some of them, as part of the Cannonball Presents! events I was doing there. A lot of this was thanks to Steve Trimboli’s open booking policy, which allowed for anyone to perform at the club at least once, and plenty more if he liked you – this also meant you’d see renowned performers like Matthew Silver or Jeffrey Lewis sharing stages with artists who’d never been on stage, and sometimes the first-time performers were the ones who really blew you away and had you taking notes on how to improve your act.
Joe Crow Ryan and Dan Costello also ran an open mic there every Tuesday that I performed at regularly in that time, which is where a lot of the NYC antifolk scene and similar communities would hang out and try out new material on a Tuesday night, just as we did on Mondays at Sidewalk.
In fact, Goodbye Blue Monday’s Tuesday night open mic was called the “Tuesday Teacup”, which I think was a reference to how the handful of people who made it to the end of Sidewalk’s notoriously long Monday night open mic (which usually went from around 7:30pm until 2am or later, with over 50 performers every Monday) had a tradition of drinking tea after hours in Sidewalk’s nearly empty back room when the performances were finally done – so those who made it through the Sidewalk open mic were among the more likely contenders to then attend Goodbye Blue Monday’s open mic the following night, usually in a pretty delirious state from having come home around dawn after tea at Sidewalk and then going straight to work and then to Goodbye Blue Monday without having slept much, if at all – and really, a lot of us just didn’t sleep, especially on Mondays and Tuesdays.

There was also a massive amount of spontaneity on that scene – I can’t count the number of times I went to a friend’s gig and was unexpectedly invited on stage in the middle of their set, or the number of people I met and the collaborations that ensued, or the sheer number of interesting, fun, and bizarre things that happened in these places and that I was part of in some way – we were all part of it, really, and it was such a crucial aspect of our lives and identities in those years, as it still is, in a different way.
People often ask me how I know so many people in the music world, or how I get paid to perform on stage without having millions of followers on social media or streaming services or spending thousands of dollars on a university degree or publicity campaign – and almost all of that comes down to the fact that I spent so many hours on stage (over 1,000 hours!) at clubs like Goodbye Blue Monday and Sidewalk in my late teens and early 20s, and became an integral part of the scene by also going to other people’s gigs, also making friends and supporting the scene, also having real life experiences and making memories with people in the real world.
The older I get, the more I realize the importance of this and how valuable it is – for all artists, really.
Ultimately, those real life experiences that we share with our fans are where the value of our work actually comes from, and why every human artist is completely irreplaceable, and why fundamentally, each of us stands on our own in that sense that no one could ever do what another does, and we’re never truly in competition for each other’s places in this world – to facilitate those real life experiences, it’s essential that there are real live artistic communities in this world, and brick-and-mortar cultural spaces like Goodbye Blue Monday and Sidewalk that open their doors to these communities without expecting much of a profit (in fact, most of these places lose money every year, but they stick around because they know they’re providing an essential service to the community and to human culture).
The closure of Goodbye Blue Monday and Sidewalk, and countless other clubs like these all over the world that I’ve had the honor of performing in, has been truly sad for so many of us – Rocks in Kaohsiung, Le Pop In in Paris, The Central in Toronto, Cal Biure in Biure, La Nueva Babel in Oaxaca, Number 39 Bar in Darwen, and any number of others I forgot to mention here – needless to say, we’ll keep going and we’ll keep finding ways to make art in this world regardless.
In the meantime, we also have some photos and videos to remember what some of us were doing at Goodbye Blue Monday in the early 2010s!
First official Cannonball Statman gig, Goodbye Blue Monday, 2012 (Full Concert)
The Dick Jokes play “One More Singularity” at their first ever gig, Goodbye Blue Monday, 2013
“Cannonball Becomes the One Armed Man” Music Video from 2013, which ends with a live scream-along at Goodbye Blue Monday led by Bob Black

Cannonball plays a few rarities with “Dexter” Dan Cohen on harmonica at Goodbye Blue Monday, 2013
Cannonball quartet play “Buddha” during a terrible snowstorm at Goodbye Blue Monday, 2013
Cannonball octet play a number of songs at Goodbye Blue Monday, 2013
Cannonball quintet play some of the songs on Real Live Cannonballism at Goodbye Blue Monday, 2013
Cannonball trio play “Horse” and “Tom Turkey” at Goodbye Blue Monday, 2013
“I Have Flowers”, from a performance of experimental music inspired by The Scarf at Goodbye Blue Monday, 2011
“Underground” and “You’re Exploding / Tonia”, from a performance of experimental music written during the recording of Lullaby Screams at Goodbye Blue Monday, 2012
Cannonball duo play “Tiger” and “Paint” at Goodbye Blue Monday, 2012
Cannonball quartet play “Sun” at Goodbye Blue Monday, 2012
Cannonball plays “Paint”, “Tiger”, and “Horse” at Goodbye Blue Monday, 2012
Jane LeCroy, Kid Lucky, and Cannonball performing “Lost My Way” at Goodbye Blue Monday
Photos of Cannonball at Goodbye Blue Monday: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6