Shea Stadium

BUSHWICK, NEW YORK –

Owned and run by local musicians, Shea Stadium is a gritty DIY live music bar/recording studio where the cream of the city’s indie music scene goes to play for a crowd of hipsters in exchange for a professional live recording of the performance.

A long flight of industrial stairs leads the clientele of indie fans to a scruffy flannel-clad rocker collecting the cover charge, and beyond into a wide second-floor warehouse space decked out in rope lights, a disco ball, and the requisite Mets logo as a nod to the venue’s name.

Friendly post-punk nerds sell cheap beer from a cooler behind a counter to boisterous punker chicks, tattooed slackers, and groups of adventurous students, who chill out on dusty overstuffed couches or step out to the balcony to admire Bushwick’s industrial desert of rooftops.

The real focus at Shea, of course, is the packed calendar of live music events that feature everyone from scene heroes like Japanther and Krallice to a slew of unknowns and misfits.

Shows begin fairly early in the evening, when the man in the red-lit sound booth turns down the jams, and the ramshackle plywood stage is taken over by the night’s performers and their deafening onslaughts of ambient noise, indie pop, prog-slop, and psychedelic black metal played to an appreciative, if mellow, audience of music scenesters.

Unmarked and with no phone number, Shea Stadium is the epitome of Brooklyn’s underground scene, a relaxed yet electric den for rockers keeping it real.