Jeff Spevak

@jeffspevak1

Maybird benefit: 8 p.m. Nov. 19 at The Bug Jar, 2189 Monroe Ave.

ROC4TIM: 2 p.m. Dec. 3, until midnight, at Anthology, 336 East Ave.

The Hotelier benefit: 8 p.m. Dec. 13, at The Bug Jar

Tim Avery booked your band. And if your band was from out of town, he let it crash at his apartment. He might have even given you a few beers.

You’re not alone. Avery’s been doing that for about a decade now. Putting on underground shows at The Shark Tank, the house he and his nomadic friends rented when they were so broke they were living on food stamps. He moved on to booking concerts at the Bug Jar, Rochester’s hole-in-the-wall, indie-music palace, giving local groups such as Joywave and Maybird their first gigs. And Avery knows enough about the national indie scene to reach into Worcester, Massachusetts, and bring us bands like The Hotelier, a marvelous emo-rock trio that speaks to the damaged souls of our young people.

It is a loosely woven, yet specifically defined, community. Without Avery, that strange, endangered bird of underground rock in Rochester would struggle to survive. “I must do it,” he says, leaving unsaid his fear that, otherwise, no one else will do it. For Avery, it is simply a matter of, “Because I like music, and they’re my friends.”

Joywave, whose booming dance-floor pop riffs have outgrown the Bug Jar, has booked a Dec. 3 gig at one of Rochester’s biggest clubs, Anthology. Maybird, which has flown the local coop as well after signing with the indie-music impresario Danger Mouse’s label, is returning to the Bug Jar on Nov. 19. And The Hotelier has lined up a Dec. 13 show at the Bug Jar after hearing the same deflating news that’s prompted the Joywave and Maybird shows.

Riding the Joywave

Tim Avery has cancer.

“I was feeling kind of sick and tired, I’d been sleeping a lot, my energy levels were not where they normally are,” he says. Avery is a mere 35 years old, a non-smoker and all-around good guy. “I was feeling pain in my back for no reason, I was rolling on a baseball trying to loosen up, thinking it was a muscle spasm. Taking three Advils before bed, that kind of thing.”

It’s not that Avery doesn’t like doctors, but he’s one of those people who feels better when they’re not around. But with the baseball not working, he reluctantly made an appointment for the end of August.

A tumor was found and surgically removed. That’s just the start. The cancer was also in his lymph nodes, “your superhighway,” as Avery puts it. The lymph nodes shipped the cancer to his lungs, and a little to the liver as well. Avery’s undergone two rounds of chemotherapy, after the second one picking up a staph infection that left him delirious with a 103.5 fever. “I couldn’t do work, I couldn’t do anything,” he says.

He had his third round of chemo this week, more to go. “Chemo messes up your system,” Avery says. He’s discovering that one doctor appointment can balloon into five hours of tests, and finds himself wondering: “Why do I need more blood or platelets?”

“The expense of this is ridiculous”

Chemo. Blood. Platelets. Numbers on a chart. That’s his life now. “Actually, none of this hurts,” Avery says. “Some cancers are really painful. I think I’ve always had a high pain tolerance. But sometimes you’re just a wreck, physically.

“I think ultimately I’ll be OK. I’m OK nine out of 10 days.”

But, “The expense of this is ridiculous,” he says. Two weeks ago, friends helped Avery move out of his Gregory Street apartment and back to his parents’ home in Chili.

These friends of his: How do you tell them?

“I kept it quiet,” Avery says. “My mom is the Facebook queen, she let it out.”

Billy Martin met Avery in 2011, when Avery took over the lease from the apartment Martin and his girlfriend were living in, along with a few other friends. “Kind of a communal place,” Martin says. “He told me this is who I am and what I do, and if I have any musical endeavors give him a call.”

Actually, Martin has two of them. Leus Zeus and the power trio The Ginger Faye Bakers. Naturally, both soon had Bug Jar gigs.

Martin heard about Avery’s illness through “the circle of friends.”

“I walked into the Bug Jar one night just to see if he was around,” he says. “He was working through post-op, pre-chemo, and everybody was talking about it. I thought, if we can get this group of local artists and musicians together, spread the word through social media …”

Avery is what Martin calls “a good Samaritan,” active in his church, local politics and volunteering in the community. “Everybody knows Tim,” Martin says. “I knew everybody would want to be a part of it.”

So many, in fact, that the Dec. 3 ROC4TIM show at Anthology, organized by Martin, Mike Turzanski and Greta Page-Mann, will run for 10 hours, from 2 p.m. to midnight. The goal is to raise $15,000 for Avery’s medical expenses. Fifteen performers, including Leus Zeus, Avery’s Secret Pizza and Joywave.

“He’s one of the best people I know,” Joywave lead singer Dan Armbruster says. “A lot of times people working in promoting shows, their end goal is to make money for themselves. Tim never does that. He lets the bands keep the door every night” – meaning the musicians receive all of the proceeds from ticket sales and the cover charge – “and he doesn’t force them to sell tickets. He’s very selfless, he brings in these great bands. He does what’s best for Rochester.”

Avery booked Joywave for its first-ever show, at The Bug Jar in 2010. It’s Joywave’s neighborhood bar. The band – back in town now, recording its next album – can walk from its studio to the club in about 30 seconds. “It’s kind of like family at this point, I guess,” Armbruster says. “We still hang out there a lot. Ben, our keyboard player, has a DJ gig there on Thursdays.”

Booking shows does not pay Avery’s rent. Well, living with his parents again, maybe it does. “I lose money,” he concedes.

But he has a real-life job now, as a New York state Department of Environmental floodplain training coordinator at Bergmann Associates. “It’s a lot like booking shows, where you’re coordinating events and training sessions across the state,” Avery says. “Teaching municipal officials, anyone who wants to go, how to understand FEMA maps. If you purchase a building and need a mortgage, and you’re working with a Realtor, you might need to check if you need flood insurance for that mortgage. That’s based on FEMA maps, which you have to read and understand.”

This is real stability for a guy who, recalling how he got through life less than a decade ago, “It’s a miracle that we all survived,” Avery says. Living off AmeriCorps jobs, eating off food stamps, “just starving, trying to stay alive.”

Music, that gets you through the week. “Putting on shows in houses, basements, getting shut down by the cops all the time,” he says. “They didn’t want you to have shows or music or fun. There were a lot of bad things taking place that the cops weren’t taking care of. We were just making Rochester a better place.”

That peaked in 2009 when Avery moved into The Shark Tank with a revolving door of like-minded indie dreamers. “That was the first house that stayed stable and never got shut down by the cops that I was a part of,” Avery says. “The first year was really crazy, we were doing two shows a week. No one paid attention to us, maybe that’s how we got away with stuff.”

“They basically brought the Rochester music scene together,” says Maybird’s Josh Netsky. “They would have a day where all day they would have Rochester musicians get together and put together a random band. Someone from Green Dreams, someone from Thunder Body, a guy from another band. Then they would go in the basement for an hour and write and record a song, and they made an album out of that. And that’s how a lot of people in the music scene met each other.”

Netsky was at the first one of those events. It was Avery who booked Maybird for its first Bug Jar gig, on October 2013. Avery even played trumpet on Maybird’s first EP. Now the favor comes back around, and the Nov. 19 Avery benefit at The Bug Jar.

“The last time I was in Rochester, I saw him for a while,” Netsky said earlier this week. He was calling from the road as Maybird was concluding a short tour, with shows in Atlanta and Nashville, before the band begins recording a new EP for 30th Century Records. “He was in really good spirits, he was really psyched about the music we were sharing with each other.”

But aside from assembling grab-bag bands of Rochester musicians, there was also nights with people such as Julian Koster of Georgia’s Neutral Milk Hotel, the psychedelic folk favorites of the indie scene. He contacted Avery and asked if he could play The Shark Tank. This is not music for rebellion’s sake. It’s really one of the few ways to keep alive this scene that generates no revenue that would interest a club, and certainly not a record label. “We’re in a very stressful place,” Avery says of the fragile nature of this scene, “you have to have an understanding of what’s going to work.”

What will work? Avery cites a Japanese manga animated book series, Fullmetal Alchemist, which is set in an alternate history, in the fictional country of Amestris.

“In the ancient city of Amestris, you have to give up something to get something,” he says. “Extrapolate from that, you have to give something up to make something valuable happen. It’s sweat equity.”

He extrapolates further to the punk philosophy of DIY. Do It Yourself.

“That’s what keeps it alive, personal sacrifice,” Avery says. “Saying it’s not about me, I have to give something out. I’m doing everything I can at my end. I had to give up a great apartment.

“If you were ever on the road, you would want people to take care of you. When they’re on the road, you take care of them. It’s the DIY thing, that’s how it works. It gets passed on by others. If you don’t do that, the whole thing crumbles.”

JSPEVAK@gannett.com

Tim Avery benefits

Maybird benefit: 8 p.m. Nov. 19 at The Bug Jar, 2189 Monroe Ave., with Alberto Alaska, The Dirty Pennies, Machine Gun English and Dangerbyrd. Admission is an $8 donation at the door.

ROC4TIM: 2 p.m. Dec. 3, until midnight, at Anthology, 336 East Ave. With Joywave, Leus Zeus, Secret Pizza, Mikaela Davis, KOPPS, King Buffalo, Harmonica Lewinski, The Demos, Tapehead, Green Dreams, Pleistocene, Seth Faergolzia’s Multibird, Total Yuppies, Howlo and DRUSE. Tickets ($20) are available at roc4tim.com, Record Archive and The House of Guitars.

The Hotelier benefit: 8 p.m. Dec. 13, at The Bug Jar, with DRUSE, California Cousins and Treadwater. Tickets are $8 advance, at the door $10 for 21 and over, $12 ages under 18 to 20 the day of the show, available at bugjar.com.