Pitchfork: You're a metal bar, but you do some shows that aren't metal.

AS: You can't just stay like that. It's pointless. I'm 40 years old. I have three favorite genres of music: metal, early 70s prog rock, and early 90s English shoegaze. I like everything. I've seen Phish 10 times, no joke.

DC: Ten times?

AS: Yeah.

DC: That sucks so bad.

AS: Late night when the doors locked, we're sitting there watching Pink Floyd's Live at Pompeii. This is what we do. Musical tastes have a wide-range. And plus, something like Merzbow brought a lot of people. We were able to do two shows. It was a Monday night. Why wouldn't we do that?

DC: If you think about the greatest clubs, your CBs, your Coney Island Highs, your L'Amours, they'll be known for hardcore and punk, or for whatever, but if you really go back and look at it, there's all sorts of shit happening. I have a pretty eclectic taste in music, but I wanted it to all be under the same banner: There's not too much sunny shit coming through our doors. So all these different things like Merzbow, Chelsea Wolfe, Vektor, and Cult of Youth make sense.

AS: Even Marissa Nadler made sense.

DC: All of these things can play in the same sandbox and it's not totally insane.

AS: The internet made it that way, honestly.

DC: Yeah! People are moving into this dark, harsh, interesting center.

AS: It changes as you get older. When I was young, it was all hardcore-- I just fucking knew everything.

GS: When I was that age I was all Touch and Go. I was a total label freak. Anything Killdozer did or Jesus Lizard did. I could listen to nothing else. There's one thing you really identify with and you kind of unravel.

DC: But the paradigm is changing now.

AS: I think it started with the whole iPod shuffle generation. That whole idea of listening to stuff and not knowing what you're hearing. Then you hear stuff like crabcore and it literally sounds like six different songs in one song. I feel that's what kids who were 13, 14 years old listened to and now they're like 17, 18 and writing this crap. I just wanna throw the Beatles catalog at them and be like, "Just fucking listen to music, asshole. Learn the basics before you do this." They're not wrong. They're just not exposed. But it's grown since then. And now everybody listens to music on Spotify and that's gonna change things as well.

DC: In terms of our scenes, it's become very acceptable to listen to certain bands and genres that are different than the core thing.

AS: You see new little crust kids with the Joy Division shirts on, which I find really interesting. And then they get all ripped up about Boyd Rice. It's like: "Hey, guys, do you realize what Joy Division is?" [laughs]

DC: But it's also unpacking artistic intention versus who a person is. It's really hard to do that. I don't think that those conversations will continue to keep going on in general. I think a lot of people let a lot of things pass by them because it's supposedly normal-- that to me is totally fucking crazy. And then somebody will get really riled up about something that I think is so minute. It's really wild.

AS: Unfortunately the internet gives people platforms to be equal in their opinions about things and it can be really unfortunate that somebody who's a total moron can be up there with somebody who's really smart. It just gets to a point where it's all convoluted. Just look at the comments on Brooklyn Vegan.

DC: At the end of the day, running a venue, I wanna give platforms to people with something to say, and ideas that are out of the norm. I wanna take it there. The only reason we talk about CB's or L'Amour's or any of these places when we're talking about that stuff is because they were there and available for people to actually do that with. Through that, there's probably gonna be some things that aren't savory to a lot of folks. Maybe that's also the point. I try to be really strong in the evaluations, and we've argued amongst ourselves. I mean, it's difficult, man. But at the same time, I wouldn't wanna push away from that standard because I think that's really important. There's enough places where you can't say what you want and where censorship lives.

AS: I can't back that shit. No way. I grew up going to ABC from the time I was 17. I felt like those crust punks were just as bad as any fucking Nazi, honestly, in the way that they were like, "Yeah, well, you're not allowed to do this. You're not allowed to do that." It's like, "Fuck you! I'll do anything I fucking want." I've had my life threatened by Nazis numerous times. I'm from Long Island. I lived in fucking fear of leaving my house for fucking six months at one point in my life because I opened my mouth. It's all repressive. I'm all about listening to music and enjoying music for what it is. Peace, love, and the Beatles. Amen.

DC: That's the key. Vitus, to me, is life-affirming. I love going there. When it all comes together, it's fucking sick, and you see it. The craziest thing was that Descendents show, honestly. It was such a mess.

GS: We lost a couple years of ours lives on that one.

DC: But I remember being in there and the whole thing is just a fucking zoo. But I'm just sitting there by the bathroom and I just stopped for a second and watched them play for like one song, "I'm the One". It was so nuts, but everyone was having such a good time. So many people were just so fucking stoked.

AS: They were having the night of their life. It was awesome.

Pitchfork: Their show was cancelled somewhere else?

DC: Yeah. They Tweeted it out. All of a sudden, I was in a cab on my way home and my phone just started shaking like a fucking maraca. I just got all these messages at once. And I'm like, "What the fuck is going on?" I thought something really bad happened. And all I saw was, "Is it true? Is it happening?" And I was like, "What the hell is anybody talking about?"

AS: He texted me and I was like, "The Descendents are playing."

DC: So I walk upstairs, I look at my wife, and I'm like, "I can't go to dinner tonight." She looked at me with the ferocity of a fucking cheetah protecting her cubs. She was gonna fucking kill me. And then I go, "The Descendents are playing Saint Vitus." And she's like, "You gotta get in a car right now!" It was like all was forgiven in [snaps] this fucking instant.

AS: A thousand people showed up!

DC: It was fucking wild.