As a recent college graduate in the early 2000s, Billy Jones lived with his parents in Richmond, Va., but his fantasy life was elsewhere: in Williamsburg, the Brooklyn neighborhood that had become the world capital of indie rock. The closest he could get was visiting his local Barnes & Noble, where he would read magazines covering New York’s music scene.
Then one day in 2002, he made the leap: He was leaving home, he told his father. He and the high school friends who made up his band, Other Passengers, had decided to try to make it big in New York.
In Williamsburg, Mr. Jones began working as a barista, with dreams of indie-rock stardom. It wasn’t so far-fetched. At a cafe down the block, another barista, Kyp Malone, would soon gain renown as a singer and guitarist with the group TV on the Radio.
There was passion in the moans of Mr. Jones’s singing, but he did not become a rock star. In time, the Williamsburg concert venues that had launched some of his peers — clubs like 285 Kent, Glasslands, Death by Audio — all closed. Rents in the neighborhood had skyrocketed. Aspiring young musicians left.
And instead of achieving his own dreams, Mr. Jones wound up doing something else: He made it possible for other people to keep dreaming.
In 2013, he and a friend, Zachary Mexico, opened Baby’s All Right, a club at 146 Broadway in Williamsburg. It became, as The New York Times wrote in 2015, the “nightlife preserver” of the neighborhood. It was a small enough venue to offer major acts an indie spirit that they could no longer find elsewhere in New York City, yet big enough to make unproven musicians feel that they had made it.
Tom Moore was one of Mr. Jones’s many young admirers who became a business partner.
“There were some people who were lamenting the death of music, which Billy would find ridiculous,” Mr. Moore said in an interview. “Baby’s stood for making something new.”
Mr. Jones went on to help found three more New York nightclubs and a restaurant. They all sought to reimagine some aspect of local nightlife.
“Billy had these tricks up his sleeve to resurrect the magic of a place,” said Joanna Cohen, a fellow producer of concerts and other events.
Mr. Jones died on June 7 in a Manhattan hospital. He was 45. His sister Nicole Holland said the cause was the aggressive form of brain cancer glioblastoma. He was diagnosed with it after an episode in July 2024 in which he began stuttering violently and fainted in a store he had recently opened in Williamsburg, Billy’s Record Salon.
He kept the illness private and managed to oversee the opening of a new nightclub and a new restaurant in the months before his death.
In addition to Baby’s All Right, Mr. Jones was behind Elvis Guesthouse, a small East Village bar and club that was open from 2015 to 2016; the Dance, a sprawling NoHo nightclub in operation from 2019 to 2020; and two venues that opened on New Year’s Eve and are now run by Mr. Moore: Nightclub 101, in Alphabet City in the East Village, and Funny Bar, a restaurant and bar on the Lower East Side.
But Mr. Jones was best known as the public face and presiding spirit of Baby’s All Right, a 250-person concert venue that included a restaurant and bar.
Mr. Jones savored the “underplay,” the term for when a band capable of filling an arena chooses to play a more intimate space. The singer Mac DeMarco can almost instantly sell out three consecutive nights at Webster Hall in the East Village, but at Baby’s All Right, which is a 10th the Webster’s size, he has a place where he can smoke in the bathroom while being interviewed, invite his mother to join the audience and leap out of a giant cake like a 1950s showgirl.
Mr. Jones made Baby’s All Right a place to catch early performances of musicians on their way to glory. Billie Eilish performed music from her first EP there in 2017, when she was just 15.
On several occasions, Mr. Jones’s enthusiasm for a new act drew him into a side gig as the band’s manager. He first met Aaron Maine, the songwriter and lead singer of the band Porches, when Mr. Maine was part of a low-profile group show at Baby’s All Right. Before long, Mr. Jones was offering feedback on Mr. Maine’s demos, negotiating Mr. Maine’s first record contract and accompanying him to Los Angeles for his first sessions at a major recording studio.
“I don’t know who or where I’d be if it weren’t for meeting Billy that night,” Mr. Maine said in an interview.
When Mr. Jones was not promoting new artists, he was often introducing figures from the past to his club’s young audience. At a 2015 show by the septuagenarian jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, the crowd “was listening hard and well,” the music critic Ben Ratliff wrote in The Times.
Among Mr. Jones’s favorite memories of the space was watching the actors Adrian Grenier and Heather Graham dance during a performance by Hailu Mergia, an Ethiopian funk keyboardist and accordion player who had spent the previous couple of decades working as a taxi driver.
Having been thrust into the position of custodian of the Williamsburg music scene, Mr. Jones brought an appreciation of nightlife lore to his projects.
At Elvis Guesthouse, he covered a wall in fake flowers in honor of Plant Bar, a bygone East Village venue. Nightclub 101 is in the former space of the Pyramid Club, which hosted performances by drag queens and which was also the first place in the city where Nirvana played.
Mr. Jones branched out further when he opened his own record shop in 2023. One customer recalled telling Mr. Jones that he was having a child, then being amazed when the indie impresario of Williamsburg dug up the ideal record for the occasion: “Disney’s Children’s Favorites.”
William Wesley Jones was born on Oct. 2, 1979, in Livingston, N.J. His father, James Edwin Jones, who goes by Ned, was a clothing company executive; his mother, Susan (Scholz) Jones, is a former dental office manager.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in media arts from Salisbury University in Maryland in 2001, Mr. Jones got his start as a concert booker at Sin-é, an East Village venue, and Pianos, on the Lower East Side.
In addition to his parents and Ms. Holland, Mr. Jones is survived by another sister, BreAnn Tassone. He lived in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn.
Ms. Cohen, who worked as a booker for Elvis Guesthouse, said she was “devastated” when Mr. Jones closed it, but now understands his thinking better.
“It created chatter and anticipation for what came next,” she said. “He loved ending on a high note.”
Alex Traub is a reporter for The Times who writes obituaries.
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