His nickname was “Little Mikey,” but I don’t ever recall there being a “Big” one (I guess no one noticed I was fat until later).
Mike Brosnan is not a name people are used to seeing in headlines or magazines, but he has a lot to do with the city’s reputation as a hotspot for underground music.
Around 2:30 in the morning on Saturday night, he was struck by a Chevy Impala at 48th and Springfield. Less than an hour later, he was pronounced dead at UPenn hospital.

After the jump, Mike McKee remembers Stalag 13 founder Mikey Brosnan, who was killed over the weekend.

Many of the reasons he’ll be missed so sorely are unique to his friends and family. Others will miss him for his role in local punk bands like Dead Alive, The Eighth Fire, Manual Seven and, most recently, The Claw—who I’m told delivered a smashing performance just last week.
Meanwhile, an entire “graduating class” of punk and indie rock fans probably owe him a few splashes from their 40s… or PBRs, as the times have changed since the mid-1990s when Brosnan helped turn a no-frills concrete box into an internationally renowned all-ages music venue.

“It was a dump,” Mike reflected this past April. “There were two bathrooms with no shower. The heat didn’t work. There was just a small hole in the ceiling with a ladder to the second floor. There were cracked ceiling joists, and the electrical system in the house was probably a fire hazard. But we loved it and moved in anyway.”

Zoned commercially and used mostly for storage, the warehouse took months to clear out. After smashing out a bigger hole in the ceiling, a second floor of apartments was made, accessible only by way of a narrow, metal ladder until stairs were built months later. By then, Brosnan’s dog, Ton Ton, had already mastered shimmying up the rungs.
A medium-sized dog made of large-sized white fluff, Mike’s pet perplexed guests, boasting a cleanliness none of the bipedal residents seemed able to match.

The first winter at the warehouse was especially harsh, with Mike and his roommates gathering around a space heater to watch re-run shows like Hogan’s Heroes. Finding a chilly parallel between Colonel Klink’s POW camp and their new home, the gang soon christened the spot Stalag 13.

Having survived their first winter, the residents of Stalag 13 decided to throw a party with live bands around Valentine’s Day of 1995. A handmade flier announced the event and a good—if not entirely sober—time was had by all. Even though concerts remained infrequent for the next year, the space quickly gained a local reputation as a punk hangout. Residents and guests (including Tom Kennedy, son of local TV and radio personality Wally Kennedy) drifted in and out.

“The place was always alive with activity, be it a band practicing for the first and last time, a show, some junkie overdosing in the backyard,” Brosnan told me earlier this year. “There was one time I paid my roommates, Billy and Ken, $4 to clean the house. They wanted beer, so they jumped at the chance. Drunken logic dictated that since they were going to clean the place, they could trash it first.”

Within minutes, 10 recycling bins full of last week’s bottles were overturned, with one roommate rolling naked in the broken shards and the leftover singer of a touring band tossing trashcans over his shoulders.

While never one to shy away from chaos, one thing Brosnan had trouble abiding was heavy drug use and the problems it invariably caused. In his typical humor, he painted a mural on the walls depicting a spiky haired waistoid suggesting that if anyone had come to his warehouse to “shoot” anything, they might try a gun to the head.

In reality, though, Brosnan was anything but hardline about the different, sometimes self-destructive, choices people who are drawn to extreme subcultures like punk can sometimes make. In fact, it was his enthusiasm, good humor and indefatiguable smile that bridged so many different cliques from the Stalag days up until this weekend.

Over the next few years, from 1996-1999, that little warehouse where Brosnan started booking all-ages concerts at, started attracting bigger crowds and bigger bands. Other warehouse regulars began booking shows of their own, such as the now well-documented R5 Productions, which credits Stalag 13 single-handedly for its working model of “for the kids, by the kids.”

In a scene all too often judgmental and fractious, Brosnan was the kind of person who kept you coming back, whether you were an old friend or a nervous 15-year-old from the suburbs trying desperately to get it right. This disarming friendly streak is something everyone I’ve talked to the last few days can’t seem to say enough about.

Mike has a lot of friends throughout America, in towns like Richmond (where he briefly called home), Pittsburgh (from whence he’s lured many a punk ex-pat to come live in Philly), and of course, Philadelphia. He’s made plenty of new ones and done plenty with his life since the things we talked about in that interview. But, the legacy of his actions and his character seems like it was minted a long time ago: he was a friendly, motivated guy who brought people together.

There’s a strong temptation for people to get depressed, depressing, boring or bored themselves as they get older. Meanwhile, topping the wild extremes of our youth can also prove an intimidating feat for some. Mike and his old friends have, sadly, lost several other “kids” from this generation to hard living and bad luck.
To his credit, Mike never seemed to let that stuff keep him down. He was active in music right up until the end, proud about his past accomplishments but not stupefied by nostalgia.

All this barely tells the story of a whole human being as loved across the board as Mike, but for what it’s worth, I’ll end on this quote about his old warehouse that he shared with me this spring.
“It was more than a venue. it was a home; it was a place people would just come to hang out. We made friends with a lot of the neighbors. We had Tiny, Grandma Dynamite, Otis the Superman Rapper and Tyrone, to name a few of the characters that would come by. I think they [journalists writing about the venue] always missed the human element, that was what made gave Stalag it’s personality. I think the part that is missed the most is the fact that it created a sense of community among the thriving independent scene–especially with the kids our age and younger.”

So, Crass shirt, now you know who you owe. Respect is due.
The end.

– Mike McKee

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 4:19 pm.