Photos: New Brookland Tavern’s last night in West Columbia, first night in Five Points

[Editor’s Note: The Chronicle sent frequent photo contributor and local musician Thomas Hammond to document New Brookland Tavern’s last night in West Columbia Friday, Dec. 29 and its first night in its new location in Columbia’s Five Points Saturday, Dec. 30, both shows headlined by reunion sets from S.C. indie rock band Sequoyah Prep School. The rock dive, a linchpin of the local music scene, had operated as a music club in West Columbia since at least 1998, making it the longest continuously operating music venue in Lexington County until its move across the Congaree River.]

I walked into the old space Friday night with a bad attitude and too much of that “kids these days” cynicism that chains people to the past. I’m getting older. We all are.

My editor asked me to capture “the vibe.” I was ready to complain about the lineup not being “Columbia enough” or that the new space was lacking the same scrappy spirit that only a building falling apart could produce. I was wrong of course.

My first memories of New Brookland Tavern were from those heady days as a college freshman in the early 2000s following my friends to metal shows. I think it was The Classic Struggle and there was a line of real tough looking dudes standing arms crossed at the back of the stage. I wanted to be those guys SO BAD. It’s been a long time since you could stand on the back line like that but I still found myself posting up by the side of the stage behind the band trying on my best impression of those tough guys as they exist in my memory.

In reality, I wasn’t so tough Friday night. By the time Sequoyah Prep School launched into the final song of the final set on that stage I was wiping tears off my face. 

“We’re gonna play another sad love song. That’s pretty much all we know,” Justin Osborne crowed from the stage.

Sequoyah is a nostalgia machine that draws a devoted crowd. The energy of that packed-out room swelled to the point of bursting with a unison chorus. In an instant I began to feel the weight of every show I attended, but even more so every show I played with every friend who has since left this plane of existence. 

I know I wasn’t the only one, too. The walls and rafters of the old space are filled with tributes and a few folks remarked to me the burden of loss they felt attached to those walls. It was a place to forge social bonds that would prove important in life. 

“It’s a vibe” Osborne remarked about his tenure on the stage that brought us chaotically into adulthood.

We were forced to grow. And in a society built on a foundation of booze and insecurity, some of us didn’t make it.

But it was never about those walls and the tributes scrawled across them aren’t the people that continue to live in our hearts. Carlin Thompson  and Mike Lyons and the rest of the New Brookland Tavern family know what they are doing and there was never any reason to doubt that. It’s always been a home for weirdos and normies alike and it always will be no matter the address.

As for the new room, it is objectively better as a space for live music. And not being weighed down by the burden of memory, it’s free to be whatever it wants. It follows in the footsteps of Bar None and Bluetile Skateshop, cementing its new block of Harden Street as Columbia’s most joyful stretch of culture. New Brookland Tavern stared change in the face and said, “Hold my beer, I got this.”

Friends, let that cynicism wash off of your weary bones and join us in the world of fun. And as Osborne sang, “I know everything will be alright.”