Plant Bar

Overview

Tiny Alphabet City bar co-owned by Dublin-born DJs Dominique Keegan and Marcus Lambkin where the early-2000s 'DFA sound' crystallized, James Murphy and Lambkin held Friday residencies as Shit Robot, Luke Jenner tended bar, and the venue became an accidental nexus for the founding of DFA Records before a cabaret-law shutdown ended it in 2003.

Plant Bar occupied a basement storefront at 217 East 3rd Street between Avenues B and C (a space that had previously housed a struggling Latin bar called Latin in Manhattan) after Dominique Keegan, a Dublin-born DJ and co-founder of the Plant Records label, approached the landlord circa 1999. Keegan opened it in August of that year with his label partner and fellow Dubliner Marcus Lambkin (later known as Shit Robot); the legal capacity was reportedly 74, and The Face magazine's two-page spread called it 'the coolest, loudest bar on earth.' James Murphy installed a modest but effective sound system, and Friday nights found Murphy and Lambkin DJing together under the name Shit Robot (the party named after a crude robot drawing Murphy had made) blending post-punk, Can, Stooges, disco, and early house into the eclectic palette that would define DFA Records' aesthetic. Luke Jenner, singer of The Rapture, worked the bar as a bartender and served as a connective tissue between the indie-rock and dance-music scenes converging in that room. The bar functioned as an informal hub for what would become DFA Records' founding circle. In 2001, Tim Sweeney (then doing a weekly warm-up set at Plant) met Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy there; Goldsworthy had been working on a David Holmes project, and Sweeney's encounter with him led to a production-assistant role that tied him into the early DFA orbit. Jonathan Galkin, who would co-found DFA alongside Murphy, also first spent time with Murphy at Plant Bar. Other Music, the beloved East Village record shop, ran Wednesday after-work parties in the space, with shop employees DJing before indie-rock figures like Dean Wareham (Luna, Galaxie 500) and Ira Kaplan (Yo La Tengo) took over the decks, a cross-pollination of downtown indie-rock and dance music that defined the venue's particular character. Major European electronic acts, including the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, Felix Da Housecat, Erol Alkan, 2 Many DJs, and Basement Jaxx, passed through for late sets. Operating without a cabaret license (dancing was technically illegal under New York City's Prohibition-era Cabaret Law) Keegan and his staff developed a workaround: a blue light wired to the front of the bar would signal the DJ to switch to Radiohead's Kid A when city inspectors appeared, the gloomy record intended to suppress dancing and spare the venue a citation. The system worked until it didn't: one night a DJ missed the cue, and Plant Bar received a citation for sixteen people dancing. A second violation followed, and the city padlocked the doors. When Keegan was told he could reopen only by removing the DJ setup and replacing it with a jukebox, the bar's identity as a dance-music space was effectively over. It appears to have formally ceased operating as Plant Bar by 2004. The bar's lineage runs directly into the DFA ecosystem: the label's early studio was nicknamed 'Plantain Recording House,' a riff on the bar's name, and the sound Murphy and Lambkin developed on those Friday nights (genre-fluid, rock-informed, disco-inflected) became the template for releases by LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture, and The Juan MacLean. The address at 217 East 3rd Street was memorialized in Lizzy Goodman's 2017 oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom as a founding site of the early-2000s New York rock revival. A cocktail bar called Corlear's NYC later occupied the space; as of 2021 it houses a café called Post.

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