Says Chris Daily of the Anthrax Gallery: “I can remember weird moments like poking my friend Spazz in the eye with my thumb while stage diving to 7 Seconds, or the singer of FANG spitting on the ceiling and it hanging down two feet before finally dropping to the floor of the stage.”

This is the story of a combined art space and punk club in a grimy neighborhood of Stamford, Conn., which began with brothers Brian and Shaun Sheridan and a space rented for $400 a month. Inspired by the early ’80s punk scene in New York, wanting to build on it for the suburban crowd in Connecticut that would’ve otherwise missed out, the brothers developed a small group of supporters and in 1983 held a benefit show at nearby venue Pogo’s (with bands like Agnostic Front, Hose, CIA and Violent Children) in order to replace their early gallery space with a TV repair shop that would serve as a bona fide venue; bigger, better than the initial word-of-mouth effort. Amusing, then, is the story of the transition to a 4,400 square foot space in Norwalk, where there’d be a run-in with Mark E. Smith and an unexpected straight edge movement.

Everybody’s Scene is nostalgic in the way We Got the Neutron Bomb is toward the Masque, of 1970’s Los Angeles, or in the way some local weeklies will glorify venues like a pre-No Age version of the Smell. The exciting aspect of it, even if you weren’t there – which you likely weren’t, unless you lived near Stamford in the early 1980s – is the shoddy photography, no doubt taken on a whim of bands like 7 Seconds, Channel 3 and Descendents, and the budding scene of locals, more small town than punk rock at first glance. The imagery does well to support a statement in the book’s preface: “Nobody’s an island.”