It’s New Year’s Eve, the night of the last big show at D-22, and all the house bands—Birdstriking, Snapline, Carsick Cars, Chui Wan—are holed up inside the little bar like kids in a bomb shelter, watching quietly as girl-rock trio Ourself Beside Me does a last-minute soundcheck.

Outside, a long line of shivering college kids winds around the block, waiting for the doors to open. Soon they will fill the venue with their sweating, smoking, drinking bodies, a fitting coda to the days when Joyside used to pack the place so full the staff thought the balcony would cave in.

Behind the bar, D-22’s owner Michael Pettis sips his drink and looks weary. It’s been something of a whirlwind week for him since a scuffle with the venue’s new landlord led to the sudden revelation that D-22 would be closing a full four months ahead of schedule.

“I can’t tell you how many bands have come up to me telling me how they’re going to cry when D-22 closes,” he tells me.

None of them would say that to me, I hazard. Pettis smiles. “That’s how you know the scene’s changed,” he says. “In the beginning, everyone was excited and enthusiastic. Now, they’re more concerned about seeming cool.”

Affected indifference is a small price to pay when you consider the seachange that has transformed local rock which was once marginal and foreign-dominated into a thriving homegrown scene. “In the old days, foreigners in the scene were looked up to just for being foreigners,” Pettis says. “With D-22, one of the things we wanted to do was create a club that was not for foreigners, but for the Chinese kids.”

This was why Pettis decided to plunk his CBGB-styled club in Wudaokou rather than one of the more profitable expat havens; why musicians drank for free; and why, when you entered the dark black-and-red interior, one of the first things you noticed was the iconic portraits of the bands that had grown up with D-22—PK 14, Carsick Cars, Hedgehog, the Gar—hanging over the stage like the brash and brassy, violent, gorgeous saints of rock and roll.

“If D-22 didn’t exist, the music scene would be completely different,” Carsick Cars’ Zhang Shouwang says. “I don’t think I or any of the bands from my generation would be where we are now. A lot of bands would have died.”

The thing that made D-22 different, he says, was that it wasn’t just a club; for scores of bands, it was a cheerleader, a laboratory, a home. Most importantly, it was theirs.

“D-22 just wanted to give musicians space to explore their ideas, to do whatever they want,” Zhang concludes. “And that made a big difference.”