A candidate meets voters wherever they can. The other day, Justin Brannan, a burly Democratic city councilman from Bay Ridge who’s running to be the Party’s nominee for city comptroller, surprised one constituent by opening a papered-over door at a vacant retail space in Tribeca. The man, wearing a black polo and slacks, looked up from a table saw, alarmed. “This used to be the Wetlands,” Brannan explained, referring to the rock-inclined night club that occupied the space until 2001. The man with the saw smiled and nodded, and the candidate introduced himself.

Brannan, who’s forty-six, played the Wetlands at least a dozen times in the late nineties, as a guitarist for the hardcore bands Indecision and Most Precious Blood. These days, as the Bernie Sanders-endorsed comptroller contender, he’s looking to bring some punk edge to the office. “We don’t have that killer instinct,” Brannan said of Democrats. “We’re too worried about decorum, you know?” He was following a day of chairing city-budget hearings by revisiting haunts from his past life. The Wetlands, he recalled, had a VW bus parked inside that acts would slap their stickers onto. The bus is now stored in the Rock Hall, in Cleveland. “So, technically, we’re in the Hall of Fame,” Brannan said.

He climbed into a blue S.U.V., a Gen Z aide at the wheel. Brannan, seizing the aux, put on some Minor Threat. Tattoos peeked out from under the cuffs and collar of his suit. “The dark corner of punk rock that I came from was very positive,” he said. “We were straight edge. We were vegetarians. It might have sounded like Iron Maiden to your dentist, but we were singing about social issues.” In addition to strumming the customary three chords, he was the bands’ finance guy: dealing with booking agents, exchanging currency while touring pre-euro Europe. One time, before Indecision opened for Run-D.M.C. in Holland, a truck backed into their rental van, which wasn’t legally allowed to leave France. The experiences hardened him for city politics. “Once you’ve been strip-searched in Austria for no reason, or slept on concrete floors in Basque country, it’s, like, I can deal with the mayor,” he said. “It gives you this sense of ‘fuck it.’ ”

Between tours, Brannan worked a number of temp jobs, most of them finance-related, too. Eventually, he landed a full-time gig as a clerk at Bear Stearns. He stood out a bit. “I have a ‘meat is murder’ tattoo on my neck,” he said, gesturing to his nape. “On Wall Street, half the deals are done in steak houses. I was eating a lot of iceberg-wedge salads.” In other ways, he felt at home. “They said, ‘We don’t care if you have an M.B.A. We want you to be P.S.D.: poor, smart, and determined,’ ” he recalled. “I was, like, This is me. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, but I’m determined, and I need to pay my rent.” After the firm collapsed, during the 2008 financial meltdown, he landed a job in his local councilman’s office. He also married his wife, another ex-Bear Stearns clerk, in their former employer’s lobby.

The car pulled up to a John Varvatos shop on the Bowery. It used to be CBGB, the famed underground venue, where Brannan’s bands played dozens of shows. In the window, a mannequin was sporting an ochre sheepskin jacket. Price: twenty-six hundred bucks. “It probably couldn’t be more insulting than it is,” Brannan said.

He gestured to the former locations of the entrance desk (now a trio of mannequins, one clutching a black leather tote, behind a propped-up guitar) and the stage (now changing rooms). On one wall, a mounted glass case preserved a loose collage of posters and flyers from the room’s prior incarnation: skulls, goblins, red anarchist “A”s. Most were so tattered that the bands’ names were incomplete. “They did a good job of leaving some shit alone,” Brannan said. He looked for Indecision and Most Precious Blood. No luck. The latter moniker was lifted from a Catholic high school that had been a local basketball powerhouse. “They would just wipe the floor with us, so that name had an ominous connotation,” he said.

Back in the car, Brannan reminisced about his brief time as a bouncer on Rivington. He spent most nights listening to news and talk on 1010 WINS. “They had the little doot-doot-doo-doo-doot—the little xylophone thing,” he said, turning wistful. “They don’t do that anymore.” On East Fifth, Brannan pointed out where he had once lived with a girlfriend. There had been a major squatter encampment across the street. One day in 1997, after a fire, the Giuliani administration sent a wrecking ball to topple the building. At least one resident was still inside. Others were blocked from rescuing their pets. “It was really fast, and really fucked up,” Brannan said. “That was, like, ‘The party’s over.’ ”

On the other hand, he noted, adverse political conditions can produce great art. Here was yet another Trump-era disappointment. “We had a decade of amazing punk rock when Ronald Reagan was President,” Brannan said. “Where the fuck is that music now? I guess everybody’s just so depressed.” ♦