More than 2,000 people packed into a Brooklyn warehouse for the occasion. Sheltered from a chilly November night, partygoers enjoyed an open bar lit by the blue, green and red strobe lights that flickered in the makeshift club. After performances by Beck, Chris Rock and Aziz Ansari, the main event of the night was a set by The Strokes. Wylie Aronow swayed with his girlfriend as they listened to the acclaimed rock band from New York. She turned to him and spoke three surreal words: “You did this.”

Just a year earlier, Aronow was living “from bed to bath” with colitis, a disease that can cause chronic inflammation throughout the digestive tract. Illness forced him to drop out of college and caused him to languish for much of his early 20s. Aronow is now better known as Gordon Goner, one…