Clubland
This was originally written in the spring of 2004 when I was at journalism school. Everyone was required to write a long article to earn their Masters. This was mine.
March 2004
Among the electronic dance music “heads” in New York, Paul McKinley is known as “The Professor.” It’s an endearment he picked up during the years he commuted from his job as a residential dean at Yale to dance at Twilo, the last undisputed champion of New York City nightclubs. McKinley, 38, moved to Salt Lake City last fall, but he flew back to New York to see Sasha and John Digweed play on March 12th at Crobar, the new nightclub in West Chelsea. It had been nearly three years since the Giuliani administration closed Twilo and thus ended the renowned British DJs legendary dance sets at the club. For McKinley, as for the rest of the Twilo Diaspora, the return of Sasha and Digweed to a big New York club was a portentous event, and he was inside Crobar by 10:00pm in his trademark faded peach tennis visor, a dark t-shirt, and sneakers.
“It’s like a reunion,” he said noting the many faces in the crowd familiar from Twilo nights long past. The old guard was impressed with the new club. Crobar’s owners, Callin Fortis and Ken Smith, spent $18 million to transform the 30,000 square foot space on West 28th street which was once the staging area for the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons. The club’s dominant motif is polished concrete, and the feel remains industrial, high tech but raw. A tunnel with sunken lights leads unsuspecting first-timers to the cavernous main dance area where exposed steel girders arc cathedral-like over a profusion of spotlights and an enormous disco ball.
“It’s not all glam and Disneyfied,” said McKinley approvingly. “It’s a warehouse.”
Around midnight on Friday, with a capacity crowd of nearly 3,000 jammed into the main dance area, a steady, expectant bass began to build in the massive Phazon sound system. Eight robotic light clusters descended in unison from the ceiling like so many black widow spiders, each spinning freely on two axes and flashing colored beams. Squeezing through the crush of bodies, McKinley smiled as he felt the hair on his arms rise and fall with each beat.
“That’s the feeling of Twilo,” he said, and looking up he noticed that Digweed had just begun his first set.
More than an hour later, however, McKinley had taken refuge on the main staircase and watched with some concern the ebb and flow of men in muscle t’s and young cosmopolitan-wielding women in stiletto heels wobbling after somewhat older men in Italian suits. The new, new thing in New York City nightclubs was packed to the gills, but the vibe was uncertain, and few were dancing.
Crobar is the current favorite of four big clubs that have opened since December within a two block radius of each other in West Chelsea. In late January, Volume, a new club in Williamsburg, joined the crowd. Then, last week came news of the demise of two long-running venues, Sound Factory and Arc. The owners of the former were arrested on drug-related charges – their drug-sniffing dog found asleep in a back room -- while the latter announced that its building in Tribeca had been sold.
The flurry of openings and closings has fueled a heated debate in clubland as to the structural health of the city’s nightlife culture. Pessimistic clubbers dismiss the new mega clubs as commercially-driven and culturally bankrupt. They blame gentrification and Giuliani-era “quality of life” law enforcement for the death of once-vibrant clubland “undergrounds.” Club owners, while hardly agreeing with that assessment, have been up in arms over what they see as the city’s misguided crusade against their industry in the form of ever stricter regulations and rigid law enforcement. More sanguine observers in both camps point out that churn in clubland is the norm, and that mayoral administrations and economic cycles come and go, but nightlife will always find a way to thrive in New York. There is at least one point, however, on which all sides agree: the recent past has been grim.
The troubles began in the late 1990s with the arrival of the Giuliani anti-vice juggernaut and its penchant for using the once-dormant Cabaret Licensing law to strong-arm clubs that it deemed problematic. Then came the stock market collapse in the spring of 2000 and the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. By the winter of 2002, New Yorkers and their diminished disposable incomes had retreated en masse to “lounges,” darkened rooms with “downtempo” DJs. When the Bloomberg Administration announced a citywide ban on cigarette smoking last spring, club owners looked on in shock, and then promptly anted up to hire a full-time executive director for their nascent lobbying outfit, the New York Nightlife Association.
The consensus on the street – particularly among dance music fans – has been absolute for some time. The scene is “appalling” says Dominique Keegan, the owner of Plant Bar in the East Village which was briefly padlocked by the Department of Consumer Affairs last spring for illegal dancing. New York’s nightlife “sucks” says Tommy Saleh, the cherubic, young Egyptian impresario who has nonetheless managed to put the uber-plush lounges of the TriBeca and SoHo Grand Hotels on the map. John “Gungie” Rivera, the “Latin Club King,” who’s Prestige Productions owns Club Rhumba in the Bronx and promotes 30 club nights a month around town simply says “The scene is bad now.”
Enter the low-interest-rate-fueled West Chelsea Class of 2004 which, along with Volume, have added upwards of $60 million to the supply side of the nightlife economy, prompting applause as well as more than one raised eyebrow.
“I can't figure out how all these places are going to make money,” said David Rabin, the owner of the posh lounge Lotus in November to The New York Times. With the Dow hovering comfortably above 10,000, however, and long lines of cabs now a regular appearance in the wee hours on 10th avenue between 27th and 28th, anecdotal evidence suggests that a gently rising tide is floating most of the new boats. Certainly the troubles at Sound Factory and Arc don’t hurt business elsewhere. Rabin, as it happens, is the president of the Nightlife Association, and part of the answer to his November question may be found in a report commissioned by the group which was released on Sunday. The report essentially points out, as it had intended to, that in good times and bad, New York’s nightlife industry is a prodigious economic engine.
According to the report, New York’s bars, lounges and nightclubs – or at least the 838 surveyed -- admit 65 million people each year. This is more, apparently, “than three times the attendance of all New York City’s sports teams combined.” Put differently, on a given Saturday night, roughly half a million people are heading to a bar or club in New York. For the record, all this partying generates 95,500 jobs and nearly $10 billion in “economic activity,” that’s when you take full account of the “ripple effect” and include everything from taxi fares and out-of-towners’ hotel charges to an infinity of early morning slices of pizza.
Unfortunately, the Nightlife Association study does not assess the health of New York’s nightlife over time. So it’s difficult to gauge whether New York is partying today in a more economically significant – to say nothing of culturally redeeming -- fashion today than it did in, say, 1994, or 1974. For some, however, the answer is obvious.
“New York is dead” said Alan Vega, lead singer of the seminal punk band Suicide, at a recent panel on the “downtown music scene” hosted by the New School. “The stuff is happening elsewhere. Don’t stay in New York. Don’t stay in America…” It was a sentiment largely shared by his co-panelists, all punk rockers from the 1970s who fondly remembered when Thomson Square Park “was like Beirut” and reminisced about clubs like Electric Circus and groundbreaking performers like Iggy Pop.
Bill Brewster, the author of Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, a recent history of the disc jockey, puts a more literary spin on the argument: “Often good art – and clubs come of the same dynamic – are created out of conflicts: between rich and poor, black and white…” He points to the gentrification of neighborhoods in lower Manhattan from SoHo to the Lower East Side and paraphrases Orson Welles famous quote in The Third Man: “In Italy, for thirty years they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had 500 years of democracy and peace -- and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
The Reed Room at Crobar is so named for the profusion of narrow yellow pillars that reach upwards towards the ceiling at various angles, a post-modern suggestion of a bamboo forest. It’s a narrow, darkened space with a polished concrete floor and cushioned cube seats amid the faux bamboo groves. On one side there is a long bar backed by a wall of flat screen TV monitors. Opposite the bar, a staircase comes down from the club’s entrance and meets up with the tunnel that leads to the main dance area.
One person who is in a position to judge the evolution of New York’s nightlife is Chi Chi Valenti. A week after Crobar opened and months before the arrival of Sasha and Digweed, Valenti, 49, was in the Reed Room shuttling go go dancers to and from podiums like a soccer mom on a Saturday afternoon. Her dyed platinum hair was piled high on her head, and she wore a matronly, full length red gown suggestive of theatrical surplus. The dancers were not your run-of-the-mill go-gos. Phalon, a tall, ambiguously-gendered creature, gyrated on his or her platform in a skintight white body suit, stiletto heels, and a hockey mask. Shifts lasted a half-hour during which time Valenti retreated to a bare, over-lit dressing room upstairs for a smoke.
“There’s more of an underground than ever.” she said impatiently addressing the subject of New York’s current nightlife. “People want the underground that they know about. Well, honey, then it’s not the underground.”
Valenti and her DJ husband Johnny Dynall are something akin to petit royalty in clubland. They met in 1979 working at the Mudd Club and remained at the heart of the club scene throughout the 1980s. She was at the opening of Palladium in 1985 in a saucer-brimmed sombrero and body-hugging mini-dress. They were pals with Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, and helped introduce early hip hoppers like Grandmaster Flash to downtown punk and new wave bands like the Clash and the Talking Heads. Then, in the early ‘90s, the duo started their own club, Mother, at the outer reaches of the yet-untamed meatpacking district and had a ten year run hosting “Jackie 60,” a weekly gender-bending, counter cultural spectacle.
“We stopped Jackie 60 and Mother in 1999,” Valenti says. The last party was, in fact, the millennial New Years Eve. “We thought we were becoming like Mama Leoni’s.”
Together, Valenti and Dynall have the sort of resume that can deliver instant credibility to a new club, not to mention a core group of patrons. Crobar’s Fortis and Smith, like owners of an expansion team intent on winning the World Series in their first season, were quick to sign Valenti and Dynall to their roster. For their part, Valenti and Dynall agreed to “produce” the Reed Room on Saturday nights, with Dynall DJing and Valenti managing the “Jackie Factory,” a tribe of glam performance artists and flamboyant night-world freaks like Phalon who had once been at the center of the Jackie 60 parties.
From the outset, however, the Jackie Factory contingent has been more an exotic backdrop for Crobar’s mainstream Gucci-and-cosmo set than an organic outgrowth of the club’s culture. As one Twilo alum put it, “it’s almost like having a she-male has become a corporate asset.” Valenti acknowledges she and Dynall took the gig in part to help pay for their other less lucrative projects. In fact, it doesn’t take much for her to wax critical, if fatalistic, about the current New York scene.
“We’re dancing on the ruins,” she says. “But I like a good dance,” and then adds “If I were 18 and just starting out, I’d go to New Orleans.”
The ranks of those in the “it’s not like it used to be” crowd do seem to have swelled of late. But nostalgia is chronic in clubland where myth trumps history and successive waves of the young and hormonal tumble after each other in a never-ending search for the elusive, communal, cathartic moment. Still, a claim might well be made that certain periods have been more fertile than others, certain scenes more original, and certain parties, in some undeniable way, better. If so, perhaps the best indicator of the quality of a period in clubland might be the emergence of new dance and music styles.
Somewhat stunningly, virtually all of the major social dance movements of the 20th century took off in New York City clubs. Harry Fox, a vaudeville actor, invented the Foxtrot in 1914 in the “Jardin de Danse” on the roof of the New York Theater. Swing dancing was born more or less ten years later in Harlem at the Savoy Ballroom. The term “salsa” was coined in New York, and the dance, which derived from the traditional dances of Cuba and the Caribbean, went critical at the Palladium Dance Hall in the Bronx where the regular band leaders were the legends Tito Puente, Machito, and Tito Rodriguez. Francis Grasso, arguably the first modern Disc Jockey, invented the concept of beat-mixing -- keeping a beat going between songs using two turntables -- at the Sanctuary on 43rd street in the late 1960s. The disco “revolution” was launched largely by lower income blacks and Latinos and newly-liberated gay men in Manhattan’s downtown lofts in the early 1970s. The seminal moments of the punk movement took place not much later at CBGBs. And, of course, what has become the hip hop tidal wave began in small venues in the Bronx before breaking into the mainstream at downtown clubs like the Roxy.
But, as clear as are the past triumphs, it is less clear what there is to celebrate in the city’s more recent history. In its final years, Twilo was arguably the center of the electronic dance movement in the United States, if not the world. Marathon sets, often running as long as 12 hours, by Sasha and Digweed and others drew clubbers from across sub-cultures and inspired a utopian fervor among the faithful. Writing on the Twilo message board shortly before the club’s closing, one user wrote in Panglossian terms:
“Twiloites…have the idealistic, open-minded attitude of the 60’s, and the carefree, disco-party hedonism of the 70’s…tempered with the responsibility that we had to learn from the 80’s, plus the tolerance and multi-culturalism brought to us in the 90’s.”
But both Sasha and Digweed are British, and it must be said that their “progressive house” sound and culture owes as much to the London rave scene of the early nineties as it does to any recent, indigenous strains of New York club culture. Arguably, one has to go back to the 1980s to the last significant creative watershed in clubland, and quite possibly the last dance form to come out of New York clubs was vogueing.
Naturally, few are comfortable discounting New York’s capacity for cultural innovation. And most are quick to give places like Crobar credit for at least trying to establish an original identity, even if the efforts sometime appear backward-looking and contrived. To be a big club and culturally relevant is a virtuoso feat of social dexterity rarely achieved. Surprisingly, it’s a feat to which many New York club owners no longer aspire.
Since the 1980s most Manhattan clubs have largely abdicated the responsibility of promoting their own events. The steadily rising cost of real estate, the growing complexity of procuring the appropriate licenses and approvals, and the consistently fierce competitive environment have altered the economics of club ownership. Less able to afford slow nights or long periods of “organic” growth, owners distribute the costs and risks of their venue over a portfolio of independent promoters. The latter take over a given night at a space and then assume full responsibility for advertising the event, hiring the DJs, and managing the door. Some, like John Rivera, whose Prestige Productions controls a database of one million names even bring their own security. Rivera says New York is now 80% promoter driven. Cornellis Craane, who works with Rivera at Prestige, traces the change to the mid 1980s when the drinking age was move from 18 to 21 and the city was hit by the AIDS epidemic. That was the first time, says Craane, that promoters were needed to fill clubs on the weekends. Interestingly, just as the cost and complexity of club ownership have increased, those of club promotion have declined precipitously as mailing labels and glossy flyers have given way to email lists and database marketing.
Proof of the ascendance of promoters is found in the fact that clubbers now refer as often to party names as to club names. Parties have their own brands: “Velvet Fridays” hosted by Prestige Entertainment at Club NV. “Cabaret Magique” produced by Valenti and Dynall at Tapis Rouge on Wednesdays, “Camouflage” hosted by Christian Bruna on Thursdays at Guernica, and myriad others with names like “Contempt,” and “Trash,” and “Reign.” The same club will often play host to very different crowds on successive nights. Show, a nightclub on West 41st street is open Wednesday through Saturday and relies on 22 promoters spread over the four nights to fill the space.
Marc Alan Gray started out in 1989 as a teen peon in Peter Gatien’s army of promotional foot soldiers, passing out flyers and managing door lists at the ill-fated Limelight and Tunnel. Today, 26, Gray is a DJ and a promoter with an email list of 30,000 and 497 “Friendsters.” He spends a good deal of his time these days bickering with the people at Hotmail and Yahoo who occasionally mistake his emails for spam.
“I don’t spam,” Gray says heatedly explaining that he hires a girl to collect email addresses at parties where he’s DJing. With some regularity, it seems, a male guest will happily give away his business card to Gray’s girl on Saturday night and then fail to make the necessary connection when Gray’s email shows up the following Thursday. A single complaint to Hotmail from such a person can result in a blacklisting and the loss of a large percentage of Gray’s audience.
“It’s a nightmare” he says. Due in part to Internet promotion, Gray feels that New York’s nightlife is more “factionalized” today than it has been in the past.
“How niche can things be?” he wonders? “I play deep, soulful, latin-tinged nu jazz and sexy house for gay, black, latin and educated clubbers.”
The multiplication of ever-more-finely-targeted web sites bears out Gray’s insight. In addition to dozens of general clubbing sites with names like nypartyguide.com, nightclubvip.net, and 4clubbers.net, there are now sites dedicated to particular types of dance music, like deephouse.com or justsalsa.com as well as sites for those of a particular ethnicity, such as clubzen.com (Asian), or those with alternative sexual preferences like hx.com (gay and lesbian) or maxphish.com (S&M.) One particularly catchy site, NJGuidos.com, targets both geography and lifestyle (New Jersey “Guidos.”)
Many of these are thinly-veiled efforts by direct marketers to gain access to well-defined demographics with healthy disposable incomes, though some are non-commercial and have grown organically into vibrant “underground” communities. The effects of the Internet, both fracturing and galvanizing, may well constitute the most enduring and least remarked recent change to the topography of clubland.
People still can’t dance online, however. And even with wired promoters, the story of clubland in New York remains inextricably tied up in the complexities of real estate. David McWater is the owner of a gaggle of bars in the East Village including Library, Nice Guy Eddie’s and Doc Holiday’s. A member of that neighborhood’s Community Board 3, he also sits on the board of the Nightlife Association. McWater says the recent historically low interest rates have resulted in a “craze” of building sales and refinancings at inflated valuations. The cheap money, he says, helps to explain both the current club openings as well as the closing of places like Arc whose landlord, after thirty years, felt the moment was ripe to sell. McWater believes the low rates have also given rise to the proliferation of lounges. Landlords who refinance try to maximize the size of the loan they can get against their buildings. Since the loans are backed by rent rolls, the refinancing trend has “jacked up” rents. Forced to come up with more rent money, bar and club owners either close up shop or become more aggressive in their business practices. Small venues that that would normally be no frills bars upgrade themselves to “lounges” by acquiring DJs and promoters, all of which tends to bother vigilant community boards and worry the Department of Consumer Affairs.
“Look,” McWater says, “on the food chain, a gin mill is better than a hardware store. But a ‘lounge’ is better than a gin mill.” He predicts a painful shake out in the near future, a domino effect of lounges going bust and landlords defaulting on loans before the system is brought back into balance.
Should McWater’s scenario materialize, it could, for a moment, bring down club rents, a result that some might be tempted to see as the silver lining in an otherwise stormy cloud. Actually, whatever happens to rates in the near term, it is unlikely to derail the longer term progress of gentrification in New York, and, in particular, in Manhattan. The city’s Department of Real Estate Taxation charts a steady inflation-beating increase of in real property values since World War II, an increase that accelerated dramatically in the 1980s. According to NYCRealEstateTrends.com, residential housing prices in the city have increased at an average annual rate of eight percent for the last nine years in a row. The trends mesh with legion anecdotes of nightclubs being displaced by building sales, rental increases, and increasingly restrictive residential zoning since the early ‘90s.
Obviously, the trends in real estate reflect socio-economic changes of the sort sensed by Vega and Brewster. Nonetheless, the rumors of New York’s demise may still be a bit premature. Even McWater who says he’s “pessimistic” about the business side of things, doesn’t seem remotely worried about the musicians, DJs, performance artists, and dancers.
“There will always be a place for them in New York,” he says. “All you got to do is to go to another city for 5 minutes to see why.”
Common sense suggests that creative moments in clubland result from some felicitous combination of trends: in immigration, in societal norms, in technology, and in the economy. The Lindyhop would never have happened without blacks arriving in New York from the south, just as salsa could not have happened without immigrants from the Caribbean. Civil rights and gay liberation fueled the disco scene, as did the novel ubiquity of drugs like amphetamines, heroin, and cocaine. Disco and all subsequent forms of electronic music were made possible by a steady parade of technical innovations, beginning with turntables and mixers and continuing through the present with synthesizers, drum machines, and personal computers. The fact that punk, disco, and hip hop all were born in the 1970s when the city was in a perpetual state of financial crisis lends credence to the idea that art thrives in economic adversity, but swing took off in the roaring twenties and salsa in the relatively prosperous fifties.
A ride on any subway is enough to prove that immigration has certainly not stopped in New York, nor has technology (witness the rise of cyber-clubland) slowed down. And if drugs and poverty contribute to the creative ferment, New York should have nothing to worry about. So, if Manhattan’s mainstream megaclubs with their ViP areas, walkie-talkie security guards, and designer bottle service are culturally exhausted, where’s the action?
“House was dead 15 years ago,” says Euguene Hutz. “I was listening to house in Ukraine in 1988! I was fed up with it in ’91.” Hutz is setting up for his weekly DJ gig at Mehanata, a.k.a. the Bulgarian Bar, a small, low rent restaurant-cum-disco on the corner of Broadway and Canal that is worlds away from mainstream clubs and yet one of the hottest dance tickets in town.
“Big clubs create a distance,” he says, “I’m interested in instigating a collective fire.” The Ukranian-born Hutz, 32, has just gotten off the plane from Israel, where his raucous band Gogol Bordello was performing in contemporary gypsy music festival. He says he has slept three hours all week, but there is a lithe bounce in his step and his trademark mustache, the jaunty sort that might have been worn by an officer in a Tolstoy novel, is in fine form. Indeed, in just a few hours, he will be perched precariously on the top of his DJ console, microphone in hand, rapping to a crowd of frenzied dancers in a hyper-kinetic semi-punk Ukranian stream of consciousness.
For the moment, however, he lopes through his sound check in his white ski hat with Yankees insignia. While his band remains his first priority, these Thursday night gigs at Mehanata which began in 2000 have clearly become important enough to him that they merit a timely return from places like Tel Aviv. Sound check complete, he cues up “Desesparecito,” a sort of post-modern salsa air sung by by Manu Chau, the French-born godfather of musical multi-culturalism. Does Hutz think New York’s nightlife is still alive?
“It absolutely is!” he says. “It’s in the process of finding a new language. Suddenly it’s not enough to do the ‘80s thing, or the ‘90s thing. Suddenly it’s time to do the 21st century thing.” Manu Chau gives way to a polka with Cuban horns which is followed by a song by Algerian musician Rashid Taha. A graduate student sitting at the bar leans over to greet Hutz: “We come for the music,” he says. “The best damn music in NYC.”
Hutz’s eclectic musical mix includes elements of gypsy music (“it’s exploding in the Balkans right now,’) punk, “Russian Ska,” and plenty of Latin Rock and Hip Hop. His particular love for Latin music is apparent, and there are many Latinos in the crowd who come largely to hear this Ukranian DJ’s selection of the latest songs from the Americas and the Carribean.
“I’ll be in Cuba at someone’s house at seven in the morning,” says Hutz, “and they’ll put on a song and I’ll say that’s why I came here!” The key for Hutz, who migrated to New York via a string of Eastern European refugee camps, is the mixing of cultures.
“It’s a simple scientific fact,” he says, “the more you mix, the more it’s better sounding and better looking….but you have to do it artistically.”
By 11:30pm a long line has formed at the door, and an informal poll conducted at one end of the bar by the owner, Sasha “Alex” Dimitrov, finds patrons from fifteen countries and six non-New York states. Dimitrov says they’ve counted as many as 30 countries in the bar at a single time, and he recalls the invite for a birthday party once held in the club: “Romanian bartender, Mexican cook, and a Ukrainien DJ at a Bulgarian Place in Chinatown hosting an Australian Birthday Party.”
The dance floor at Mehanata has the feeling of a raucous wedding reception. When Hutz cues up a thumping klezmer tune, strangers are apt to throw their arms over each others’ shoulders and form circles which spin about until they dissolve with the songs end. Smooth transitions are not Hutz’s strong suit. Expert dancers in the crowd, of which there are always a few, weave salsa, belly dance, and modern moves together in adroit ways. Sometimes a slam dance will erupt, with men and women careening wildly into each other. No consistently recognizable new dance form has yet evolved on the Mehantata dance floor, but Hutz is waiting for it.
“I keep wondering when are they going to do this thing,” he says. “Like break dance. We have yet to invent the dance. But we have the sound.”
The crowd’s appreciation for the low tech Mehanata and the distinctly analog song selection is clearly a reaction against the more hackneyed commercial club fare. Hutz says New York is ahead of Europe, “ahead of everything,” in terms of the new sound “because all cultures are represented here.” The odd thing, he says, is that “NY is first, but America is last.”
Thanks to its low overhead and obscure location – before becoming a Bulgarian bar Mehanata was Korean karaoke joint – Hutz’s party has been able to grow slowly over the past four years, with the core group of Ukrainians blending over time with a self-selected group of other immigrants and downtown hipsters. It’s a luxury that clubs at fancier addresses with higher production values do not have. Some might argue that it’s impossible in today’s New York at any place other than a small room on the second floor of a run down building in Chinatown.
Unless, that is, the party is on Monday night, traditionally the deadest night of the week, and a evening when any income is welcome to a venue owner. That’s the strategy hit on by Erica Ruben and Francois K. when they launched their party, “Deep Space,” at Cielo, the chic new Meatpacking district venue.
“We’ve kept our marketing low key,” says Ruben who was for ten years the producer of Central Park’s Summerstage concert series. “I could blow this party up tomorrow. We want the right vibe with the crowd.” With Deep Space, Ruben has rejected many of the givens of party promotion. She doesn’t enforce a dress code, and she instructs her door people not to make people wait by the velvet rope. She says she has adopted a slogan: “No dress code. Just an open mind.” And it has worked. Despite its Monday night handicap, Deep Space was a one of five parties nominated for the “Best Club Night” honor at the national DanceStar Music Awards, the nightclub industry’s equivalent of the Oscars which were held in Miami earlier this month.
It helps, of course, that Francois Kevorkian is a legend in the dance music community. A French musician who arrived in New York in the early 1970s at the start of the disco era, Kevorkian, 50, has had a long, successful career as a record producer and DJ. But perhaps even more critical to the success of Deep Space, has been the fact that Kevorkian continues to take musical risks. In his own sets as well as those of guest DJs, he has committed the party to exploring “dub,” a musical genre born in Jamaica in the 1970s in which songs are separated into their constituent tracks and then woven together on the run in the DJ booth. Kevorkian describes this as a “conceptual art form equal in significance to other giant aesthetic leaps such as Cubism.”
Cielo on a Monday night falls somewhere between Mehanata and Crobar: an intimate room with a highly diverse, dance-centric crowd that is clearly pro-electronic music. Fashion models share the crowded floor with off-duty modern dancers as well as veterans of Paradise Garage and Body and Soul, the former a mythical 1980s club and the latter a recently defunct but wildly popular Sunday afternoon party that Kevorkian helped to found. Often, there are also acrobatic young Japanese men in loose t-shirts and baggie pants who have made the pilgrimage from Tokyo where house music is a craze and Francois K. a legend.
Ruben says she does “niche marketing” to all of those groups and has tried to attract the “most open minded and most hungry for a mix.” In the process of developing the party, she says she has become appalled by the “demonization of the music scene and criminalization of clubs,” in New York.
“You go to Europe and as teenagers everybody is dancing,” she says. “In America it’s like this big deal thing…and the American government wonders why we’re all so damn fat!”
Ray Velasquez, one of many DJs who admire what Ruben and Kevorkian have created, feels the distinguishing feature of successful parties like Deeps Space is the motivation of those giving it, that is, whether the party is an attempt to nurture or to exploit its guests. “Erica and Francois,” says Velasquez, “are nurturing.”
Nurturing is far easier to do, of course, with a group of 300 than it is with one of 3,000. But the appeal of a larger party remains. Brian McConnell was the engineer behind the Twilo message board. He says he appreciates the smaller venues and loft parties that have flourished in recent years, but he still hopes for a new mega club to take Twilo’s place.
“It’s a totally different kind of community experience,” he says, “when you’re surrounded by 2000 people at four in the morning and the DJ drops a track and everyone just looks at each other….”
There are some, however, who believe the emergence of another culturally relevant big club like Twilo in New York is unlikely. John Rivera is one them.
“The days of the big nightclubs are over,” he says.
By the end of the recent Sasha and Digweed appearance at Crobar, at least some of the Twilo veterans, including Paul McKinley, might have disagreed. McKinley had left his perch on the staircase and waded into the crowd on the dance floor by 2am. By 4am, the dance floor opened up to reveal some of the more committed dancers from the Twilo era. According to McKinley, it was then that Sasha and Digweed “unleashed the dogs of war.” McKinley’s positive report was echoed in message board conversations the next day. “They were maybe the best I’ve ever seen them,” he said. But perhaps more important than the quality of Sasha and Digweed’s performance was the sense that Crobar, the big new club, had lived up to its own aspirations.
“The sound is really good,” said McKinley. “I think it’s going to take off. People have been waiting for this for three years.”
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