Good Night Mr. Lewis: Shane Neman, JoonBug Alumnus Emeritus

I started writing my humble blog over at JoonBug working with my friends Shane Neman and Ariana Gordon. I intended to write a paragraph or two a couple times a week, and well, it didn’t work out that way. A couple months ago, JoonBug was sold to another friend, Jon Gabel. I moved my blog over here to BlackBook with the intent of reaching a new and larger audience. The nightclub industry is not just owners, staff, and promoters -- there are so many things going on behind the scenes, so many people feeding at the trough. One of the things companies like JoonBug and Jon Gabel do is rent out virtually every club in New York for New Year's Eve and use the hundreds of thousands of names on their email lists to sell tickets. This works, as the clubs are very happy farming this action out so they can concentrate on Christmas business.

Each year when I was booking talent, the end of the summer started a desperate race to book someone for New Year’s Eve. As each day passed, another club in this city or the next was signing talent that I may have wanted. Back then, the concept of the four-hour open bar wasn’t good enough. You needed year-defining talent, and the struggle to define it, find it, and book it was all-consuming. One year right before the Gulf War, I booked the ancient Cab Calloway and the very political and very relevant Laurie Anderson. The New York Times wrote nice things about this quirky combination. The 90-something Calloway emerged from the bathroom in the dressing room, as I waited to meet him on New Year’s night, with his endowment hanging out. I stuttered and muttered something, but he didn’t hear a word I said. Per a band member who dealt with it, Calloway had lost most of his hearing. He was amazing onstage, and I cant believe I got to see this Cotton Club legend doing his “Minnie the Moocher” routine. The Limelight was filled with tuxedos and hipsters, and it was a great event. For the third time I was directing the Palladium, I booked Sandra Bernhard presented by Gianni Versace, Robin Byrd, Andre Leon Talley and Naomi Campbell. This was followed by a solo Debbie Harry, then the Psychedelic Furs in their first performance in 10 years. I added the very hot P.M. Dawn at dawn with bagels and croissants for the late-night revelers.

Now, it’s rare that anybody books talent. If they do, it’s a big-time DJ. JoonBug and other such entities have made life easier for the promo teams who can now concentrate on the other 30 days of the month and the looming winter. The nightclub industry feeds lots of people, many of which work in offices all day long. These marketing firms and PR firms and liquor companies stand to get real hurt if current anti-nightlife policies continue with their cruel intent.

So tell me how JoonBug started and what it was.
Well JoonBug started in a very strange way; it wasn’t something that was planned or expected or anything like that. It kind of came out from just knowing a lot of people in the nightlife business and really looking for a way to make money. I think it was right after 9/11, Ariana and I were walking around on 59th Street, where the Guastavino’s space is, and we went by it, and we looked at it, and (our first reaction was) ‘this is such a sick place, I can’t believe nobody’s done a party here.’ At that time, Ariana was doing the door at all the great places—Au Bar, Chaos, System. Halloween was coming up, and it was the perfect place for doing a Halloween event.

Guastavino’s is on First Avenue ...
It’s under the arches of the 59th Street Bridge.

And it had those old vaulted arches, and it’s really amazing.
At the time it was owned by Terrance Conran, of London.

Conran is a major shopping store, like Macy’s in America, only hipper, higher end.
At that time, I had computer experience, and Ariana had events experience. She knew people in nightlife from doing the door, and all my friends from high school were promoters and owners. We did this event, and it was a big success—the thing we’d done differently that wasn’t being done at this time was using email as a way to invite people, (as well as having) a website for the event itself. About 5,000 showed up to the Halloween party. At that time, Guastavino’s was a relatively unknown place. (The initial reaction was that) nobody’s going to go uptown, because everything was in the downtown space. There was Pangaea and Rehab, etc. And so essentially, we did this party and Artan—I don’t know if you know Artan, he’s the head of Norwood now, he was running the nightlife portion of Guastavino’s. After the party, the question from them was: why don’t you do a Saturday night party? We weren’t promoters at the time, and we said, OK, fine: why don’t we just try it? So we tried it, and we kept on using the same techniques (of utilizing the internet) to do it. And then, we threw in the mix of taking pictures of the party. And at that time, digital cameras were very, very expensive—they were thousands of dollars. It’s not like right now, where you could go and buy a digital camera for a hundred bucks.

So you posted pictures on the web.
We posted pictures on the web, and the key was that people would see the pictures, and they would give us their email address to see the pictures, and we could re-invite them to another one of our parties.

So how many names did you eventually gather?
When I left, it was close to a million names nationwide.

How many in New York City?
It was something around half a million.

You had a half a million names (including mine, by the way) in your database. And I knew that, because when I worked at JoonBug, it was very common for you guys to do an email blast, alerting people to something I was writing, and that really helped support it.
It did, it did, and you know what? It was a lot more effective when we first started. It seems like such a kind of commonplace thing to do an email blast right now, because it’s eight years later. But at that time, it was pretty much unheard of. Nobody had put two and two together to do something like that.

How many clubs bought into your services?
The beauty of what we had done was getting to work with everyone. From Noah Tepperberg and Jason Strauss to Scott Sartiano and Richie Akiva, to the Asian promoters, the African American promoters, the bridge and tunnel promoters. Every single nightclub, from the largest ones like Pacha, to the smallest ones back in the day like Pangaea and Rehab.

They hired you to do a blast?
They hired us for our services. I mean, there was a lot more that was going on behind the scenes. For the public, our website is what they see, but you’ve been to our office, you saw how many people we have working there.

Yeah, it’s a large office.
We do a lot of things behind the scenes, like event production. And then, eventually, I think what happened was our website, ending up legitimizing nightlife (in a certain way).

Now you have that database with half a million people ... I used to book New Year’s Eve all the time, and at the clubs that I ran, I would tell my staff that if we weren’t booked by the first week of September, we were in trouble. Now JoonBug comes along and takes away the burden of booking New Year’s. Were you the first person to promote New Year’s Eve with the mass mails?
Well, we did New Year’s Eve, we did Halloween, a lot of the big nights. We did a lot of event production in the back end also—not just for our own events, but for other people who’d hire us. But eventually, doing things on the web enabled you to get to the masses. When we first started, we were very elitist, just like a new nightclub; we were very selective of who was on the list, and then eventually as time went on, we got more for the masses. In any case, we started doing ticketing online, and that kind of grew out of having the database and having the recognition through the website. And yes, then for New Year’s Eve and Halloween and really big nights, the website would be where you would go to get your tickets and find out what’s going on.

Right, because a guy like me, running a club, doesn’t want to spend all his efforts booking New Year’s Eve. What we do is we hire your company, or your company rents the club, paying a rental fee depending on the size of the club, its cachet, which translates into the amount of money you could sell a ticket for. And you would sell New Year’s tickets to your database, and you would sell out 20 venues online.
Yeah, and we started doing places outside of New York; Miami, Vegas…

I think we became friends, we had known each other, but we became friends because we ran into each other randomly in Philadelphia.
I think it was at 32 Degrees.

Right, I designed 32 Degrees for those guys down in Atlantic City, so I was always in Philly meeting with them, and there you were throwing a JoonBug party.
They were actually a client of ours. But you know what, Steve? Honestly, I’ve been going out since I was 15 in the city, and I remember going to USA ...

I hate that, when people say “since I was 15.” It was 18 to get in back then, but ID’s were rarely checked. I’m glad they are now. Especially when I hear that line.
Yeah, I knew you, I knew you. The ironic thing is (remembering saying to each other), “Is he gonna let us in tonight?” You actually ended up letting me in, not all my friends or anything. It’s ironic that we ended up working together afterward.

So now you’ve sold JoonBug. I walked into your office one day and I said Shane, I have an idea, because someone told me about blogging, and like the day before I had discovered blogs
Wait, wait—let me correct this. From my recollection of what happened ... I’ll tell you what mine is and you’ll tell me what yours is.

Go ahead.
So I remember one day, almost a year ago maybe, a little less than a year ago, I was at an event on 27th Street and I was walking by Marquee just to get a cab to go home, and Wass was at the door. I said hello to him, and then you were at the door, and I started talking to you randomly. And through the course of just talking about nothing, I had this eureka moment. I told you that, in the back of my mind, I had been thinking about something new to do with JoonBug. And I didn’t know exactly what it was, but at that time when I was talking to you, I said, “Steve, what do you think about doing an industry blog for nightlife?”

Yeah, that’s what happened, but after I talked to you about the Village Voice, because it occurred to me that I had been writing the camel pages in the Village Voice, and I wanted to get my name out there, and I was looking for a home for this “blog idea”, and so you just walked by and it was one of those fate things.
Yeah. We were both in tune with each other, and through the course of the conversation, we realized that we could start a blog. You told me that you used to write a little, and we started talking about what the content of the blog could be. I called you the next day, and the next week you came to our offices, and me, you, and Ariana sat down and kind of went through the seeds of what would be eventually “Good Night Mr. Lewis.”

Yeah, that’s right. And the thing was, I was worried about content, whether we were going to maintain content. And then I said to you, “We’re not going to run out of content,” and you looked at me and said “No, we’re not going to run out of content,” and we knew we could do it.
I think part of the success of “Good Night Mr. Lewis” was obviously the team that came together. We had the resources, you had the talent, we also had Josh at the time.

Josh was great. I’m doing a project with Josh now. Without Josh and Val Harris.
And Ariana to organize the whole thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah I was flumbering around ... But now you sold JoonBug recently to John Gabel and his group—basically you sold everything except a text messaging entity?
Well, they were two separate companies we were just running them in the same office. So tell me about the text messaging part. What is it?
Well, about three years ago, we had been doing emails, and the efficiency of the email system was getting lower and lower, because as technology progresses, more and more people start doing it. So now, you get a million emails from the club, the promoter, JoonBug, and a million other JoonBug look a-likes. So there was this concept of being able to text people who want to find out about events. Obviously, texts are a lot different than email—they’re on your phone, which is a lot more personal, and people read all their texts. So three years ago, we had this idea of getting people to opt into a JoonBug text messaging list. I was trying to look for some sort of technological solution for this, and apparently there wasn’t any at that time. So, of course, if there isn’t any, you say, how can I do it? And since I had that computer background at the time, I kind of did my research and figured out, this is how you do it. But there wasn’t some sort of packaged technology—for example if you want to get Microsoft Word, you can buy it at the store and use it. But there was nothing you would use for text messaging.

So you invented the way to do this? You’re to blame? So when I’m in the movie theaters and I have my phone on vibrate and I get invited to some party, it’s because of you?
Well, actually the name of our company is EZ Texting, so when I started, I obviously started with what I knew, and the clients that we started with were clubs because I already knew everyone in the nightlife industry and it made a lot of sense. In all reality now, nightlife and clubs are maybe 10% of our customers.

Who are the other customers?
We have customers like the LAPD that use it; a lot of schools that use our system. Basically any emergency service uses, couponing, American Express, etc.

For text messaging, are there rules that your client as to opt-in?
Well, opt-in means that you agree to get messages for a certain store or a business. And our system is a packaged mobile marketing platform for small- to medium-sized business that’s easy to use and affordable. You can just log in online, send out your messages, and have people text in to opt-in. We have a special code—313131—and you can text in a club’s name or other keyword, and you join that messaging list. Then you get updates via text messages for certain events or certain promotions. And right now actually, its really funny, the perspective that this has given us. We have a lot of clients, all the nightclubs and promoters in New York, Miami, and Vegas use our system. But its cool to see some club in Idaho using the system as well.