Good Night Mr. Lewis: Shouting on Sunday

A few weeks back I spoke of the Haves and the Have-Nots. I tried to explain what the club market would be looking like as the now "official" recession sets in. The rich (or well-run clubs) are maintaining; they have tightened their belts and shed bottle promoters whose clients haven’t survived the crunch. With payrolls cut and a steady flow of people, they scoop from the Have-Not clubs which are dying -- things aren’t so bad for them. On the other end, however, its bad news across the board. The C- and D-list clubs are swimming upstream, and they're in a losing battle with the bad economic current.

It’s easy to figure out how much a club is making: you just ask a waitress at some joint what she made—say, Saturday and then do some math. A waitress gets 20 percent of her client’s bottle sales, and from that loot she pays out according to the joint, ranging anywhere from 43 percent to 47 percent. So after a little math and a little question—“How many waitresses were working?”—you know what sales were generated at the tables. Ask her if the place was crowded and you can guesstimate bar revenues, etc. It’s not entirely accurate, but you can get a good idea. My spies tell me that 1Oak, Tenjune, Greenhouse, Kiss & Fly, Mr. West, and Marquee are still selling bottles and feeding their staff. But after that it gets a bit thin.

Yesterday, I spoke of the return of the dance floor, and today I add the return of the cashier booth. For a long time, nobody had me building them—the bottle-service theory had eliminated the need to charge at the door. That’s going to change. Groups of guys who used to be hit with the obligatory two-bottle minimum will now be humbled with the $20 door admission—look for this everywhere, and real soon. The crowd that our hero-of-the-day, John Davis, attracts will become increasingly more important in the scheme of things because they are used to paying to hear good music. That club renaissance I’ve been chatting about for almost a year will rise out of this decaying scene. Phase two is here.

Without the boring bottle-monkeys, clubs are being forced—in an incredibly hostile and competitive market—to adjust. It becomes uber important for them to provide good music, dance floors, cater less to the yuppie scum, and finally welcome a more diverse crowd because it’s simply too hard to turn away those pays. Now, if we can get a few drag queens on the bar, I may whip out my last Halston suit and go out ... and I might even smile.

Back to John Davis. I think the bottle service side is sliding as the stock market slides, and clubs that are music-based and giving a good bang-for-your-buck are where it’s at. Will the DJs now adjust to the worldwide recession?
I’m doing bookings with Studio B over in Brooklyn, and a lot of the DJs are still trying to get their same fees. I don’t think they’ve felt the pinch of the economy yet.

But it’s inevitable that some of these prices have to come down.
A lot of the clubs are moving away from strictly bottle service—Cain is an example ... they’ve already approached me about doing Thursday nights there because they want a music-oriented crowd on Thursday. They know they’re not going to make as much money, but they want the credibility of having a music crowd and having a good sound. I think those clubs are starting to change, realizing that they need to have bottle service because it pays the bills, but also understanding that it’s good to have that music crowd too.

The club music scene used to be a very drug-oriented culture. When I talk to owners today a lot of them say they don’t want to bring that in. You operate and run your own party within the framework of a club. How do you deal with this problem?
By the very nature of it, the crowd from the music events I do isn’t a hardcore drug crowd anymore. Because of what’s been going on in the Meatpacking District, a lot of that crowd now is very sensitive to that. And I always used to say this to people coming into the club—look, do what you need to do, just don’t do it at the risk of our business. If you want to do it, go outside, walk around the block, do what you have to do and come back. We were always very cool about it. Usually if you’re polite and very upfront with people, they’re respectful of that. Plus the crowd we had was a very cool crowd.

People don’t understand the subtleties of house music, but the Body&Soul crowd is highly intelligent.
The thing about the Body&Soul crowd—which I think is our winning formula—is that it wasn’t ever any particular crowd; it was a mixture of everything, a real melting pot. It was a gay, straight, black, white. It’s so mixed that you have your floor-filling crowd, which is predominantly the non-drinkers, and then you have the people who want to stand at the bar, drink, and listen to the music. It’s that mixture of people that work.

Body&Soul is also not a night crowd. You start in the afternoon, which is an unusual approach.
When I first started the concept of the Sunday day party, I had come from London where this big Sunday scene had just started. Clubs were opening up at 10 a.m. and going on till 6 or 7 p.m. on a Sunday. They were getting this crowd coming in that weren’t even going out on Saturdays; they were an older crowd, people who had jobs and kids and mortgages ... it was perfect for them. They could get babysitters on a Sunday, come to the club, party, dance, then go home, go to bed, and get up for work on a Monday morning. And it’s a casino concept—you go into a club, with no windows, no clocks, so for all intents and purposes, it feels like nighttime.

But you also got a lot of the people who were up from the night before?
That was the problem. When we started the party, we started at ten in the morning, and we were getting everyone coming out of the Palladium and the Tunnel. They were coming straight out of those clubs and coming to Body&Soul. I’d have people come to Body&Soul, they’d be there for an hour, full of energy, then all of a sudden everything started wearing off. And next thing you know, I had a room full of people fast asleep. So I changed the time to noon. At noon, we were getting the crowd coming out of Palladium from Junior Vasquez’s party, drag queens, etc. So we eventually moved the start time to 4 p.m., so when people came out of the clubs at 10 a.m. or noon, they had nowhere to go, so they had to go home.

So it was a public service thing too—you saved lives?
Probably. I wanted people to come the same way you go to church every Sunday; I wanted them to come to Body&Soul fresh.

The music is like a religion with your crowd, isn’t it?
Well, the music’s very diverse now; we play everything from electro to techno, reggae, and house. It’s so mixed up because we’ve got three guys who’ve collectively got over 100 years worth of musical experience between them. Francois plays predominantly electro and techno, Danny plays the old-school disco, classics, and house, and then Joe plays all the tribal and Latin music.

How do you mix them up? Are there rules?
They just do their thing together, all three of them. And if you see it on, December 28, at Webster Hall, you see the crowd just loves it. The crowd is screaming. I’ve been doing this for 15 years now in New York, and everyone says to me that there’s no club that has the kind of energy that you see on a Body&Soul night.

You never made the step of being an owner ... how many times did you think about that?
I’ve been presented with offers many times, but for various reasons I never did it. My whole concept was—I saw this from being involved with a lot of owners and dealing with owners—that being tied to the real estate in a club that all of a sudden isn’t popular anymore can be like an albatross around your neck. For me, it was much better to come, do my party, make my money, and leave. I know now how fickle this industry is ... your club is as hot as it is until the next hot place opens up, and then everyone moves there. Very few clubs have been able to keep it up. But honestly, I’m at the stage in my life where now I would be interested in becoming an owner.

Becoming an owner in New York?
I’m involved with Studio B in Brooklyn now. We’re making a lot of changes there and it’s doing really well. We’ve only been open three weeks and already we’re doing over a 1,000 people every Friday night. It’s in that sort of semi-industrial neighborhood, but it’s still in an area where the cops drive by every night, and they never bother us. It has that old warehouse feel that I remember when I went to clubs. I didn’t go to velvet-rope, red carpet type places; I went to old dingy warehouses, where you had to make three phone calls just to find out where it was. I have a new party starting there on December 14 called Sunday Shoutin!

Since you now have experience doing both, how does DJing compare to being a promoter?
The biggest difference being a DJ as opposed to being a promoter is the connection you have with your audience; to be able to take them on a musical journey and to see deep into their expressions. Their minds are taken to any place, and to be a part of creating that is nothing short of magic. Soulful house music, in my opinion, touches you in a way no other music does. It reaches deep into your soul and takes you to spiritual place that you have to experience to know what I mean. The DJ is the facilitator of that amazing ride. It is truly a blessing to be able to be in that position.