The Club King: My Rise, Reign, and Fall in New York Nightlife

by Peter Gatien

  “These guys just got an album deal, coming out next spring,” Ron told me. “After that vinyl hits the record stores, they won’t come so cheap.”

  Rush had emerged from the city’s Willowdale neighborhood with a hard-edged rock sound that brought to mind earlier power trios like the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, and James Gang. Listening to Rush, you could not understand how a simple guitar-bass-drums threesome could possibly create that decibel roar. Guitarist Alex Lifeson, drummer John Rutsey, and the screaming lead singer, bassist Geddy Lee, would morph later on into one of the most popular bands in the world, changing their sound and lineup over the years. But in spring 1973 they were relative unknowns outside the Toronto area.

  I signed them for Aardvark’s opening and made sure the roof shingles were firmly nailed down. I traipsed into the offices of sleepy Cornwall’s only newspaper, the Standard-Freeholder, trying to buttonhole whoever was responsible for covering entertainment. Turned out, nobody was. But I wound up talking to a tired-looking newsman my father’s age.

  I blurted out my scoop: “I’m doing this new club and we’re bringing in a Toronto band called Rush for the first week.” The guy didn’t exactly shoot to his feet and yell “Stop the presses!” I had no idea that media outlets like the Standard sold ads to businesses looking to promote. For my unschooled efforts, the Aardvark got a tiny write-up, a couple of inches of copy tucked away in the local news section that went all but unnoticed.

  But luckily for me, in a small town like Cornwall, word gets out. Just as it had with the Pant Loft, pent-up demand from area youth ensured that my first foray into the nightclub business was a monster success from the start. That first week, Rush packed them in, then blew them the fuck out. Geddy Lee’s vocals reminded me of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, but in my opinion, Rush’s front man was the better singer.

  I knew from that first week that I had a hit on my hands. Aardvark was filled to its four-hundred-person capacity all six nights it was open. After Rush inaugurated the stage, I continued to bring in groups that were a cut above the local cover bands. We drew acts out of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver that were touring Canada. For midlevel acts—which were the only ones I could afford, given the bar’s limited size—the Aardvark became a recognized stop on tour. I’d cycle the bands through, keeping things fresh, booking them for one-week gigs.

  One month in, I was floating on air. I knew most of the people who came into my place. Nothing, I thought, could be better than hanging out and drinking with friends. I bartended when necessary, and glad-handed the clientele the rest of the time. I had put in a couple of bumper-pool tables in the smaller room, and I became something of a shark at the game, playing for rounds. That was a win-win situation for me, since it was my alcohol the losers were buying. Even away from the pool table, the shots always came at me fast and furious.

  Soon enough, my lack of experience rose up and bit me in the ass. Aardvark might have been a success, but I actually didn’t know what the hell I was doing. After that first month of partying hearty with my customers, something wasn’t right. The place was crowded, the drinks were flowing, but somehow my payroll checks started to bounce, and I couldn’t afford to buy groceries. I realized that while I was doing shooters with customers all night, the business tended to drift, like a ship without a captain. I swore off drinking on the job and paid attention to the till, and the ship began to right itself.

  Sheila was excited about the Aardvark’s success, but she preferred domestic life to the crazy tilt and chaos of nightlife. Our schedules clashed, and I never came home until she was long in bed. Imperceptibly, we began to drift slowly, too, in separate ways.

  There was no real club competition within a fifty-mile radius. I pretty much exclusively booked rock bands, paying the acts $600 to $1,000 per week and charging a cover on weekends. From my scouting trips to Montreal and Toronto, I noticed a shift in the music scene. It was the mid-1970s, and the first hints of the disco revolution had started to appear. I preferred rock ’n’ roll, but there was something powerful that happened when disco was booming over the sound system; the insistent beats got everyone up and dancing.

  From a business perspective, I had to admit that disco made sense. Bands were more expensive than DJs, whom you could hire for fifty dollars a night. Aardvark’s entertainment began to follow the trend, relying more and more on turntables rather than live bands. I watched from the bar as dancers got lost in the music. They hit the bar more often, flushed and excited, and stood passively listening less. Showing off their moves put a smile on everyone’s faces. I remembered the magic of those chanson à répondre parties my parents threw around the holidays—the basement ceiling threatening to collapse, the talcum powdering the floor.

  Even with the understanding that I was only a not-that-big-a-fish in a very small pond, I felt great. I was twenty-two years old and tooling around town in a Mercedes. I had married my whip-smart, beautiful high-school sweetheart and owned the hippest, most happening club this side of Toronto. What more could I want?

  As happy as I was, I couldn’t say I was content. That fabulous realm right across the southern border was so close that I could almost see it from the front door of my club, the magic-dust world of Disney and Polaroid cameras and two-car garages. A sad voice wouldn’t stop whispering in my ear.

  Ah, little Pierre, what chance would a French-Canadian nobody have in America? They’d eat you alive over there. Stay close to home, mon petit chou, stick to your own kind.

  I was too restless to listen.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Florida

  By all accounts I should have been securely settled in the mid-1970s. In June 1974, Sheila and I greeted our first child, Jennifer, and her birth was one of the most singular events of my life. Like any proud papa, I was thrilled. I was transformed.

  I remember working my tail off at the club, then returning home to a sweetly sleeping daughter at four o’clock in the morning. Without disturbing my wife—Sheila no doubt would have disapproved of the practice—I used to rouse Jen from her crib just for the delight of playing with her. Don’t wake the baby is a universal rule of parenthood, but I couldn’t resist.

  A year and a half later, we welcomed another baby girl, Amanda, whom we always called Mandy. I was over the moon. My mom finally had the little girls she’d always wanted. The Aardvark was a success, and I felt confident I could support my growing family. I embraced the typical masculine formula of money equaling love, spoiling my daughters with the kinds of gifts and outings that would have been impossible dreams for me as a child. I brought them to Disney World on their birthdays so they could visit the fairy-tale castle I had fantasized about. I made sure they always wore brand-new clothes, a luxury I had never even considered during my hand-me-down childhood.

  Caught up in my nightly hustle, I didn’t grasp the fact that being a good father involved much more than providing material comforts. Jen and Mandy will be better off than I was, I thought. They will never suffer the indignity of poverty. I thought I’d fulfilled my fatherly duties and then some. But I was young and emotionally unsophisticated. I didn’t realize that my late nights and erratic schedule were taking a toll on the family.

  From the beginning, I understood that part of my job as a club owner was to stay current, ride the trends, keep my finger on the public pulse. Maybe it harked back to my peashooter/yo-yo/Hula-Hoop days, but I intrinsically understood that there was always something new on the horizon, and I’d better be ready to get out in front of it. I wanted to be first, and I wanted to be best. If you aren’t the lead dog, the view never changes was an expression I took to heart.

  For better or worse—and much of it was for the worse—what was happening in culture in the 1970s was disco. With the European influence in Quebec, Canada embraced the pulsing music and flashing lights slightly earlier than America. The term disco went beyond music and dictated a sense of fashion and style, a total rejection of sixties political seriousness in favor of a “j
ust wanna have fun” ethos. Disco has since become a synonym for shallowness and empty-headed hedonism, but as a club owner I witnessed what the music could do, jolting a dance floor alive as if an electrical current were running through the crowd.

  I continued to haunt the clubs of Montreal and Toronto, making monthly forays in search of anything fresh and new. Plus I began to consume whatever cultural reportage I could scrounge up, reading everything I could get my hands on—newspapers, magazines, tabloids, xeroxed fanzines—sifting through it all in an attempt to break out of my provincial mind-set. Back then, Rolling Stone was still considered something of an underground publication, and I pounced on every issue.

  I also subscribed to Billboard, the bible of the music industry, studying it religiously. In early 1975, I came across an advertisement for the first-of-its-kind Billboard National Disco Convention, which was scheduled to be held in a midtown Manhattan hotel. Billboard magazine was a bastion of rock ’n’ roll, and its recognition of disco signaled that dance music was here to stay.

  I turned that ad over and over in my mind. I had never visited New York City. I should have been terrified at the prospect of joining a collection of sophisticated music-industry professionals in one of the cultural capitals of the world, but my innocence served me well. Fools rush in, as they say, and, following my foolhardy impulses, I rushed right into places and situations where I barely belonged.

  So I signed on for the conference and flew into JFK. It was springtime in New York. Stevie Wonder had a hit out called “Living for the City,” and I was a perfect stand-in for the wide-eyed boy hero in the song: “Wow! New York, just like I pictured it—skyscrapers and everything!”

  Taking my place among the assembled club owners, booking agents, DJs, and music-industry types, I initially felt as out of place as an altar boy at an orgy. Naïveté might have gotten me through the door, but it didn’t help once the door swung shut behind me. At the opening-day lunch I sat next to Jay Rizzo, owner of 2001 Odyssey in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. That was the club where, in just a couple of years, the dance-floor scenes from Saturday Night Fever would be filmed.

  But when I looked around at the supposed geniuses attending the conference, I realized to my great relief that I could hold my own in the room. They were just ordinary people—hustlers, yeah, and with different accents than I was used to. But they put their pants on one leg at a time like the rest of us, even though their pants were flared extravagantly and made of white linen. Fuck that, I told myself, my mother could sew those damned outfits, no problem.

  The main theme of the gathering was basic and straightforward: In disco, the customer is the show. The focus in the club scene, the conference organizers declared, had shifted from the acts onstage to the patrons on the floor. That message, as spot-on as it seemed to be, felt a little stale to me. I’d witnessed that shift and used it to my advantage. I didn’t need a room of presenters to tell me that nightlife was changing. I couldn’t help but wonder if everyone at the conference was riding a wave that was already cresting, and the disco trend might be flattening out. Peashooter season might still be happening, but by next week I had a feeling everyone would have moved on to the yo-yo.

  I made my way through the events of the conference one after another. The caliber of the nightlife entrepreneurs there inspired me, sure, but they also ignited a competitive flame in my gut. Meeting those so-called music moguls and cultural curators, I realized I needed to expand my horizons in order to compete with them. I had to set my sights beyond Cornwall, with its obvious limitations, and find my motivation from something other than competition with my brothers. I dreamed of doubling down on the dance-club business, taking a risk on a Titanic-size discothèque that made the Aardvark look like an actual anteater. To go big, I had to think big.

  Anyone else would have glanced at the ad in the Business Opportunities section of the New York Times and dismissed it as “too good to be true” before turning the page. I didn’t. I had never looked at a copy of the Times in my life. But on one of my last days at the conference, an ad caught and held my interest.

  “Fantastic Miami-Area Nightclub Discothèque! Thirty thousand square feet! $600,000 lighting array! $300,000 sound system! Capacity 2,000!”

  I’ve always thought that using a lot of exclamation points is like laughing too hard at your own jokes. In small print at the bottom of the ad came the kicker, the price: $400,000, along with the helpful note, “Terms!”

  Florida was a fantasy realm to me. In Canada, wealthy people relocated to Miami to avoid the frigid winters. I didn’t know a single person who lived there year-round. The idea of moving my family to the Sunshine State indicated I was moving on up in terms of class status, the kind of great leap forward that instantly attracted me.

  For months, I had been wondering what I could do to pump up the action at the Aardvark. I had considered enlarging the place, but at best I could only double the capacity, making it eight hundred instead of four hundred, though I might be able to squeeze in a thousand in a pinch. But the problem ran deeper than square footage. The club-going population of Cornwall could not consistently fill a larger place. The demographics wouldn’t support it, and the market just wasn’t there. As long as I hung around my hometown, my ambitions had a built-in limit.

  So there were logical explanations for a career move to a bigger city, but they only served to cover up my real reason: I was restless. I’ve encountered this motive again and again throughout my life. I’d conquer a mountaintop only to scan the horizon for a taller peak to climb. A sense of been-there-done-that afflicted me whenever I accomplished a goal.

  Restlessness caused me to read the Times ad over twice, three times, then once again. You’re good where you are, the voice in my head insisted. You pulled in over a hundred grand last year, and there’s more where that came from. Sheila and my daughters were safe and happy in Cornwall. Kids are little conservatives and hate to be uprooted.

  Those were sober-minded, quite valid considerations. Ranked against them was a wild combination of big-city energy, disco-conference confidence, and my standing as probably the most naïve person in New York City. I decided not to scurry back home after the conference as I had intended. Instead I booked myself on the first flight to Miami. I wasn’t exactly making a blind leap. At least I had my one eye wide open.

  As you travel north from Miami International Airport, the towns of South Florida merge seamlessly into one another, so you are never sure exactly where Fort Lauderdale ends, say, and Pompano Beach begins.

  I had never been to Florida before. Of course, like every other Canadian citizen, I had visions of the place as a realm of sun and sand and warmth. South Florida was the anti-Canada, well endowed with everything my own homeland lacked. The sunlit spring landscape appeared beautiful, just as the tourist brochures had advertised. But I also glimpsed the American Dream’s underbelly. A huge influx of Cuban immigrants was just beginning. I passed encampments that had been set up beneath the highway interchanges, packed dense with hundreds of refugees.

  It turned out that the “Fantastic Miami-Area Nightclub Discothèque!” at 1001 North Federal Highway in Hallandale had a seedy underbelly of its own. The ad copy was total garbage. That “$600,00 lighting array” the Times ad boasted about was antiquated shit. The expensive and fabulous sound system was also outdated. Lighting and audio technology advanced so quickly in those days that what was cutting edge one year inevitably became worthless only a few years later. I would have to start all over from scratch.

  Even the name of the club sucked. Rum Bottoms had been created by a half dozen Greek and Italian businessmen from Long Island. They named the Hallandale place after their flagship nightclub back in Massapequa. The dudes were behind the times, proudly claiming to have unleashed the band Twisted Sister upon Long Island and the waiting world. The owners were all in their midforties and almost comically at each other’s throats. I walked into Rum Bottoms to discover two of them in the midst of a fistfight.


  The Florida venue had taken over a German beer hall that specialized in drag shows. To my mind, the name Rum Bottoms called up the idea of “bottom feeders,” and that seemed to be the type of patrons the place attracted. The club logo was of a dancer striking a disco pose next to a palm tree. The old owners let me examine their books and it was clear that, as a nightclub, the place just wasn’t making it. Fluctuations in Florida’s seasonal population made winter the only time of year they made a profit. Barely.

  But I wasn’t interested in buying someone else’s vision, or even someone else’s clientele. I thought of the transaction as “buying the box”—purchasing the club’s structure, the physical plant, the location. In that sense, the box was solid, the box was good, and it came with one other necessary piece of the puzzle: a liquor license. As soon as I walked into the building, my mind raced with ideas for a makeover. Thirty thousand square feet—six times what I had in Cornwall. Visions of a disco inferno danced in my head. What I could do with thirty thousand feet!

  Once you exited the box, the location proved to be great, too. There was a lot of action at area nightclubs, especially at smaller cover-band venues like Pete & Lenny’s, which had been packed the few times I visited. I was certain that the South Florida nightlife scene could support a megaclub like the one I was envisioning. Two of the area radio stations had just switched to all-disco formats. The area had clear potential.

  Just to take over the lease on the place, I bargained the owners from their original $400,000 asking price to $340,000. Looking back, I probably should have paid even less. I put down a couple hundred grand up front and negotiated an option to buy the building outright for $600,000. The deal was the equivalent of nearly $3 million dollars in today’s money.

  Things were moving fast. I had so many delusions of greatness clouding my vision that I didn’t talk over the move with Sheila. It wouldn’t have mattered. Any consultation with my family would have been pure window dressing. There was precious little that could have stopped my ambition. There was nothing for Sheila to say, really. It was clear that I’d made the decision without her input. She was resigned, if not supportive.