As dance music's fortunes shift, so dopromoters at Circus, Vanguard, and Avalon Hollywood
It's a dreary Saturday night - windy, damp, and bone-chilling. But Gene La Pietra, a multimillionaire by most accounts, stands where he has every week for most of the last three decades, just steps outside the door of his disco-era Hollywood club, Circus. Wearing a black leather jacket, La Pietra politely takes suggestions from clubgoers, gives whispered orders, and tells an assistant to open a second dance floor as crowds swell in a nearby tented line. People have queued up for the last time to attend Spundae, L.A.'s longest-running weekly super-club night. It could be the end of an era for Circus, which has seen almost all of L.A.'s big-room promoters come and go, often exiting with complaints that La Pietra needs to remodel or doesn't get the superstar-DJ revolution. He says maybe it's the promoters who don't get it. After all, he's still standing.
Spundae's move to Avalon Hollywood, where it will anonymously book DJs and occasionally sponsor the club's Terrace, says as much about its former home at Circus as it does about the DJ-driven big-club scene in L.A. Sure, Circus is no spring chicken, especially after Avalon (2003) and Vanguard (2005) hit the scene with major remodels and massive sound systems. But seen through La Pietra's eyes, the days of $15,000-a-night DJs and up to $50 cover charges lasted six of his 30 successful years, and now there's a correction, a new cycle, perhaps. La Pietra says he'll do without the middlemen known as club promoters, at least for now. He'll offer lower cover charges, no more than $15 most nights, and local, no-name DJs, starting this Saturday.
"I'd like to see the good old days of $15 at the door," says La Pietra, the onetime leader of the Hollywood secession movement. "Maybe that accounts for why people don't go out as much - maybe the prices are just too high."
Over at the newest Hollywood big room, Vanguard, Giant club nights last year joined with the venue partner Pasquale Rotella and his Insomniac Events raves. Today their successful parties dominate Saturday nights in the big-name DJ department. At Avalon, the Spundae crew, one-off promoter Liquified, and the venue's old mainstay promoters, Wired L.A. and One Promotions, will all join forces to get Saturday nights pumping in one place instead of at competing locales. In the midst of a dance-music recession, it seems promoters are cozying up for shelter.
"We don't think the electronic-dance-music scene in L.A. is big enough for three major clubs," says Spundae partner Peter Becker. "Circus is one of the best clubs in regards to layout and venue size; it is just time for us to move on."
In fact, it's not unusual for promoters to play "musical chairs," as La Pietra calls it. The practice keeps crowds fresh, excited, and ready to set their cash on new bars. And it's been a mainstay of L.A.'s big rooms since Giant founder Dave Dean teamed up with Spundae for the original Giant nights at Circus in 2000. The partnership dissolved, and Dean was asked to leave nearly a year later. He moved on to one-off parties while Spundae stayed at Circus, decamping to the Henry Fonda Music Box Theater for much of 2004 but returning to La Pietra's place after a promotion partnership with British-based Godskitchen fell apart. After 14 years of operation, and with nights in San Francisco as well as Las Vegas, Spundae has considerable booking power - the promoters can offer many overseas DJs three gigs for one trip out West. That makes it attractive to Avalon, which has had some difficulty getting top-name spinners since Giant departed last year.
Giant, in fact, once found a semi-permanent home at Avalon when the venue opened in 2003, becoming its lead Saturday-night promoter. The following year, however, Giant Saturday nights transformed into the in-house promotion "Avaland," and, by last summer, the thinking within the venue was that Giant was unnecessarily siphoning off a sizeable slice of profits. It didn't help Giant when it drew bad press as a result of canceling its 2005 New Year's Eve party at the last minute, blaming weather on a rainless night. Many ticket-holders still haven't seen refunds, and Giant's reputation suffered.
Still, after moving to Vanguard in August, Giant took much of its loyal crowd with it, as well as many of the world's top DJs, leaving Avalon to struggle in the talent department. "Vanguard ... has provided Giant the latitude for innovation we've never before enjoyed," says Dean.
With Circus essentially bowing out of the superstar-DJ business, and Spundae and Liquified throwing their weight behind Avalon, the stage is set for a booking war between promoters at Avalon and those at Vanguard. One interesting question will be whether Liquified, which has had a lock on Los Angeles faves Sasha and John Digweed, will use its relationship with the star spinners to bring them back to Avalon. Dean says that Digweed is coming to Giant this year. Liquified founder Damian Murphy says, "I am certainly trying to get Sasha and John Digweed to do Avalon."
Nevertheless, the end of Spundae at Circus comes at a time of momentous changes in dance music, and perhaps marks a new wave of anti-superstar-DJ sentiment. DJs and electronic acts are looking to bands and rockist influences to freshen up their shtick. Sales of DJ mix-CDs have been dwindling. The millennial super-club generation, raised on trance that was itself a relic of '90s raves, has grown up, and the replacement demographic seems iffy. Avalon, in fact, is trying to prepare for the end of the days when one DJ can fill its nearly 1,400-capacity space. This year will continue to bring live, rock-inflected electronic acts such as recent stage-stormers Hybrid and Deepsky, as well as leftfield DJs such as Berlin tech-house breakout Booka Shade (coming March 24) and a greater reliance on local talent, including three new local resident spinners and DJ crews starting in March.
"The big-name DJ has a place in the scene," says Garrett Chau, Avalon's manager of bookings and promotion. "But reliance on the big name is something that, when we have 52 weeks, we do a disservice to pin everything on that big name. We want to be able to bring the best electronic music, so the crowd feels that this is a club that stands for doing things the right way."
Chau takes inspiration from London super-club Fabric, which has had solid success with adventurous bookings, an austere, modern environment, and dedication to customers. Acts ranging from Chicago house veteran DJ Heather to Berlin techno star Michael Mayer produce amazing sessions for the club's dance floor and record label. Above all, Fabric idealizes the notion that you can go out on any given Saturday and be blown away, regardless of who's behind the decks.
This brings us back to Circus, in a way - the way things used to be before you could buy tickets online, before DJs played sports arenas, before a club was about worshipping a disc-spinner. Sure, with Circus all but bowing out, it's now a two-way race in the Saturday-night super-club scene. But Circus is still a big room - perhaps the biggest, at nearly 3,300 capacity - and people line up to dance to house, progressive, and trance. Isn't that what it's all about?
Interestingly, in the last year La Pietra says he has made improvements, including new rooms, an expanded capacity, Buddhist figures on the patio (à la Vanguard), and bigger restrooms, not to mention purchasing an adjacent parking lot and warehouse for private events. It's not like he hasn't been making moves and spending money on his properties. He just old school, unwilling to launch a publicity campaign, feign a grand reopening, or establish overpriced bottle service. And don't even mention changing the name of Circus.
"I'll be dead and buried before that happens," he says. "My favorite word is longevity."
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