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Anyone read the article on the SF chronicle....
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| *InVeRs3* |
| about how clubbers are getting old or something? I think it's called "clubbing scene ages" or something. What was it about? |
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| DaveT |
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/artic...&sn=001&sc=1000
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CLUB SCENE GROWS UP
The party isn't over in S.F. -- it has just moved on to smaller, mellower places. Nights of excess in huge venues give way to calmer gatherings in more intimate settings.
Carolyne Zinko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, December 2, 2005
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On a Thursday night at Mars Bar, at the corner of Seventh and Brannan streets, Carla Eggleston, 40, stood on the patio, smoking a cigarette and contemplating her surroundings.
Music from the dance floor wafted outside. Strands of colored lights twinkled over tables where people mingled. Men were dressed as if inspired by Gap commercials. Women favored halter tops or halter dresses atop jeans with high heels, their arms bare despite a chill in the air.
For Eggleston, a decorative painter who used to go to cavernous dance clubs where talking was less important than bumping and grinding until 2 a.m., the subdued scene was just fine.
"I was just at a large club last Saturday, and it was a mosh scene," she said. "I got pushed around and spilled on. ... It's no fun for us adults. I'm so happy to be here -- it's nice and mellow. I know everybody.''
Raving with the masses is out. Sipping in selective company is in. A downbeat economy, the aging of Generation X and the pendulum-like swing of fashion (and of fashionable drugs) are spurring a trend away from the previous decade's favorite way to party -- DJ dance fests for 1,000 or more -- toward gatherings at small bars and clubs where people can talk without shouting, drink without being spilled on and spare themselves exorbitant cover charges.
Ever since the dot-com bust flushed thousands of well-paid young people -- and their money -- out of the Bay Area faster than a bar's last call, it also has been closing the door on partying to excess. Some dance clubs have closed, and the bigger ones are lucky to fill up once a week, several party promoters said.
"Big clubs were an era that was very important -- it was a time of celebration and the evolution of the big-name DJ as entertainer,'' said Audrey Joseph, vice president of the San Francisco Entertainment Commission, who ran Club Townsend on Harrison Street for 10 years.
Now, she said, "there's a move to a lounge society -- and to people staying at home, Tivo-ing shows, playing videos and meeting people online. Lounges are easier to access, less expensive and so numerous that they tend to develop their own little crowds. You can pick and choose where you want to go.''
In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was not unusual for clubs to have cover charges of $35, $40 or even $50 -- necessary to fly in DJs from London, Amsterdam or even Ibiza and pay them the going rate of $35,000 for a night's work.
But now, customers can't -- or won't -- pony up for high cover charges plus drinks at $10 apiece for a night's entertainment.
Among the new crop of trendy bars, the most popular are Pink, Levende Lounge and Le Duplex in the Mission District; Lime in the Castro; Mars Bar and Anu in the South of Market area; Fluid Ultra Lounge downtown; Bambuddha Lounge in the Tenderloin; and Otis off Union Square.
Vast, by comparison, are mega-clubs such as Ruby Skye on Mason Street, a former theater with a balcony overlooking a dance floor; City Nights at Third and Harrison streets, with two floors for dancing and second-story "cages" for hired dancers; and the EndUp, a floor-to-ceiling tomb of a dance hall at Sixth and Harrison streets that is open until 6 a.m.
"I wouldn't go to Ruby Skye if you paid me,'' Eggleston said on the Mars Bar patio.
Another factor in the rise of small clubs is the aging of Generation X, loosely defined as people born from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. People in their 30s and early 40s are focusing more on careers, marriage and raising families, leaving less opportunity to party until dawn as they used to.
One result is daytime parties at Bambuddha Lounge in the Phoenix Hotel. Daniel Detorie, who has promoted a variety of events there, said Sunday afternoon poolside parties were popular this summer. The parties, called "Feather,'' ran from 3 to 9 p.m. and featured tropical drinks and DJs playing disco music for dancing.
"It was all about being seen in '70s clothes by the pool,'' said Detorie, a veteran of the straight and gay club scene for 20 years. "The trend is toward themed events like that."
Levende Lounge, a restaurant-bar-nightclub on Mission Street at South Van Ness, is popular with fans of hip-hop, which is played one night a week. It is an industrial oasis with warm overtones, styled in red brick, metal piping overhead and brown velvet curtains hanging in front of large plate-glass windows.
On a recent Thursday, after the dinner crowd had left, modular dining tables with couch-like seats were transformed into low-slung coffee tables where patrons sipped drinks. A flat panel TV that had been showing the sci-fi film "Logan's Run" was turned off, focusing the attention on music.
Michael Jimenez, a 32-year-old senior engineering director from San Carlos, drinking with friends, said he goes out four times a week and favors Levende Lounge because "it's not like the mega clubs where the atmosphere is like a big meat market.''
Between 10:30 and 10:50 p.m., nearly 100 people entered the club, which draws on average 400 patrons for hip-hop night, according to Dirk Kahl, a partner who once co-owned a nightspot in Miami's South Beach.
Among those was Jimenez's friend Alice Wu, 26, a paralegal from Emeryville who joined him for the dance party. She said her taste for large clubs has disappeared entirely.
"I don't want to come home with music ringing in my ears, tired of fighting the scene,'' she said. "You can't have fun with your friends because you're distracted by lights, the music volume and people bumping you all the time.''
The quest to provide something intimate was behind the newest of a growing crop of ultra-small lounges, Le Duplex, opened by Sami Elabed, a former manager at the Kensington Park Hotel, Raphael Coeffic, who runs the Little Baobab restaurant in the Mission, and Antoine Crumeyrolle, a real estate agent.
The partners, all originally from the south of France, say partygoers want to be cozy, so they promote bottle service, which is popular in France and in larger American cities such as New York, Miami and Los Angeles.
Bottle service coddles guests by providing them with a reserved table in a VIP section, so they don't have to stand or angle for a seat all night long. For the luxury of a table for four upstairs, above the club floor, there is, of course, a price: single bottles of liquor start at $150. (Fruit juices for mixing are free.)
"A big club is a box you dance in and go home,'' Elabed said. "The smaller a club is, the more people want to come to it. The darker the lighting, the closer the people are to each other."
A shift in the drug culture also might have contributed to the trend toward small clubs. Several people interviewed at bars and lounges said that in the early years of rave parties, people favored ecstasy because it made the user feel happy and at peace -- allowing 5,000 people to dance side-by-side without feeling claustrophobic.
Today's drug scene, they said, has veered toward methamphetamines and to the 1970s and '80s drug of choice, cocaine -- which creates a more agitated vibe.
"Speed and Crissy (crystal meth) changed everything,'' said Lisa Mills, 36, sitting with friends at Mars. Mills said she went out dancing almost every night in her late teens and early 20s.
Before speed, she said, "the scene was all loving, giving, let's experience this together -- it was safe, and everybody loved each other. The environment that was loving became paranoid. It got really ugly and hard.
"Small clubs are the only place I can find the intimacy and the attention, where the DJ is watching our response in deciding how to mix the music.''
Promoters Nabiel Musleh and Martel Toller have watched the club scene evolve since they ran the biggest warehouse parties in San Francisco in the 1980s. In the 1990s, the advent of electronic music ushered in the rave scene, and then electronica fell to hip-hop music and the rise of the superstar DJ.
By 2002, attendance at the giant parties began falling off.
"In Los Angeles, people are going out with a vengeance,'' Musleh said. "San Francisco, for some reason, after the dot-com bust, it's never recovered. There's a lot of cool parties that happen, special events, but they're not every week.''
Musleh and Toller saw the changes coming and, being aging Gen Xers themselves, branched into a new line of work that fit their sensibilities -- restaurants.
Along with occasional theme parties they produce at Ruby Skye, they are co-owners of Oola restaurant on Howard Street and the Sushi Groove chain on Russian Hill, in the South of Market area and in Walnut Creek. The restaurants feature food in a stylish setting with pulsating downbeat music.
"The music is chill -- what you'd get if you mixed Herb Alpert with electronic music,'' Musleh said. "The music we play at Sushi Groove adds to the dining experience. It feels sexy. That's the kind of mood we're trying to put out.''
Otis Lounge, on Maiden Lane, is the smallest kid on the block with an occupancy limit of 49, but it has perhaps the largest ambitions.
In opening the lounge, proprietors Damon White, a New York City native and club promoter from Los Angeles with East Coast prep school ties to San Francisco's society set (some of whom invested in the club), and Joseph Latimore, an Atlanta native who has managed bars in New York and Los Angeles, sought to draw a crowd that crossed economic, racial and professional lines.
"Although San Francisco had a lot of good places, there wasn't anything with New York flavor,'' Latimore said on a recent weekday as deliveries were made to the club. "Here, everything was homogenous -- a place was either all Asian, or all gay, or all dirty rockers, or all suits, a strictly professional crowd. There was no room we encountered that had a mixture of these communities.
"Go to Manhattan, you have older, younger, artists, professionals all in the same bar.''
Otis, with no sign at the door, no posted street address and no listed telephone number, initially was billed as a private club -- just the sort of thing that builds mystique in Manhattan, where lots of people clamor for the status that only a privileged few are granted.
Otis technically is not private, but it does have a VIP list, like other San Francisco nightspots, allowing its preferred customers (dubbed "members") to enter before others.
On a recent Saturday night, Otis was filled with guests for a cocktail party-fundraiser for Hurricane Katrina relief, and to introduce guests to One, a global campaign against poverty and AIDS supported by the singer Bono, tech billionaire Bill Gates and others.
"Every time I come in here, it's the only time I feel there's a real renaissance in San Francisco,'' said Mireille Schwartz, 32, editor in chief of Bientot magazine, who with cinematographer Cameron Noble, 42, was tucked into a corner of the upstairs.
Schwartz said that as an African American and a single mother, she likes Otis for the security of knowing whom she will see. The club managers are both African American.
"There's a multicultural, multiracial thing that permeates throughout," she said.
Whether Otis and the other small clubs have staying power is uncertain. Michael O'Connor, 36, who sits on San Francisco's Small Business Commission, knows from experience that fads come and go.
He owned the Justice League at Divisadero and Hayes from 1996 to 2002 and is a co-owner of the Independent, a live music club that sprang up in its place.
"This current trend is a reaction to the impersonal nature of big clubs,'' O'Connor said. "A couple of years from now, the pendulum will swing back.''
E-mail Carolyne Zinko at [email protected]. |
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| DjWoody |
I agree with that article. I been noticing the same trend here in LA for quite a while now.
:D |
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| TSG |
| quote: | Originally posted by DjWoody
I agree with that article. I been noticing the same trend here in LA for quite a while now.
:D |
What trend is that? Reading long articles put me to sleep plus I'm at work. :nervous: |
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| DaveT |
I personally think the article is just...well, it doesn't get both sides. Everyone interviewed is 35+ in it and of course most people who are that age are not going to want to deal with hectic, crazy huge clubs and its crowds.
At that point, it's largely about just going to hang with friends and enjoying music while chatting. You can do that at lounges/real small venues.
I think the big difference between full on clubs and lounge type settings is that you don't even need to know anyone at clubs to have a blast. Long as the vibe and music is great, you can jump around and dance like crazy...at lounges, if you don't really known anyone it becomes a really uncomfortable setting rather quickly.
Dave |
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| ninetyninej |
| Interesting article....a similar trend has happened in Sac, which started about the same time in 2002, with lounges and small bars taking over. Most of them play top40/hiphop with the exception of a few that play house (like the new "The Park Ultra Lounge" downtown). |
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| TSG |
| Oh hellz no! No lounges, small venues or chatting (gossip is what it is) for me. I've always preferred the large clubs with large dancefloors and plenty of room to move around (Yeah CIRCUS!!!) and being able to dance all over the place. |
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| gehzumteufel |
| quote: | Originally posted by ninetyninej
Interesting article....a similar trend has happened in Sac, which started about the same time in 2002, with lounges and small bars taking over. Most of them play top40/hiphop with the exception of a few that play house (like the new "The Park Ultra Lounge" downtown). |
haha sac had a nightlife? sac has the tyest nightlife ever. everything in general closes by 9pm and then the people that are out after that are doing stupid . i lived there my whole ing life and not one person i knew would ever say sac had a good nightlife. they always said it was very mediocre and that SF was 100000x better. sacto = place where people move cause they want a bigger house for less money than it would be in bay area. |
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| lex400sc |
Lounges aren't even in the same scene as clubs really. The lounges I've been to in the city feel very exclusive... everyone in the place always glances over at the door when someone walks in and if you don't know anyone it's always more of the "what are you doing here?" look. And yeah, everyone there is like ten years older than the club crowd, sipping wine and cocktails in booths rather than dancing with beer and liquor in their hand. I felt very out of place as a 23 yo. Some lounges are way too bright, some are annoyingly dark and loud music sounds like crap in all of them because they're acoustic nightmares (lots of small brick boxes).
Right now hip-hop and house clubs are still doing very well in the bay, the decline seems to be isolated to the Superstar DJ acts, which I've noticed a thinning of the crowd in myself :(. But trance has died down and made a comeback in South Florida too no? I think clubs in SF will make a rebound as Love Parade brings more exposure to this area, but a big part of it is the club atmosphere and crowd too. If we had clubs and crowds as nice as LA, there wouldn't be a problem. People my age are still paying $20 covers 2-3 nights a week for no-name DJs at nicer clubs... |
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| TSG |
| People are forgetting about the freshly "just turned 21" peeps that are now showing up at the clubs. It's a cycle. People I know that are in their late 30's and 40's +, are now out clubbing again. Why? Cuz most of their kids have grown or they're getting baby sitters cuz they still love music, dancing and partying. :D |
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| DaveT |
I think we are more in a transition of people looking for a new DJ to obsess about. Back in the day it was Sasha & Digweed here…then it became PvD and Tiesto. PvD on NYE will only be his second time playing here this year and the only other time he played here was the night of Love Parade, which made that night absolutely not about pleasing the local scene so I don’t count that. Tiesto has not played AT ALL in SF this year. None, zilch. And from what I hear, thank Godskitchen and Tiesto in Concert in restricting where he has been able to play out here. Could be wrong there, though.
Deep Dish still draws an amazing crowd.
Armin’s crowds are very, very packed. But I think they would even be more packed if he played at Mezzanine. I know a large chunk of crowd types that Armin would also bring in at Ten15 dare not step into Ruby Skye because they are so out of place there. Too bad Mezzanine’s sound has gone into the crapper (not kepted well tuned) and it’s DJ booth setup is still pretty crappy.
Sasha and Digweed both bring in big numbers, too….but you don’t see the mayhem you used to with them. They are a couple of the few DJs who can bring out what is more of the “lounge” crowd now.
Ferry brings in a solid crowd, but just isn’t up there with some of the others. I think it’s largely because of his PR though. If he had a good PR team behind him to push him out here, he’d tip that scale and bring in massive crowds.
Didn’t see Oakey the last two times he’s played here. Know in Jan 2004 that he completely sold out Ruby Skye. In Oct 2004 when he played with Sander K it was hella packed (on a Sunday night….Halloween) but not sold out….and Sander K blew Oakey away, lol. Last two times have been during the week so they don’t count.
Tiesto. Last time he played was on a Wednesday night….and I don’t remember if it sold out but it was pretty packed. Time before (Jun 2004) I am pretty sure it did sell out and it was f’in nuts in there. Remember it being $45 at the door.
Anyhow, seems like SF might start seeing what LA gets a lot with the likes of Digweed and PvD on a consistent basis. The huge DJs during the week or on Sundays. DJs are much cheaper and are going to be relatively close in numbers….I imagine profit margins probably being higher between everything, though.
Wow….I’ll stop rambling now. I probably don’t make any sense at this point. |
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| *InVeRs3* |
| Thanks DaveT :wtf: :toothless |
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