dallaspenn.com

Dark Side to New York’s Neon Clubs

That NYTimes article depicts a time long past in NYC history. I remember the nights of going to some spot that would have an open bar and a $5 dollar cover charge, but we wouldn’t even have the $5 to get in so we would dig someone’s pocket beforehand. Silly kid shit is all it was to us. We had no consideration for what happened the following day as long as we were in the club that night. This was a daily operation too.

As we got older and doing dumb teenage shit lost its luster we moved into other business. Still going out to the clubs almost nightly and still living just enough for the city. For several years the city made it impossible for any nightspots to play Hip-Hop music. The clubs would open one week and be shuttered the next. The city has passed quality of life ordinances which would levy fines on establishments for complaints they received corcerning noise or trash on the sidewalk. During this time in the late 1980s-early 1990s there were several pop-up parties in loft spaces along Broadway. Milky Way, PayDay and $100,000 Bar come to mind because of their candy bar references. Wild Pitch was another party that accessed various Broadway loft spaces during its tenure.

Rap music didn’t have a dedicated home until the TRIP party opened up inside a former warehouse on Manhattan’s westside meat packing district. What was ill is that you could smell the blood on the sidewalks as you congregated in front of the club called Mars. The architects that I worked for knew every single club owner in the city because their office was where everyone passed thru to get the design assistance you needed to comply with some of the City’s arcane building and zoning code laws. Since I did the drafting for these projects I would visit the spaces long before they opened up and I would survey the spaces in order to complete the floor plans. I would mingle with the owners and managers and when the club’s opened I knew the right names to drop to get past the velvet ropes.

Mars was one of the dopest spaces I worked on because it wasn’t simply a wide open party area, but several different floors and rooms that were all interconnected. There was a floor for every genre of music that was underground at the time. There was the Hip-Hop floor which was the primary residence of DJ Clark Kent. Clark was the dude that crafted the Run-DMC ‘Peter Piper’ scratch. I remember seeing De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and Brand Nubian perform in the Hip-Hop room on different occasions. Mars also had a dancehall room, a house music room, a punk rock room and from time to time there was a techno room. The TRIP party brought all of these genres together for at least a few hours. The lead promoter was named Beasly and he was a skateboarder and club kid from the Chelsea projects.

Beasly knew all the club kids by face and he distributed a laminated card to everyone that he wanted to attend the TRIP party. Your laminate got you in the building without having to pay a cover charge. The TRIP laminates also put you down with other heads you might encounter walking the streets. Washington Square Park was the meet up location back then. I would have gone uptown during my lunch break to copp some weed or some tabs from Lexington Ave and then I would link with Soundwave or Polotron who would have a 40oz.(or two) of that Old Gold and the plan was in effect. We would be goofy on goofballs all night. Mars had this incredible sound system in every space where you felt like you were inside of the speaker and the beat was supplanting your heartbeat. The only respite from the sound would be up on the roof which is where I would go to burn my trees.

What made Mars so fux’n dope was how it intermingled the fans of all types of underground music. There were Hip-Hop heads who were finally exposed to house music and rock fans were getting their first taste of rap or reggae. Mostly it was this freeform environment where you could enjoy your favorite grooves while you were really high and no one said shit to you sideways. I credit Beasly for that vibe more than anyone else. If you were blessed with a laminate then you were going to have a good trip.

R.I.P. BEASLY