So I get a call at around 7:45pm asking me to go down to the club to help set up. I’m making dinner, so I don’t get down there for nearly an hour. All reports about this place leading up to this, my first visit, were horrendously sketchy. After I get in there, the place actually looks surprisingly cool. Kinda like a bigger version of Neo in Chicago – ya know, the all-black paint, weird risers near the walls, long bar, etc. First thing I hear from my friend Greg is that someone was shot with an AK-47 outside the place last weekend. Just what I wanted to hear, regardless of how factual it was.

So… when we arrive none of the sound is in place. After an extremely tedious process of moving an entire PA from the downstairs to the upstairs of this club, we start to hook this thing up. The entire DJ booth is run out of one wall outlet. 1500 Watts of power running through one wall outlet. Imagine 7 washer/dryers in one wall outlet. INSANE! Not to mention that all of the PA speakers are hooked up with normal speaker wire, like you and I have at home, from the aforementioned 500+ watt amplifiers. I can simplify all of this by saying it’s a fire code inspectors worst nightmare…. 5 minutes of testing the sound with 2/3rds of the speakers hooked up, the entire DJ booth goes dead. The owner of the club didn’t even know where the fuse box was! He wound up hooking up the DJ booth using the 20 foot extension cords you’d find in your garage to outlets on the other side of the room. WHAT THE FUCK??? THEN, after all of this, and one of the speakers blowing at 1/2 volume, he tells me we have ruined his club. I was about to strangle the guy… There’s just no talking to him. So this process of trying to get things powered back up goes on for another 1/2-hour until 10:05, 5 minutes after we’re supposed to start, and then I go home to get some things taken care of before spending the rest of my night there.

I get back to the club around midnight, and the first thing I hear is that we’re not charging anyone at the door because the sound is not working. My friend tells me his set was interrupted 7 times by the owner asking to shut everything off while he rewired things (did I mention the owner didn’t show up until 45 minutes before we started)? I immediately have to jump into a conversation between one of the managers and a guy who is distantly affiliated with us that was trying to fix the sound, telling him to back off, that it was a totally futile effort. During the next 45 minutes we lost the monitors in the DJ booth twice, the second time the owner told us to go on without them… I just left. What a disaster.

Did I mention we had maybe 45 people of an expected 500??? Apparently word had gotten out about the danger of the night (probably a good thing all things considered), and the ravers steered clear. My friend’s warnings that we didn’t want to tarnish our reputation in such a shady venue rang completely true.

Cheers to Lev, the Czech beer selling for $6.49 at the liquor store next door. I’m the only person who buys it so they’ve got a huge backstock that’s dropped over $2 in price since I first tried it. It’s got a picture of a guy that looks like Shakespeare on the 6 pack. Well recommended after a frustrating night of anything. 🙂