The Log The Words The Music The Photos Home

Reviews

"Clubland" explores New York City's dark side
 
BY PAULINE M. MILLARD
Associated Press Writer
 
NEW YORK (AP) _ "Clubland: The Fabulous Rise and Murderous Fall of Club Culture." By Frank Owen. St. Martin's Press. 323 Pages. $24.95.
 
The first few pages of "Clubland" make it seem like yet another book glorifying drug use in New York nightclubs in the 1990s. After all, it does begin in 1995 with author Frank Owen making his way through the Limelight nightclub hoping to score some drugs.
 
But, like the clubs themselves, the real story requires a closer look.
 
Beneath the clubs' glaring lights and blaring music is a darker side, one that starts with the best intentions of a disco open to all and ends with a body count.
 
For Owen, it began when he was a writer for the Village Voice and working on articles about Peter Gatien, who ran the Limelight and the Tunnel, two of the most popular New York clubs of the 1990s.
 
Owen hung out at the clubs and got to know four of the biggest players: Gatien, and promoters Michael Alig, "Lord" Michael Caruso and Chris Paciello. These four, entangled in a web of drugs, parties and power struggles, turned the two clubs into hot spots, gaining admiration from their patrons while arousing the ire of the police, who saw the clubs as centers of drug activity.
 
Owen's intimate tale of his five-year odyssey through the clubs and the various dramas and court cases that unfolded are the key ingredients that make this book such a fascinating journey.
 
At times Owen is just a fly on the wall, admiring Paciello as he climbs within the ranks of celebrity or making readers wince as Alig brutally murders a former friend. Owen has an astute eye for detail and shows readers every sequin worn by the partygoers and every smirk worn by the thugs he met along the way.
 
However, Owen is not always unbiased, especially when it comes to the trial in which Gatien was charged with operating the clubs as fronts for drug-dealing. Although there was drug-trafficking, Gatien claimed that he wasn't hiring drug dealers to come to his clubs, nor could he control every person's moves. "Owning a nightclub is like having three thousand children," Gatien said. "You can't be responsible for them all."
 
Owen frames the chapters involving the trial as a sort of witch hunt for Gatien conducted by the New York Police Department and the newly elected Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He even takes gentle jabs at the prosecutors in the courtroom, making fun of their clothing and how they speak. "(Michelle) Adelman _ whose constant nervous eye-blinking throughout the proceedings made it look like she was trying to signal the jury in Morse code: C-O-N-V-I-C-T-P-E-T-E-R-G-A-T-I-E-N _ did admit that some of the government witnesses were serious criminals."
 
But in the end, as some of the players go free while others are given lengthy prison sentences, Owen looks back on his years inside the dance halls with a fondness readers can share after spending 300-plus pages with him and his motley crew of clubbers.
 
While Owen never preaches about how big a role drugs played in the downfall of many of the key players, he acknowledges that using a nightclub as a common ground for all races and creeds in a place as eclectic as New York certainly seemed like good idea.
 
"I saw what went on at American clubs and raves as perfect but temporary democracies of desire," he writes. "An ideal world where racial, sexual and social divisions were dissolved in the communal abandon of the dance floor."