Updated 1 year ago
Discover a New York Times survey from October 1991 on the “alternative” music scene. Explore the clubs, parties, and unique subgenres of that era.
Found in Brooklyn storage: Oct ’91 NYT survey of “alternative” (remember that word?) music clubs and parties. See below.
I had just moved here. This article was a road map for me… but even this just showed the direction, not access. NYC nightlife was still pretty opaque – you had to delve, to strive to enter the inner sanctum. That “work” made it worth so much more. It was a virtuous cycle – all solutions involved just stepping outside your door, finding the promoters, the info lines, the guest lists. Self-repeating, because it just got better and better. And along the way, very very slowly at first, it snowballed and you picked up actual friends along the way.
You could do this on a shoestring budget. I was so poor I stole rolls of TP from my company’s bathroom, and, when out, got pretty good at nursing one drink the whole night. That was a good thing – kept me out of an early flameout with Michael Alig & Co.
And luckily for my transportation budget, it was all Manhattan. No one I knew ever went to Brooklyn, which I looked down on as dangerous, blue collar, uncouth, ghetto, bridge and tunnel. You didn’t live there because it was cool, you lived there because, full stop, you couldn’t afford Manhattan. I marveled at the $800 rent for a dilapidated massive corner retail space of a friend who lived near the L in Williamsburg.
It felt worth it to make all the sacrifices in living standards. Unlike my college town, then-sleepy Austin, NYC was an end game. A destination. People didn’t churn in and out – when they made it here, they stayed.
Finally, this was, to my memory, pretty much the last NYC era before mass Internet adoption, before it all split into so many little subgenres, where you could go hear many styles in one “underground” night and no one cared.
The core of this scene lived on in a few places such as the Batcave.
New York Times, October 20, 1991
Every week a small but fervent band of alternative-music devotees in their early 20’s makes a circuit of Manhattan clubs, most of them open only one night out of seven.
“I go out every night,” said Rona Geller, “because I live with my parents.” Duane Monsky said: “I’m a slacker. I have no job, no money, nothing. But I like to go out and hear music.”
Alternative music is a term used by the American music industry to categorize songs that get airplay only on college radio. People like Mr. Monsky and Ms. Geller, who pursue the alternative-club scene with a passion, call the music gothic (meaning rock with facetiously ominous or brooding lyrics) or industrial (computerized descendants of new wave and old punk).
A New Addition
In February 1990, Tony Fletcher and Neville Welles started Communion, a Tuesday night alternative club at Limelight.
Before then, alternative-music fans in New York had been served only by a storefront club called the Mission, on Fifth Street off Avenue B.
Attendance at Communion was sparse at first, but in the last 19 months the movement has grown so that a few thousand people may flock to the former Episcopal church on Avenue of the Americas at 20th Street, by any measure a significant club crowd for Tuesday.
The most obvious feature of a gothic club is religious parody. Crucifixes, votive candles and shrines are the decor, and nowhere have they more truly found their niche than at Limelight. The spectacle of a caged woman writhing in front of a stained-glass window to music by the Sisters of Mercy
is hardly for everyone, but it nevertheless sent Paul Brindle, a textbook publisher from Boston, and his date to the dance floor. They both seemed to be in their 40’s.
“This place is fun and inexpensive,” Mr. Brindle said. His companion added, “We never danced this close at church dances when we were young. They’d put a stick between you.”
According to Mr. Fletcher: “Industrial runs parallel to the techno scene; techno is hard house music from Europe or industrial with the lyrics dropped out. I’ll play an industrial song by Nitzer Ebb
followed by a techno song and see two different crowds dancing.”
No Bands to Follow
DB, the disk jockey at the techno club Brilliant (on Thursdays at the Bank, at Houston and Avenue A) revels in the “soulless” quality of techno. There are no bands to follow, he says, “just producers and 12-inch singles.”
When techno plays on the main ballroom at Communion, alternative-music purists flee to the Chapel, a club within the club, where another DJ, Dave Kendall from MTV’s “120 Minutes,” plays gothic music. The Chapel scene is ruled by a number of guest-listed Fashion Institute of Technology students who share cigarettes, are fond of the phrase “I’m parched” and look down on the “rich kids from Pratt,” as one F.I.T. student put it.
Just as poorer scene-makers rely on disk jockeys to get into clubs free, clubs need the devoted alternative-music disciples to validate the scene. When Jhan Dean Egg, a soft-spoken man with a shaved head and a pierced nose and tongue, came to the opening of London, a club that materializes on Wednesdays at 19th Street off Fifth Avenue, he found his name on the guest list. Despite the abundance of black-clad patrons, he was disappointed.
“It was too full of regular people,” he said. “And I get tired of hearing the same 20 songs over and over: Meat Beat Manifesto’s “Psyche-Out,”
those two Nine Inch Nails songs.”
Reese, the DJ at Troublemaker, at Washington and 14th Streets in the meatpacking district, said his Thursday club draws “a hard-edge crowd, but everybody gets in,” meaning ordinary-looking people are admitted. “I discriminate only against the techno, rhythm crowd that’s latched onto industrial,” he said.
Thinking Black
When choosing tights, sleeveless turtleneck mini-dresses, blazers, nail polish, garters, fishnets, trenchcoats and Doc Martens, clubgoers think black. Men can wear white Front 242 T-shirts or navy-blue eyeliner or have green mohawk hairdos. Women — who can have tattoos — cannot wear pink lipstick (burnt orange, burnt crimson, even purple are fine).
In the downstairs lounge, a dark room permeated with the smell of clove cigarettes and patchouli oil, a group took a passing interest in a video of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salo.” Samantha Steiger, who was walking a toy dog on wheels, said she preferred the intimate scene on Mondays at the Pyramid Club, at Avenue A off Sixth Street, run by Michael T.
Hundreds of shadowy minions follow Ward 6, Jeffrey (Father Jeff) Cylkowski’s year-old club, from one end of the city to the other. One Saturday night, when Ward 6 popped up at 16 West 22d Street, the black basement of the Cadillac Bar, Ms. Geller, who studies at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, had trouble making her friends out in the darkness. She could make out only that the club was “infested by some abnormal species,” one she certainly approved of. Her mood lightened further when Father Jeff played an old song by Depeche Mode.
Father Jeff, a lawyer by day, also spins the usual industrial groups like Thrill Kill Kult, but says he won’t allow slam-dancing. “People want to slam when any industrial is played,” he explained. “When people start jumping on top of each other, I’ll play Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon.”
Thrashing Bodies
Roughhousing used to be half the fun at Censored, the former Friday night alternative at the Building on 26th Street off Avenue of the Americas. When Ministry’s anti-establishment song “Thieves” climaxed in an ironic machine-gun exhortation to “kill, kill, kill,” followed by a sound bite of Richard Nixon, saying, “I want peace,” bodies thrashed about, and dancers clustered to watch the melee.
On Oct. 11, Censored was evicted, not because of violence but because, said the Building’s owner, Howard Schaffer, the alternative scene was “financially not viable on weekends.” The clientele, largely 18 to 20 year olds, couldn’t legally drink.
In any case, Dante Maure, Censored’s original promoter, had workers distributing fliers for Evolution, a new alternative night opening Friday at the Big City Diner, on 43d Street and Eleventh Avenue. There he promises to play music by the radical vegetarians Consolidated, techno by the Shamen and, he says, “a lot of B sides from the top 10 industrial bands.”
