by Peter Gatien
Tunnel Sundays represented a sensational collision between Street and Industry. Record company A&R people were drawn to the nights like bees to honey. One of our regular patrons was a street-educated, South Bronx–born scrapper, Chris Lighty. He became a recognized fixture at Tunnel. Lighty was a take-charge kind of guy, a presence, a force to be reckoned with in pretty much any situation, no matter how extreme. His don’t-fuck-with-me nature came hard won, from a childhood growing up in the Bronx River Houses.
When I met him in the early ’90s, when he was in his midtwenties, Chris was already making moves in the music business. He’d founded a company called Violator, named after a street gang he’d been involved in during his youth. He displayed an instinctive business sense that was similar to Flex’s. The cliché had him educated in the school of hard knocks, but Lighty always put it a different way: “I gained my MBA in hell.” His “streets to the suites” saga would become the stuff of legend, and his self-made journey got a big boost at Tunnel.
Chris Lighty often took a place among the personnel at the door. He knew the troublemakers, because, like Lee Coles, he had a personal history with many of them. Chris looked kind of baby-faced, and he was ace at keeping his attitude neutral, not aggravating a situation by going all aggro himself. As a manager of young talent, he always boasted about his inside status at Tunnel Sundays. He put many of his protégés, including 50 Cent, onstage at the club.
The force propelling hip-hop into the mainstream was gangsta rap, the irresistible G-funk beats coming out of the West Coast hip-hop community in the late ’80s, beginning with NWA and especially the genius of its vanguard superstar, Dr. Dre. There’s a lot of debating the point, a lot of East-West rivalry, but the truth is that, in my club, gangsta rap was what finally bridged the underground-mainstream gap. A lot of bourgeois people cowering in their gated housing developments hated and feared the music. And if they didn’t hate and fear it, they failed to understand it.
White-boy Canadian that I was, I still heard the essential truth of rap right from the beginning. In the early 1980s, I saw how the Limelight dance floor convulsed when George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” came on the sound system; it was one of the first songs we ever played at the New York club opening. People howled. It was music-fueled ecstasy.
“To rock the Tunnel,” DJ Flex said, “you just can’t play it like any other club. It’s all about the people in that room, who are some of the most aggressive, most hip people on the planet. They saw artists like Jay-Z, Busta Rhymes, DMX, and Biggie grow from being in the club with them to being on the stage and then on MTV and beyond.”
I counted on associates such as Flex to keep me current, but I was also constantly reading, listening, absorbing what was happening in the culture. I dipped into dozens of magazines a month—at one time I counted over two hundred of the slicks lying around the house: news mags, fashion mags, music mags, top sellers like Vogue and Vanity Fair, alternative publications like SoHo Weekly News, PAPER, Details, and HX. Anything, everything, all the way down to random underground zines that were no more than a few xeroxed sheets stapled together. By the time a trend hit the pages of Time magazine or the New York Times, I knew it was already on its way out.
I understood one of the core truths of popular culture: if parents hate a type of music, it’s almost a guarantee their children will like it. Parents hated gangsta rap with a vengeance. They didn’t hear the pulse of life in it, but instead registered violence, threats, insecurity. It was designed to upset people, to rub their noses in uncomfortable realities. Brutal and muscular, this brand of hip-hop simply would not be denied.
“Rap music is funny,” Ice Cube once said. “But if it’s not funny, if you don’t get the joke, then it’s scary.”
I’m not sure if I really got the joke or not, but I definitely connected to the sound. Mainstream radio boycotted rap, with only a few exceptions. Tunnel, a solitary nightclub on the west side of Manhattan, became a conduit for what eventually rose to become the most dominant cultural trend of the day. Flex, Jessica, Chris Lighty, and I, a whole crew of us, approached the massive dam holding hip-hop back, took a few hammers and picks, and put a crack in it. The explosive force of what poured through was the Tunnel Sunday-night phenomenon.
It was hip-hop’s coming-out party.
The seventy-foot bar running down the center of the main room served as Tunnel’s central artery, delivering the buzz that kept the party going. It split the space in two, with the dance floor at one end and the stairs down from the entrance at the other. I kept a dozen bartenders working both sides, and made sure a few of them were big enough to double as bouncers.
No one had ever heard of bottle service back then. But when real money began to flood into the hip-hop community, nobody flush with new cash was going to be satisfied with just a single snifter of cognac or a few fingers of Jack Daniel’s. Everyone was trying to be top dog, and they wanted the whole world to see them succeed.
Patrons began ordering bottles of high-end French champagne—Moët, Cristal, and Dom, no glass necessary, thank you very much. The traffic got so fast and furious that the bar would run out and we’d have to raid Palladium or Limelight for resupply. Servers used to load a half dozen bottles into the plastic tubs of busboys and distribute champagne that way. It was lucky no one wanted glasses, because we wouldn’t have had enough to go around.
Plowing through a raucous club crowd while gripping the neck of your very own bottle of Cristal represented conspicuous consumption at its finest. Customers would keep the empty bottles in front of them on the bar so everyone could witness the impressive number they had purchased. One night I watched as Sean Combs and Jermaine Dupri competed not in a battle rap but in a bottle rap, seeing who could line up more dead soldiers, one side of the bar against the other.
In the beginning, at least, Sean Combs was king of Tunnel Sundays, back when he was still known as Puff Daddy. Combs was a gifted rapper—try listening to “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” without it going through your head for the rest of the day—but he started out as a promoter and manager. Puffy’s real genius lay in recognizing talent in others, putting together scenes, creating energy. He’s one of hip-hop’s most brilliant entrepreneurs, and in the early 1990s, when Tunnel Sundays were ramping up, he was just beginning to hit his stride.
Puffy’s joint, Bad Boy Records, brought along a relatively unknown and unproven Brooklyn nineteen-year-old named Christopher Wallace, helping to transform him into the Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Biggie Smalls. The gifted rapper pretty much single-handedly broke the dominance of West Coast hip-hop and pushed East Coast rap back to the forefront. Like a stand-up comic trying out his routines at a comedy club, Biggie developed raps live onstage on Sunday nights, including many cuts from his breakout 1994 release, Ready to Die. Week after week at Tunnel, I heard him work out a smoother, more fluid style. It was like watching Picasso paint or Michael Jackson choreograph.
Biggie was our guy, a creation of Tunnel Sundays as well as of the streets of Brooklyn. Dark and violent as his lyrics could be as he chronicled his upbringing in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Biggie appeared as a gentle teddy-bear presence at Tunnel. In the beginning, there was no VIP space on Sundays. The artists mingled with the crowd. Biggie wasn’t that huge a name before Ready to Die dropped. But insiders knew, and since so much of the Sunday-night crowd consisted of insiders (or people who thought they were), he was lionized, always getting a lot of love from well-wishers. Being mentored by Puffy helped.
Another Tunnel regular who was cut out of the Svengali Puffy mold, Jermaine Dupri, came in fresh off his success managing Kris Kross. The boys, Chris “Mac Daddy” Kelly and Chris “Daddy Mac” Smith, were still underage and couldn’t make the club scene. Dupri basked in the success of “Jump,” the blockbuster Kris Kross debut single that spent weeks atop the charts.
Jermaine Dupri and Puffy represented only one of the many rivalries on the club floor, face-offs between boroughs, between crews, between followers of var
ious artists. But the excitement everyone felt just being at Tunnel kept the atmosphere from boiling over. The clubbers were young and alive, the scene was fresh and new, and that made Sunday nights a be-there-or-be-gone phenomenon. No one had ever pulled off weekly hip-hop parties that attracted three or four thousand people a night. The promise I extended to them—that Tunnel would be safe and secure—made the nights into a rolling, one-of-a-kind party.
Most importantly, the safety measures allowed women to feel comfortable. While female rappers like Missy Elliott and Lil’ Kim made the scene onstage, the real lady action went down in the audience. Women came outfitted and coiffed to an incredible degree, not satisfied with being dressed to the nines but, like Spinal Tap’s amp, dialing it up to eleven. The nail-lacquer artistry on display deserved a fashion spread of its own.
Tunnel allowed women in free before eleven p.m., so the crowd was definitely estrogen heavy when the first wave of paying customers hit. The numbers wouldn’t even out until well after midnight, so the men had a kids-in-a-candy-store look in their eyes when they finally made it through the line, got searched, and entered the main room. The DJs would play mostly R&B for the ladies until the clock struck twelve, and when Flex dropped the first hip-hop groove, the dance floor seemed to explode.
Street plus Industry equaled a raised roof. Record-label execs and power brokers—some of them, like Chris Lighty, already in positions of power, but a lot of them not yet launched—made everyone in the club feel like someone was about to be discovered. Tunnel Sundays developed into a womb that gave birth to careers, recording contracts, chart-topping hits.
The list of label execs who saw their careers rise after frequenting Tunnel Sundays is stone-cold impressive: New York–born Lyor Cohen, brought into Def Jam under Russell Simmons, later became head of Warner Music Group and is presently global head of music for YouTube; Cohen’s protégé Julie Greenwald is now chair and COO of Atlantic Records; Todd Moscowitz rose to CEO of Warner Records, and Kevin Liles also became an exec at Warner. Joie Manda worked as a promoter before becoming VP of Interscope Records. They were all consistent presences at the Tunnel hip-hop parties, contributing to an intoxicating sense of possibility among the young and unsigned.
So the artists made a lot of great music on Tunnel Sundays, and the music industry spun off a lot of business. But juicing careers was never the main reason for the parties. Creating culture—those were the bywords I used to tell the troops at all my clubs, as a way of rallying them to the collective cause. Ever since I’d first started in the nightlife business, that had always been my goal. I never wanted simply to go through the motions of running a nightclub. I wanted something bigger, grander. My definition of culture was a communal form of creativity, like crowdsourced art.
A few of my staffers might have remained skeptical about my grandiose ideas. Tell the truth, Peter—I could see the judgment in their eyes. You are in the business of making money. A cynic takes the least influential aspect of anything and declares it the most important. I’ll tell you right now that money was never the real motivating force for me, not compared to stirring the pot of popular culture. Tunnel Sundays might have been lucrative, but more importantly, they turned out to be revolutionary.
Without experiencing it, it’s hard to grasp how the main room would become so densely crowded that at times no one could move. You had to shoulder your way through a great wall of flesh, VIPs and young fans crammed in together, sharing the moment. Jay-Z might be up onstage, rapping about the very place where we all were standing.
Me and my operation runnin’ New York night scene
With one eye closed like Peter Gatien
The week after Biggie Smalls died at the tender age of twenty-four, Flex cued up “Hypnotize,” and I watched as three thousand people in the club chanted along or silently wept. That night of mourning deepened the bonds of the community, getting beyond neighborhood rivalries or the East-Coast-vs.-West-Coast rap wars. The heartrending scene epitomized Tunnel Sundays for me. By design or by accident, we had managed to generate a real sense of kinship, an impression that everyone present was part of something great.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Plate Spinning
Tunnel admittedly took a lot of my attention, but I had three other megaclubs to run. I was forced to compartmentalize, breaking the business into easily accomplished tasks. For all the ink that has been previously spilled about the club world, an essential fact has been missed: Limelight, Palladium, Tunnel, and Club USA were each very different clubs on different nights of the week. A fashion-oriented party and a Goth night attracted totally different crowds, and I had to supply different music, different personnel, different environments, even different lighting to suit each clientele.
A sample weekly lineup at Limelight during the classic years, for example, included Rock-N-Roll Church on Sunday, Communion (Goth) Night on Tuesday, Disco 2000 on Wednesday, high-end fashion with DJ Jeff Mills on Thursday, and Techno on Friday; Saturdays were mixed, and Mondays were dark. Limelight wasn’t a single club, as outside commentators usually portray it. It was six or seven different clubs that happened to share the same venue. Only on Monday did Limelight remain dark, since we had to have at least one day for maintenance and repair, to recover from the wear and tear of some eighteen thousand patrons passing through on the other six nights.
On my nightly rounds I might first check in at Club USA for Bump, a gay-night party, with three thousand people packed into the venue. Afterward, I would head downtown to Palladium, where Nathan Lane was hosting a Broadway benefit, then jump westward to Tunnel, where Mary J. Blige performed, before finishing up the night with heavy metal at the Rock-N-Roll Church at Limelight, which played host to bands like Guns N’ Roses and Pearl Jam.
Between the four clubs, I was doing multiple separate theme nights, which sometimes made for a total of twenty-seven individual parties in a week. It was a crazy, exhilarating, punishing schedule. In the space of a few hours I was able to traverse an incredible variety of New York cultural scenes and become immersed in them all. It was a wonder I didn’t get whiplash. I had to employ three drivers—two full time and an extra one on weekends—just so I could make my rounds effectively. I routinely put in fourteen-hour workdays.
In that pre-internet world, nightclubs served as our Facebook, our Instagram, our Snapchat. If people wanted to discover new music, new fashion, new trends, they had to go to the clubs. No one could get a sense of the pulse by sitting at home staring at a screen. Record-label execs came out to hear which cuts got people up on their feet and dancing. Designers such as Alexander McQueen and Marc Jacobs likewise hit the nightlife world to scope out what trendsetters were wearing.
I’d see things on my dance floors that would show up a year or two later in suburban shopping malls. Lady Gaga’s outrageous style was born at my clubs. Voyeurism, S/M, glam, Goth, androgyny, the cult of the supermodel, hip-hop style, gay chic, outré chic, kiddy chic, retro chic, body modification, and antifashion fashion were all trends that grew out of the nightlife underground. I had to create environments where each of these radically different styles could fit in and thrive.
As the operator of a thousand-employee organization, I always had fires to put out somewhere. I scrambled to deal with a clause in Pearl Jam’s contract rider while at the same time advising the drag queen Lady Bunny on whether a pink or turquoise gown suited her skin tone better. I refereed spats between employees, monitored security arrangements, passed judgment on the success of this or that DJ.
Matching the right music to the right crowd could make or break a party. In the early days of Limelight, I recall agonizing over paying Moby the grand sum of $300 for a night on the turntables. Now, of course, superstar DJs knock down hundreds of thousands of dollars per appearance, and Calvin Harris recently topped the Forbes list of highest-paid DJs with yearly earnings of $48.5 million. Moby himself became a leading artist in his own right, with millions of records sold. He and I laughed recently as we remini
sced about the lowball Limelight fee.
“I did feel that three hundred dollars was a lot of money at the time,” Moby said.
When prima-donna DJ Junior Vasquez’s beloved Jack Russell terrier, Oscar, went missing and Junior was much too upset to show up for his weekly Palladium gig, I reached out to New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams. She ran an item on the missing-pet situation. Voilà—Oscar was found and the show went on.
A typical day in the life started at eleven a.m., when I arrived in the office (at Tunnel or Limelight) to deal with various duties, most of them involving staying on top of bookkeeping. I’d go through payroll, maintenance, readouts from the night before that listed cashier receipts from the door, bar, and coat check. Then I’d meet with the beverage managers to check on inventory.
At noon, promoters would begin to arrive, and the day would start to take on a speed-chess kind of atmosphere. I’d dash between my different offices, where there would often be two or three parties to plan for each upcoming night. This meant approving the budgets, checking out the invitation designs, and taking care of technical requirements such as sound and lighting arrays. I had to examine the contract riders for musicians slated to appear, which dictated that a certain kind of slippers had to be supplied from a specific luxury boutique, perhaps, or that two dozen white candles must be present but not smell of gardenia—all sorts of “no brown M&M’s!”–style demands.
I paid bills, oversaw supply contracts, made sure all the city permits and certificates of occupancy remained current. With fees controlled by some obscure actuarial calculus, liability insurance would cost $500,000 one year, then get lowered to $200,000 the next. Dealing with heating or air conditioning, addressing wear and tear on the premises, freshening club décor, getting four venues ready for their ten o’clock openings—it all demanded my attention. As I said, the real nuts-and-bolts work of operating a club always went on during the daylight hours.