Michael Alig (far left) and his Club Kid coterie in 1994. (Getty Images)
(
)
On Tuesday, the documentary “Limelight” arrives on DVD, offering an insider’s look into the heyday of New York’s most notorious ’90s nightclub, run by impresario Peter Gatien. Here, key players look back at the club’s glittering rise and shocking fall, before its glorious Gothicchurch home turned into a mall.
Jen Gatien, Peter Gatien’s daughter, filmmaker and “Limelight” producer: “Limelight has been in my life almost as long as I can remember. My dad opened the first Limelight club in Florida in 1977, then moved it to New York in 1983.”
Michael Alig, “King of the Club Kids” and Limelight party promoter: “When I was 18, in 1984, Limelight was totally uncool. My friends and I would pass it every night going to Danceteria. There were businessmen and women in skirts and tennis shoes coming from their office. But then it changed.”
Steve Lewis, director of Limelight: “I redesigned Limelight to take it from being good just one night of the week to being good every night. I booked events in there: fashion shows, art shows, DJs. So when the club was really fabulous, I’ll take credit for it. [laughs]”
Frank Owen, former Village Voice night-life reporter, author of “Clubland”: “Limelight had some of the best music I’d ever heard. I saw practically every major techno act at Lord Michael’s Future Shock night — Ultramarine to Prodigy to the Orb. Also, Funkmaster Flex’s hip-hop events were amazing. I first met Michael Alig in the late ’80s. He seemed as harmless as a powder puff.”
Brian “Fast” Leiser, Limelight receptionist: “I loved that every night Limelight had a different crowd: Sunday night was rock ’n’ rollers, Monday night it was closed, Tuesday night was industrial Goth night, Wednesday was freaky club kids, Thursday was a cool hip-hop/reggae/house night, and then Friday and Saturday were just mad techno.”
JEN Gatien: “I remember when I was 20, Bruce Springsteen walked up and said, ‘I’ve always wanted to come in here. Do you think I could get a tour?’ So I gave him a tour of the club, and it had this inflatable [Moon Bounce] — you know, one of those things that kids jump inside of. So we both took off our boots and jumped around. I’d regularly see celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Juliette Lewis, Adrien Brody, Vin Diesel, Chloé Sevigny.”
Alig: “I started Disco 2000 on Wednesday nights [in 1990], a multifaceted, pansexual extravaganza for the super-jaded, featuring topless green transsexuals and little old ladies from Pasadena that used to be men. Not your grandfather’s club!”
Owen: “All the club kids would make their own clothes. You didn’t go and buy a Dolce & Gabbana suit — that was tacky. The whole idea was that you were a character that you created yourself.”
Alig: “My favorite memory of Limelight was this magical time between 4 and 6 a.m. All the “normals” had gone home, and all that was left was a really fabulous group of club kids, drag queens and transsexuals, and everyone was really drunk and high on the dance floor, and you could see sunlight coming in through the stained glass windows.”
Owen: “The next time I saw Michael, he looked like a total mess. He’d gotten heavily into drugs. And of course once he got into drugs, he took all those club kids with him.”
Alig: “It started to turn sour when we were reaching our zenith. Suddenly, the music being made was our music: acid house. The fashion was our fashion: junkie chic. The trendy drugs were our drugs: ecstasy and heroin. Calvin Klein and Gaultier were coming to us for inspiration. It was our moment, but that’s really when we were all falling apart.”
Owen: “I remember standing on the balcony with Peter in ’95 or ’96, saying, ‘This can’t go on, the authorities are going to crack down.’ Kids were lying comatose on the floor.”
Lewis: One night in March 2006, “Michael asked to borrow my car, and I asked why. He said, ‘Well, I killed Angel [Melendez, his drug dealer], and I’m going to chop up the body, put it in a box, put it in your trunk and dump it.’ I said, ‘Michael, get the f - – k away from me.’ I knew he had gone down a very bad road with drugs, but this was the most absurd thing I’d heard.”
Alig: “I had been in my apartment with Angel and another club kid, Freeze. We got into a stupid argument over that black leather cap Angel wore. We just hated that hat. We were out of our heads on Special K and Rohypnol. Angel was biting me, and I was trying to make him stop, so Freeze hit him with the handle part of the hammer. Then I put a sweatshirt in Angel’s face. We were these lumbering K-hole oafs. We didn’t think he was dead until seven hours later. It was almost like a hallucination. [Not] to say that I am not completely responsible for it, because I am.”
JEN Gatien: “In May 1996, my father got arrested by 15 agents outside our door at 6 a.m., with a warrant saying he was part of a drug-related conspiracy [unrelated to the death of Melendez]. They tried to get him on racketeering charges for his personal drug use. He was acquitted on every count.”
Alig: “I was arrested in December 1996 and sentenced to 10 to 20 years. The feds wanted me to say that Peter was being paid off by drug dealers, but that absolutely wasn’t true. Right now I’m in Southport Correctional Facility and hope to get out in summer of 2012.”
JEN Gatien: “They arrested my father again and ended up deporting him back to Canada, basically for sales-tax violations — because he didn’t pay tax on the entries to the clubs. So now he can never re-enter the US under any circumstances ever again. He lives in Toronto now.”
Owen: “Never in a million years could a scene like Limelight’s happen again. These days, club owners [say], You want to make money in the club business? It’s simple: Just throw in a few banquettes, pay a designer, buy a bunch of vodka, and you’ll make money hand over fist selling bottles for $400.’ Think of the culture that came out of nightclubs in the ’80s and ’90s: hip-hop, house music, garage music. But nightclubs today are no longer cultural institutions.”
Alig: “Clubs like Danceteria and the World used to put fabulousness before business , but they didn’t last. Limelight was the transition: a successful business but still fabulous. Back then, [people said] Peter was all about money, but now you can see what a club owner who really cares about money is like. “It was probably better that Limelight was shut down by the feds. It’s better to go out at the peak of fabulosity than fade away into obscurity — what’s more boring than that? If you’re going to go out, go out with a bang!”