cover image The Club King: My Rise, Reign, and Fall in New York Nightlife

The Club King: My Rise, Reign, and Fall in New York Nightlife

Peter Gatien. Little A, $24.95 (280p) ISBN 978-1-5420-1530-1

Best known as the impresario responsible for some of New York’s greatest 1980s nightclubs, Gatien shows in workmanlike prose how he managed longevity in a short-fused business. Raised in a working-class Canadian town, Gatien parlayed restlessness and a chip on his shoulder to opening up a bar in Cornwall, Ontario, and booking up and coming bands like Rush when he was 21. Following “delusions of greatness,” he rode the disco wave by opening up Limelight in South Florida. In 1978 he repeated the Limelight formula in Atlanta with buzzy attractions (a live panther) and a belief that “clubs create culture” and would attract celebrities. In 1983, Gatien opened New York City’s Limelight in a deconsecrated church, hiring a “motley crew” that included promoter Michael Alig and the popular “club kids,” who helped keep the club and his later ventures, including the Palladium, relevant into the ’90s. Excepting the epochal hip-hop nights at Tunnel (he writes enthusiastically of Sean Combs and Tupac Shakur), Gatien gives short shrift to the gossipy particulars of N.Y.C. nightlife. The later stretches of the memoir detail the Rudy Giuliani–led crackdown that saw Gatien being accused, though later acquitted of, dealing ecstacy. Like the strobe lights at the clubs, the narrative is fast and furious but flimsy and fleeting. (Apr.)