KING OF CLUBS STILL BIG FAN OF NIGHTLIFE
How Adelman kept the beat going at city’s hottest venues
In the snarky, snobby world of clubbing, you’re either on or off the list.
Unless you’re Steve Adelman — then you write the list.
For decades, Adelman was the director of some of the East Coast’s biggest clubs. He oversaw mammoth music-driven parties at Manhattan hotspots the Roxy, Limelight, Tunnel and Palladium. Later, Adelman built his empire with new clubs in Boston, Los Angeles and Singapore. He moved in a world of sex, drugs and electronic dance music. And somehow, he survived it all.
“Nocturnal Admissions: Behind the Scenes at Tunnel, Limelight, Avalon, and other Legendary Nightclubs” is his story, a peek at what went on behind those velvet ropes. It’s also a defense of that raucous, rowdy world.
“Nightlife is critical to our well-being,” Adelman insists. “It has always filled the universal need for the ultimate escape, a place to forget your worries, fears, and problems while bonding with others, if only for a few short hours.”
Adelman fell in love with nightclubs early, watching reruns of “I Love Lucy.” To a wide-eyed 6-year-old in Essexville, Mich., nothing was more magical than the Tropicana club, with its exuberant audience and pounding music. “I wanted to be Ricky Ricardo,” he confesses.
Later, Adelman decided that was an impossible dream. He majored in economics in college in the ’80s, going on to graduate school and, at 26, a job with “a prestigious Boston firm, where I proceeded to dread every moment,” he writes. “I left after six months.”
A chance meeting with an investor in a new nightclub led to a job going over their finances. But, Adelman says, he spent little time crunching numbers.
Instead, he learned the business — from dealing with liquor suppliers to planning events.
The first gala he mounted was “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” night, inspired by the cult comedy. Loudspeakers blared the movie’s theme song while, up in the balcony, Adelman launched 50 red, oversize beach balls onto the dance floor.
The night was not a hit.
The next month, though, Adelman organized a party devoted to the Seven Deadly Sins, with RuPaul as host. That night was a smash, and RuPaul was impressed. When a friend mentioned Manhattan’s Roxy club was looking for a new director, RuPaul said he knew just the guy.
With just five months’ experience, Adelman got the next plane to New York.
The Roxy had been a roller-skating rink, then a roller disco. As a club, it had found some success with “Locomotion,” a weekly dance party popular with drag queens and Chelsea “muscle boys.” Adelman saw the future. He doubled down on gay-friendly events and DJ-driven music.
Party themes ranged from “Night of a Thousand Chers” to the “Leather Daddies Christmas Spectacular.” A giant swing hung over the dance floor. Underneath it supermodels, chic designers and the neighborhood’s anonymously fabulous posed and partied.
Roxy’s biggest competition came from the nearby Limelight. A former church, its bizarre parties starred camp celebrities like Tina Louise from “Gilligan’s Island,” who ran a kissing booth. A growing gang of “Club Kids” — bizarrely dressed, heavily madeup partiers — were simultaneously the core audience and the free entertainment.
Adelman joined the rival operation, already growing at a tremendous rate. Owner Peter Gatien, a colorful impresario with an eyepatch and a taste for hard partying, soon bought the Palladium club. Then he opened Tunnel, and finally a new midtown space, Club USA. And Adelman helped run all four.
But the anything-goes ’80s had been over for a while. Now it was the ’90s, and Rudy Giuliani was mayor. Calls grew to clean up Manhattan’s increasingly grimy nightlife.
There were stories of open drug dealing at Limelight and Tunnel. One clubgoer was thrown out and later died on the street of an overdose. One club kid killed another over an outstanding drug debt. By 1996, the DEA was involved, accusing Gatien of running “drug supermarkets.”
Gatien was acquitted, but his massive legal bills — and an ensuing prosecution for tax evasion — left his empire in tatters. By the end of the decade, the entire scene was reeling. Although Adelman was never implicated in anything illegal, he planned a cautious retreat.
“Giuliani was not about to make it easier for those in nightlife,” Adelman writes. “Given what NYC had now become, it was time to pick my cards up off the table and move on.”
And so he went back to where his career had begun — Boston.
Boston didn’t have Manhattan’s hip reputation, Adelman acknowledges, but it had one huge advantage: “the world’s largest per capita student population.” And all those stressed students had to party somewhere.
By 1998 Adelman was running the Avalon, with the hottest DJs and flashiest crowds. Live shows were part of the mix, too, with one sellout crowd watching Green Day or Iggy Pop, only to be ushered out to make room for the following multitude, there to sweat and sway to electronic dance music.
But Adelman had new responsibilities now and new challenges.
First, there were the employees themselves. Most were wonderful, but two had figured out a way to secretly skim money, handing out fake tickets and then pocketing the admission fees. Their take over a few short months? $28,000. Adelman got one crook to turn on the other, then had the mastermind led away in handcuffs.
Years later, the thief had the audacity to ask Adelman for a reference. He was trying to get a job at another nightclub, Avalon’s biggest competitor. Adelman was happy to recommend him. He could steal from them now.
Then there were the stars. Performers’ demands had to be met, from specific foods to “no eye contact” with the staff. (Both Bob Dylan and Alanis Morissette initially refused to go onstage because Adelman had glanced at them.) Celebrities not only wanted comped admissions but perks.
“Ashton [Kutcher] needs a secluded booth and will be there with 10 people,” was one request. “Pink wants the menu sent to her,” went another. “She will be with six people and needs eight bottles of free Dom.”
People on the A-List — rock stars, movie stars, top pro athletes — had their demands immediately met.
People on the C-List — comedians, producers, reality show contestants — not so much.
Adelman would continue to expand the Avalon empire. He opened one in Los Angeles and, once the mood was more amenable, one in Manhattan, returning to the old Limelight space. He went international, opening a club in Singapore, and went down South, refurbishing the New Daisy Theatre in Memphis.
But while Adelman doesn’t come out and say it, it seems as if the thrill wasn’t there anymore. The chapters on these clubs are shorter and drier than the ones before. His interest seems to have cooled. And then COVID hit, with shutdowns doing the kind of damage to nightclubs that Giuliani could have only dreamed of. The rush was gone.
But Adelman will survive. And so, he insists, will nightlife. “Nightlife, in its many forms, is our permanent friend, always there when needed,” he writes. “Like most things of intrinsic value, it is rooted in simplicity — needs only a beat and a single disco ball to create magic and memories lasting a lifetime.”