Club Venom. Sounds kind of cheesy, right? Sounds like a bar full of blacklights and hyperbolically caricatured cyber-Goth dancers in some regrettable future-set action movie that went straight to Cinemax. Where the young, hot, female street-punk/ace hacker tells the grizzled ex-fed to meet her when she finally decides, against her better judgment, that she's going to help him solve the crime.
"If you want to know who killed your wife," she says, climbing out of the wrecked car as the sirens draw closer, "be at Club Venom at midnight."
Actually, there's a very real and relatively new Club Venom in St. Petersburg. The club does cater to extreme-music fans — hosting live pummel from death metal to punk to industrial five, six, sometimes seven nights a week — a fact that might bring to mind the aforementioned, hopelessly unrealistic celluloid clichés. And on the occasion of a Tuesday-night hardcore show, the place does call up certain cinematic associations. But the connections I make are with the flicks that got it right (The Decline of Western Civilization, the first Suburbia, Repo Man) rather than woefully wrong (basically anything that cost more than $1-million to make).
The place does have a buttload of blacklights, though.
The building, located at the corner of 49th Avenue N. and 66th Street just west of Kenneth City, may have been a bar more than once over the course of its existence. The low-slung ceilings, half-of-a-warehouse construction and pale, well-lit anteroom with its glass display cases, however, lend the feel of a roller rink, a skatepark, a youth center, some complex conceived with the intention of giving the bored and underage someplace to go.
Which, tonight, Venom basically is.
Beyond the anteroom, in the club's girdered, columned, enthusiastically darkened main cavern, 150 kids dudded up in their punk-rock best mill about. The vast majority of them are old enough to drive but too young to drink, high-school students with an 11 o'clock weeknight curfew and a summer schedule the first week or so of school has done nothing to diminish. Almost all wear the uniform of hardcore punks, fans to whom the hooky, melodic pop-punk bands of radio and the Warped Tour are wimpy bullshit sellouts. They prefer the chaotic, nihilistic sprint of hardcore bands, "oi" bands, crusty-punk bands, gutter-punk bands, bands whose disenfranchisement, small cliques and comparative anonymity mirror their own. And they loudly announce their fandom with their appearance: 10-inch liberty-spiked mohawks, scuffed leather biker jackets in the sweltering heat, cloth band-logo patches safety-pinned rather than sewn on, skinhead-style braces and boots, black everything, pierced everything.
I grab a beer and wade into the back of the crowd in front of the stage, trying hard and failing miserably to appear inconspicuous in jeans and a shit-brown long-sleeve button-up.
The majority of Club Venom gives off the vibe of a hastily thrown-together hangout; a work-in-progress whose progress has slowed to a crawl since the doors started opening almost every night. The excepted details are the two roomy bars and the stage: a sturdy, carpeted, wide performance space of medium height. It features a slight lip for maximum rock-stance foot placement, a surprisingly killer sound system, and a huge backing mirror where the club's logo is painted in what one assumes is supposed to be an appropriately menacing font.
In front of the mirror, a band called A Global Threat careens through blistering, unintelligible verses and shout-along choruses. Though it's scarcely 10:15 p.m., they're the last band on the bill; mindful of the fans' predominant age range, the venue started the show early, and I've missed the group I came to see, a politically conscious hardcore act from Huntington Beach, Cal., called F-Minus.
In front of the band in front of the mirror, the crowd has assumed a shape that concert-going fans of other genres might find strange, but that punk and thrash pundits consider standard operating procedure. Behind the two or three rows of people jammed up against the stage, a circle 10 feet in diameter yawns, ringed by the remainder of the throng. Every half a minute, one or two or 12 dudes will come flying out of the masses and into the circle, or around it, or straight across it, knocking into and being propelled along by as many people as possible for a bit before disappearing back into the crowd.
Purists will tell you there are various minute differences between moshing, slam dancing, circle pitting, etc. But in essence, the pit is home to three kinds of activity: Hammy, hey-look-at-me attention seeking. The physical expression of exhilaration inspired by the music. And petty, violent bad-ass posturing by large guys who think, deep down, that they might be homosexual, and that that would suck if it turned out to be true.
Tonight, there's a lot of the first, a whole lot of the second, and, thankfully, almost none of the third. Two dudes decide to lock crossed arms and go windmilling into the backs of the kids at the foot of the stage; security intervenes, and they cheerfully go back to knocking the crap out of their appreciative friends.
One of the most exciting things about a hardcore show, and one of the things that sets that scene most decidedly apart from popular music, is the complete lack of division between performer and audience. A Global Threat's set provides a palpable sense of interaction, with conversation between band and crowd becoming as much a part of the experience as the music. Some of the catcalls are sent in jest ("Go back up north, Yankee!"), but harsher jibes visibly irritate the group's singer. At one point, he offers the microphone to a particularly loud heckler who, naturally, declines to take the stage. But a dozen others do so for the final tune, crowding the backup mics for the choruses.
Fifteen minutes after the last note fades, other than a group of young fans perusing the merch table, Club Venom has been left to the drinkers. I am delighted to discover that liters of domestic drafts are three bucks. A trio of skinheads at the other end of the bar talks quietly and drinks imports. Three girls in strappy wifebeater undershirts and bondage skirts meaningfully eye the sign at the entrance to the dressing room that says "Members of F-Minus and A Global Threat ONLY;" after no bouncers have been spotted in the vicinity for awhile, they get up and brush by it. CDs play over the PA and are virtually indistinguishable from any of the songs played by the band earlier.
"First time here?"
A guy in a Club Venom Security T-shirt, but who looks more like an ex-college football player with a business degree, introduces himself and shakes my hand. He obviously can't buy that I might've come to see the bands. He tells me that pretty soon, this cool, communal, half-done club will start offering entertainment other than live heavy music — you know, trance DJs, house music, maybe an Old Wave night, drink specials — while I sit there and drink my beer and wonder why the hell they would want to do that?
Scott Harrell can be reached at 813-248-8888, ext. 109, or by e-mail at scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Aug 28 – Sep 4, 2003.
