Joshua Glazer, Editor for DJ culture magazine URB, feels the marketing effort did little to tap into actual DJ culture. “Sure, they paid some of the top earners, like Z-Trip and DJ Shadow, to be a part of the game,” writes Glazer on Huffington Post yesterday. “But Activision’s real media buy seemed to center around TV ads featuring Jay-Z and Eminem (two acts who have very little actual connection to DJ culture) in a cynical bid for mainstream appeal.” I can see his line of thinking here, but I disagree. Especially with his new album, Jay-Z is getting a lot of play in the clubs, and why shouldn’t gamers want to come home and recreate that experience themselves? Plus DJ culture is something that most in the mainstream don’t understand. In order to overcome this, a populist game such as DJ Hero needs to be placed in the most familiar context possible.

The real reason is that DJ Hero falls short in game play. Where Guitar Hero grew into a social phenomenon, sparking get-togethers and themed club nights with people dueling it out to their favorite Santana song, DJ Hero is pretty much a one-man-show. Its attempts to have multi-player functionality ultimately fail to create the same sort of excitement that its six-stringed counterpart does. Another reason—one that’s also being put forth on gaming blogs across the web—is that regardless of the expansive catalog of songs, the tunes are inevitably chopped up, cut into and out of while playing and this doesn’t garner the same sort of familiarity with the music that other music-based games do. This is something that actual DJs are probably used to, but for anyone else who’s getting their first introduction to turntablism, the chopped effect could be seen as a turn off.

Dani Deahl, a local DJ and one of the participants in our initial DJ Hero test drive put it best: “It’s too ‘DJ’ for the layman, and not ‘DJ’ enough for the DJs.”  I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Wicker Park’s most reliable hipster get down Rehab, every Monday night at Debonair Social Club, is finally getting proper recognition on the national stage. It made the move to Deb earlier this year from its previous home at Evil Olive. The new location helped it reaffirm its street cred amongst the spandex-loving and mustachioed masses. Now, its in the running for America’s Best Party in New York-based Paper Magazine’s annual poll. Rehab’s got some stiff competition running from Seattle, Washington, to Miami, Florida, so follow the link below to cast your vote:

Paper Magazine Nightlife Awards

If the party—in and of itself—isn’t enough to win your vote. Rehab head honcho Derek Berry has informed us that they’re going to make this Monday’s edition a nomination party complete with voting booths and free cans of PBR to all who vote.

Photos: Nick Aleck with Future Nostalgia Photos

Photo: Martha Williams

Kid Sister had this to say about the Roots during a recent interview with Nightlife writer Joshua Ferguson, “I love the Roots—I love you Roots!” (shouting into the recorder) “But! The Roots are like a conscious hip-hop band. Does that really mix with what we do? So we’ll see. I’m bff’s with ?uest so I don’t think he’ll take it personally.”

Photos: Robert Ayers

“When we opened that place and we were flying in DJs, you could get them for a certain amount of money and keep the door low. Guys you could get for $1,000 are now $3,500 plus expenses. Now, with the economy being as it is, kids can’t pay more than 10 dollars to get in the show. It wasn’t working out numberswise. That’s basically what happened.”

DJ crews such as Dark Wave Disco and Flosstradamus, nurtured with residencies at the 300-capacity Sonotheque, have now moved out of Sono’s range. They can play bigger clubs such as Smart Bar or crobar for more money. Same goes for Scion-sponsored DJ events. Sponsored DJ nights can bring in bigger crowds than they could four years ago, so they are being booked at much larger venues.

When new partners in Sonotheque, the Empty Bottle, introduced Terry and his partners to the Beauty Bar people, things came together nicely. “I didn’t want to put a For Sale,” says Alexander. “It was perfect; we sold it to those guys.  They’re doing a Beauty Bar. We’re gonna support it. We’re excited about it. The timing was exactly right for everybody. Some of the staff is staying there. Some went over to Big Star. Rarely does a place a close and you pick everybody and move them around and everything is going well.”

Sonotheque’s issue may be that it was too popular to be what it was intended to be—but not large enough to be a serious contender in the nightlife business. The place where Diplo, Grandmaster Flash and countless DJ legends and locals spun records was never intended to be a dance club in the first place. “We thought it was going to be a neighborhood bar with a really great sound system,” says Alexander.

Sonotheque’s music director, Joe Bryl, talked to me about his move to the Charleston—recently taken over by Jeremy Lewen—where he will be managing the bar and directing the music. He’s not expecting it to be a dance club. “Charleston is going to be the Charleston,” says Bryl. “If I would do a Brazilian night, it would be totally different from what I did at Sonotheque. Charleston is a bar where people sit down and have cocktails. You would make the music and the vibe different. There are many things I couldn’t play at Sonotheque I could play at the Charleston.”

“We’re just gonna run it as is. In 2010, after we do our build-out, we’re going to put a sound system in, not a club sound system of course, and just clean up the rough edges,” says Bryl. But programming could evolve to include “interesting jazz on weekdays, DJ music on the weekend,” plus Tunisian and other types of African music, funky jazz, garage bands from Peru—an altogether eclectic menu. Right now, he’s just getting his feet wet but envisions something roughly like a “Danny’s/Matchbox place with live music, sometimes.”

Sonotheque was the first club in Chicago to sport a Funktion-One sound system.

There’s been a lot of talk in the music corner here at Time Out, on the CTA and around town at gigs about what’s happening with Sonotheque. Despite the fact that I did some pre-construction work on the club way back when, worked and deejayed there early on in its history, and have friends and family on the ownership/management side at the club, I have had trouble getting all the details as to what is going on with Sonotheque. I knew that Joe Bryl, music programmer, had moved his Brazilian night to the Charleston, a bar/venue that will be going through its own changes. I knew that Sonotheque was up for sale within the past few weeks and interested parties from New York and Chicago were rumored to be buying the club and completely redoing it and renaming it. I finally just got confirmation from Pete Toalson of the Empty Bottle—big shout out to Pete for his help. Did I just get a scoop? Tell me I did.

“We can confirm that the current ownership group—one that includes Terry Alexander, Joe Bryl, Bruce Finkelman, Donnie Madia and Peter Toalson—have sold Sonotheque and it will close the week ending November 15th.  The new ownership group continues to include both Finkelman and Toalson, and now adds Paul Devitt,” writes Toalson in an email.

Paul Devitt is owner of the Beauty Bar franchises—which have a vintage beauty parlor theme—there are outposts in Brooklyn, San Francisco, Vegas.

I’d expect a rehab and a big change in the look and feel. We’ll have to wait and see about the music programming.

Double A, the much-anticipated lounge beneath Mercadito, is set to open November 12 at 8pm. Last week, I spoke with the club’s cocktail consultants, Tad Carducci and Paul Tanguay—a.k.a. the Tippling Bros—to find out everything I could about the bar. Read the excerpts from the interview to find out what’s in store.

How the Tippling Bros assembled an all-star bartending staff—and why those mixologists aren’t (yet) designing their own drinks

JK: We have a pretty small cocktail community in Chicago. When you went about assembling the team of bartenders at Mercadito, you definitely took some of the best bartenders in the city.
Tad Carducci: Yes, we did.
Paul Tanguay: Absolutely.

JK: What was your thinking behind that?
TC: First and foremost, it wasn’t to try to poach anybody from anywhere. I had personal relationships with basically everybody on the team, and months and months and months ago, we started planting the seed, saying, we’d love for you to come and help us out. And when we let people know that we were finally ready and looking, everybody that we opened with came to us and said, “Yeah, we absolutely want to come and work with you.”

JK: Did the two of you come up with all of the cocktails at Mercadito, or was it a collaboration?
TC: We came up with the opening cocktails—that was all us. Part of the reason we hired the team that we did was so that we develop the opening list, kind of to establish the Mercadito culture on the drinks side, and then the idea being to slowly give ownership to the team, utilizing their creativity. Our next menu changes will have more contributions from the bartenders. We’ll always maintain probably at least half of the cocktails on the list, but then leaving probably the other half for the bartenders to play around with and really get creative.
PT: In terms of building a team, if bartenders contribute to the menu, they feel like they’re part of it—they take ownership of it a little bit more.

Tad Carducci

Everything you want to know about Double A, or, the risks of opening a bar without a bar
JK: So is that the same team that will go to execute the cocktails at Double A?
TC: Yes, primarily.

JK: What’s the cocktail list like at Double A?
TC: Double A’s going to be interesting. At Mercadito, the focus is all agave spirits—tequila and mezcal. Double A, while it’s a tequila lounge, will be much more varied as far as spirits categories go. So we’ll have rum, we’ll have gin, we’ll have vodka cocktails. We’ll keep the menu down there a lot smaller—maybe between five and ten selections on the menu, and then we’ll have what we call “Dealer’s Choice,” or bartender’s choice cocktails every night to foster a lot more creativity with the bartenders and to allow our repeat guests to walk in, and if they don’t feel like looking at a menu, they don’t have to. We will be doing some bottle service as well, but we’re taking kind of a unique spin. Instead of offering the standard bottle-service presentation, we will offer freshly made mixes to be served with the bottles, so that, if somebody, let’s say, orders a bottle of tequila, they’ll get a freshly made cocktail that just needs to be assembled at the table.

JK: I heard the cocktails will be made table-side. Is that only for bottle service, or is that for all the drinks?
TC: It will primarily be for bottle service. I think the layout of the space is so unique that basically, every person that’s in the lounge—whether they’re sitting or standing—has a very intimate relationship with the bartender. So it’s almost as if all of the cocktails are being made tableside because it’s so small and because the bar is kind of built inside out, so everybody’s got a bird’s-eye view, got a vantage point onto the bar.

JK: What does it mean that it’s built “inside out”?
PT: There’s no bar!
TC: Our bar is basically a very long sort of work table that extends out of the wall into the center of the room, and the bar stations are built on the outside, so that you have two bartenders, one on either side of the table, who work facing each other. So basically all the seating is built around this communal table. So you could theoretically be standing next to the bartender as he makes your drink—immediately right next to him.

JK: Is that a set-up you guys have done before in New York?
TC: Oh no no no, this is unique to Double A, and it’s something we worked and worked and worked on, and there was a lot of going back and forth like, “Are we out of our minds?” “Is this going to work?,” because it presents some unique service issues. However, we took a leap of faith and we built this this way, and what we’ll need to do is very quickly establish the, the—
PT: The culture.
TC: The culture—not so much rules and regulations—but kind of the culture, the etiquette of Double A, meaning, although we foster that intimacy of standing next to the bartender, anybody who tries to interfere, let’s say, will be frowned upon.

JK: Interfere meaning….?
TC: Meaning try to grab a bottle, try to do something like that.
PT: Touching the bartender—
TC: In inappropriate ways, unless of course the bartender appreciates it. There is no room for us to tolerate [that], so that will be established right off the bat. But I think it will present a much more intimate experience for the guests.

Paul Tanguay

The Tippling Bros’ take on the Chicago cocktail scene
JK: Have you been drinking anywhere else in the city?
TC: We prefer to call that research. We have been researching in other places, and we’ll be doing some more research this evening: Violet Hour, Drawing Room, Crimson Lounge, Delilah’s.

JK: That’s all tonight?
TC: Potentially.

JK: Well have a good time, and thanks for calling.
TC: Thanks for talking to us. We’re so excited, and it’s tremendously rewarding to see what the reception has been so far for Mercadito.

JK: We don’t have a lot of ”scene” kind of places in Chicago I don’t think, so when a place like Mercadito opens here, you know, it’s a big deal.
TC: It’s funny, for us, being involved with it, we never thought of Mercadito as being a scene.  We thought of it being a great restaurant with a great bar, and we were, I think, all of us involved —not just Paul and I—were thrown for a loop initially when we opened at just how busy we were getting. I don’t think I ever expected that on any given night we would sell 400 margaritas, 300 of another of our signature cocktails, and a couple hundred of each other one. I think last week we sold 1,000 plus just straight margaritas. On top of all of our other signature cocktails. So it’s presented some challenges for us, in keeping the balance between our craft and what we do and volume.

JK: Are there things that you’ve had to change?
TC: There’s things that we’ve had to adjust, yes, in order to make service faster and consistent and not have the service bartender want to stab me in the heart.

Double A, 108 W. Kinzie St, (312-329-2444). Wed–Fri 8pm–2am; Sat 8pm–3am.

The ace shutterbugs from Darkroom Demons consistently capture some of the more amazing images of Chicago nightlife out there. It’s been a while since we featured their visual work on the blog—but when we got a look at their Halloween pics—vibrant, grimy, glam and just plain freaky—we just had to have ‘em. Here’s a compilation of Darkroom Demons Halloween 2009 photos from Angels & Kings, the Loft, Debonair Social Club’s anniversary party, and RiNo.

All photos: Darkroom Demons

Photos: Clayton Hauck