Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Boogie Down Josh and there's Disco Stu Chuck.
And it's just the two of us because Diana Ross Jerry is not here right now.
Yeah, this is what I'm surprised we didn't tackle shortly after our disco episode as like a two parter.
It is a little surprising, isn't it?
But I hadn't heard of Studio 54 until you picked this.
So I don't know how that would have been possible.
I'm just kidding. I've heard of it.
I'm cool, man. I'm hip.
Even though I guess I was one year old to three years old when it was open.
So as it was going on, I wasn't aware of it.
But later in life, I kind of developed an awareness of it.
What do you think about all that?
I mean, I would have been six years old to nine.
So I probably could have gotten into Studio 54.
I was gonna say the same thing.
There's some shocking revelations about this stuff that anybody who knows about Studio 54 is probably like, yeah, that's just how it was.
And on the outside, it's just nuts.
It was just such a, they called it like the disco Sodom and Gomorrah.
It was just a complete bacchanal of like, just drugs and sex and like in the club.
And it was just absolutely nuts.
But as you read about it, it's it's this, it's just the same themes over and over again.
People had sex in the club.
Everybody was doing coke in the club.
Everybody was on quaaludes.
And this Mick Jagger's wife Bianca was on a horse once, and it just kept getting like, it all just kind of melded together.
And I kind of felt like by the time I was done researching this, I get Studio 54.
Yeah, there's a documentary on Netflix that's okay, called Studio 54.
Yeah, I saw it. From filmmaker Matt, I guess, Tiernour.
There was a very bad movie about Studio 54, like a movie movie with Mike Myers famously playing Steve Rubell.
I thought that was the documentary.
I was gonna say Steve Rubell is like the spinning image of Mike Myers.
But now I gotcha. No, Mike, it turns out Mike Rubell, I'm sorry, Steve Rubell, Mike Myers, young Billy Joel, and Alex Edelman all sort of are the same person.
Oh, that's interesting.
They all look alike.
But it's interesting when I was watching the documentary, Emily was floating through the room here and there and people were just like, oh my god, and we would just do this and this and this and this.
And she finally wandered through and just went, these people sound like idiots.
Yeah, it is. It's just basically another example of it.
Apologies, like this is a pretty blanket statement.
But Boomer Generation being like, we did this and had so much fun.
And it's the coolest thing that could ever possibly happen.
Yeah, I think and it's sort of like it reeked of a documentary on like the, you know, the what was that ill -fated doomed island music festival?
The Fire Festival. Yeah, it was kind of like that where she was just like, these people are idiots.
Like, how long can you just sit around and talk about doing cocaine every night and dancing until the sun came up?
Yeah, but the thing is, and Livia helped us with this, and I think she kind of captured it.
The reason it seems like that Studio 54 is still just so prominent in just the general cultural consciousness, especially in America, is because it was short -lived.
It ended at its peak, so it didn't stick around long enough to like really like become passé.
And in the very short like bursting lifespan that it had, less than three years, like 33 months, I think, it was just it was the coolest of the cool.
And when you put all that together, that's how 50 years later, people like us are doing a podcast on it still.
You know what I mean?
About a club. A club.
That's what we're doing a podcast on.
One of 8 ,000 disco clubs that were open between 1974 and 1976 alone.
That's how important this club was to that scene.
Yeah, I mean, it's on one hand, there's a couple ways to look at it.
It was it was a symbol of something more than probably anything was a symbol of that era.
Yes. Of that excess and decadence and everything.
And on one hand, like my brain goes, Yeah, but you know what, this is great because it was these nightclubs were havens for minorities and for for gay people to for that community to get together in a safe place where they could be themselves.
Because like you literally like the documentary even says, like, if you were a transgender person, you were taking your life and your hands walking down the street some nights, you know, you could get just assaulted.
You can still get assaulted for for for that.
But especially back then.
So part of my brain goes there and part of it of it goes to like kind of what Emily said, just like what a vapid material, just sort of seen based on how you looked and who you knew and part of it part of it was like, oh, wow, what a cool time.
And then part of me was like, jeez, what an awful group of people.
Yeah. Okay, good. I'm glad that we pretty much arrived at the same place.
And also, I find it comforting that I'm following the long standing trend of agreeing with Emily.
Yeah, well, as we get older, I think I tend to look at things a little more with like, an eye like that rather than just like, Yeah, man, what a cool party that was.
Exactly. For sure. But let's talk about what a cool party that was.
Yeah, I guess we should get to the building first because it was a history building that was located at 254 West 54th Street.
It was originally an opera house in the 1920s and then in the 1940s, kind of through the 50s and into the 60s and 70s.
It was a CBS studio.
They had a $64 ,000 question and Captain Kangaroo and What's My Line and it was called Studio 52 weirdly at the time.
It's so square. But they all eventually moved their operations to Los Angeles with the CBS studios there in central Hollywood and it sat there empty in 1977.
So the guys that noticed that studio was sitting empty or this large theater, I guess, were two guys named Steve Rubell and Ian Shrager, who were Brooklyn guys from sort of working class to middle class Jewish families who met each other at college at Syracuse.
Yeah, apparently they became like friends for life.
Ian Shrager, when they met and became friends, he thinks that he and Steve Rubell spoke every day for the rest of Steve Rubell's life.
And Ian Shrager also put it that because they were from Brooklyn, they had something to prove, especially you know, going to Syracuse with probably some wealthier kids and then coming from working class families.
I'm not gonna say they had a chip on their shoulder, but they were like, they were hustlers.
They were ambitious, they were going to make a life for themselves rather than, you know, just end up joining their dad's firms because their dad's didn't have a firm.
One was a postman and the other one was named Max the Jew, who ran illegal gambling operations.
So that kind of drive and then also just the creativity that those two guys had together.
And then also like just the connection that they had, like this was a genuine partnership that this came out of.
It just kind of I think inserted a little electricity that otherwise wouldn't have been there.
Yeah, so after they graduated, Ian Shrager went to law school at St.
John's and started practicing law in the early 70s.
Rubell got into the steakhouse business and was apparently opening steakhouses a little too quickly, because he overextended himself.
Did you see the one ad for one of his restaurants?
No, they were called steak lofts, right?
Well, this one was at least steak lofts, make love to your stomach.
And in the subheading, it said all entrees include soup, salad bar, baked potato and shrimp.
Wow. Not a bad deal.
Yeah, no, that is a pretty good deal.
I'm kind of hungry for it now.
But he had these steakhouses, he got into a little financial trouble, and his old pal stepped in to help keep creditors at Bay as his attorney.
And then by this point, though, in the early 70s, they were already sort of co owners in two different discos, one in Queens and one in Boston.
Yeah, the one in Queens is the more important one, they actually gave up their share in the one in Boston so that they could get full ownership of the Queens one called Enchanted Garden.
And it was kind of like the original template for what would become studio 54, they would throw like theme parties where everybody would dress up and they would decorate it along with the theme, like, it was way more than just some club, it's like look at the mirrors on the wall in the disco ball up
there, like this was there was theatrics to it too.
And so the other big thing that happened at Enchanted Garden is that they met a man named Jack Dusci or Dushy.
Let's go with Dushy.
Oh, I thought it was Dushay.
Oh, Dushay. D -U -S -H -E -Y.
Dushy is definitely a pronunciation of that.
So you say Dushay, huh?
I thought it was but I actually can't remember now from the documentary that I watched three hours ago.
Well, let's agree it's definitely not Dushy.
Okay. His name was Jack D.
And he owned a store in Brooklyn, I think a discount store and was fairly wealthy and he threw either depending on who you ask, his daughter's bat mitzvah or his daughter.
And I guess like the cut of Steve and Ian's jib and went into business with them as a silent partner, and he gave them the influx of cash that they needed to start Studio 54.
Yeah, it was about a half a million bucks.
It was kind of a crazy idea at the time, even though disco texts were big.
West 54th Street at this time was really, I guess the best way to say it is sleazy.
Is it near Times Square?
Yeah, I mean, that's all sort of in that that theatre district.
But at the time, it was just it was dirty.
It was dangerous. People thought like, if you're trying to open a high end discotheque, like this is not the part of town where you want to be doing that.
They did it anyway.
Wow. Yeah, they formed a company called Broadway Catering Corporation, which will make a little more sense in a little while.
And they leased that building at 254 West 54th Street.
And they got to work on turning it into a club.
They did it in six weeks.
They went from nothing to ready for people to come in six weeks without a construction license, I think.
Yeah, and they just kind of got to work.
It was sort of a time where you could just get away with stuff until you didn't, kind of under the table style.
And that's what they did.
You said they started with nothing, but not quite because the theatre was, it was an old theatre.
So they had a stage and they had a proscenium arch and they had a lighting rigging system.
Yeah, it's big. That was there from the TV days and because they sort of got not blocked, but their rivals and the other discotheques were basically saying like, hey, don't go work for these guys.
Yeah. If you're a designer or or, you know, someone who would help them open it.
And so they went very smartly to Broadway and got people who worked in the theatre to come in and they were like, this place has got all the bones and this lighting rigs already set up like this is not going to be too hard.
No, they had a lot to work with, in other words.
So they hired one guy, a guy named Richard Long, who actually was the sole veteran of the club scene of like, like setting up clubs, he had set up the sound systems for most of the gay discos in New York.
So he knew what he was doing.
And that certainly came in handy, because I mean, one of the main things of Studio 54 was the music, right, like in the dancing to the music.
So to have a pro creating the sound system was a big one.
And then you also cannot overlook the role that Carmen D 'Alessio did, she was a PR sorceress I saw her described as and her role essentially was to basically go around to New York's Glitterati and talk about how awesome this club is going to be.
And it worked very well.
Yeah, for sure. There were other PR people that worked with them that literally got paid for placing story, placing stories in the newspaper, like you get $500 if there's a picture of Liza Minnelli and Truman Capote going into Studio 54, and the New York Post and you get this much if it's in this magazine.
And that was, you know, it was a pretty smart way to do it.
It was incentivizing these PR people to get the, you know, the biggest stars of the time vary publicly through usually the front door, but sometimes they would slip in through the stage door.
Right. There was also just a little bit more about the club, right?
I see that it had 85 foot ceilings.
Is that right? Oh, yeah, it was super, super tall.
That's like a nine story building inside.
Okay, well, I just want to make sure because my brain starts to boggle like 30 feet up.
Well, I mean, those big old theaters in New York were huge and vast.
Yeah. And still are.
Okay, so like that's what you got to remember is this was a performance theater turned into a nightclub.
Right. I got that. I still don't think I've ever been in a theater that was 85 feet up to the ceiling.
Maybe you should go to Carnegie Hall, Mike.
Right. I'm a bad judge of height and distance and all that too.
But so I guess it makes sense, then, that it could hold a capacity of 2 ,000 people because when they ran out of room on the floor, they just start stacking them on top of one another.
On that 11 ,000 square foot dance floor and what you know, while there was a scene happening anyway, a lot of it was really about the dancing there.
There was a mezzanine lounge on the second story, a second story bar and a balcony that kind of looked down upon the whole thing where you could go up and drink and do mountains of cocaine and have public sex.
What? How cool. Are you serious?
It all sounds gross to me.
I mean, it was gross.
At one point, they retrofitted the second floor balcony like the I guess the whole area around it with like wash off rubber.
Coating. Gross. It is.
The whole thing's gross.
Yes. And it was fairly gross, but I saw it.
I saw it described as this.
These people were living in the age after the invention of the pill before the onset of AIDS.
So they could just have public sex and do mountains of cocaine and take tons of quaaludes with virtually no consequences whatsoever.
The good old days. I guess so.
You want to take a break?
Should we take a break?
Look at us. Yeah, let's do that.
And we'll talk about opening night right after this.
Okay, Chuck, so it's opening night six weeks after they started construction on Tuesday, April 26th, 1977, aka the most important date in the history of humanity, according to some of the people who were there.
That hype that Carmen D 'Alessio had been building up was really paying off.
Apparently, there was an hours long wait already.
And it was so long that Frank Sinatra and Warren Beatty were like, this is taking too long.
I'm out of here. That's how long the wait was.
Warren Beatty. Yeah, they, I mean, the pre -hype was there in full because well, because the PR push for one, but also because they were selling memberships before it opened.
They had 18 ,000 people apply to get a membership card.
So here's how it worked.
If you just showed up, and you were lucky enough to get in and had to pay the cover, I think they landed on like 10 bucks, even though I saw everything from seven to 14.
10 bucks is around close to 50 bucks today.
So it wasn't cheap to get in for a cover charge.
But if you bought a membership card for between 75 and 150, you were guaranteed, and that's in scare quotes because nothing was really guaranteed as far as entry goes there.
But you were supposedly guaranteed entry, but you had to pay with a $3 reduction in charge.
18 ,000 people applied for that card and only 3000 got it preopening.
Wow. Pretty nuts. Yeah.
So this, one of the other legends or stories about opening night is that wait was so long that they just basically broke out into a party on the sidewalk outside of the club.
Thanks.
