In the DJ booth on Wednesday night, one DJ asked, "Hey, aren't you the girl who did Transmission?" while another asked a bit later, "Have you ever thought about reopening Transmission?"
It felt good to be asked two years after the fact about a little Wednesday night party that went down in a West Hollywood bar and prompted me to reflect a bit on that venture. At that risk of sounding like a complete egomaniac, I wanted to post those reflections here.
In early-2002, my friend Brian introduced me to these guys Lenny and Andrew, who had just renovated a formerly seedy WeHo bar and dubbed it the Parlour. Their goal was to provide nightly parties that were different from the typical Hollywood and West Hollywood scene and they wanted to know if I could DJ on Wednesday nights. At that point, I was a resident at Bang and Beat It and was yearning for another gig with a more open setlist, so I jumped on the opportunity despite the fact that I had never promoted before, loathed flyering outside of clubs and didn't even know what kind of format I wanted to follow.
The name was taken from a Joy Division single. The main musical goal was to play all of the songs that my friends and I loved, but would clear the floor at my other gigs. A few weeks before the club opened, I bought a copy of the Rapture's 12" single for "House of Jealous Lovers" as a means of giving the band a second chance since I really did not like the first cd. I fell madly in love with the single and it helped form the ideal setlists for the club-- rock vs. dance. In the beginning, the sound was more rock-oriented, heavy on the Faint and Le Tigre with the dance stuff representing what became "electroclash" a few months later (Miss Kittin and the Hacker, Felix da Housecat, Tiga and Zyntherius, et. al.). As time went on, though, the sets become almost completely dance, moving into releases from Bpitch, Kompakt, Gigolo, Disco B and incorporating italo-disco, early house and even the occasional acid track. Transmission was the place where I went from feeling like a human jukebox to becoming a real DJ. I learned more in those two years of the club's run than I did in the five years of club work that preceded that.
What really made Transmission a success in my mind was the crowd. Whether we had a busy or slow night, the crowd was always interesting-- a hodgepodge of hipsters, middle-aged gay men, European travelers, former club crawlers out of retirement, goths, mods, ravers and more. To this day, I have absolutely no idea how that happened, but it probably had something to do with the Parlour's location on Santa Monica Blvd. in the east end of West Hollywood, a good distance from the main club strip down at the intersection of Santa Monica and Robertson. Inside that club, my friends and I witnessed some of the most scandalous activities we had ever seen inside the club (but, dear reader, that is fodder for another post) and also met some of the nicest people we could ever fathom meeting at a club.
I would never attempt to re-invent Transmission. Musically, it was of its time and, since then, there have been scores of other clubs playing similar music. As far as the crowd goes, though, there is no way that vibe could ever be recaptured. Transmission was specifically about the Parlour (which, as we have previously posted, closed over the summer) and the cross-section of alternative lifestyles that met therein. Maybe someday, when time permits, I'll end up involved in another weekly party, but it won't be Transmission.