Dallas’ Lizard Lounge hosts a couple of noisy-stuff nights a week, under the name The Church. On Thursdays and Sundays, the DJs spin neo-gothic, industrial and electro (that’s according to The Church’s website) tunes in one of the cooler club environments I’ve experienced.
The Leland City Club is the first club I ever went to, and quickly went on to become the nighttime place that I unashamedly call home. City Club’s not like any place else, for better or worse.
The club is ancient (it’s been open since the 1980s), and single-purpose. It exists at the whim of the Leland Hotel’s owner, which means both that it does not particularly need to make money, and that it can be only one thing. City Club is only open Fridays and Saturdays (and occasional holidays), and only as a goth-industrial club, unlike most other nightclubs which rotate through different-themed nights during the week. As a result, the place has a comfortably shitty, lived-in feel to it. There’s a good chance that it’s haunted, and the condition of the building mirrors the decay of Detroit in spite of recent minor renovations. And in a way, that’s part of its charm. If the speakers didn’t occasionally short out, if the heat worked on twenty-degree December days, it somehow wouldn’t be quite the same place. More than one regular calls it “Shitty Club,” but they still keep showing up, generation after generation of punk, goth, rivethead, cyber, electro, lolita and emo kids. Gay, straight and anywhere in between are present and welcome.
