Jackie 60 Founder Chi Chi Valenti on the Lost Art of Clubland

If anyone can call herself the empress of New York nightlife, it’s Chi Chi Valenti. Starting out in the 1980s on the door of the Mudd Club, she has been a vibrant and creative presence on the scene ever since.

Over the years, Valenti has been a journalist for publications such as the Village Voice, i-D and Interview, co-owner of the much-loved Meatpacking District venue Mother and a sought-after commentator and panelist on club culture.

However, she will always be best known for Jackie 60. Run in collaboration with her husband Johnny Dynell and the costume designer Kitty Boots, this flamboyant party blended drag, burlesque, performance art and dance music into a heady cocktail throughout the 1990s – each night with a different and meticulously planned theme. If that’s not enough, Valenti also helmed the popular Manhattan fetish event Click + Drag, and is the brain behind the annual Fleetwood Mac-inspired Night of 1,000 Stevies.

In this interview with Frank Broughton, which took place in 2005, Valenti talks about the end of Jackie 60, the hollowing out of Manhattan nightlife, how to create a digital community and her ongoing battle against Rudy Giuliani’s clampdown on public dancing.

Post-Jackie 60, what direction have you taken things?

For these shows, which are actually called Jackie 60 Further, it’s been a lot of one-off, on-site things specifically for the site we’ve done them in. We did the Siren Festival at Coney island, where we took over the sideshow for two hours and did a long club piece called Dreamland, based on exactly the kind of entertainment that would have been there in 1910. So, it uses all the elements – the MCs, Jackie’s DJing, the House of Domination, the costumes – but it specifically makes it for one place and one time.

For London specifically, we’ve decided to do Paris. Johnny [Dynell] and I are also doing a weekly series here called Cabaret Magique, and we’ve got this repertoire of French incoherent, pre-Dadaist influences for the performances. People think it’s insane to be doing a French-influenced night in New York, especially since it started during the [Iraq] war.

Because of all the anti-French feeling…

A lot of the music we use for that is in French, but it’s also a tongue-in-cheek take on Frenchness, with lots of French cliches, like “Sexy Eiffel Tower.” When we were thinking of what Jackie Further should do there, we thought it’s even weirder to bring Paris to London through New York. We always like to have that second twist in things.

You probably revel in being contrary, with this “freedom fries” thing going on.

We’ve always had close connections with Situationism and obviously Dada – this sort of bridge that we felt – and then, like a month before the war started, we thought, “Let’s actually do a French cabaret.” This is more fun, because a French cabaret that you’re doing every week is great, but to take it one more step and bring it to London, I’m really curious to see how it goes.

What specific things can we expect?

Well, performance-wise we have several [members] of the House of Domination, and they’re going to do updates on the can-can, their own version.

The original was pretty risqué.

Well, they have the split knickers. We’re doing showgirl elements that are based on – not reconstructions, but definitely a homage to – the can-can costumes of Kitty Boots, who’s our fourth partner in Jackie and a legendary costume designer. We’re also bringing over a burlesque queen. I think she’s played in London before, she’s really incredible. Her name is Dirty Martini. She’s absolutely the best of the whole burlesque wave here, in terms of incredible reconstructions, being able to do all the physical things involved in burlesque.

There’s an enormous burlesque renaissance in New York. We were involved in seeding some of that, but there’s a whole thing that goes along with that other school of burlesque, that’s more like Frank Sinatra. It’s a little too straight, the ’50s, ’60s burlesque. So, even though Dirty is fantastic at that, what she loves to do, and we asked her to do, is step back. Our showgirl is much more tied in to the late 19th century and then 20th century, up to about the ’20s. Those are our references.

And this is what’s going on at [your weekly night] Cabaret Magique?

Yeah, and we have spoken word, and people do the shadow puppets that used to be done in Montmartre. It’s very retro, but picking out an incredibly wide range from, say, 1870 to 1950 at the absolute latest, so it’s not retro to one period. And even musically… Like, at Jackie, the way the dancefloor room always has a dance track, and there’s another room… There’s a lot of charleston, and Django Reinhardt and stuff like that, and you’ll actually see people doing the charleston. So that’s been fun, but we’re very clear about not wanting to re-do Jackie.

Do you miss it? It must have been pretty frantic coming up with all those themes [for your parties].

I can’t say I miss it. I’m really glad we did it, but…

That’s a decade where you’re thinking of something pretty in-depth, every week. How long did it take you each week?

Literally, it would take at least three full days. We’d come out of one – I’m sure for people that do certain kinds of TV filming, it’s the same thing – we’d be completely dead the following day, and then start production for our next night the day after that. For instance, the whole place would need to be decorated. The new soundtrack, the costumes, it was incredible. There was a bigger team of people through most of those years than just us.

What was the process?

We all kept separate themes that we liked… We all had ones that were on our list. Kitty’s tended to be very punk or Bowie or something, and mine were like the really intellectual ones that no one ever wanted to do, and Johnny’s were really accessible and boy-driven. Occasionally one of mine would really take off. Night Of 1,000 Stevies was mine.

That was a long-running theme, the Stevie Nicks thing? It’s like Steviestock.

That’s still going on. We get 1,000 people a year now. That has outlived everything. We’re coming up on our 14th edition of that. It’s going to be at Irving Plaza. That is something. I just really love her and thought it was a really sick idea for a night. I had no idea.

We did a night called Low Life, based on the Luc Sante book, which was totally fabulous. That’s the kind of thing of somebody reading that book and then saying, “Let’s do this as a theme.” Maybe because that was up my [street], because I love New York history and stuff. We did the whole Suicide Bar on stage, with the girls. Interestingly, the actual Suicide Hall building, 295 Bowery, right by CBGB, is being torn down by the city after this long fight. One of the tenants is Kate Millett, the feminist author. She’s on the floor that actually was the Suicide Salon, and before it goes down she wants to give it to us to do a Jackie, so that will have to be very impromptu, and right before the wrecking ball.

Johnny’s themes were more accessible. like when Adam Goldstone’s record “Up All Night (Won’t Make The Gym)” [came out, he had an idea to do a whole night of Chelsea queens [and] rebuilt the David Barton gym onstage. David gave us the towels to put on everyone.

There were a few themes where we always said, “If we ever do this, it’s been so long in coming that either the world will end or Jackie will end.” One of them was the thing that started Martha, the dance series that Richard Move does, and that was the Acrobats of God. He kept saying, “Next year we’ll do it,” and then he finally did it. It was his Martha Graham – he performs as her but he speaks as her as well… and then he has a whole company doing Martha-like dancing. It got so big he started doing it as a series when we opened the club as Mother. It got so big, his next performance after Mother was at the Town Hall. That was one Jackie theme that took years.

We still speak a kind of shorthand with each other that no one else would get. Having done all that research, having learned about all of that music, has been incredible for everything we do. But I would never want to go back to that. We did that production for a decade. And we did it for four years, while owning a full-time venue. We probably aged a lot in that time. I feel a lot younger now.

And the city’s changed so much. Without dwelling on the negatives too much, New York nightlife is quite depressing.

And that’s really why we started doing something again, for the very same reason we started Jackie. We wanted to have a place to go… but our work was subsidized in the beginning by Nell’s. It began as a free series. We’ve been lucky that it’s still important to people that we do our work in New York, so we get help from people, because it’s not even the financial climate that it was when we started Jackie. It wasn’t great [then], but so many people have left… they’re not drop-ins and they can’t just walk across town anymore.

I was reading an interview you did when you closed Mother, and one of the things was that there was no longer the local audience that would come and understand what you were doing. You also talked of the animosity of the people in the new Meatpacking District, even though you were the spearhead of why that was a cool place to live.

I’m glad we did what we did. We had no way of knowing everything else that happened. So many people have totally lost their businesses. We got to make the decision.

Are there silver linings? Is there anything underground emerging to react against what’s going on?

The tremendous silver lining for us… After we closed the club, we started this big online community called the Motherboards. That’s been the silver lining. A lot of the work we do… like this enormous art show that we did in May, which took [club-based artists] – costume designers and performers – from all over the country, and they collaborated on this show [of the visual work] that was at CBGB for a month, and it was a whole big performance night. A lot of them had never met until three days before the show, when they started coming into town. We did the entire Major Arcana of the tarot, with people portraying different cards in tableaux, and they created digital work, costuming. There were about 50 people who collaborated on it.

That’s been incredible, even in terms of feeding events, because people are so spread-out, to Philly and other places, but they can just read that this thing is going on, come in with their costume and introduce themselves as a performer. So there are these levels of collaboration that are possible, and ways for people to reach us and reach what we are doing that never existed before.

For me, that’s been a big old silver lining. It doesn’t tie us into paying these insane rents, or [mean that] we have to be at the same spot every night. You bring people together online, then throw occasional events and bring them together in the flesh.

Even the smoking thing, even though that’s been devastating in general for nightlife, it’s actually been really great for us, because we’re in the East Village and people are regularly driving by and see me standing out there smoking and they’re like, “Oh, this is where the new place is.”

Where is the new place?

Tapis Rouge [now permanently closed] is on Avenue A at 1st Street. It says “Salon Prive” outside. We found it because they have this huge African night on Sundays, and we would go past and go, “Wow, what’s going on here?” It’s a perfect size. It holds on two floors, maybe 300 people, so it’s half the size of Mother, but two distinct floors.

Does it have a dancing license?

It has a dancefloor, let’s just put it like that. There are really interesting things going on with that, and I’m very involved with that “legalize dancing” stuff.

People are fighting that?

It really moved forward in June, especially by Legalize Dancing NYC, which is an umbrella organization I’m involved with, which also includes the original Dance Liberation Front people. All the different organizations that were doing it on their own kind of banded together. That’s been a help. Norman Siegel has been involved in our legal stuff, the great civil liberties dude. We’ve been banging away, meeting with City Council people, doing these events, drumming up the press. Then in June, really out of the blue, Commissioner of Consumer Affairs Gretchen Dykstra, contacted the group and said, “We’re doing these hearings about the cabaret laws, because we’d like to remove dancing from the cabaret laws. “Well, that would be OK.”

So, it would no longer apply against dancing? You could dance without a license?

In venues below a certain size.

Well, that’s what it was all about, anyway.

Sadly, anything over that size is Webster Hall, and has the money to get a cabaret license. So, they had these hearings and in the public sections of these hearings 60 people spoke, including me and everyone from ballroom dancers to the director of Summerstage, agents for DJs that had gone out of business because no one was bringing people to play here, record store owners who have gone out of business… Everybody was saying, “Here are the numbers, and this is not related to 9/11.” That didn’t help, but Giuliani had already destroyed it.

This interview was conducted in September 2005. © DJhistory.com