Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

Danceteria video lounge (Photo: Emily Armstrong)
For a lot of people, those early Reagan Years were also the Up All Night Years. Typically, an after-hours spot opened around 3 a.m. and gave up the ghost around noon. Somehow, they were always packed and never too hard to find. Given the variety and sheer number of options available, folks tended to flit from place to place, but clubs did have individual identities. AM/PM in Tribeca attracted a mix of Wall Street types, downtown rockers and artists, while Crisco Disco and the Anvil were for the gay boys on the West Side. The Jefferson was shabby chic, a derelict vaudeville theater and a bit of a death trap; there was only a narrow staircase to the second floor where the festivities sometimes spilled out onto a rickety marquee overlooking East 14th Street. It did have romance: a friend of ours met his first wife there.

Danceteria doormen Aleph and Taylor (Photo: Emily Armstrong)
There were others: places like Laight Street, Club 82, Berlin, Brownies, and Save the Robots. There was always one more place to go, a little more trouble to get into, if that was your inclination.
Of them all, only one after-hours club advertised in the Village Voice and booked bands on a regular basis and that was the first Danceteria, circa 1980. Completely illegal, it ran from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. There were three floors of action, a disco in the basement, performance space on the main floor and on the second floor, the Video Lounge.
We designed and operated the Video Lounge, working as the first regular VJs in a nightclub. We entertained patrons with a mix of found footage, kung-fu movie trailers and our own video collection of the bands we had documented over the years, displaying it all on a network of console t.v. sets with sofas arranged like living rooms.

Danceteria’s main stage, seen from the video lounge (Photo: Emily Armstrong)
Doorman Aleph Ashline remembers, ”By that time most of the door action would be over and we were often able to go in and watch the late set, especially if they were friends like 3 Teens Kill 4 or the Bush Tetras. Their song, ‘Too Many Creeps,’ by the way, was our doorman anthem and great to dance to.”
Which is all the more reason to enjoy a little more Pylon. We got such a great response to them last week, we decided to share a little more of Athens’ finest at Danceteria. Now, remember this performance of “Volume” was shot around 5:45 AM on a very hot and humid night. If you close your eyes, you can feel it. Or stay up really late tonight and play it loud. It’s almost like being there.