A behind-the-scenes look at the meteoric rise and stunning takedown of a nightclub empire, by the man who held the reins.
Limelight, Tunnel, Club USA, and Palladium—the cutting-edge, insanely successful, and notoriously decadent clubs that dominated New York City’s entertainment scene, their influences reverberating around the world. Across four decades, a single mysterious figure stood behind them all: Peter Gatien, the leading impresario of global nightlife. His clubs didn’t follow the trends—they created movements. They nurtured vanguard music acts that brought rock, house, grunge, hip-hop, industrial, and techno to the beautiful ones who showed up night after night to tear the roof off every party. But as Peter and his innovative team ramped up the hedonistic highs, Rudolph Giuliani was leading a major shift in the city. Under the guise of improving New York City’s “quality of life,” the club scene was targeted—and Peter Gatien’s empire became a major focus of the administration.
In this frank and gritty memoir, Peter Gatien charts the seismic changes in his personal and professional life and the targeted destruction of his nightclub empire. From Peter’s childhood in a Canadian mill town to the freedom of the 1970s, through the excesses of the 1980s and the ensuing crackdown in the 1990s, The Club King chronicles the birth and death of a cultural movement—and the life of the man who was in control of every beat.
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The Limelight and Tunnel are long gone. But the story of their vilified owner is still being written…With his memoir, The Club King published on April 1, he hopes for a degree of catharsis after an epic rise and fall, but also to celebrate a lost New York, when clubs felt mysterious and transgressive, luring the misfits and outcasts from the city’s creative underground, and every night felt like a Mardi Gras on Mars.
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New York Times