The four-letter word on the street

Shaun Slaughter has had one mixed-up year. Lipstick, Slaughter’s long-running Tuesday dance club at Old Ironsides, was drawing capacity crowds at the beginning of 2004. In February, Slaughter launched the weekly Fuck Fridays at the Townhouse. Fuck Fridays featured a mix of aggressive dance music, as well as live performances by cutting-edge dance bands like the Lovemakers and Pets.

“Fuck Fridays was the best club I’ve ever been at, DJ-wise,” Slaughter said. “Every single Friday was a blast. There was never a time when I was bored.” In July, Slaughter won the Critic’s Choice award for DJ Turntablist at the Sammies.

Then things got weird. “We were doing Fridays at the Townhouse, and we didn’t have any problems,” Slaughter said. “But I guess the owner of the business—the bar—had a beef with the actual owner of the building. They couldn’t settle their quarrel, so the owner took back the place.” The Townhouse was closed to the public with no notice. “We didn’t even know it was happening,” he said, “so we had no way to tell people or find another place or anything. It was pretty lame.”

At first, Slaughter was confident he could simply move his club to another venue. “Lipstick was really ‘it’ still. A lot of people were coming. And here at the same time, I got the Best DJ thing from the Sammies. So, I was thinking, with Fridays being so awesome and us pulling in 300 to 350 people like we were, that any venue was going to want to offer us a weekend night. We already had this huge following that loved our club. But nothing opened. No doors opened.”

Slaughter found most club managers unwilling to deviate from the Top-40 formula that dance clubs have relied on for decades. “All the bigger venues in town that could be doing something really amazing just don’t care to do anything with someone who’s not playing Top 40 or shitty house music,” he said. Finally, Slaughter convinced the Tower Club to take a chance on the Fuck concept.

On Saturday, January 22, Slaughter and DJs Jon Droll and Sascha 23 will throw a one-time party at the Tower Club, located at 1517 Broadway, to see if Fuck can be resurrected. Slaughter promises a mix of aggressive but accessible dance music. (A lengthy list of band names on the flier includes LCD Soundsystem, Ladytron and Peaches.) “I just play whatever I think is neat at the time,” he explained. “It could be pop-sounding, or it could be more aggressive techno, but I’ll work it in and trick people to dancing to stuff they normally wouldn’t have been into, by surrounding it with stuff they know or stuff that just feels right.”

San Francisco acid-house band Eats Tapes will perform live, and drag queens and drink specials will be in the house. If all goes well, Sacramento could be Fuck-ing on a regular basis. Visit www.clublipstick.net for details.