Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (3 page)

In a place the size of West Warwick, there’s a fine line between business-as-usual among old friends, and outright corruption. When members of the same family populate multiple municipal departments, opportunities for self-dealing and nepotism abound. A town councilman sought to negotiate contracts with the police union — of which his son was a member. A school committee member pressured a principal to hire his son as a teacher. A departing mayor illegally paid himself $15,000 in “sick time and vacation pay.” Few townsfolk were shocked.

Nor has its fire department been immune from West Warwick’s brand of opportunism. In 1977, a firefighter in the department helped his diner-owning cousin dynamite a competing Warwick restaurant. The next year, two town councilmen running for reelection promised a forty-one-year-old campaign worker a firefighter’s job, even though town policy barred hiring recruits over age twenty-eight. In 1980, a battalion chief was convicted of arson conspiracy for delaying the department’s response to a “successful” fire at a friend’s warehouse. Later, in 1996, an obese firefighter sought retirement on a disability pension when he could no longer fit into his boots. This, in a fire department of sixty-five employees. It takes a lot to raise eyebrows here.

In February of 2003 there sat in the southeast corner of West Warwick, at 211 Cowesett Avenue, a small roadhouse that had seen many different incarnations over the decades. During World War II it had been the Wheel, a navy
bar catering to rowdy sailors from Quonset Point. Later, it was reborn as the Red Fox, the Cedar Acres Inn, and Tammany Hall (reportedly, bullet holes in the beer cooler attested to its rough-and-tumble crowd). The wood-frame building was modified from year to year and from owner to owner, often with materials of dubious quality and origin. A suspicious fire scarred its interior in 1971, but despite fuel containers later found in the dining area, no arrests were made.

Raymond Villanova bought the building in 1974 and operated one of three “P. Brillo and Sons” Italian restaurants there until 1982, peddling “spaghetti by the pound” to Rhode Islanders hungry for bargain eats. The success of “Papa Brillo’s” was to be the building’s “highest and best use,” in real estate parlance. All subsequent tenancies were short-lived, alcohol-based, and downscale by comparison.

By the mid-’80s Villanova, his reputation as an aggressive businessman well established, found commercial real estate development to be more profitable and less demanding than his restaurants. The dingy single-level building at 211 Cowesett Avenue became just one of his many holdings, rented to a succession of hapless entrepreneurs willing to sign onerous “as-is” leases under which Villanova had no obligation whatsoever to maintain or repair the building. Developer Villanova’s management of the property on Cowesett Avenue consisted primarily of collecting overdue rents and seeking property tax reductions for the deteriorating property. If he ever visited the building after 1995, his Rolls-Royce would hardly have blended in.

The dubious allure of operating a marginal bar attracted a parade of renters who changed the club’s name, made low-budget renovations, and more often than not ended up begging off their lease with Villanova and selling their “business” to the next, and greater, entrepreneurial fool. After Brillo’s came, variously, Glenn’s Pub, then CrackerJack’s, then the Filling Station. In late 1995, Howard Julian rose to the challenge.

Julian liked rock music. A guitar player of sorts, he found the prospect of rubbing (and bending) elbows with musicians too attractive to pass up. So he bought the restaurant-turned-pub-turned-rock-club from Skip Shogren, signing an “as-is” lease with Villanova’s realty company. The “Filling Station” name combined an automotive theme with, perhaps, a wishful allusion to anticipated drink sales. From its prior owner Julian inherited not only the club’s name but also a clientele, several employees, and its manager, Tim Arnold. He was also heir to the building’s prior brushes with fire. A tradesman changing a lightbulb for Julian once reached into the ceiling space. “All the rafters were charcoaled,” he said. “I put my hand on it, it was black.”

Another thing that Julian’s club shared with its predecessor on the site was the animosity of its neighbors. The area of Cowesett Avenue and Kulas Road in West Warwick was, to put it most charitably, mixed use. (Comprehensive zoning was never the town’s strong suit.) Across Cowesett Avenue from the Filling Station was a restaurant, the Cowesett Inn. Across Kulas Road from the club, an auto dealership. To the club’s west lay a wooded lot. To its immediate south, less than a hundred feet from the club itself, the property of one Barry Warner marked the beginning of a residential plat. Over the years, as tastes in musical volume came to surpass fans’ pain thresholds, it was inevitable that neighbors would complain about the noise. And Warner frequently led the charge.

Each time successive owners sought transfer of liquor and entertainment licenses at the site, Warner and others would complain to the town council of overcrowding, parking lot disturbances, and, invariably, the loud, bass-pounding music. And each would-be impresario, including Julian, would promise the council new measures to fight the noise: performing volume checks; keeping the door nearest Warner’s house tightly shut; installing noise-dampening materials.

One application of soundproofing material occurred in the early summer of 1996. The Filling Station’s manager, Tim Arnold, observed Julian screwing white plastic foam blocks to the walls of the drummer’s alcove at the center of the stage. They were seventeen-inch-square, two-inch-thick blocks of stiff foam, each the consistency of “swimming pool noodles.” Julian applied 192 square feet of the stuff to the alcove’s three walls. It is unclear where he obtained this plastic foam; however, this was not the last time that materials of questionable quality would compromise the building at 211 Cowesett Avenue.

Notwithstanding Julian’s parsimony, his club formula was still a bust. By late 1999, he was resorting to gimmicks like karaoke, mud wrestling, and male stripper nights to stay afloat. A video shot at the club (which by then had been renamed, simply, The Station) captured Julian onstage with the featured act, engrossed in fish-faced guitar noodling. Heady as such moments must have been for him, they did not pay the rent. Almost four years into his venture, Julian still owed purchase money to prior owner Skip Shogren. In arrears to his landlord by over $40,000 in February 2000, Julian, like so many before him, sought a buyer for his failing business. He implored his landlord not to tip any prospective buyer to the fact that months of unpaid back rent (as well as the balance of his debt to Shogren) would be escrowed from any purchase closing. “I firmly believe that if the amount of rent in rears [
sic
] is disclosed, the potential buyer will be scared away,” wrote Julian to Villanova.

One potential purchaser, Al Prudhomme, played drums with a local band, Fathead, and was a regular at the club. He dearly wanted to buy it from Julian, but his wife, Charlene, “just wouldn’t go for it.” He would one day thank her.

Julian’s potential salvation arrived in December 1999, in the persons of two thirtyish brothers, Michael and Jeffrey Derderian. Native Rhode Islanders, the Derderians were, respectively, a businessman and a reporter for a Boston
TV
station. They hardly blended with The Station’s blue-collar clientele (one of the bar’s denizens later described them as sporting “Wally Cleaver haircuts”); however, they were sufficiently bitten by the club-owner bug as to seriously consider buying Julian’s business.

It could not have been the ramshackle building that attracted the Derderians. And, yet, standing inside facing west toward the stage, the brothers must have entertained grand visions for the dingy space. The stage itself was a platform, approximately two feet higher than the dance floor area. Another six inches above that sat the drummer’s alcove, a bump-out on the club’s exterior wall. To the right of the stage was the only door on the building’s west or south sides. This “stage door” was used to load band gear in and out. It was actually two doors hung back to back. The first hinged inward and bore a sign, Keep Door Closed at All Times. Immediately behind it was another door, hinged outward. This double-thickness door was on the side closest to the house of that vocal neighbor, Barry Warner. It would certainly appear to be sound-deadening.

To the far right of the stage was the club’s pool table area. Its north wall was not really a wall, but an “atrium” (not open to the outside, as in a true atrium) with curved Plexiglas windows of ’70s fern-bar style arching from roof to floor. Unbreakable save for three low glass panels, that tough Plexiglas would never need replacement by the new owners.

Walking east through Julian’s club, the Derderian brothers had to pass the narrow hallway leading to the men’s and ladies’ rooms. Windowless (and sometimes doorless, in the case of the men’s room), they were dead ends off a dead-end corridor. There had been an exit door in that corridor sometime in the past, as evidenced by concrete steps outside; however, it had long since been walled over.

Further along their tour, the southeast corner of the building housed a little-used game room, business office, and storage area — with walled-over windows and no exterior doors. Probably good for security. Separating this quadrant from the main bar area was a small kitchen, its outside door hidden from public view.

The club’s main bar area consisted of a large horseshoe-shaped bar and
several small stand-up tables. Occupying the very farthest end of the club from the stage, this room had its own exit door and several single and double windows. Like the game room, its walls were lined with framed photos of second-and third-rate bands that had appeared at the venue.

As the two prospective purchasers exited the club on their tour, they passed through the ticket-sale area of the front entrance. Jutting diagonally into the entrance corridor, the ticket desk left a narrow thirty-three-inch path through which the brothers took turns passing. If they were worried about patrons sneaking in without paying, this pinch point had to allay any such fears. A single interior door eight feet farther down the main entrance corridor probably slowed entering patrons, as well. They’d have to pay to play at the Derderians’ club.

As the brothers exited through the front corridor and double doors of The Station, they probably didn’t notice the downward-sloping pitch of the tile floor beneath their feet. It was really not any cause for concern. Especially if no one behind them was in a hurry to leave.

CHAPTER 3

ROCK IMPRESARIOS

“IT’S A PLACE WHERE GOOD BANDS GO TO DIE,”
quipped Steven Scarpetti years before the fire. Scarpetti, a promotions executive at radio station
WHJY
, was referring to The Station’s prestige among third-rate concert venues, but he could as well have been talking about the club’s potential for actual tragedy.

When the Derderian brothers bought The Station from Howard Julian in March of 2000, they knew little about operating a rock club. But they would soon learn on the job that cutting corners on payroll, stuffing patrons into the club, and stiffing local bands were all part of the economic equation for small-time promoters.

The closing date for their purchase from Julian was to be March 22, 2000; however, several acts were already booked to appear that month. The first such gig would be W.A.S.P., an ’80s heavy-metal band famous for its raunchy lyrics and violent themes. It was anticipated that the W.A.S.P. performance on March 8, 2000, would be “run on the Derderians’ license” with all proceeds going to Julian, and all expenses for the performance borne by Julian. This would be a dry run, of sorts, for the new owners. Jeff Derderian worked with W.A.S.P.’s road manager to prepare for the show.

The lead singer for W.A.S.P., who calls himself Blackie Lawless (born: Steven Edward Duren), embodies heavy-metal shock-schlock. Lawless’s stagecraft with a previous group, Sister, included lighting his boots on fire and eating live worms. With W.A.S.P., he graduated to throwing raw meat into the audience and positioning girls on torture racks. (It’s a safe bet that the band’s debut single from 1982, “Animal (Fuck Like A Beast),” never made it onto Tipper Gore’s iPod.) “Blackie,” in studded, cut-out leathers, would posture onstage sporting raven-dyed shoulder-length hair and heavy eyeliner, sometimes mounting a demonic-looking metal sculpture that doubled as a microphone stand.