So far the death toll has hit 95. I hear that it keeps climbing. Last night’s club fire in Rhode Island had the unfortunate honor of being the second horrific nightclub tragedy in under a week.
The first incident, the stampede in Chicago following a burst of pepper spray was terrible. But the blame could easily be placed on the negligence of the club operators.
This time around, the blame is spread out more. The band that was playing the nightclub, Great White, has had the finger pointing at them since this morning. The club, which was not permitted to have pyrotechnics, now claims that the band didn’t tell them that pyrotechnics were going to be used. A club that the band played last week is saying now that the pyrotechnics came as an unwelcome (if less deadly) surprise there as well.
So does the blame rest on the shoulders of the band? Maybe. Time will, of course, tell, and I don’t want to write anything that I will regret later. Someone might read it and laugh at me.
The immediate reaction to this horror was to find BLAME, before the death toll is compiled. Not only before people have stopped crying, but before people have found out if they have to even start crying, the blame is being placed on “Nightclubs” A poll on Netscape’s website this morning asked visitors, “Should public officials do more to ensure nightclubs are safe?” Of course, with a question phrased like that the results, as of about three this afternoon were, “Yes, too many clubs ignore safety violations. 83% / No, most clubs are safe. 17%”
This worries me for a few reasons. The first is a question of the accuracy of this, and any of the other similar surveys that will be shown to us in the coming days. How many survey takers have been in a nightclub recently?
Honestly, if nightclubs were so horribly unsafe, why would the rare tragedies be international news for days in a row, when, say, deadly car crashes rarely get local TV blurbs?
But my biggest worry about the potential for rabid series of campaigns to “make nightclubs safer” is based on similar campaigns of the past. “Making Night Clubs Safer” has, historically been code for the targeting and closing of primarily black clubs. Once again, a haze of well intended energy has the potential to cause racist action.
Personally, I think the reason that this tragedy happened, if not its specifically liable parties, lies somewhere else. Great White had its 15 minutes. They were huge for a few months! To this day, nearly everybody who was listening to the radio at the end of the 80s remembers “Once Bitten . . . Twice Shy.”
They toured, I imagine, with a pretty impressive stage show. When you are on the bill of a stadium show, or even a thousand seat theater, you can really use a bit of fire. I guess that that was their genre, big, explosive, and famous as all fuck and gonna stay that way! The socks-in-pants pomposity was much more important than anything that they ever sang. Even when they could no longer fill a 300-person capacity Rhode Island club with people, they still wanted to fill the town with pre-Nirvana rock theatrics. All it took to bring them there, setting the stage ablaze, killing at least a third of their audience that night, was one hit single. After that, they couldn't go back. Sure, the clubs were shrinking; the records weren't really selling so well...
But at least the show could feel like a stadium, even if it were in grandma’s living room or an old wooden building.
The blame for this could fall on any number of people. It could fall on the club, on the band, on the band’s management... That’s not really important, at least for me, here, now. I think that the puckish fickleness of fame may have played its own vicious little role.