Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (11 page)

Actually, it was also part of his job. As an on-air “radio personality,” Gonsalves was expected to appear at concerts and events promoted by
WHJY
or its advertisers. In the case of the Great White concert, Rhode Island’s exclusive Budweiser beer distributor, McLaughlin & Moran Inc., was the advertiser who arranged with
WHJY
for his appearance at The Station. Budweiser’s interest in the concert was to promote its then-current marketing gimmick, “Born-On Dated” beer. Despite decades of touting “beechwood aging” as key to its product’s quality, Anheuser-Busch decided in 2003 to hype beer sold within days of its brewing, presumably to derive competitive advantage from its dozen regional breweries, as compared with Coors’s and Miller’s more centralized distribution systems. With that calculation, Born-On Dated beer took its place beside Spuds MacKenzie and thespian frogs in the brewer’s never-ending quest to persuade Americans to ingest more of its intoxicant.

For the marketing program, Budweiser distributors like McLaughlin & Moran conducted “Day-Fresh” promotions at various bars and nightclubs, its trucks delivering beer brewed that same day, which would be given away (“sampled”) to retail patrons. Because The Station was a good Budweiser customer, its assigned salesman thought it a great idea to run a Day-Fresh promotion at the Great White concert.

McLaughlin & Moran was a substantial advertising customer of
WHJY
, thereby earning promotional credits that the beer company chose to collect in the form of promotion of the Day-Fresh gimmick. The rock station agreed to park its distinctive van at The Station the evening of the concert, provide
WHJY
personnel to distribute promotional items at The Station, air commercial spots for the beer promotion, and coordinate the appearance of Gonsalves.

For its part, McLaughlin & Moran would pay a $200 “talent fee” directly to Dr. Metal and provide two three-by-ten-foot outdoor banners for the club’s façade. Festooned with the Budweiser logo, each read: “Party with
WHJY
and Budweiser” and “The Station Presents Great White.” The Derderians displayed them prominently the entire week before the concert.

From February 17 to February 20,
WHJY
trumpeted: “This Thursday night, 94
HJY
wants you to taste Day-Fresh Budweiser — bottled and delivered that same day! Try it this Thursday at The Station in West Warwick . . . with Great White performing live! The Doctor is there,
HJY
and Budweiser will hook you up with prizes from ten to midnight. Think fresh, drink fresh with Budweiser, this Thursday night at The Station in West Warwick!”

Members of The Station nightclub’s target audience who were listening would have reasonably concluded that two of their most trusted brands,
WHJY
and Budweiser, were endorsing the upcoming concert. That impression was cemented by Dr. Metal’s on-air telephone interview with Jack Russell on the evening of February 19 in which Russell bragged of pyrotechnics being a new addition to Great White’s tour. Neither
WHJY
nor Budweiser inquired whether the pyrotechnic-enhanced concert, with which their names were being associated, was illegal or dangerous.

The night of Great White’s appearance at The Station, veteran McLaughlin & Moran salesman Donald Trudeau, who was fifty-seven years old, and merchandiser Michael Cordier, thirty-two, arrived at the club with a dozen Budweiser hats and two dozen T-shirts to give away. Earlier in the day, ten cases of “Day-Fresh” Budweiser beer had been delivered from a brewery in Merrimack, New Hampshire. The beer was purchased by The Station but kept segregated from the bar’s other stores, to be accessed when Trudeau or Cordier requested a bottle or two. They’d approach concertgoers, engage them in conversation about the many benefits of drinking fresh beer, and ask them to try Day-Fresh Budweiser. Out would come a long neck from the salesmen’s Day-Fresh stash, and another entry would be made on McLaughlin & Moran’s tab. And so it went. Trudeau and Cordier confined their educational efforts to the horseshoe bar area of the club because the music in the club’s west end, from Great White’s opening band, Trip, was too deafening for conversation.

The two beer men were joined near the horseshoe bar by a group whose ages set them apart from most of The Station’s paying customers. Jordan Clark, David McGinn, and Jill Malinowski were Rhode Island College communications majors, participating in unpaid internships with
WHJY
for academic credit, when luck found them assigned to McLaughlin & Moran’s beer promotion that night. They were supervised by
HJY
promotions staff Steve Scarpetti and Jeremy Gately. The Budweiser salesmen chatted with the fresh-faced kids from
WHJY
, handed them hats and shirts to distribute, and prepped Gonsalves on what to say about Day-Fresh beer. Trudeau also gave Dr. Metal his $200 check.

When Trip’s set ended around 10:30, Gonsalves took to the stage with Scarpetti, McGinn, and Clark. Jill Malinowski remained near the horseshoe bar. As promised, the radio team pumped up the crowd for Great White, urged them to drink more Budweiser, and threw promotional junk at grasping hands. Had Dr. Metal glanced around him, he would have seen Great White manager Dan Biechele working in the shadows, setting up the special effects that Gonsalves and Jack Russell had discussed on-air the night before.

On the floor at center stage, just in front of the drum alcove, Biechele placed a wooden board onto which he had affixed four metal broom clips.
Into each clip he snapped a single cardboard tube, about the size of a Cuban cigar. Each tube bore a label, “
PYROPAK
^®
15 × 15.” They were gerbs. And they would prove Biechele’s undoing.

A gerb is a pyrotechnic device that produces a dense plume of sparks with little or no post-burn ash. Each is rated with two numbers — a burn time and a clearance height. Biechele’s 15 × 15 gerbs were rated to burn for fifteen seconds and throw a spark plume fifteen feet high.

Each spark from a gerb is literally a burning fleck of metal, carefully size-screened to burn out before reaching the floor. But if the sparks contact a dry, flammable material — like non-flame-retardant packing foam — before reaching the floor, they can ignite that material. A hand placed in the stream of sparks a few feet from the gerb might feel lightly peppered, as by sparks thrown from a grinding wheel; however, moisture in the skin prevents any burn. For this reason, the devices are incorrectly thought by some to emit “cool sparks.” But sparks are sparks.

Michael Jackson learned this painful lesson in 1984 while filming a Pepsi commercial. Sparks from a prematurely fired gerb ignited the showman’s heavily pomaded locks, searing his scalp before assistants noticed the fire and beat it out. Frightening images of that incident appeared on the Internet for years thereafter.

At The Station, Biechele pointed two of his gerbs straight upward; the other two, to either side at a forty-five-degree angle. His intended effect was a fan of sparks fifteen feet high and thirty feet wide, lasting fifteen seconds. His actual effect would be much longer lasting.

Each Pyropak gerb had a black plastic cap on its upper end, covering a round hole formed by a clay “choke” designed to concentrate the gerb’s spark plume. Through each cap Biechele carefully inserted an incendiary-coated wire loop called an electric match. When electricity passes through it, the loop becomes a red-hot short, igniting its chemical coating and, instantly, the gerb itself. Great White’s manager ganged the eight electric match leads, four and four, and connected the two wire bundles to a microphone-type cable, which he ran just offstage to a battery. When connected to both battery terminals, the gerbs, like model rocket engines, would ignite and burn until they exhausted themselves. There was no putting them out.

Rhode Island law, like that of most states, requires that fireworks of the type used by Great White be operated only by licensed pyrotechnicians. The fire code mandates that licensed pyro operators pass a safety examination, carry insurance, and keep fire extinguishers at the ready whenever fireworks are set off. The code also requires that anyone planning a pyro display obtain
a permit from the town’s fire marshal after submitting a stage plot, effects list, and proof of licensure and insurance. Applicants for a permit must also be prepared to conduct a preshow pyro demonstration for the fire marshal.

Biechele was neither trained nor licensed. He, Jack Russell, and the Derderians simply ignored all the pyro requirements.

Plans for Great White’s show had not always been so flashy, or so dangerous. In the weeks before Great White’s tour departure, Biechele corresponded with Randy Bast of High-Tech Special Effects in Memphis, Tennessee, from whom he had bought pyro for the 2000 W.A.S.P. tour. When Bast learned that Great White would be playing small venues, he urged Biechele to rent special effects like confetti spreaders, snow machines, bubble machines, and fog machines, none of which involved fire. But a fogger cost $350 a week, plus fluid; bubble or snow machines, $100 apiece per week, plus fluid. That could run $600 a week. And look wussy, to boot. Great White was heavy metal.

By contrast, a gerb was $12.60, and each electric match, $1.56. Pyro for a week of four concerts (four gerbs at the beginning of each concert, three at the end) would run $396.48, total. The calculation was easy. Just as long as safety was assigned no value.

Biechele did, however, rent one confetti spreader for Great White’s tour. Originally used to distribute grain in feedlots, these machines blow vast quantities of confetti from a spinning drum. But Biechele’s confetti machine did not make an appearance at Great White’s Station gig.

About a year earlier, Paul Vanner had painstakingly cleaned confetti from his speakers after a national act had blown it all over the club.

“What’s up with this?” Jeff Derderian had inquired.

Vanner explained, “Jeff, we can eliminate this one way. Don’t ever allow it. ’Cause I’m gonna start charging you money to come down here and clean these things out. You know, there’s six monitors here,” continued Vanner. “It’s gonna take me three, four hours, to do them, you know. If you give me a hundred bucks, I’ll come down and do it and then you can have all the confetti you want. You don’t want to give me a hundred bucks? Then, don’t have any confetti in the club.”

Derderian needed no further convincing. From that day forward, through Great White’s final appearance, he enforced an ironclad rule: No confetti at The Station.

Pyro, sure. Just no confetti.

CHAPTER 9

FILM AT ELEVEN

THE MONTH OF FEBRUARY 2003
was not a good one for nightclub-goers. In the early morning hours of February 17, an overcrowded club on Chicago’s South Side called
E
2 was the scene of twenty-one deaths when someone (a club security guard was suspected) discharged pepper spray on the second-floor dance floor to break up a fight between two women. A panicked crowd surged to the only exit it knew — at the head of a steep flight of stairs descending to street level. The force of the crowd pushed victims down the stairs, where they piled up ceiling-high at the bottom. The dead were crushed and asphyxiated, their bodies stacked and faces contorted against the glass doors to the street.

It was this tragic event that prompted Rhode Island state fire marshal Jesse Owens to tell a reporter the day before the Station fire, “It’s very unlikely something like that would happen here.”

When Great White took the stage at 11:05 p.m. on February 20, an unprecedented audio-visual recording memorialized the event. The coincidence of Chicago’s tragedy three days earlier and a
TV
reporter, Jeff Derderian, owning The Station, resulted in the presence of a professional news photographer at The Station, filming a walk-through of the venue, then Great White’s appearance.

Jeff Derderian, who had begun his
TV
career at Channel 6 in Providence, then worked at Boston’s
WHDH
, had just returned to Rhode Island, where he started reporting for
WPRI-TV
Channel 12. His first day at Channel 12 was the day of the Chicago club trampling. Derderian figured that a story on nightclub safety would be newsworthy in the wake of the Chicago tragedy, and what better place to shoot generic nightclub footage than his own club, The Station? So, around 10:40 on the night of the Great White concert,
WPRI
cameraman Brian Butler, driving the station’s
SUV
, passed soon-to-be club
owner Michael O’Connor’s car traveling in the opposite direction and pulled into The Station’s parking lot. Butler hefted his broadcast-quality digital video camera into the club, where Jeff Derderian set him up with bouncer Tracy King to act as his guide and crowd “icebreaker.” Clad in black T-shirt and black vest, with shaven head and brilliant smile, the house-size King parted the crowd and played host to Butler’s camera as it roamed each quadrant of the club, gathering footage of both crowd and venue. At times, King’s six-foot-two, three-hundred-pound body obscures all else in the frame. Watching the video, one feels like a slow-motion running back, following his lead blocker through crowds of opposing tacklers. But the opponents all wear smiles. And heavy-metal Tshirts.