Club Dada is reopening. You’ve read that before and it is true again. City Tavern’s owner, Joshua Florence, is reopening the fabled bar/venue and is positively giddy about it, despite all the extra work it entails. “I’m stoked about Club Dada,” says Florence said. “You’re not going to find me complaining.” Armed with the same business savvy that has made City Tavern a success and a sober caution that respects both the area and the difficulties of doing business in it, Florence is doing his best to ensure that his Deep Ellum venture will be one with longevity.
Florence, a Dallas native, grew up visiting Deep Ellum, racing around its musical campus since he was seventeen. A self-proclaimed “Tripping Daisy junky,” he spent the’90s devoted to that group and others, developing that interminable bond that so often joins person to place, an experience that is especially common with somewhere renowned as Deep Ellum. Florence respects the history of the neighborhood and aims to both preserve and build upon the same foundation that nurtured him two decades ago.
Opening a music club in Deep Ellum has long been in Florence’s mind, but a number of mitigating factors led him to open City Tavern first. Virtually the only music venue in downtown proper, City Tavern has been up and running in Dallas for about five years. The establishment inhabits two stories: a traditional bar downstairs, a music stage and smaller bar above. Looking out the second floor windows behind the stage, one thinks of Max’s Kansas City, Manhattan’s overlooked little brother to punk Mecca CBGB’s. The resemblance is not merely architectural. City Tavern frequently hosts the best of Dallas’s burgeoning musicians. Hipsters and downtown white collars, City Tavern is a place of solace for an intriguing cross-section of Dallas society that has drawn comparison to Star Wars’ Mos Eisely Cantina. Joshua Florence would not have it any other way.
Florence intends to foster the same welcoming spirit at Club Dada that has made City Tavern a mainstay. This is best accomplished, he believes, by first shedding the area’s former reputation for standoffishness.
“One of the things that La Grange and Trees have done really well is to get rid of the old Deep Ellum mystique of the surly bartender and the dickhead door guy,” Florence said. “What we tell our door guys here at City Tavern is I want you to be 90% Wal-Mart greeter and 10% security.”
Florence’s aim is not to be patronizingly friendly; he truly believes in the virtue of hospitality, particularly as it applies to the cultural importance of bars and music venues in society. His vision for Club Dada going forward is that it will be “where regular people go to commune, listen to great bands, have a beer, and talk politics, religion, or their favorite band.”
Excited about the new growth in Deep Ellum, Florence believes that Club Dada, enveloped between new music venues La Grange, Nightmare on Elm, and the resurrected Trees, is perfectly located: a vacant opportunity to further extend the neighborhood’s already diverse patronage. Florence intends to fill that vacancy with quality offerings from a mixture of traditions.
“I hope, over time, we can establish the reputation that Club Dada is where you go to see good music,” he said. “Whether it’s good indie rock, whiskey country, hip hop, soul, it’s where you go and you know it’s going to be good.”
To accomplish this, Florence has enlisted the help of local booking agents Scott Hawthorne of Annex House, John Iskander of Parade of Flesh, Lance Yocom of Spune, and John Solis to help him stock Dada’s schedule with class acts.
While Club Dada’s booking brigade and spatial improvements (Florence is demolishing the old bar and bathroom to clear out an extra 500 square feet) will allow the venue to book larger acts, Florence promises that it will still cater to local talent. Impressed with the quickening hip-hop, folk, country, and rock landscapes springing from Denton, Dallas, and beyond, Florence reassures, “There’s no way [Club Dada’s size] is going to take away from our involvement with the local scene. The local scene right now is just out of sight.”
Florence appreciates that Club Dada comes prepackaged with its own story and local expectations.
“We’re feeling the pressure of reopening what was an institution in a really big City,” he said. “We’re going to be respectful of what this place has always meant to people.”
Fortunately, Florence knows that a respectful approach does not obviate sweeping improvements.
“We’re just going to have to walk the line between what we believe are going to be some good improvements while still maintaining the essence of what Club Dada used to be,” he said.
It is deference wrought, not by replication, but quality. The masks, the T-shaped tables, and the stage are all staying. The sound, the lights, and the bookings, he aims to improve. Florence knows that to do Club Dada the greatest justice is to ensure that it continues to be a place where musical memories can be forged.
“I feel confident; definitely not cocky,” Florence says as he looks to open Dada’s doors before year’s end. Conscious that others have walked in the same shoes and failed, the co-owner and his three partners are trying their best to be prudent.
“There’s got to be a balance between blind passion and smart decisions,” he said. “There’s a lot of blind passion involved, but we’ve put pencil to paper a thousand times over.”
Florence’s caution is what gives people confidence that they will not be reading “Dada Closing Again” headlines in another few years. Florence’s “blind passion” is what reassures people that Club Dada will be very, very good once again.
