First Avenue sparking a dance revolution

On Saturday night, every booze joint is beautiful. And on a recent Saturday, First Avenue is more beautiful than most. The 18-plus crowd celebrating the Too Much Love dance night's fourth week in the Mainroom is younger, smarter, scruffier and way less drunk than any other nightclub crowd downtown. It's also having way more fun.

Half of the patrons -- 500-plus through the door -- dance on the Mainroom stage. The rest gather around the DJ booth, which is set up in the center of the dance floor. Nearly everyone is dancing, and none too self-consciously.

A skinny young bearded guy with a mop of dark, curly hair rubberlegs around the floor like he owns it as Karl D. segues into Mad Mike's "Death Star," whipping his torso around to the Detroit techno classic's elliptical beat. His counterpart, a girl with a black bob and sunglasses, dressed all in black except for her fuzzy pink kitty-cat ears, pogos alongside the booth, 21st-century-style.

When DJ SovietPanda sets up his laptop above the turntables and eases into LCD Soundsystem's "Beat Connection," not a soul yells "Check your mail!" Nobody even seems to notice. Especially not the guy at the front of the stage, who's far too busy twirling his glow sticks.

"I haven't gotten too much 'How can you be using a computer to DJ?' " says SovietPanda (whose given name is Peter Lansky) a few days later over coffee in the basement of the University of Minnesota's Wilson Library. At 21, the lanky, baby-faced DJ, journalism student and blogger is barely older than Too Much Love's youngest patrons. Still, given the deftness with which he blends rock and electronic dance music, you'd never guess that he's been DJing out for less than a year.

"But I feel that it's definitely what some people think," he continues. "I don't necessarily blame them. But to me, it's legit. That's the way I listen to music. To me, it makes sense to DJ in the medium you use as a listener. Also, I can change the speed of tracks without changing their pitch, loop parts of tracks, do all kinds of things I wouldn't be able to do otherwise. Plus, I could never afford to buy everything I use on vinyl."

DJing with a computer still carries a bit of a stigma among dance music purists, which is a little silly. (Attention geeks: He uses Native Instruments' Traktor DJ Studio software.) After all, Lansky has to select tracks and mix them, just like colleagues who use vinyl or CDs. What he doesn't have to do is haul a bunch of heavy stuff around.

Lansky embraced dance music in 2001, right around the time he started blogging. He's also been known to spend long hours posting on I Love Music (ilxor.com), the bulletin board that serves as an online battleground for critics and enthusiasts worldwide.

"The thing that got me huge into dance music was DFA Records and LCD Soundsystem," he says. "That, and a friend playing 'Homework' by Daft Punk all the way through -- not just the singles -- which just blew my mind. For a time I liked Moby. I don't much anymore. But I really got hooked on DFA when those first couple singles came out. I started reading interviews and reviews, seeking things out."

Compiling his discoveries on mixtapes for friends led Lansky to long for a wider audience. "I'd always wanted to do live stuff, but could never afford turntables and records," he says. Then I got to know a DJ in Chicago who I really respected: Johnny Love. He'd throw these wild parties where everybody would be in their underwear. He uses a computer for every gig. I thought I'd give it a try."

As Lansky learned his craft, First Avenue went through a revolving-door succession of weekend dance-night attempts. As with most dance venues in the country, the club's attendance sagged dramatically in the wake of 9/11. Newer, cleaner spots, offering essentially the same house music and trance, sprung up around downtown, and the venerable institution started hemorrhaging clientele. Numerous attempts to lure customers back failed, often miserably. By the time First Ave reintroduced the lip-sync contests that had proven successful in the early '80s, pundits were wondering how long it'd take for the club to give mud wrestling a second go.

Instead, it raised its sights. Led by Roy Freedom and Paul Spangrud -- two-thirds of the DJ team that successfully towed the club out of the disco era a quarter century earlier -- 2005's Downtown Danceteria marked a return to the diversity that had sustained First Avenue's dance nights through the '80s and most of the '90s. While the music was great, the club's effort was too little, too late. Early last year, First Avenue stopped doing weekend dance nights altogether.

"When First Avenue said, 'We want to put you in the Mainroom once a week,' I was like, 'You're crazy,' " he says. "I agreed to it because they had enough faith in me to do it, and because they said they'd go all out in promoting it, which they have." Still, he wasn't expecting all the Too Much Love billboards.

"People are showing up, and seem to be having a good time," Lansky says. "And First Ave has been really cool. ... I usually end up getting a little tipsy and telling people how much I love working with them at the end of the night."

Rod Smith is a freelance writer and recovering DJ who worked at First Avenue --abundantly on and off -- for roughly a decade.