Party Pooper
The party at Club Evolution was crashing more spectacularly than its regulars knew.
On Saturday nights last summer, the club was the final stop before last call, a 3 a.m. bar where the city’s normally self-segregated cliques converged, pulsing toward a capacity of 1,500. The dance floor overflowed with various tribes — spiky-haired white boys, skate-styled Asians, blingy African-Americans and, most famously, an assortment of jiggly women in low tops, short skirts and high heels who gyrated atop a clear walkway while the crowd flowed like an electric sea below them.
The windowless, warehouse-sized building was a labyrinth of cavernous party rooms connecting to dance floors through a series of dim tunnels. People buzzed around six bars, two in the main room. DJs scribbled separate vibes — Xan Lucero and Atom Bryce, who called themselves the Control Freeks, spun ambient electronica in the low-ceilinged Oxygen Room while DJ Nam and Shawn Flo pumped techno or Top 40 anthems for dancers on a floor covered with gold glitter.
The building at 3954 Central had been home to various nightclubs since the 1980s, reincarnated every few years as another down-and-dirty hot spot: Fanny’s, Guitars and Cadillacs, Winchesters, The Coliseum, The Limelight, Fall Out, Atlantis.
“People wanted the whole big experience all in one building,” says former owner Stuart Salomon, who bought the club in 1993 and now owns the Beaumont Club and the Grand Emporium and is rehabbing the defunct American Chrome (formerly Johnny Dare’s).
In 1999, Salomon installed new lighting systems and debuted the goth-leaning Club XO. Competing with the burgeoning one-stop party market offered by the casinos, he booted bands and hired DJs to provide a modern vibe. Skilled bartenders mixed highballs from top-shelf liquor in plastic cups on the main floor. (In the alcoves, booze came in glasses.) Bouncers were mostly ex-military, outfitted with radios because the labyrinthine club had no clear sightlines.
But by 2003, Salomon had learned the sad truth about the city’s nightlife. “You can’t charge a cover in KC that supports the ability to have an ever-changing club,” he tells the Pitch. “Because Kansas City won’t allow a high cover charge, it limits the ability of club owners to create dynamic concepts.”
In April 2003, Salomon sold controlling interest in the club to Jeff Holloway, a dentist from Sedalia with no experience in the nightclub business.
Immediately, Holloway faced trouble. A pack of nearby homeowners had organized Westport Neighbors United to push their complaint that the club had become a public nuisance. They said they were tired of hearing the club’s noise and seeing its patrons roam the streets, break bottles, pee in yards, huff from crack pipes and hump in parked cars. The group’s leader, James Grow, and three neighbors had filed a lawsuit against XO in August 2001, and by October 2003, Jackson County Circuit Court Judge John O’Malley had fined XO $360,000 and ordered it to begin closing at 1:30 a.m.
Holloway, who later claimed he was unaware of the suit when he bought the club from Salomon, had a limited time to appeal — but never did. (“There is absolutely no question that he was aware of that case,” Salomon says.)
Instead he flouted the judge’s order, blaring music at ear-splitting levels. The party continued to spill out into the streets around 3 a.m. Though city liquor-control officers were aware of the disturbance, they couldn’t revoke XO’s liquor license because the lawsuit had been between the neighbors and the county.
Meanwhile, former employees say, Holloway seemed to be running the club like a get-rich-quick scheme. He’d introduced hip-hop on Friday nights, capitalizing on the fact that many of the city’s bar owners were afraid to cater to the so-called urban crowd. On Saturdays, DJs pumped rap, techno and dance, and a second wave of partiers clogged the entryway after 1 a.m.
“It was a happening spot,” says Anthony Barnes, a Major Brands distributor who supplied XO with Crown Royal, Jägermeister and Red Bull — and watched his sales balloon. “People were getting back into it. It was wall-to-wall people in there.”
But one Friday night this past May, the night crew arrived for work to find the club’s heavy wooden door bolted with a metal crossbar. They were suddenly out of work, and thousands of partiers were cut off, forced to disperse to smaller venues across the metro.
Now there’s a “For Sale” sign on the building. A graffiti tag scrawled along one side reads: “$300,000 RIP.”
Most people chalked up the closure to neighborhood pressure. But employees say that Holloway was his own accidental buzz kill, a man who liked to take part in the festivities more than manage them, who smiled broadly while short-circuiting the longest-running party spot the city has ever seen.
Folks from Jeff Holloway’s part of Missouri think of Kansas City as the big time.
By early 2003, Holloway had run a six-person dental practice in Sedalia for more than a decade. He was a 48-year-old, recently divorced father of two who, court records suggest, might have been better-suited for bachelorhood.
The split had not been amicable. “During our marriage Jeff repeatedly declared that when I reached age 40 he was going to trade me in for two 20s,” his wife, Janet Love, wrote in court documents. Love alleged that her husband had had at least three affairs while they were married. Over the course of several years, he’d spent more than $86,000 on one of his dental-office employees, a woman in her early 20s, paying for rent, trips and a boob job, he later told Sedalia police. Love also claimed that Holloway had left firearms and ammunition in an unlocked closet within reach of their daughter, and in court documents she accused him of refusing to adhere to the limitations of his dental license, treating his kids for medical illnesses related to “dermatology, gynecology or stomach pain.”
For his part, Holloway reported to police that his wife was threatening to kill herself, resulting in her involuntary trip to a mental-health center for evaluation. He filed a restraining order against her in January 2001, calling her verbally abusive and griping that she hadn’t taken her medication.
It was shortly after his divorce was finalized, in April 2003, that Holloway paid $400,000 to buy Salomon’s 49 percent ownership of HMKG&C, the corporation in charge of Club XO. (Salomon describes HMKG&C as a handful of local businessmen who viewed the bar solely as a good investment; at one point in the early ’90s, the club was reportedly grossing more than $139,000 a month.) Holloway would later buy the entire operation; at one time, the deal involved Holloway’s solicitation of extra funding from his twin brother, Jon, who ran a large hog-farming operation in Sedalia.
For the Holloway brothers, the club wasn’t just a way to make money. After initially agreeing to speak to the Pitch, Jeff Holloway failed to return phone calls. His brother, however, suggests that they thought of the club as a vacation spot with dividends.
“My closest neighbor is two miles away, so you can imagine just how fun life is here down on the farm,” Jon Holloway tells the Pitch. “The corn blocks the view of the timber and the 1,200-head hog farm, [but] you can still smell it. There’s really not a whole lot going on here, so for us to go to the city and to have a good time — it was just a good time is all it was. We like to see people have a good time, and that’s what the whole purpose of the club was for.”
Jeff Holloway claimed to have tipped drinks in exclusive circles in Puerto Vallarta and Las Vegas, former employees say.
They weren’t impressed. They were professionals, most having worked in the nightlife industry for decades, and the club had been lucrative. But during club hours, former employees say, Holloway seemed more interested in meeting women than in running his business.
After Salomon sold out to Holloway, general manager Sleiman Abdullah stayed behind to ease the transition. Abdullah had started at the club as a doorman back in 1993 and had managed it since 1999.
But things got off to a rough start. That April, the club lost a major source of cash when cigarette maker RJ Reynolds stopped pouring more than $130,000 annually into clubs across the metro in exchange for stocking Camel supplies and giving away cigarettes. The money had saved XO $10,000 a year in bar supplies such as ashtrays and napkins, Abdullah told the Pitch in 2003.
Then, in October, Holloway single-handedly sabotaged the club’s efforts to fight Jim Grow’s much-publicized lawsuit when he showed up to Jackson County Circuit Court without a lawyer. At the hearing, Judge O’Malley told Holloway that because XO was technically owned by a corporation, he needed legal representation to speak on its behalf — and then ruled in favor of the Westport neighbors, granting their entire list of demands, resulting in the $360,000 worth of damages and the 1:30 a.m. shut-down order.
But XO continued to stay open until 3 a.m., in violation of O’Malley’s ruling. Abdullah tells the Pitch that the club was spending only enough to keep running — and it showed. On April Fool’s Day the club lost electricity, forcing a show by ‘tween rocker Katy Rose across the street to the Hurricane. That spring, receipts plummeted by more than $14,000. The club began cutting its monthly liquor order in half, Barnes says.
“When I first got there, things were already going downhill,” says a former bouncer who had worked doors at other metro clubs before joining XO just after Holloway bought the place.
“The ice machine broke, and he’d send employees to QuikTrip to buy bags, then the cooler broke,” says Gabe Meyer, who worked his way from valet to barback by the time the club closed. “We never had anything fixed at the same time. We’d run out of cups, out of napkins. We were always running out of something.”
In January 2004, Abdullah says, Holloway left him a personal check and took most of the club’s cash on hand, then took off for a birthday bash in the Cayman Islands. “It bounced,” he says. Abdullah says he covered the expenses out of his own pocket — which, he adds, would become a regular occurrence. From January to May 2004, when the club closed for remodeling, Abdullah says, he spent more than $40,000 of his own money for liquor orders as well as a personal-injury lawsuit against the club and the fines imposed by Grow’s lawsuit. He also shelled out approximately $10,000 to pay state sales taxes.
Holloway had a revival plan that seemed like it would keep the club solvent. By that time he had bought out all of the other partners in HMKG&C. In July he and his brother formed a new entity called HS&H LLC, then secured renewal for the club’s 3 a.m. liquor license.
Abdullah says the letter S in HS&H was supposed to stand for his first name, Sleiman; because he’d contributed so much financing, he’d been promised part ownership in the club. (Documents filed with the Kansas City Regulated Industries Division list Abdullah as an officer with general control of the business.) Abdullah says he took time off during the remodel and returned to find the club’s locks had changed.
Holloway reopened the club in September, this time calling it Evolution.
Still, the six-digit, court-imposed tab was due, and Holloway’s new direction for the club was seemingly conceived to make fast cash. But before he got that plan rolling, he wanted to get an ATV back from an ex-girlfriend. Holloway’s new bachelorhood had a messy complication, one that would grow into a series of accusations that threatened to shut down his dental practice and poop on the Kansas City party. Again.
On July 20, 2004, Holloway’s 23-year-old former girlfriend accused him of sexually assaulting her. She said she’d come to his dental office after-hours for free veneers. (She told police that Holloway had bought her an ATV but now wanted it back; she said she’d agreed to trade the off-roader for some under-the-table dental work.) She claimed that while she was in his chair, he’d injected her with three times the normal dosage of Demerol and that when she awoke hours later, her shirt and bra had been pulled up over her breasts, her belt cut and her jeans pulled down. She had a hickey on the right side of her neck.
No formal sexual assault charges were filed. But the woman’s statements to police also contained claims that Holloway had been her prescription-drug dealer. She told police that Holloway had used phony names to issue her numerous prescriptions for painkillers and had allowed her to write and fill her own.
Soon, Holloway’s dental practice was crawling with Sedalia police officers as well as investigators from the Missouri State Dental Board and the Missouri Department of Health and Human Services’ Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
Things got worse for Holloway on September 13, when he tested positive for cocaine after agreeing to the dental board’s demand for a urinalysis. Court records show that Holloway tried to explain that “someone must have slipped the cocaine into a drink.”
Jon Holloway uses what might be called the “redneck defense” to dispute the claim that his brother used cocaine. “I know my brother. I know my brother real well. And I know, as redneck as he is and as redneck as I am, that we are totally against that,” he tells the Pitch.
Cocaine or no, Jeff Holloway’s behavior was disturbing. At noon on September 27, dental board inspector Mark Dudenhoeffer later reported, Holloway was standing despondently in front of his office building with his dental mask untied. He had cuts on his right arm and leg that he’d sutured himself, according to Dudenhoeffer’s sworn affidavit. “The defendant was not alert, was unclear in answering questions, and behaved in a manner that was disoriented and unfocused,” Dudenhoeffer testified. He added that Holloway said he “did not know how he became injured but that he may have fallen” and “did not remember coming to work … or how he got to work.” But he had seen patients that morning, Holloway told Dudenhoeffer.
That day, Holloway voluntarily surrendered his license. The next day, the Missouri Dental Board, arguing that Holloway presented “a substantial probability of serious danger to the health, safety and/or welfare of clients and patients,” won a restraining order barring him from practicing.
Board investigators alleged that since May 2002, Holloway had issued at least 89 undocumented prescriptions, and they accused him of “incompetence, misconduct, gross negligence, fraud, misrepresentation or dishonesty.”
To regain his license, Holloway agreed to complete a treatment program. In summarizing the results of a court-ordered psychological evaluation, Judge Donald Barnes noted that Holloway had an “inability to control impulses including gambling and compulsive behaviors with people” and that he “appeared to brag about such relationships and conduct, which by any reasonable standard is outside the norms expected.”
By last fall, Holloway was heavily leveraged. He faced fines against XO, was fronting cash for the club’s remodeling and was fighting to keep his decaying dental business solvent. Everybody seemed to have a hand in his wallet: He’d paid a $65,000 settlement to his wife in early 2002 and owed $4,000 a month in alimony. He owed more than $19,000 to Jackson County for 2003 and 2004 real estate taxes on the property at 3954 Central. The bank had foreclosed on his home. The two checks he had written for his court-ordered mental evaluation had bounced. Jackson County court records show that he owed more than $9,000 to American Ingredients for back rent on the club’s parking lot and was about to be hit with a $50,000 judgment for another personal-injury lawsuit over a bar fight in the fall of 2001. He had been sued for another $2,000 in small-claims court by a man who’d paid in advance for dentures but claimed never to have received them.
But things could have been worse.
Lacking DNA evidence, the Pettis County Prosecutor’s Office never filed charges on the sexual-assault complaint. In February of this year, the Missouri State Dental Board allowed Holloway to return to practice under supervision while he awaited a trial to determine professional sanctions, including the revocation of his license. (The hearing is scheduled for September 15.) For writing undocumented prescriptions, Holloway pleaded guilty in March to a misdemeanor charge for failing to keep records of controlled substances, earning two years of probation and community service. He also was able to keep control of his nightclub; under Kansas City ordinances, a bar owner must be convicted of a felony to be ineligible for a liquor license.
Soon Holloway was celebrating a September grand reopening for Club Evolution, attempting to reaffirm his position as king of the scene.
To stay afloat, Evolution needed an insta-party.
At the peak of its power, XO had reigned as Westport’s dance and electronic-music emporium.
“They wanted to be different and didn’t want to give in to format changes happening at other clubs,” says Bill Pile, a promoter whose company, U:Move, began bringing nationally known acts such as Paul Oakenfold and Dave Aude to the club in 2003. “XO was a focus point for underground dance music. People gravitated there on Saturday night for dance stuff. It was one of the first places to bring national DJs on a consistent basis.”
Pile says the club had at least three subsets of frolickers: suburban kids from Johnson County or Blue Springs who sought the biggest place with the longest line for their city experience, music intelligentsia who followed the national talent, and meatheads who were there to thrust at every female body that moved.
“Didn’t matter if you were wearing a $300 pair of Prada shoes or just a pair of trainers, people were getting what they wanted out of that room,” he says.
But Evolution was supposed to be a rave and techno joint, the kind that brought Gucci girls and guys with glowsticks. Building a glitterati scene takes time, though, and KC’s night vibe had changed since XO dominated. Rave and techno weren’t cutting-edge anymore. Most of the old midtown hip-hop outfits had folded, and even Plaza restaurants were upping their cool factors by offering DJs residencies.
Working at XO had once meant status with a paycheck, so some employees had hung on during the remodel, hammering nails in their downtime and dreaming about bringing the scene back full-tilt.
“We just wanted to rebuild this club so we could play and people could dance,” says Xan Lucero of Control Freeks.
“I was just trying to avoid Jeff’s personal problems affecting the club and keep it open and make it the hot spot it used to be,” adds Brian Kessinger, one of the bar’s managers.
The club was near capacity when it reopened in September 2004. But after the initial rush, crowds came in crests and lulls.
So Holloway tried yet another tack. He fired Will Crabtree, a big-party thrower who had booked nationally known DJs such as DJ Micro, Baby Annie, DJ Monk and Trevor Lamont. He told the Control Freeks, who had recently opened for Moby, to stop their trademark break beats and invest in hip-hop wax. And he hired a promoter who went by the stage name “Rome” from Distinctive Affairs, who had connections with national stars such as Jamie Foxx and Usher. Rome took over in January and issued a dress code: no athletic wear, no T-shirts, no XXL clothing.
“They usually call me to get a nice, polished, black crowd in there,” Rome says of the city’s white club owners. “I’m like the next hope when the white crowd doesn’t stick around.”
Rome’s promotional strategy didn’t pivot on attracting clubutantes — he supplied them, hiring 50 knockout male and female “promotional models” to show up and schmooze. His models networked, hitting other bars or concerts and handing out invitations to the club. Each got a cut of the door receipts, based on invitations that clients brought to the door.
“We always try to cater to groups of chic ladies and dapper guys, and one of our niches is to make sure our events are diverse and hyped,” Rome says.
On Fridays the line went from single file to straight mob. The wait at the velvet rope was sometimes more than an hour, and the cover went from $5 to as much as $50 as the club filled toward capacity and people tried to buy their way inside.
It was chaos outside, but inside, Distinctive Affairs provided its own crowd controllers, a handful of thick-limbed guys at the front door. “Once you got in there, everything was calm,” says Mary Morrison, a promotional model who worked the club.
“We let people in on our motto: appearance and class,” Rome says.
But that was only on Fridays. On Saturdays, absent Rome’s crew, Evolution’s staff was left to handle the mob alone. Rome sometimes checked out the scene, and he says that with no established dress code, it was even bigger than his Friday nights. When the club had been XO, a full security staff had consisted of ten bouncers and four or five privately contracted armed guards out front. Evolution, though, usually had just eight indoor enforcers. Many of the previous staffers had found other jobs by the time the club reopened, leaving a crew of inexperienced muscleheads and former doormen who couldn’t handle the new scene.
“On certain nights it was one fight, then another, then another,” says a former bouncer. “It was like a domino effect. People would see the door staff occupied, so they’d do something.”
Once last winter, DJ Shawn Flo says, he left his booth to push a mob of people out the front door and got his hand sliced from wrist to forefinger. Another time, a patron hit David Salyers, a bouncer who helped manage the club, in the forehead with a beer bottle. The staff learned to search both women and men for weapons, another bouncer says. Bartenders and light techs often had to jump their posts to stop fights.
Most of the ruckus went unreported to the Kansas City Police Department; the number of calls to the club’s address increased slightly, from two in February to six in April, but most were reported as outside disturbances. “The reality of the situation is that most club owners like to handle problems internally,” says Capt. Roy True, who’s in charge of the Central Patrol’s late-night shift. “A lot of times, they don’t want to call us, because they feel there will be consequences on their [liquor] licenses, which isn’t necessarily true.”
Because hip-hop nights have such a negative perception in town, Rome says he allowed a clause letting Holloway terminate his contract if Holloway believed that the Friday promotions jeopardized his business. In April, Holloway severed ties with Rome (though he would rehire him a few weeks later after attendance lagged).
“I felt like that was an excuse for him to take over my door fees and cut me out,” Rome says. “Jeff always smiled in my face, but I just felt like what he did was kind of snakish. He didn’t talk to me about what we could do to stop the bad apples from coming down and hanging outside.”
It was a kamikaze business plan that brought in cash — little of which seemed to be going back into the club. Lucero and other employees say they often contributed their own money for booze, hoping to make enough to be reimbursed later. “We had to chase them for money forever,” Lucero says. “It was like pulling teeth, which is funny because he’s a dentist.”
Perhaps he should have stuck to his day job. His moonlighting had become the nightlife’s punch line.
In April, Judge O’Malley called Holloway back to Jackson County Circuit Court and asked him to explain why he thought he could still operate a club until 3 a.m. after the 2003 order to close at 1:30.
HS&H LLC seemed to be a company created to avoid O’Malley’s mandate to Holloway. According to court records, Holloway and his brother shared interest in HS&H, which had not only purchased the assets of HMKG&C but also leased the same building and parking lot and retained the same attorney and accountant. They had settled just $8,000 of the former neighborhood judgment. Though Holloway claimed to have purchased his old corporation for $50,000, he’d paid only $6,000 of that sum, most of which went directly to HMKG&C’s creditors. (The twins now seemed unclear about terms of their own deal. “I don’t own anything there,” Jon Holloway tells the Pitch. “The only thing I did was go up there and help Jeff out. That’s what I did, being a brother.”)
But Holloway did the most damage himself when he took the stand. Under questioning, he told the judge he’d closed XO because of the judgment against it and had had no intention of reopening. Then, he said, he um, reopened it. Then he copped to the questionable “new” corporation.
“The corporation [HS&H] was created so we could obtain a liquor license,” he testified. Then he explained his motive: “Because the other corporation had — how do I say it? Because we had expended all our attempts to get this appealed or resolved in the courtroom … and I knew it couldn’t survive at 1:30.”
O’Malley found him in contempt and ordered the club to close for 20 consecutive days of operation — that’s seven weeks on the party calendar, because the club was open only Thursday through Saturday — and imposed a midnight closing time. It was the equivalent of a death sentence for a bar with a reputation for being the night’s last stop.
Now the hulking building is for sale. Other potential nightclub owners might understandably view the location warily; speculation among business owners is that it will likely be converted into office space or high-priced condos.
The long-running good times at 3954 Central are most likely over.
Someone, however, may have had one last blast.
In June, Holloway reported a break-in at the building. Someone had pried a deadbolt from a door on the building’s north side, forcing a two-by-four from the wall and looting $76,000 worth of equipment — computers, sound mixers, turntables, lighting equipment, video projectors, CD and DVD players and karaoke machines, stacks of amps and towers of speakers.
Whoever got away with the goods could throw a hell of a party.
