“From sunset Friday to sunset Saturday, your mind had to be on nobody but God,” says Phife Dawg, remembering weekends at his grandmother’s house growing up, in last year’s documentary about A Tribe Called Quest, Beats, Rhymes and Life. “So I had to sneak and watch Soul Train. I had to sneak and watch Scooby Doo, or whatever cartoon was popping off at the time. But when it came to the block parties and the hip hop, once I saw them grabbing mics and getting busy, I risked my livelihood, getting kicked out of the house and everything, just to be a part of it.”

So how did this hip-hop legend, who lived for his music, go on to be the same one who later said, “I love hip-hop, but at the rate its going right now, I could do with or without it?”

That’s the strange story of Phife Dawg, who performs at Axis Nightclub in Santa Clara this Friday. Growing up in Queens as Malik Taylor, he was not just one of the founding members of Tribe, but the common demominator of the group, the one who basically brought them all together. His childhood best friend and fellow MC Q-Tip jumped out front to become the recognizable voice of Tribe on their first album, but on their second, 1991’s The Low End Theory, Phife started to emerge as an MC, especially on “Check the Rhime,” one of their most famous songs. By their next, 1993’s Midnight Marauders, the interplay between Q-Tip and Phife was an integral part of their sound.

After the group broke up, Phife put out one solo album in 2000, but the follow-up has been delayed by over a decade as he dealt with crippling health problems culminating in a kidney transplant in 2008. While Michael Rapaport’s 2011 documentary is far from the definitive statement about Tribe, it seems to have at least re-ignited Phife’s career—he was the only member of the group to stand behind it and even tour around it.

Phife’s show is one of the first from Alan Lim and Johnny Caron, who as Avant Productions have started booking shows at Axis Nightclub in conjunction with longtime DJ Dave Dynamix. So far, they’ve been on a roll, bringing the kind of bigger hip-hop shows that the South Bay has never really had a spot for. Last weekend, Axis had a “Legends” show featuring pioneering Bay Area turntablists Q-Bert, D-Styles and Shortkut of Invisibl Skratch Piklz.

To say that opening a nightclub is risky business is an understatement—eight out of 10 new clubs fail within the first year, according to Nightclub and Bar magazine. What does it take to beat those seemingly insurmountable odds? Trends, concept, funding, business plan, luck—a hundred factors both practical and abstract. But like the proverb that asserts that it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a crack staff with the right experience, skill set and chemistry to make any nightclub successful. It’s a team effort every single night—from the touch-and-go early days to (everyone hopes) long-term success.

When the new Santa Clara club Axis opened at the beginning of last month in its 14,000-square foot space with three dance floors, just such a team had already been working for months. Axis was meant to be something new and different in the South Bay, and the team behind it had to be able to pull it off.

“That was the key to hiring people. We wanted a tight-knit family environment on the staff, where there was a lot of trust,” says Axis manager Linda Dodge.

But what exactly do they do? Most patrons never see the tiny details behind the scenes that are handled every night and can make or break a nightclub, but the Axis staff took some time out to tell us about them.

Peter Bui, Bartender

Peter Bui had never seen anything quite like the hiring process for Axis bartenders. “It was a different approach. I was competing against like 30 people,” he says. “They really wanted the best.”

He’d heard about the new club from one of the owners, who suggested he apply. The process was rigorous, but he feels its emphasis on work ethic, time-management skills and honesty paid off. “It worked, because now we have a great team,” he says.

That team had a couple of months to set up a system before Axis opened, but they’ve been continuing to tweak in the weeks since then, taking patrons’ feedback into careful consideration.

Some of the issues they’ve had to fix are the kind of thing most people would never even think about, like the shot glass problem. Initially, the club was using 2-ounce shot glasses, but Bui noticed they were getting lots of complaints about the size of the shots. The issue was purely psychological—the standard 1-ounce shot looked puny inside the larger glasses. “It’s just the perception,” says Bui. “‘If I’m paying for a shot, I want the glass to be full.'”

Bui talked to his manager about it, the club switched to 1-ounce glasses, and the complaints from customers that they weren’t getting a “full” shot stopped instantly.

Bui says he’s never seen a staff as tight-knit as this one. The trust level extends to their tip system—they are split between the bartenders in all three rooms. That allows Bui to go from room to room, without the other bartenders feeling like he’s trying to cut in on their tips.

“It lets me say ‘If you need help, I’m there for you,'” says Bui.

Linda Dodge, Manager

The manager of Axis couldn’t tell you what the biggest challenge was trying to get the club ready to open. “It was all a challenge, I thought,” says Linda Dodge about trying to prepare for that target date. But perhaps the most nerve-wracking decision of all was deciding what that date should be.

“There are so many little things that you couldn’t possibly figure out what they all are. You just have to jump in with both feet,” she says. “We were all prepared for the worst, and hoping for the best.” The date they finally set was May 4, roughly two months after she started officially working for Axis in March. Hopes won out over fears: “The opening weekend was as smooth as could be.”

When people ask her what exactly the manager of a club does, her short answer is “everything.” “When something needs to be done, I jump in. When we run out of stuff at 2 o’clock in the morning, I’m down at the store,” she says. “I’m on call 24/7.”

So, for instance, it was her job to fine tune the staff training when one of the first hiccups turned out to be that bottle service and other transactions done with portable registers were simply taking too long. “I think we underestimated how important it was,” she admits. “You don’t want people waiting.”

DJ Sy-ence, Resident DJ

There’s no way DJ Sy-ence could have known that the debut of the Electronic Music Dance (EDM) festival I Love This City was going to be moved from San Francisco to Shoreline in May. But when it was, not even a month after the club opened, it gave a big visibility boost to what Axis set out to do musically—and even sent some electro fans their way.

“That night I was playing jungle and some drum ‘n’ bass, and I got a lot of compliments,” says Sy-ence. “One guy told me, ‘There’s no place in the South Bay playing this.'”

That, of course, was sort of the point. Axis launched with the idea of giving clubgoers who’d normally feel like they have to drive to the city to find DJs spinning an emerging genre like EDM a place to go in the South Bay. Sy-ence, a DJ for 15 years, has enjoyed a lot of freedom to experiment with finding the right sounds for the club. “They’ve given me the green light to do what I want to do,” he says. “So far we’ve gotten nothing but compliments on the mix of music.”

The entertainment menu is expected to grow very soon at Axis, with plans to bring in live music this summer. “We’re trying to get ourselves apart from just being looked at as a nightclub,” says Sy-ence. “We want to be a performance venue.”

Melissa Wells, Bottle Service/Cocktail Waitress

Melissa Wells most recently worked at Motif in San Jose. Having had a lot of experience with bottle service, she knew the demands were different than cocktail waitressing.

“It’s a lot more pressure,” she says. “You have a lot more people at one table, and you’re constantly at their table. You want to make them feel their time there is worth it.”

Once again, it’s the details that matter. One thing she noticed is that the club uses glass cups with their bottle service, whereas some other places she’d worked at used plastic, or worse. “C’mon,” she says. “If you get bottle service, you’re not going to want a paper cup.

Colby Reade, Executive Chef

“Street food without the wheels.” That’s the concept that executive chef Colby Reade has brought to The Eatery at Axis, the new club’s restaurant. As a prime mover in the food truck and pop-up food movements in San Francisco, and as an event chef for a catering company (in addition to working as an executive chef for Wolfgang Puck), Reade already knew plenty about people who need to get their food quickly and without a lot of fuss. Though he initially thought the business lunch crowd was completely different than the nightclub crowd later on, he came to realize that was the connection, and began his design of the menu from there.

“They want really good quality food in a relatively short amount of time. I’m kind of unique in that I look at the venue and what it needs, instead of saying ‘I’m going to put this kind of restaurant here, no matter what,'” says Reade. “I love the space. It’s big and it’s got a lot of unique features. And to me the feeling was that it’s time for something new, something more relevant in the neighborhood.”

With that in mind, he started with a small number of items to build around. At The Eatery, they cure their own meats, and make their own pork belly, in addition to baking their own bread. One of the first breakout hits on the menu has been the baby banh mi sliders. “Everyone’s been ‘wow,'” he says. “That’s really popular.”

Axis Nightclub
2909 Lakeside Dr.
Santa Clara

“I like candied yams, I never jeopardize who I am!” says Andre Nickatina, the renowned West Coast rap veteran who’s making a highly anticipated tour stop at Santa Clara’s Avalon Nightclub this week. Formally known as Dre Dog, Nickatina has achieved luminary status through slanging tapes and CDs hand-to-hand, most of which solely talk about drugs, money, or women.

On his most recent mixtape, Where’s My Money?, he raps in different cadences over an array of production both old and new. His voice, calm and confident, continues to age well. But his music is mainly—and has always been—more about personality than delivery; more vibe than subject matter.

That’s how has he grabbed such a huge following through the years. After all, he’s hardly the first rapper to fixate on his chosen subject matter. Yet he’s popular enough to have toured internationally since his 1993 debut The New Jim Jones, when he was still known as Dre Dog (a handle he dropped after his second project). The subsequent I Hate You With A Passion peaked impressively at #3 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart with no major promo push or marketing campaign.

He’s also maintained a mysterious aura around his whole hustle, rarely doing interviews and often times eluding journalists and fans. What’s special about his rise is that the Internet wasn’t then what it is now. And while his career got a shot in the arm certainly as file sharing exploded, he’s essentially thrived on what even the most mainstream of artists sometimes can’t: simple word of mouth. He’s gone from performing at public venues or any college campus that would have him to his current 44-city tour, selling out huge venues.

With the reunited Jane’s Addiction headlining Live 105’s BFD this weekend, it’s the perfect time to remember the first club to bring Perry Ferrell’s legendary band to the South Bay. From 1985 to 1990, Santa Clara’s One Step Beyond was a hub of counterculture in the Valley, with their all-ages policy exposing a generation of indie kids, punks, goths and other mistfits to not only Jane’s Addiction, but the Ramones, Replacements, Ministry and other alt-rock legends.

After the success of the One Step Beyond reunion last year, organizers are doing it again on July 21 at Club Illusions in Palo Alto (which has its own unique history throughout its various identities as the Keystone, the Vortex and the Edge). Headlining the One Step Beyond reunion this year will be the Frail, with performances from several DJs, including Live 105’s Aaron Axelsen.

Before Axelsen was shaping musical tastes around the Bay Area as music director at Live 105 and host of the weekly new-music showcase Soundcheck, he was having his own tastes shaped at One Step Beyond.

“I used to go to One Step Beyond and see crazy bands there when I was 14,” says Axelsen, who grew up in the East Bay. “It was a big part of who I am.”

He sees this event as sort of a high-school class reunion for those who had their eyes and ears opened at 1400 Martin Avenue. He’s also a big fan of headliners the Frail, the up-and-coming San Francisco electro-pop group who are releasing a new record this summer.

The One Step Beyond reunion will be held July 21, 8pm at Club Ilusions in Palo Alto, $10 pre-sale/$15 at the door.

There’s a certain symmetry to the alpha and omega of Santa Clara’s Avalon Nightclub. Mike Beard, who has booked hundreds of shows there though his Man Down Productions, remembers when Avalon owner Mike Jafari first transformed what used to be the DJ-dance spot Backbeat into a live music venue back in 2003.

As a Santa Clara native and a hard-rock fan, Beard knew that Y&T lead singer Dave Maniketti lived not far from the club, and decided one day just to walk over to his house.

“Dave was out there gardening or whatever,” he remembers. “You’re not really supposed to do that, but I did. I didn’t care, because at that point Y&T was really doing nothing, Dave had this band called Maniketti. I said ‘Hey, Dave, my name’s Mike Beard. I grew up in this area, played little league down the street. There’s a club here that’s doing live music now, called the Avalon. Why don’t you call over and check it out?'”

Beard didn’t think much of it at the time.

“But a couple days later, [Maniketti’s] wife, Jill, called the club and chewed Mike Jafari’s ass about me coming over to the house. But they started talking, and they played a show there,” he says. After a long, close relationship between the band and the club, which includes a benefit held for Y&T bassist Phil Kennemore before he passed away in 2011, Beard says “They’re cool about it now.”

Fittingly, perhaps, Y&T will play the last-ever show at the Avalon, on the day the club is set to close, June 30.

“It’s kind of come full circle,” says Beard.

There’s some symmetry, too, to the “Last Days of Avalon’ show this Friday at the Santa Clara club. Headlining will be El Chicano, the L.A. group known for hits like “Tell Her She’s Lovely’ and “Viva Tirado’ in the 1970s. A documentary about the band, In The Eye of the Storm, was filmed at the Avalon in 2009.

It’s been seven years now since dredg released their breakout third album, Catch Without Arms. Considering the impact the record had on the Los Gatos artists’ career—both because it was their first album to chart, and their last album for Interscope—it’s ironic that one of the best-remembered shows from the supporting tours at the time was when they played their other two albums in their entirety. They’ll correct that when they play Catch Without Arms in its entirety at Avalon on Thursday.

In retrospect, dredg was handling what could have been a difficult transition for fans perfectly back then. Though Catch Without Arms doesn’t sound as different from their previous albums now as it was made out to be at the time, it was undeniably a simpler, more accessible set of songs. Gone were the “brushstroke” interludes of El Cielo, and the winding, impressionistic touches of their concept albums.

Though there was a central concept at the heart of Catch Without Arms, it was a leaner, more powerful brand of the band’s angular art-rock. Fans could have taken it hard, worried that dredg was losing its edge, and maybe some did, but in their live shows dredg staked out a solid link between the new songs and their previous albums.

Ultimately, it worked—the album pleased early devotees while also expanding their following dramatically. But if the qualities that made Catch Without Arms unique got a bit of a raw deal at the time, this show offers a chance to re-discover them.

Los Gatos’ dredg play Thursday, March 22, at Avalon in Santa Clara, 8pm; $20.

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