It’s Legal, but Fun Anyway

Happy Wednesdays is legal. The Wednesday-night-only club has the energy, atmosphere and music of an underground club, but it’s legal. This is good, because 20 feet from its door sits the police substation on the Redondo Beach Pier.

“Yeah, they kind of keep an eye on things,” says promoter Gary Blitz. The brightly lighted substation juts out of a concrete parking structure at a Gehryesque angle. Blitz looks up at two policeman sitting behind the glass walls of their office.

What the officers look down upon is a line of about 30 club-goers, ranging in age from 18 to 30, waiting to have their ID checked. Those over 21 get a fluorescent-green plastic bracelet so they can buy beer, the only alcohol sold in the club. The sound of loud, bass-driven music drifts upstairs from the Happy Wednesdays dance floor. A ‘60s-style psychedelic light show plays on the wall by the door.

What’s happening downstairs in the club could be a scene out of any of the late ‘80s underground clubs. More to the point, it sounds like an underground club. Disc jockey Joey Beltram is playing heavily synthesized dance music--call it techno acid house, for lack of a better phrase. It blasts out at a breastbone-quivering 126 bass beats per minute.

“This is the music people want to hear and are looking to hear,” says club-goer Robert (The Reverend) Anderson. “What they play on the radio is crap.”

In sync with the music is a fairly overpowering light show. Most of the time it scatters multicolored beams, but then a battery of strobes goes off with the intensity of airport landing lights, freeze-framing the action.

The 400-strong crowd dances into a frenzy. There’s never a pause in the sound. The club has a dervish-in-the-’90s quality.

“The whole underground risk-getting-arrested club scene isn’t happening any more,” says Heather Wessner, 22. “This is the closest thing to it.

The club has been successful partly because “this isn’t a good time to do an underground club,” says Blitz, who is a veteran of a few. “There’s a police task force that will shut you down.” He’s managed to keep Happy Wednesdays going since February, which, for this type of club, is a very long time.

“When they originally opened they did everything right,” says a veteran of the night scene whose nom de club is Mike Hell. Happy Wednesdays “gave out a lot of passes,” Hell explains. “They made it 18 and over, they kept the beer cheap. It attracted a lot of people. And people go where people are.”

If the club has a drawback, it’s that it shuts down at 1:30 a.m. “It’s probably just as well,” says Blitz. “If it didn’t close early, these people would be jobless within a month.”

Name: Happy Wednesdays at Fashions on the Redondo Beach Pier. Wednesdays only. 9 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. 18 and over. (310) 288-1116.

Cover: $6 if over 21; $8 if under. (“The cover is higher for those under 21 because they can’t buy alcohol,” says Blitz.)

Drinks: Tap beer, $1; bottled beer, domestic or imported, $2.

Door Policy: No dress code, no frisk, no hassle.