Indigo Keeps Pace With Late-Night Crowd

Choice being this year’s buzz word, it’s probably good business to offer a variety of whatever it is your business offers. Case in point: Indigo, in the Marina Pacifica Mall in Long Beach, which gives area nightclubbers multiple options--three to be exact--and the result is a Saturday night dig doing brisk business till closing.

Promoter Dan Barrett started Indigo three years ago, and it remains his longest-lived club, although it’s in its third and (Barrett hopes) final home: at the Acapulco restaurant in Long Beach’s Marina Pacifica Mall. This latest space brings in a much more diverse, bi-county (O.C. and L.A.) crowd than did past sites, which included the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach.

Barrett’s resume also includes such successful Orange County “undergrounds” as Land of the Lost, Doomsday, Happy House II and Avalon (we’ll wait and see what happens with his recently opened Back Alley at Club 5902 in Huntington Beach every Friday night).

The doors open at 9 p.m., but the crowd is decidedly late-night. The club doesn’t get fully fired up until about midnight and would undoubtedly burn longer if the goings didn’t end at 2 a.m. sharp. The club stays open later during the summer and for special events, such as Halloween.

Pacing entry is a strategy used outside and inside the club for appearances’ sake. It works inside the club by keeping the second and third rooms closed until 11 p.m., thereby filling up the main room (which happens to remain the most popular throughout the night) and keeping the energy and patrons from spreading too thin.

But keeping a long line outside when the first room is not even full is a rather tired exercise in image-building.

“Hey, that way people driving by think the place is happening,” confided the doorman. Well, Indigo need not resort to such cheap tricks--the place is happening without them.

Not everyone has to wait out in the cold. Those with the dark blue passes can walk on in free with a friend before 10 p.m. or for $5 thereafter, shaving at least a little off the $7 general cover charge. Before 11 p.m., apply the savings to $1 tap beer. The business card-sized passes can be picked up among the stacks of event flyers and fanzines at other nightclubs, coffeehouses, clothing and record stores. “It’s not an elitist pass,” Barrett says.

DJ Henry from Power 106 (known for his underground remixes) fills the main room with Top 40 House and R&B; hits. The first two hours until the other two rooms open serve as a warm-up session for some exhibitionists, mostly guys showing off their fly hip-hop and breaking moves. Groups of females tend to dance in protective circles with their backs to the males, making the whole scene look like some primitive mating ritual.

The room shoots for a post-modern, industrial look with sheets of corrugated metal covering the restaurant’s bright Mediterranean-colored walls and metal columns crowned with smoke-stack-like tops. Trying for a post-apocalyptic effect, male and female mannequin parts painted in silver and gold are strewn about: a bent leg sticking out of a smokestack, several limbless bodies hanging from individual nooses.

At 11 p.m., DJ Babylon swings the techno room into action, followed shortly thereafter by the opening of the “underground” downstairs, featuring ‘70s funk and disco and some House brought to patrons by DJ Bumper.

Barrett again pays close attention to interior decor in the dark techno hall. Half a dozen marvelous, four-foot-tall papier-mache heads hang overhead watching those on the makeshift wooden dance floor. Bamboo blinds air-brushed and spray-painted with graffiti-style art cover the walls, colored lights and televisions peek through the slits. The centerpiece is an 11-foot-tall futuristic go-go cage.

Too little dance floor space throughout Indigo’s three rooms proves to be one of the club’s few shortcomings. Another minor drag is the paced closure of the club. Although it empties out the three-room, two-story club easier, it doesn’t suit those who want to exercise their options right up till the end. The ‘70s room shuts down at 1 a.m., followed by the techno room 30 minutes later.

Indigo mostly adheres to a dress code prohibiting tennis shoes, hats, T-shirts, tank tops and shorts--though hot pants, which show up in great numbers, are apparently acceptable. The two-month-old code has kept gang-bangers out, Barrett says, and has led to a more fashionable crowd.

- Indigo at Acapulco restaurant in the Marina Pacifica Mall, 6720 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach. Cover: $7. Saturday only, 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. (714) 479-7148.