RIP DV8

"It's definitely a burner," said the Salt Lake City firefighter. He was referring to Club DV8 during a 1995 inspection of the X96 studios located in the adjacent Arrow Press Square. I don't know why I asked him about DV8; I must have feared its inevitable demise. "Old buildings like that, three floors open all the way to the roof. They'll go up in a hurry," he said with the slightest hint of glee that lurks in the pyromaniac hidden in all firefighters.

Turns out that this firefighter knew what he was talking about. On the evening of Wednesday, Jan. 23, the vacant building that once housed Club DV8 went up in flames that ripped right through the roof, shooting hundreds of feet into the downtown skyline. I was at home at the time, half asleep on the couch watching American Idol on TiVo, killing brain cells ever so slowly. A text message from my friend and coworker Heather Johnson vibrated me from my Fox-induced stupor. "Arrow Press Square is on fire," is all the text read. I immediately grabbed the remote control and flipped to live television to catch reports of the dramatic structure fire. Immediately after the first text came an update that it was Club DV8 and that the fire was huge, sending black smoke all over downtown.

When I saw that the aging building would essentially burn to the ground, I felt part of my Generation X heart breaking, just a little bit. If Utah's alternative music scene in the 90s had a collective rite of passage, it was the doorway of Club DV8.

I turned 21 in 1991 and one of the big thrills for me was being old enough to DJ the KJQ nights at Club DV8. At the time I was working for piss-money on the 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. shift at KJQ, and DV8 paid $100 cash to spin in the DJ booth on Saturday nights. But trust me, that hundred bucks was well earned. First of all, I lived in the Ogden area at the time and had to cart my personal collection of records and CDs to downtown Salt Lake City. Vinyl is heavy and compact discs aren't as compact as the name suggests; this was long before the days of the iPod where you can have 2,000 songs in your pocket. A tiny alley between DV8 and a one-story building just to the north led to a puny parking area behind the club, and I hated the process of squeezing my Mitsubishi Mirage into the heap of other cars from DV8 employees back there. Other DJs had scarred their cars trying to maneuver the tight quarters in the alleyway, but I somehow managed to avoid leaving any of my paint on the brick corners.

The DJ booth at DV8 was nothing more than a squalid hellhole. The balcony that housed the two turntables and a microphone felt more like a gallows because of the trapdoor that was the terrace's only entrance. To actually get into the DJ booth, I had to climb a ladder directly beneath, open the trapdoor, haul my heavy crates of records and CDs through the opening and then make damn sure I closed the door. To reach the controls, one had to stand pretty much on top of the trapdoor. Sometimes drunken patrons would climb the ladder and open the trapdoor to make a request, and more often than not leave it open, just waiting for the gaping hole to swallow the poor DJ with one misstep. I had many close calls, but never fell to my death from the booth.

My fellow DJs and I would often joke about what we viewed as an extreme fire danger in the equipment racks that contained the amplifiers for the sound system. The power cords got so hot at the end of the night that we had to insulate our hands with an old towel when we unplugged them.

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