2012 Nightlife Hall of Fame: John Blair

A lot can be said about the new XL Nightclub in Hell’s Kitchen, but nothing about the place comes off as accidental. From the detailed lighting motifs to the labyrinthian, mirrored bathrooms, the 4,000-square-foot club is a shiny monument to precision and planning in an area densely populated with a wide variety of gay nightlife venues. That fact makes it all the more surprising that the man behind XL, John Blair, practically fell into the industry by mistake.

“It was truly by accident,” says John Blair. “I was using clubs to promote my gyms. And that grew into a business bigger than the gym business.” The gyms he is referring to are the Body Center athletic facilities that he started in Los Angeles in the ’70s. As a way to promote the gyms, Blair began to throw “gym night” parties at local clubs. The nightclubs appreciated the attractive clientele, and Blair enjoyed the free advertising. Eventually, club owners started paying Blair to keep bringing in his gym-toned bodies, and his career as a club promoter was born.

After moving to New York at the end of that decade, Blair threw a Thursday night party at the legendary Studio 54, where his gay party followed a modeling industry bash and broke down barriers between the two scenes. “The model people started coming later and later because they wanted to be part of the gay party,” he says.

Blair’s career in New York’s gay nightlife hit new heights in the ’90s when his company, John Blair Productions, began throwing one of the largest weekly gay dance nights in the city, Roxy Saturdays, at The Roxy. In many ways, the party became a symbol of the muscular Chelsea culture of the ’90s, a time, Blair says, that benefitted greatly from the looser politics in the city. Artists as iconic as Madonna, Grace Jones and Chaka Khan performed at the legendary club and world-famous DJs including Hex Hector, Victor Calderone and Junior Vasquez rose to fame there.

David Moyal, who started Next Magazine with Blair in 1993, says that it was his personal touch that made Blair’s Roxy parties such a success. “He always maintained a good mailing list and relationship with his followers. He always had a booth coming in, would shake everyone’s hand personally.”

As New York entered the nightlife drought of the 2000s and the city shuttered many of its clubs, Blair opened the first XL, an impressive lounge on 16th Street. But even XL couldn’t withstand the massive changes to the Meatpacking District and it too closed in 2006. He has spent the last two and half years developing XL Nightclub into the well-oiled party and performance space that it is today, filled with up to 2,000 party goers on some Friday and Saturday nights. Justin Luke, a promoter who works with Blair on the current Thursday night party, 20Something, says that his personality is a big part of what’s made Blair such a success. “He’s not here for the fame. He’s here for the fun, and I think that’s why he’s still here, when so many other people who came during his time, or after his time, have washed away.”

Blair, however, attributes his lasting career to something far less complex. “It’s the group of people you put together and the music. Those will always be the two most important things.”

Do you feel like XL Nightclub fits into the gay community in a different way than Roxy or the old XL did?
Well absolutely; we’re in an urban complex. We have a gay hotel. We have nightclubs. We have cabarets. You can really come stay here and not leave this area. You go to cabarets, you go out, you can eat dinner and you can stay in the hotel. It’s all encompassing. So we’re offering everybody a lot more. This is not just a “let’s go some place on Friday or Saturday.” We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. What we’re going to do is look back all these years at what worked, why did it work and how can we incorporate here. Nothing here is original. Everything has been done before. It’s just been taken and done up to 2012 standards. We have access to so many things we didn’t have access to before. And that’s exciting.

Can you talk about the Roxy in the ’90s and how that scene was different from what came before and after it?
Well, you know the only difference between the ’90s and 2012 in the nightclub business is politics and economics. They drive clubs in certain directions. So the politics in the ’90s [were] a lot looser. The cops didn’t really care if you did drugs. It was all under the radar. And there wasn’t any Internet. So for people to hook up, you had to come to the clubs. Now the police watch us like hawks. You can’t have any back rooms. Every place had backrooms in the ’80s and the ’90s. Even Studio 54 had a backroom; that was just part of the nightclub. You can’t have that any more. So what makes nightclubs different from decade to decade is not the people. The people are the same. It’s the economics, the politics.

What about nightlife are you most excited about now?
XL is not just a nightclub anymore. What I’m excited about is us really heavily investing in cabarets. Putting lots of money into doing legitimate cabaret shows. This is a big event space now. So it’s not a nightclub that you open three nights a week from 11pm to 6am in the morning. This is a seven-day, 24-hour day space. That’s the right way to evolve. When the club business was all cash, you know, you made a lot of money, and put it away and didn’t have to open at all during the week. This business is now up on board. Nothing’s cash, everything’s check. So, you have to run it like a real business and that I like.