Saturday night in Williamsburg Brooklyn and we finally made
it to give a review to Output. Output is multi room club, spread over several floors and a rooftop lounge, located at 74 Wythe Ave in Williamsburg, and the main asset is a finely tuned beast of a sound system. While they consistently have good lineups
(typically techno) and packed crowds, before we give this club any kudos for which
there were plenty, we are obligated to note a few gripes. Normally we don’t complain over typical
trifling club bullsh*t, but when you match it all up with our first gripe, Output,
you deserve being called out.
This main push us over the cliff gripe was a really big one. A needless and easily
avoidable life-threatening event caused and exacerbated by a horrible incident management plan.
Without any doubt 100% gross negligence. At 3 am some idiot apparently pulled a
fire alarm. Not cool, but certainly something that happens once in a while and any club needs to be prepared for. It should not have been a big deal really. First thing would be to cut the music.
Wrong.
When the fire alarm went off, the music continued to play and Maudober was so in sync with the beat of the loud chirping alarm, it sounded like it was actually part of the tracks. Everyone around us thought someone was blowing a whistle at first. Output chose to keep playing music over the alarm for over five minutes before acknowledging it. By the time they announced it was a false alarm and the Fire Marshall was inside, people were getting quite nervous. Most of the crowd ignored the alarms the entire time (brilliant idea folks!) and the rest of the crowd were pushing towards the fire exits. So, the alarm is going off, the Fire Trucks are outside, and many people want out of the building. So.......Just let the people exit if
they want to exit, let the Fire Marshall in to inspect the place, reset the false alarm
and clear the building. Then resume the party, right? Crisis averted.
Wrong.
“Don’t let people
out.” was the theme of their fire-drill. While we note there was no
fire, simply telling people on the peripheral of a mass of people ‘not to
panic’ is just not logical. It may seem logical to a pre-schooler….maybe , but surely
by high school, any kid would be able to tell you that hoards of people in a very
dark (near blacked out) club are going to tend to panic when the fire alarms
are flashing, they can’t see the outside world, and face it, there’s people in
the building that may have been drinking or be impaired …… and with all the
news in recent years with the horrific details of tragedies just like these
(WHERE PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS ADVISED TO IMMEDIATELY GO TO AN EXIT) the security is
told specifically to ‘not let anyone
through’ at the upstairs fire exits and rather to instruct people to go back into
the angry hoard of people pushing them towards the door (somehow), through the dark building, to try to find some other exit door that will no
doubt be packed with people being told something else. Just was beyond
negligent. People were pushing in both directions when the obvious thing would
be to let people walk to street and come back in when the alarm was shut off.
It’s not rocket science. Everyone already had stamps on their hands. If there
actually was a fire there, heaven help the people inside, as these are the
knuckleheads that get 1000’s of people killed. All so they could keep people
from leaving so that they would spend more money at the bar? We’d love for the person making the call
to not let people out the clearly marked "Fire Exit"'s at that point to go listen to the recorded audio
from inside some of these nightclub venues where masses of people die. We’ve read some of
the transcripts and it’s not pretty. Huge shame and an epic fail to the safety
plan and incident management handling at Output.
These other complaints would normally be censored and
ignored, but paired with making us feel needlessly endangered, we’re not holding back…
On entry,
there were two ‘guest list’ lines and the one we were in was shut down when our
group was all but at the front. The dude flipped the sign that said "Guest List" and said: "No it's not." OK jerk. Now the once near empty other ‘Guest List’ line was now almost as long as the main line and everyone in the group is more than slightly annoyed. Not really a fan of being
at front of lines, then told to go to the back of the new long line. Nobody would
be. Normally we’d already be gone, but Nicole Maudober was playing inside. We can wait.
Most of our blame to all these gripes clearly falls on
whoever has the authority to bark orders into the security guard’s earpieces. (And
to whoever hired and or has authority over this person’s comedic job execution should have their head examined!)
One could at least argue it is not really the security’s fault as they are only
following orders (I think they tried that in Germany once too). They only
want to keep their jobs. Obviously. If you hire a group of people to work at a
job dealing with the health and safety of thousands of people and you check off
‘zombie and lemming like traits’ as the main hiring criteria for the job description
after 'maintaining huge muscles', you better have unequivocal top-talent competency above them. These employees will be following a sole persons' orders blindly. You pay them to obey the earpiece and not to think as
an individual, that is the job. So we patrons should expect there to be some relative aptitude with the person barking the orders.
Final case in point before I rest my argument that somebody
needs to loose their job there… At one point they closed an exit from the rooftop area
back to the main club and began telling patrons to go back in through the 'Panther Room' where you need a special paid upgrade to go to. Fine, we’ll all walk back to the club through a maze for some unknown reason, navigating through another very crowded room, instead of a simple walk
down stairs. No problem Output. Errr......of course there is a problem. The genius instructing this into the guys earpieces failed to bother to inform the guy standing
at the 'Panther Room'. So the people get to the 'Panther Room' trying to get back to the event and are told: “I’m just
following orders. No stamp you can’t come through here.” he repeated and repeated this,
as a huge mob of people more and more irate by the second built up in front of
him. You’d think if 50 people are all
saying, some screaming, the same thing…..lol. To be honest, we’ve seen many
much better equipped staff at illegal warehouse raves and watching them react
to a simple false fire alarm was not far off from a three stooges skit. Albeit a really incompetent and dangerous one.
OK….besides clearly needing to reassess their safety plan
and hire a competent event manager to instruct their pet lemmings, the venue is
awesome.
Output has multiple rooms, a banging Funktion One sound
system, intriguing stage lighting, $7 Stella Artois flowing on draft (kudos to the downstairs bartenders), and the club is an
overall fun space. Nicole was amazing the entire night. It takes quite some talent to play 6 straight hours of techno with not a single person seeming bored with
the music. Watching her spin for a while we observed she was using Traktor
while basically having four decks rolling simultaneously about 90% of the time. It was
texturally complex and an amazing sonic thread she used to spin her web with. We
couldn’t begin to name a setlist, but suffice to say if you like techno, anything
Nicole plays is banging. Amazing set.
We knew it was going to be good when waiting through the entry
cue (yes, waiting through it for the 2nd time) a group was overheard
in line talking of being tired for having traveled from all over the country
for the gig, some as far as south Florida. Her long curly and
bigger than the 80’s hair spent much of the night in front of her face and we
wondered how she could even see through it at times as she rocked along behind
the decks. A guy at one point kept screaming he loved her and she was the
‘Queen of Techno’ which was quite annoying at least to us, but you can thank
him for the only song we wrote down of the set….at 1:31 she apparently played
‘Come and Lay’, because he screamed “’Come and Lay’! I love this song! ‘Come
and Lay’!!! Yeay!” the song like 20 times.
We have plenty of great photos….as the security did not
noticeably try to stop anyone the entire night from shooting any, despite the
clubs very strict ‘no camera’ policy. We’ll be polite and not post them, along
with our polite plea to Output for some competent event management and safety
planning in case the nrext fire drill is for real. Thanks!!!
