October 11–18, 2001

cover story|music issue

Bar Noir Superstar

DJ Bobby Startup has owned the night for 30 years and counting.

by A.D. Amorosi

Firestarter: Bobby Startup with his adoring fans. photo: Scott Weiner

It’s 2 a.m. on 18th Street, yards from Rittenhouse Square. A mob is standing outside Bar Noir, David Carroll’s notorious salon. The crowd outside is carousing and cruising the crowd they see inside the bar, itself a swelling itching body of tony types drinking, sweating and dancing to the swift array of brassy eclectic tunes. Jay-Z’s "Izzo (H.O.V.A.)" blends smoothly into K.C. and the Sunshine Band’s "Boogie Shoes." Drunk blonds smoking too many cigarettes get bumped against by mannerly boys with slicked-forward hair and tight Greco-Roman sleeves they don’t have the pecs for. This configuration — nubile new friends slurring from malted scotch or old standard punk bearers spitting white wine — always bump into the DJ, say they’re sorry, then exalt him. The DJ smiles, takes a drag from a Navy Cut and plays on, as he has for 30 or more years. It’s 2 a.m. Do you know where your Bobby Startup is?

Startup, 55, in some way, shape or form, has been in the thick of most things scenic in Philadelphia. He’s introduced Philly musos, posers and clubfucks to import-only sights and sounds since he began DJing at 40th and Walnut’s legendary Inn-a-Go-Go in 1966, stage-managing Larry Magid’s original Electric Factory at 21st and Arch in 1967, and running California Earthquake — the premier U.K. clothier of rock ’n’ roll velvet and suede on 12th and Pine — in 1968. When Startup left Earthquake and began working for Carroll at his live rock spot Artemis, Startup and Carroll embarked on a joint social journey that continues today in Bar Noir.

"I maitre d’d the back half of the club," Startup says proudly of Artemis at his house just blocks from Bar Noir. "It was like having a hip doorman making sure the right people got seated." Carroll and Startup moved together to Peanuts on 17th and Lombard, then finally the Hot Club. Around early 1977, Startup and bartending pal Ivan Weiss (with whom Startup would buy into the original Saint Jack’s in Old City) persuaded Carroll to let them book punk rock Mondays and Tuesdays. "They were the slowest nights," says Bobby. "We knew, David knew, that there was a new scene developing. We wanted to be on the ground floor."

Starting with a jukebox stuffed with what little domestic punk 45s existed ("Imports didn’t have the big center hole," laughs Bobby), the Hot Club began using Startup as DJ right after Manhattan’s Hurrah’s did so. Along with being one of the country’s first punk spinners, Startup also helped Carroll book the Hot Club, co-manage a little known rockabilly act named the Stray Cats, as well as make flyers for the club’s just-starting acts. The Dead Boys, the Cramps, the B-52s, Elvis Costello, Madness, Devo, the Cure and Startup’s own band the Autistics all made their Philly debut at the Hot Club.

"When the Hot Club closed, it left a true cultural void that took a long time to fill," says Startup, who still managed to take the Stray Cats to London and bring them fortune, only to return to Philly to co-book and spin at (with Danny Kelly) the East Side Club on 12th and Chestnut in the ’80s. "The funny thing," he says, "was that I had to compete against Larry Magid," for whom he would work again when EFC opened the Factory on 7th and Willow, "and Stephen Starr’s Ripley on South Street," with whom Startup sounded the Bank for eight years, an amazingly long time in DJ years. "Because I had the contacts from the Hot Club and my Rockpool connection, I stole all the early new wave acts no one else knew about." Those acts included Duran Duran, Depeche Mode and The Cult.

The East Side Club drifted in the mid-’80s, so Startup hooked up with Bob Denney and David Cohen for Cohen’s new after-hours spot Revival. That hall of decadence was notorious not only for its bathroom sex and bringing techno and industrial’s earliest sounds to the U.S., but for introducing the grotesquerie of downtown NYC performance art — ass-stuffing lady Karen Finley, shark-finned goofball John Sexx, man-diva Joey Arias — outside its Soho realm. "The media back then had it all wrong. We brought Finley to Philly long before Painted Bride did," says Startup. Startup left the Bank in the early ’90s with the impression that club owners and promoters had become one-dimensional, unwilling to mix up music beyond their singular tags of "ambient" or "house." He stopped spinning altogether, conceptualized, opened then left Saint Jack’s and waited for the tide to turn — especially after he had run into Carroll too many times with the promise of a unique new venture.

"By that point ‘seeing is believing’ became my motto. But David had just come back to Center City after life in ‘Flowertown’ and said he had rented this tiny space on the west side of Broad. An oddity, especially when you consider all that Old City became to people." says Startup.

Bobby had an idea that had been brewing since the early ’80s, one he got from a London club he’d hung in and loved, The Pigeon Toed Orange Peel. Like at the Pigeon, Startup had always wanted to do a true blend of rock sounds mixing ’60s, ’70s and ’80s new wave into present day alterna-sounds and current dance and hip-hop. But he also wanted to combine that with root sounds of jazz, R&B, big band, jump jive and rockabilly, as well as show tunes. "David was probably the only person to truly listen to me and immediately apply my ideas into whatever concept he had."

Startup and Carroll expected little more than an older crowd and offbeat artist types to hang at this space that became Bar Noir’s mix of salon and saloon. But the rest — as its always packed-tight tabletop-hopping crowds attest to — is recent history. "My role is, and I guess always has been, to make people feel as if they’re in the right place and really believe it," says Startup, who’ll also bring his swing, jazz and lounge largesse to Carroll’s new Rittenhouse-area restaurant Magazine come Thanksgiving. Let’s face it: There’s nothing worse than a morose group of people sitting at a table uncertain of their hipness.

In turn, Startup has come to realize how important his role is within the current society of social animals. Much like his role at Artemis, Startup is a gentle gatekeeper. Ask those who’ve known him for 40 years or ask kids who just met him last night: Startup is a generous gentleman and a musical encyclopedia who never loses his smile — even when people request the stupidest possible song as they do nightly at Noir — and never lords his stature over anyone. It is this calm, collected cool that makes him and what he does as relevant and important now. Though the kids who crowd around may be slightly more hep than they once were — the forced eclecticism of MP3 culture, the immediacy of the Internet — they are also a mixed bunch of designer snobs and relaxed slobs. Startup weaves between both crowds, which is part of Bar Noir’s popularity as the place to be for out-of-towners and locals, big names like Mel Gibson, Robert Downey Jr. and Oasis, as well as area-names like Billy King, John Timoney and Bobby Simone.

"I can help control how people feel, lift their emotions, make their nights better." says Bobby humbly. But that humility is Bobby. That Startup’s been making people feel better with innovative sounds — and maintained the looks to go with it — for 35 years says as much about Bobby as it does the crowds that have followed him.