Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (6 page)

One night at The Station in 2002, while he was listening to a band called Rebellion, Iannone’s sense of something being “not quite right” triggered quick action on his part. He was standing near the stage when two flashpots on either side of the band erupted in five-foot tongues of flame. Iannone “just didn’t feel right” with the flame effects because the club “just seemed too small” for them, he later explained. So, he simply walked out of the club, unimpeded. Mike Iannone was, apparently, the only person at The Station who was troubled by Rebellion’s pyrotechnics that evening.

Nightclub safety was the farthest thing from Gina Gauvin’s mind in the winter of 2003. At forty-two, Gauvin, a single, stay-at home mom, had little time or money for “clubbing.” But when she heard that Great White was going to appear at The Station on a Thursday night, Gina arranged for her son, Joseph, and daughter, Shayna, to stay with their grandparents, so that she could stop in at the club just before the band, one of her favorites, went on. Her eldest daughter, Heather, eighteen, would be on her own for the night. It would be a night out for Gina, whose life had always been light on luxury.

Gauvin wasn’t often seen at The Station, but she was easily recognizable there by her flaming-red, down-the-back, wavy hair. She hoped to meet friends — perhaps Mike Gonsalves, the radio
DJ
who’d be emceeing the event, or others she’d known from growing up in Providence. Gina had married young, but neither that marriage, nor subsequent relationships, had survived. She stayed at home, making do on child support from her children’s fathers.

Years earlier, Gauvin had rented a house in a rural corner of Rhode Island where she kept rabbits and geese. Over time, she developed a fondness for pet reptiles, and expertise in breeding them. Eventually, Gina became the go-to girl for online tips on nursing droopy dragons and lethargic lizards. She was also an art hobbyist, painting detailed, colorful portraits of her beloved pets. Kids and lizards and rock ’n’ roll — not exactly the stuff of song lyrics, but the makings of a full life for Gina.

Unlike Gina Gauvin and Erin Pucino, others who found themselves at The Station for Great White’s concert were not necessarily fans of the group. Thirty-three-year-old Pam Gruttadauria was normally not even a late-night person. As food buyer and breakfast supervisor for the Holiday Inn Express
in Warwick, she began her mornings before 5 each day, so her evenings were not party friendly. Pam was single and lived with her parents and rottweiler-shepherd mix,
JD
, in Johnston, Rhode Island. When she wasn’t earning one of several employee-of-the-month awards at the Holiday Inn, Pam mostly spent time with her brother’s three kids. Trips to karate class and nights out for pizza with the niece and nephews filled what little spare time she had.

When Pam’s co-worker at the Holiday Inn, Donna Mitchell, suggested that they go to The Station to hear Great White, Pam was ambivalent. Donna was a big fan of Great White, but Pam’s musical tastes favored easy listening over heavy metal. And the show wouldn’t start until 11 p.m. Still, Pam could take the following day off. She thought, “One late night really couldn’t hurt.”

So, on Thursday evening, February 20, 2003, Pam Gruttadauria left a note for her father that read, “Dad, don’t wake me up. I have a personal day. Love, Pam.”

Thirty-four-year-old Joe Kinan had even less interest in Great White than did Pam Gruttadauria. But he wasn’t immune to midwinter boredom, either. Joe worked as a manager at a formal-wear shop in Canton, Massachusetts. An obsessive physical conditioning devotee, Kinan worked out seven days a week, often twice a day, with morning cardio and afternoon weight training by body part. He once competed in a contest to lose the greatest percentage of body fat and increase his muscle mass over twelve weeks.

Joe’s buddy Karla Bagtaz had two tickets to Great White’s show at The Station and wanted somebody — anybody — to go with her. In truth, Kinan couldn’t have cared less about the band. He had never heard of them. But Joe and Karla had been friends for many years, and tagging along with her to a roadhouse to hear some ’80s band would be small sacrifice. It might even be cheap fun on a bitter-cold Thursday night.

Three hundred miles north of Rhode Island, Bangor, Maine, was even colder. There, an over-the-hill heavy metal band was doing its best to give the locals their money’s worth — melting the snow, as it were, with volume and special effects inside a small club called Russells. In forty-eight hours, it would be doing the same at The Station.

CHAPTER 5

THAT AIN’T NO WAY TO HAVE FUN, SON

TO THE RIGHT OF THE AISLE,
immediately behind the driver, lay a table littered with empty soda cans, a cigarette pack, and
CDS
. To the left was a sitting area with cracked Naugahyde bench seats. Farther back, twelve bunks were stacked three high, six on either side of a narrow corridor — about as commodious as aboard a nuclear submarine. If groupies were ever invited “back to the bus,” they would have to be contortionists. This was the “luxury motorcoach” that Great White shared with its opening band, Trip, for their 2002–3 tour of little-known venues. Its occupants received $25 per day for expenses, on which each was to live his own rock ’n’ roll dream. The glamorous life, indeed.

It had not always been so.

Great White, originally called Dante Fox, was formed by singer Jack Russell and guitarist Mark Kendall in 1978. A self-described “backyard keg band,” the group drew a following in Southern California during the early ’80s. Great White’s 1989 album, . . .
Twice Shy
, was the high-water mark of the band’s success. Certified double-platinum (two million copies sold), the group’s third album contained a Grammy Award–nominated (Best Hard Rock Performance) single, “Once Bitten, Twice Shy,” which would become Jack Russell’s anthem for the next twelve years. That song reached number five on the 1989 singles chart, and its video was an
MTV
staple — not bad for a “surfer stoner guy from Whittier, California,” as Russell later described himself.

The year 1990 saw Great White appear on
MTV
Unplugged
and sell out the
LA
Forum; however, it was all downhill from there. Throughout the ’90s the band’s popularity faded, along with that of most heavy-metal groups. One
of Great White’s albums released in the 1990s,
Hooked
(1991) and one single, “Rollin’ Stoned” (1999), may have described Russell’s personal lifestyle, but they did not capture the public’s imagination or its pocketbook. Pressed for cash, Russell sold all his copyright interest in Great White recordings in 1996. In 1999, he sold the rights to any royalties from post-1996
CDS
. In mid-2000, Mark Kendall and the two other original members left the group.

By New Year’s Eve 2001, Great White had completely lost its bite. The band briefly surfaced that night for one “farewell show” at the Galaxy Theatre in Santa Ana, California, then went belly-up, seemingly for good.

Lacking a broader skill set, Russell tried touring as a solo act, singing mostly “adult contemporary” numbers with four session musicians; however, even with some Great White tunes thrown into the mix, audiences stayed home. His new solo album,
For You
, was, alas, not for many, selling 770 copies nationwide. Russell, forty-two years old and a decade past his
MTV
prime, had ridden his one-trick pony into the ground. By March 2002 he was hopelessly in arrears on lease payments for $86,000 worth of sound equipment. In July of that year, Colonial Pacific Leasing Company obtained a judgment against him, seizing the last $6,687.93 in his savings account and repossessing his mixing console.

When Russell filed for personal bankruptcy on August 21, 2002, he had less than $20,000 in assets and over $200,000 in debts. He owed money to the IRS, to a finance company, to a credit card company — even to his dentist ($160). Nevertheless, his promotional bio still waxed optimistic: “All I want is for the people to decide. . . . There’s nothing worse than a song you believe in and no one hears it.” It’s doubtful that Russell’s creditors were whistling any of his tunes when his debts were discharged by the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California.

It is a music industry convention that unless an act has at least two of its original members, it may not tour under the original band’s name. Laws have been enacted in some states to ensure this. So, it was not surprising that Russell, once freed of his debt burden by personal bankruptcy, contacted Mark Kendall in 2002 and suggested that they tour with some of Russell’s session musicians from his short-lived solo act, calling themselves “Jack Russell’s Great White.” Kendall had been no more successful than Russell in garnering a solo following, and his day job as a newspaper telephone solicitor wasn’t cutting it. So he agreed to join Russell for a tour of marginal venues in late 2002 and 2003, riding a bus from city to city with another band, Trip, and a sound man, Bob Rager. The tour would be budget conscious, to say the
least. It would be road managed by Dan Biechele, the same fellow who ran W.A.S.P.’s tour in 2000. Biechele would not only control costs, but he’d also operate the tour’s single extravagance, pyrotechnics.