Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (9 page)

Mike Derderian explained to O’Connor how they’d book national acts “four or five times a year” but use “cover” bands Thursdays through Saturdays. He pointed to the rock-themed mural they’d commissioned from Anthony Baldino as a valuable property improvement. O’Connor was impressed at how positively Derderian spoke of his employees’ teamwork.

Derderian also spoke of the club’s “very good” relationship with its residential neighbors. He told about giving them Jeff ’s cell phone number to call if things got too loud. They never discussed buying soundproofing materials from Barry Warner. Asked about permitted occupancy, the club owners told O’Connor they were “never really given an occupancy limit.”

Five days later, buyers and sellers negotiated terms. Derderian asked for $195,000. O’Connor countered with 165. They settled on 190, but there remained issues of the lease assignment to work out. Nevertheless, they inked a “pre-purchase agreement” on February 7, and the buyers handed the Derderians a $19,000 deposit. The plan was for O’Connor to return on the twentieth, to see the club in operation when a national act — Great White — was appearing. Then they would close on the deal.

Around 9 o’clock on the morning of February 20, Jack Russell and the band headed to Denny’s restaurant for breakfast. Russell hardly had time to order the Grand Slam Breakfast when a tradesman in dusty work boots approached from a nearby table. “You guys have got to be a rock band,” declared Richard “Rick” Sanetti. Sanetti had been working with a crew installing flooring at the
Hampton Inn then under construction in nearby Coventry, Rhode Island. That same crew was now working on some serious breakfast at Denny’s.

Sanetti could not believe it. Back in the ’80s he had bought Great White
CDS
. He had once cribbed lyrics from the band’s “Save Your Love” for a note he wrote to his then girlfriend, now wife. And here he was, twenty years later, with only a plate of hash browns standing between him and the great Jack Russell. Life was good.

Russell, the gracious celebrity, invited Sanetti and friends to The Station as his guests the following night. He told them that the Station concert would be a “killer show,” complete with pyrotechnics. They accepted in a heartbeat.

Great White road manager Dan Biechele added Sanetti and friends to the guest-list page in his notebook, penning a special reminder for Russell to dedicate “Save Your Love” to Rick’s wife, Patty. It would be a night to remember. In addition to his friends from work, Rick Sanetti planned to bring his wife and their beloved niece, Bridget Sanetti. Bridget was only twenty-five and knew little of Great White. But she had lived with Sanetti and his wife the last three years while working as a career counselor with at-risk kids. Bridget was responsible beyond her years, but Richard knew that her fun-loving side would not let her miss a chance to see an ’80s band so dear to her old aunt and uncle.

The morning of February 20, Michael O’Connor and Dan Gormley took an important step toward owning their very own rock club. They filed articles of organization with the Rhode Island secretary of state for “The Station Club,
LLC
,” a limited liability company. Pretty soon they’d be in business.

That same day, Jack Russell woke up with an idea. Notwithstanding the paucity of free space on his arms, he decided that what he really needed was another tattoo, and so set about finding the best local artist. He asked around and was told that Doors of Perception was the place to go. When Russell called the tattoo shop, the phone was answered by its owner, Skott Greene. Greene, thirty-five, had always wanted to tattoo a rock star, but when Russell sought an appointment, Greene smelled a practical joke. The caller wanted him to “bring his equipment to Russell’s tour bus” late that afternoon, but Greene was already committed to an in-shop appointment. Canceling on a customer was not how Greene had built his reputation. If this “Jack Russell” really wanted a tattoo, he could come to the shop.

Skott Greene was a gentle bear of a man, huge, bearded, and covered with the art of his trade. Thursday night at his shop was “geek night,” when he and friends Brian O’Donnell and Richard Cabral would gather to drink soda and work on model airplanes, surrounded by Greene’s Star Wars collectibles.
O’Donnell was in the shop when Greene took the call from someone claiming to be Jack Russell. He stuck around all afternoon and evening just to see if the call had been legit.

Greene’s late-afternoon appointment was Michael Hoogasian. That Hoogasian was accompanied by his beautiful wife, Sandy, was no surprise. The two were inseparable. Hard workers both, they had saved from Mike’s job as a Coke deliveryman and Sandy’s at the Gap in Warwick Mall to impeccably furnish a small house they’d bought in Cranston. Married just sixteen months, they came to the shop to get a tattoo for Mike’s thirty-first birthday. Mike already had a couple of tattoos, but this one would be different — a flame design.

Even though Sandy and Mike lived in Cranston, they were very familiar with West Warwick. Mike Hoogasian’s bachelor party had been held at The Station. Not only did Mike have a history with The Station, he had past exposure to Great White. In 1984 Mike, then twelve years old, attended a concert at the Providence Civic Center with his childhood friend, Derek Knight. The opening act was Great White, starring Jack Russell. Hoogasian never forgot it. So when he heard that Great White was coming to West Warwick in 2003, he immediately downloaded Jack Russell’s new solo album.

Come nightfall, Russell still hadn’t forgotten his tattoo. But he had one thing to do before he could get it. The rocker had agreed to be interviewed by two
DJ
s from the campus radio station of Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts. So, at 6:30 that night, Russell sat with Jimmy Gahan, twenty-one, and Mike Ricardi, nineteen, in the galley of his tour bus, their camcorder rolling. Gahan and Ricardi planned to air the interview on their hard-rock program,
Jim and Mikey’s Power Hour
, back at school. Each asked Russell a handful of questions, and the singer was expansive in his answers. Russell explained to his rapt listeners, “I don’t do this to make money. I don’t need to work right now. I do this because I love playing for people.” Speaking wistfully of the ’80s, Russell mused, “We grew up in those days, and those days were special to us. A lot of people seem to forget that. They get older. They get [gesturing with ‘air quotes’]
responsible
.”

Russell told the boys that they, too, were on his guest list for the show that night. Both stepped off the bus elated.

When Jack Russell finally strode into the Doors of Perception at 7:15 that night, it was like Jesse James walking through the swinging doors of a saloon. Heads turned and conversations stopped. It was really him. Russell turned out to be a regular guy, though, bantering with the crowd as Greene’s needle buzzed and another dark figure joined the dense ranks of Russell’s body
art. Mike Hoogasian regaled Russell with his knowledge of Great White’s old songs, as well as material from Russell’s recent solo album. Russell even sang a little. Then, he invited all in the shop to The Station that night as his personal guests. “If they give you any trouble at the club, come to my bus. Come get me. You’re on my
VIP
list.” A phone call to Dan Biechele was all it took to put them on that lucky list.

As Mike and Sandy drove home to change for the concert, Mike excitedly called his boyhood friend, Derek Knight, with whom he had seen Great White almost twenty years before. “Come on, Derek, I can invite anybody I want. He put us on his guest list.” Knight was tempted, but thought better of it. It was past nine, and his young family was tucked in for the night. Knight had gotten “responsible.”

About ten minutes after nine, Mike O’Connor arrived at the nightclub that would soon belong to him. He eyed the huge Budweiser banners over the front door and on the railing of the club’s front steps. Sponsorship would be something he’d have to learn about. Tracy King, working front door security, welcomed him as he passed through the double white doors, up the gently sloping corridor to the ticket desk staffed by Andrea Mancini. Her long blond hair and dazzling smile were disarming, but O’Connor never let on that he would soon be her boss. Andrea confirmed that he was a guest of the house, then waved him past her husband, Steven, who was checking
ID
s. O’Connor spoke briefly with Jeff Derderian, who was busy running the place — at the door, behind the bar, in the back office. Derderian pointed out the emcee for the night’s show, Mike Gonsalves, a
DJ
with rock station
WHJY
who went by the moniker “Dr. Metal.”

O’Connor was surprised that the crowd was close to his age — thirty to forty-five years old. The band opening for Great White, Trip, was onstage, so he retreated from that noisy area to the less crowded horseshoe bar, where he bought a drink and watched the operation. Eventually, O’Connor’s gaze was drawn to the bar’s two cash registers. Their constant ringing was more music to his ears than anything coming from the stage.

By 10:25 Mike O’Connor had seen enough. He didn’t need to hear Great White, so he walked out the front door, through the packed parking lot, and got in his car to drive home, buzzing at the prospect of owning a cash cow. On his way out of The Station’s parking lot, he noticed a news van from Channel 12
TV
turning toward the club — and then he remembered that Jeff Derderian was a reporter for that station.

Jason Lund, twenty-six, was in the thick of The Station crowd pressed to the front of the stage, anxiously awaiting Great White’s appearance. His wife
was expecting their third child, and he hadn’t felt right going to the show alone. But she had persuaded him to go and have a good time with his friends. When his cell phone rang, Lund barely heard it over The Station’s din, so he elbowed his way to the men’s room to talk. It was his wife. She was having contractions. He’d better get home. Lund immediately left to join her, but by the time he got home, the contractions had diminished to a false labor. “Too bad,” he thought.

As of 10:30, all the people on Jack Russell’s guest list had arrived at The Station: the housekeepers from the Fairfield Inn, the construction crew from Denny’s, the two college
DJ
s, and everyone from the Doors of Perception tattoo parlor. But at 10:55 Patty Sanetti left to go home. Her job required her to activate a computer program at 11 p.m., “but she’d be back,” she assured her husband and niece. She’d miss the beginning of Great White’s set, but what could she do?

Everyone else on the guest list remained at the club, in a state of high anticipation. Right up until 11 p.m., when Great White struck the opening chords of “Desert Moon,” each would consider it to be the very luckiest of days.

CHAPTER 7

YOURS, IN FIRE SAFETY …

AS THE HOUR APPROACHED FOR GREAT WHITE
to go on, Mike and Sandy Hoogasian huddled together facing the stage, feeling the crush and the excitement of the crowd. They tried to take in the whole scene, but the sheer number of bodies, shoulder to shoulder and back to belly, made appreciation of anyone beyond a six-foot radius impossible. Mike thought back to his bachelor party at The Station two years earlier, when his firefighter brother-in-law had asked him, “You hang out in this firetrap?” and wondered about the room’s legal occupancy. Every other restaurant or club he’d been in had a sign prominently displaying the maximum occupancy. But Hoogasian saw none here.

Perhaps the reason no maximum occupancy was posted at The Station was that legal capacity there was a fluid concept, depending upon when the calculation was performed and who performed it. The last person to undertake that calculus, Denis Larocque, did so as part of the club’s transfer of ownership from Howard Julian to the Derderians. To call Larocque’s methodology creative would be putting a most benign gloss on it.

In Rhode Island, local fire inspections are carried out by a member of each town’s fire department who has been appointed a deputy state fire marshal. In West Warwick in the late 1990s that responsibility fell to Denis Larocque. Larocque was responsible for enforcing the state fire code, which specified, among other things, how legal occupancies were to be calculated for restaurants and nightclubs. Having lived his entire life in West Warwick, Larocque was more than familiar with every street and building in town.