House Finds A Home At Phantom Dance Club

Mondo Freak Beat, Wednesdays 9 p.m.-2 a.m., Phantom dance club, 332 Fifth Ave. N., $2 cover, 448-7888.

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Advocates call it a full-fledged dance-music movement. Detractors call it the return of disco. Some in the know claim it's even beginning to die out a bit. But thanks to a new Seattle nightspot, there's now more of it in Seattle.

It's called house music, and the proprietors of Phantom, a three-week old club in the shadow of the Space Needle, are beginning to bank on it to bring in Wednesday night crowds.

House music is a funky, high-energy form of dance music that originated in Chicago in the mid-1980s, later gaining popularity on the East Coast and England. Like disco, it began as a counter-culture movement, enjoying popularity in gay and black clubs before coming into mainstream awareness.

But if house music, with its low, throbbing, mechanical pulse beat, electronic noises and celebratory lyrics, is disco revisited, it's being done with a lot more aggressiveness and style than could have been mustered during the polyester 1970s.

Because Phantom will play Top 40 and contemporary dance music on weekend nights, the clientele paying $8 cover to dance to Janet Jackson and M.C. Hammer will differ markedly from those paying $2 on Wednesday night to listen to DJ Don Glaude mix racy lines from X-rated movies into a variety of bass-propelled dance workouts.

The Wednesday night contingent this week ran the gamut clothes-wise, from casual (striped shorts and a white T-shirt proclaiming ``SPAM'') to glitzy (two women in bullet-bosomed, glitter-augmented tops and neon color-coordinated body scarves and sequined hot pants).

``On Fridays and Saturdays, we expect a well-heeled crowd, ranging from 25 to 38 or 40. Wednesdays we expect a diversified crowd, an alternative crowd. We expect them to be younger, more hip, hair people, nightclub people, and record people,'' said Bill Smith, the club's general manager.

House music has emerged in Seattle clubs in the past two or three years. The 18-and-older Underground in the University District has featured house music almost since its inception, and the Vogue added a weekly house night on Sundays two years ago. By mapping out Wednesday nights for house, Phantom is gearing up for head-to-head competition with Celebrities' 18-month-old Wednesday house night.

``I think Seattle's ready for another house club,'' said Glaude. ``It's a community, and there's not just one grocery store. Why should there be just one house club?''

Phantom isn't only a dance club - it's physically and financially under the same roof as a new restaurant, the Pacific Pasta Kitchen. In addition, the club's owners, Franklin Ho and Howard Yeung, are waiting for the go-ahead from the Department of Construction and Land Use to double the club's 5,000-foot floor space with an alcove reserved for live shows, scheduled to be open in January or February.

So far, nearly $1 million has been spent on the restoration of the building, formerly Basil's restaurant, and the club is full of special touches.

``The air conditioning is five times what a typical club this size would have,'' said Smith, the club's manager. ``The ventilation system is incredible - we have fans that will immediately get rid of the smoke from the fog machines and the cigarette smoke.

``We could have spent just $4,000 on a maple dance floor, but we spent $17,000 on a spring-loaded aerobic dance floor. Everything is designed with the comfort of the dancer in mind.''

The club is two stories, with a bar on each floor. The dance floor is on the lower level, with the upper level serving as an observation area from which the DJ booth juts out.

The club's decor is an aesthetically happy marriage of chrome, black and neon, with black lights, mirrors and neon tinges accentuating the strategically splattered paint on the walls. It's slick and self-consciously hip, betrayed only by the kitschy, small silver face peering over the dance floor from the side of the booth, which periodically spits fog from its eyes and mouth.

``This club is great,'' said Debbie Jones, a DJ at Vancouver, B.C.'s expansive Graceland nightclub and co-editor of the club's Discotext magazine, a guide to dance music distributed in Seattle as well as Vancouver. ``It's small, granted, but with the right energy, a club this small can be quite successful. And it has a good energy.''