Ten years and 600 hours of dancing at the Good Foot

PHOTO by JENNIE WARREN

DJ Scott Weaver remembers the night six years ago when the crowd became the music. Asked to guest DJ at the Good Foot—the monthly soul club held every second Friday at Que Sera—he and fellow DJ Chris Hall had arrived at the bar, laptop in tow—not for deejaying, but recording.

“We wanted to record the entire DJ set that night and press a CD the following month,” Weaver says. “With laptop in hand, we recorded the sets of all of the DJs and brought it home to cut it up and mix it.”

Then Weaver heard something unusual on one of the tracks.

“During the ending of one of the songs we were mixing,” Weaver explains, “the needle on the record picked up the crowd noise—everyone clapping and screaming like little children. [People] ask, ‘How did you get the crowd noise on the CD?!’ ‘The needle picked it up!’ I tell them. They were that loud.”

Now in its tenth year, the Good Foot has attained in the minds of many Long Beach residents—and the out-of-towners who happily join them in lines that have been known to wind around the corner—the sort of status usually reserved for hometown heroes, be they athletes or politicians or musicians, recognized as much for their merits as for what their accomplishments say about the town at large. And in the case of the Good Foot, it’s this:  family.

“Long Beach is my inspiration,” says Good Foot co-founder Dennis Owens, who in September 1998 launched the club with childhood friend and former bandmate Rodi Delgadillo. “It’s where I grew up, and I understand the climate, I understand the people. Rodi and I felt we wanted to give something to Long Beach. We wanted to try to really establish something here.”

Today, some 119 nights (not counting the yearly Good Foot Christmas party at Alex’s Bar) and 595 hours of music later, having withstood the exodus of Delgadillo and other resident DJs—not to mention the tides of locals who’ve moved away, come back and moved away again—the Good Foot has surpassed normal club life expectancy to signify something far greater than new shoes on a dance floor.

“I think the Good Foot represents the diversity of people that live in Long Beach,” says Delgadillo. “Dennis and I wanted to make a club where everyone could feel accepted. I think we succeeded in that.”

“I first went to Good Foot on the second night ever,” says former local DJ Jacob Pena, now living in San Francisco. “I think because I wasn’t of age to get into the first night, I had to wait another month until I turned 21.

“I was properly schooled on soul and funk that night. I’ve since told Dennis that night was the final push that made me decide to start playing records out.”

The October 1998 Good Foot was maybe only Owens’ third time behind a pair of turntables—the second, he says, was the night the Good Foot debuted to a crowd of 80. In years previous, beginning in 1989, Owens had played with Delgadillo and other friends in bands like Suburban Rhythm and Action League.

Action League had recently broken up when Owens— “burned out on the whole rock ‘n’ roll deal,” he says, but always a music fan and record collector—began going out to area hip-hop, soul and drum ‘n’ bass clubs.

“I was talking to Rodi one night a couple weeks after the band had broken up and told him I wanted to start deejaying,” Owens remembers. “He said, ‘Why don’t we do our own club?’ ”

Delgadillo’s boss at the time, Kathleen Schaff from Fourth Street vintage clothing pioneer Meow, suggested Que Sera. Delgadillo, who had learned about graphic design after working for his father, came up with a flyer.

“Rodi made these really amazing flyers,” says Owens. “He scanned a James Brown 45 and put all the information on the center.” With a button maker, they cut a hole in the middle, as if it were an actual record.

“The look of the flyer was very important—the black and white aesthetic,” Owens says. “Everything else [promoting other clubs] was color.”

Together, the two blanketed Southern California with flyers along what, in the wake of MySpace, seems a ridiculous route.

“Looking back, it’s really kind of crazy how relentless we were with flyering,” Owens recalls. “For the first Good Foot we went to south Orange County, to the Valley. We would hit up all sorts of clubs—soul, mod, gigs with indie bands, even raves.”

“Oh, the days of flyering!” says Delgadillo. “What a hectic time for us—we went flyer crazy as time went on, but I think it had a lot to do with the success and longevity of the club. We were really excited about the club and didn’t mind putting in the work.”

“We didn’t have any expectations,” Owens says of that first night—at least not about the turnout. In terms of what he expected of himself—of the Good Foot experience—Owens was inspired by a night at a drum ‘n’ base club called Science, at the Pink in Santa Monica.

“From the first person at the bar all the way through the dance floor, everyone was moving: B-boys, indie rock nerds, businessmen,” he says. “Everyone was moving, and they didn’t care what they looked like—they were just absorbed in the music. I thought, ‘I want to do something like that.’ ”

In the months after those first shows (and the years since those first few years), Owens and Delgadillo (plus secondary support from Weaver, Pena and DJs Angelina and Abel, among countless guests) didn’t just host a club where some people would show up and dance and then go home and forget about it. They grew a gathering where regulars were rewarded by the DJs—and the DJs, in turn, found the ideal crowd.

“I was speaking to Danny Holloway [longtime record collector, DJ and producer whose family owned Zed’s records, where Owens previously worked] about Good Foot, and he said he loved it because the crowd is so willing, so cooperative, so appreciative—wanting to hear more, wanting to be blown away,” says Pena. “From a DJ’s perspective, it’s like paradise: People want to be challenged. They’ll cheer you on, applaud and ask about the records when you’re done. They want to know more. It’s just a great exchange.”

Every second Friday, the parents of Dennis Owens, Carole and Louis, work the door at the Good Foot. “People come hang out with them all the time, come talk to them—my dad likes the energy,” Owens says. “My parents are outgoing people, and when I take a step back I think it’s highly unusual, but they were so enthusiastic, it worked out.”

They also received help planning their 50th wedding anniversary from the staff at Que Sera, a place Owens and Delgadillo—indeed, every DJ interviewed for this story—point to as equally essential to the success of the Good Foot as the DJs, the music and the people paying at the door.

“The Que Sera has a lot to do with [our success], because the owner, Benz, and staff really believed in what we were trying to do,” says Delgadillo.

“Good Foot wouldn’t be Good Foot without Que Sera,” Owens agrees. “It’s really hard to find a place where not only can you deal with the people who work there, but you love the people who work there. That’s something you can’t duplicate. It’s something that either happens or it doesn’t.”

The space—a mid-sized, kitschy, dimly lit bar with bright splotches of colors, sort of like hanging out inside a supermarket toy machine—lends itself to a club like the Good Foot (and other decade-in-the running nights like Release the Bats and Mannequin) where there simply isn’t room for pretense. But there’s room to dance.

“There are nooks and crannies all over that place,” says DJ Scott Weaver. “The dance floor, the stage, the sitting area, the fireplace, the pool room—plenty of places to hide if you need a break from the action.”

And yet there was a time when the Good Foot could have left the Que Sera—left Long Beach—for good, nearly three years ago, when Delgadillo decided to relocate with his wife some 5700 miles away, to Osaka, Japan.

“It was really, really hard to leave my family and friends as well as the Good Foot,” says Delgadillo. “I love Long Beach, but I felt if I didn’t make a change I might get trapped.”

The move could have signaled the end of the Good Foot; shorter moves have broken up many a partnership. But with Delgadillo’s blessing, Owens stayed on, recruiting “co-captains” DJs Abel, Angelina (aka Angie Lawson) and Pena. Twelve months later, however, Pena moved away, followed by Lawson—Lawson to medical school in Ohio (see sidebar) and Pena to San Francisco.

And yet, Long Beach being a temporary town, a place where people can and have moved away and moved back numerous times over a decade, the departure of the DJs also meant there was room in the Que Sera for one more person—a newcomer, perhaps.

“There’s no question the Good Foot is a community resource,” says Weaver, now a resident at the club.
“I know people personally who have moved to Long Beach and discovered us by accident or word-of-mouth—and they are there every month.”

“I just went month after month because that’s what I did,” says Pena. “Not out of habit. Because there was and is nothing like it in Long Beach. Hell, nothing like it anywhere. It’s a one-of-a-kind deal that can’t be created. I miss it.”

And then there’s the music. The beats and voices that keep the dance floor sweaty and the fans returning for more every month. It’s impossible to overlook the music itself—soul and funk—to not recognize that the very timelessness of these genres might be what is ultimately propelling the Good Foot forward into its tenth year. (And keeps other popular local soul/’60s/mod clubs like Secret Affair packed as well. With residents like DJ Frankie the Face—who will be spinning at the Good Foot anniversary—the Secret Affair crowd outgrew the Pike and relocated to a monthly first Friday night at Alex’s Bar.)

“That’s definitely one of the things I’ve thought about throughout the years,” says Owens. “People in my age bracket grew up with rock and R ‘n’ B—and the next had hip-hop. But younger people can relate to the music through sampling—there’s a connection between the old generation and new generation.”

“The Good Foot’s success is because Dennis and Rodi are all about the music,” says Riley More, who deejays with Owens at LA’s monthly Space is the Place roller disco. “There are no club promoters, so the DJs run everything, do all the promotion and play what they know is the best music. The music is everything—that’s the only way a club can maintain a packed house and survive for so long.”

For Owens, about to step behind the turntables at the Good Foot for the 120th consecutive month, the music—of James Brown, of Curtis Mayfield, of Sly Stone—is Long Beach, is life, really, and it’s the only constant that has been there with him at the Que Sera every single time: “The Good Foot is something where people can really like the music and the way it’s put forth,” Owens says. “We wanted people to feel welcome when they got in.

“We didn’t feel like the kind of music we were spinning fit any one scene—it’s the people’s music.”

THE GOOD FOOT 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION WITH DJS DENNIS, SCOTT WEAVER, NOBODY, SONICDRED, MIGUEL, RILEY MORE, BOBBY SOUL, ABEL, RAMONA, FRANKIE THE FACE, ZANS AND CTRL Z QUE SERA | 1923 E SEVENTH ST | LONG BEACH 90813 | 562.599.6170 | GOODFOOT.ORG AND THEQUESERA.COM | FRI 9PM | $5 | 21+ | MIX CDS AND OTHER GIVEAWAYS

Tags: dennis owens, good foot, Music, que sera, rodi delgadillo, soul