True Independence
A DJ’s Perspective Drives Independent Bar for More Than 20 Years

Nightclubs come and go. It’s a tough and notorious business that gathers a monumental amount of gold-plated blather about how to succeed. Talk to some operators in this industry and you might find yourself covered in the gooey residue of marketing speak and promotions hype. It’s like those scenes in “Ghostbusters.” You end up all slimy and wish there were something clean and real left in the world. How refreshing, then, to encounter the aptly named Independent Bar (or iBar for short) in Orlando, Fla., a club that has been around for 23 years and continues to prosper within the tradition it started. No frills. No fuss. No fraudulence. Its story is a simple tale of passion.   

Faith in Physics
“I started out as a DJ. I just loved music. I loved playing it and loved watching other people get turned on to it.” That’s John Gardner, who started and still owns Independent Bar. He’s referring to a period in his life more than 30 years ago, but his voice has the infectious quality of the teenager still. “This was way back in 1976,” he says. “DJs were just emerging. I started working at various clubs. I called up the Yellow Pages in Orlando and asked if I could be listed as a DJ. It was available!” Gardner is modest about his accomplishments, saving his enthusiasm for the music itself. But what happened was, Gardner started something big. The Hague was a random bar in a hotel in Disney World’s Lake Buena Vista area. In 1984, Gardner started doing a New Wave night there. Things went bust, though. They went bust because Gardner started packing so many people into the bar that it interfered with the hotel’s business. They fired him. But Gardner had a buddy who was 17 and just getting into the nascent video business. His friend Les Goldberg thought Gardner should open his own club. He chipped in $3,000, and Gardner came up with another $9,000. I n 1985, the first incarnation of today’s Independent Bar opened in an Orlando pizza parlor with a whopping $13,000 of investment capital. The fledgling bar was called Faith in Physics. “We could only get seven different kinds of beer,” Gardner recounts. “Nobody thought we were worth the time. I couldn’t afford a hard liquor license. I just threw down some scrap tile for a dance floor. It didn’t matter. The whole thing was about music.” And videos. Gardner got a Beta VCR, which cost $900 in those days. Goldberg provided video screens. “We just put up our sound system and video system and called people up and it was on,” Gardner says. “We had two bartenders and two doormen. I was the DJ.” 

Still Independent
Soon, a better location opened, and Gardner moved into the spot he’s inhabited for more than 20 years, right on the corner of downtown Orlando’s Orange Avenue and Washington Street. He dubbed the new incarnation Beach Club and tried his hand at doing a lunch business in order to maintain a liquor license, but after a few months, he quit serving food, quit hard liquor and went back to the old formula. “For 12 years we just did wine and beer,” Gardner says. “Wine, beer, great music, a dance floor, videos and music. And black paint. All we used, man, was black paint, 2 x 4s and plywood. And more black paint. If we saw something that needed to be painted, we painted it black.” What resulted is much more than a successful nightclub. What resulted can be described only as a movement — one that proved stubbornly resistant to modern entertainment business models and just as resistant to failure. Every now and then, Gardner has changed the name of the club for kicks. It was Barbarella for a while. Now it’s Independent Bar. What hasn’t changed is the ethos. Fifteen years ago, if you drove down Orange A venue — which is Orlando’s main drag — on a Saturday night, you’d have seen a long line of people wrapping around to Washington Street. Teenagers strung out on Morrissey’s lyrical loneliness. Earringed, nose-ringed alterna-chicks with their hair teased up like Robert Smith of The Cure. Leathered toughs juiced on The Cult. Delicate Depeche Mode dolls trying to pretend they were in Berlin. And then — could it be? — people in their 20s, 30s and 40s in relatively normal attire? Standing right there with the kids? It was true then, and it’s true today. And it’s been true without bikini contests, without VIP rooms or bottle service. Here is a genuinely democratic nightclub, where the beautiful, the bizarre, the hip, the duds, the damned and even attorneys-on-the-sly feel welcome. Here is where all kinds of people have come to get the Big Music Experience.

The Perspective of a DJ
“I’ve approached everything about my club from the perspective of a DJ,” Gardner says. “Other people have other approaches, and that’s fine. “But I just went with what I loved. I’ve never wanted to do anything else.” Inside, iBar is dark, with a long bar along the back and a massive dance floor right in the middle of everything. There are 36 videos screens that form four video walls. One wall faces Orange Avenue behind a window and can be seen by passing cars. The other three hem in the dance floor. The walls are, in fact, televised puzzle pieces. The signal gets split up, and so each screen shows only a segment of, say, a Bat For Lashes or Bauhaus video. You have to look at the wall as a whole to see the entire picture. On Friday and Saturday nights, Gardner will have anywhere from 400 to 600 in attendance. He just started a Grits & Gravy night that features Motown and has been drawing 450 people on a Tuesday, many of them shagging away on the dance floor. Thursday night is Goth night. Friday night is Alternative. Saturday is New Wave night. “I went out to Vegas recently to check out all the hot clubs,” Gardner admits. “I just shrugged. The music was all chopped up and then filtered into this seamless flow of sounds and beats. Everything was so jacked up. It all pretty much sounded the same. I thought it was dehumanizing frankly, taking all that music and blending it. The music didn’t have any integrity. It wasn’t allowed to move people or speak for itself. It was just a part of something else.” John Gardner was happy to get back home. At  Independent Bar, things are personal and they’ve been personal for a long, long time.