“The hairdressers in Dallas and the surrounding states would tell everyone who sat down on their chair about the club.” “There wasn’t any of the social media ways of getting the message out, but what they had was this hairdressers’ network,” Mr. Cain first attended the Starck Club in 1985 when his then-girlfriend’s brother, who had heard about the place from his hairdresser in Arkansas, was visiting Dallas and insisted they check it out. “And the Starck Club was just a safe place where you could finally be yourself in the city.” “We vote conservatively in Dallas, yet we love to break rules,” said Wade Randolph Hampton, a onetime Starck regular who in the 1990s tried to produce a feature film about the club. (Chicago and Detroit, where “acid house parties” took place in the late 1980s, are more traditionally credited.) Some have even argued that the club, which closed in 1989, gave birth to raves - the throbbing, Ecstasy-fueled dance parties that became popular in the 1990s.
Bush, Princess Stephanie of Monaco and Maureen Reagan.Ī year later, the club unexpectedly found itself at the center of the war on drugs when Ecstasy, which was used widely at the Starck, was declared illegal. Opened in 1984 in a converted warehouse just north of downtown, the nightclub attracted oil-and-gas scions, Southern socialites, gay and cross-dressing men, and boldface names like Rob Lowe, George W. Among Dallas residents of a certain age, the Starck Club is often recalled with a mix of nostalgia and wonder: How did such a thing ever exist?