BILLBOARD
An article dated February 8, 1975, in Billboard reported that the club in Lincoln, Nebraska, had opened on January 28, and another one would open in Maxville, Tennessee, on March 15. They were already open in Houston, Detroit, Des Moines, Buffalo, and Syracuse.
Pat Lyons, the manager of the Minneapolis club, said that the company had a space requirement of at least 10,000 square feet and capacities ranging from 1,000 to 1,5000 persons. The firm’s policy was to build a $35,00 – $40,000 lighting/sound system in each location. Food was not offered in any of the clubs, but alcoholic beverages were available. Admission to each disco was $1.
With the exception of the Minneapolis club (it has live music six nights a week until just recently), the programming format at each disco is designed to give the dancers a wide variety of sounds, including r&b, pop and rock. The norm, says Lyons, is for each club to play at least 75-80 different records a night.
Playlists of the DJs working the clubs come from the home office in Cincinnati but, at the same time, are used primarily as guidelines. The individual spinner and manager in each club is allowed freedom to work their audiences as they see fit.
The article mentions a “comment sheet” from each club that is ciruculated throughout the clubs to alert managers to trends and give them ideas. Lyons said that recent comment sheets indicated that 80 percent of club-goers “prefer recorded dance music over live entertainment.”