16 MAY 1-7, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | LETTERS | CONTENTS | the entire crew for a vacation in Los Cabos. “I said, ‘Shit, this is my chance,’” Christou recalls, still fi red up by the memory. “So I wrote a sign that said, ‘Joe, Michael, meet me at this new place called the Dead Beat Club,’ and I stuck it on their door. That Wednesday, I had 75 people. On Thursday, it was over 100. On Friday, we had 500 people. On Saturday, we had 700 people. And by Wednesday of the next week, I took all the furniture out, because it was still a restaurant upstairs, and made the entire thing into the Dead Beat Club. I used a lot of Day-Glo paint and black lights, and the week after that, we were doing 1,200 to 1,400 people through the night.” With the Dead Beat Club as his founda- tion, Christou began to build what would become a full-scale, late-night empire under the CoClubs banner. “I opened 29 places in forty years,” he recalls. Among the names that Denver fun-seekers will remember are Lost Planet, Roo Bar, Shelter, Serengeti, Bar Standard, Milk, the Wreck Room, the Liv- ing Room, Salty Dog, City Hall, Fat Daddy’s, Fidel’s and the Funky Buddha. In a profession that tends to turn out more misses than hits, Christou’s batting average was fl at-out impressive. But there were plenty of struggles along the way, as exemplifi ed by the backstory of 1082 Broadway, where Club Vinyl pumps up the volume today. A tragedy at the venue would cast a shadow over Christou’s burgeoning operations for years to come. On March 20, 1996, as Westword reported, a young witness told Denver police offi cers Kenny Chavez and Andrew Clarry, who were moonlighting at 1082 Broadway, about a fi ght in a nearby parking lot. By the time the pair arrived at the location, the fi ght had concluded but an Acura Legend started back- ing toward Clarry. When the driver didn’t follow orders to stop, fi rst Chavez and then Clarry opened fi re on the car, unleashing more than two dozen shots in all. The bar- rage killed 25-year-old Jeff Truax, injured one of the friends accompanying him, and ultimately resulted in a $500,000 federal court judgment in favor of the Truax estate. The incident remains vivid for Christou. “I was a witness to it,” he says. “In my life, I’d never seen anybody get shot and die. I’d seen violence, but I never saw anything so right in front of me — something so preventable. It wasn’t even in my background, and it was so upsetting. But in- stead of blaming the situation on the offi cers who shot Mr. Truax, they decided to blame me.” Future Denver Police Chief Gerald “Gerry” Whitman, at the time the division chief for District 6 that covered the club, banned his offi cers from moonlighting at any of Chris- tou’s clubs. Christou also be- lieves that Whitman engaged in a long-running harassment campaign against him and his ventures. “This went on for ten to fi f- teen years, until Chief Whitman retired,” Christou claims. “They’d send fi fty police cars, eight motorcycle policemen. One time, they sent guys on horses on a Tuesday night, because that was my biggest night. They’d come in at 11:30, quarter to twelve, right before I was getting busy, walk behind my bar and shut the bartenders down until 1:15, 1:30, so I couldn’t make any money. One time, they said they were looking for fruit fl ies in the liquor bottles. They put me in jail for dar- ing to tell them a fruit fl y investigation was a health department function” — as opposed to a duty of what he calls “the city’s fi nest.” Keeping mum at such moments wasn’t Christou’s style. “I got put in jail a bunch of times because I kind of resisted, you know?” he says. “Listen, I’ve got a big mouth, and when I see something unjust and unfair, I stick my fucking head out. I don’t know why. It’s a character fl aw, I guess.” In the early 2000s, Christou says he tried to force a truce with Whitman by reaching out to the offi ce of then-mayor John Hickenlooper: “Hickenlooper gave me to Michael Bennet,” his chief of staff turned U.S. Senator and now a declared candidate for Colorado governor, “and Bennet’s solution was to tell me, ‘Learn to live with him.’ This courageous guy you see in the Senate now, the best he could do was tell me, ‘Learn to live with him.’” In an attempt to do so, Christou tried to stay a step ahead of the forces he believed were arrayed against him. One strategy: “By the time they could shut down one club, I would open another one.” His biggest launch involved the Church, a converted house of worship at 1160 Lincoln Street. The idea was to debut on New Year’s Eve 1996 — less than a year after the Truax shooting — and Christou had to clear plenty of obstacles in order to make it happen. “We were getting ready to open the place when I hear, ‘Something’s wrong upstairs’ — and then I saw the fl ames,” he remembers. “This guy was putting the air conditioning in and installing the roofi ng, and he put his torch down and the roof caught on fi re. We tried to put it out, but we ran out of extin- guishers, so we had to call the fi re depart- ment. They put the fi re out, but my whole basement was fi lled up with water — and I had to open on New Year’s Eve, because the show was already sold out and I had all these people’s money.” The city initially planned to declare the building unsafe for occupancy, but Christou begged for more time to make repairs. “So many people came in to help out,” he recalls .”All the employ- ees showed up with their kids and got to work. Jesus Christ, it was one of the proudest mo- ments of my entire career. We got our license at 4:30 in the afternoon on New Year’s, and I knew we were going to kick ass. By eight o’clock, there were a thousand people trying to get in — and from there, it’s history.” Over the next quarter-cen- tury-plus, Christou faced many more challenges. In 2006, his brother Chris, who was man- aging the Funky Buddha, shot a man he identifi ed as a burglar. Instead of making Chris’s day, the Denver District At- torney’s offi ce accused him of fi rst-degree as- sault; he ultimately pleaded guilty to a much lower charge, tampering with evidence, for which he was ordered to serve two years of supervised probation and fi fty hours of community service. Years later, the rise of COVID wreaked havoc. “We opened the Living Room, which became Jive, a week before the pandemic,” Christou says. “All the work we did had to be shut down.” Even the global spread of an infectious dis- ease couldn’t slow Christou for long. But in re- cent years, he has been increasingly bedeviled by the combination of bureaucracy, politics and economics. “The minimum wage the geniuses of Denver decided to pass is literally putting the hospitality industry out of business, but nobody’s realized it yet,” he contends. “And the permitting process in Denver, especially, is all about control. It has nothing to do with safety, and some of the things they require of people in hospitality are fucking ridiculous. Maybe I sometimes do things in the restaurant business that aren’t 100 percent kosher, but otherwise, you can’t survive.” Given these concerns, Christou has been winnowing down his holdings. According to public records, in 2024, Club Vinyl and the Church were purchased by Los Angeles- based Insomniac, which underground club scenester Pasquale Rotella created in 1993. (Christou declines to comment on the sale.) At this point, Christou’s main properties are Bar Standard and Milk, in the Jonas Bros. building at 1037 Broadway, “which are doing great,” he says. “We’re also going to be open- ing a listening lounge at 11th and Broadway in the next month or so, and I have a warehouse project at 2020 Barberry, near 8th and I-25. I just got the permits for that one after fi ve years, but I’d like to fi nd somebody to get it off my hands or somebody to run it.” The reason he’s soured on the latter enter- prise, he says, is because the Denver Depart- ment of Transportation and Infrastructure wants him to make over $300,000 of upgrades to sidewalks and alleys since “someday it might become a residential area. They come up with all these rules and regulations that make a project like this not feasible. That’s why I don’t want to go back to running clubs anymore.” Granted, he’s entered into a profi t- sharing agreement for another forthcoming nightspot set for the Jonas Bros. building. But others will be handling the day-to-day operation, he says, “and they can send me a check when I’m on my boat.” If the party’s almost over, though, Chris- tou’s had a hell of a time. “There are so many people in my life who made me enjoy my business, enjoy my journey. I’ve met so many people I still consider my friends. I even became friends with Chief Whitman, “who was replaced as Denver police chief in 2011, “after everything that happened,” he says. “That’s the essence of who I am. And that’s why I’ve been in the business.” Email the author at [email protected]. Regas Christou today. Regas Christou at the grand opening of The Church in 1996. Music continued from page 15 COURTESY OF REGAS CHRISTOU COURTESY OF REGAS CHRISTOU
