Party Pooper

The party at Club Evolution was crashing more spectacularly than its regulars knew.

On Saturday nights last summer, the club was the final stop before last call, a 3 a.m. bar where the city's normally self-segregated cliques converged, pulsing toward a capacity of 1,500. The dance floor overflowed with various tribes — spiky-haired white boys, skate-styled Asians, blingy African-Americans and, most famously, an assortment of jiggly women in low tops, short skirts and high heels who gyrated atop a clear walkway while the crowd flowed like an electric sea below them.

The windowless, warehouse-sized building was a labyrinth of cavernous party rooms connecting to dance floors through a series of dim tunnels. People buzzed around six bars, two in the main room. DJs scribbled separate vibes — Xan Lucero and Atom Bryce, who called themselves the Control Freeks, spun ambient electronica in the low-ceilinged Oxygen Room while DJ Nam and Shawn Flo pumped techno or Top 40 anthems for dancers on a floor covered with gold glitter.

The building at 3954 Central had been home to various nightclubs since the 1980s, reincarnated every few years as another down-and-dirty hot spot: Fanny's, Guitars and Cadillacs, Winchesters, The Coliseum, The Limelight, Fall Out, Atlantis.

"People wanted the whole big experience all in one building," says former owner Stuart Salomon, who bought the club in 1993 and now owns the Beaumont Club and the Grand Emporium and is rehabbing the defunct American Chrome (formerly Johnny Dare's).

In 1999, Salomon installed new lighting systems and debuted the goth-leaning Club XO. Competing with the burgeoning one-stop party market offered by the casinos, he booted bands and hired DJs to provide a modern vibe. Skilled bartenders mixed highballs from top-shelf liquor in plastic cups on the main floor. (In the alcoves, booze came in glasses.) Bouncers were mostly ex-military, outfitted with radios because the labyrinthine club had no clear sightlines.

But by 2003, Salomon had learned the sad truth about the city's nightlife. "You can't charge a cover in KC that supports the ability to have an ever-changing club," he tells the Pitch. "Because Kansas City won't allow a high cover charge, it limits the ability of club owners to create dynamic concepts."

In April 2003, Salomon sold controlling interest in the club to Jeff Holloway, a dentist from Sedalia with no experience in the nightclub business.

Immediately, Holloway faced trouble. A pack of nearby homeowners had organized Westport Neighbors United to push their complaint that the club had become a public nuisance. They said they were tired of hearing the club's noise and seeing its patrons roam the streets, break bottles, pee in yards, huff from crack pipes and hump in parked cars. The group's leader, James Grow, and three neighbors had filed a lawsuit against XO in August 2001, and by October 2003, Jackson County Circuit Court Judge John O'Malley had fined XO $360,000 and ordered it to begin closing at 1:30 a.m.

Holloway, who later claimed he was unaware of the suit when he bought the club from Salomon, had a limited time to appeal — but never did. ("There is absolutely no question that he was aware of that case," Salomon says.)

Instead he flouted the judge's order, blaring music at ear-splitting levels. The party continued to spill out into the streets around 3 a.m. Though city liquor-control officers were aware of the disturbance, they couldn't revoke XO's liquor license because the lawsuit had been between the neighbors and the county.

Meanwhile, former employees say, Holloway seemed to be running the club like a get-rich-quick scheme. He'd introduced hip-hop on Friday nights, capitalizing on the fact that many of the city's bar owners were afraid to cater to the so-called urban crowd. On Saturdays, DJs pumped rap, techno and dance, and a second wave of partiers clogged the entryway after 1 a.m.

"It was a happening spot," says Anthony Barnes, a Major Brands distributor who supplied XO with Crown Royal, Jägermeister and Red Bull — and watched his sales balloon. "People were getting back into it. It was wall-to-wall people in there."

But one Friday night this past May, the night crew arrived for work to find the club's heavy wooden door bolted with a metal crossbar. They were suddenly out of work, and thousands of partiers were cut off, forced to disperse to smaller venues across the metro.

Now there's a "For Sale" sign on the building. A graffiti tag scrawled along one side reads: "$300,000 RIP."

Most people chalked up the closure to neighborhood pressure. But employees say that Holloway was his own accidental buzz kill, a man who liked to take part in the festivities more than manage them, who smiled broadly while short-circuiting the longest-running party spot the city has ever seen.

Folks from Jeff Holloway's part of Missouri think of Kansas City as the big time.

By early 2003, Holloway had run a six-person dental practice in Sedalia for more than a decade. He was a 48-year-old, recently divorced father of two who, court records suggest, might have been better-suited for bachelorhood.