Riot on the Dance Floor (2014)

Final Rating: 7.4/10

Steve Tozzi’s music documentary on the renown City Gardens is heartfelt in tone. It has Randy Now’s recollections of his life as an avid music fanatic. We see Randy Now course through job after job either to be closer to music or to have the money to be able to. He worked as a mailman. He worked as a DJ. He’s been on the radio. He’s run events. Most significantly, he’s run City Gardens: The New Jersey hotspot for eccentric bands. The movie doesn’t tell too much of a linear story but instead has two running narratives. The first is Now’s nostalgia of the venue and how hard it is for him to separate himself from it. He’s poured his heart and soul into City Gardens and we see it. We don’t need a big story on how he was class president at school or how he won some race and gave his prize to the runner up. All we have to do is hear him talk fondly of his many passions to instantly feel warm. Riot on the Dance Floor succeeds in having a very likable focus so it wastes very little time trying to convince us to like him even more.

That’s where the second narrative comes in. We see many musicians talk about City Gardens and Randy Now and because many of these musicians were given a chance by Now they speak so highly of him and so wide eyed about the starts of their careers. We see Ween talk about the Butthole Surfers’ performance at the venue as Ween opened for them. We see Henry Rollins recollect his confusion when he played the same night as the black metal hyperbole known as Venom. We see all of these smiles while we also see Randy Now being fully aware that he has run a lot of his money out the door feeding his passion for music. He’s fully admitted that he has no retirement fund. He cheerfully talks about his massive record collection (which includes some extremely bizarre entries ranging from the weirdest Christmas albums to ‘Hitler Inferno’) and then says that it is this very same collection that has prevented him from retiring.

While this movie doesn’t tell a story a lot of the time it does catalogue many fond memories. While the memories end up being a sum of why City Gardens had to close down (because of violence or the rise of lawsuits, for instance), most of the film is having many familiar musicians sit around us in a circle as we scan across the room and look at each person talking. It’s a partially informative film but mostly a film that wishes to celebrate the opportunities Randy Now has given. The film is like City Gardens itself: Not fully put together but a very welcoming experience. With delight, Riot on the Dance Floor will charm any viewer and it will grab a chair in the hearts of extreme music fans.

I had an interview with director Steve Tozzi and, as there was way too much to record here, I have transcribed parts of it here.

How are you doing today, Steve?

I’m doing good. I’m quite busy with the film and moving it around at festivals and stuff like that, so there’s a lot to do. It’s not my full time job in any way but it feels like a full time job. I’m good, I’m really good.

What is your real full time job if you don’t mind me asking?

Oh sure. It’s–I’m actually like–I do a couple of different things, but my main, sort of, work that I do is I do effect directing. I do directions for commercials and films. I’m a designer. I deal a lot with animations for commercials and films and stuff. So that’s what I do with my days.

Working with these documentaries (such as It Might Get Loud) with the title work and the effects and everything, is that what made you want to start your own documentary or?

Yes. Sure in a way, yeah. I was doing this work for other filmmakers. When you work with the director there is no separation. Your director is going to want to be a part of that process. You’re around the film for a long time, so I was around those films for several months. So you see the process and how it goes.

Riot on the Dancefloor has an interesting concept. How did you get upon jumping into this story?

I used to go to the club [City Gardens]. New Jersey is right between Philadelphia and New York so basically the whole state, I grew up there my whole life, there’s a major highway that goes through it and most of us took that highway to go to New York or to go to Philly, and New Jersey doesn’t really have a city that was really getting behind music at the time. There were clubs. It wasn’t like there weren’t clubs but a lot of them were like bars, cover band clubs. You’re not going to pack the house with a cover band. You’re not going to pack the house with a local band. So when this club showed up on the scene, in the early 80’s, this was another way of making some money because it would be on a night they didn’t play, so there’s a place where you could play for a thousand plus. On top of that it wasn’t like you were dealing with a promoter. This is a guy [Randy Now] that bands actually liked to work with so it was a big deal.

[In regards to NXNE] Do you find that these festivals are replacing community built clubs and bars or do you think they are still going strong in their own way?

I think they’re going strong in their own way. I don’t think they’re going to replace that, like the local bar and the local great band that would show up and play and were like “this is amazing and no one knows about it and I don’t want anyone to know about it” because I don’t want them to go away. I think that’s going to exist, but I think it’ll coexist with stuff like NXNE and what they do, which is amazing, you know, by the way. They’re giving exposure to bands that’re just starting out and have a nice buzz, but they’re at that, kind of, lower end of the beginning of their career and they’re getting this huge exposure which I think is just, that’s what you want to happen. There were things like this earlier on but I’ve heard more of these festivals popping up that show hundreds of bands over the course of their time which I think is doing these bands a lot of service.

[on the topic of on screen interviewees] How does that work? Is it strictly professional or did you end up hanging out with Ian Mackaye [Fugazi], or anything, afterwards? 

Musicians are always friendly. The people we interviewed were really accommodating, like Ian Mackaye was very accommodating to us and he knew we had a group of people coming down to visit him and he flew us right at the end of his tour, he was very friendly. Some of our crew knew him from the past. My crew wasn’t necessarily a traditional film crew. They were people who worked or played or went to the club that would become waiters or photographers or what have you and they helped me make the film. Instead of having a traditional crew who really didn’t know about the subject but they could handle a camera, I had all the production. When the people on my crew became producers and all that, they opened doors to get some of these artists, so when they met up again it was like “hey! they knew each other back in the past”. So there was always a bit of a reunion moment with everyone which was really nice. So it’s professional, of course, we’re doing an interview, but we’re not really a reporter coming in. They [bands] know this is a much bigger thing. They want to be represented properly. They want to make sure that I’d get everything that I need. So there’s a lot of help.

I wasn’t asking the traditional “tell me about your band” “tell me about the important of Black Flag”, it wasn’t those sort of stale questions you ask a band. It was really about “what do you remember about dealing with the club”, “how was it dealing with the promoter” [Randy Now], “what was your impression of him”? Because people don’t know that. I thought people really didn’t understand that end of it, that, “what’s the behind the scenes of putting a show on in a rock club?”

Is there a next documentary in mind? If so, is it music related in any way?

I actually just started to talk to somebody about doing something that is music oriented. It’s kind of unexpected how right it was and what the story’s about, it’s bigger in a different way. I am looking at another music project because I do like the subject. I think it’s time to build film around subjects that haven’t been put out there already like the traditional band film or rockumentaries. It’s where my interest currently is. So I kind of want to peruse that in different ways. I’m hoping, I can’t really confirm it yet, but I’m hoping I actually get to do this next project. Give you something I can really develop again.