- Thursday, April 8th seemed like it would be a good day for House music in San Francisco. After being forced to avoid the usual events in the city with the same tired old Djs and boring Jazzy House we’ve been hearing since 1991, Roger Sanchez was in town.
This could be a good thing if he had come to a venue where he could have showcased his skills properly, but as it is all too common in this city, that was not the case.
To start with, we made sure we got the “advance limited reduced admission tickets (10$)” about 60 days in advance. We had seen Roger Sanchez before in Europe and knew that surely this event would be sold out. Upon arrival at Ruby Skye we waited for 40 minutes in line on the “will call and guest list line” and when we finally get in we discover that our friends who “had not planned ahead” and just got the tickets at the door had been in right away and had paid $10 as well. Never mind the extreme rudeness and negativity of the door staff, the waiting, the mess outside, we were there to see the S-MAN.
So when we finally get in, there he is, Roger Sanchez, working the crowd as usual, dancing, having fun, playing a good combination of commercial near-cheesy House and good underground high-energy House. One big problem, we couldn’t hear the music. After 5 minutes we realized that highs, lows and every other frequency in between were blended into an incredibly loud thump that was near vomit inducing.
The club that boasts “America’s best sound system” has still not figured out how to set the levels right. We really did try to stay as long as possible, never mind the headache, gagging, and yes believe it, shaking of my throat as if I had a frog stuck in there trying to get out. All in all there were no more than 400 people at the event. The upstairs area was roped off so there was nowhere to escape the NOISE.
Roger Sanchez seemed to be having a good time though, good for him, and he usually does a good job. Since there was no place to sit or go to other than the nauseating dance floor we decided to find the nearest bar, have a few drinks and come back later. Maybe being drunk would help ignore the bad sound. We arrived at a nearby bar and noticed a trail of no less than 20 people that had followed us from Ruby Skye, and judging from the line of cabs picking up people at the club’s door at around midnight, we were not the only ones being turned off by the horrible sound.
We returned an hour or so later after a few beers, and guess what, alcohol does not help cover up for mediocre sound engineers. If anything, now, we REALLY wanted to vomit, and the crowd had been reduced to a few Asian kids holding water bottles, and obviously under the influence of “something”. Yet another horrible experience at Ruby Skye, mainly because of the violently rude staff and terrible sound.
In the next few weeks Carl Cox, Timo Maas and other few talented well known DJs will be playing there> Why? We go regularly to just about every single event in SF that is electronic music related, and they never seem to have it right with this venue. This one time is the final time we give it a try. I can’t imagine any serious club (with the capacity of Ruby Skye) in the world that would have Roger Sanchez and only manage to pull in 400 people out of which half were men in their late 40’s, and early 50’s accompanied by “suspiciously hot” young ladies. There is an intelligent House crowd in San Francisco that refuses to support this mediocre events and it is rather sad that we don’t get to see these DJs play somewhere where we can really LISTEN to them play. See you next time Roger.