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Beach Club celebrates 70 years
Jimmy Geurts
jimmy.geurts@heraldtribune.com
Beach Club 70th Anniversary Party: noon Sept. 2; Beach Club, 5151 Ocean Blvd., Siesta Key; 941-349-6311; beachclubsiestakey.com
From a humble beach bar on a dirt road to a trendy nightclub booming electronic music for crowds of twentysomethings, the Beach Club has been a fixture of Siesta Village for seven decades now.
Current co-owners Christopher Brown and Mike Granthon, who also own the other Siesta Village establishments The Hub Baja Grill and The Cottage and plan on opening a steakhouse nearby as well, have run Beach Club for 11 years now. But more than a decade before that, they were coming there just for fun.
"Twenty-five years ago when I got here and Mike got here, this was the place to come," Brown said. "It's truly an institution."
Beach Club, which opened in 1947, will celebrate its 70th anniversary with an all-day party Sept. 2. There will be giveaways including a cruise for two, VIP limo ride and flat-screen TV, as well as a cash cannon, drink specials and more.
There will also be music starting at 2 p.m. with The Instigators featuring Burt Engelsman, who played bass for Gregg Allman's band. Allman and Dickey Betts are among the numerous musicians who have played the Beach Club over the years.
Tampa Bay-based dance rock group NoFilter will perform, too. And as typically happens on Saturday nights, the evening will close with a DJ playing music.
Granthon said Beach Club tries to feature different types of music at different times of the day — rock and reggae during the daytime and evening, electronic late at night — the way it used to separate them by sections of the building.
"You could come in and you could go to the right to the rock 'n' roll, reggae side," Granthon said about Beach Club back when he was a customer. "You could go to the left to the techno, pool table area. There was sand on the floor."
'Beer and a shot joint'
While preparing for Beach Club's 70th anniversary festivities, its current owners have been looking back at the history of the building. T-shirts featuring photos of 1940s-era Beach Club will be available at the event.
"It seemed to me that it was kind of live music but a beer and a shot joint," Brown said. "It was half the size of this, it was small, low ceilings. From the pictures when I look back, that's what I see — just an old honky-tonk kind of thing. It wasn't glamorous by any stretch of the imagination."
When it opened, Beach Club was the only bar on the island, Brown said. Across the street from it, the building that is now The Hub Baja Grill was a shop selling ice cream, fountain drinks, newspapers, magazines and more.
Two years later in 1949, Crescent Club would open in South Siesta Key. To this day, the dimly lit, smoky dive bar feels like it's preserved from that era.
Conversely, Beach Club has made several changes over the years — for instance, Brown and Granthon decided to change it to a non-smoking venue a few years ago. But when they took over the venue, Brown said they wanted to maintain its traditions as well, as the previous owners had tried to make it more of a restaurant and less of a live music venue.
"It's very difficult to have a higher-end restaurant and a live music venue," Brown said. "So they tried that for a couple of years and Mike and I decided, 'Let's just do one thing and let's do one thing really good.'"
Going national
Beach Club's current musical lineup largely consists of local acts, including the DJs, but a number of national musicians have also performed at the venue in recent years. Rockers Bad Company, Eddie Money, The Marshall Tucker Band and Molly Hatchet have played there, as have reggae acts Inner Circle and Yellowman.
Granthon and Brown said they're interested in booking more national musicians in the future at Beach Club.
"Since we've done some national acts, we now have agents reaching out to us all the time, 'Do you want to book this band?'" Brown said. "Years ago we were reaching out to them to maintain that level. Now it's kind of funny, they're reaching out to us."
Beach Club has brought back a limited menu of food including pizza, sandwiches and appetizers such as fries and wings. Granthon also said they look at nightlife venues in other locales such as Las Vegas, Miami and New York to get ideas of what else they could do here.
Whatever the entertainment is, he said what's most important is making sure visitors enjoy themselves and continue to come back for the generations that make up Beach Club's now-seven-decade history.
"I don't know how many couples have met here and married and now have kids," Granthon said. "And now their kids are coming here and they call me to make sure that the kids are going, having a good time."
"But not too good of a time," Brown added.
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