Three Minutes in Hell

The crowd looked like it always did inside the Station, a roadhouse in blue-collar West Warwick, Rhode Island, on Thursday night, February 20th, 2003. Standing in the back, a tall metalhead named Adam Tanzi, 23, drew on a four-dollar Heineken. Close by, Jay Gates, 37, an off-duty drummer in a popular Van Halen tribute band, Diver Down, ordered a Bud draft. Waiting in line for the men's room was Dave McDonald, a Roger Daltrey look-alike who sings in an outfit called Who's Next. That was the vibe at the Station -- musicians mining Eighties hard-rock nostalgia, together with their loyal fans, and no boundaries in between.

At around 11 p.m., the lights went down, and Great White, for a brief time in the late Eighties one of metal's biggest acts, took the stage. Dan Davidson, a tall, curly-haired thirty-one-year-old who plays in a cover band called Mad House, raised his camera to take some photographs. He stood stage right, near the side door, next to the speaker cabinets. The fireworks that went off during the first song, "Desert Moon," reminded him of a maple leaf, one column of fire shooting straight up, one at a forty-five-degree angle to the left, another forty-five degrees to the right. "Two fires broke out on each side of the stage, in the acoustical foam in the ceiling," he says. "I said to myself, 'No big deal. They ought to be putting those out with the fire extinguishers any minute now.' They never came."

Beer in hand, Gates took a few steps away from the bar toward the band. Another patron bumped into him and spilled his drink. "I looked over at the guy and gave him the eye, looked back at the band and there was already a ball of fire," he says. "The music stopped. People started to turn around. Somebody was saying, 'Get out!' I was very close to the front door, probably ten feet away." Gates hurried out, still clutching his Budweiser.

The fire scaled the wall behind the band, gained the ceiling, then spread across it. Initially, people remained calm, too calm. Black smoke quickly filled the building. It took only thirty seconds. Ninety seconds later, the Station lost power. The entire building went dark. Panic set in. "No exit signs were lit up," recalls Chris Travis, 37. "People started pushing and running."

For an instant, Travis, a truck driver who'd bought his fifteen-dollar ticket a month in advance, considered ducking into a restroom to find a window to jump out. But if I'm wrong, he thought, I'm dead. Travis waited. He got knocked down. "People were trampling me and falling on top of me," he says. "I pulled my jacket over my head so I could breathe. I started crawling on my hands and knees. I lost my sense of direction. I didn't know which way I was facing." A few moments later he tumbled out a side door into the snow.

Davidson rushed out a door behind the stage, the door where band equipment comes in. The fire followed. It crawled around the door, surrounding the doorjamb. "When I got down the stairs, three steps down, flames came through the top of the doorway, and nobody else was coming out," he says. "And if anybody went down the hallways toward the bathrooms, they were trapped, because there was no exit there. That place was a deathtrap to begin with."

Outside, Davidson saw Great White's singer, Jack Russell, and lead guitarist, Mark Kendall. A young man ran around the corner of the club, shouting, "You've got to do something. People are burning alive." Russell, Davidson recalls, had tears coming down his cheeks and his hand over his mouth, in shock. "To my right, there was some guy puking in the snow."

Davidson moved to the street in front of the building, took one more picture and stopped, as a swarm of EMS, police and fire units arrived. "I couldn't snap pictures of people stuck in the doorway, horizontally stacked up," he says. "When I got out to the street, the smoke that was barreling out of the front door turned into flames, and then I didn't hear any more screaming."

Before fire claimed it on the night of February 20th, the Station -- capacity 300 -- was a last refuge for an increasingly marginal East Coast hard-rock audience. It included fans over thirty who clung to the hair-metal vibe and fans ten years younger who had adopted the abandoned musical genre. Many in the crowd -- working-class folks, predominantly -- had driven more than an hour to reach the Station that night from various points around New England. "Rock & roll is in my blood," says survivor Scott Dunbar, 24, of Woburn, Massachusetts. "Me and Derek and Geno. Distance didn't matter, never did." Dunbar's friends, Eugene Avilez, 21, of Burlington, Massachusetts, and Derek Gray, 22, of Dracut, Massachusetts, did not make it out alive.

The Station was a typical roadhouse -- wood-paneled walls, a low tile ceiling, a few black lights, a floor covered by a rug with so many holes in it you could catch your foot and fall. Posters for local bands, and their autographed guitars, covered most walls of the long room, as did various bits of Boston Red Sox memorabilia, the other main passion of club patrons. Pool tables were located in a side room with a glass, greenhouselike ceiling. A kitchen served onion rings, sandwiches and small pizzas. Service was friendly; brawling and drug use were minimal. "The metal scene made a permanent fraternity in that place," one regular says. And so it did, right down to the ladies. In the early Nineties, out-of-town dancers working at Rhode Island's many strip clubs considered the Station their home away from home.

Tribute bands drew well there, performing note-perfect versions of songs by Kiss, Ronnie James Dio, Van Halen, Ozzy Osbourne, Aerosmith and the like. One hundred to two hundred fans could usually be counted on to pay seven bucks at the door for ninety minutes of 1987. With a squadron of different members, local favorites Diver Down have been gigging in the area since 1983 -- a full two decades traveling hard-rock memory lane -- supported through the years by two generations of construction workers, waiters, landscapers, liquor-store clerks and Sears managers. "The Station was like home for us," says Diver Down's current Eddie Van Halen, a long-haired Brit with formal musical training named Amos Sanfilippo. "And for the club, tribute bands like ours were its bread and butter. It was a three-to-four-month turnaround -- that's how often we were in there. Night after night, it was a good mixture of people having a really good time." The beers were cold, the pool tables gratis, the parking lot crowded with Harleys and dented pickups.

Periodically, outfits such as Warrant, Ratt, Dokken and Great White -- former kings of hair metal -- came through, still cashing in on hits from more than fifteen years earlier. "People need entertainment, and the small venues are great to play," says Ratt's former lead singer, Stephen Pearcy.

"There are a lot of people out there who love music from the Eighties who are still freaks," says Warrant guitarist Erik Turner. "They probably love it more now that it's not fashionable. It's more their music. It's almost underground." Every time Warrant played the Station, Turner says, the place was packed, with people sporting Warrant tattoos and lining up to buy T-shirts. "These kids bought our record when they were twelve, and now they're twenty-five. They're drinking beers and we're hanging out. They get to meet us, we get to meet them." Bands like these, which built a fan base one fan at a time on the Sunset Strip in the 1980s, now maintain that fan base, one fan at a time, at places like the Station.

The Station's management treated its bands well. Musicians drank for free and ate hot pre-show meals ordered in from a nearby restaurant. The club's equipment -- sound and lights -- was top quality. "They paid us very handsomely to do something that we really enjoyed doing," says Jay Gates. Handsomely, for West Warwick, Rhode Island, being $1,000 to $2,000 for the night.

Gates went to the Station with five friends that night. Two of them died. They'd been standing near the stage, next to a local DJ, Mike Gonsalves, better known to Providence as Dr. Metal, who'd been spinning hard-rock hits from midnight to 5 a.m. on WHJY for seventeen years. Perhaps more than anybody else around West Warwick, it was Dr. Metal, as narrator, who kept the Eighties flag flying, and kept tribute bands and clubs like the Station in the black. Dr. Metal, too, is now dead.

Tanzi, a security guard at a Wal-Mart in Cranston, Rhode Island, encountered a scrum of people near the club's front door. Tanzi grew up in West Warwick and had seen Warrant and Kiss tribute bands at the Station. With his right hand, Tanzi grabbed a wooden partition by the door. The crowd surged, crushing two of his fingers and bending their nails back and straight up. "A huge cloud of smoke filled the lobby area," he says. "I held my breath. I couldn't see my hand in front of my face, that's how thick the smoke was."

People in front of Tanzi fell down. He fell on top of them. "There must have been at least thirty people squished in that doorway, lying down," he recalls. "Then people fell on top of me. From my waist down, I was inside the doorway, still half in the building. From my waist up, I was outside, so I could actually breathe." Tanzi tried to pull his legs out of the pile and get free, but he couldn't prop himself up to get enough leverage. His abdominal area was crushed against the frame of the doorway.

One of the cops grabbed Tanzi by the belt of his khakis and pulled. Nothing happened. "Then he grabbed me by my arms, my shoulder area. I started to get free. Once he got me out a foot or two, I waved him away. 'I can get the rest of myself out. Go help somebody else.' " Tanzi stumbled off, pulling his pants up from around his knees. Officers dragged another man from the building. His clothes were black, the skin on his face bubbling. If, like many Great White fans, you wanted to be near your heroes that night in West Warwick, you probably paid a heavy price for your devotion. It probably cost you your life.

As a grand jury investigates the Station fire and wrongful-death claims are filed, some Rhode Island musicians have changed the way they think about Great White. They're angry at the band for setting off pyrotechnics, killing ninety-nine people and leaving dozens more maimed for life. They're also furious at how the band behaved after the fire, for what they see as callous abandonment of the faithful in their time of need. "The fans there that night were fans who supported them back in the day," says John Mellini, Diver Down's David Lee Roth. "These people were supporting them now, still buying tickets to see them. Great White should have stuck here by these people a little bit, and they took off. Why couldn't they have given flowers or showed their concern in some way? Their guitar player is dead. Everybody in this community has lost in some way." Mellini thinks a moment. "To tell you the truth, I'm not a Great White fan anymore." One West Warwick record store, outraged at losing a number of loyal customers in the fire, removed Great White CDs from its racks.

On the Monday after the fire, Amos Sanfilippo began to receive calls from members of other tribute bands in the area, men of a certain age who act the roles of Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Pete Townshend and Steven Tyler. How about putting on a benefit concert, in a Providence park, sometime in the spring, he asked them. Everybody signed on. Something was owed, they all felt: a debt for years of support, for the shared experience of re-creating something they couldn't let go. "We had just played at the Station on January 31st, and at the end of the night people were up on the stage partying," Sanfilippo recalls. "Just as much as the people who died were the club's clients, they were our clients. This whole thing has been like a 9/11 for musicians."

(March 12, 2003)