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The local bar trade that provides the haunts for thousands of young singles, tanned and dried after summer beach days, is providing something different this season.
Some bars are evolving into clubs, with all the music and excitements of the taverns, but with an “atmosphere” that lends itself to soft talk and dressier rendezvous.
Where the conventional bars have held their ground with the t-shirt and cut-offs crown, electronic games and heavy beer consumption, the clubs are rounding the bend to a charges elegance.
The skeptics grumbled when Richard Bigmur “Biggy” Korn let it out that he’d be moving his Hotel Viking club, Nene’s across the lobby to bigger quarters.
A major attraction of Nene’s was its size; big enough for dancing, tiny and quiet enough – before 11 p.m. – for intimate conversation.
What Biggy has created for the former Nene’s patrons across the lobby, is a montage of atmospheres. He calls it “three rooms in a bar.” One room stretches into the other, each lending a bit of itself to the other, but each maintaining a unique identity.
From the entrance, a Bogart tea room to Harlow’s dance floor to an after-yachting pub, Biggy’s three rooms provide the best of several nightclub worlds.
Enter off Church’s Street (there’s a new parking lot across the street), and guests face a magnificent alabaster lamp. You’re in the “Plant Room,” where, in two weeks, Biggy’s waitresses will serve lunch and dinner. Biggy suggested a small menu – fresh fruit salads for lunch and “specialties,” such as curries and quiches, for dinner.
Biggy emphasizes certain phrases when he talks about his restaurant plans: “Everything will be done well. Everything will be very fresh.”
The tour proceeds and you’re in the dance room that points to a camp revival, with its tropical neon signs and a Thirties Parliament ad. The music is provided by a disc jockey, who leans toward blues early in the evening. Things don’t get started there until 11 p.m.
The nostalgia trend spills over into the bar, formerly the hotel’s Torch Tavern, where Biggy takes visitors to demonstrate that the bar though next door, is almost free from the sounds of the dance room.
Biggy, who runs his club under a management contract and three-year lease from the Hotel Viking, is not new to the entertainment trade.
The 29-year-old club owner will tell you that, after a stint with the commercial department of the Ed Sullivan Show in 1965, “I managed a local group called the Cowsills.”
He came to Newport, he said, to hear the Cowsills and the jazz festival, “and never left.”
With the Cowsills, then a two-man group, providing the music and Biggy tending bar, they opened MK’s, a club in the former (Muenchinger King Hotel.)
He later owned Bambi’s, a teenage club, with David Ray, now owner of the Candy Store that reopened on West Pelham Street, Wednesday, and Bud Cowsill, father of that clan. The story gets more complicated.
Ray owned the original Dorian’s, then on Thames Street that later became the Candy Store. The club changed hands and Biggy held it until 1969 when he went on the road with the Cowsills. (The club eventually got back to Ray, who last year had the building moved to West Pelham.)
It took Biggy three years to get sick of touring. “I was on an airplane every day and I was tired,” he said.
So, after a year of travel – one suspects at a more leisurely pace – he returned to Newport and Nene’s.
For Biggy, success does not mean competition with other area clubs; and he mentions his former associate David Rey and the Candy Store.
“I don’t think the idea is competition,” said Biggy. “If you have places and things to do in Newport, everybody will find it profitable. The trade is in what you can visualize.”
The secret, he says, is to keep in touch with the people you serve.
“We wanted atmosphere … to cater to many ages … we want a cross section of people. Nene’s was too small for that.”
The atmosphere includes good, “friendly” help, like his four waitresses Liza, Allison, Dede and Kimberly.
And Sundays, Biggy’s features Jim McGrath who used to sing Irish folk songs and sea shanties in the Black Pearl.
“You’ve got to feel out the people,” says Biggy. “The people who come in here are helping to build the place. I listen to them.”
But, with the experience of past club tending, Biggy added: “The public is fickle. One day, 10 people will like my neon. Other days, 20 people will hate it.”
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