Shortly after midnight on a Friday, eerie lights start flickering from the dance floor of Johnny’s Hideaway in Buckhead. The regulars at the venerable midlife singles bar know the future has just arrived.
Kids, some of them college age, others in their 20s or early 30s, swarm the parquet expanse. The lights come from their cell phones, held aloft. They’re taking pictures of themselves gyrating into the night.
“The women look good, but I’m not sure I like it,” says Jesse Martinez, 43, shaking his head, nursing a beer and leaning against the bar as he sizes up the youthful throng.
“This place used to be our secret,” says Martinez, who divorced 20 years ago and has been coming to Johnny’s looking for women, with some luck, for the last six. “It had a lot of class. I worry they’re turning it into a meat market.”
That Johnny’s has survived, in any shape or form, for 30 years in Atlanta is miraculous. Only a few others -- Manuel’s, the Clermont Lounge, Mo’s and Joes among them -- have stuck around long enough to become beacons of both social history and nightly reverie.
The average lifespan of an Atlanta night club is three years, says Atlanta restaurant and bar consultant Paul Breslin. If you want to know Johnny’s secret, he says, it’s that it was never considered in fashion, so it’s never gone out of fashion.
“It’s one of those clubs where the appeal is you can dance and you can have fun (and) you don’t have to be 23 years old,” says Breslin. “But they’ve never been hot.”
The club’s 72-year-old owner, Mike Dana, recognizes the peril of younger customers having adopted, without much encouragement, his club as a late night hot spot.
On the other hand, he says, “most of the customers we had in the old days are no longer above ground. So, something had to change.”
A few years ago Dana and his 41-year-old son, Chris D’Auria -- who’s been the club manager for the past 12 years and will take ownership of Johnny’s in January -- started tweaking the Johnny’s formula.
They noticed the late crowd getting younger after the closing of the Buckhead Village bar disctrict, when dance halls such as the Tongue And Groove shuttered. The young and footloose made the club their last stop of the night.
Three years ago the club started charging a $5 cover to capitalize. But the owners didn’t do much else.
“We don’t know exactly why Johnny’s has been such a hit all these years,” says Dana, who took over the club from his former partner, Johnny Esposito. “So we’re afraid if we change anything that might change the magic.”
What few changes they’ve made are almost invisible.
The club is in a retail strip on Roswell Road about two blocks north of Piedmont Road, and it still looks stuck in 1979, the year it opened. The inside lighting is lounge lizard dim and the disco ball over the dance floor still spins and splays the place with fractured light.
The walls are adorned with photos of actors and crooners who were hottest around World War II, but they are interspersed with celebrities from the 21st century, such as Britney Spears, and George Clooney (who came by the club one night).
The front of the room is still devoted to Frank Sinatra, whose late imitator, Lenny Stabile, once was the club’s biggest draw. A back corner still plays homage to Elvis.
But the music no longer has many nods to the Big Band era. Now it’s Pop 40 from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. Eventually, the sound will move into the 90s.
“What we’ve done to stay current is cut off music from the low end,” says Dana, “and added music on the high end. We’ll keep doing that as we go along.”
In the early evening, the club still feels like “Cheers with a dance floor,” as Dana describes, with regulars gathered around the front bar, chatting and laughing. One recent evening they exchanged Christmas presents.
On weekends, they like to get there before the disc jockey starts spinning songs at 7:30 and while there’s still room to find a seat at the the bar and room to cut loose on the dance floor.
“It’s a great place, the only place for us to dance,” said Valerie Hammond, who was doing a jitterbug-like routine with her Johnny’s dancing partner of the last six years, Abdou Benkhedda.
As the night wears on the crowd gets denser and the singles’ action picks up. Men and women, of all ages, give everybody the once over, and seem to ask everybody, and anybody, to dance until somebody says yes.
Dana Herring, 34, was one of the late night crowd who took to the floor and stayed for an hour, posing and taking photos of herself with her cell phone, and wiggling around to very un-Big Band songs such as Big & Rich’s country hit, “Save A Horse, Ride a Cowboy.”
“Johnnys is the only bar I ever go to in Buckhead,” she says. “People joke that it’s a bar for cougars [older women trying to meet younger men], and I guess they are here, but it’s a great place to dance. It’s like a mash pit.”
D’Auria said he’ll continue to tweak things, but not something so drastic as, say, changing the rugs or the table tops.
“We just upgraded the bathrooms for the first time in 30 years,” he says.
He knows the reputation the club has for producing as many divorces as it has meetings and marriages over the years.
“I’d rather people not come here meet and get married, because then they get a divorce,” he says, only half joking. “And when they get a divorce, they have to decide which one gets to come back. And guess what? I lose a customer.”
