Noel it all

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“UPPER EAST SIDE QUEENS AREN’T BORN AT THE TOP, THEY CLIMB THEIR WAY UP IN HEELS NO MATTER WHO THEY HAVE TO TREAD ON TO DO IT…†- Gossip Girl

Plumm’s head honcho, Noel Ashman, is not an owners owner. He does his own little thing and although he shares DJs, promoters, and some staff with the rest of the scene, he exists sort of on his own in his own little Shangra-La. We have made this analogy before and it really applies here. Each owner/operator does things his own way. They are indeed like pro poker players. Each has their own approach to the game, their own style. The math is the same for all of them as it is for club owners, but their approach to the game is very distinct and personal. Noel doesn’t dress up, he’s actually very shy and not always recognizable as the owner. He is blessed with an aura of honesty and despite an Upper East Side rich kid upbringing, he has a very down to earth demeanor. He basically wears a white t-shirt all the time. It’s his signature outfit. It creates a feeling of accessibility that transcends classes and cultures. Other owners discount him and his approach to the biz, but when I watch poker on TV these are often the guys left standing at the end.

The Plumm location is strange. Just far enough from the meat districtto be not in it, but too close to take a cab. It’s surrounded by fratboy bars and c level clubs, and right next to a blinding yellow subwaysandwich shop. It isn’t exactly glamorous. Yet it was here that NellCampbell opened Nell’s, a club so chic and so different that it’sranked as one of the best of all time. Long after the celebrities andsmart set had moved on I would go and check out a jazz band and hangwith a real New York crowd, I’d even have a burger and some wondrousfries. This is from a guy that never ate in nightclubs. Although I didnot design Plumm, I was involved in the layout of the main floor. Iremoved some false columns and situated a stage at the far end of theroom. Shortened the bar, improved the entrance/egress situation, andrethought the seating plan. I still think that it could be a great rockand roll bar but alas, those aren’t making enough money these days.

I think Noel’s approach to clubbing can be summarized like this. He befriends lots of people, celebs, and hoi polloi alike, and cultivates and maintains those relationships. His core crowd are the people he grew up with who support him to this day. It’s an old school saloon keeper approach, making people feel they are your friends and the club is a second home to them. With Noel, it is that way. I may only see him four or five times a year, but I consider him a friend and would never deny him an accommodation. Reliability of product and a familiarity with the people who feed you is a real good approach to the club biz. Noel’s nice guy approach is a winner.

Steve Lewis: So I’m sitting here with Noel Ashman who is an old friend of mine and currently the owner of Plumm, the 14th Street nightclub in the location where Nell’s was. Some of the old people in the business will still say, ‘I wanna go by Nell’s tonight.’ I hear that once in a while, but they’re referring to Plumm. It’s big shoes to fill being in the space that was Nell’s, which was one of the greatest clubs of all time. And you can’t nod your head, you actually have to talk…

Noel Ashman: Right, yeah the reason I bought it actually was because it was Nell’s. Nell’s was one of the first clubs I promoted in '86 when it first opened, so it’s an honor to be in their shoes.

SL: It’s an unbelievable space. Nell’s lasted forever. Nell’s was famous because they charged five dollars to everybody, and I guess they got famous one night after they turned down Cher. They tried to make Cher pay five dollars and she refused.

NA: I was there that night.

SL: Oh yeah? Tell me about that, I was never really sure it happened.

NA: Oh it’s true. I didn’t see it actually happen, but I was inside when it happened. Was it Jessica or Simon at the door? One of the two came in laughing, like, ‘Guess who we just turned away?’

SL: Jessica who?

NA: Rosenblum. But it must have been Simon, I don’t think Jessica was there yet. Simon Allen was the first doorman at Nell’s. No one believed us, but it was on Page Six I think…

SL: It was everywhere. I mean that was a big deal. I think the act of turning away Cher was better than letting her in, because if they let her in, they would have gotten one day of an item, ‘Cher was sighted at Nells.’ But in this way, it just went everywhere. Everyone was talking about it, and I guess that says, ‘Hey, everybody is going to pay.’ If they’re going to turn away Cher, they’ll turn away everybody. I guess it was a good business decision.

NA: Definitely.

SL: I like Cher.

NA: She did something that offended them, I forget what it was. I forget the exact story, but she did something that was offensive.

SL: Cher always seemed like such a sweetheart, but I guess she does have a temper, or maybe a little sarcasm. Although I’ve dealt with her, I’ve always found her to be ridiculously cool. Like when you’re talking to her she smiles, and you just know she’s listening.

NA: Yeah she’s definitely a cool person.

SL: So it was an honor to take over Nell’s, of course, but tell me how you started; you started when?

NA: Uh, funny story. I started when I was thirteen, actually.

SL: Thirteen years old?

NA: Yeah,when I was thirteen, I lived with my mother at the time. My parents were divorced, but they got together and decided they were sending me to boarding school. I refused to go, and at the time I was working for a real estate company.

SL: At thirteen?

NA: Thirteen. It was my summer, after school job. I had a job since I was four years old actually; I can go through that, that’s kinda a funny story. But yeah, so I went to my boss, who I was very close with, and they owned like half the West Side. They had hundreds of apartments that weren’t selling at the moment. I asked if I could pay him cash to get an apartment for a little while, and he gave me a little apartment which was maybe the size of a big walk in closet.

SL: You’re talking about 10x8 or something like that, 12x8. You’re thirteen years old and getting your own apartment.

NA: Right, I moved out. Well, my parents basically kicked me out when I wouldn’t go to boarding school.

SL: It’s gotta be illegal in every state but Kentucky to do that.

NA: Without a doubt. But somehow I got away with it. We literally had a big fight, I left, and then didn’t speak to my parents for a year after I moved out.

SL: So between the ages of thirteen and fourteen, you didn’t see your parents for a year, and you were supporting yourself in your own apartment. What’s the statue of limitations on a crime like that, I mean that’s got to be child abuse.

NA: I don’t know actually. The funny thing at the time was when I wouldn’t go to school for a day, and my school would call my mom and be like, ‘Your son is not in school today.’ She’d say, ‘ Well I don’t know, call him, here’s his number, he doesn’t live with me.’ So they’d call me; it’s very funny. I had the best life in the whole world.

SL: Tell me you weren’t getting laid at that age, right?

NA: Actually, I hit puberty very, very young, so my first experience was around that time.

SL: Jesus Christ, you were way ahead of me.

NA: I had a live in girlfriend at fifteen. She was older.

SL: That’s amazing. This is not an interview, we should do this as a movie. We should stop right now and turn this into a mini-series on Showtime.

NA: You know, we’re doing a screenplay on this.

SL: On what, you living with a girl at fifteen?

NA: Well we’re doing a screenplay on my life. It’s not going to be my life exactly, it’s going to a character that is very loosely based on my life.

SL: Gotcha. What’s your first job in a club? Tell me about that.

NA: Well I didn’t start in clubs, I started in lofts. See, I was thirteen and I went to prep school with all kinds of rich kids in New York, but when you’re thirteen you really have nothing to do. Cause you’re not old enough to get into a club yet, but you’re too old to go to a movie every weekend. You’re kind of in that tween age of not knowing what to do. I was with a couple of my friends that had said, ‘Yeah let’s get together, let’s throw a party.’ So what I would do was rent out different lofts. I remember we called it Midyear, the invites were this flyer that had said, ‘Midyear Bash, five dollars all you can drink.’ Even though I was thirteen, I actually looked much older so no one ever carded me. I went and bought the kegs myself without a license.

SL: Ok, so, now you’re thirteen years old, you’re not talking to your parents, and you’re throwing keggers in a loft. It’s not your loft cause you live in a small apartment, so you’ve got a loft….

NA: I’d go to like a starving artist and say, ‘I’ll give you three hundred bucks, just let me throw a party at your place.’ And they’d be like, ‘Sure!’ You know. I played football in high school, so the security at these parties was actually different members from our football team; that was our security.

SL: Unbelievable. You had the football team as security, you had all these rich kids; this is right out of Cruel Intentions, right? That’s basically the crowd. It’s an Upper West Side crowd?

NA: Yeah, very much like Cruel Intentions, although it was mostly an Upper East Side crowd.

SL: Ok so it’s rich kids, Manhattan, old money Manhattan crowd. Entrepreneurs, the sons of people like should we say Henry Kravitz, because that’s one of the people who were there. His son Robbie Kravitz, that kind of crowd. Those are the names.

NA: Well the funny thing back then was that there were all those names who did come to the parties, but no one ever thought of it then because they were so young. It was like they were lepers, you know, kept away. When I first started doing clubs people were like, ‘Oh, get these little kids away from me.’ I used to have to go beg club owners. ‘I’ll sweep the floors after work, please let me do this. I’ll pay anything.’ I’d literally beg to get my crowd into clubs, but the first club I think I actually did was Private Eyes.

SL: Private Eyes, which is closed now. Actually, the block where we’re having this interview is the same block where Private Eyes was, right across the street from where we are. How funny is that, it’s on 21st Street, and Dolf London was the door person.

NA: I didn’t even remember that.

SL: Dolf London was the door person, I believe. There were many other door people, but Dolf was definitely at one point the doorman. That’s where Grace met him, that’s the rumor. He was a good looking guy, a really cool guy, I’m sure he still is. Sweetest person I’ve ever met by the way. People know Dolf as this big, dumb, blonde actor, but actually he has an engineering degree. He speaks seven languages; he’s sharp and he’s a cool guy. Alright so you have your first party at Private Eyes.

NA: I was probably fourteen when I started at the clubs; 1984, or around that time. For the following three years I did a lot of clubs, but they were mostly kiddie parties, they weren’t adult parties.

SL: When you say “kiddie†you’re talking about under twenty-one.

NA: They were made that way.

SL: But it was more acceptable back then, it was eighteen and over to get into a club. When the party’s eighteen and over, it was far more acceptable for sixteen and seventeen year olds to be found going out. It was not unusual for sixteen year old girls to be in clubs.

NA: Oh not at all. It was actually trendy at that time, if you remember at like Tunnel – you did Tunnel the first time around right?

SL: I didn’t do Tunnel the first time.

NA: You didn’t do Tunnel?

SL: No, not the first time. I was at a place called Café Americano which became Nobu. I was there with a guy named Johnny Corio who was the operator, and Eli Dyan owned it. I was introduced to Eli Dyan and he told me about this wondrous club called the Tunnel. The funny thing about the Tunnel was that the concept was, at the end of the night, they would turn on the sprinkler system and wash everything down these big drains in the floor. Wash away all the dirt from the night. So all the garbage would go into these drains, and I said, ‘My God, there’s going to be mildew and everything like that.’ Anyway he wanted to hire me to do the place, and I brought in partners Rudolph and Steve Gold.

NA: Rudolph was the guy I actually made that deal with.

SL: That’s right. And Rudolph was running Palladium, I went and took over Palladium, and Rudolph sort of pushed me out of the Tunnel. I ended up going back to Tunnel later.

NA: I remember that, that’s when we worked together. That was probably the first time we worked together. When you reopened Tunnel for the first time, I think ‘90 or ‘91.

SL: I don’t remember dates.

NA: Yeah,I did the very opening, I remember. I remember that Peter paid me some crazy amount of money the first week…

SL: Something like nine hundred dollars.

NA: And then it stopped.

SL: It was a lot of money at that time. I know that Noel Ashman was getting more money than anybody else at that time. We were paying you more than any other individual promoter. The first week we thought you did amazingly well, but then there was always a problem identifying your crowd from the other crowds, and it was always a war.

NA: I did the first week and then you kept me out, so I left.

SL: Well, you were a large promoter who was probably better suited off doing your own space, which you ended up doing. We would integrate you and you were good for a thousand people, which was great. If you’re doing three thousand people, the energy between three and four thousand is so incredible, but your crowd basically at that time homogeneous. You had one crowd. It was white bread, in one age group, all Upper East Side people. You didn’t want to add too many of those people into the environment…

NA: Well that’s the funny thing actually. When I talk to commercial promoters and such they’re always like, ‘Oh well you wouldn’t understand this cause you do this, you know, celebrity thing.’ I’m like, ‘Well actually, I was known to be commercial until much later in my career.’

SL: You were a very commercial promoter, and that’s where we had beef with you. We were always in a tough situation identifying people cause I’d be hanging out at the door, and let’s face it, I knew ninety percent of the crowd. Everyone would be coming up to the door and say, ‘Hey Steve!’ And then you’d say, ‘Wait, that’s mine,’ and I’d say, ‘Well why is that yours? He comes here every week.’ So it was a very difficult thing to quantify what you were doing. But I remember saying to Peter and to whoever else we were working with that, ‘Whether or not they’re yours or ours, if he doesn’t do it here, he’s going to do it there.’ And that’s what you did, you went to other places, right? You never had trouble getting a place.

NA: Never.

SL: And where else have you worked?

NA: Wow uh Nell’s, MK…

SL: MK was Eric Goode’s place. It’s on 24th Street in that little triangle there. It’s that really good building that you can enter from all sides, and it wasn’t licensed at all. In fact, there was an alarm system where if the police entered the building these sirens and lights went on, the sound system went down to low, and it became a lounge. You can see MK if you look at King Of New York, it’s the scene where they’re having dinner when Frank first gets out of jail.

NA: Oh really?

SL: That was shot at MK, the rest was shot at the World on 2nd Street. That was Frank White’s headquarters.

NA: Oh wow, I gotta look at that again.

SL: Yeah, and Able Ferrara is the most insane human being I’ve ever met. I once said to Able at the King Of New York party at the Palace, ‘Able man, how do you do this? Every time I see you you’re a wreck.’ And he goes, ‘You think I’m bad, wait til you meet Walken.’ Right then Christopher Walken walks in and he goes to the bar, and man he’s throwing down. I mean at that time, those men were animals, I mean they were all over the place.

NA: Yeah, I almost did a movie with Able and Lillo Brancato was…

SL: Lillo Brancato, in case you guys don’t remember, was very much a club person. He was the young kid in the Sopranos who got killed. He of course was involved in that murder and is currently awaiting trial; he’s in prison right now. He claims it was an accidental murder of a cop during a robbery.

NA: Well one important thing is that he did not have a gun. The guy who he was with had the gun. That’s no excuse, but the guy who he was with actually went and killed him.

SL: Right. There’s no dispute about that that Lillo did not have the gun on him. If you knew Lillo at all, the concept of Lillo actually shooting someone is ridiculous.

NA: He’s actually very scared of guns. I’ve known Lillo for a long time, he’s a very close friend of mine. I’ve known him since he did Bronx Tale probably, and he was always very afraid of guns. He was the last kid in the world to have a gun, it’s really tragic in my opinion cause…

SL: Because he had a lot of potential.

NA: Exactly, so much potential.

SL: Robert De Niro took him under his wing and they put him in Robert De Niro’s film, A Bronx tale. Peter Gatien was actually the executive producer of that film, and it was the first film that De Niro directed. Lillo Brancato played the kid; everyone said he stole the movie, it was a great role. He went on to the Sopranos and was doing well, then these things happened. I guess that’s unfair for me to say that things happen, they don’t happen to some people, and most people, but it did happen to him. When you live a life on the edge, you do come into contact with evil doers.

NA: The tragic thing about it is, you know he’ll be the first to admit that he had a problem. He had a bad drug problem and he got very into it. It affected his thought and he made a lot of very dumb decisions. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong person.

SL: But isn’t it if you get drunk, you get behind the wheel of a car and you hurt somebody, you’re responsible. It’s a murder, it’s a manslaughter, it’s vehicular manslaughter because you take that drink and you know you know that you can’t control yourself, you do those drugs and you know you can’t control yourself, you’re taking responsibility for your actions, whatever they may be.

NA: Well, the only thing with Lillo is that he didn’t know the other guy was armed. What happened was, they were trying to get into an apartment of a friend of his, they were banging on the door, and the cop I guess heard the raucous and came down. He pulled a gun, and the guy who Lillo was with pulled a gun, and they then returned fire. The cop happened to get killed and Lillo and the guy he was with both got shot. The tragic thing about it was that Lillo was guilty of being an absolutely moron for being in that situation. You know, with the guy in an alley trying to bang on someone’s window. Of course it’s stupid, but he’s not a killer.

SL: So you’re saying he’s guilty of being a moron?

NA: Yeah, guilty of having horrible judgment.

SL: I always knew him as a respectful kid…

NA: He’s a very good kid, he’s got a very good heart, and really means well. He wouldn’t hurt anybody intentionally, except himself unfortunately.

SL: I’m going to visit Michael Alig with Maurice Brown next week, for the fist time since he’s been in prison.

NA: Oh wow.

SL: Yeah, so I’m in a forgiving mood.

Good Night,

Mr. Lewis

Interview conducted and written by Steve Lewis.

Interview has been edited and condensed by Jessica Tocko.

Check back on Wednesday for day two of Steve's conversation with Noel Ashman, owner of The Plumm, as they explore, the nature of his business, his relationship with celebrities, and an explanation on why it’s never good to burn them in the press.

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