After fixing the repairs ordered by the Tacoma fire marshal, the all-ages Club Alano officially re-opens Friday night hosting Durango 95, The Drug Purse and Paris Spleen.

“We actually opened a couple of months ago but got immediately shut down by the fire marshals,” explains co-owner Mike Kopf. “We had to do new wiring, new conduits, put up lighted exit signs, put in new toilets and more.”

This week the fire marshals gave their blessing.

The club is owned and operated by Matrock Records steered by Kopf, Garrett Dawson, and Louis Messina. The name Matrock came from Kopf’s high school nickname. According to Kopf, he only knew one person when he enrolled at Tacoma School of the Arts (SOTA) several years ago, and that girl jokingly introduced him to everyone as Matlock, like the detective on television. The nickname stuck. Later, due to his interest in music, it evolved into Matrock. When the guys started their own recording company, they went with Matrock.

Matrock Records began three-and-a-half years ago when a teacher at SOTA sold Kopf his old recording gear (a digital analog interface that plugs into a computer) and Kopf went to work on it in his parents’ living room. The first band he recorded was his own at the time, called The Cutwinkles (Kopf, Messina and Chuck Scheurman). Then he started recording his friends’ bands and it grew into a small business. Today Matrock records still charges only $15 per song for professional quality recordings, and that includes mix and mastering. 

That is amazing enough, but the studio was just one part of the plan. “Ever since I was in the 11th grade I was looking for a place to hold shows,” says Kopf. “I always said that I wanted to own a nightclub. We drove around Tacoma for weeks until we found this place.”

The Lorenz Building at 17th and Market in downtown Tacoma called their names. The sign on the entrance read: Club Alano. It was very old and needed a lot of work, but they loved it and signed the lease. The clean-up took months. They rented a dumpster and filled it beyond capacity.

The three underage entrepreneurs had to acquire a business license, get liability insurance and get a permit for public assembly. Their general music business license covers the live music venue and the recording studio, which also resides inside Club Alano. They also had to form an LLC.

“Every day I learned something new about business or construction,” says Kopf.
They discovered that they needed to do deconstruction and construction to the space, so they needed to be zoned for demolition. They created blue prints (with the help of a contractor friend), built walls and passed a building inspection.

Kopf credits his education at SOTA for much of his ambition and success. He says he learned not only about making and recording music but also how to run a studio as a business. He says Paul Eliot, for example, was a big help and resource of information for them while they were undertaking this project.

Kopf explains at SOTA they learned community communication skills that enabled them to effectively reach out and gain support for their project. Several local bands came out to help with the manual labor, like: The Side Effects, Joe Myers, Sleazy Streets, Space Creatures from the year 3000, Zepher, Patton, Snub Nose, and Metal Matt.

Community relations training is a very important component of the education program at SOTA. In fact, every senior has to undertake a project that benefits the community in some way. Club Alano was Garrett Dawson’s senior project.

[Club Alano, with Durango 95, The Drug Purse and Paris Spleen, Friday, Aug. 17, 8 p.m., all ages, $3, 17th and Market, www.myspace.com/thealanoclub]