Will a wee-hours free-for-all between dozens of dance clubbers and police that even made Fox News nationally spell doom for Harrah’s Saturday night DJ blowouts?
For the time being, the answer appears to be no. The casino will stay the DJ course.
“Definitely, we’re booked up on Saturday nights into August,” Harrah’s spokesman Todd Hotaling says. “So, yeah, we’re going to continue on. … I wouldn’t want this one incident to brand VooDoo. We have a very well-trained security staff, and you can see that from the video. And we’re happy no one was seriously injured.”
Harrah’s “high-tech security was able to get it all on camera,” and the video has been turned over to police, Hotaling says
Former Harrah’s marketing manager Amy Leiker, who left in March, says the VooDoo’s DJ Saturdays have been largely positive.
“It’s not a scary crowd; it’s a very diverse crowd that just wants to go out and have a good time,” Leiker says. “They are flying top-notch DJs in from L.A. and San Francisco every Saturday night, and when I was programming the room we were consistently getting 700 or 800 people a night.”
Things did get a little dicey early on, Leiker says. Handling overflow dance crowds was somewhat problematic.
“We just did not anticipate, I guess, the amount of people that would be coming into VooDoo,” she says. “We had an overwhelming response. When we first opened the VooDoo for the DJ things, we were turning away 1,200 people a night and we still had 1,200 people in the room.”
Did programming dance and hip-hop music attract the wrong element?
“I don’t know if ‘wrong element’ is the word I would use,” she says. “I mean, we absolutely didn’t want to play all hip-hop music all the time, but we didn’t want to play wedding music all the time either.”
Leiker’s bottom line?
“I believe in the VooDoo, I believe in the venue. And I would hope that they would not simply hang their hats on a Saturday night DJ crowd that’s going to bring in folks that were going to cause a commotion at the casino. … Maybe they need to take a couple steps back and re-evaluate their strategy, and that may or may not include having a DJ on Saturday nights. But at the end of the day, I think they need to continue to focus on providing live music and developing an exceptional experience for all Harrah’s customers.”
Could happen anywhere
A single mini-riot does not a war zone make …
For the most part, Harrah’s VooDoo Lounge should not overreact to its police versus the dancers melee, Leiker says.
“It’s just one fight — they need to stay on course,” she says. “You know, I was at the Power & Light the weekend before last at a rock club, and there were fights breaking out. We never had any fights like that when I was at VooDoo.”
Bad News Bears alert
Word that Oscar-winning actress Tatum O’Neal was arrested Sunday in New York, where police say they found two bags of cocaine in her pocket, may not come as much of a surprise, given her past drug use.
O’Neal stayed at the historic Frederick Hotel in Boonville, Mo., last September during the filming of Connie Stevens’ forthcoming movie, “Saving Grace.”
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