"The Lo-Fi Social Club Is Dead"

If you follow local venue politics--and why would you?--you already know this, but some weirdness and changes have been under way this past spring and summer at the Lo-Fi Social Club. Under circumstances that are still mostly unclear--which involve a few accusations from former employees about unpaid wages and missing artwork, as well as a slew of bad fuck-ups involving bands arriving to a locked club--the venue's owner, Neil Freebairn, has departed. According to, um,

, Freebairn hitchhiked to Canada. Or something.

In any case, he's gone, and the club is under new management/ownership and is reopening as

. A MySpace posting last week states both the title of this post and "The club has no affiliation with Neil Freebairn, previous owner of the Lo-Fi Social Club." Moreover, Matt Sterling, one of the club's new managers, wrote in an e-mail to

City Paper

late last month, "there hasn't been a Neil sighting in almost a month and that's all I can say for the moment." So, there's that, though Miguel Sabogal, one of the other four managers, explains in a phone interview that Freebairn made off with the club's sound equipment--owned by one of the club's former soundmen, Eric Boring--a couple of months ago.

"When it became apparent that Neil wasn't coming back, we had to get rented gear and stuff," Sabogal says. "We weren't going to let his dirty work to prevent us from doing that. Nobody could contact him at all."

After Freebairn's lease ran up, property owner Joy Martin (also owner of the Club Charles down the street) offered to re-lease the space to Sabogal, Sterling, Karl Ekdahl, and Josh Atkins, who have established the Hexagon as an LLC. "The hand-off was pretty unbelievable and pretty weird," Sabogal says. "I met Neil a few months ago. I asked him if I could do the door a few times. I became more enthusiastic about the space. In April or May the space was having less shows. One of the owners of the club now said [we should talk to Neil about the bookings]. We approached him about doing more shows. He wasn't as interested in managing the space as I thought he should be. Neil started showing up less and less--gave up autonomy."

Ideally, the four would like to run the space as a collective. "We want it to be something anyone can be involved in," Sabogal says. "We're offering people right now to be members--pay a membership fee, [and] they are allowed to put on shows and promote."

The Hexagon is tentatively holding its first collective meeting this Sunday, Aug. 3, at 4 p.m. at the venue. The space will have its first show under the new name this Saturday, Aug. 2, at 9 p.m., with Megedrives, Controllarm, Last Year's Model, and Psynet34. For now, everything at Hexagon is BYOB.