The Night I Fell in Love With Dance Music: Loren Granic

In this ongoing series, dance music industry veterans talk about the night they became slaves to the beat.

As the cofounder of the esteemed and long-running party A Club Called Rhonda, Loren Granic has facilitated peak moments for party people in L.A. and beyond for the past seven years. Known for its stylish crowd and an underground vibe, Rhonda hosts up-and-coming DJs and musical luminaries alike. Granic and his brother are also Rhonda’s resident DJs.

It is a career that Granic has been groomed for since childhood. As a kid growing up in the L.A. area, dance music would literally arrive on his doorstep; his father was a radio DJ who received vinyl promo albums on the daily. Shaped by seminal labels including Strictly Rhythm and production team Masters at Work, Granic began hosting parties in the mid-aughts. It was during this era that he snuck into Coachella and found himself forever changed by Daft Punk’s now-legendary 2006 set, an event that set Granic off on a trek around the world—pun intended.

Here, he tells the tale.

You grew up listening to dance music, but do you have a night that sticks out in your memory as the moment things really gelled?
I guess [when] it all started to change, and when everyone started coming into dance music, in a way, was when Daft Punk was at Coachella. That became such a weird, unintentionally watershed moment for the way that everybody in the L.A. scene was experiencing dance music. It went from this sideshow to something that could be the thing that we directed all of our energy toward.

You were at that show?
Not only was I at the show, but I followed that tour around the world. I was an insane Daft Punk fan before that.

Everyone that was at the show said they saw God and were never the same.
Usually when you’re a kid, you look back on stuff you used to like and you’re embarrassed. I will always be a proud Daft Punk Fan.

Let’s start from the beginning. Who did you go with? Did you buy the tickets right away when you saw them on the lineup?
As soon as the lineup was announced, we were like, “We’re for sure going.” We were broke at the time, so buying tickets was out of the question, but we snuck in. That was when Coachella was easy to sneak into by pretending you were on New Order’s management team, or by saying that you were supposed to pick up some bad tequila that was poisoning people, or something like that.

What did you really say?
Those were two of our actual lies. I forgot which one we used that specific time, but we even had oversized JanSport bags that we had friends crouch into and then just walked in with them in the backpack. I was with my girlfriend at the time and my brother. My brother is the other resident at Rhonda, and we were huge Daft Punk fans, and we always knew we needed to get there. We knew it was going to be cool, but I don’t think we expected it to be what it was.

So, you snuck in. Did you then go straight to the tent to get a good spot?
It took us several attempts to sneak in, so we didn’t get in until 8pm, and they played at 10 or 11, so we pretty much went straight there. That was all we did for that night, for sure.

So the lights go down, the music comes up; what’s your state of mind?
It started off with the alien sounds from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and just seeing that they were in a pyramid was like, “What the…” It was like some old Pink Floyd crazy stage theatrics that nobody was expecting. It was just total bliss, and everybody was pointing at their friends like, “Can you believe this?” It was beautiful.

Was everyone going crazy?
People were incredibly stoked and happy. It was cool seeing how many people considered that show the highlight of their whole Coachella. When you think about two French guys playing house music, you didn’t think there was that much penetration into L.A. or West Coast America, but it was just huge. It was gigantic.

So, you sensed that it was a big deal even then?
Yeah, huge deal. Clearly, people haven’t stopped talking about it. It was just cool to have a collective moment like that, that was so defining for a lot of people.

And was influential enough for you personally, that you followed them on tour.
Immediately after we get home, we were like, “Where else is this going? What’s going on?” All said and done, we saw them back in L.A. when they did their arena show; then we went to Vegas, New York, Tokyo and one other place that I forget. It never got old. Every time, it was incredible.

How old were you when this was going down?
This was probably 20 or 21. It was eight years ago, 2007.

How did you pay to go to Tokyo if you had to sneak into Coachella?
We were looking at the price to go to New York, and my brother had some work that he could go elsewhere to do. He put in the cost to go to New York and the cost to go to Tokyo, and for some reason they were both $650. We were like, “Let’s fucking go to Tokyo and see them in Tokyo.” It was cheap enough at the time, and he was able to find some work, and we were able to get a flat out there. We were out there for two or three weeks, just hanging out, and the show was the highlight of the trip. My brother fell in love with Tokyo and ended up living there after that.

What was the difference, if there was one, seeing them in a different culture?
It felt the same—maybe even more feverish, because while we clearly loved Daft Punk, in Japan, they not only loved Daft Punk, but without overgeneralizing, they also really love robot stuff. So with that going on, people were just like, “What the fuck.” It was really cool to see the excitement there. People rushed barricades in Tokyo. Nobody got hurt, but you weren’t going to stop people from rushing that stage.

You saw them five times total. Can you choose the best one?
Definitely seeing them for the first time, and then when they played in L.A. afterward, because they had added a bunch of stuff to their show. And seeing it with all your friends in L.A., there was just this energy afterward, and all these parties celebrating Daft Punk. It was great. Fantastic.

Considering they haven’t toured behind their last album, and with stage productions now being massive, next-level things (for better or worse)—do you think they could come back and shape people and have such a watershed moment, considering what our expectations are now as an audience?
I think they’re very well aware of that, and how things have changed since they did that. They know the pressure. It’s same with the pressure they have to make another house music album, and they don’t care about that. They’re trying to move forward as artists. With the sheer amount of energy and horsepower that goes into these shows, I don’t think they’re interested in having a pissing match with modern-day stages. I think if they were to do it again, it’d be more like their Grammy performance last year—which wasn’t concerned with making a spectacle onstage that you couldn’t ignore, but was more about having an organic feel inside of a studio.

Are there moments within Rhonda when you have that same sort of hands-in-the-air, “we’ve done it” peak moments?
That’s one of the most rewarding parts about doing it. It happens all the time. That’s why I keep doing it; I’m like, “Oh, yes! This feels so good.” A lot of work goes into it, and the thing that made us fall in love with it is still there. Just seeing everyone in a crowd feeling it and smiling and hands in the air, it’s just so awesome, because that’s the way we feel. We had Basement Jaxx recently, and I told them how much one of their songs meant to us. I always try to not tell DJs what to play because it’s their stage, but I was just like, “I want you to know that I spent more than a few nights listening to that song on repeat for 13 hours.”

Which song?
“Fly Life (Extra).” I’ve had magic moments to that song, and when I told them that, they played it five times. I was like “Oh my god,” and they just kept rewinding.

That’s the nicest. What were you doing with yourself?
I was almost in tears, hugging my friends who have the same passion for that song. That was so, so, so incredible.

A Club Called Rhonda happens this Friday night at Los Globos in Los Angeles.

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