This Friday: Klassen at Beauty Bar Austin

Beyond free drinks and the naked forms of beautiful people, there is only one thing that draws us into a bar:

A salt-worthy DJ.

And we don’t mean just any old DJ with some blending skills and the latest music mills’ production singles. It needs to be someone who knows their music. Someone who gives a shit about it to begin with. Someone who enjoys listening to the music MORE than they enjoy forcing you to listen to THEM spin it.

For this purpose, Prince Klassen fits our fancy like our fourth Mandarin & tonic: brilliantly.

There’s a new bar on 7th: Beauty Bar. We’ve already mentioned this on our site, and we’re happy to say it’s a somewhat emotional venue for some! (the exclamation point is a note of sarcasm, denoting how ridiculous it might be to get emotional over such things). At first, we were a tad dubious as to concept of the place, seeing as it is part of a somewhat-chain. We were all hot and ready to destroy the place, conceptually, because we felt it had this Los Angeles-type vibe to it. But we met one of the owners and forced the interior designer to talk to our drunk ass during SxSW, and they were all quite genuine and pleasant. In short, they want you to have a good time. And a bar which peddles both booze and aesthetic enhancement is probably the easiest way to please the broadest spectrum of people.

Feel free to agree/disagree with the bar itself ALL you want. It’s a bar, owned by locals who have been here for a LONG time, and while their main intention just might be to stay in business (whilst making a living – how dare they!), we think they just might bring something more interesting to the standard bar-top. Time will tell, but we have high hopes.

Add to that: Prince Klassen is starting up a twice-monthly Friday night spot there. The man does the dance thing, and does it well. We really respect Klassen, and his encyclopedic knowledge of music, musicians, and genre complexities. So much so, that we convinced him to start writing for us here at Austinist.

So technically, we’re pimping one of our own! Quasi-nepotism is the shit! So, soon, you’ll be reading his reviews, interviews, and general insights up on our humble little web speck. We can’t wait!

But until then, you can find him spinning at Beauty Bar on 7th, behind Spiros (much better directions than my own, Mr. McManus, many thanks), across from Sidebar, the first and third Friday of each month. Go there, sip a cocktail, dance like it’s your goddamn twenty-first birthday, and get your nails did.

Prince Klassen’s Every Other Friday Night
Beauty Bar Austin
617 E 7th Austin [ map ]
We’re guessing he’ll spin 11pm-ish to 2am-ish

*Photo © Matthew Marand, the man behind One October Night

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