Nightlife Impresario Bryan Rabin Is Bringing Back Giorgio’s and a Bit of Disco Decadence to New Year’s Eve in L.A.

In the fall of 1990, inside a fully functional second floor magic shop located above a methadone clinic on Hollywood Boulevard, Bryan Rabin made his first splash on the Los Angeles nightlife scene (alongside his partner, the late actor Jimmy Medina) with a traveling, if extralegal, after hours club called The Lounge. “It was the Wild West. We’d just drive around at night and look for spots. I was 20 years old, full of moxie, and we’d just tell people we wanted to throw a bar mitzvah in their space,” recalls Rabin, noting the club migrated from photography and film studios to empty lofts and attracted everyone from Billy Idol to Thierry Mugler and Wolfgang Puck to dance there. “We moved every week to keep away from the police and had to call or fax everyone the day of each party.”

From there, he opened Prague in a Czechoslovakian meeting hall on Western Avenue, the 1940s style lounge Highball in West Hollywood (in what is now Harlowe) and a burlesque club on Cosmo and Selma simply called Burlesque where Scott Ewalt, who deejayed Kenny Scharf’s Cosmic Cavern parties, spun 45s of grindhouse and ’60s garage rock bands for folks like Ron Athey. Rabin became his own boldface name in the pages of Details and L.A. Weekly when he opened Cherry, Hollywood’s longest running rock club, in 1994. This glam rock mainstay hosted a fashion show with Alice Cooper handling a live boa constrictor; Courtney Love debuted a Hole song topless, and the club was even featured on Beverly Hills, 90210 and served as a precursor to hospitality reality TV shows, with Rabin’s patrons and staff starring in the E! documentary special Hollywood Nights. He even opened a short lived club called Operator — Madonna came to the opening — during the Cherry years, but by 2002 he was done with club land.

In the early ’00s all the top fashion houses wanted to be in L.A. more and Rabin was their man, organizing events for Harry Winston, Dior, Armani, Paul Smith and countless others. He stayed away from nightlife for a good decade until he got an idea for a one-night-a-week discotheque inspired by the vibes of the Giorgio Moroder-produced Donna Summer song “Sunset People.” He opened it in a little mirrored boîte with a disco ball stuffed into the cavernous ceiling. Guests entered through a kitchen behind the lobby of The Standard on Sunset and almost immediately the guest list became a who’s who of the art, music and fashion orbits.

“The only reason I came back was that I was trying to get my movie Freak Show made and I couldn’t spend 16-hour days producing events for clients like Vanity Fair or Margiela,” says Rabin of the Trudie Styler-directed film (based on the titular James St. James novel) that he produced in 2018. The dance floor was a must for A-list actors (Kate Hudson, Leonardo DiCaprio), rock stars (Mick Jagger, Lenny Kravitz), artists (Kenny Scharf) and fashionistas (Rick Owens), and Giorgio’s remained at the apex of A-list Hollywood nightlife for nearly a decade until the COVID-19 pandemic shut it and The Standard down for good. While Giorgio’s briefly re-emerged for a couple of post-COVID revival nights at the old Grandmaster Recorders space on N. Cahuenga Boulevard, Rabin was happier splitting his time between “Calm Springs” and his second home in the Yucatán town of Mérida. But when the West Hollywood Edition came to him with an offer to do some parties last year, which he couldn’t commit to amidst his travels, they got to talking about what might be possible for a New Year’s Eve celebration to close out 2024 at Sunset at The Edition.

“It’s gonna be a night of legends,” says Rabin, referring to the fact that Jellybean Benitez, the former Studio 54 and Palladium DJ who remixed albums for Madonna and Whitney Houston, will be spinning records; the iconic cabaret and drag performer Joey Arias will sing live; while legendary nightlife producer Susanne Bartsch, who threw unforgettable parties at the Copacabana in the early ’80s and later created the bacchanalian Love Ball, will co-host the evening with Rabin. “It’s always about the music and the people. Jellybean is gonna blow the roof off, and those three, they’ve known each other for decades and haven’t worked together for decades, so it’s going to be an incredible trilogy of fun.”

Though the New Year’s party had been in the works for months, Rabin didn’t see the stars align with everyone’s schedules until just before he announced the bash this fall. But given all the highs and lows of this tumultuous election year, he thinks it’s the perfect time for Giorgio’s to get people back out on the dance floor with a serious disco revival. When Giorgio’s was at The Standard, patrons would go up and down to their hotel rooms (or those of friends) for multiple outfit changes, and he expects the same at The Edition.

“I love when people do two or three outfit changes throughout the night and hotels lend themselves to that, especially with Giorgio’s where everyone knows they need to really get dressed. People haven’t really danced in a long time like they did at Giorgio’s,” says Rabin. “And having Susanne in the room and Joey performing — that’s magic — but then Jellybean will be giving us the soundtrack for going into 2025. I would say it’s going to be the naughtiest New Year’s I’ve ever done. It’s gonna make people really loosen up and have an amazing time. It’s going to be an amazing night for our community.”