On July 19, 1995, I registered our company called Velocity Life to operate the Congo Internet Cafe located at 2515 N. Scottsdale Road in Scottsdale, Arizona. Caroline made the graphics, and I scavenged the HTML to build our web page.
Over the course of the month, before we opened, we had to renovate the space we were occupying. Before we christened it as the Congo Internet Cafe, it was simply the Congo and was a joint for live music. We were able to generate some press before opening with the Arizona Republic doing a front-page story about us in the business section back on August 9th.
Our neighbors were an early promoter of all things rave culture with their shop called Swell, which is the entire reason we were able to open Arizona’s first dedicated Internet Cafe. The year before, in 1994, when Caroline and I were getting married, we visited the Arrowhead Mall, where we ran into Russel Ramirez. Something about techno music connected us, and he asked if we were ever in Arizona again to visit his shop. Well, that’s just what we did, but he wasn’t in. Turned out he and his wife were notorious for being late. We did meet the owner of the property, who listened to our story and asked if we’d be interested in taking over the next-door space. I told him it could be a great idea for an Internet Cafe as they were starting to kick off in England and Japan. He became one of the investing partners.
When we finally opened, we had $47 dollars in cash left of the money we raised and invested, enough for our change drawer. We had to make money immediately, and with the help of Swell, that’s just what happened.
DJs Z-Trip and Emile were going to headline Fridays as The Bomb Shelter. Mixing music from across the spectrum on four turntables, we took a mic and turned it over to the floor, and blam, the place was packed with guys rapping freestyle over the eclectic mix of tunes.
Saturday’s went off the clock and kept us open until daybreak. The place was lit by a single strobe light for DJ Shawn’s performance, with women coming in from the Arcadia district while some of the women from Babe’s Cabaret up the street would show up after their strip club closed.
This is Tobias Beldermann, a.k.a. Redeye, Acidisn, and Arena Trex, who came in from Germany over the summer to stay with Caroline and me and help paint our place. From the images behind him and Kermit to the “Mushroom Runners” overhead, he lent a lot of creativity to this endeavor. As for the Dreamfish on the right, that was spray-painted by Dion Terry.
We had most of the early movers and shakers from the Phoenix area who would define much of the electronic and club music scene of the late 1990s and into the new century with Zack Sciacca, a.k.a. Z-Trip going on to work with LL Cool J, Beck, and even performing in front of 450,000 people, opening for the Rolling Stones.
Caroline and I bailed out just before Halloween that year due to cultural disagreements with some of the investors. For the 90 days, this was part of our lives; it created a huge impact and opened many doors.