Miami night life sizzles nonstop

Author: By Steve Morse, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, May 25, 1997

Page: M1

Section: Travel

``How late do you think the band will play?'' I ask a club manager standing by the open-air doorway that faces Ocean Drive.

``Oh, about 4 a.m.,'' he replies nonchalantly.

And this is a Monday night? Yes, it must be South Beach, where the night life swings and then swings some more. On weekends, this same club, which has a Day-Glo jungle motif on its inside walls, will keep roaring until 5 a.m.

Miami night life is the fast lane of partying -- a virtual, anything-goes pleasure cruise where the fashions and the libidos are off the charts. There's an accent on trendiness, but also enough diversity for just about any clubgoer's taste, from rock to jazz to Latin to Euro-dance music, all enmeshed in a see-and-be-seen spectacle.

Sylvester Stallone owns a club here called Bar None, a tony spot where the supermodels like to hang. Sean Penn has been an owner of another trendy spot, Bash. And Liquid, a high-tech dance club where the waiting lines go around the block on weekends, is owned by a friend of the Material Girl herself, Madonna.

If you're not satiated on South Beach, you can head over to Coconut Grove, a more mainstream, but still fascinating, club mecca where revelers party on balconied bars connected by escalators. This happens in the aptly named CocoWalk, a multistory showcase of clubs that range from football star Dan Marion's Sports Bar to the Caribbean-style oasis, Cafe Tu Tu Tango, and the one-of-a-kind piano bar, Howling at the Moon.

My personal howling encompassed both South Beach and Coconut Grove during a recent visit. Each had its appeal. In fact, the real hard-core Miami party pros sometimes stay in Coconut Grove until 3 a.m. (when that area starts to wind down), then drive the 20 minutes to South Beach, which often cooks until dawn.

Driving around South Beach can be a pain because of the traffic jams on the narrow streets (there's nothing quite like feeling caught in rush-hour traffic at 3 a.m.), so it's best to ditch your car and play pedestrian. You can then join the hordes that walk around Ocean Drive, Collins and Washington avenues, where the beautiful people and the wannabes mingle.

South Beach is in the revitalized Art Deco district, where an infusion of New York money (and attitude) has turned the scene around completely in the last 10 years. Amid the clubs are many Art Deco hotels such as the Marlin, where Boston band Aerosmith started recording their latest album. The Marlin, like so many hotels in South Beach, has its own bar, a romantic, atmospheric nook next to the main lobby.

Along Ocean Drive, hotel bars proliferate -- and some have live music. The Breakwater Hotel often has a flamenco guitarist playing out front, serenading the stream of humanity that passes by in a bedazzled haze. The Waldorf Towers often has some good blues music pumping through the premises. And you're never far from great outdoor bars that also serve palate-pleasing food, such as the News Cafe and Wet Willie's.

Simply put, South Beach has a dizzying number of night-life alternatives. There's a crowded dance club called Zen, a live jazz bar named Jazid (small and also crowded), and for those with more primal tastes, the rather nastily named Club Madonna, which offers nude entertainment. And then there's Groove Jet, which boasts different music in every room.

OK, enough.

So what about Coconut Grove? Well, get ready for another feast-for-the-senses enclave.

Strangely enough, this club center is not on the beach, though it's just a quarter mile from the water. It has terrific outdoor restaurants in Cafe Mambo (Cuban cuisine) and Green Street. But the real draw is the clubs of CocoWalk and of the nearby Streets of Mayfair, where a Planet Hollywood (which contains the Mercury stunt car used in Stallone's movie ``Cobra'') stands alongside the very hip Virtual Cafe, a veritable indoor amusement park with high-tech gadgetry sprinkled amid an industrial decor.

Also in the Streets of Mayfair (a complex of buildings cut by a pedestrian walkway) lies the rock club, Sticky Fingers. It's a dark, underground-style spot whose name is taken from an album title by the Rolling Stones, though the Stones have no involvement in the club.

But it's still hard to beat the adjacent CocoWalk. The CocoWalk is, in effect, a 21st-century shopping mall that has a Blockbuster video and Dalton bookstore amid its open-veranda clubs and restaurants. The energy level is intense, as hundreds of people always seem to be walking between the night spots, up and down escalators and stone stairways that connect the tropical bar, Fat Tuesday, to the chic new, top-floor dance club, St. Croix, and to other spots such as Cafe Med (a beautiful outdoor cafe), Cafe Tu Tu Tango (with an elegant balcony bar that overlooks the main street) and even a Hooters, where waitresses wear T-shirts that say, ``Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined.''

There's even a Johnny Rockets across the street -- a cool, '50s burger joint first popularized in Hollywood. And the Coconut Grove Johnny Rockets (one of four in the Miami area) has an outstanding jukebox in which Patsy Cline's ``Crazy'' is side by side with Bruce Springsteen's ``Streets of Philadelphia'' and Ritchie Valens' ``La Bamba.'' That's quite a range of music history right there.

Oh yes, there are more Miami nightclub lures than those just in South Beach and Coconut Grove. Two examples jump to mind: One is Big Fish Miami, a nifty, canalside retreat downtown. It was where the cast of the new Jimmy Buffett/Herman Wouk musical, ``Don't Stop the Carnival,'' held its cast party, with Buffett, the pied piper of the Caribbean, in attendance.

The other is Tobacco Road, another downtown Miami club. The downtown is generally barren of great clubs, but Tobacco Road is a notable exception. It has a funky roadhouse flair, with two rooms (one outdoors) for live music, another for smoky conversation. A favorite in this club is the roots-rocking Iko Iko, which also served as the house band for the Buffett musical. Iko Iko hosts an open jam on Monday nights -- yes, there's that Monday night thing again -- that has become a true Miami tradition.