The Night I Fell in Love With Dance Music: Jen Schiffer

As the founders/owners of Verboten, Jen Schiffer and her husband John Perez have founded a musical empire with an underground ethos. Focused on event promotion in New York and beyond for more than a decade, Verboten last year opened a brick-and-mortar venue of the same name in Brooklyn’s ever-trendy Williamsburg neighborhood.

Since its inception, Verboten has garnered an A-plus reputation for its on-point bookings (“If you are looking for trance, hip-hop or mainstream EDM, another venue may be more to your liking,” advises the club’s website) and a D-bag-free atmosphere founded on a culture of mutual respect and no VIP area. (The website also states: “Verboten is a pro-woman company, run by strong women and the men & women who love them. Harassment in any form will not be tolerated.”)

Before Jen and John were dance music insiders, however, they were just regular club kids exploring the scene while backpacking Europe together after graduating college. As in so many dance music fairy tales, they ended up in the Balearic Valhalla of Ibiza. Here, Jen tells the story of the night on the island when Erick Morillo paid her tab and opened her world.

Tell me about the night you fell in love with dance music.
[John and I] were trying to go to Ibiza, which became difficult for us because everything was really expensive; but he had his mind set on it, so we were going to go. We got to Barcelona and thought it was going to be cheaper and easier to take the ferry from Denia—nobody takes the ferry anymore, everyone just flies—but we were really trying to save every dollar. We scraped it together to get to this place. Our boat from Denia was delayed, and when we got to our hotel, which was horrible, our room wasn’t ready and they sent us to another hotel.

I’m a poor backpacker, and I use all the money I have to pay for some crappy hotel room that we’re sharing with friends, and we’re really not in it. We were like, “This whole island sucks. It’s not cool. It’s really expensive. It’s not on it. I hate it. Maybe we’ll leave sooner.” But my boyfriend was like, “Absolutely not. We’re going to go out.”

When was this?
It was 2001. We go out and proceed to have a couple of good nights, and the first great moment where I start to regain my spirit was at [the nightclub] DC10. We go for the first time, and really fall in love with techno, and during the week we at some point wind up at these underground parties all over the mountain. But I’m still having a rough backpacker vacation. It was great that I went to DC10 and met Davide Squillace; it was the foundation of what would become my Verboten business, and I found another sound that day. I loved dance music that day. But it was still hard. By that Wednesday, I had only been in Ibiza for three days, and we were fucking broke.

What did you do?
We take the tickets we had bought in advance and go to Pacha Ibiza, and it was Subliminal Sessions with Erick Morillo. I can remember it to this day, because we take our credit card to the bar, open a tab, get a few drinks and walk away, and a couple hours later we come back and they can’t find our credit card. Someone had taken our credit card offsite and went shopping in Ibiza, and we come back at the end of the night and the credit card is gone.

Shit.
We had a small tab, but a big enough tab where they’re also not apologizing that my credit card is gone. I had just graduated from college; this is my only credit card. And I think I had been up for too many days, but I start crying—and I’m not a crier. I’m a fucking tough girl, but I start crying at the lobby bar between the terrace and the DJ booth. The waitress is talking to me in Spanish, and my Spanish isn’t great but I’m trying, and I’m like, “We’re not trying to walk away from our tab, you lost our credit card. I don’t know if I have that amount of money in cash or any other place. Give me a second to go an ATM,” but they’re not going to let me go to an ATM. And I’m losing it, and I want to go.

That sounds terrible. What happened next?
Erick Morillo comes rolling out of the booth and is like, “What is going on?” I turned to him, and my New Yorker accent comes out a little bit, and I’m like, “I don’t know what happened. They lost my credit card, and now they’re screaming at me in Spanish.”

This is in 2001, so he’s officially the king of Ibiza, and he waves his giant arm and he’s like, “Calm down. Do we know each other? Are you from New York?” He calms me down. My boyfriend is like, “They lost her card, and we can’t pay for this.” And Erick takes care of the tab, introduces us to people, takes us around, buys us drinks and takes care of us. And we have one of those moments when another American reminds me that there is a bit of an expatriate thing going on in the community. He literally saved our vacation.

That’s incredible.
What is awesome about this moment for me is that about a year later, Erick Morillo is looking for [representation], and my husband convinces me that we need to take the full run of Erick Morillo. So he becomes our first big client when we’re publicists. Then four or five years later, my husband and I get engaged in that same party, on the same Wednesday… by the DJ booth by Erick Morillo in Ibiza. Then two years ago, on the same Wednesday at Pacha, I throw [Guy Gerber’s party], Wisdom of the Glove.

What does that particular memory mean to you, in the larger context of your career?
The Europeans at the time couldn’t give a crap if they stole my credit card; I was just a little dumb American kid—who cares about my market or me. But I really think people like myself— Nicolas Matar, Erick Morillo, Noah and Jason who run Marquee, from 2001 until today—I think the New York City market has become what it is because all of us love dance music that much. There’s a moment where you kind of have this concept that dance music is bigger than you, and that week and that experience was the moment I realized the world was bigger, and that it was something that I wanted to be a part of.

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