Nightlife

The new club in town

by Matt Ashare

Look for a new place to hang in Somerville. On December 28, Lilli Dennison, a long-time behind-the-scenes player in the local music world, took over the lease and licenses for Club 3, at 608 Somerville Avenue between Union and Porter Squares. For years it's been a marginal, off-the-beaten-path stop on the Boston music scene. But times have changed, Boston and Cambridge rents have escalated, and Somerville isn't quite as far from the center of things as it once seemed.

The new 380-capacity venue, which will be called Lilli's, is expected to open its doors in late March or early April, after major renovations. "Right off the bat we're going to empty out the whole place and rebuild it," says Dennison, whose partners in the venture are B-Side Lounge owner Patrick Sullivan and former Combustible Edison keyboardist Brother Cleve. "What we envision is cutting the room in half with a curtain or a moving wall so we can do big or small shows. We are going to have a Hammond B-3 organ permanently installed in the front bar area so we can have an early-evening `unhappy hour' with a live organ trio. And we're going to be building in a DJ booth and doing a few nights of DJ stuff, too."

Lilli's is Dennison's first foray into club ownership, but she's been involved in a number of successful hotspots over the years. She got her start in the '80s managing such notable bands as the Del Fuegos, the Flies, the Turbines, Scruffy the Cat, and the Titanics and working at the Rat in Kenmore Square, when it was still the hub of the Hub's music scene. She then moved on to Central Square, where she started a popular Monday-night music series at the Green Street Grill and booked it for a decade. Last year, she helped the Milky Way in Jamaica Plain get off the ground before taking a post at the hip new B-Side Lounge in Cambridge, where she started Lilli's Monday-Night Celebrity Invitational Record Thing, a DJ night featuring local musicians, DJs, and scenesters.

"Patrick and myself and Cleve have so much experience in the service end of things that we can design this thing so it really works," she says. "We don't want to be just another local rock club. There are never enough local rock clubs, but we want to mix things up to keep it fresh for all of us."