Jeffrey Paradise on Blow Up's Saturday Night "Reunion" Party

​Nationally lauded dance night Blow Up blew up during its five-year run at the Rickshaw Stop, succeeding far beyond its founders' wildest dreams. "We wanted a place to showcase the new music that we thought was blowing up at the time: Tommy Sunshine, DFA Records stuff, the rock side of dance music that was too rock at the time for house DJs and too house for the indie/Britpop crowds," promoter and DJ Jeffrey Paradise says. "It turned out to be something much bigger than any of us ever expected, and not just in the number of people who came -- bigger in that it was something special to everyone that came."

But a couple of months ago, Blow Up was blown to smithereens when issues around club capacity and age limits put the kibosh on hosting the party at the Rickshaw. When organizers weren't able to find a suitable new venue, they reluctantly put their dancing baby to sleep. But that's yesterday's news: Blow Up is back, at least temporarily, for a "reunion" show at Kelly's Mission Rock on Saturday. The crew was originally thinking about keeping this weekend's party on the DL, but now the hope is to use the farewell as inspiration to keep things going.

"Blow Up never really got to have a grand finale," says Paradise, who will be celebrating his birthday at the event and DJing alongside Richie Panic and Dan Sena. "The book got pulled out of our hands before we even got to the last chapter. We are looking at it as a kinda choose-your-own-adventure [now]. If this ending is good, then maybe we will start over and see what happens next."

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