Rock in the Reptile House : Iguanas in Tijuana is a bizarre, almost-anything-goes venue just 15 minutes from San Diego but light-years from most other clubs

It’s near midnight on a moon-drenched, second-story terrace outside a nightclub within walking distance of the border. A young, long-haired man slowly winds through a gathering of his peers, many of whom are dressed in regalia out of a Lewis Carroll style book. He’s wearing a top hat covered with fresh-cut flowers, purple lame sultan pants and paisley suspenders. Although there’s a chill in the air, he’s bare-chested except for red-tassled pasties on his nipples.

The man draws little notice in this milieu, certainly no more than the teen-age girl in the neon-geometrics fishnet body- stocking, or the 30-ish woman in black biker attire--her head shaved to frame a heart-shaped tattoo and a Hare Krishna ponytail.

Revelers below the legal age in the States congregate around a semicircular bar, quaffing Mexican beer and well drinks. Inside the club, Lady Miss Kier, the kittenish lead singer of the dance trio Deee-Lite, breaks character at the end of the group’s global-love ditty “World Clique” to angrily scold those in front of the stage for pushing and shoving.

Welcome to Iguanas.

If it isn’t, unintentionally, the most bizarre rock ‘n’ roll venue on the West Coast, Iguanas--a 1,000-capacity, concerts-only house that caters to the fringe tastes of the “alternative” market--is a formidable candidate.

Fifteen minutes from San Diego, yet light-years removed from parental supervision, Iguanas offers an ambience of almost-anything-goes, frontier neutrality that gives underagers an intoxicating whiff of freedom.

Although different races, ages and ethnic backgrounds--including local Mexicans--are well represented in Iguanas’ crowd, the groups who play the club attract a predominantly young, predominantly Anglo-American audience.

“There’s just nowhere like this in San Diego for kids to go,” said Deena, 18. “The under-21 places I’ve been to are really dumb, and anyway I don’t like deejay dances; I like live bands.”

“Before I was 21 I used to come down here just to party,” Zak, from National City, said. “But Iguanas is such a cool place to see a band, I just kept coming. I’d much rather be here than at any of the clubs in San Diego. Besides, I know just about everybody who comes here.”

Iguanas is a fascinating juxtaposition of the new and the old, the beautiful and the ugly, the exotic and the familiar, the benign and the menacing.

The first hour or so of an initial visit is spent merely cataloguing the visual stimuli. From the exterior, the club looks like a garish end piece in the sprawling Pueblo Amigo Shopping Center.

Located just a couple of quick turns past the border crossing at San Ysidro, the mall is a complex of candy-colored walls and Spanish-style friezes that, ironically, mirrors the Zorro’s-hideaway kitsch so popular with gringo developers north of the border.

After the shops close, the Pueblo’s muted colors and theme-parkish facades convey the eerie unreality of an abandoned movie set. Because Iguanas’ proprietors long ago recognized the futility of going head-to-head with Tijuana’s glitzy discos, the club, too, remains dark on non-concert nights.

Gaining admittance to Iguanas is part of the adventure. One must climb either of two winding staircases that converge at a second-story portico, squeeze past a fortress-like steel door to the tiny box-office window, and cross a large patio to the club’s nondescript entrance.

The patio itself is a testament to mislaid blueprints. The no-frills bar sits on a high porch at one end of the deck, and tables and chairs fan out below toward locker-room-type restrooms 100 feet away. On one side of the patio, functionless, floodlighted kiosks stand sentry over the parking lot below.

To reach the concert area, you descend a black-painted, dimly lit catwalk. Steel construction rods twisted into skeletal shapes, painted in Day-Glo colors and illuminated by black lights give the pathway the budget spectralness of a school-sponsored haunted house. The primal dance-throb emanating from the club’s $200,000 sound system, meanwhile, engenders the sensation of traveling through an immense aorta.

That impression seems less far-fetched when one reaches bottom. A system of balconies forms a towering rib cage around the dance floor. There are five irregularly shaped, interconnected tiers on either side of the room and one long one that bridges the two sides and looks down on the floor, facing the stage on the far side of the room. Two levels are serviced by full bars.

People stand in darkness and watch the action from these perches, separated from a bad fall by wooden railings and chain-link fencing. From this angle, Iguanas seems less a concert club than the set of “Jailhouse Rock” as designed by Dante.

Hearing live music in this cavern is an intense experience, and it scarcely matters who’s performing. All irrelevant sensory information surrenders to the light system and the apocalyptically amplified sound, which suspend reality and turn what in daylight might look like a huge warehouse into a dance-rocking mothership.

The scene confirms that although physically Iguanas might blend into the commercial development that surrounds it, the club is, in fact, an island of nonconformity--a vortex formed by the more outre cultural and musical currents that flow in both directions across the Mexican-American border.

Iguanas was the brainchild of American entrepreneurs hoping with a single stroke to exploit Baja’s legal drinking age (18), the restlessness of young Americans and Mexico’s burgeoning rock scene.

Built at a cost of $1.3 million, the 18-and-over nitery opened to much fanfare in May, 1989, with performances by the Fixx, Stevie B, Sheila E., Pete Escovedo, Third World, the Wailers, TNT and a Cinco de Mayo show featuring Jane’s Addiction.

Today, Iguanas is a mecca for those who: a) don’t want to wait until they’re 21 to hear the latest speed-metal, post-punk, hip-hop, world beat and other non-mainstream acts in alcohol-serving, Stateside nightclubs, and b) don’t want to spend $20 to hear them in a theater or shed. The average ticket at Iguanas: $10.

(The tendency of American teen-agers to go drinking in Tijuana has long been a problem, according to both the California Highway Patrol and the U.S. Customs Service, which oversees the border crossing point. But officials for both agencies said that they don’t trace alcohol-related incidents to specific establishments in Tijuana.)

Harlan Schiffman, whose Fineline Entertainment has booked Iguanas almost from the beginning, has been able to lure many of the more notable alternative or underground groups to Tijuana. Three acts who have made Iguanas a second home are primordial metal-men GWAR, the German death-metal cadre Kreator, and hard-core holdout Bad Religion, which remains the club’s most consistent draw. Recently, San Diego major-venue promoter Bill Silva Presents has participated in producing shows there.

“Iguanas is a magnificent club, and I only wish it were possible to put a place like this in San Diego,” said Schiffman, 35, who admits that his personal tastes run to more “traditional” rock. “Between restrictive city ordinances and the San Diego Fire Department, we might have seen the last concert up there done in a dance-party setting. They prefer fixed-seating concerts. But, then, that only makes us more unique.”

If you discount the shoving that’s creating an ebb and flow below the stage, the throng of 900 at the Deee-Lite show is well behaved. But an appearance by the English band Jesus Jones a couple of weeks later would expose a darker side of Iguanas lore.

Frequently, a rowdy element of the club’s clientele seeks to exaggerate its hard-core reputation by turning the middle of the dance floor into a “mosh pit”--an update on the punk-era slam pit--in which moshers hurl themselves into one another after running starts.

The fact that this sort of behavior has become something of an anachronism didn’t deter about a dozen brazen souls who played bumper-heads at the Jesus Jones show. In defiance of pre-concert warnings, bodies also were passed overhead and onto the stage, from where they were unceremoniously flung back into the crowd by security.

Most of those in attendance made an effort to ignore the mayhem, although isolated pockets of fans exhorted the moshers from above, thus lending Iguanas the crucible-like atmosphere of a high-tech cockfight gone awry.

A muscular, 23-year-old San Diegan named Terry limped outside to the terrace to get some fresh air and nurse his wounds. “Took a shot to the mouth, one to the ribs, to the ankle, took a good shot here,” he said, holding up a badly swollen forearm.

So why does he mosh? “It’s fun, it’s a way to let off steam,” he said, joining his pal in a hearty laugh, but wincing and grabbing his ribs. Terry would be back to slam another day.

How to Get There--and Where to Park

To get to Iguanas, take I-5 south to the San Ysidro border crossing. Once past the entry, follow the signs that read “Race Book” to the Pueblo Amigo Shopping Center. Iguanas is around back. You park at your own risk in the club’s large lot--there have been reports of break-ins. Inexpensive Mexican insurance is available at several places on the American side of the border. Or, you can park in one of several parking lots on the American side, and walk over. These lots charge anywhere from $5 to $10, depending on whether or not they have guards on duty. To reach them, take the last possible exit off I-5 before you reach the crossing.