One factor behind Christou's decision is simple wear and tear. When asked his age, he avoids offering a number, declaring with a guffaw, "I'm an old fucking guy, man!" (In a 2021 article commemorating the Church's 25th anniversary, he told Westword he was 69.)
"But it's not just that," he adds. "I think at this stage of my life, I want to spend time with my kids." He has two sons: Nico, who's graduating from St. Andrew's University in Scotland in July, and Roman, who is finishing high school with plans to attend Southern Methodist University in the fall.
"Don't forget," he continues, in an accent still deeply flavored by his Mediterranean upbringing, "for 38 years, I used to get up at seven o'clock in the morning and didn't stop until three the next morning. I used to sleep two or three hours a night — and I didn't have a New Year's Eve off for 35 years."
What he saw during this span could fill a book — and indeed, Christou says he's planning to write one. Based on the always colorful, defiantly blunt, gleefully profane way he tells his story, the results should be well worth reading.
"I was born in Cyprus," Christou says of the island nation typically associated with Greece, although it's actually closer to Turkey and Lebanon. His father was a carpenter who died when he was four years old, and his mother stayed at home to tend her large brood, which included Regas and five siblings: George, Andy, Chris, Eva and Maria, whom he calls "my biggest supporter." Many of his future businesses would succeed in part from the strength of these blood ties.
Skip forward to Christou's adolescence. "I got into a little bit of trouble," he acknowledges, "so my mother, in order to save me and the sanity of the family, sent me to the U.S. at the age of fourteen on a 747 Pan Am. I didn't speak any English, but I was happy to get off the island."
His initial destination was Connecticut. "I went to Immaculate Heart, a Catholic high school in Danbury, and learned how to kick field goals for the football team," he recalls. "Then I went to Western Connecticut State College and, upon graduating, I took two years off to start a construction company with my brother Andy. Then I decided to go to grad school at Long Island University; I majored in international relations and got my master's degree. But I also got a fellowship to go to the University of Denver, around the time Condi Rice was there. I graduated from DU in 1982."
In the meantime, "I had a job at this place called the Olympic Flame on Colorado Boulevard. I worked for Pete Contos," he says, referencing a legendary Denver restaurateur of Greek heritage who died in 2019. "I was probably the first 26-to-27-year-old busboy in history at that time. I went from waiter to bartender, and I realized I enjoyed that part. So by the time I got out of DU, I was already kind of in the hospitality business."
The next step for Christou was opening a place of his own, but raising the cash for such an enterprise wasn't easy. "I tried to get a loan from Bank One. But the president of the bank — I remember that son of a bitch to this day — wouldn't see me. I used to sit in his office, wait day and night, and he'd walk right past me and close the door," Christou says. "But one day, I walked into his office and said, 'You're ignoring me. I need $5,000 to open my restaurant across the street.' He told me, 'What am I going to do with you when you can't pay?' I looked at his little eyes and said, 'You're not going to have to deal with me, because I'll be under the rubble.'"
When his pitch didn't sway the bank manager, Christou decided to sell his precious 1978 MGB. "I put it on sale for $6,000," he recalls, "and a guy came in and said, 'I'll give you $4,000.' I said, 'It's a brand—new car. I can't let it go for that.' But then a lady came in with her son and said, 'I'd love your car for my son, but I only have $3,000.' I told her, 'Sold.' That first guy looked at me like, 'What the fuck is wrong with you? How the hell are you going to make it in business doing something like that?' But at the end of the day, it was never about the money. It was about accomplishing something, beating the odds, never compromising and just moving like the water. That's been my whole philosophy."
After the MGB sale, Christou says, "My family and I pooled all our money together, which came to about $12,500, and I opened a place called the Regas Cafe. At that time, I was doing Greek music, belly dancing and great Greek food."
This combination didn't spell success, however. "We were losing our ass," he admits. "For years, we just made the sales tax, which is all I wanted to do. But it grinds on you, and after a while, there was a lot of tension with my family. I'm very stubborn sometimes — what do they call it, hardheaded? It was my word, and that's it."
From there, Christou launched "the KHIH Cafe, after KHIH radio," he says, "and we went from Greek music to jazz. But it was the biggest mistake I ever made. I got this jazz guy, Rob Mullins, who was playing the Bay Wolf in Cherry Creek, and the food was great; my sister Eva, who worked with her husband, Jimmy, was a tremendous chef. But again, we were basically working for the bank. I'd pay Rob and his band on Saturday, and on Monday, it was like starting all over again."
Regas Christou, right, with sisters Maria and Eva (from left) at the grand opening of The Church in 1996.
Courtesy of Regas Christou
As Christou frankly concedes, the concept was foreign to him: "It was my first time moving away from jazz and Greek music. I knew I wanted to go in a different direction, but I basically had zero knowledge at all. I knew the music I wanted to play, but I didn't know what it was. So I relied on the DJs I was able to find, who knew a lot more about it than I did. Even today, I don't know anything about EDM or rap music or house music. I just know what I like to listen to."
Breaking into the club scene wasn't easy, and the big kahuna at the time of the Dead Beat Club's launch was Aqua Lounge. "It would be, like, a Tuesday night, and they'd have a thousand people and I had five," Christou grumbles. But then he learned that Aqua Lounge would be closed for a week because its owners were taking the entire crew for a vacation in Los Cabos. "I said, 'Shit, this is my chance,'" Christou says, still fired up by the memory. "So I wrote a sign that said, 'Joe, Michael, meet me at this new place called the Dead Beat Club,' and I stuck it on their door. That Wednesday, I had 75 people. On Thursday, it was over 100. On Friday, we had 500 people. On Saturday, we had 700 people. And by Wednesday of the next week, I took all the furniture out, because it was still a restaurant upstairs, and made the entire thing into the Dead Beat Club. I used a lot of Day-Glo paint and black lights, and the week after that, we were doing 1,200 to 1,400 people through the night."
With the Dead Beat Club as his foundation, Christou began to build what would become a full-scale, late-night empire under the CoClubs banner. "I opened 29 places in forty years," he recalls. Among the names that Denver fun-seekers will remember are Lost Planet, Roo Bar, Shelter, Serengeti, Bar Standard, Milk, the Wreck Room, the Living Room, Salty Dog, City Hall, Fat Daddy's, Fidel's and the Funky Buddha.
In a profession that tends to turn out more misses than hits, Christou's batting average was flat-out impressive. But there were plenty of struggles along the way, as exemplified by the backstory of 1082 Broadway, where Club Vinyl pumps up the volume today. A tragedy at the venue would cast a shadow over Christou's burgeoning operations for years to come.
On March 20, 1996, as Westword reported, a young witness told Denver police officers Kenny Chavez and Andrew Clarry, who were moonlighting at 1082 Broadway, about a fight in a nearby parking lot. By the time the pair arrived at the location, the fight had concluded but an Acura Legend started backing toward Clarry. When the driver didn't follow orders to stop, first Chavez and then Clarry opened fire on the car, unleashing more than two dozen shots in all. The barrage killed 25-year-old Jeff Truax, injured one of the friends accompanying him, and ultimately resulted in a $500,000 federal court judgment in favor of the Truax estate.
The incident remains vivid for Christou. "I was a witness to it," he says. "In my life, I'd never seen anybody get shot and die. I'd seen violence, but I never saw anything so right in front of me — something so preventable. It wasn't even in my background, and it was so upsetting. But instead of blaming the situation on the officers who shot Mr. Truax, they decided to blame me."
Future Denver Police Chief Gerald "Gerry" Whitman, at the time the division chief for District 6 that covered the club, banned his officers from moonlighting at any of Christou's clubs. Christou also believes that Whitman engaged in a long-running harassment campaign against him and his ventures.
"This went on for ten to fifteen years, until Chief Whitman retired," Christou claims. "They'd send fifty police cars, eight motorcycle policemen. One time, they sent guys on horses on a Tuesday night, because that was my biggest night. They'd come in at 11:30, quarter to twelve, right before I was getting busy, walk behind my bar and shut the bartenders down until 1:15, 1:30, so I couldn't make any money. One time, they said they were looking for fruit flies in the liquor bottles. They put me in jail for daring to tell them a fruit fly investigation was a health department function" — as opposed to a duty of what he calls "the city's finest."
Keeping mum at such moments wasn't Christou's style. "I got put in jail a bunch of times because I kind of resisted, you know?" he says. "Listen, I've got a big mouth, and when I see something unjust and unfair, I stick my fucking head out. I don't know why. It's a character flaw, I guess."
In the early 2000s, Christou says he tried to force a truce with Whitman by reaching out to the office of then-mayor John Hickenlooper: "Hickenlooper gave me to Michael Bennet," his chief of staff turned U.S. Senator and now a declared candidate for Colorado governor, "and Bennet's solution was to tell me, 'Learn to live with him.' This courageous guy you see in the Senate now, the best he could do was tell me, 'Learn to live with him.'"
In an attempt to do so, Christou tried to stay a step ahead of the forces he believed were arrayed against him. One strategy: "By the time they could shut down one club, I would open another one."
His biggest launch involved the Church, a converted house of worship at 1160 Lincoln Street. The idea was to debut on New Year's Eve 1996 — less than a year after the Truax shooting — and Christou had to clear plenty of obstacles in order to make it happen.
Regas Christo, flanked by sons Nico and Roman (from left), is winding down his entertainment career.
Courtesy of Regas Christou
The city initially planned to declare the building unsafe for occupancy, but Christou begged for more time to make repairs. "So many people came in to help out," he recalls ."All the employees showed up with their kids and got to work. Jesus Christ, it was one of the proudest moments of my entire career. We got our license at 4:30 in the afternoon on New Year's, and I knew we were going to kick ass. By eight o'clock, there were a thousand people trying to get in — and from there, it's history."
Over the next quarter-century-plus, Christou faced many more challenges. In 2006, his brother Chris, who was managing the Funky Buddha, shot a man he identified as a burglar. Instead of making Chris's day, the Denver District Attorney's office accused him of first-degree assault; he ultimately pleaded guilty to a much lower charge, tampering with evidence, for which he was ordered to serve two years of supervised probation and fifty hours of community service.
Years later, the rise of COVID wreaked havoc. "We opened the Living Room, which became Jive, a week before the pandemic," Christou says. "All the work we did had to be shut down."
Even the global spread of an infectious disease couldn't slow Christou for long. But in recent years, he has been increasingly bedeviled by the combination of bureaucracy, politics and economics. "The minimum wage the geniuses of Denver decided to pass is literally putting the hospitality industry out of business, but nobody's realized it yet," he contends. "And the permitting process in Denver, especially, is all about control. It has nothing to do with safety, and some of the things they require of people in hospitality are fucking ridiculous. Maybe I sometimes do things in the restaurant business that aren't 100 percent kosher, but otherwise, you can't survive."
Given these concerns, Christou has been winnowing down his holdings. Public records show that in 2024, Club Vinyl and the Church were purchased by Los Angeles-based Insomniac, which underground club scenester Pasquale Rotella created in 1993. (Christou declines to comment on the sale.) At this point, Christou's main properties are Bar Standard and Milk, in the Jonas Bros. building at 1037 Broadway, "which are doing great," he says. "We're also going to be opening a listening lounge at 11th and Broadway in the next month or so, and I have a warehouse project at 2020 Barberry, near 8th and I-25. I just got the permits for that one after five years, but I'd like to find somebody to get it off my hands or somebody to run it."
The reason he's soured on the latter enterprise, he says, is because the Denver Department of Transportation and Infrastructure wants him to make over $300,000 of upgrades to sidewalks and alleys since"someday it might become a residential area. They come up with all these rules and regulations that make a project like this not feasible. That's why I don't want to go back to running clubs anymore." Granted, he's entered into a profit-sharing agreement for another forthcoming nightspot set for the Jonas Bros. building. But others will be handling the day-to-day operation, he says, "and they can send me a check when I'm on my boat."
If the party's almost over, though, Christou's had a hell of a time. "There are so many people in my life who made me enjoy my business, enjoy my journey. I've met so many people I still consider my friends. I even became friends with Chief Whitman, "who was replaced as Denver police chief in 2011, "after everything that happened," he says.
"That's the essence of who I am. And that's why I've been in the business."
