Read - DJ History

David Morales feels it

In 1999 David Morales won a Grammy for Remixer of the year, only the second time it was awarded (his friend and Def Mix Productions compadre Frankie Knuckles won the first). This was a major milestone in the rise of DJing, industry recognition that a remixer could play a huge role in chart success. At the time a Morales house mix was a surefire way to get R&B and pop artists played in the clubs, and through the ’90s he was in constant demand to create dance smashes like Mariah Carey’s ‘Dreamlover’, Alison Limerick’s ‘Where Love Lives’ and Jamiroquai’s ‘Space Cowboy’. At the same time he was making sumptuous underground music under his own name and in his Red Zone dubs. Morales now has over 500 remixes to his name, the bulk of them big-name stars. A Brooklyn DJ fired up by visits to David Mancuso’s Loft, he joined New York clubland’s inner circle in the early ’80s, when he was Judy Weinstein’s assistant at her record pool, from which he was chosen in fairytale fashion to replace Larry Levan at the Paradise Garage, followed by residences at Zanzibar, Red Zone, The World and Club USA. In this brilliant 1999 interview, conducted in the Times Square studio where he was mixing the Pet Shop Boys, he remembers his rise to fame, gives us an insider’s view of the evolution of remixing, and describes the passion which defines DJing greatness: the musical love, instinct and emotion that lies at the heart of his success.

Interviewed by Frank in Manhattan, 4.2.99

What was the music you heard growing up?
Born in 1962 and raised in Brooklyn, grew up in Flatbush, parents are Puerto Rican. I guess I liked music from when I was really little. I remember taking this record from a friend of my mothers, ‘Spinning Wheel’ on RCA Victor [by Chet Atkins]. I must have been three, four. I always liked black music, I didn’t like the Spanish music. There used to be a social club downstairs, and I was free to roam around. Once the morning came the door was open and it was ch! I found myself in the craziest places. As a child you just wander.

What clubs did you go to?
I mean real like ghetto neighbourhood clubs. Painted black with black glow paint. I mean real primitive shit. And that’s when ‘Mr Big Stuff’ [Jean Knight] was out, I remember. ’68, ’69? I remember ‘Want Ads’ [by Honey Cone].

How did you get into DJing?
I used to be the one appointed to play the music. We all be hanging out and I be the one hanging out by the stereo. Picking the tunes. And this is with just one turntable. It wasn’t about two turntables at the time. I never saw that yet.

When did you take it to the next level?
When I was 13 there was my prom. And this is when ‘Ten Percent’ [by First Choice] came out, that was the first time I saw two turntables, and a guy mixing, and this was outside.

Who was that?
I think the guy’s name was Grandmaster Flowers. He was doing black block parties, people hanging out in the park and then they be playing music, and I was like, Wow!

When I first started mixing with the mixer and headphones, I was about 15, and ‘San Francisco’ was out by the Village People. And I remember we was in my friend’s sister-in-law’s apartment and the decks were in the kitchen. Forget about having monitors, the monitors were the speakers in the living room way over there. I put on the headphones, and I’m sitting there looking at the mixer ’cos I never worked one before. The first mixer I tried was a mic mixer, where there’s no cueing. And you’re sort of doing shit backwards because you’re not supposed to really plug a turntable into a mic mixer. Anyway, it worked and that’s how I used to phase shit in and out. So that’s how I started without headphones.

How did things come to another level?.
After doing house parties I started going to a club called the Loft, on Saturday night, probably like 1980. The Loft was Saturday nights and a lot of people from my neighbourhood used to go. I used to hang out and dance. I used to be there for like 12, 15 hours, dancing. I was one of the ones who got there early and I was one of the last ones to leave as well.

What was that like for you?
It was amazing, ’cos up to this I was what you’d call a commercial DJ, I bought the hits, I bought the records you bought in the mom-and-pop shops; that’s what I knew. When I went to the Loft I heard all this different music. I thought wow, I like this. Then it was all about where I could buy these records. That’s when I went to Vinylmania. And I was going to Downtown records since I was 14. So that’s when I started going to stores to collect music.

There were a lot of people there who would go on to be part of the dance industry
Well, people I saw, I saw François [Kevorkian], but I never met him at the time. David Mancuso, Steve D’Acquisto. Those are really the people that I remember from the business, ’cos I was going there from such an early stage, and I wasn’t in the business.

It was after Frankie and Larry had been hanging out there.
Larry would come after The Garage, because the Loft stayed later than the Garage, and he used to bring certain records. I used to go to the Garage. I went to the Garage as well, a couple of times on a Friday, and the reason it was only a couple of times was I was doing my own parties. I started doing my own parties in 1981.

As a mobile DJ?
No, no, no, as a summer resident DJ. I was mobile from the minute I started, I went everywhere.

Where were you resident?
I started at a place called the Ozone Layer in Flatbush. I use to do it on Friday nights, somewhat based around the way the Loft did stuff: I gave fruits away and tried to make it a party. But it was a smaller venue. My girlfriend at the time, her girlfriend was going out with one of the owners from the club. She had asked to do a party of her own, and asked me to play. I drew the invitation, cos I was a graffiti artist, and at the end of the day the people that really came out were my friends, people who I had invited, people that I used to invite to house parties. But the house parties were free, whereas this was pay.

Then I approached the owner and asked him to let me do some parties on my own. I just wanted to play records so I would hire other people to promote the parties, to be co-host, and I just asked for a fee for playing. And they wanted to give me some sob story they weren’t making money at the bar, at the door, all this kind of nonsense, they give me some bullshit trip. So anyway, after going through that a couple of times, there was a core audience, and that was my audience. And I started to realise that I didn’t need these folks. People were coming for me. They’re coming for my music. So I said, I’ll run this. I got it together with my girl. She handled the front, I played the music.

What kind of music were you playing back then? Were you picking up on records from the Loft?
Yeah. The Loft and the Garage. Plus the new stuff, the underground stuff, at the time. Of course with some other commercial records.

Were there any which were really your records, that weren’t being played anywhere else?
I was the first guy to play ‘Set It Off’ [by Strafe] at the Garage, because Larry wasn’t playing it.

How did you get in with those guys?
That’s the funniest story. I had been to the Garage five times.

Just to hang out.
Yes. I come dressed up, trying to get in out there, ’cos it was a private club. ‘Yo get me in, get me in…’ And I’d be the last one out. I’m always one of the last ones out. Not to mention the kind of stuff I used to do to stay there! But anyway, it was part of growing up, like everybody else.

How old were you?
I had to be 20 so it was ’82, ’cos I didn’t play there until 1983. I was one of those kids that sat there and looked at the booth and was like [whispering reverentially] ‘Oh my god…’ Just fantasising. This room was incredible. Even before I went to Garage, I heard stories: four turntables, the guy’s incredible, and all of this, you know.

I used to go to the Loft but the Loft wasn’t about mixing. David had two decks, but Mancuso, he’d play the record from beginning to end, the way it was made. And that was his philosophy: no artificial flavours, no MSG; and that’s the way his sound system was too. Everything was straight. No processors in between, no crap. Just pure, you know. It’s like eating organic food.

Whereas the Garage was the monster system. It was a showcase for [sound engineer] Richard Long. It was his room. So anything new that he built, it was here. It was Larry’s house. He had a carousel for the record bin that schwoooo, spun around. I mean… You see pictures of Mick Jagger and Grace Jones. The Garage had a booth unmatched by any booth there’s ever been in the world.

Even now?
Even now.

The first time you went, did he really impress you, did he blow you away?
Naaah, he didn’t. I mean, the music was ch, incredible. Couldn’t say anything about the music, but you know, as a DJ I had this vision, I thought I was gonna hear science. And at the time I didn’t get the whole picture, because to me the mixing part, I wasn’t impressed by the mixing. There were some mixes that were awesome, when I first heard him do the acappella of ‘Love is the Message’, which he was the first one to play, that shit was like…

How did he play that?
Well, that was when they started doing acappellas.

So he would just kill everything and play that?
No, no, no, he would play ‘Love Is The Message’ over ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’. That was it man. He would play some of his productions of Peech Boys at early stages, just ideas, and people would go wild.

He could be quite temperamental.
He could be SHIT for seven hours, and then he could take 15 minutes, and kick the shit out of you, and that made your night! That’s what it was about. There was nobody that was able to do that. And he didn’t care either. You be like ‘Aww man, what is this guy up to today?’ I actually think I caught him on a bad night. Which was alright. Second time I went I thought, ‘Oh, caught him on two bad nights’.

Tell me about how you got to play the Garage.
Here comes 1983. I joined the record pool. I got in because of this DJ, Kenny Carpenter. He was playing at a big club called Bonds International, which was a huge club, six, seven thousand people it used to hold, right in Times Square. They used to have people like the Clash there, and Planet Patrol, Soulsonic Force, all that shit. And Kenny lived in my neighbourhood. I had met him through a mutual friend, and Kenny took me to the record pool, which is For The record, Judy [Weinstein]’s pool.

It was a privilege to be in that pool, all the big guys were in it, a serious roster. There was a waiting list to get in at the time. I’m talking to Kenny Carpenter, and another friend of ours, late friend of mine, Larry Patterson, my mentor, who used to play at Zanzibar and Better Days. I gave them some tapes, and the pool director at the time was David DePino, and they were looking for somebody new, so they referred me.

Then we’re in my house listening to some new records and I get a phone call: ‘Hi, my name is Mike Brody, I own a club called the Paradise Garage, I’d like you to play my club.’ I was like, ‘Yeah?’ and he’s talking: ‘You’ve been highly recommended.’ He said, quote, ‘Our DJ’s been playing like shit lately, and we’d like you to come in and do a spot.’

So by now I’ve sunk to my knees and I’m trying to write with a pen and a piece of paper to my friend, who I’m speaking to on the phone. He’s like [excited speechless noises], and I’m like ‘Yeahh’, and he says, ‘I have two dates available.’

How did it come about? Did he hear your tape?
Didn’t hear nothing. Totally recommendation. From Judy and David Depino.

Was she managing you then?
Naww. There was nothing like that at the time. No, she had her record pool, that was it. I was 21 years old. I was not making music, I was working at a restaurant… and doing parties… I had my Friday thing going now, full-on, every single Friday. So it was me taking off from my own night, and at the same time, worried about losing business from my Friday night, you understand?

Taking people with you…
I had people come to me and say ‘How did you pull that off?’ because there were other people that were a lot more worthier of playing in that room, before me, that were incredible DJs. But anyway, they picked me, a guy from Brooklyn, it was my first New York club. I play in a sweatbox in Brooklyn, and here all of a sudden I’m playing at the mecca of the greatest club in the world. At 21 years old. And this wasn’t about doing two-hour sets, this was about eleven-hour sets. beginning to end, 12 to 11. And you had to beg me to stop!

Can you remember how it was the first time?
I had never played for a gay audience, either. And I thought that playing for a gay audience you had to play different music. ’Cos I played for a straight audience, and when I went to Garage I went on straight night. So when he asked me if I wanted to play Friday and Saturday I said I didn’t think I could handle the Saturday, I’ve never played for a gay crowd before. He said just come here and do what you do best, that’s all I want you to do. The rest… You’ll love it. And man, I can’t tell you…

And I never played on Thorens turntables, that’s another thing. I only used the Technics. The 1200s were out at the time. I asked, can I put in some 1200s, but I had to play on the Thorens. This was belt driven, the Thorens was a whole ’nother beast, altogether.

So I’m playing at the greatest club, and yet I’m playing on turntables I ain’t never played. It’s like I’ve been driving a Volkswagen and all of a sudden I’m given a Ferrari to drive. I’ve got this fuckin’ major machine goin’ on here. I remember doing my first mix, and it was like milk.

Can you remember what it was?
It was my first two records was, one was ‘Encore’, I believe, which was Cheryl Lynn, and I can’t remember the other record. I remember going to all my friends saying it was gonna be slamming tonight, cos I just felt it. The greatest thing was that I wasn’t part of the politics, at all. I was naive to anything. So even the people that didn’t like me, the pro-Larry Levan people, because of course his people, they got their favourite DJ, come to hear him, he ain’t there, ‘Who the fuck is this guy over here? Why is he here?’ And then you got those that feel that, ‘How come I ain’t playing? How come he is?’ You know what I mean. I had people throwing darts behind my back and I had no idea. They just bounced off because I wasn’t part of the politics, I didn’t care.

A young Morales with Judy Weinstein, Liza Minnelli and Frankie Knuckles

So how many times did you play there?
About ten times. I did the Friday and Saturday, October 13th and 14th, 1983, I’ll never forget it. I still got the invitation, it’s framed. And they asked me who I could pick for my artists to sing on my night. I picked Jocelyn Brown, and the other one was Captain Rapp, at the time I think it was ‘Bad Times’. And then I came back the following February and played two weekends in a row. Friday, Saturday, Friday, Saturday. ’Cos Larry was gone for two weeks straight.

And in between you’re still playing at Ozone?
No, I wasn’t. I had Kenny Carpenter playing. He was taking over the whole night, cos we split the night by then. ’Cos I took him from this big club to play this little hole in the wall, and it was like culture shock to him but, it was great. at the end of the day the vibe was great so,

What did that lead into?
All of a sudden I was the new kid on the block. There was a new sheriff in town, so then clubs in New York approached me and I had a residency at a straight club called the Inferno, run by Vito Bruno. On 31st Street I believe. Right off Sixth Avenue. After the Inferno, I played at 1018, which is the Roxy now, and then my next residency was at a place called Lovelight in 1987 right after the Garage closed, which was on 33rd Street, and I had a residency at Zanzibar. That’s where I met Larry Patterson and Tony Humphries. Tony was Saturdays. Zanzibar was like the Garage of Jersey: tough sound system, people went to it. I had a residency there for about a year. I was doing Fridays and then I had my own night which was Wednesday. And then in 1988 I worked at The World for about a year and a half, and after the World I went to the Red Zone, in 1989.

And the Red Zone again, was your place.
Yeah. The Red Zone was where I really made a statement for the new age. I think the Red Zone was definitely the turning point on the maps for music changing.

Why do you say that? For you personally?
The only person that was really playing different stuff was Mark Kamins, ’cos Mark used to travel and bring these imports. He was at Danceteria years before, but at that time he would play at Mars, and Red Zone on other nights, which was where I had the residency on Saturdays.

In 1989 I took my first trip to England, and I brought back a lot of records. We were playing ska. ‘This Is Ska’, and ‘Ska Train’. Nobody was playing those records, and they used to lose it. I was the first one playing KLF, ‘What Time Is Love’. That was one of my biggest records. People used to run up to the booth saying, ‘What are you playing?’ ’cos it was this whole different sound that wasn’t the New York house sound. And when I started doing mixes, the Red Zone had its own sound, so there was a fusion.

Did you do any remixing before the Red Zone?
Yeah. In 1987 I did ‘Instinctual’ by Imagination, I did some more deeper stuff. But when I started doing Red Zone I started branching out away, away from pure soulful. The Red Zone dubs, that’s when I stepped away. The core mix had all the soulful stuff, the songs, and then the Red Zone dubs were more on the daring side, going somewhere different.

What were you trying to do?
It was mostly experimentation. I was making records for somewhere between here and abroad. Which was what the Red Zone represented.

With his Def Mix buddies Satoshi Tomiie and Frankie Knuckles

What was the crowd like?
Very mixed. It was a dance crowd. It had a great sound system, the lighting was incredible, and we used to put on a show. Sometimes Satoshi Tomeii would play keyboards while we were playing. We used to go off in that place, it was severe. Everybody who got to experience the Red Zone will tell you it was one of the last places of its kind. And then came Sound Factory. The big Sound Factory was the afterhours to go to. You went to Red Zone first, that closed at five, and then you went to Sound Factory.

Was remixing a natural progression.
I made remixes back in 1983, ’84, before I even thought about it. I knew guys from the pool, like Steve Thompson, or Bruce Forrest, and they used to come in and say I just mixed the new Madonna, or I just did the new Rolling Stones. Bruce Forrest he was the resident at Better Days. He introduced me to the world of samplers and drum machines and keyboards, ’cos he used to bring them in the booth. We were doing this back in 1985.

You were doing it purely for your dancefloor?
Yeah.

There was no commercial thing
No. In the club, three decks, bam! David Cole would come in, play around on keyboards. At that time it was the Chicago house sound, so it was great for all the synthesiser stuff that was going on, and it was all live: live remixing, we did it on the spot.

So anyway, from my club Ozone in Brooklyn which I had for about four years, I bought myself a keyboard and a drum machine. Even though I couldn’t play anything to save my life. Then in 1985 I remember hiring Steve Silk Hurley when it was JM Silk: him and Keith Nunnally, and I hired them to spin at the club. And that was round about the time when I started to play around with the Casio CZ101, that was my first keyboard. So anyway Bruce invited me down to the studio. I liked it, it grabbed my eye. Bought myself one or two pieces of equipment, I tried to make my own drum beats and things like that.

And then I did a record with David Cole and Robert Clivilles called Two Puerto Ricans, a Black Man and a Dominican, and we cut that at Judy’s office. I was basically mixing records, David played keyboards. It was just something we did on the fly, which was very successful. And then David and Robert went and turned it into something else, C&C Music Factory, which is a whole ’nother story.

So that was the start of you having a name as a remixer and a producer?
Yeah. I really got a lot of profile when I did ‘Instinctual’ by Imagination. That was my first real hit. I remember Larry Levan telling me, ‘Great, great job.’ I was like, Wow, Larry told me I did a good mix. I was originally an Imagination fan, from ‘Illusion’, ‘Changes’, ‘Burning Up’, and then when I heard this record that was done by Phil Harding at PWL, it sounded like a Rick Astley record. I was like, ‘Yo dude I can’t play this, this is not even Imagination, what happened here? Let me remix it.’ He was like there’s really no money to mix it, only to do promotions, I said let me do the record. Anyway, even though it was off-key with the vocals, it worked. The second one I did right after that, was Whitney Houston ‘Love Will Save The Day’, and they rejected it, it was too housey.

Really?
Of course. It wasn’t bubblegum enough. And I was traumatised, I was devastated. Because it would have meant so much to my credit at the time. I remember they had Rick Wake mix it. I was running the record pool at the time, and the promotion guy asks me, ‘How do you like the new house mix on Whitney Houston?’ I said, ‘You got to be kidding me, you call that a house mix?’ It was what those pop cornballs thought house music was. What I did was house music, that was the difference. But I think that’s what it was, it was too cool.

Do you find there’s a compromise when people hire you as a remixer? How often is there a real conflict between what they want for commercial reasons and what you want to do creatively?
Well, not too much, but sometimes it does happen where they expect a certain style. And sometimes that’s not the style I want to give it because I don’t want to have one particular style.

And sometimes the song isn’t right for that.
Right, and sometimes it don’t work for the song. What some A&R man hears in his head is totally different from what can actually work. So, I mean, I’ve had moments when they’ve said, ‘But I wanted this style, I wanted it like this and like that!’ because I don’t normally ask them what style do you want it, I want to go about it the way I hear it.

’Cos remixing started as a DJ’s tool to feed his dancefloor.
The remixing thing. It’s totally leftfield now. It’s totally in another place. I mean, let’s not even call it remixing any more. In the beginning of remixing you remixed the original tracks, existing tracks. You used what was there to create the intro, your body, your break, your tag – the end of the song.

And then it started changing: OK you change the bassline, added percussion, or you added some things, but you still had the song. You still had the artist intact. Then it came to the point where you just got rid of the original music. Now you started to put new music…

So you’ve only got the vocal track left.
And all you got is the vocal track. So now people expected to hear something totally different. Now the expectancy was: ‘Well, did he change it?’ Now they wanted to hear something totally different. It’s come to a place where now you’re changing the music and what you do to it makes the record successful. You only getting a one-time fee. In reality you’re sort of like becoming a co-writer, but you’re not getting a writer’s share.

So that’s why remixing fees went up so much?
So that’s one whole thing. When I started mixing there wasn’t too many guys, number one, and number two is if you noticed, when it comes to guys mixing songs [ie vocal tracks], there still aren’t that many. Now remixing has crossed over into R&B now which is great, there are some guys that really deserve, I think in hip hop, in remixing in the R&B is the most creative, more than the dance remixes.

Why do you say that?
Because they’re redoing the song. They all redo the song. There’s no time-stretching, you understand. they’re recutting the song. They’re adding rappers to it, so they’re producing. They’re all productions. Which is where I’ve taken remixing to now: production. I started that with Mariah ‘Dreamlover’. We said no time-stretching [digitally changing the tempo of the vocal].

You want to keep faithful to the tempo of the original
It used to be that you had waves of music, different tempos through the night. So you were able to enjoy yourselves in a club without hearing a constant four-four pounding. But now there’s no up and down tempo, now there’s just straight across, full-on. When time-stretching came around there was no more downtempo records. Everything had to be club music; they didn’t care if the vocals sounded bad. I believe the reason why I even still get a lot of work is, I do vocals. because I work with the song. You have tons of other guys…

…who just take just a tiny sample of the vocals
And not even that. It’s gotten to the point that there’s no respect for the artist any more. You’re selling the remixes, that’s what you’re selling.

Is that how you approach it, you want it to come out recognisably the same song?
Of course. That’s what the challenge is. What guys are doing today, it’s not even a question of mixing the record, or the vocals, verses, choruses – no fuckin way. They put a slamming track together in the studio. Somebody says, I need a remix of Tori Amos. So you take a piece of a vocal: ‘Bla’ and drop it into your own track. That’s a remix? That represents the artist? That doesn’t represent the artist, it represents you. And you’re giving up publishing, because you’re giving up a whole track. You’re giving it to somebody else’s name. That really doesn’t represent them. And they’ll never perform it, either!

Why did it get so out of hand with the money. It got quite crazy a few years ago?
It’s still crazy. It’s crazier. I can’t explain why you can spend so much money on a record and could have a great song, with like everything and not do anything, compared to something where there’s no effort, that’s put together in two hours and for some reason the thing just hits and that’s it! I mean ‘Stardust’ [‘Music Sounds Better With You.’] How much work you think went into Stardust? It’s sampled. Whoever went into the sample, that was where the work was. When those musicians did that, that was where the time was spent. But you know, and look how huge that thing was.

I believe you have the privilege for having the highest fee for any one remix. Michael Jackson’s ‘Scream’
Probably.

Didn’t they fly you over to LA rather than send the tapes etc…
They wouldn’t give me the masters. They flew me to LA, money was no option. It was a lot of work. It wasn’t like that was my fee for one mix. I must have did three different mixes. I mean I spent a week in Michael Jackson-land. But now hip hop guys are making that kind of money, regularly.

Do you know what the highest is ever?
Probably Puffy. Who knows.

What does he get nowadays?
I don’t know., It would be interesting. You can’t be surprised at a guy like Puffy probably wouldn’t do it for less than a hundred grand, between 75 and a hundred maybe.

’Cos you got 80 for the Michael Jackson, is that right?
Nahh. It was, I can’t say.

Did that feel a bit crazy, all that Michael Jackson-ness.
You know what, It was definitely a moment, with Michael Jackson.

Did you meet him?
No I didn’t. I should have for all of the security I went through. You would think he was coming. I mean they were guarding those tapes like it was their life. It was the first track off the album.

That’s why it was so secret.
Mission Impossible. And I felt that I compromised my sound. I went to another place. I took everybody out of a familiar environment, and we tried to recreate that somewhere else and it just didn’t work. I don’t feel like my best effort went into ‘Scream’. ‘Scream’ could have been a much better sounding record…

Do you think the DJ is an artist?
Sure

What makes the DJ an artist?
The way he puts on music. Not all DJs are artists, It’s something that has to project. It’s not something that has to be present all the time. It’s something that comes on when it’s supposed to come on. It’s like ‘Put on this show’. Most top guys, they don’t plan their records, they don’t put them in a certain order. I take more records than I need, I don’t know what the first record is, or my last. Or my second.

And you need the people on the dancefloor to make it happen
As great stuff as I have in my studio, I can’t turn it on for myself. I can’t. I got a great sounding studio, but when I make my show tapes for the radio, I can’t turn it on. I don’t come up with the creative things that come on when you’re playing live to an audience. I can’t duplicate it.

What do you get from the audience?
Well, you get the live feedback. You’re working records, you have to present them in different ways, and it’s how you present the mixing, the technical aspects of it; it’s a whole combination of things.

How do you feel like when it’s going really well?
Ohhhh man, it’s like jumping out of my skin. I dance in the booth. I jump up and down. I wave my arms in the air, you know. It’s that feeling of knowing I’m in full control, I can do anything I want. And the thing is, I like to entertain myself. It’s important to me to keep me going this far. I have to get something out of it. I can’t just do it for the money, otherwise what makes you different and special is that you give it that extra something.

Does it ever feel sexual or spiritual?
Oh for sure. For me, absolutely.

How does it feel?
Pure sex…

Yeah?
Sex and… oh absolutely. For me it’s sex.

Really?
Totally.

So you’re having sex with all the audience.
Absolutely. It’s spiritual sex. classic, spiritual sex, oh my god. A great night man, sometimes I’m on my knees in the middle of a mix, just feeling it that way, and then when you play a record, you can bring it down, you can just turn everything off and the people going nuts. And you stand back, you just wipe your forehead and, ‘shiit!’ Everybody just going nuts and just knowing that you’re right there. You could play whatever you want. Whatever you want. You got ’em from there.

And that feeling must be what makes your DJing so powerful
If I wasn’t doing something like that I wouldn’t still be one of the top players in the game. I feel I’m actually, in all of my years, at the top of my game. I’ve played at some incredible parties, before the travelling and all of that. I go back to the Ozone to Mirage, to Zanzibar. I got to experience some incredible moments, of music, that have enabled me to carry that on, that a lot of people, the new kids, haven’t experienced.

And to me the fundamentals from those days still apply. My experience comes from back then. My experience is not a new generation’s experience. My experience is an old school experience. And I do things the old school way. Now I understand records more because I make records. And that just makes you all the more better because you understand.

When you talk to the old guys they say the DJ doesn’t have to work as much nowadays, because records are made so precisely for the dancefloor, whereas in the old days… you had to change the record every three minutes.
So the 45 stage was one stage, then you had to work, and be a lot more creative, because the intro was like this [snaps fingers], Then they started doing those first mixes in the late ’70s. Tom Moulton and Walter Gibbons, when he did ‘Ten Percent’, which was the first 12-inch edit. And before the 12-inch it was albums. And it was all live drums, so you had to work, you really had to be creative. There was no such thing as blank drums for 16 bars and you got enough time to ride that beat in, hell no! You had to be creative and go up down, up, make that shit sound real smooth.

Is DJing a dying art then?
Nah, no.

Will there always gonna be people who put body and soul into it?
Yeah, absolutely. In whatever kind of music, whatever style it is, the most important thing for all the DJs that are successful is that they feel it. They have to believe in the stuff they’re playing.

The worst scenario is playing it for the sake of playing it. It’s like me playing drum and bass and playing something progressive, because hey man I need to make some money to make ends meet, and because I don’t have a name, this is what I gotta do.

The real connoisseur, whether he’s working or not, this is what he‘s doing. Even if he’s a bedroom DJ all his life, nobody’s gonna take away from him that he loves music. No matter what. So even if I wasn’t working I’d still be trying to put some records together. Even if I’m not playing out anywhere, I’d still be in my office trying to put some practice tapes. Because when I started buying records there was no two turntables, there was no clubs. Nobody ever told me I was gonna get a job as a DJ one day. And I never thought for a moment that that’s what I wanted to be.

How do you feel then when you go to places like England and Italy and everyone treats you like a superstar?
I laugh sometimes. Because you know what I mean it’s the treatment, the honour, the money, the fame, I don’t ask for it. Even if I stopped making records tomorrow, I’d still keep playing records, and I enjoy doing what I do. I get a lot of passion from it, and to be paid, and to be put on a pedestal for doing something that I love doing naturally, is mindboggling.

Has the adoration and fame ever got out of hand?
One of the most incredible times I had was in Japan, a place called Yellow, and they literally wanted to climb over the walls, up to the box, and I was like wow… and when you see people standing around in the booth, just like every space, waiting for you to do magic, and “I’m just playing records. I’m not doing anything. You can do this” If you felt it. But you mean, I’m not doing anything to learn from. It’s all here [thumps heart]. It’s here and here [heart and ears] Cos that’s what its all about.

I have a party in Mykonos in Greece in August every year for my birthday. It’s full-on, it was 3,000 people last year, I’ve been playing for 20 years now, but I walk into the place and my heart is pumping. My heart is coming out of my chest. All these people here for me. I’m in the booth and the minute people see me they’re going ballistic, nuts. I started out with this record – ‘Joy’ by Kathy Brown – and the original has an acappella, and it’s this beautiful thing, and I start to break down, I’m crying man, and I’m trying to mix a record and my tears are coming down, and I’m trying not to let people see me. [He mimes keeping his head down and secretly wiping a tear. He’s speechless.] I’ve had some great experiences, It gives me the reason to still keep doing it.

Tony Smith did it Barefoot

Tony Smith was one of the original cohort of DJs who were instrumental in defining what a DJ did in the modern era. Starting out playing at block parties as a teenager, before progressing onto the tiny, but influential, Barefoot Boy as a resident through most of the 1970s. He went on to play at commercial disco – and Studio 54 rival – Xenon. We talk about his early colleagues and heroes and the records they championed in an era that changed dance music forever, including his friendship with Larry Levan and the Larry impersonator who used to hang out in the DJ booth at the Garage. Sadly, Tony passed away in May 2021, having caught pneumonia during the pandemic.

Let’s start at the beginning…
I was born 20 blocks from here, in the projects, lower Manhattan. I loved music since I was a kid. My brothers and sisters had a group, you know in those doo-wop days? So I was always listening to music.

These must’ve been older than you.
Yeah, they’re like 14 years older than me. A brother and two sisters. I’m the baby, by a long shot. I’ve known music since I was little. And that whole R&B, Little Anthony & The Imperials, that whole sound. I started a band when I was 13 and we played in the projects, in schools and colleges and talent shows.

What was the band called?
Soul Sound Explosion. It was good, until we kept expanding, because you had to have a bongo player, then we had a vibe player. I taught myself guitar. It was the only instrument people didn’t learn in school. And then after ’69 we had about 12 guys in the band and we were making no money and during the band breaks, I used to play the music for the party or whatever. Not calling it DJing then, just playing music.

How would you do it?
Using the PA system and two volume controls so there would continuous music. It wasn’t mixing, it was more blending. So what happened was the band broke up because everybody got greedy and, you know, personal things and I just started playing music outside. I got harassed to play music outside. Because that was before the police knew what was goin’ on; disco wasn’t out, so we could do whatever we wanted.

You say outside. Where exactly?
Right out in the park. You could hook up your system in the lights sockets; in the street lights, in places like Pierce 1 Park and the park right in the middle of Smith Projects. But then I went all around lower east side. Most people don’t know, but there’s project after project after project on the lower east side. All along the east river edge.

Was that an unusual thing to be doing with two turntables?
Oh nobody knew what I was doing. Until I had a competition. There was a battle of the DJs. There was a Puerto Rican kid and his brother who started doin’ the same thing. And we would compete for the crowd.

Do you remember his name?
Yeah, Spanky and Ice. I was just me, but I always had people watching my records, watching my sound system things like that. We started competing. I was still 16 then. The whole thing then was to get records he didn’t have and him to get records I didn’t have, just so we would draw the crowd towards us. Probably when I was like 17, I went to a gay club like in the West Village. Totally freaked me out. I didn’t know that existed. It was called The Limelight, where David Rodriguez was the DJ and he just blew me away. Before then I used to go to black straight clubs, but it was a totally different thing.

What were black straight clubs like?
In the old days the Mafia owned the real clubs, so they had the gay clubs. Most black people’s clubs were either recreational centres or restaurants in the day and they would turn into a black club at night. Or colleges like Hunter College, NYU, they would always have parties for black straights, so that’s all I really knew till I was 17.

What was the clientele at the black clubs; all ages etc?
Yeah, we were goin’ in there when we 14 and underage. No ID, no card, no alcohol, you always brought your own, they always had BYOBB. The music was… everything. I call it black music but it was all in those days. They were playing Chicago in those days, Rare Earth, Steve Winwood, Boz Scaggs, a lot of white groups mixed in with the black, James Brown, Dr. John. There was a lot of white groups that had maybe one club or R&B song and somehow or other the word would get around about it. There was maybe about four DJs who rotated around: Flowers, Maboya, Plummer and the Smith Brothers. And whenever you went they had really loud sound systems and they had a lot of exclusive records. So what happened to me was I was always around the DJ booth and I finally found out where they went to buy records, because they always had records that none of us had and that was Nicky at Downstairs. I finally got to Nicky’s in the train station and that’s when I finally wiped out everybody in my area, because I had the music that nobody had and it was like my secret store! No one knew about Nicky’s. And while I was there I got to know other DJs, because I didn’t really know that this was going on.

What was Flowers like, because everyone says he was the best?
He was the best, but he was most egotistical, too. He was a bastard. He just wasn’t nice to you. He wanted to be so exclusive. He wanted to be the best and I guess and he thought that’s the way he had to be to be the best.

So if you went to ask him about a record he wouldn’t tell you?
Yeah. In those days that was the one bad thing with straight jocks. As a matter of fact, they used to cross the records out so if you looked you couldn’t even see what the record was. I started doing that as a teenager, especially exclusive records. Maboya and Smith Brothers were definitely more friendly. Flowers had the best music. He had a really great sound system.

Were they mixing back then?
It was more blending, it wasn’t mixing like say when I heard David Rodriguez. That’s when I knew I had to do some work because in black clubs it wasn’t about mixing, it was about programming. You could mix horrible, but if you played the right record everybody’d keep dancing. With the gay crowds, it was more about programming and mixing. You had to know how to mix, too, or they’d walk off. They might come back on but you’d still have a reputation for not being a good mixer. Straight clubs like that it was definitely more about programming than mixing. Finally one black disco opened up called the Cheetah.

It wasn’t the one around 18^th Street was it?
No, it was different. Hey had Latin on Thursdays. They had all the groups playin’, like Kool & The Gang. I found out later that the DJ there was David Todd, which freaked me out because I was a kid then and I didn’t know there was a DJ there. I remember the strobes, because it was the time I’d seen strobes. We went every week. I was definitely underage, but I looked older for my age, so I got in.

Describe to us your first visit to the Limelight?
I was scared. Scared shitless [laughter]. All these guys are staring at me and I just wanted to hear music.

So how did you hear about it?
I walked by. This is how I was in those days. Any time I heard music and it was something I’d never heard before. At that time I think he was playing things like Everyday People’s ‘I Like What I Like’, so that draws my attention. I used to just stand outside and listen to the music. Finally I got the courage to go in. Come on! I’m 17 and I’m scared. I didn’t know there was gay clubs. I had no clue. I stood right next to the booth. Until he got to know my face. Every time I went there I’d stand next to the booth and tell him how great he was. He was my first idol. My second idol was Richie Kaczor who worked at Hollywood. And that was like on 44^th and…

It was what had been the Peppermint Lounge wasn’t it?
Yeah. Once I’d heard about Limelight, I knew they existed so now when I go to Downstairs I’m gonna ask about other clubs. Some clubs I liked, some I didn’t. Bobby DJ was good at Le Jardin. After that, I started going everywhere!

What was it that struck you about David Rodriguez. Was it the mixing?
The mixes.. but the one thing I took from him was enthusiasm. Some DJs don’t look like they’re having a good time. David always looked like he was having a great time in that booth! So that’s how I always felt when I was DJing. I always connected to him because he looked he was having a ball up there. Always smiling, always in a good mood and his music always showed. He never played filler music – you know that stuff you play to get to other things? – he didn’t really play that. He wanted you to always dance. Even if they didn’t always he wanted you to dance. He was the type that wanted to educate the crowd, which was another thing I learnt from him. You know, you can play it safe, play everything they know. But David was the type that wanted to expand their taste in music because he was playing like black club stuff, gay music and just these different styles but blending them so they went together.

Do you remember the kinds of things he was playing?
He was playing Bohannon’s first record with ‘Stop And Go’, he was playing ‘Girl You Need A Change Of Mind’, ‘I Like What I Like’ and ‘Hum Along And Dance’ by Jackson 5. It was a wide range. That was the best thing about him. He was never boring. Some DJs are boring and I can’t really hear them more than once or twice because I know what they’re gonna do. One thing I learnt with David was that every night is a different night and you don’t know what you’re gonna do. He was totally spontaneous. He would see someone he knew and feed off of that. It was like a science to him, but at the same time he was having a good time. Then I went to Richie Kaczor. Richie was more technical than David. He was a better mixer than David. I can’t say a better programmer because they were both really good. Richie could blend much longer. Now there’s a new skill I didn’t know about.

Blending for more than five or ten seconds. For that you gotta memorise the record since all these records have different drummers and different beats so you have to know each record, because a lot of DJs would try and make mistakes. With new music you can do it, because it’s all programmed for that. Richie was good at things like ‘Newsy Neighbors’, which came out around that time. It wasn’t really disco yet but it was almost; on the cusp before disco. He was playing Blue Magic, ‘Dance Master’ by Willie Henderson; he was going into imports and all that stuff. That was when I first went towards the imports. Now Nicky’s making a mint off us, because imports were costing so much more. I don’t really remember David playing imports. You could tell Richie was hunting out for records. His range was wider. I listened to him for at least a year, didn’t want to miss him. Come to find out later that they came to hear me play, which was my biggest thrill. My four idols at that time were David, Richie, Walter Gibbons and Nicky Siano, because I was younger by five or six years…

David Rodriguez mix of Candido’s ‘Jingo’.

What was Nicky Siano like?
He was just crazy! He got famous even younger than I did. Nicky was like really young and his style was like… just crazy. He could throw anything on, he had such a rapport with the crowd. He would take any chance, that’s what I liked about him, he was very courageous. He’d play the most insane things, like soundtracks, not disco soundtracks, just soundtracks. I didn’t know whether David or Richie were takin’ drugs, but I knew Nicky was [laughter]! He could throw anything on it would work.

Can you think of any of these things?
I can remember him playing the Carrie soundtrack and then going into Love Hangover. Which is just totally bizarre, but it worked! That’s what I learned from Nicky was get your crowd to know you and then you can get away with more stuff than you can if you’re just a guest DJ. So the one thing I really wanted was to get a club. A friend of mine told me there was ads in the Village Voice for clubs. There was a club called Barefoot Boy before it opened, and it said: “DJ Wanted”. I thought, I know I’m not going to get this job. I’d only worked in straight black clubs and this was a gay white club and I only watched DJs. I hadn’t really played. So anyhow, I auditioned for this and I got the job. It still amazes me. It was like seven days a week, $25 a night.

Would that have been considered a lot of money then?
It was for me! I was getting paid for something that I liked to do. I would’ve done it for free. Once I got that job, I’m in the record store every day because now I’ve got money to buy records.

Tony Smith playing Barefoot Boy classics.

Where was Barefoot Boy?
It was on 39^th and 2^nd Avenue. Barefoot was open every night and it was packed every night. So there’s this packed night and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing! This was 1974 and I was 20 years old. There’d be a lot of people in the bar and a lot of people dancing, all gay, white. Which I knew I had to integrate, which I did eventually. I knew that to get to play all the music I wanna play I couldn’t just have all gay white. I already found out certain records that I couldn’t play. Like I couldn’t play James Brown.

Even though the gay scene was relatively new then was it already that segregated? Did you go to any black gay clubs?
I guess Nicky’s club, but it was mixed but at least blacks could go and feel comfortable.

What about David’s crowd?
That was mixed, but it was in the West Village so it was predominantly white. They all had a little mix, but there was one black club and when I went there I was frightened out of my mind! It was Better Days and Tee Scott. I wanted to expose myself to everything so when I do finally get this job I’d be prepared for everything. A friend of mine took me to Better Days. Tee was just unbelievable and the crowd just scared the hell out of me because it was all black men staring at me and I just wanted to get into the music. But I made friends with Tee. I know how black gays are really harder to play for than white gays, but he could do that. I couldn’t do that. Mainly because I had white taste in music, but I also didn’t wanna play in a club where I was restricted. That’s why I like Richie and David and Nicky’s clubs, because they had a mix and they could play anything. I didn’t want to play just black gay music or white gay music, I just wanted to play music.

So you had a strategy then?
At the beginning I had my straight friends come down, totally offsetting the whole thing! Straight black friends from Little Italy. Finally, the Latins came in. Once Latins come in, then everyone can come in. I don’t know why, but that’s how it is. Then my music widened even more. Barefoot never turned black, but there was always blacks in there. In the beginning, all the bartenders, busboys, coat check, waiters, everybody was white except me.

Do you remember the first night?
I couldn’t wait until it was open. I just wanted to give a good impression on my first time, and it was packed and I really didn’t know what to play so I’m playing safe. So my inner soul has to do something crazy so they remember you, otherwise it’s just like, ‘he was okay’ which I didn’t want to be. But after the first night the owner came over and said, “You played good”. I stayed there three years. In the second year there, I got offered Garage and Studio. I turned them both down.

Who offered you the Garage?
Mel Cheren. And Steve Rubell used to come to Barefoot. Rubell was in there all the time, he had a club called Enchanted Gardens. I used to guest there, Nicky used to guest there. I got some award from something like After Dark, I thought it was hokey, but you know, it was top ten and I was in it and so were my idols. This was when I knew Barefoot was big. I had started to find out on Mondays that Nicky, David, David Mancuso, all of them were coming to hear me on Monday nights, but I didn’t know it, they were downstairs at the bar. One day I’m going down to get a drink and I see them all at there, Richie Kaczor, all of them listening to me, at Barefoot! And Monday night was like my boring night, so now I gotta make it a better night! I felt like I was a peer to them who were totally my idols. And in Barefoot, too, which was such a dumpy little club, but there used to be lines outside the club. That was the other thing, it was free to get in, but maybe £2 at the weekend. So it’s always packed, now DJs are coming to watch me play and promoters are coming. All of a sudden I’m getting ‘Free Man’ on white label, Mel Cheren’s bringing me ‘Doin’ The Best That I Can’. I was totally overwhelmed. I was getting everything and I didn’t even have to go to a record store.

Do you remember what you were playing at Barefoot Boy?
I’d play everything from Deodato to Yvonne Fair’s ‘Should’ve Been Me’. I used to play what I called sleazy music; slow but not boring. The only thing I really couldn’t play there, still, was black urban music. But I still got away with ‘Doin’ It To Death’ by the JB’s but I couldn’t get away with ‘Give It Up Turnit Loose’ or ‘Sex Machine’. I was playing Fatback Band’s ‘(Do The) Bus Stop’, which was a dance. I could play African music, I was playing Osibisa’s ‘Music For Gong Gong’, Latin-sounding music, but I couldn’t play a lot of the stuff I was playing outside. That stuff was a bit too progressive for gays at that time, but they really liked female vocals.

So were you still doing outside parties [meaning block parties]?
I did Fire Island, I used to do Ice Palace. Since I was working seven days, I didn’t wanna give a day up because I knew I’d get backstabbed. After a while I knew I couldn’t work seven days I started giving a day to friends I knew like Wayne Dixon and Walter [Gibbons]. The one who backstabbed was Jerry Bossa who used to work at Buddah. I gave him the job and he undercut me. I tried to give it to Walter but he was too progressive for that crowd. Walter worked at Galaxy 21. The first time I heard him I think it was my first year at Barefoot. He blew me away. More than Nicky, Richie, all of them. Walter was just way ahead.

François K tribute edit to Walter Gibbons.

In what way?
Mixing. See, everyone else knew how to mix, but Walter, he could remix a record live and you don’t know he’s remixing it. I never saw anyone do that. Most of the time you can hear when someone’s remixing it and I couldn’t believe he was doing it. First of all I couldn’t believe it was a white guy that was doing it and somebody I didn’t know, because he was really somebody who was unknown then. What happened was the bartenders used to bug me to go out and I was always exhausted. I was like alright I’m gonna go to Galaxy. I heard him remixing ‘Girl You Need A Change Of Mind’. You know the remix that you hear? It’s on a bootleg that loops the bongos? Walter used to do that live. And he would come out with records that no one else was playing, like Doc Severinson. He had unbelievable programming, unbelievable mixing. But he was really a bastard. He was really stuck up. He drove everyone crazy, but somehow I became friends with him and I was let through that barrier of Walter’s. Most people don’t really know what a nice person he is. He didn’t trust nobody. Come to find out later, he was smart not to trust anybody, because everyone stole his stuff! ‘Girl You Need A Change Of Mind’, ‘Erucu’, which Walter invented, Rare Earth, ‘Two Pigs And A Hog’. He used to do these live! And they used to be really hard work. I don’t know if you know how small [the part from] ‘Happy Song’ by Rare Earth is.

It’s tiny!
He used to do this live, with GLI mixer, which was just amazing.

Really what he was doing was like hip hop DJs wasn’t it?
Yeah, and what was funny was that everyone was going to buy ‘Happy Song’ not knowing it’s like 12 seconds long! So what he did – because after a while there was just too many songs – he did quite a few Eddie Kendricks songs but the best known is ‘Girl… ‘ What he did was he went to Sunshine Sound and next thing you know everybody had his music. Nobody knows what happened.

Well François went down there and did some stuff for them didn’t he?
Ah, François was playing the drums at Galaxy. He probably didn’t tell you that!

Yeah, he did.
He didn’t know any English or nothing. He was just this annoying guy – who we all got to love later – because he didn’t know how to play drums. But he knew the owner and the owner let him play drums right in the middle of the dancefloor. It used to drive Walter crazy. Every once in a while he’d be on beat, but with Walter’s mixing he’d be – Da! – but he was a friendly guy. We came to find out later that people were recording Walter secretly. There was a wire we found and we followed it all the way up. And this is when Walter became even more distrustful and went into God. He kind of alienated me and everyone else because he didn’t trust anyone. But he was such a genius. I remember he used to talk with me on the phone while he was editing ‘Ten Percent’ and asking me should I make it three times or two times – [mimics the stabs] – he used do things so easily whereas with me it would have been a struggle. Once I met him, I knew I gotta practise some more. The one DJ skill he had that most DJs don’t know how to do and I still freak out people when I do it. It’s the drop mix. To mix like hip hop DJs do where you have to just let it go and it was on beat. It was amazing and it used to fuck up the whole crowd. This volume is up and this volume is up and he would do that continuously. I told everybody about Walter. I told everybody about Nicky, too. My big mouth was telling everybody at Downstairs, “You gotta got to Galaxy, You gotta go to Hollywood…” Then Garage came out and it was totally different to Walter.

Just before you go on to the Garage, do you have any experience of those really early guys like Francis Grasso, Michael Cappello?
Oh, I forgot about that. Francis I heard at Footsteps. I didn’t know he was there till afterwards. You know Union Square? It was right around the corner, maybe 18^th & Broadway. You’d have to go up 200 steps, that’s why it was called Footsteps. There was no elevator and it was a long walk up to the club. I never heard him at Sanctuary. I always heard he invented mixing. Then I heard that Alfie Davison invented mixing, then I heard Flowers mixing, so I don’t really know who invented it.

Who is Alfie Davison?
He was this really big DJ at the time and I know he probably hung out with Francis. He was a black guy, gay, he even made a record on RCA later on. Who I never really heard DJ, but the word of mouth I heard when I was young was it was him and Francis. Gays and straights always argue about who invented that stuff. I don’t really know. But I remember straights when I was 15 or 16 who were mixing, so there was no pause. I remember when there was a pause and I remember when Flowers and them came out there was no pause. There wasn’t any mixers yet. My first mixer was two mic amps with two pre-amps connected with them. So I don’t know who did that first. Michael Cappello was a good friend of mine, but I’m just trying to remember where he used to work. I’m thinking it was Queens. I only heard him once, but he was like Joe Palmienteri. You know they were good, but they didn’t do anything for me. Walter I would go every week. Sometimes, later, I would find out he had been tripping when was doing this stuff. I can’t even smoke and do this stuff! Kenny Carpenter was absorbing all this stuff, because used to do the lights. And he’d be amazed, too, because he’d be looking over: how can he do this? And he rarely made a mistake despite doing all these crazy things. The only bad thing about Walter was you really wouldn’t want him to come near you, because Walter was critical because you couldn’t live up to his skills. You’d do your best and Walter was still going to diss you a little! He did it live, in front of 1,000 people, on acid, and never made mistakes! But, for some reason, once he left Galaxy, he never got big.

People say when he got religion he lost a little something.
Yeah that’s true. Then he started working at a record store. I got him a job at Xenon, which was like a really big mistake by me…

That was quite a commercial club wasn’t it?
Yeah and he tried to put this religion thing and I’m like “Walter, I’m trying to get you back into the flow of everything, you can’t do that. Xenon’s competing with Studio”.

And they don’t want to hear gospel music all night!
They don’t wanna hear gospel or Salsoul all night, because he did a lot of Salsoul records. So I was like, “Walter, you gotta play the list” meaning you heard me play there you know what this crowd wants. And that was when it was mostly all-white. I hadn’t integrated it yet. But he influenced me so much I wanted to try and help but he would not… once he got into religion it was over.

CJ & Co doing the devil’s work.

So is it true that he really wouldn’t play anything unless it had a message?
I’ve seen him break ‘Devil’s Gun’. I’m like “Walter, that record’s hot!”. There were certain records he would not play. And I said to him if you listen to the words it’s not really saying what you think it’s saying. He wouldn’t play ‘Bad Luck’ by Harold Melvin, either. ‘Bad Luck’ wasn’t a bad song either. But I think it was the titles. When he went into the extreme religion thing, we fell apart. When he didn’t keep the job at Xenon he kinda blamed me. I said, “Walter, you’re playing gospel and it’s not gonna work in Xenon!” I wish he had’ve stayed because I knew how great he could be because I gave the job to Jellybean.

How did you first meet Larry Levan? Did you go to Reade Street?
I went to Reade Street once. I thought Larry was really good. He was a programmer. He knew what to play. Mixing was secondary to him, sometimes he mixed good, sometimes he didn’t. But that wasn’t the priority. The priority was the next record. He liked to play with words, so sometimes his records connected with the words, which I used to love, because you had to think about it. He was more cerebral than most people give him credit for. Nicky was just crazy. Nicky could think of words, but maybe just for a couple of seconds before he was somewhere else! I got to know Larry really good at the Disco Convention in California because we were like New Yorkers in California.

What year was this?
I guess ’79. Even though I knew him, this was the first time we really hung out and acted like normal people rather than DJs. We were New Yorkers in California. And we were black guys in California. I didn’t know that Larry was like cool and funny and all of these other things you don’t get to see when he’s working. It was cool for him to see me when I wasn’t working, too, because I was working in a white club and he was working in a black club, but we both still had the same musical heads on. A year or two later we spun together at Area, which was just like the best times, with Gwen Guthrie. It was a birthday for Gwen Guthrie. One other person I gotta bring because I haven’t brung him up yet and he’s one of my best friends. He didn’t influence me DJing, but influenced me musically and that’s Danny Krivit. We’ve known each other so long it’s ridiculous. Danny influenced me more in black music and I influenced him more in disco music because Danny knew black music… I remember as a 16-year-old kid, I couldn’t believe this white kid could know black music so well. We met in a music store and we were both going for the same record and I got the record. I think it was ‘Yellow Sunshine’. We became friends after that. When I went from Barefoot to Xenon there was this weird transition where Xenon was tryin’ to compete with Studio. And Ray Caviano – I’m gonna tell this story, but I don’t know whether it’s totally factually true.

But it makes a good story!
Ray Caviano gave a list to Xenon of seven top DJs. They were going through DJs every month. He gave them all the white jocks like Roy Thode, Jonathan Fearing and I was the last person on the list. Every two weeks they would try a new DJ because none of them worked but they didn’t wanna try me. Finally Howard Stein gave in. I happened to be there one night and the music Jonathan Fearing was playing was so bad they said I could have the job, right there. Just because I was there! I told them no, out of respect to Jonathan and also I was working someplace else. I remember the mix I did that just blew them away and next day I had the job.

Patrick Labatte’s tribute to Tony.

What was it?
The mix was Patti Brooks’ ‘After Dark’ with, in the break, ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’ by The Supremes, just in the background low in the mix. It was one of those things I learned from Walter: no voices crashing. Because Walter, if the voice’s clashed, he’d give you a look! And the keys matching, too. I also did it with Inner Life’s ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ and ‘When Doves Cry’ in the background. Everyone was blown away and was asking me to do it again, but the old school way is not to repeat it but think of something better! Once I got the job at Xenon and now I’m playing for 1,000 people. At Barefoot Boy it was only 200 dancing. I love challenges and this was a challenge. But they want me to work seven nights a week. I can do that when I’m in my early twenties, so I also had to find DJs. I wanted Wednesday thru Sunday. I went to hear Richie at Studio so I could know what kind of stuff he’s playing. I was always trying to do my homework.

What was the difference between what Richie was playing at Studio compared with Hollywood?
He had to play more commercial, which was understandable. But I did, too, unless it was a special party, which I loved special parties. But what I did was – and Richie didn’t do – try to make the crowd last longer so it would have a reputation of staying open longer, after the bars had closed. In the beginning the owner resisted that, but I’m telling him if the people start coming in at 2 in the morning, they’re gonna drink until four and they’re gonna dance and come back. I’m trying to tell him this is going to be better in the long run and he didn’t have to be here, just let me play till I wanna finish. I don’t want no extra pay, I just want control of the crowd, because that’s what most DJs want. And I finally had it, I didn’t really have that at Barefoot, but I did at Xenon, where I could play anything I want. I brought my whole collection, eight thousand records, so whenever I had a whim I could go with that and I had a tremendous time.

When did you play from and until?
From ’79 to ’82. That was one of the best years of music because you could still play all the stuff from 1973 on. There was a lot of great music in that period, new wave, rock, reggae, disco, club. Anything.

You played at Xenon around the time that disco was collapsing, really. Did that make a difference in the kinds of records you were playing? Was that Disco Sucks feeling prevalent?
What I did was play new wave.

But did you feel resistance to disco from certain sections of the clientele?
No. I could feel it in other clubs, but as I had my crowd trained they accepted what I played. I learned that from the older DJs that I watched. If you had the crowd on your side they accept what you’re doing. Because you’re right, when the music changed, at one point, that was one of the few points I didn’t like and that’s why I went into new wave, you started to play more oldies because the new music is not as good or creative and you put more oldies in your programming to compensate for the bad music.

Telex – Moskow Disko

What new wave were you playing?
It was English imports. I was playing ‘Pop Muzik’, Gen X, ‘Moskow Diskow’, ‘Jet Boy Jet Girl’. Plus they’re still hearing ‘I Got My Mind Made Up’ and ‘Disco Circus’.

Was it a regular crowd?
There was a hardcore crowd. As a matter of fact, it was a mescaline crowd!

A mescaline crowd?!
Yeah. They would have the sticks, they would have the tambourines, they would really give the crowd excitement. They were usually Cuban, from New Jersey and they weren’t supposed to be in the club because they were from New Jersey, but what they did was, they used to have a bag of clothes and they would change once they were in. Meaning they would dress like Xenon people on the outside.

So they’d come in in suits?
And then change into shorts, outfits and take mescaline. You know the rest of the crowd was taking coke and coke don’t make you dance it makes you talk. Mescaline makes you dance!

So these kids knew each other?
No, but they got to know each other week after week.

That must’ve felt quite subversive.
It was the best.

Because even if the crowd’s a bit lacklustre you can turn them?
I know! You turn them on and you turn the crowd on! I focused on them and the good thing about them was that their taste was as wide as mine. As a matter of fact, they turned me on to some new wave stuff that I wasn’t up on, like ‘Moskow Diskow’. At that time Americans wasn’t playing this music. The cokehead crowd, they like the commercial disco, but the regular dancers who were the ones who were always gonna be faithful if you please them. There was never this fear of making the crowd angry at you. Since the music was changing, at one point I was playing rock. That’s how bad disco music got. Really bizarre stuff, ‘Secret Agent Man’.

What was your relationship with Larry Levan and the Garage? You said you were offered a gig there…
That was one of the few times Xenon hated it… Because I could decide when to close early and if something was happening at Garage I would close early. And they’d all know, too: Tony’s going to Garage! Bobby Shaw I took the first time and he was totally resistant. It had this connotation of being too black and too raunchy or whatever. And, of course, once you go you’re addicted.

Bobby said the first time you took him he didn’t like it.
But he went back! He’s used to me mixing and Larry’s not that kind of technician, so I’m telling him you gotta forget about all these things you have in your head and go and listen to the music. Once you do that, Larry’s gonna be incredible to you. You just gotta let go of all this stuff you expect. Bobby was addicted to it! Then he got to know Larry and since he had the booth – which was the ideal booth for any DJ. It was as big as this… bar! It was two booths. One for us and one for him. We could look out and see the crowd. You’d be happy just hanging out in the booth, but sometimes you just had to go out in the crowd, because even though some records would sound good in the booth you gotta hear ’em on the dancefloor because of that system. There was never anything like that system. There will never be anything like that system. Records that would sound adequate in your club, they would sound tremendous in the Garage. So you have a whole new outlook on the record. You play it in your club and wonder why the reaction is lacklustre and then at the Garage they’re screaming and stomping to it. That’s not Larry, that’s the system and how Larry worked the system. David Mancuso’s system at the Loft was crisper and clearer but it’s not heart-rending.

What kind of records do you remember him playing?
I remember what records he wouldn’t play! He wouldn’t play too much commercial. He’d play commercial, but once they came out he wouldn’t play them. So he always wanted to be exclusively first. The best thing we all liked about Larry was how many records we heard there that never came out.

Really?
So many of us DJs were salivating, oh can’t wait till that comes out and then when they came out it was a totally different mix from the one Larry was playing.

Was this stuff he’d mixed himself?
Sometimes. Sometimes it was just stuff people gave him.

Do you remember any examples?
Well, I always wonder who has all this stuff.

François is supposed to have a bunch of things.
Really? Well, how come when I went to Body & Soul I never heard any of it? I would notice! Most of the West End stuff, Peech Boys, ‘Is It All Over My Face’, what happened was that Larry would have like several drafts. Like Colonel Abrams records? We would hear versions you would not believe then when it came out it was so commercial sounding. Larry’s versions would sound so raw. There were records like ‘Stay Free’ by Ashford & Simpson and ‘Razzamatazz’, you’d hear them in there and they sounded like number one records. You play them in my club and they sounded tinny. You know they sounded cute and you liked the song… Another one is Labelle’s ‘What Can I Do For You’. You don’t know how many DJs tried to play that in a club and the crowd would just be like phht. But you go to the Garage and it’s a 20 year old record and they’re still singing it like it was number one. You say it’s Larry but it’s the system, too. But without Larry there is no system because when he had guest DJs there, he would take out certain things. There was also a Larry lookalike.

What?!
Somebody who looked like Larry when he wasn’t there and there’d be a tape playing!

No?!
Oh he fooled a lot of people. He would do it when he didn’t feel like spinning or he was pissed off at the crowd. I always wondered how he got this guy, because when you were on the dancefloor, he looked like him.

Surely they’d have rumbled him?
Oh he would never get close up and he did look like Larry! Ask Bobby Shaw about this one. In the old days Larry used to live in the Garage, so he might have been sleeping or he might have been pissed off with the crowd which he did.

So Larry would come back later?
Yeah. But you would know when he came back. He made sure that you felt it. The lookalike was definitely a fact. We definitely knew it existed. You could tell it was a tape in the Garage.

What did you do do after Xenon?
It was a down point in my life. I went to Magique. Tee Scott used to call it Tragique! [laughter]. It was an East Side club which was already a no-no and an Upper East Side club… I got fired from Xenon for not playing ‘Happy Birthday’ for Bianca Jagger. It was the middle of the night and I just did not want to do it. She was a Studio person, I was like why are you sweating it, she’s not coming back anyway?! I was pissed but… if Bianca got me fired so what! The whole crowd didn’t know. Then they got a Tony lookalike! I swear to God! Everybody came and tell me, because they could tell it wasn’t me. It only lasted about another month and then it closed. Every club I went to closed after I left. After I left Xenon I had all these offers and I wanted to transform Magique, because Magique was a bridge-and-tunnel crowd, very John Travolta. I love a challenge so I thought if I can do Xenon then I can do this. It didn’t work. This crowd was so bad. If you didn’t play a radio song…. This was 1982 and new wave is the hottest thing, Thompson Twins, Ian Dury, everybody. They said they wanted to hear Xenon music, but Thompson Twins and Ian Dury weren’t on the radio. The only time I had a good time at Magique were the porn parties, with Ron Jeremy and a few of the porn stars used to give a party about once a month and there’s naked girls everywhere and I can play anything I want.

How long did you last?
A year. I took a vacation for a month or two. I knew I was going to lose it., You never go away if you’re a DJ. From there I went to Limelight (which Tee used to call Slimelight). I hated that, too.

The original Limelight?
Yeah. Then I went to the Palace which is Palluccio’s restaurant on 14^th St. It only lasted a year but that was a lot of fun. New wave was hot, but I could play anything I want. What I didn’t know was that on 14^th St they had it advertised as a disco and on 13^th St. they had people coming in the club who thought it was a new wave place. Double whammy: Why you not playing disco? Why you not playing new wave? After that I went to Funhouse. I wasn’t really a rap fan, but I liked it, so I had to evolve my DJing style to accommodate this. Some of the music was creative, but there wasn’t eight hours of good rap music to play. I liked variety. Jellybean, you know, if a record was a hit he would play it four times a night. I didn’t like to do that. The one credit I give to Funhouse is discovering Set It Off, which nobody knows about.

Walter Gibbons’ mix of NYC club classic Strafe.

Which was the first version, Strafe?
Yeah, because Walter mixed it. Walter brought it to Jellybean two or three times, but Jellybean wouldn’t play it. The whole sound then was the Roland drum and Arthur and Shannon and it’s totally the opposite of that. I was doin’ a guest spot and Walter didn’t know I was gonna be there or that I was tapin’ the night. I taped it when I played it. It cleared the floor. All of us in the booth goin’ crazy! This was at the time when even Loleatta was doin’ that drum sound and I hated that sound. He gave me two versions, a vocal and another one. Walter takes the record and he’s totally disappointed. A month later he comes back and they’re screamin’ to this record! They were callin’ it ‘On The Left’ because they still didn’t know the name of the song: “Tony, play the On The Left”. He didn’t know I’d taped the song! It was just so different for the time. So now Strafe wanted to do a PA at Funhouse but I didn’t know that Strafe had this thing against Walter. He didn’t like his mix. Even though Strafe’s mix was like puke. At this stage nobody’s playin’ it. Not radio, not Larry. Finally I’m telling Walter you gotta go take this to the radio and Larry. He was still skeptical because no one would give Walter the time of day. If I can get these 16 year old kids to like it, don’t worry about everyone else! Strafe came and did it and the crowd went ballistic. Then he tried to do a new song, I think it was ‘React’, and he got booed off stage. Kids are very reactionary like that. But then I got undercut again but a friend Randy. He’s not a friend any more. Then I went to an all-girls club. I had a new challenge. I’d played for all men, all black, all straight, all gay. Networks it was called. 84 or 85. Now I’m like this guy who’s a total threat to these women. If I could play for them and learn about what they like compared to men.

What do they like?
They like a lotta meaningful words. Not just party down. They liked a lot of female vocals. What I find out, once I got to know them, they liked everything that everybody else liked. There were a few things I played there that I didn’t play anywhere else, like Pat Benatar and Stevie Nicks. That lasted two years. The last club I played in was the opening of the Palladium with Jellybean. And that was because Jellybean hadn’t DJed in ages but his name was still big so he got me to play with him. Even though I’d retired, he knew I still kept up with the music.

CLASSIC CLUBS: The Dorian Gray, Frankfurt

Before the Panorama Bar and Berghain and even long before the Front in Hamburg, there was the Dorian Gray in Frankfurt. Secreted in a terminal in Frankfurt Main Airport, the Gray opened during disco’s heyday, and ran through to 2000 when it finally closed. It was the crucible in which the German trance scene was defined and developed – plus, it was also the only location in Europe which had a Richard Long sound system. Sarah Gregory takes a soft landing to central Germany to find out more.

Think Dorian Gray, think Oscar Wilde’s immortal libertine. The ideal name then for a nightclub intended to be Germany’s answer to Studio 54. A club whose impact was so far-reaching that even today, the roots of Berlin’s Berghain can be traced all the way back to November 28, 1978, when The Gray opened its doors to the Hi-NRG beats of Sylvester’s disco anthem ‘(You Make Me Feel) Mighty Real’.

“As a DJ, I got to know hundreds of clubs,” says DJ Dag, techno specialist and Gray resident from 1988-1993. “But none were as cool as Dorian Gray.” Located in Hall C, Terminal 1 of Frankfurt Airport (and in turn providing the template for the airport club), the Gray was the brainchild of Gerd Schuler and Michael Presinger, who decided to create their own centre of musical decadence in the middle of Europe – spending 2.5 million Deutschmarks in the process (about £3m. in today’s money.)

“It was all built very simply,” says Ralf Holl, dancer and Gray resident from 1980-83, as he talked to Frankfurter Rundschau about the magical effect of dancing in darkness, the long hallway, the neon lights – even the smell! With three floors catering to every dancer’s need (Runningman, Studio 54 and Chillout), The Gray absolutely followed up on its promise of emulating New York’s disco powerhouse. “My life was just one huge party back then,” says the club’s first resident DJ, Bijan Blum. “I was constantly meeting people and there was a lot of partying.” VIP Playboy and Formula 1 parties were staged there, beauty pageants for a while; even camels and elephants were brought in – a step-up from Bianca and her white horse.

And the comparisons don’t stop there. With a very similar door policy, security had no hesitation in turning hopeful punters away – not that that put people off trying. The Gray became the in-place for the hoi polloi of Frankfurt… and Roger Moore. But it wasn’t just about the moneyed or the social set, the Gray appealed to everyone – attracting converts and the newly initiated. Holl, for one, had been highly sceptical when he first crossed the threshold – a Zappa acolyte and vehemently not a fan of disco. But within 15 mins he was sold. “When you were in it, it was a world of its own,” he remembers. “You forgot where you were for hours.” He saw it as a place where people could be whatever they wanted. “The first gays were seen at Gray,” Holl remembers.

Spanning two decades of immense cultural change, the musical content shifted accordingly. The late ’70s was all about disco, funk and soul – in keeping with its Studio 54 template, while the mid-80s saw a move to electronic music – house and techno – and by 1992, ‘urban’ had even found its place. With Blum instilled as the Gray’s first resident (having been courted by the club’s founders while playing at Malesh in Dusseldorf), seven-day work schedules were de rigueur, as the German courted the crowd with the likes of Chic’s ‘Le Freak’, ‘Dancer’ by Gino Soccio and Instant Funk’s ‘I Got My Mind Up’ from 9pm to 8am. Blum did manage the occasional night or two off though, as other early DJ spots were also taken by Michael Munzing, German producer and co-creator of Europop combo Snap! and Ulli Brenner. Plus, guest DJs often made an appearance. When Blum went to Aschaffenburg’s disco palace Aladdin’s, Peter Römer came over from Hamburg’s Trinity to fill his spot.

And despite the sensibility of excess, excess, excess, the music was never sidelined. Imported records was where the hits were, and Gray DJs would travel to ensure that they had all the latest; the rest of Europe providing the source. “The DJs went to Amsterdam and bought imported records that you couldn’t get here,” says Holl. “You have to keep a store like that at such a high level for so long.” Blum agrees. “I went to Amsterdam and Paris and flew to London especially.” But the dancers in those early disco days trusted the DJs – ready to embark on whatever musical journey lay ahead. Some have called the club avant-garde and DJ Dag confirms that the freedom that was part of the club’s appeal. “I experimented,” remembers DJ Dag. “That was possible at the Gray.” As recalled in Frankfurter Rundschau, he would turn all the lights out, and as the fog started billowing would drop The Doors’ ‘Riders on the Storm’; Dag wasn’t averse to throwing in the odd whale song either.

DJ Dag at the Dorian Gray, 1992

What made the club even more special was its sound system – built by none other than Richard Long; student of Alex Rosner (who had constructed the Loft’s sound system) and sonic innovator for the Paradise Garage. The system was built on a JBL and Gauss-Alnico base with Thorens turntables inevitably giving way to Technics over time. And given that the club opened at the height of disco, there was a light system to match. Red, green and orange lights were reflected in the mirrors that adorned the dancefloor; lasers had their place too even renowned producer Alexander Metzger was a VJ there.

By the mid-1980s, the sound and general aesthetic of the Gray began to change as the music gradually shifted from disco to techno playing host to some of the great German DJs: the sadly-missed Mark Spoon (one half of Jam & Spoon and veteran Love Parader), Torsten Fenslau (originator of Culture Beat and ‘Mr Vain’) and of course, Frankfurt techno DJ and producer Sven Väth alongside other big names including Oakenfold, Paul Van Dyk and Carl Cox. DJ Dag is even credited with triggering a worldwide passion for trance at the beginning of the 90s. “Something completely new emerged in Frankfurt,” says DJ Dag. Gone were the sequins and glitter – this was a wholesale change.

Welcome To The Dorian Gray by Crazy Malamute.

Alas, however, as is often the case, technical problems brought the club to a close in 2000. A fire at Dusseldorf airport had ushered in stricter fire regulations which put paid to the Gray – it would have just been too expensive to renovate – so the owners cut their losses. But that’s not before going out with one last big bang on New Year’s Eve climaxing with the vocal brilliance of Minnie Riperton’s ‘Lovin You’. The owners tried opening a new venue in Berlin in 2003, but it barely lasted a year, although a sister venue does live on in Stuttgart.

The Gray closing party in 2000.

At its peak, the Dorian Gray was packed out with over 2,500 dancers – at the forefront of the German dancefloor scene and an inspiration for clubs and DJs worldwide – a dedicated fanzine called Frontpage even sprang up. Sadly, largely forgotten in the minds of partygoers, without The Gray things may have been very different.
Sarah Gregory

Dorian Gray classics.

Danny Krivit rolled through disco

It’s hard to believe Danny Krivit has been DJing for five decades. He was around for the early flowerings of disco in the early ’70s. So what’s the secret to his youthful appearance? Well, Danny started DJing at the age of nine! His mum was a white vocalist on the black New Jersey club circuit; his dad, a jazz musician who managed Chet Baker. By his teens Danny was programming music on reel-to-reel for his father’s Greenwich Village club, The Ninth Circle, which was the start of him playing many of the landmark clubs of the disco era. He was resident at The Roxy, the massive west-side rollerskating venue, for four years from 1979, as it became the wild epicentre of hip hop (Quick to embrace a few scratching techniques, they called him Danny Rock). Danny was particularly close to Larry Levan and the family of DJs and music-lovers that coalesced at The Paradise Garage, and would often skate over to King Street after the Roxy and hang there, playing records. In 1996 he teamed up with Joe Clausell and another old friend, François Kevorkian, to create Body & Soul, a club that kept the flame alive for the Garage heads. More recently, his own 718 sessions have given him a residency that still delivers some of the best nights in New York. Through it all, as Mr K, he’s a creator of legendary edits, creating cuts of songs that have become the classic version. Check his great website where he posts new ones all the time.

Interviewed in New York, 06 10 98, by Bill

Where were you born, where did you grow up?
I was born in 1957 in New Jersey, we moved to Manhattan when I was four or five. Pretty much stayed in the Village my whole life. In fact, until I moved over here (E14 Street) I’d only moved about four blocks in thirty years. My step-father owned a place called the Ninth Circle, which he started in ’62. In the Sixties, it was one of the main Village spots. When I was growing up I was really around there a lot. There were a lot of rock’n’roll people there, music people. When I was seven I was already doing brunches and working as a waiter, and I served Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon. In the Village it just wasn’t that odd, I suppose. And they had a very happening jukebox. So without even knowing it, before I was even into music, I was around it. My mother was a jazz singer, my father was into jazz, an older sister into pop.

Did your mother perform?
She performed on the black circuit in New Jersey. I remember we went to Puerto Rico when I was a kid and Dionne Warwick was really happening then. She had seen her there and she said lemme introduce you to her because my mom had worked with her. And Dionne Warwick remembered her because she was a white girl doing this thing and she just stuck out. But she never really made it.

The Ninth Circle was kind of dying out by about 1970 or so and a friend of his owned the Stonewall and when that closed he said to my father I know you’ve had this great thing for years but you know the Village has really turned gay. If you just turn your place gay, all your troubles will be over and you’ll be a success overnight. And literally that’s what he did. The Ninth Circle went gay about 1971. He turned the restaurant downstairs into a disco and I started programming [reel-to-reel] tapes for him. He also got tapes from clubs like Le Jardin, Le Hippopotamus, happening places. I got in the door like that. Then he opened up a place called Ones. If you’re down near Vinyl on Hudson, there’s a Korean fruit store down there. That’s the location of Ones. I started working in 1974. It opened in ’75.

A proper nightclub?
Well, back then… It had food, it had dancing. But Ninth Circle was definitely a disco downstairs. Although there were no turntables ever there (at Ninth Circle). At Ones it started out the same thing with tapes but then it progressed to a DJ booth with decks. We didn’t have a Bozak, we had something cheaper. Probably AST, they’d just started outfitting everyone downtown.

I remember even the tapes I was making were segued. Basically, when he played these other tapes from the clubs, they were segued. I was like I can’t do the radio mix thing. I didn’t understand at first but I was going around checking things out. At that time, I was probably a little more into drugs than the music, so I’d be going to clubs to get drugs and things and I’d be standing outside waiting for somebody and I’d be hearing… They had a Limelight on Sheridan Square, and David Rodriguez used to play there. I didn’t know him at the time, but I’d be standing outside waiting for someone. And the music I’d be hearing was not the regular stuff. He’d play some really rough old stuff. But he was mixing, I was really paying attention to that. I knew what was expected of me.

Were you actually going into any of the clubs?
Back then I wasn’t really going into the Limelight. I was looking old for my age, so I could get in, but I was a little more into concerts than clubs. Especially the Fillmore East. As far as clubs go: I went to the Hippopotamus, Le Jardin, the Dom: below the Electric Circus. I ended up buying their speakers when they closed. They had these beautiful Altec Lansing cabinets; really nice wooden cabinets. I nearly killed my mother with these speakers. I showed no mercy. I remember when ‘Doctor Love’ [by First Choice] came out and I played it to death. A few weeks later, I met my neighbours in the elevator and they said, ‘You know, we never really say anything. You play music loud, but we like music. But this song: ‘Doctor Love’. We can’t get it out of our heads. You’re really doing a number on us with this song.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Six months later, my music’s off and I’m hearing ‘Doctor Love’ It burned into their heads so much they had to buy it. I remember going to the Loft.

What are your memories of the Loft?
Well, I never went to his first one, I went to 99 Prince Street. I just remember it was unique. Before that, my idea of a club was more dressy, the Saturday night out feeling. The Loft was the opposite of that: it was a professional house party. These were eccentric club people who were really into dancing. They knew music, not just the top ten hit parade, but they knew music they never heard before. That impressed me. The type of music that was being played it just had a lot more substance to it. At first, I remember congregating with a few people. There would be a regular crowd that I’d meet with: François was one of them, Steve D’Acquisto, this girl Freddie Taylor from Pearl Distributors. And we’d just be hanging out critiquing the music; bringing David some new records. David was very friendly with me and when he had the record pool, I tried to get in it when I was DJing at Ones. It had just opened and I wasn’t actually spinning there. So he said, ‘I can’t really do anything for you there.’ But he hooked me up with some of the record companies. By the time I was ready to come back to him, he was shutting his doors and I was one of the first members of For The Record [Judy Weinstein’s record pool].

What records do you readily associate with the Loft?
I remember things like ‘City Country City’ [by War]. If I heard it somewhere else it was not a big record. Here it was a record that people went crazy to from the beginning to the end. When the disco stuff started to come in heavy, he had like USA European Connection. It was extremely different. Especially as David had it on reel-to-reel, it sounded better than when it came out on vinyl. I remember in general hearing the depth of the production in stereo. It was that true feeling of, ‘I’m not on drugs, but I feel like I’m tripping on music. The music is really taking me somewhere.’ These people are just dancing. All night. Seriously.

How did the Gallery differ?
It struck me as quite a bit more gay. Definitely less about the hi-fidelity sound, more pumping. More mixing. More to do with the lights.

And Nicky Siano as a DJ?
Certainly more about drama. He would be like: I’m in the DJ booth. This couldn’t be a tape. This couldn’t be a just a record you like. I’m playing this record. He had a presence. He also was very much about drugs himself, there was a whole thing about him, especially towards the end; high, but not too high, to play the music. But there’d always be a point where it seemed like he’d collapse in a very dramatic manner: fall on the turntables and stop the music. Everyone knew what was going on, and they’d be patient and know that somehow, somebody would help him get it together and an even better record would come on. And usually it did. Certainly, both David and him, this was very different to the other clubs I’d been to. Very vibey. He’s picking a record that’s not just a hit record, but he’s picking a record that’s timely for these particular people; and he’s also talking a message, certainly creating a vibe. There’s a story being woven. With Nicky it was a vocal story. With David it was a mood story. David in general was always about love and he’d always try to stay with that. But there were a lot of instrumentals; more percussive, Latinesque things.

How did your DJing progress from there?
After Ones I opened up an after-hours with this ex-boxer. And I started working at Trudi Heller’s. It was along the lines of Copacabana, Régines. 25-30-year-olds’ club. Kind of a clip joint. But it was on Sixth Avenue right by 9th Street. All my life I’d lived on 12th Street and Sixth Avenue, even though I passed by, I never went in it. They had a Richard Long mixer. A decent set-up. It was a funky little club. Straight mainly black. Trudi Heller took it over and it went wrong. Even then I was making a bit of a mark; getting my charts out there. Then I got a job as the opening DJ at Roxy. And I played at a place called Lacey’s in Long Island from 1981 to 1991. I managed to turn some little nights into big nights. That’s how I got the job at Lacey’s. There was something about having the booth elevated and right in the middle, like they had at Lacey’s. There was something infectious about having all the people surrounding you in a circle and you in the middle. It’s not like being on the edge of the floor. The energy is focused at you. It was a rush.

And how did you get to know the Paradise Garage crew?
I was friendly with Larry Levan through the Loft. Mel Cheren [Garage co-owner] had told me he was going to open this club; and he described what he wanted. I went there; but it hadn’t really started yet. The main room was just an off-room but it was very pumping and Larry was kicking. It expanded very quickly. I was very close with Larry and I’d come there in the daytime, because he also lived there.

What, he actually lived in the club?
Yeah, before [the other Garage co-owner] Michael Brody couldn’t deal with him any longer and bought him an apartment. He used to pay for his apartment just to keep him out of there because he was causing too many problems.

(L-R) Danny with David DePino, Judy Weinstein, Larry Levan, Jeffrey Osbourne, John Brown

Was this around the time of the construction parties?
Well, he was living there during the construction parties. Basically, you go up a ramp and the first room you come into was a kinda small room that they used as the disco. What ended up being the main room, right next to that, they used as a lounge. The construction parties were this: just a killer sound system and nothing much else. But then there was another room after that which was a pretty good size and these were the offices and Larry’s apartment. Soon after, that began to be an extra room and he got Larry out of there; gave him an apartment.

But while he was living there, I used to come down in the daytime and roller-skate and play him some records from the pool. And he used to come to Roxy and skate. He told me he used to be a skate guard at Empire Roller-rink. But he was a little crazy. I remember playing ‘Girl You Need A Change Of Mind’ [Eddie Kendricks] once and he got so excited, got up, then I couldn’t see him skating. Next time I saw him his arm was in a sling. He didn’t skate much after that. He knew he couldn’t control himself. I would hang out with him a lot. I’m a passive person and he would, you know, want me in the studio with him when he was mixing. I was in the studio with him when he did ‘Bad For Me’ [Dee Dee Bridgewater], ‘Give Your Body Up To The Music’ [Billy Nichols], ‘Work That Body’ [Taana Gardner], a few others. So he wanted me to get a handle on this and get involved. His sessions were so stretched out that I was just hanging, not learning.

In what way?
He was a record company’s nightmare. Basically, he’d show up really late and while he was there it was about socialising and drugs. And eventually he would get to the mix, but he would be distracted very easily. And the mix, instead of taking a day or whatever, it would go on for weeks. This budget would be a $27,000 budget, stretched to that. I remember the Gwen Guthrie project wasn’t really even supposed to happen. He was supposed to mix a song and he ended up doing all these mixes.

Did her Padlock EP…
Well, basically, he did ‘Should’ve Been You’. That’s what he was supposed to do. He did this whole thing. I think he was in there so long that he was actually working on this stuff. It was probably one of the more productive sessions he had. But when he showed it to them, they were so pissed off at the price and how long ‘Should’ve Been You’ took that they just shelved it. For a year or two he was just playing it at the Garage and kicking it.

Had he finished the other Guthrie mixes? And was he playing them?
He’d finished them but they were rough. He was playing them and unlike a lot of other things where he mixed it seven or eight times, he did these and they worked out good rough. He kept them like that. Lots of his things, like ‘Work That Body’, the one that came out was his seventh mix. He mixed it over and over again and fine-tuned it.

What was he changing?
Really a lot of things. He’d say: ‘This is sloppy’, ‘I don’t like the sound of this bass’, ‘I played it in the club and we need to compress it a little more.’

So he’d be floor-testing at the club?
Sometimes that, other times just in the studio non-stop over-producing. So I would be invited in on some of this stuff. Some of it I was getting a little feel for it, but for the most part it was so stretched out I didn’t have patience. In general, he wanted me to get involved but the thing was I was DJing for a living. Working at Roxy and other places. I always had a weekend job. When it came to the Garage, I always came there after work and after a few years there, there were times when he couldn’t be there because of the studio and he’d have to have somebody fill in a little bit. ‘Danny if you could be here a little more often, get this feeling, I could stick you in here a little bit.’ I wanted that. But I couldn’t hang out non-stop. So I’d come at my usual time.

A couple of times he was like, ‘Why don’t you put on couple of records and we’ll have a dance’. Another time there was a pool party for For The Record and I played, Jellybean, Jonathan Fearing, Larry ended the night. I remember I was the last one before Larry. The club was just packing as I played. So I had a really good set and it was the first time I played ‘I Want To Thank You’ [by Alicia Myers]. And I kept telling Larry about this song. He came over to me and said, ‘What’s this you’re playing?’. I said it’s that song I been telling you about. He started playing it after that. Sure enough, Frankie Crocker heard Larry play it. It had already been a big hit on the roller skating for a while.

Anyway, I had a really good set, but I was a little in awe of the sound system: I didn’t want to fuck with the sound system too much. He was working the system while I was doing my mixes; really tweaking it and beefing it up. When I came on he had a switch underneath that he flicked which basically took the limiter off and he said: ‘Only for you’. So I felt really privileged. He really supported me. I was working a lot, so when push comes to shove, he really needed somebody and David DePino was close with him, right there and out of work. He was opening for Larry a lot, a few other people too. Victor Rosado, Joey Llanos.

Danny has an entire apartment where his records live.

How did you first meet Larry?
I came to the Loft to see David. But David was knocked out. His DJ booth was kind of on the second floor looking down; he had a bed right next to it. So I came up and thought Mmm, this is isn’t David, David has long hair and he’s white. Larry wasn’t rude, but he wasn’t especially friendly the first time. He was just, you know. Next time I had a few records – I don’t think he played them or whatever – I think he liked the idea that I didn’t just bring them for David. Then I would run into Larry at the record pool.

What was he like as a person?
He was bit eccentric. He was really like a little kid. Very energetic. When Star Wars came out he was like, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta go see the opening. This whole thing about lights; anything special and big like that, he loved. Big bright things. Disneyland. Even Studio 54, as a club. He liked that sort of thing.

Did he go to Studio 54?
Oh yeah, I think he played there a couple of times. Richie Kaczor was a sweetheart and we all knew him from Hollywood. And Hollywood wasn’t as commercial; it was a little more edgy and more underground. So he had a lot of respect from all the underground DJs. When he did Studio 54, instead of thinking of him as, ‘Oh, you’re just playing that commercial stuff,’ we thought of him as someone who does his own thing, but is playing the commercial stuff at Studio. Also, the whole time I knew Richie he was so down to earth. There were so many egos going on then. Even the guys that were nice would still be a little like that. But Richie was never that way. Larry was very friendly with Richie and used to go there and Richie would come to the Garage. The Garage had a very social DJ booth. It was huge. Like another club in itself. There was a real scene going on there. And for a long time, I’d find myself in the booth, that was a club experience. You were right above the dancefloor and you’d get the whole feeling of the crowd. The light show, everything.

What kind of drugs were people doing at the Garage?
Well, I was kind of out of my drugs stage by then. I was just a pot-head. I would notice a lot of coke, some heroin, tripping. More of the kids would be into tripping, but there’d be dust, too. It seemed like because I wasn’t into it, I didn’t latch on to it so much. There was a lot of drugs there.

Do you think that Larry’s drug taking eventually had a detrimental effect on his music?
I look at this way. He was definitely into drugs, but as opposed to the drugs having a handle on him, it definitely seemed like it wasn’t running his life. Towards the end, say the last year or two, it was probably clear to him, it had been said in so many words, that’s it, the Garage is closing this time, and even then, everyone else was very hopeful that there’d be another spot. You have this party and the party’s going to go somewhere and when it does, you’re going to be it, so don’t even worry about it.

But I think at that point the drugs seemed to be more obvious. He was there less. When he came in, it would be less about putting the record on, there would be a long rainstorm first. Rain effects. He would still turn it out. But he was there less. A lot less mixing, just about playing the right record and working the sound. Adjustments, like he was in a studio. Not just feeling it, but going out on the floor and checking it. Some nights he would keep the club from opening an hour or two because he wanted to rewire the whole system. He’d always have things for Michael Brody, the owner to buy, new toys. He really had put a lot into it. Towards the end there, David was playing the most, especially the last year. A lot of people who went to the Garage really just went that year [1987]. And when they remember the Garage, it was really the staples of songs that made up ‘Garage Music’.

How would you describe that?
My feeling going the whole way through was that Garage music was kind of breaking the rules. It was what he felt like playing. He’d turn you on to something. It was really about having no boundaries. A lot of rules were broken there. When [Taana Gardner’s] ‘Heartbeat’ came out there wasn’t hip hop on the radio like there is today. There wasn’t any downtempo music like ‘Heartbeat’. And when he put that record, a full club of people left the room to get food. There was not one person left on the floor. He played the record from beginning to end and they stayed off from beginning to end. And you’d hear people talking, ‘What the hell is this? It’s painful.’ Sure enough, next week he played it and a few people stayed on the floor. The week after, the floor’s not happening, but there’s a decent amount of people there. The week after that, now there are actually people running to the floor when they hear it. By the end of the month, there was no-one left off the floor when they played that record.

And now, of course, they had to go to Vinylmania and bug Charlie for that record. He would break rules. He would play things and you thought, ‘Oooh, this is a commercial record.’ Pat Benatar ‘Love Is A Battlefield’ Someone said he could never play that there. That was reason enough for him to play it; and make it happen, too. Those things stuck out a lot more than the so called staples that you associate with Garage music.

That’s Garage music, sure, but it’s the other things that make more of an impression on you. He would take a chance. He would play ‘Why D’Ya Do It’ by Marianne Faithfull. When he played that, it was a violent record; it got a violent response. He had this thing with the lights where he had an elaborate light system and Robert Da Silva was his light man and he was a great light man. Larry had this clear arrangement with Robert – because he had been a light man too – he had a mini light board on a track with a handle and he would just pull it over in front of him. And without saying anything, he would just start working this song, or part of a song. Robert would just accept that. I remember when he did things like Marianne Faithfull. It was like: I’m doing this and you can tell Larry’s doing the lights: very extreme, very violently emotional. He made you remember that song. He would do that with a lot of the music. That was the thing I remember about the Garage.

The difference between this and the other places, is that he’s controlling the entire environment. At the end, it was far less about him. David [DePino]was told to play not the newest records, but the staples. That’s how the club was then. And Larry was more into drugs, and even if he played well, you related a little less to him personally.

After the club closed, there was a period when I didn’t really see him. Then I started seeing him at the World a little bit, and Trax, behind the Roxy. Basically, Trax was David DePino’s club and it was a huge success but it was basically built on what Larry had started at the Garage. At that point, he didn’t have another situation where he could control the entire vibe. As a DJ he would come in and do his thing but he couldn’t hit that mark like before. He was an excellent DJ, so he could still play well, and mix it up, bring in a few boxes to beef up the system, play a better selection of music. But it didn’t have what people were getting at the Garage. The system wasn’t there, it wasn’t his people, and you would notice more that drugs had a little more of handle on him. Not that he was more high, just that he was more affected. When I had Ninth Circle, my father had passed away, and I ran into him. Larry would come by to me and I had so much respect for him as a mentor, he’d hit me up for a bit of money. I knew what he was going through. And I wanted him to get out of it in a way, but I couldn’t say no to him. It was a real struggle. More than that, it was because of this: how could I deny him? He was such a major part of what I am and what I’m doing.

Is it true that he kept selling his records to pay for drugs towards the end?
That probably has some truth in it. I knew I would find big chunks of it – in a flea market once. He had his records stored all over and, because he wasn’t playing that much and he was into drugs, the people keeping his records weren’t taking them seriously and they’d just get rid of some of them. I remember finding a bunch of things, this particular record, I found an acetate of ‘Can’t Shake Your Love’ by Syreeta. It was a remix that only he had. It was scratched up and didn’t play well. When I saw that, I thought this other stuff must be Larry’s collection. I had a done a lot of edits for bootlegs. I saw Larry after that, and I mentioned this and said, well, it’s not like they’ve got your name on it, but there’s this acetae of ‘Can’t Shake Your Love’. He was like, ‘I need that.’ I said it’s unplayable, but I’ve done these edits of it and you can have that.

How did you get into editing?
My first mix was ‘Chill Pill’ on Sleeping Bag. The first record on Sleeping Bag. [credited to The Sounds of JS126 Brooklyn]. It was a rock thing. Will Socolov I’d grown up with. We did this, and during the session, I knew what I wanted but the engineer… kept saying, ‘Oh we’ll fix that in the editing’. And towards the end he started to do an edit, but he couldn’t do it. I had a reel-to-reel at home, but I’d never done any editing. I was getting frustrated with this guy, literally half the session was this guy trying to do this edit. We salvaged it. I walked out of there thinking I know how to edit, just from seeing what he did wrong. Same thing happened next time: ‘Oh, we’ll fix it in the editing.’ A DJ friend of mine Jonathan Fearing, was into editing, working at WBLS, I was telling him about it and he finally just gave me a quick pep talk and said it’s really just about the ear. I went home and I edited ‘Funky Drummer’ and it ended up being ‘Feeling James’. I gave it to this guy who bootlegged it.

What, the thing on Tommy Boy by Fresh Gordon?
No, it was a bootleg. That may have sampled it. Anyway, there was this guy Tim Rogers at Polygram, he was hanging around the Garage, instead of being a big record exec, he was actually into all this editing and bootlegs and stuff. He found out that it was me and he said, ‘I’m working on all this stuff and I want to put out “Funky Drummer”. Do you wanna do a mix?’ Whenever I’d do an edit, it would turn into a legitimate job. Like I did one of ‘Touch And Go’ [by Ecstasy Passion & Pain] and [future Maxi label founder] Claudia Cuseta was working at Sunnyview at the time, gave me a job to remix the song. The second edit was ‘Rock The House’, which wound up becoming ‘Put The Needle On The Record’. I knew Arthur Baker. I’m just a DJ and I’m doing something that just ends up being a bootleg, so I can’t call anyone a thief. But basically, he took my edit ‘Rock The House’ and he had Gail King play it over this drum beat. That’s all it was. When I saw him in a club, I came over to him and said: ‘Oh is that your record?’. He says, ‘Yeah’. ‘I did ‘Rock The House’. He got so defensive. ‘You did “Rock The House”? You’re a thief anyway, who you calling a thief?’ I said, ‘I’m not calling anyone a thief, I’m just letting you know that I did “Rock The House”’. After that I got a few jobs with him.

Danny with his great friend and Body & Soul collaborator, François Kevorkian

You did the MFSB bootleg of ‘Love is the Message’ as well didn’t you?
Well there are two and they both sample Gil Scot-Heron. I did the white one that has ‘My First Mistake’ on the other side. It’s on T.D. Records. It’s just basically ‘Love Is The Message’ and ‘Love Break’ put together. The other guy that did the other one, this guy who worked at Vinylmania. Speak to Charlie about him. I’ve done a lot edits for that guy, though. By then those were the two main ones. Mine was after the other one, but they were close: early Eighties.

When David Mancuso was playing MFSB was he playing the ordinary version?
Right from the beginning he was probably playing the quad mix on the album. The original album also came in quad. I collect quad and usually since quad wasn’t a bit hit, they had to make things a little different so that even if you played it on your regular stereo you knew it sounded different. Sometimes it was a different version of the song. ‘Rocksteady’ Aretha Franklin, instead of ending at the fade out, it goes on for another two minutes and slows down to a complete stop. It’s got a completely different horn part in it. Apparently in ‘Love Is The Message’ there were a lot of loose keyboard parts that they edited out of the final mix because it was sloppy. In the quad mix, they put them in to make it sound different. Played that till the Tom Moulton Philly Classics mix came out, then played that.

When Tom Moulton remixed it without the frilly bit at the front?
The original and the Tom Moulton mix both had that on it. But the original didn’t go on much and Tom’s kept going.

Has your version of MFSB ever come out legitimately?
No. But MFSB is probably the quintessential bootleg mix.

[Danny was kind enough to let us release his 11-minute mix for the first time on the original compilation for Last Night a DJ Saved my Life (Nuphonic)]

Which other edits have you done?
I stuck to things that were either long gone or impossible to find. As far as other ones: ‘Just Us’ by Two Tons of Fun, ‘Sugar Pie Guy’ [Joneses], ‘Bra’ [Cymande], ‘You Got Me Running’ Lenny Williams, ‘Let’s Start The Dance’ [Bohannon], I had a version that never came out, I just kept going with the guitar.

Is that ‘Let’s Start The Dance III’?
I think it was II. The one with the rapper over it. I did a version without the rapper on. ‘My First Mistake’. I was really proud of that.

I assume that you were doing them to make them better for DJs to play?
Yeah. I’d do something that I knew Larry was into, like ‘Family Tree’ (by Family Tree). I have the original here, it’s one of the most rare records. It’s one of the first 12-inches. Something Larry played and it was such a rare record that even if you owned it you didn’t want to play it in case you scratched it up. When I brought him that he was happy. Also it was a really good edit.

What do you think was the first 12-inch?
It was ‘Dance Dance Dance’ by Calhoun. Definitely. Warner Spector. It was a terrible record. It was a bad way to try and get into the market. I remember immediately after that, the second 12-inch I got, because at the Ninth Circle, I was getting a lot of stuff in the mail. And at that time I was getting a lot of 7-inch 33s, before the 12-inches. Seven minute version on a 7-inch. All of a sudden I started getting these 12-inches in the mail. And I started hearing that this was the new thing. The next song was Floyd Smith on Salsoul, very Barry White sounding, but it wasn’t a big hit. This was a better example of something sounding good. Then there were a few 12-inches. Motown, 20th Century.

Tom Moulton says he did one that he thinks is the first? Al Downing ‘Dreamworld’?
If he did that and that was the first 12-inch, then I’ve never even saw that to this day. The thing about Tom Moulton is, for instance ‘Free Man’, he made a couple of 12-inches himself. Because the record label weren’t going to. I’ve a feeling that if he did a 12-inch of Al Downing, it could’ve been something that just 20 copies were made. If it was the first, it was kind of unheard of. These things were promos, but you’re still talking about 100 copies at least. They got around the US. I’m an avid record collector and I’ve never seen Al Downing. Atlantic’s first one was ‘Mellow Blow’ by Barrabas. People weren’t impressed to start because they really weren’t putting the best stuff on them. Everyone was, ‘Well, there are a lot of hits out there, why are putting these songs on there?’

It was a marketing ploy, basically?
Definitely. This was the age of promotion and this was how to promote these records. Soon after it was almost like 12-inches were going to be laughed at, so they started putting some good songs on there. ‘Ten Percent’ etc.

When The Garage closed and Junior Vasquez started Bassline, what was the reaction to him. Was he seen as a Larry copyist?
Definitely that, but kind of like the way I was describing David DePino at the Garage. Junior was taking it a step further. He had nothing to do with the Garage and yet he was just playing this hit parade. When Junior was playing some great music, but it was rehashed in a time when people really weren’t rehashing music. It was not about retro then. When you heard retro then, it was like what’s wrong with this picture. It was only because the Garage had closed and people were still hanging on to that that it seemed okay. They were good songs and he was mixing. I thought it was fad, and it would fade away, but it kept getting bigger. But then it slowly changed. He was always friendly with me, but he was out of the loop; I crossed a lot of circles and he wasn’t in any of them.

Do you think they turned playing records into a performance?
Totally. And also broke ground. They didn’t take the new hot record and break it when it would have been a hit anyway. They broke a record that would not have been otherwise. They educated people.

Can you think of any examples?
With David [Mancuso] there was such a long line of them. Things like ‘City Country City’ [by War], or ‘Woman’ [by Barrabas]. Those were Loft records. Without the Loft, they were just records. People would scream when they heard a record for the first time, not the tenth. One of the legacies they left is that fever for hunting down records. These are records that were rare the moment they came out. There was a DJ, Tony Smith, from Barefoot Boy, there was a record store on 8th Street, Daytons. I met him because we’d always be looking for those kind of records. A lot of jazz-funk. They’d play something, and if I liked it, it always seemed that Tony would want it too. It was underground even then. Forget about now, back then some of these records were hard to track down too.

What do you think the legacy of these DJs is?
There’s a lot of marks that they made that might go unnoticed. Certainly, I think that Mancuso is one of the main ones. The thing that David expressed, and came out in Larry and Nicky, was playing a positive vibe in the club. When I went to other places I was always amazed at how negative the vibe was. Weaving a message, rather than wandering all over. David made people realise the DJ was important. Before that most people thought a band or DJ: what’s the difference?

Larry Levan and the Lost Art of DJing

He burned bright and left us at the age of 38. If he’d stuck around, on 20 July 2024 Larry Levan would be celebrating his 70th birthday. In the history of DJing, he epitomised the young craft’s possibilities and inspired a generation. As the DJ became a force for record promotion, as the DJ entered the recording studio to become producer and remixer, and as the DJ learnt how to generate shared moods of grand intensity, the biggest most influential DJ making those moves was Larry Levan. To celebrate his life, and to remind anyone who calls themselves a DJ what the job is really all about, we’ve polished up these epic sleevenotes from our 2000 Nuphonic compilation, Larry Levan Live at the Paradise Garage. Read to the end and there’s a visual treat – star-studded photos from Larry’s 1984 birthday.

by Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster

Putting a roomful of people in the moment. Amazing them, surprising them, challenging, even confusing them; pushing, electrifying, loving them; carrying them with you towards a better place. Shaking the dull daylight out of their bones, waking them into their other life.

Few people know what great DJing is really about. Today’s global club culture, with its lightshows and rootless brand-name jocks, has bred dancers with a painfully short attention span. Our dancefloors might throw their hands in the air for a clever technical mix, a swift key change or a bombastic snare roll, but they’re largely immune to anything that takes a bit longer to achieve – like pacing, building, teasing, exploring. Sadly, these days most of us just want to pay our money and get an immediate dance fix. We’re happy to be switched on by manipulative drug-pop and thrashed around at fever pitch all night. It’s rare today to find a DJ brave enough to take a crowd down as well as up. Or to reflect emotions more complex than mad-for-it ecstasy, or to play music outside the narrow focus of their niche. Or to throw a risky curveball or two and ‘cleanse’ the dancefloor for a fresh start. When you find a DJ willing to do more than stitch together a bunch of surefire floorfillers, shake their hand.

Larry Levan played records back when a DJ had to sweat for a living. When he started in 1971, a DJ’s set was built from 7-inch singles and uptempo album tracks. The album tracks had to be painstakingly unearthed and the singles had to be changed every three minutes. There were just a handful of records released each week and almost all of them were aimed at radio or home listening. There were no ten-minute dubs, no extended remixes, no minimal beat tracks, no easy-to-mix intros. Records were all made with live drummers, with often wildly wavering tempos, and record decks were mostly fixed-speed monsters taken from the world of radio.

DJing as we know it evolved from all these unimaginable restrictions. In New York a small band of explorers worked themselves to the bone to dig up danceable music from whatever sources they could find, and distorted, extended and manipulated it until it met the energetic demands of their dancers. In doing this they forged the DJ’s craft, pioneering almost everything that DJs do today. In clubs like Arthur, Sanctuary, Salvation, The Loft and The Gallery, DJs Terry Noel, Francis Grasso, David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Michael Cappello and Steve D’Acquisto built a whole new world, the world of dance music we’ve inherited.

Eventually we’d call their scene ‘disco’ and we’d think of its music as a single genre. But originally it was far from a homogenous, definable form. It was an amalgam of anything people would dance to: rock, Latin,soul, funk,rhythm and blues. It was simply music you heard in a discothèque, which back then was probably just a black loft, hot with bodies.

This was a small, close-knit world and despite the basic decor of the first disco clubs, something else invariably filled the room: the dancers’ togetherness, their sense of redemption, their feelings of escape from a racist and homophobic reality. ‘More than anything, disco was driven by an underground idea of unity,’ says Vince Aletti, the first journalist to write about disco. ‘The manifesto was the music. Love Is The Message.’

Larry Levan was an early child of this scene. He danced in its clubs, he learnt from its originators, and he joined a growing band of DJs who were filling New York with thrilling, loving music. And later, in his own club, The Paradise Garage, as disco was declared dead he took it underground, nurtured and developed it and allowed it to take its first steps as something new.

HEAVEN IN A PARKING GARAGE

‘You have to un-learn everything you’ve ever experienced about clubs to understand The Paradise Garage,’ insists DJ and pioneer dance producer François Kevorkian, explaining what made this particular nightclub such a mythic inspiration for so many of the world’s greatest DJs, producers, clubs and dance labels.

The Garage was where, a decade or so after taking its first steps, black, spiritual underground disco reached its peak. It was quite simply the largest and most powerful expression of the original disco spirit. As disco became mainstream and occasionally moronic, it was at the Garage that the underground sound and the scene’s strong sense of community were preserved. Outside, insurance men in brown suits were knocking their knees to Abba, dreaming of the coke-and-celebrity-fuelled nonsense of Studio 54. Inside the Garage, the original disco family were continuing and amplifiying their tribal rituals. And at the centre was Levan himself, a DJ who enjoyed such a passionate relationship with the people on his dancefloor that they worshipped him more or less as a god.

‘This is the Paradise Garage in a nutshell,’ says New York DJ Johnny Dynell. ‘One night, Chi Chi, my wife, was bartending at the Garage. And, having worked at Danceteria doing the same, she couldn’t believe it when she saw these boys making everything so clean. They would take the garbage out and then wash and scrub the garbage can, then dry it, and put a new garbage bag in. She was in awe at the love these kids showed that garbage can. Because to these kids, it’s the temple. It’s sacred. This isn’t just a garbage can, this is a garbage can at the Garage. It’s very Old Testament. And for everyone there, it really was the temple. It was sacred ground.’

The Paradise Garage inspired an unparalleled reverence. It dominated gay New York’s dance vista for more than ten years, with only the Saint – which catered for a very different crowd – as a serious rival. For its members the Garage was a sanctuary from an increasingly cruel and voracious city, a role made poignantly necessary as AIDS cut through New York. Dance there and you were treated as an honoured guest, with a level of courtesy and respect that is virtually unheard of in clubs today. ‘You felt special,’ says Danny Tenaglia, one of many DJs inspired by early visits to the Garage. ‘You felt like you were an elite group, with people who were on the same level of understanding about music as you.’ In a drab district in south west Manhattan, it created a private world based on disco’s original ethos of loving equality. In stark contrast to the harsh city lights outside, the Garage offered freedom, compassion and brotherhood.

Dave Piccioni, owner of London’s Black Market records, then living and DJing in New York, was a regular at the Garage in the late eighties. ‘It was New York cut-throat money time,’ he remembers. ‘Everybody was sticking knives in each other’s backs. It was dog eat dog. Aggressive. Dealing, 60,000 people living on the street. It was a dog of a place to live in. And then you’d go to this little oasis, where people were really well-mannered and friendly to each other. You just felt completely comfortable. People of a like mind who shared something, and that was an open mind. America is a very narrow-minded place. The thing they had in common wasn’t just getting high, like it is here – it was much more than that. That was what was so great about it.’

Flyer for Larry Levan’s Birthday Bash by his friend Keith Haring

PREPARE FOR TAKE-OFF

You entered the Garage along a long darkened runway lit by tiny flickering egg-strobes. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to going up a ramp as much’, smiles DJ Joe Claussell, who today runs Body & Soul, the New York club founded on reclaiming the atmosphere of the Garage. ‘At the top was The Garage logo in neon. It was like going to church. Once you got up that ramp and paid your money, you were in heaven. Paradise.’

‘You walked up the ramp and you heard this ‘wooof, wooof, wooof, wooof’’ remembers Louis, another Garage regular. ‘And then, as soon as you got into the tunnel people would start this scream, and you knew you were going into somewhere special.’

In his evocative book Disco!, Albert Goldman wrote that ascending into the Garage made you feel like a character in a Kafka novel. ‘From overhead comes the heavy pounding of the disco beat like a fearful migraine. When you reach the bar, a huge bare parking area, you are astonished to see immense pornographic murals of Greek and Trojan warriors locked in sado-masochistic combat running from floor to ceiling. On the floor of the main dancing room are the most frenzied dancers of the disco scene; black and Puerto Rican gays, stripped down to singlets and denim shorts, swinging their bodies with wild abandon.’

Inside there were changing rooms, a chill-out area where movies were shown, a non-alcoholic bar, the large, beautifully-appointed booth, and the giant, relatively spartan dancefloor. In the summer you could climb through the cinema onto the roof, which itself was half the size of the club. Dancers would take a breather from their intense workouts and hang out under the stars among fountains, flowers and brightly coloured lights, watching the majestic New York night until Larry threw down another unmissable tune, perhaps ‘A Little Bit Of Jazz’ by Nick Straker Band or Spark’s ‘Let’s Go Dancing’, and there’d be a rush for the floor.

The Garage was located on 84 King Street in west SoHo in the echoing expanses of a cast-concrete parking garage. Levan was its pilot from the beginning, but the club was the creation of a tireless young clubber named Michael Brody. As disco grew to define gay life in post-Stonewall New York, Brody dreamt of recreating the atmosphere of its earliest clubs on a much larger scale.

His prototype had been 143 Reade St, set in a two-floor warehouse space which he ran from the summer of 1974 till it was forced to close in 1976. Here a gay and predominantly black crowd had gathered to sweat to the young Larry Levan’s increasingly exciting sonic experiments. ‘Reade St was very free and open,’ chuckles clubber Yvon Leybold. ‘I remember going there dancing topless. It was hot in there, but it was so much fun that you wanted to take your clothes off.’

Reade St gave Brody the confidence and experience to proceed, and proved his hunch that as a DJ Levan was exceptional enough to build a club around. However, the Garage would be an altogether more massive undertaking. He borrowed $110,000 from friends and relations, including $30,000 for sound equipment lent by his ex-lover Mel Cheren, founder of West End Records, but quickly found that this was a tiny fraction of the money he’d need to renovate such a huge space. He continued running it as a parking garage, but this was never going to generate the necessary sums, and parking cars all day left him with no time or energy for anything else.

The solution was to open a small fraction of the space as a club and enlarge it bit by bit. So the Paradise Garage opened in early spring 1977 with a series of ‘construction parties’, held in the Grey Room, what would eventually become the entrance area. For its first months, the club was just a raw space with an amazing DJ, the germ of a phenomenal sound system, a small but loyal crowd and a whole universe of possibilities.

Things grew steadily, until, in January 1978, Brody felt it was time for an official opening. He planned a grand launch party and invited the cream of Manhattan nightlife. Disaster ensued. Blizzards had been raging, delaying the arrival of a new sound system, which had spent several days sitting on a runway in Kentucky. And true to form, Levan refused to hurry the installation process, instead spending days incorporating it with the existing equipment and ironing out problems. This perfectionism continued right into the night of the planned opening, and even as thousands of people waited outside in sub-zero temperatures, the DJ refused to open the club until he was ready. Naturally, most of the waiting A-list clubbers stormed off. Those that were finally admitted found themselves in a vast club, not much warmer than outside, with plenty more glitches to meet them throughout the night. Few ever came back. As Cheren writes in his memoirs, Keep on Dancin’, ‘These queens never gave a disco a second break.’

Paradoxically, this failure was the defining moment for the Garage. Brody deeply regretted the club never held the attention of the A-list and he worked hard to entice the more upmarket (and mainly white) gay crowd. (He even at one time arranged free buses to and from the gay beach resort of Fire Island, 60 miles away.) However, in the long run their absence was the making of the club. Had the Garage opening gone smoothly, it may have ended up as chi-chi as Studio 54 or with the hi-NRG music tastes of The Saint. Instead, rather than being an instant hit with the in-crowd it was forced to grow organically, filling up gradually with dancers who came simply for Levan’s music.

TIME TO DANCE

In a city which usually decides a person’s importance by their money, their clothes or their race, the Garage became a rare place of equality. ‘One of the great things about The Garage was that it was very mixed,’ says François. ‘It was a place where everyone would mingle together – whether you were a superstar or whether you just happened to have a regular job. No heavy door scene. There is no alcohol for sale. The point of the club is dancing.’

Every weekend, regular as church, the club filled with people who came to shake their troubles away. But more than escaping the harsh outside world; they came to the Garage to feel close to each other. The atmosphere made them feel part of a huge, inclusive family. And this sense of communion was powerfully infectious. The club regularly welcomed stars like Mick Jagger, Diana Ross, Eddie Murphy, Boy George, Mike Tyson and Stevie Wonder. But when celebrities came to the Garage they didn’t draw attention to themselves the way they did at Studio 54, they dressed down and joined the crowd.

‘You didn’t know who would party there,’ recalls musician and songwriter Ray Reid of Crown Heights Affair. ‘Diana Ross, Calvin Klein, everybody came to the club. Russell Simmons tried to get in there. The common celebrities went to Studio 54 for the dressing up thing; that glamour, that little fuck parade. But everybody knew if you really wanted to party you had to go down to the Garage. Celebrities would go there in their jeans and be inconspicuous, and no-one would run up on them. You could party next to your number one hero. You’d just be minding your business and enjoying yourself.’

The majority of Garage regulars were far from wealthy; some could barely scrape together the price of admission. They were predominantly black and Latino, although the Garage was never an intentionally ‘black club’ as such. It was simply a place where, unlike most well-appointed New York nightspots of the time, skin colour was no barrier to admission. As Mel Cheren writes, it was ‘the one place that truly reflected the rainbow that had produced disco’s pot of gold. The potent intersection of rhythm, race and realness that had produced disco in the first place – black as it was gay, gay as it was black – all came together here.’

One thing was never in doubt: this was where you found the city’s most devoted clubbers: kids who danced for seven, eight hours, or more every week. They knew the records that were played, they screamed with excitement for their favourites, and they booed with bitchy contempt at visiting performers who didn’t cut it (including the young Madonna, who bombed badly when she first performed at the Garage). As Cheren writes, ‘There was no attitude here, no cliques defined by their muscles, no fashion victims, no A-list. These people were dancers.’ And this is what made the atmosphere at the Garage so electrifying – it was driven by the energetic input of its clubbers. ‘The intensity of the disco pyrotechnics was unlike anything anywhere. Venturing onto the dance floor was like swimming into an undertow – you were sucked into the vortex, and you surrendered, for hours at a time.’

FAMILY MEMBERS ONLY

This dancefloor singlemindedness was possible because only members and their guests were admitted. And as the club gained in popularity, fairly stringent measures were taken to ensure that its population of hardcore devotees was not diluted by an influx of curious onlookers.

‘The Garage was underground. There was no advertising’, explains David DePino, one of Levan’s closest friends and one of the few other DJs to have played at the Garage. ‘We were not an off-the-street club – it was a private, 100 per cent membership thing.’ Prospective members had to turn up in person and submit to an interview before they were accepted into the family. These membership days were kept virtually secret. Nevertheless, as DePino remembers, ‘so many people would line up at the door, there’d be a line round the corner twice.’

Initially the Garage only opened on Saturdays, and efforts were made to keep it almost exclusively gay. However, in answer to the growing number of women and straight men who wanted to get in, a mixed Friday night was launched which was, as people recall, much straighter and blacker. But the Saturday nights kept their reputation for being wilder and more explosive and straight guys would swear that they were gay to try and get Saturday night membership. Few succeeded.

For those who danced there, the Paradise Garage felt like home. It was run for the benefit of its members, and changes were made not with profit foremost, but with the impact of the party in mind. It was open during an unprecedented boom in nightclubbing and all around it businessmen were raking in the disco dollars. The Garage could have easily shared in this, yet its owner Michael Brody rejected commerciality as far as possible. ‘He could have made a fortune,’ says DePino. ‘But he was never money greedy. The party was first.’

Fruit, coffee and soft drinks were served free, as were lemon ices in the summer, while at Christmas and Thanksgiving clubbers were even served turkey with all the trimmings. ‘In the winter time we’d be baking brownies and popping fresh doughnuts and pastries,’ laughs DePino. ‘We’d be in the kitchen tripping our brains out wondering if we turned ovens on or not and then screaming when we touched them. Then we’d realise that Larry was pumping it, run out onto the dancefloor, and forget we were cooking in the kitchen, and all the muffins would be burnt. So I’d go up into the booth and say, ‘Larry, don’t play any more of our favourite records, we’re trying to bake brownies.’ Then we’d be back in the kitchen but he’d put on our favourite records and we’d run back up to the floor. Then it was like, ‘Get the fire-extinguisher, we’re burning all the muffins again.’ That’s the kind of thing that went on.’

There was no alcohol, a reflection of the serious focus on dancing. This also let the club escape the scrutiny of the notoriously draconian New York Liquor Commissionand stay open as long as it liked. Most of the dancers energised themselves with drugs, however, selecting from the era’s range of misappropriated chemicals: speed, poppers, cocaine, acid and angel dust, with newer confections like MDA and ecstasy creeping in as the years progressed.

It is an open secret that for the first three-to-four years – until the crowds grew too big, increasing the risk that someone would get hurt – the punch was spiked with acid, ‘In the early days, you took a glass of electric punch and you were going, boy!’ recalls DePino. ‘It was never enough to actually make you trip, just enough to make you have a fantastic time and not know why. We knew what was in it though, so we’d drink 12 or 13 cups of punch and we’d be flying!’ Surprisingly though, the euphoria on the dancefloor had less to do with illegal substances than it does in most clubs today. ‘It was the music,’ continues. DePino. ‘There were lots of kids there who did drugs and there were a lot of kids that didn’t.

The Garage opened around midnight and allowed admissions until 6.30am, after which the doors were closed and the party would continue until midday or later. As well as Levan’s music, there were live acts, and Chaka Khan, Dan Hartman, Loleatta Holloway, Gloria Gaynor, Al Hudson and the Jones Girls were all regulars on the club’s stage. One weekend Michael Brody booked Patti Labelle to perform for the princely sum of $20,000. A snowstorm on the ‘straight’ Friday night kept all but 500 people at home. But on the Saturday, raging blizzard or not, there were 4,000 queens there for her, some crying as she sang, and the club scraped through to break even.

DISCO CHILDREN

Disco was revolutionary. In its spirit it rescued the best elements from the swinging sixties and refined them for a new decade. As rock turned into a ‘progressive’ head trip, disco reclaimed its peace and love agenda, together with its original emphasis on dancing, and made them its own. Indeed, while disco is usually seen as glittery and mindless, it actually had a tangible political agenda – an enduring obsession with equality and togetherness. The 1969 Stonewall rebellion had opened up American gay life forever, black people too were enjoying greater equality. In the first disco clubs, as gay and straight, black and white, rich and poor danced together, the word ‘love’ in a hundred songs took on a forceful reality.

The Paradise Garage was perhaps the grandest expression of this. In its intimacy, in the way it treated its guests like an extended family, it was a direct descendent of the earliest disco clubs. It was from two places in particular that Michael Brody took his inspiration.

Opening on Valentine’s Day 1970, David Mancuso’s Loft had been a clear bridge between the decades, a place that would redefine clubbing forever. Mancuso filled his home, a Broadway loft, with balloons, friends and beautiful music played on an audiophile quality sound system. At this time nightclubs were the preserve of the jet-set, scenes of aspiration and exclusivity. The Loft showed that a club could be in-clusive, an interracial, pansexual celebration of humanity. With guests who shared a love of music and dancing, brought together by invitation and word of mouth, it was a professional house party. It would stay open, in various locations for the next 25 years.

In 1971 the teenage Nicky Siano opened the Gallery, the first properly commercial club to follow Mancuso’s inclusive, dance-driven blueprint. He hired the city’s leading sound engineer Alex Rosner to repeat the magic he’d worked for Mancuso, and armed with a similarly shattering sound system, drove New York wild with his soaring mix of music.

And, as DJs, Siano and Mancuso were also Larry Levan’s main inspiration. (He had brief affairs with each) and he never hid his obvious debt to his forebears: ‘Nicky Siano, David Mancuso, Steve D’Acquisto and Michael Cappello, David Rodriguez,’ Levan told Steven Harvey. ‘This is the school of DJs I come from.’

Lawrence Philpot was born on 21 July 1954 in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn, the son of a dressmaker named Minnie Levan. Her other children, a twin brother and sister were 18 when baby Lawrence arrived, so he enjoyed the attention usually granted to an only child. His parents never married and in later years he chose to take his mother’s name, becoming Larry Levan

Most of Levan’s teenage years were spent in the company of his lifelong friend Frankie Knuckles from the Bronx, also destined to become one of history’s most important DJs. The two met at a Harlem drag ball in 1969, while sewing beads onto a costume for a lavish queen known as The Duchess. They became so inseparable that people regularly confused their names. And as they danced across the city together, they were soon known in Manhattan’s clubs as energetic party catalysts. Their adventures started in a tiny gay bar called the Planetarium, but soon they were regulars at the Loft, where Levan was mesmerized by David Mancuso’s musical mastery. When Nicky Siano opened the Gallery, he recruited the two club bunnies to put up the decorations, set out the buffet and pop acid blotters into the mouths of arriving guests.

Siano also schooled the duo in DJing, as Frankie recalls: ‘He showed us how to work the equipment and taught us an appreciation of the music, how to put it together and what a song is supposed to do. Nicky was the first DJ at that particular time that came remotely close to making beats match, and what happened was that Larry pretty much perfected it after that.’

By 1971 they were making money as DJs. Knuckles landed a six-month stint at a midtown club called Better Days, and Levan’s job working the lights for DJ Joseph Bonfiglio, turned fortuitously into DJing. ‘I was doing the lights and the DJ walked out,’ he told Collusion magazine. ‘The manager, who was like a six-foot three-inch Cuban guy, said, “You’re going to play records tonight!” I told him that I didn’t have any records. “You’ve got five hours!” It was Memorial Day weekend. I went back to Brooklyn and borrowed records from my friend Ronnie Roberts, who had everything. I went back and worked three straight days.’

This was at the famous gay spa complex, the Continental Baths, and at first Knuckles refused to visit his friend in the Bacchanalian ‘Tubs’, as it was known, even though Levan was now living in an apartment there. When he finally set foot in it, he didn’t leave for three weeks. After Levan left, Knuckles became the Baths’ resident, playing there until its closure, when he, famously, moved to Chicago and forged house music.

Levan’s next great break came when he started dating Richard Long, a talented sound designer who had once worked on the door at the Planetarium. Together, the couple turned Long’s showroom, at 452 Broadway, into a club that became known as The SoHo Place. Levan, still only nineteen, built this up to bursting point. From here he went to Reade St, starting his long partnership with Michael Brody, and when this was forced to close promised not to play elsewhere until bigger premises could be found. These would of course be the Garage.

INSPIRED ANARCHY

‘The Paradise Garage was open for so long and it was so obviously and blatantly superior to anything else going on,’ insists François Kevorkian. ‘You had the best sound-system around, the most talented DJ you can imagine, with amazing records that no one else could get: things he’d made himself and things others had made exclusively for him.’

The Garage holds an almost supernatural place in the history of dance music, and it would be pointless to try and separate the myth of the club from the legend of its controlling genius. Larry Levan is regularly hailed as the world’s greatest ever DJ. Listen to this performance and you’ll get a hint of his power, a glimpse of the way he could turn mere records into a soaring, probing, energising narrative.

You may well be surprised to hear a few sketchy mixes, but surprise turns to excitement when you see the bigger picture –the connections he makes with the meanings and feelings of songs, the way he teases just the right moments from each record. The variety of styles and tempos. Levan’s greatness is proof that technical prowess is but a tiny part of DJing. Technically speaking, he was no match for the likes of Walter Gibbons or Nicky Siano or, indeed, most of the early disco-mixers. His mixing was slapdash, and he’d often prefer to slam something in awkwardly rather than seamlessly blend. What made him great was his sense of drama, his obsessive control of all aspects of his clubbers’ experience, and his heightened ability to transmit his personality through the very grooves of his records.

‘He yearned for more than technical perfection,’ writes Cheren. ‘He wanted inspiration. Ecstasy. He wanted to spin the way he lived – in inspired anarchy.’

‘Larry himself was a wizard when it came to DJing,’ says Joe Claussell. ‘But I don’t think many DJs today understand his philosophy. Everyone is still with the pretty mixes, making sure that it’s all on-beat but they don’t have a clue what it takes to present their music to a crowd.’

For Claussell Levan’s greatness came from his almost psychic understanding of the people on his dancefloor: ‘It was his combination of different music and the fact that he knew how to read a crowd, he knew what record to play at what time; he knew the crowd intimately and what record would move what part of the dancefloor. It was magical to watch.’

Kenton Nix, who produced some of the classics most closely associated with the Garage (including Taana Gardner’s ‘Heartbeat’), agrees. ‘He would have a feel of people’s records, he would read peoples’ minds. He was the puppet master and he controlled your emotions.’

Justin Berkmann, a Garage regular and later the DJ who envisaged the Ministry of Sound (originally based firmly on the Garage) remembers watching Levan standing in his booth, conducting the crowd as if he was controlling their very movements.

‘He’d go into the booth and say, ‘Those people over there aren’t dancing, watch this,’ recounts Berkmann. ‘Then he’d put on a record, and they would just go off. That’s how well he knew his dancefloor. After ten years, he knew everyone in the club and he knew what got each group going. That’s something very few people get. Most of the big DJs now are flying all over the world, and most of the time they go into a club and they haven’t got a clue what people want.’

François believes Levan was the first DJ to show that such a profound understanding between DJ and dancers was even possible. ‘To have a relationship with the crowd. It’s not larging it; it’s a lot more spiritual than that, and it’s something that’s life-long. Not just something that lasts for a couple of hours while you’re on drugs. That’s what the spirit of The Garage was about. Something that was so powerful, it actually changed your life, and let me tell you, it sure changed a lot of our lives.’

Larry’s idea of control went far beyond the music. Thanks to his different club jobs – from decorating the room and spiking the punch at the Gallery to doing the lights at the Continental Baths – he strived to make a visit to his nightclub a total experience. At Reade Street, where the dancefloor was in a refrigerated meat warehouse, he even used the temperature as a way of manipulating mood, letting the airless room heat up to extraordinary levels and then cranking up the cooling equipment. Frankie Knuckles recalls stepping in as the temperature dropped suddenly below zero. ‘I would go into the booth and yell at him, ‘Somebody’s gonna catch pneumonia, you can’t do that.’ And he’d just say ‘Miss Thing, you’re getting on my nerves!’ and throw me out of the booth.’

He also loved to work the lights. Although the Garage had a very talented light man in Robert DaSilva – who had also worked the lights at the Gallery and Studio 54 – Levan had a second set of controls fitted on a rail along the top of the booth. When the mood took him – when he was ready to take people for a ride – he would draw the console towards him and decant the booth of its occupants. It was like clearing the flight deck for take-off.

‘They used to do these blackouts and they would switch all of the lights out,’ recalls Johnny Dynell. ‘Exit lights and everything. Totally illegal, you can’t turn exit lights out! You couldn’t see a hand in front of your face.’ He would build the intensity to a peak and then let fly with an acappella or sound effect – one time Dynell recalls him playing the Wizard of Oz – before the system would crank up and – BAM! – he’d hit the crowd with another favorite. ‘Oh, man, it was fabulous. He would just take control,’ sighs Dynell.

Jellybean, Larry and a young David Morales in the booth at the Garage

PLAY ME A STORY

One facet of Levan’s performance which is all but lost today, is the use of lyrics. Disco was largely centred on real songs, and the words they contained were far from mere vocal decoration. The era’s messages of inclusivity, love and togetherness may sound banal after decades of repetition, but back then they were vitally important to people. Following his mentors, Mancuso and Siano, Larry rejoiced in telling stories with his music.

‘Larry was able to use songs – songs with lyrics – and he used those lyrics to talk to people,’ says François. ‘It was very common for people on the dancefloor to feel like he was talking to him directly through the record. ‘He built sets that were built on stories that went into each other.’

Mel Cheren had first-hand experience of this kind of communication. ‘Larry and I had our ups-and-downs. He did a lot of mixes for my West End record label, and we’d have a disagreement and sometimes we wouldn’t be talking. And if he was upset with you, you knew about it. If he was angry with me, he played songs that said, ‘Fuck you, excuse me’ – he actually had a record that said that.’ Other times, as Cheren recalls, Larry would use music to ask forgiveness after a fight. ‘One night we hadn’t been talking for a while, and I was dancing, and he was playing ‘Gotta Get You Back Into My Life’ and songs like ‘I Love You’. All of a sudden I turned around and there he was. He’d left the DJ booth and gave me a big hug.’

Levan explained his technique in Collusion magazine: ‘Out of all the records you have, maybe five or six of them make sense together. There is actually a message in the dance, the way you feel, the muscles you use, but only certain records have that.’ He went on to give an example. ‘Say I was playing songs about music – ‘I Love Music’ by The O’Jays, ‘Music’ by AI Hudson and the next record is Phreek’s ‘Weekend’, that’s about getting laid, a whole other thing. If I was dancing and truly into the words and the feeling and it came on, it might be a good record, but it makes no sense because it doesn’t have anything to do with the others. So a slight pause, a sound effect, something else to let you know it’s a new paragraph rather than one continuous sentence.’

MASTER OF SOUND

If Levan was a virtuoso, his instrument wasn’t just the turntables, it was the whole system, the whole room. Elements of the Garage’s sound system are copied to this day in clubs around the world. To most who heard it, it has never been bettered. Designed by Richard Long, it managed to recreate the intimate crystal clarity of Mancuso’s Loft on an unimaginably vast scale. Levan rejoiced at having this phenomenal instrument at his disposal and used it to the full. He became a master of the crossover controls, using these to cut out certain frequencies, to boost particular instruments, even to isolate particular words in a song.

He would spend hour-after-hour lovingly honing, manipulating and adjusting the sound system. Often, Richard Long would optimise the room’s EQ levels, only to come back and find Levan holding a screwdriver changing the whole thing around. Several times, with the club about to open, he’d insist on rewiring or repositioning speakers, making his disciples wait outside while he made perfect some tiny – but to him, essential – aspect of the peerless system. Klippschorn speakers, a quartet of JBL bullet tweeter arrays, a Bozak mixer: these were items of recently-perfected equipment that came together wonderfully in the Garage. And Levan would experiment ceaselessly, doing things like progressively upgrading the cartridges throughout the night from the most basic up to $150 Grace models.

‘Larry managed to fine-tune the sound over the club’s 10 or 11 years until it was so incredibly superior to anything else you ever heard,’ says Francois. ‘There has never been anything remotely close to it ever since. The Ministry system is a copy of what the Garage was 10, 15 years ago, but The Garage was never a static thing. Larry’d spend all these hours after the club was closed moving speakers around, changing amplifier levels and trying out different cartridges and other different things. It’s not just about building it, it’s about maintaining it, improving it, tweaking it and taking care of it. No one does that now.’

‘It was the antithesis of The Saint,’ says Sharon White, recalling how different the Garage sounded compared to the other great room of the time. The only DJ to have played both clubs, she told DJ Jaguar: ‘The Garage was all highs and mids, and The Saint was bottom and hard.’ Sharon makes it clear how much the club was inseparable from its DJ. ‘I was a resident at many clubs, but at The Garage I was considered a guest. We did special functions in the space or held the room for Larry Levan, but that was HIS house.’

‘He didn’t want the biggest sound-system and the best booth to fuel his ego,’ says David DePino. ‘He just wanted what he thought would be incredible for the people. Speakers got moved around every week. Lights got changed every single week to give a different atmosphere. And if it didn’t happen, he’d go crazy and fire people. He never wanted it to become stale, he never wanted it to become regular. He always said, ‘The people won’t come. They’ve gotta know that it’ll be different.’ And they did. People never came into a stale place.’

On occasion, Levan’s attention to detail would even mean a pause in the music. ‘I’ve seen nights where everyone was rushing around to get things open and they’d forget something like cleaning the mirror-balls,’ recalls DePino. ‘It’d be 1am and Larry would run onto the dancefloor with a ladder to clean all six mirror-balls. The record would run out and everyone would be standing there waiting. Not booing, nothing mad… just waiting. And when he finished, he’d go up and put the next record on and people would go mad again. They loved that. The fact that even though he was the DJ, he’d spend half an hour cleaning all the mirror-balls. That would never happen today, DJs are such divas!’

DJ BRAVERY

As well as his fierce controlling instinct, Levan had a dark self-destructive streak. In his personal life this manifested itself in tireless drug abuse. In the club it provided an aura of intense drama. Each week was a lesson in improvisation, an unscripted performance on the emotional level of high opera. What would be served up on a particular night depended on any number of variants, with only one thing certain: Levan gave good show. He could shock you. He could thrill you. He could amaze you. He could even appall you. The only certainty was that he would surprise you. He was an audacious programmer. His high-octane, seat-of-the-pants DJ style was the aural equivalent of a highwire walk across Niagara Falls.

Rarely has a DJ’s mood been broadcast quite so powerfully to a dancefloor. By the records he played and the order he played them in, you could tell whether he was feeling good or bad, whether he’d just had an argument, whether he was tired or whether he was ready to party.

David Morales, who was lucky enough to play at the Garage as a young DJ, says Levan’s mood swings were dramatic. ‘He could be shit for seven hours and he could take 15 minutes and kick the shit out of you, and that made your night! That’s what it was about. There was nobody that was able to do that.’

He could drive dancers wild with desire or work them into a fury of frustration, often at the same time. Sometimes he would simply disappear from the booth. Occasionally, he would play an hour of dub reggae, or the same record three times in succession. Once (while sitting on a rocking horse), he had the whole club dancing to nothing more than a few of his live keyboard doodles, unaware that the record he was accompanying had finished minutes ago. Occasionally he would collapse in a stupor; somehow always managing to keep the party – if not himself – going. One time François remembers him putting on a movie instead of music. ‘What are you gonna do? There’s two and a half thousand people there and you suddenly play Altered States. That’s the kind of freedom that I think people need to know exists.’

‘He had attitude,’ remembers Cevin Fisher, another DJ/producer whose formative years were spent on the floor at King Street. ‘He would leave the DJ booth and the record would end and just spin around. Who knows what he was off doing… Actually, we all know what he was doing! And he would come back into the DJ booth totally trashed, lift the needle off the record and start it again. People got off on that.’

DJ Harvey, who played with Levan on his 1992visit to London, recalls how perfectly he could tease an audience. ‘He’d be playing one of his favourite records and just when it was getting to the best bit, he’d turn the system off, put the record back to the beginning and let it play again. He could do that three or four times and then not let the record play in full until an hour later. So people have been waiting for their favourite bit of that record for quite some time and they go barmy to it.’

‘There was no norm for Larry at The Garage,’ says David DePino. ‘It was his home and he didn’t follow no book. He didn’t care what happened. The freedom and the nonchalance he had up there was what made 2,000 people come together as one.’

Sharon White lived close to the Garage and was often called to cover when Levan hadn’t appeared. But she would always stick around when he finally did. ‘I’d go down and start the room up and then at 8 o’clock in the morning he’d come sliding in, fresh from wherever, with a smile on his face. He’d always come with gifts because he’d know attitudes would fly. Then the night would start all over again. You wouldn’t leave when Larry arrived, because that was when the party really started.’

‘Everyone has certain talents, natural abilities,’ adds Mel Cheren. ‘Some people are born with the talent to paint; some people are born with the talent to write. Larry had the talent for music and he could take 2,000 people and make them feel like they were at a house party.’

GARAGE MUSIC

‘Garage’ is one of the most mangled terms in dance music. The term derives from the Paradise Garage itself, but it has meant so many different things to so many different people that unless you’re talking about a specific time and place, it’s not much help. Part of the reason for this confusion (aside from various journalistic misunderstandings and industry misappropriations) is that the range of music played at the Garage was so broad. The music we now call ‘garage’ is a very distant relative, evolved from only a small part of the club’s wildly eclectic soundtrack.

The Garage opened just as disco was enjoying its greatest mainstream success, and the music played there initially would be broadly categorised as disco by modern ears. Yet as Eurodisco took hold and the sound grew ever more formulaic, Levan took his sonic palette in the other direction. ‘It’s boring when it’s the same thing all the time,’ he would say, arguing that dance music should have as much contrast and diversity as possible. So he married solid gold disco classics, burnished at the Gallery and the Loft, with disparate elements that took in rock, pop and weird electronic oddities, as well as soul, rap, funk and post-disco releases. The Garage was Yazoo’s ‘Situation’ as well as Loleatta Holloway’s ‘Love Sensation’. The Garage was Steve Miller Band’s ‘Macho City’ as well as Gwen Guthrie’s ‘Seventh Heaven’, Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ as well as Diana Ross’s ‘Love Hangover’ and Chaka Khan’s ‘Clouds’. The Garage was Grandmaster Flash and Eddy Grant. The Garage was MFSB, Marianne Faithfull, Talking Heads and the Clash. In short, he played anything good, accepting no boundaries of style, tempo or ‘coolness’.

Levan could even take records that every other DJ in the city had long been playing and make them recognisably his, ‘Love Is The Message’ being the most famous. The fact that it all converged so seamlessly and effectively is testament to his personality. ‘Garage music was kind of breaking the rules,’ says DJ Danny Krivit. ‘It was what he felt like playing. It was really about having no boundaries.’

Levan took this to extremes and was a determined manipulator of his clubbers’ tastes, pushing unusual, sometimes bizarre records on them and making them work through his immense force of will. One such record was Yoko Ono’s sonic sonnet, ‘Walking On Thin Ice’. A rock mantra in which Yoko’s dissonant eastern wail weaves around a wall of heavy percussion, it was the song John Lennon had been working on the night he was murdered. Levan loved it. Another example was Pat Benatar’s ‘Love Is A Battlefield’, one of several extremely unlikely Garage anthems. ‘Someone said he could never play that there,’ chuckles Danny Krivit, a key New York DJ. ‘That was reason enough for him to play it – and make it happen, too.’

And he would just as easily champion a commercial record as the most obscure underground cut. Dave Piccioni remembers him playing ‘Fascinated’ by Company B, a real electro-pop commercial record. ‘It was tacky in the extreme. But, fuck me, he played that for 20 or 25 minutes and you could not help but get into it. He thought, ‘I like this record and it’s gonna sound great in the club, and I don’t really care if you like it or not.’ And he got away with it because he had talent and creativity.’

‘People would be gagging,’ adds DePino bluntly, ‘but eventually they accepted it. He was the bravest DJ I ever knew.’

LEVAN’S LEGEND

There is no doubting Levan’s magnificence as a DJ. His famous inconsistency was the payoff for his bravery in exploring the power and the freedom he had in his booth. In truth, however, his legend grew from several sources besides his actual performances. Remember, he had the city’s most intensely dance-oriented nightclub at his command, a fact which greatly magnified his genius. Even more importantly however, he was a shining example of the new possibilities of his profession. This was a time when DJs were first emerging from their booths and entering the recording studio as producers and remixers. They started having the power not just to tailor their music live for their dancefloor, but to record original material and have it released commercially. With the support of a growing network of independent dance labels and with the inevitable attention of key radio DJs, they could even use their clubs to push records (including their own) into the mainstream charts. Few DJs expressed this new power as well as Levan. More than anyone else at the time, he showed where the DJ profession was heading.

He was a powerful tastemaker. Knowing they’d hear the best and latest tunes at the Garage, the city’s other key DJs would attend religiously ‘Two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon after the night before, he’d have a thousand people sitting on the floor,’ recalls DePino. ‘He’d be playing these obscure wild records and they’d be snapping their fingers and moving their heads around. Then he’d run down and dance, then run back up to change the record.’

‘After several years of being open, the word got around that this was the place where you had to break your record,’ adds François. ‘So everybody would bring Larry their tapes months and months ahead of time. He had access to the very, very best music months in advance.’

His friendship with radio DJ Frankie Crocker (the airwave equivalent of Barry White, known variously as ‘Lover Man’, ‘Fast Frankie’, ‘Chief Rocker’ and ‘Hollywood’) gave him even greater influence, to a level unprecedented for a club DJ. A record could go from the floor of the Garage one night and find itself on the platter at WBLS the next. After that the rest of America would join the party. It became an informal industry test centre. Veteran producer Arthur Baker recalls bringing ‘Walking On Sunshine’ by Rocker’s Revenge to the Garage for Levan to play. The following day, Crocker gave it its first airing on the radio. With such influence, Levan naturally shot to the top of the list of DJs when it came to receiving new product. One record promoter pointed out, ‘He’s someone to whom top record industry people hand-deliver new albums. When a record goes here, we know we’ve got a hit.’

But Levan rarely dwelt on his growing commercial power. Instead, he concentrated on increasing the pleasure of his clubbers and extending the range and possibilities of his music. The result was a striking combination of artistic freedom and commercial influence. By the early eighties, just 10 or 15 years after modern DJing was born, Levan was everything a DJ could be. No wonder he remains the central inspiration for almost every New York DJ above the age of 50. David Morales, Danny Tenaglia, Cevin Fisher, Junior Vasquez, Danny Krivit, Kenny Carpenter, François Kevorkian, Joe Clausell and many, many more. They all readily acknowledge their debt to Larry Levan. So many clubs too, have been based on the Garage. The Shelter, now Vinyl, home of the well-known Body And Soul nights, was founded more or less wholly on preserving its memory. The mighty Sound Factory too was a conscious copy of the Garage and at its early best came close to the same feelings of community.

And besides all this, Garage lore has been made more enduring by the fact that Levan died at the tragically young age of 38, after suffering heart failure (Levan had a life-long heart condition, though his legend-affirming drug habit can’t have helped). Music mythology loves nothing more than a good-looking corpse, which lends Danny Tenaglia’s description of Levan as the Jimi Hendrix of dance music yet more aching resonance.

DISCO’S REVENGE

Another crucial reason that Levan enjoys such a prominent place in the history of dance music is that his club presided over its most creatively fertile period: the death of disco and its rebirth in a hundred forms. As the eighties dawned and the mainstream was twisting disco into a camp cartoon, the Garage was paving the way for its many offspring to take their first steps. House and techno would soon emerge from the experiments of several innovative young DJs (Levan and his great friend Frankie Knuckles included). And the silicon revolution would make bedroom producers out of a generation of clubbers. Already in New York there were hectic collisions of underground energy and music. Hip hop and electro were blossoming onto record, funky new wave was rising from punk’s corpse, and after Bob Marley’s passing in 1981, reggae was about as popular as it would ever get in Gotham City. As disco boomed and busted, DJs were forced to search that little bit harder, that little bit longer to find the right records to feed their dancefloors. Levan was already the master of this magpie approach. Naturally the Garage became a key link between disco and the musical forms which evolved from it.

Levan’s role in this was to transfer his eclecticism to the studio ‘If you could see my collection, you’d know I like all music – you’d think it belonged to four different DJs,’ he explained. ‘And because of this, I found myself taking things from here, from there – reggae, pop, disco, jazz, blues – and using lots of things as a base to take things from.’

His first studio sortie, in 1978 was, bizarrely enough, to remix a novelty disco record by Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster called ‘C Is For Cookie’. The following year he remixed Taana Gardner’s debut single ‘Work That Body’, but his real breakthrough was the international hit ‘I Got My Mind Made Up (You Can Get It Girl)’ by Instant Funk. The record went Gold and suddenly Levan’s studio career snowballed. His most prolific period was in the early-to-mid eighties when he created a series of classic productions many on Salsoul and West End. These included his dense, hypnotic remix of Gardner’s sensual disco workout ‘Heartbeat’, Jocelyn Brown’s anthemic remake of ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’, Edna Holt’s funky ‘Serious Sirius Space Party’ and a string of productions and mixes for Gwen Guthrie including ‘Ain’t Nothing Goin’ On But The Rent’.

His late seventies remixes – such as Cognac’s ‘How High’ and Dee Dee Bridgewater’s ‘Bad For Me’ – sound much like the regular disco mixes of his peers. But by the turn of the eighties, he was experimenting with drum machines and synthesizers and, like François Kevorkian around the same time, forging a new electronic, post-disco sound. This was epitomized by his group Peech Boys – Levan, keyboard player Michael de Benedictus (who had worked on ‘Heartbeat’), and vocalist Bernard Fowler – and their digital-funk excursion ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’. It took Levan a year to complete the final single mix; he constantly tested the latest version in the club, before going back into the studio to make adjustments. When finally released it was a significant breakthrough; one that gave him worldwide acclaim in the dance community (it was even a minor pop hit in the UK).

‘Everyone was influenced by the Peech Boys record,’ says Arthur Baker. ‘When those handclaps started whipping around the place… oh, man.’ Fired by this new sound, Baker produced ‘Walking On Sunshine’ by Rocker’s Revenge. ‘ ‘Walking On Sunshine’ was specifically made for the Paradise Garage,’ he says emphatically.

With reggae making its presence felt, Levan had started absorbing dub as an influence. His interest in its warping basslines and luxuriant wide-open spaces came, no doubt, from the people he encountered while doing remixes for Island Records. Jamaican producers Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, and in particular the engineer Steven Stanley, were to exercise an important influence on his tastes. He started airing many of the tracks coming out of Nassau’s Compass Point studios – records like Will Powers’ ‘Adventures In Success’, Ian Dury’s ‘Spasticus Autisticus’, and a succession of Grace Jones singles.

Levan would use echo and reverb to dramatize records in much the same way that Jamaican sound system DJs had done. The flitting handclaps on ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ were an approximation of a reverb trick he would often do live. And on the Garage’s superb system, certain dub-inflected records sounded simply awesome.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

But the Garage couldn’t live forever. In 1987, with Michael Brody tiring from AIDS and with some ugly financial conflicts within the club, when the lease expired he made no effort to relocate the Garage. The club finally closed on 26 September 1987. The last days were a truly bittersweet affair.

Judy Weinstein, one of Levan’s closest friends, now manager to Frankie Knuckles and David Morales, recalls the loss people felt: ‘It was a very sad moment when the club closed. It was devastating to both Larry and the 5-10,000 people that were members. But in retrospect it closed probably at the right time for where music was going at that point.’

‘It wasn’t until the last few weekends of The Garage that Larry really realised that it was definitely closing,’ remembers Mel Cheren. ‘Somehow he thought that Michael was going to come back and say that he’d found another space and everything was OK, but he didn’t. The last few weekends he finally realised this and began playing like it was a funeral march.’ However, Levan eventually saw it was wrong to bow out in a petulant sulk. And from then on the music was incredible.

The Paradise Garage ended its eleven-year house party with an amazing closing event that ran for more than two days. An estimated 14,000 people came through the doors, it was rammed to bursting throughout, and Levan played music as if his very breath depended on it. People came from all over the world to be there. Artist Keith Haring, whose graffiiti paintings decorated the club, flew in from Tokyo to attend. Regular Garage performer Gwen Guthrie, whose biggest hits were also produced by Levan, was carried on-stage garnished in diamonds and furs. ‘You know why I’m wearing these?’ she asked the ecstatic crowd, ‘Because you bought them for me.’

After the marathon session, the exhausted crowd gathered at the front of Levan’s DJ booth on a dancefloor littered with ‘Save The Garage’ stickers, and pleaded with him not to go. But the sands of time had finally run out.

‘There can never be another Garage,’ reflects Judy Weinstein. ‘It was what it was. There was a time for it and that’s what it was. ‘There are all these clubs that fancy themselves to be the next Garage,but when I go to The Ministry, or places of that magnitude, with their huge sound-systems and their claims to be the best club in the world, I realise that nothing could ever come close to the warmth and the feeling you got from The Paradise Garage. It wasn’t just the sound, it was the whole thing, and there will never be anything like it again.’

KING WITHOUT A KINGDOM

The closure of the Garage, though long anticipated, had a deadening effect on New York clubland. ‘It was like somebody had died in my family,’ says Charlie Grappone, whose Vinylmania record store was almost an annex to the club, built on selling, as so many customers requested, ‘the tunes Larry played last night’. Then, on 28 December, only two months after the club closed, Michael Brody died. In the last five years, AIDS had been claiming more and more of the club’s family and now it had taken its creator.

For Levan himself, it was all simply devastating. He knew that without the Garage he would never achieve that same level of communion with a crowd. ‘He was now a king without a kingdom,’ says Mel Cheren. ‘Even before it closed, he had entered into a steep decline in which his DJing was running second to his drug use, which now included heroin. Friends began to view the DJs actions as a kind of slow, deliberate suicide. In the final year, he was relying increasingly on the club’s alternate DJs, David DePino, Joey Llanos, Sharon White and Victor Rosado.

‘When Larry knew The Garage was going to close, he freaked,’ exclaims DePino. ‘He went on a self-destructive binge. He took drugs to spite people, to hurt them. The more you would say, “Larry, please don’t do so many drugs”, the more he would do them, right in your face.’

He put his records in storage but missed the payments and the stirage company sold them. After the closure of the Garage, whenever Levan was booked to DJ, his friends had to trawl the rummage sales to buy back his collection, just so he could fulfil the date. Danny Krivit remembers finding Levan’s unique acetate remix of Syreeta’s ‘Can’t Shake Your Love’ on a record stall and realizing that most of the other records there were his also.

Frankie Knuckles recalls a night in 1992, when Levan paid a visit to his Friday residency at the Sound Factory Bar. David Morales was there too, and they stood together in the booth, playing records and having a ball. Larry was moved to confide something in Frankie: ‘He said, ‘I’m really proud of you and what you’ve done with your life. I hope you use what I’ve done with my life as an example of what not to do.’

Shortly before his death, Levan went on a successful two-month tour of Japan with Mel Cheren and François Kevorkian. He was treated like a star, a living legend. ‘Larry went into a set of Philadelphia classics which was just so poignant,’ recalls François. ‘It was so emotional because the message of all the songs said he was really hurting. We all felt it at the time, but I think he pretty much knew he was dying and all the songs he played were so deeply related to how fast life goes. He played Jean Carne’s ‘Time Waits For No One’ and The Trammps’ ‘Where Do We Go From Here’, and I realised that this was one of the best moments of greatness that I had ever witnessed in my life. It was so obvious, so grand, such a drama to it that you just knew.’

Larry Levan died two months later on 8 November 1992. He died of endocarditis, an inflammation of the lining of the heart, which was exacerbated by his excessive drug use. He was 38. Nearly 800 people attended his memorial service, friends, colleagues and Garage kids alike. He was, as DePino puts it ‘the last DJ who could touch people in that way’.

JIMI HENDRIX OF THE TURNTABLES

Now that the world is so full of DJs we need a few more Larry Levans. We need people to remind us that playing records is fun; that up in the booth you have a joyous freedom which you should revel in. DJs who make no mistakes are just not taking enough risks. There’s no safe road to paradise.

‘Larry was awful, he was too loud, he’d leave big gaps and let records jump, he’d play ballads in the middle of the night,’ laughs DJ Bruce Forest, one of his contemporaries. ‘But that was only five per cent of it. On the other hand, he had an atmosphere nobody will achieve ever again. He made it seem like he was playing records to you in his living room. His rapport with the crowd was immense. If you went to the club one week and a light bulb was red and the next week when you returned it was blue, people would say, ‘Larry changed the bulb this week.’

David Morales remembers his wilfulness: ‘Sometime the audience would get uptight with Larry – but it was his home and he did what he wanted to. If he wanted to go off on a Samba kick for an hour, that’s what he did. But make no mistake he was my hero and a genius. It’s only now that I fully realise just how much of a genius he was. Now that I’m older and a little wiser I can understand what’s required to entertain an audience. It’s more than just a tune. It was how he handled the system, how he talked and related to people. How he was able to work them up into a frenzy with them standing in the same spot.’

‘He was like the Miles Davis of the trumpet, the Jimi Hendrix of the guitar, the John Coltrane of the sax,’ reflects Joe Claussell. ‘He was the man of the turntables.’

Johnny Dynell says Levan showed him what DJing was really all about: ‘When you’re creating that magic on the floor. When they’ve thrown their hands up in the air, and they’re totally lost and abandoned into this other world. And you’ve taken them to that other world. That’s what DJing is. Before that I was just playing records, which is not DJing at all.’

‘There’ll never be another Larry Levan, just like they’ll never be another Paradise Garage,’ concludes David Morales. ‘There are a lot of other great DJs and awesome great clubs, but there’s never been a DJ that commanded an audience as strongly as Larry Levan.’

In recalling Levan, most people are also thinking back to their nights in his club, for many the best times they can remember. But equally, for those who were close to him, memories of the Garage are inseparable from memories of Levan himself. ‘He was very special,’ says Mel Cheren. ‘He was a genius. I miss him a great deal. So many people do. But you have to go on and keep things going.’

‘Larry was adventurous, he was daring, he was a risk-taker,’ reflects Frankie Knuckles. ‘He was a dark character, but a lot of young kids gravitate towards dark sounds, feelings, moods. He was very, very funny. He was always the odd man out, but he had something about him that automatically drew people to him. People were just drawn to Larry like a magnet.’

Another close friend, David DePino sums up what Larry brought to the world. ‘He was able to get 2,000 people to feel the same emotion and peak at the same time. He could make them feel like one. They loved him for his insanity and his genius. I miss him. I miss him very much. It was just like going over the rainbow every Saturday night.’

This is a lightly edited version of the sleevenotes to the album Larry Levan live at the Paradise Garage (Nuphonic), which in turn was an extended version of the Paradise Garage section of our book Last Night A DJ Saved My Life. Thanks to DJ Jaguar and Lewis Dene. And a big shout out to the Nuphonic diaspora.

Larry Levan and Keith Haring’s Party of Life, celebrating Larry’s birthday in 1984, from The Vinyl Maniac fanzine, courtesy of Charlie Grappone.

Eddy Grant defined the frontline

Eddie Grant arrived in Britain in 1960 on a mission to show the country its musical future. He was taking bands into the studio and writing and producing hits with them when he was still getting pocket money from his parents. In The Equals he gave us Britain’s first multiracial pop band, challenging the dour monochrome of his adopted home with the defiant optimism of ‘Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys,’ and the timeless groove of ‘Funky Like A Train.’ A slew of ’60s and ’70s projects pushed soul, ska, reggae, soca and even rock into new shapes, giving black British dance music firm foundations. As a musical magpie, he combined styles from across the Caribbean, Africa, the UK and US, pioneering a cross-cultural approach that would underpin decades of future British sounds. Under his own name he’s a chart star with a barrel of international hits your mum knows: ‘Electric Avenue,’ ‘Living on the Frontline’, ‘Walking on Sunshine’. He’s also a relentlessly experimental producer, creating flagrantly unique tracks like ‘California Style’ and ‘Timewarp’, that are sampled, stolen and re-edited to this day. He launched his own labels Torpedo and Ice, and opened perhaps the first black-owned studio in Europe. At one stage, to capitalise on massive export success, he even bought his own pressing plant. Eddy Grant is an artist who mastered the industry rather than let it ever control him.

Interviewed by Bill, 16.10.02 in Stamford Hill, London

Describe what it was like for you arriving in Britain.
It was December 1960. I was 12, and when I landed it was cold and wet and I can still remember the exact smell and look of the place. The very first thing that grabbed me was the smell of coal burning. It was asphyxiating because I was used to wide open spaces. Everything was grey and black. England had two colours in its decorations: brown and cream, and they permeated everything. Cars were black or very dark colours. Men wore dark suits. Dustmen wore suits, so I thought, ‘This country’s gotta be happening! A guy’s a dustman and he’s wearing a suit!’ You never saw anyone in a suit in the West Indies unless someone was dead or very important.

My dad took us to Burleigh Road in Kentish Town and said ‘Okay, we’re going to our new home now.’ I could see this house with about 50 doors and I thought ‘Jesus, my old man has really arrived.’ But he said come this way, down to the basement and I found out what a basement was. It was cold, damp, and there was this lino on the floor, and he showed us into this room, which was gonna house the four of us, and my father and mother would sleep in the front room. That was a culture shock for me. I never conceived we’d be living underground.

Where did your parents come from?
Guyana. My mother’s from Plaisance and father’s from Berbice. My dad came over in 1957 and my mom a few months after that. Three of us three years after that. I’m the eldest. My father was a musician, primarily. He also mended bicycles and cars. Here, he worked at Blackman’s Motors in Kentish Town. He also had his own little garage that he would go to work in after work, and before playing gigs at night, so my father held three jobs.

What was his music?
Dad played the music of the time, which was Harry James, some jazz, Caribbean and all of that. Like all the musicians of that time, he played with different people. In Guyana he played primarily with a band called the Luckies [The Lucky Strike Orchestra]. When he came to London it was a similar situation. He’d play society parties, anywhere the band got booked, in clubs, pubs… There were pubs like the Tally Ho in Kentish Town that were very popular for music, trad jazz in particular. It was a very esoteric time, you had West Indian musicians playing with English musicians in all kinds of formats. Guys like Harold Beckett, Joe Harriott, Ivan Chinn. Iggy Quayle, the keyboard player, was a contemporary of my father and played in the same bands. Harry Beckett played with Herbie Goins and the Night Timers, but he was like a gun for hire. Herbie was around when the Equals, Jimmy James, Geno Washington, Georgie Fame, Zoot Money, The Gas, a whole circuit of bands. It was called the ‘Gunnell circuit’ because the Gunnell Agency controlled it, which was the Flamingo, the Manor House, Eel Pie Island, The Witch Doctor in Catford, they were the local gigs.

Did you learn music from your dad?
My dad was always interested in me learning to play. I can remember being four or five and taking my dad’s trumpet under the bed from the night before and making the most unbelievable racket, and he would come down and grab it off me. I learned the embouchure of the trumpet very early on by watching him. Once I came to England I didn’t touch the trumpet much more, though I did play bugle in the Boy’s Brigade. The drum was my instrument there. My dad tried to send me for piano lessons, the teacher was a woman called Mrs Philadelphia, Her first name was Prophet. She was a great teacher. My brother Derrick couldn’t absorb it as quickly as she would like so she would take a ruler or pencil and hit him across the knuckle. And I got totally pissed off because nobody hits my brother, so I started skiving off. My older uncle who had charge of us in the house found out, and he beat us so bad! We never went back to piano lessons. So that was the end of my musical education.

What did you listen to in Guyana?
Everything. Guyana is a totally multiracial society. In Guyana I’m hearing Indian music, African, western, American, Latin and Dutch on the radio at night, calypso from Trinidad. I heard everything that there was and listened to everything. I had a very eclectic base and my music shows in that.

When I came to England even more so. There was African, and early bluebeat, and British artists were copying Americans and doing their own version of it. Lonnie Donegan was a particular favourite of mine. I really liked trad jazz, I loved Kenny Ball & the Jazzmen, Acker Bilk, Monty Sunshine, Humphrey Lyttleton. Because I played trumpet as my first instrument, I was really into Freddie Hubbard, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie.

So at the same time as listening to trad and modern jazz, I listened to pop, the Shadows, the Beatles, and then the Rolling Stones who I listened to a lot, because they were playing real hot rhythm and blues from the American standpoint. I soon realised they were playing Chuck Berry’s music so I made a beeline for him, although he was in prison at that time. When he came out I saw him with the Nashville Teens at the Finsbury Park Astoria [later the Rainbow]. That was the moment that changed my life. I suddenly saw my mission in my life. I saw something in Chuck Berry on stage and thought I had a chance as a musician.

Why did he have such an effect?
There were very few people that can play like him. It’s accessible and accessible to your spirit, and he’s very articulate. He writes little stories so it’s like calypso. Early on in my life, apart from my father, my first hero was Mighty Sparrow. When I heard Chuck Berry it was similar. Little stories being told. But I still spoke West Indian, so I would have to learn that vernacular. I had a West Indian soul and I would now have to find an English soul. Chuck Berry delivered the path.

What were your first impressions of England?
I saw it as opportunity, because my dad had worked really hard to bring us here, so I had to make the best use of it. I made English friends very quickly so I could get into their homes and learn how they speak. That was a conscious thing. I read a lot. I had to get my head into English racism. I had to get to understand why they were like they were. They reacted to us in a different way and I’d never met that way. I was planning to be a doctor, train here and go back to Guyana so I thought none of this would matter once I’d gone, anyway.

Where did you go to school?
I went to Acland Burghley, an incredible school. It produced a lot of very talented people, I played in the school jazz band with Derek Griffiths, a great actor and musician, Maurice Lavey, Danny Dukowski, Gus Ibegbuna. All the teachers were great role models and there were no black teachers there, either. It was 99.9% white pupils. I was in the vanguard of the black invasion of the school, so to speak. All the black kids did well there. My brother Rudy was a fantastic footballer, brilliant. He played with all the great players of the time, the Bowles and Bests and Marshes.

Were there any notable role models for you in Britain?
I have to call the name of [St Lucian-born pop singer and sound engineer] Emile Ford. When I came here I saw Emile and he was black and he was in a position where people looked to him as a star. [Actor/singer/songwriter] Kenny Lynch also was a star. In a funny kind of way they didn’t belong to the community because they’d been appropriated by the white society. But nevertheless they were black people and they represented a vanguard. So I knew it was do-able.

There was the injustice of race, though. England was quite inclement to its foreign children. I’ve seen great musicians give up because of their race, and great artists, too. Although I’ve done well I am the one out of hundreds and thousands that gave up on the way, like the one salmon who made it up the stream to mate.

They seemed to accept what was given to them. When the time came for me, which was with the Equals, I knew it wasn’t going to be like that for me. We were going to be the first multi-racial band of its kind and, as such I had to establish a whole new modus operandi.

Did you know the early black London DJs like Count Suckle and Al Needles?
Suckle played the Roaring Twenties with his sound system. I became very close with him many years later. Suckle moved on from just being just a DJ to owning the Q Club in Praed Street, where I played early in my career. It was the premier black club in London. That and the All-Star Club which was owned by Ken Edwards in Artillery Passage in Liverpool Street. They were the two main black clubs in London during the ‘60s.

I played all of them, every ballroom, every church hall, every barmitzvah in this country. All of them. The Equals were a very popular band. Money was good. And the food, too! We played youth clubs, we played Blytheway Mansions, we played York Court.

How did you get your first break?
This friend of mine Georgie took me to meet a rasta one night. At that time rastas were very serious men and you didn’t see them around London really. He was called Roddy and he said he knew Admiral Ken, a disc jockey who owned the All-Star Club. He was just about to go to Ethiopia but he took me to the All-Star the night Stevie Wonder was appearing. It was jam-packed, black with people. Afterwards he took me to meet Ken [Edwards] and asked him to give me an audition.

We came down and he loved us. There was us, the Rick’N’Beckers, and Heart & Soul. All black bands. Rick’N’Beckers played more ska-oriented soul, Heart & Soul were total soul, and we played anything from James Brown, Rufus Thomas, Sonny Boy Williamson, Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, really eclectic. We had no bass guitar and no organ and no saxes and you couldn’t play a black club without at least an organ. But we went into the All-Star and mashed it up! Just pure energy. Our first gig supporting was Wilson Pickett and he came on and he was awesome. He had a pick-up band. Sometimes they’d use Herbie Goins. We gave those guys a good run for their money. One night when we played with Solomon Burke, the crowd didn’t want to let us off. Every major black artist that came to England we supported.

How did you meet the other guys in the Equals?
I had just made my first guitar in woodwork in school. I’d started to play a little. My father taught me some chords and some guys who lived in our house helped me. One day a guy called Andy Vassilliou invited me to come to his house for a jam session. Very good musician. Exceedingly good. We’re jamming in Mrs Hall’s room, who was John Hall’s mum, who became our drummer. A fantastic atmosphere. I said to John one night, this is all well and good, but it ain’t going nowhere. Do you want it to be a group? ‘Yeah, I’d like it to be a group’. Well let’s put it together, let’s look for a singer and guitarists. So there was a guy called Eddie Faisems, an Indian guy who could play the guitar better than me, the Gordon brothers, they were at Barnsbury School but had left to go to work. I was the only one still at school. Pat Lloyd came one night. Eddie left because he was into his girlfriend. And then we were five.

Was it a conscious choice not to have bass and organ?
I decided early on we were gonna be different. Being the musical head, I never encouraged having bass in the live line-up. We recorded with a bass guitar, Calvin Fuzzy Samuels became our regular bassist on record, and there’s only one song we recorded without it. Not having saxes or organ hastened our demise. Ken Edwards our great benefactor kept on at me ‘Yout! Why don’t you get a little organ or sax in the band an’ be like the ‘Beckers, bwoy’. We used to rehearse upstairs at his club and one day he’d locked us out because we wouldn’t get a ‘little organ or bass’! I could see through the keyhole other equipment that wasn’t ours, but we never did find out who replaced us.

How did you get discovered then?
Gene Latter, he was a popular singer in Europe, he made me angry when he said he could dance better than James Brown at a time when James Brown was my God. But I didn’t know he lived next door to me! We were rehearsing one night doing ‘I Won’t Be There’, which I’d just written. There’s this knock at the door and this guy says, ‘Who’s that song?’ I said ‘It’s mine.’ ‘You didn’t copy it from Rufus Thomas or Wilson Pickett or anybody?’ ‘No, it’s mine.’ He said, ‘How would you like to record it? I’d like to make a record of it. I know somebody who would take a listen.’ And he took us to Eddie Kassner at President [transatlantic music mogul who also managed The Kinks]. He took us into the basement at Kassner House, 25 Denmark St and set us up among the sheet music. Eddie came down, liked it, and by the time we left, Gene was our manager and Eddie Kassner was our record company.

What motivated you to write in the first place?
My good friend Gus. He said there was this guy Bob Dylan and he writes his own songs, I’m sure you can do that. You can play chess and you know science, I’m sure you could do it. Then a guy called Lee Shepherd who became our manager said to me, ‘You should really write songs, you have that kind of intellect.’ But I had no way of knowing how. I started humming things and eventually a couplet started to come and I’d write them down. Nothing significant happened until a girlfriend gave me a tape recorder. Then I started really seriously. I’d write ten songs in an evening.

I started writing songs with other people in mind. I remember writing ‘Hold Me Closer’, which started as the A-side of ‘Baby Come Back’ and ended up as the B-side, and offering it to all my friends at the time. I eventually gave it to Lincoln, who was always a good spar for me in the Equals. We became really good friends. ‘When’s your birthday, do you wanna a piece of my song?’ It wasn’t till later I realised what value a song could be.

The Equals were big in Germany before the UK.
Yeah. Equals used to do weekend gigs in Germany and we took over there in a really big way. ‘Baby Come Back’ was a hit 18 months before it was a hit in England. And remember, I was still at school. The other guys were content to get up and play all over the place but I could really only go out at weekends and when we went abroad my dad would come with me. We’d get off the boat at Bremerhaven, drive to Bremen, do a big club, do the clubs around north of Germany, Hamburg, Gütersloh, then we stretched out into Dortmund, the Ruhr, Stuttgart, Berlin.

Were you still at school when you had a hit?
We got a hit in Germany in 1967. I didn’t leave school until after ‘Baby Come Back’. When you talk about boy bands, the Equals would have to have been the first! There was just not anything like the Equals. You remember I talked about England being two colours brown and cream, the Equals were the first to dress brightly. We would be multi-coloured people in our multi-coloured clothes. We loved it. It was strong. From that we went wilder and wilder till eventually I wound up with the white hair.

How were you received in Germany playing as a multi-racial band?
Never had a problem. The Equals, because we were not girlish, we got big respect from guys, We could play Club 51, the rocker’s heaven, and we played places like the Shoreline Hotel [in Bognor Regis], the first youth hotel.

Was that like a YMCA?
No. It was a number of different caverns, which could all house different groups, one playing this bay, another playing that bay, and more women per square foot than you can imagine. You had kids taking pills, everybody was on pills [amphetamines]. Dozens of kids sleeping outside on makeshift beds. How that was allowed to carry on in that time, god only knows! Great environment.

Back in London did you get to play Flamingo?
Yeah, that was standard fayre. We played Tiles, where Jeff Dexter DJed. Twisted Wheel in Manchester, Top Hat in Newcastle. We played every gig in this country. Sherwood Rooms in Nottingham. We took over from Geno Washington because we had the added benefit of getting a hit record. I said to Geno, ‘It’s okay mashing it up in the clubs but you gotta have records.’ He was big, he was god. To upstage Geno, we had to be doing very well. I got the right education in the music business, and I took it very seriously. I learnt the studio inside out, I learnt all the instruments, I learnt to dance. I learnt about property though my father.

When did you sign with President?
It would have to be ’65. I made ‘Train to Rainbow City’ [by The Pyramids] in ’66.

You suffered a heart attack very young, didn’t you?
Twenty-three! The heart problem precipitated my departure. You don’t know who is who until something like that happens. I saw the light in so many regards. That was January 1st 1971. it knocked me out for a year and other people had to come into the band. I got the vision for the future.

So what happened to the Equals after that? What was your vision?
That wasn’t to do with music it was to do with people. The greatest thing in this world is love, it blinds you to everything. And the first love of my life was the Equals. I would’ve died for the Equals. I didn’t go out to clubs, I wasn’t a drinker, I wasn’t into drugs, I wasn’t into girls. I just wanted to play music and these guys were my instruments, they gave substance to everything I thought about. I could visualise incredible things for the band and for the music.

You had to leave the band but you continued writing and producing.
I thought the illness would kill me, so I had to do this and come out the band and hoped the guys would understand and allow me to do the thing I loved the most which was to make the records.

You built our own studio early on, didn’t you?
My manager Lee Shepherd was an ex-actor, RADA, and involved in property in a big way. He had a brochure from an estate agent on his desk. I noticed one that had a property in Clapton with a coach house on the corner. It was 25 grand which was a hell of a lot of money then. I went to look at it; it was a mess, falling apart, a dump. Lee said it was a bad buy but I bought it anyway. I bought it in 1973 – exactly at the time when there was a depression in the property market! It took 28 skips to clear the rubbish out. Eventually I got to the point where I could call it a studio. Bought some equipment from Dave Robinson [of Stiff Records] and some from Manfred [Mann], who had owned the Maximum Sound Studio in Old Kent Road.

So I built the first black-owned recording studio in Europe. It opened late 1974, early 1975. I got Frank Aggarat who became the first black engineer in this country, through giving up a very lucrative job as a technician to do this job and make the dream a reality. We really tried things. And because we were new and totally idiotic, we did things and they happened.

Did you use Coach House for everything?
I did, in the early stages. Anything that required more than eight tracks was done outside. Things like the Pioneers I would have started pre-production at Coach House and then gone over to Maximum Sound. Some of the Equals would have been done at Coach House and then gone on to Manfred’s studio. I’d know if I heard them because Coach House sounded really different to anywhere else. It helped me to establish myself through that sound, you know.

The Pioneers’ ‘Racial Segregation’

What was the inspiration for ‘Funky Like A Train’? It’s quite different to anything that the Equals had done till then.
Well you know the music can never be one way, because I was always looking for something else. So experiments continue and occasionally when you experiment you find a germ of an idea, a germ of a song, and that stands out from the rest. ‘Funky Like A Train’ just happened to jump out of the group of tracks because I had to approach it in a special way.

It’s mainly based around a clavinet, right? And Ron Telemacque on drums?
It’s the two of us on drums! Like James Brown. I think Lincoln played bass, Ron was on drums, I overdubbed drums, I overdubbed all the other things, the synths and so on. For me the most remarkable thing about it is the actual sound of the train and the synthesis of the voices to make it sound like a train. Even though I did it and I know how I did it, it can still fool me.

Yes, but why are trains funky? Where did the concept come from?
The whole idea is that the funk of a train is quite magical. It sounds like absolute nonsense but when you actually check it out it’s like, ‘Oh yeah I see what’s happening’. The lyrics came to me in a certain kind of way.

Did they think you were barmy when you brought them the song?
You don’t know how much shit I got with regard to the Born Ya and Mystic Syster albums. In the end the record company were asking me every other second, ‘Is that the synthesiser? Is that the synthesiser?’ It was early days for synthesisers and people could only see it making those warbly sounds that some bands had used it for.

How did you get into production?
I was always in the role of making music. When Eddie Kassner signed us he got a guy in called Tony Clark, a Decca producer, who didn’t like the music and wouldn’t stay. I remember going in there and having to sit with Adrian Ibbotson the engineer and he said ‘Okay, who’s producing the session?’ I’m looking at him and I don’t know what it means. I say, ‘You better ask Mr Kassner’. ‘Mr Kassner will only come in and check at the end.’ And so I became the producer of the Equals. After a while it became my band, if there was a piano part, I played it; if there was a bass part and Fuzzy wasn’t there, I played it. In the early years Mr Kassner took all the credit and later he gave me a half credit, but long-term he acknowledged I was the producer of those records.

Marco [aka Eddy Grant] ‘I’m Coming Home’

Tony Morgan & Muscle Power ‘Racial Segregation’ (note similarity with ‘I’m Coming Home’

Coach House Rhythm Section ‘No Such Thing’ (basically a later dub version of ‘Racial Segregation’)

Did you get producer royalties?
No, no, no, no! No. We didn’t have a proper hit until ‘Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys’. When I wrote it, I had to demo it myself. I put down all the tracks and I remember playing it to Mr Kassner. He listened to it and he said ‘What the fuck is that? A hit, my ass!’ I said ‘I wanna do it.’ ‘Not at my studio with my money.’ I went into ABC Studios in Portland Place and recorded it. When I came back to play it to him I said you’re not having your name on this right? ‘That’s right.’ I played it to him, he says, ‘Edward, my son, you’re making a great mistake.’ I got Lee Shepherd in to help promote it. It was one of the biggest records I’d ever had. It was released on November 17th. Hendrix was dead and immediately thereafter I nearly went.

Tell me about The Pyramids
When the Equals wasn’t happening, I used to go in the studio and experiment with ska. In my father’s house in Kentish Town was a guy I called Georgie but was actually called Roy Knight, who had just joined a group called the Bees, who were backing Prince Buster on a national tour. These were the guys who would become the Pyramids. I went out with them on a few gigs. I was about eight years younger than Roy; I’m a little kid hanging out. Buster wore this little pork pie hat and I got the job of holding Prince Buster’s hat before he went on stage. He’d do a song or two first and then he’d say, ‘Yout’!’ and I’d come on stage and give him his hat, he’d put it on and the whole place would go crazy.

I asked Roy if he would organise with the guys to come and do a session with me. We went to the studio on the basis that I make I will get some royalties whenever it sells. So this guy who’s taking them in the studio is really a schoolboy earning 2s 6d a week pocket money! Remember I told you I can write ten songs in a night very easily? Well, I was about to demonstrate it. We’re in the studio, an idea comes out. Off they go. Anything out of my head. Another song. There are other guys from the Equals there. My brother Patrick and I created a party atmosphere and I started to talk about the things that were happening in Jamaican music. I started talking about the black women in Skaville, bad people that lived in Phoenix City, even though I didn’t know where Phoenix City was. I’d never been to Jamaica. My only interface with Jamaican culture was hearing the sound system playing in the clubs or having parties next door.

We did maybe 15 or more songs. And they’re done, one take. This guy Jimmy Spencely, the second engineer, he came up at the end of the session and says ‘Love the session Eddy but what about the money? The studio costs, the tape. The money is ten pound a man.’ But I don’t have that kind of money. ‘Well, you better find it.’ Any half of them could have killed me. Mr Kassner came down, paid for the studio and the guys. Then when they’d gone, Kassner says ‘Play me the tape. You did all of these today? Jesus!’ So we signed a deal, and I was so glad to have got out of the shit that I didn’t care what happened.

We were in Germany a few weeks later and Eddie Kassner turned up. ‘Edward, something very serious has happened, you know those songs you did, I put them out and people can’t get enough of them.’ I called the band and said if you want you can become the Pyramids; change your name from the Bees. And so they were out there earning more money than we were. ‘Train to Rainbow City’ was the first British-produced ska record to chart. The next record I made with them was ‘A Wedding In Peyton Place’, which again used my voice. I did an album called the Pyramids with them singing. The original session all appeared on an album called Club Ska or something.

What about Symarip?
The guys in the Pyramids eventually ended up being called Symarip, which is Pyramids spelt backwards. ‘Skinhead Moonstomp’! I wasn’t involved in the track but I owned the song; they sold it to me. There are two songs in my entire life that I own but didn’t write, one is ‘Skinhead Moonstomp’ and another one called ‘Why Build A Mountain’.

You produced a couple of all-black rock bands. Sundae Times and Zapatta Schmidt
Sundae Times was Conrad Isidore, Wendell Richardson who went on to sing with Osibisa, Calvin Fuzzy Samuels, who played on all those Equals hits and then went on to play for Crosby Stills Nash & Young and everybody else. They were the greatest group of black rock musicians in the world. There was no band that could touch them. One night Stephen Stills saw the band and he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. So he nicked them. He broke up my band, a band I loved and recorded. They were my alter ego, we played funky soul music with the Equals, and hard rock with Sundae Times. I bought them equipment, I bought them a van, I roadied for them, even when the Equals were selling millions of records I was out on the road with them.

I produced them. I gave them pieces of my songs but I don’t think I wrote anything for them. The album Us Coloured Kids was recorded in about ’68 or ’69. When you listen to the playing, it’s awesome. Conrad Isidore is the baddest drummer I’ve ever heard, period. His brother Reg Isidore played with Robin Trower and his youngest brother Gus plays with Seal. Musical family.

The end of Sundae Times was that the two of them went off with Stephen Stills and played with all those rock’n’roll artists. And Wendell took all the equipment and the van and formed Osibisa. The music industry is so racist, though. Osibisa is the greatest afro-rock band in history, I was meant to be their first producer. Tony Visconti did it instead, and maybe Tony Visconti can produce David Bowie, but he can’t produce Osibisa. So all that great music came out sounding like a little tin cup rolling down a hillside. Kofi is my percussionist when I play live now.

What about Zapatta Schmidt?
I produced them. But they were a bona fide band. A great band too. Zapatta Schmidt and Sundae Times were the two great black rock bands There were not many at that time. When Stephen Stills broke up Sundae Times, I had no one to play with, so when I saw Zapatta Schmidt playing upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s, I thought, yes here’s another great bunch of musicians. So I made a record with them. They were Tony Zak-Edmonds keyboards, Ronnie Telemacque drums, he’s now playing with the Equals, Marcus James, who’s now married to Marcia Barratt of Boney M, then there was Vince Clark the singer and Joe Blanchard the guitarist. All black. They could rock the shit. I used them as my backing band after Vince left them, on my first gigs I did as a solo artist.

When was your first solo record?
My first solo record was made in 1972 as Eddy Grant. It came out on Torpedo first. That’s the album which nobody knows about, the Hello Africa album. It’s just called Eddy Grant. Then it came out on Ice in 1974 in the Caribbean.

I want to ask you about ‘Nobody’s Got Time.’ Why did you come back to it so often. You’ve managed to reinterpret it in so many different ways.
I did it on the very first album, Hello Africa, with a guitar synthesiser. I played that sound on that and on ‘Georgetown Girl’. That album was done in ’72. Then I did ‘Nobody’s Got Time’ again which came out on Ice, the version with the harmonica, part one is the vocal and part two is the harmonica. Part three is ‘Timewarp’. I’ve also done ‘Nobody’s Got Time’ with the Equals on Mystic Syster. They’re all different. That’s what remixing is really supposed to be about. If you’re going to revisit the song you must give it some degree of originality.

And ‘California Style’. Two different records in one tune, what was that about?
Well as I’ve grown and got better facilities, my work has taken on a different shape, but the central feature is that I’m a Caribbean person who has influences from the world, and that Caribbean-ness must stand firm in that firmament. If you listen to the lyrics of ‘California Style’ you’ll hear it talk about me basically. All the music of me. You’ll hear the way in which I’m prepared to stretch and groove and with very limited resources quite successfully. The music of ‘California Style’ and ‘Nobody’s Got Time’ and all the others is me being able to stretch the boundaries of a song, either sonically, rhythmically or lyrically.

What about the second half of it?
The jam? Since it came out there has not been a Trinidad party where that’s not been played. There has not been a successful record out of Trinidad that has not incorporated some part of that record. It’s like a well that people go to for inspiration. That song stands till today.

Were you aware your records were so popular in New York?
I had no idea. After having all the success in the Caribbean, Trinidad in particular, [Ensign Records founder, then at Phonogram] Nigel Grainge had arranged for me to go over to New York. I hadn’t been successful in the States since ‘Baby Come Back’. None of my music, as far as I knew, was meant to be here and yet people knew it. All the guys who were playing in the gay clubs, people like Larry Levan, Jellybean Benitez, all those boys were playing my music. I thought this was incredible, but it was not on a level that could take me into the charts; that didn’t happen until much later. Here I was the underground, so I came back to the UK with a renewed vigour. I’m getting through. It’s not massive, but I’m getting through. People like Arthur Baker were getting my records, my brother sent stuff over to him.

I met Sylvia and Joe [Robinson] at All-Platinum Records [they later launched Sugar Hill], and a bunch of other people. When I finally got through to Epic and Columbia there was this guy called Vernon Slaughter in black promotion and he championed me to that company. He told them, ‘If you wanna know what’s happening it’s this’, and he threw ‘Walking On Sunshine’ on to the table. Eventually they signed me. I went to LA and was a guest of my friend Mike Parrish who took me to meet Stevie Wonder. Stevie wanted to record ‘Walking On Sunshine’ with Aretha Franklin but it had fallen apart. Of course Arthur [Baker] did it, Bill Summer also did a version.

Tell me about ‘Timewarp’
I’d made Nobody’s Got Time again. It’s obviously a track I love. Something about that track fascinates me, and every time I make it I find something else and I add something else. This time I’m playing around and I’m starting to hear an instrumental. So I got the synthesiser and I started to play. I thought it was alright. Then everybody who heard it told me how brilliant this track is. Anyway, we put it out as the B-side of ‘Nobody’s Got Time’ and everybody flipped the record and all the gay clubs were playing it. All the Larry Levans were playing it. They were using it for catwalks and fashion shows. So I thought surely this has got a life of its own.

Not only had it refused to die, but I went to Xenon in New York one night after having been to the Paradise Garage and I heard a wall of sound playing ‘Timewarp’, ‘Nobody’s Got Time’ and ‘Walking On Sunshine’ and they were like absolutely new records. I couldn’t imagine that’s what I had made. Xenon really was like a wall of sound, so many different speakers, and it imbued these records with a whole new set of dynamics. It stunned the hell out of me and gave me a whole new focus. From then on I started to concentrate very heavily on the bottom end of my records. The synth bass, I must’ve been one of the very first people to use it, that bass that’s on ‘Timewarp’ it’s only now that people are using that sound on their records.

What about Nigeria? You spent some time out there, didn’t you?
Nigeria was like Trinidad for me. They both came at a very important part of my career and they afforded me the celebrity and money to be able to do other things that transported me to another level. I’d been successful in Nigeria with the Equals in the first configuration in the ’60s. I couldn’t believe that I would ever be more successful than the Equals were. It happened in Nigeria, so much so that I ended up recording in Yoruba, two albums for Nigeria specially which were immensely successful. Tunes I’d had originally done in English and lengthened. ‘Wipe Mon Fe E’ which is Say I Love You and that was 18 minutes long. One side of the album. I loved the record. It was a moment in time for me and Nigeria. We were selling so many records into Nigeria, I bought a pressing plant – the British Homophone pressing plant in New Cross. I was manufacturing so many records for myself and shipping out to these places that I thought it would make sense to own my own factory,

So did you meet Fela?
I did interface with most of the other artists at the time, like Sonny Okosun who really introduced me into Nigeria. But I didn’t come into contact with Fela at the time because he’d just been beaten by the army.

Did you tour in Africa?
No. Although The Equals went to Zambia at the end of it all. In ’71 and ’72.

When did you leave the UK?
November ’81. It was time. I’d promised myself when the time came I’d know. I’m not one for the cold weather. It was a particularly cold winter and I was driving my daughter down to school at Parliament Hill and my brother’s car, going down the hill, wouldn’t stop. It was going straight for the crossroads and I turned to jam on it onto the kerb. And I thought no, leave the country right away. It came to me like that. I told my wife I was going out there to find a house to fix it up and then left quicktime. Not many days after.

Mind you, when I left I lost all my baggage with all my songs for my next album. When I got there I didn’t have a studio, nothing. No clothes, no songs. A German record company were threatening to sue me over non-delivery of my album. I had to build a studio quickly. I got one in about six weeks, and the album was Killer On The Rampage which would spawn ‘Don’t Wanna Dance’, ‘Electric Avenue’, ‘War Party.’ That album was the quickest flash of recording. I went there in November 1981 and by the end of 1982 the album was out.

What motivates you as a songwriter?
To tell a story in a short time in a way that nobody else would, that is the ultimate for me. That’s why I like songs like ‘War Party’, ‘Gimme Hope Joanna’, ‘Living On The Frontline’. They would be called protest songs, but in a way that nobody else would protest. Always just to do something slightly different, because slightly can be a whole heap in musical terms. The difference between G and G sharp is only one little step but it’s a whole heap in terms of music.

Strange Things Happened To Richard Norris

To celebrate the publication of Richard Norris’s excellent memoir, we’ve exhumed this brilliant 2010 interview from our capacious vault. In this wide-ranging interview, we cover lots of ground that Richard writes so well about in Strange Things Are Happening, from his teenage punk band, the Innocent Vicars, through to Jack The Tab with Genesis P. Orridge, The Grid and his solo project Time & Space Machine. A vivid account of clubland and beyond (the wizard’s sleeve).

What thing are you most proud of?
The thing that I’m most proud of is generally just the ability to keep making records really. Looking at it as a long haul rather than instant gratification is the thing that I’m proud of and I think the way I make records now has definitely got that in mind. I’m aware of current trends but I’m thinking a little bit like what they’ll sound like in twenty years’ time as much as two weeks’ time. In terms of music, probably ‘Floatation’, The Grid’s first single, I would’ve thought would be up there just because it was quite a timely record in that it was sort of the peak of Balearic Ibiza period but just managing to kind of marry John Barry with Café Del Mar was quite an achievement. More recently, I think one of my favourite things has been the mix of ‘Roscoe’ by Midlake which, in terms of the Wizard’s Sleeve, is probably the one that, if we were going to do it again, we wouldn’t change at all. [Laughs]

How do you make sure the machines that you use don’t force you to make music their way?
I think there’s two parts to that. When people come round to my studio they’re quite surprised because I haven’t got racks and racks of gear. I only use very very minimal bits of equipment so my first thing is therefore melody and ideas rather than, ‘How does this computer’s internal logic work or how do I turn the reverb off?’ Also, I’ve been working on making a record and I’m writing the whole thing on just the one sound, which is just a quite, cheap Fender Rhodes copy, which is quite neutral. With modern technology you’ve got unlimited sources of sounds that you know that every time you do put up a sound it can lead you in different areas so I’m trying to pare it down to this one noise at the moment.

On the other hand, I like the machines talking as well so it’s like a bit of both. The thing I like the most is the bit where you can hear that it’s humans and machines, so it might be a very stark and very motorik rhythm but it’ll have a very human melody. That’s probably my favourite thing about music really, like Neu! where it sounds very machine-like but it’s actually quite human as well.

Do you always know when you’ve made a hit?
I don’t think so. I always think I’ve made a hit [laughs]. But yeah, I am an eternal optimist. When we [The Grid] did ‘Swamp Thing’ which was such a big hit, the record company said, ‘Right, well the last one’s got to number three so the next one’s got to be number one’. So we were going in to make a record with the pressure that it had to be number one. And you can’t really write like that and I think that if you do write about music thinking that it’s going to be a hit, it’s never going to be because it’d be just too contrived.

Do you think that’s because of who you are because I’m sure that someone like Stock, Aitken and Waterman would just knock them out, because that’s what they did.
Oh yeah, I think so. For me personally, it’s more difficult to make pop music than it is to make leftfield music but that may be just me, I’m sure Stock, Aitken and Waterman would tell you the opposite or Elton John would say the opposite. But I don’t know, I think because of the changing nature of the music business and also how I think about music, I’m not that interested in having a hit, but then success and a hit doesn’t necessarily have to be the same thing. Our [Beyond The Wizard’s sleeve] mix of ‘Roscoe’ was a hit to me.

Well, hit as in a song that has legs rather than necessarily getting into the charts.
I think you know when to finish, definitely. That can be quite hard if you’re working on your own, as I was doing with The Time & Space Machine record. There’s a natural period when you’ve done it and sometimes – particularly with remixes – if you do something and the record company come back and say, ‘Ooh, can you just change one little thing?’ It’s quite hard because you’ve kind of done it and the arc of it has gone to beginning, middle and end and you’re like, ‘Well, I can’t really…’

Why do you think DJing leads so naturally into producing and remixing?
The bit where it’s great is when you are remixing and then can go and play it out. I remember playing things out where the new T Bar is downstairs, they’ve got a lovely Funktion 1 system and just playing a few things on that before people were in the room and just hearing this great sound and how it’s going to work on the dancefloor really did affect what I did with the records. So it’s kind of hand-in-hand.

I mean, I started off aged fourteen playing guitar and shouting in a kind of Buzzcocks type band and so the music bit came first before the DJing. I’ve never really put myself up technically as an amazing DJ. I know how to do it but I’d say I’m much more a musician than DJ. They go together because of the process. If you are out and playing all the time and listening to other things and being in that environment and then you can bring that into the studio. And that kind of energy that you get on a Saturday night if you can bring that into the studio on a Tuesday morning then that’s great!

You said you were in a band at fourteen, what was the band?
We were called the Innocent Vicars.

Where did you grow up?
In St Albans and we did a little single and got my dad to drive me up to London, and it was the first time I’d come up to London. I’d kind of read about Rough Trade in the back of NME but I’d never been to any of them… So we stopped off at Rough Trade and they took half of the records and paid us money out of the till straight away so we paid for the whole pressing really with one stop at Rough Trade. And it was quite intimidating that shop. But, you know, they were great.

Then we went from there to the BBC and took the records to John Peel and just went up to the desk and asked to see him and he came down, took it and played it the next day so [laughs] so from then on I was like, ‘Right, this is what I want to do’. I think part of that was it was quite an interesting Undertones-y kind of record, but also because there was a little period of time where if you were really young and were writing and putting out records, it was really really encouraged by the generation above. There was a St Albans label called Waldo’s and they had bands like The Tea Set, The Bears and The Bodies and that became Bam Caruso Records which is the psychedelic re-issue label which I worked for later on. I remember going around to see them and they were really welcoming. As a little kid you thought they’d tell you to eff off but there was a definite period – I don’t know if it was particularly PC to encourage the kids? It was very open. It was lucky we hit that thing, I hope it’s the same for anyone that’s fourteen and making music. I hope the avenues are open like that. Because that was it for me after that, I knew what I wanted to do.

What happened to the rest of the Innocent Vicars?
Bloody hell! I don’t know actually! I think the drummer Cali looks after Nick Drake’s estate. The rest of them, I’ve got no idea. I haven’t heard from them in a long time. I have tried to track them down on numerous occasions. But I also found out that there’s another band called the Innocent Vicars in America who did a funk album but I’ve never found it. I’m wondering if this record actually exists because why would there be two bands called the same name when it’s such a ridiculous name?!

How did you wind up at Bam Caruso? Was punk your formative influence?
Yeah, pretty much. Just the excitement of it. There’s two things really. One was the DIY bit of it. But the other thing was the romanticism. Malcolm McLaren is looked upon as a bit dubious really but I like how he always seems to have a story, he has a romantic vision for everything. I really like that. I was always much more a Pistols person than a Clash person because of that. I just like the ideas he was bringing to it. Putting odd things together that didn’t really work, as he did later on with lots of other projects. I like the idea of DIY and of something dramatic.

I got into Bam Caruso through Waldo’s, run by this guy Phil Smee and Cali (who was the drummer in Innocent Vicars). Phil’s done a lot of sleeves for Ace and Charly; he did a lot of Elvis Costello records, designed the first Motorhead logo. He’s an amazing record collector. I used to go in the school holidays and work for him. He’s got this big house, there’s probably more records than furniture. I don’t know how many thousands. We used to sit there all day just making up cassettes of disco. I remember acquiring someone’s mobile disco collection and just sitting there all day making disco cassette tapes. We’d invent genres like ‘cosmic cowboy’, which was psychedelia but it had to have a slightly trippy edge to it. Phil invented the word ‘freakbeat’ which is basically mod gone a bit wrong. It was the most idyllic apprenticeship for 19 year old trainspotters. It was perfect. It was psychedelic university. Probably the most formative influence of my career was Phil. He was a very, very generous sort of character. Just allowed me to do what I want. We had a magazine called Strange Things Are Happening, which I was really encouraged in.

So after you were in the Innocent Vicars, were starting to produce in your bedroom?
Mainly guitars and little amplifers and…

TEAC four tracks and things like that?
Yeah a bit but I don’t think I even got that far. I used to get old radiograms from jumble sales. I used to get those and take the speakers out and weld them together and do different things with them. I used to do tape experiments with two tape recorders, very primitive double tracking.

Was that inspired by Cabaret Voltaire?
Pretty much. There was a record on Waldo’s called ‘X. ENC.’ by Nigel Simpkins, which was the same sort of period as Cabs. In that they cut up very old records and certainly Cali and Phil when they made tapes they would put in spoken word bits, I got really interested in that from then. By the time My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts came out I was fairly aware of using spoken word and stuff like that but that then was a big step for me. Even today there’s a strangeness about it that’s really appealing and it’s got a darkness but it’s got a funk to it as well. If there is one record that is most influential, I would say it’s that. It’s a fairly obvious one for people coming from sampling and stuff like that. But it was Phil and Cali that inspired me more than Eno.

What was the link between that and Jack The Tab?
Well we were writing this magazine Strange Things – it was a slightly more cult and fan-based version of Mojo. There’d be comics and books but anything that was slightly towards ‘60s psychedelia. I went to interview Genesis P. Orridge in about summer of 1987, ’cos we found out he was a fan of Bam Caruso and psychedelic records. Previously I thought he was some kind of strange Alastair Crowley nutter. I didn’t really think of him as being someone who was into the sort of records that he was. So we went to interview him about it and he was fascinating. I wasn’t a big Throbbing Gristle fan – they had a slight love/hate relationship with the press. But he was a real enthusiast. He introduced me to things like Martin Denny and he was really into Tiny Tim and he was massively into psychedelia as well. In terms of things like exotica, it hadn’t really surfaced yet and he was massively into that. He had a great dark sense of humour that was obviously being lost on people. People thought he was a po-faced mad magician or something. So we went to interview him and he said, ‘Have you heard of acid house?’ and I was like “No! but it sounds great… psychedelic dance music. Brilliant! Let’s do it.” He hadn’t heard any records either, he had just heard the words “acid house” because I don’t think there were any records then? There probably were some records. X-Ray’s ‘Let’s Go’ was probably earlier but we hadn’t heard anything. We just thought, “That sounds amazing, let’s go into a studio next week.”

So we went into a studio in Chiswick – it was probably September ’87 when we went in, there just happened to be this guy, Richard Evans, who went onto become the main engineer at Peter Gabriel’s studio years later. There was an Akai S950 and an Atari computer. I bought a load of people from Bam Caruso and Genesis brought a few of his mates including [Soft Cell’s] Dave Ball which is the first time I met him. We just sat there with piles of records and loads of videos and tapes and stuff and just put it all into the computer. And we had a rule that we had to record and mix a track in an hour. This guy was so fast on the computer and there were 12 of us in three rooms, including children and a dog and stuff and people sort of splicing a bit of tape over here and finding a bit on the VHS and throwing it all in. And everything was first take. There were a couple of keyboard players and so we just bunged it all in. And ever since, I always thought everything takes too long in studio because I was used to making records in an hour, which is such a weird concept these days. But it was great! It was just an amazing thing. So we made this record which we thought was acid house and by the time we’d finished it we’d heard some acid house. So we put out this one single which incorporated elements of an Adonis track, ‘No Way Back’. That was the first one we’d heard and by then we’d started hearing them and then we started going to Shoom just a bit after that.

Who’s ‘we’?
Me and Genesis P. Orridge, we all used to go to Shoom. And the first person we met was Andy Weatherall, walking down the stairs. Who very proudly showed off his Psychic TV tattoo which I think he’s since had covered up. And ever since Gen thought he was the King of Acid House because he thought he invented it. I really think he thought, ‘These are my people and this is my time’ and in a way, in his mind, it was. But I don’t know if anyone else would’ve felt the same. I remember everything was very kind of loved up at the time and he sent in his picture for his Shoom membership card wearing a T-shirt with “Hate” written on it and Jenni Rampling wasn’t very impressed. Didn’t quite fit into the peace and love manifesto [laughs]. We used to go down there every week. Lots of people couldn’t get in and we’d make sure we’d go before 12 and we’d always bring something, like a T-shirt or a record or something and they’d go, ‘Ah great, come in!’ It sort of dovetailed into going out really.

There’s something that I quite like about British music is when you hear something second-hand and you make up your own idea of what it would be like. The same happened in psychedelia, hearing about San Francisco and all that. To get the records it took quite a while, there was probably a delay of about a year.

Well, they all sound like Lewis Carroll Does San Francisco…
Yeah I think that’s partly ‘cause there wasn’t a war going on that affected the British people in that they might get drafted. We were allowed to revert back to childhood. It was our idea of what psychedelic music with sampling would sound like. And the weird thing about it is that it sounds like Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve. I’ve kind of gone full circle.

Obviously you saw the connection between psychedelia and acid house – it’s quite weird because it was a big break in dance music in this country because of all the old soul boys who had obviously been alienated by the psychedelic nature of it. But yet there were other people like Pete Tong who were quite straight in a lot of ways, embraced it. It was quite a strange time. Did the psychedelic aspect of it appeal to you?
Yeah, absolutely. Having worked at the psychedelic re-issue label and writing about that period, I was really disappointed that I’d missed it basically. So I thought, ‘Right, this is it, this is my time for something to go on.’ And it did feel really special. There was a self-consciousness about it, you knew there was something going on. Even though there weren’t that many people, not to start with anyway. The psychedelic thing, there are different strands that go together. I can definitely see it from Mancuso and his going to see Timothy Leary’s League of Spiritual Discovery talks and bringing that into The Loft. Because there’s definitely a psychedelic link there. Also there was a mix that we did of Findlay Brown’s ‘Losing The Will To Survive’ and Mancuso really liked it but he wouldn’t play it because the lyrics were negative. And I thought that was really interesting that there’s this thing that goes through all the records that he’s played. So there’s definitely a link there, although obviously I didn’t know it at the time.

Did it feel like it was going to be something massive when you were involved in it? Did you think it was going to explode or did it feel like this little secret thing that you liked?
The one thing that was really interesting about it was that it seemed to change very quickly. So from people going to this Gilles Peterson thing on a Sunday at Dingwalls where people were wearing very kind of Gaultier, uptight, black and white with very shiny shoes to completely the opposite: very loose, quite hippie. That was almost overnight; it was certainly no longer than two months. And because it was so quick, you didn’t have time to think of it as ‘your little thing’. But I do remember walking down the street in Euston Road at four in the morning in the early summer of ’88 and I was wearing a Shoom T shirt and someone over the road was shouting at me and they were wearing a similar T-shirt. There were like these lone beacons of acid house-ness and that felt like, ‘Oh right! There are more of us out there!’ I never wanted to keep it elitist even though at the time I was definitely quite snobby and wouldn’t go to the big raves because anything over 2,000 I thought was a bit too big – which was a shame because I’m sure I missed out on some great things. So I did have some elitism but mainly I wanted as many people as possible to get into it really.

I think it was so caught up in it, I didn’t really feel a need to keep it small. Even when the press got to it. Having read Sidney Cohen’s Folk Devils & Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and Rockers and the way the press reacted to that and even that Marek Kohn’s Dope Girls about the 1910s to 1920s which is an amazing book about moral panic. It was the same thing – you could almost mirror acid house in what happened then. It didn’t really bother me, I thought it was quite funny. I think for a lot of people reading about it in The Sun was the first thing they’d heard about it. I loved how within days they had ‘Buy Our Smiley T-Shirts’ on the same page saying, ‘Drugs Are Really Bad’ and ’10 Bad Things About LSD’ by our doctor Vernon Coleman. They really went for it for a few days.

How did you get together with Dave Ball?
We did one track and we just got on really well…

Did he go to Shoom as well?
He was a big northern [soul] kind of guy and used to be able to the backflips and everything. Not sure whether he went to Shoom, he probably did. He’s always been a clubber really. We didn’t go that many places together actually, not until a bit later on. But I think he had his moments… and he still does. After Jack The Tab we were going to do an album as The Grid and The Grid was initially me and Genesis and…

Was The Grid named after the Lime track?
It wasn’t, but then we found the Lime track at almost exactly the same time and did a cover of it. We just had a list of names, including The Matrix, which was one of them and various other things. And Dave knew the Lime stuff and was very keen on that end of things. And stuff like Klein & MBO. Loved all that era. We were both massive Hi-NRG fans anyway. So it kind of fitted.

Genesis was going to be in The Grid and then we had some meetings with some record labels and Gen kind of didn’t want to do it because it was Warners and they’d had a deal with them before and it didn’t happen so we said, ‘Alright so we won’t do it’, and the guys from Warners said, ‘We want you to do it on your own’. So the plan was to do an album which would use house music or dance rhythms but as a kind travelogue. So you’d have an English one, an American one and a Latin one and do it with a load of different producers. But then Mark Kamins did something almost exactly the same and I was like, ‘DAMN! I really wanted to do that’, so that got scuppered. But I was signed to Warners (East West) on a solo deal and still was going to use loads of different producers but the first person I worked with was Dave and it worked so well we thought, ‘Sod it! We’ll just do it together’. So for the first album Dave wasn’t even signed, he was on the production end of it. But it changed from the second album.

So what was The Grid experience for you? It was sort of a changing era of music…
Part of it was great because it was coming from our slightly more ‘art school’ approach, slightly more experimental end of things. The bands that me and Dave really bonded on were basically the Hi-NRG, Suicide and Kraftwerk and a general art school mentality. But then that’s just one end of it. On the other end of it we had quite a lot of commercial pressure because we were signed to big labels. So there was always this kind of thing of ‘You’ve got to have a hit record’. We got signed and dropped from three major labels. It was quite schizophrenic really… our taste was quite broad. We loved pop music and we loved experimental music so it was trying to marry the two that sometimes worked really well and sometimes didn’t work at all. And a lot of the time we were putting those records out so we were making our mistakes in public. There is a great compilation album of The Grid to be had but there is also a not-so-great one as well!

The fact that that hasn’t come out is due to the three record label situation?
Yeah. We got dropped after we’d just done ‘Floatation’. We didn’t have a deal at all. The only reason we got a deal with Virgin was down to Boy George. We did a mix for him and he just completely championed us. No one was going to touch us because we’d just been dropped. It’s very rare to get dropped and picked up again. But he just really, really went with a real enthusiasm to Virgin and they picked us up for the second record and at the same time we got a new manager called David Enthoven. He hadn’t been doing anything for years – he’d been basically doing NA and AA and any kind of ‘A’ that you want. He had last been seen when he was managing Squeeze, being stretchered out of Madison Square Gardens for some kind of rock‘n’roll-related accident. In the ’70s he’d been this massive manager. He’s the ‘E’ out of EG Records, he managed Roxy and T-Rex. He was quite a player for the late ’60s through the ’70s but then had fallen into a bit of disrepair. But then we were signed to Virgin, he called me up and said, ‘I heard your first album and I cried’. A real posh, Chelsea, kind of slightly Austin Powers-esque type character. He said, ‘Yes, yes it reminds me of first Roxy Music, I have to manage you’. So I was like ‘Brilliant! Well, I’m not going to turn him down, he sounds amazing!’. So he started managing us. He was an amazing character and pulled in for the Four Five Six album, most of Roxy Music on it and Robert Fripp and loads of other people. Sun Ra did a bit on it, we got an insane list of people on the album, pretty much down to David. Who then went on to manage Robbie Williams and make stupid amounts of money! He met Robbie through us actually, through one of our guys. A fantastic character, worthwhile just for the stories.

Dave had quite a lot of success with Soft Cell so does he have an innate pop sensibility?
Absolutely. Certainly in terms of arrangement and simplicity and in terms of ‘hook’-iness. He’s very good at that. He’s a massive soul fan and also a massive Throbbing Gristle fan so quite wide Catholic taste. We are also drawn to dance music that’s based on a gay tradition. We’re drawn to ‘camp’, we’re drawn to artifice and to Hi-NRG; to Divine and Bobby O. Not in an ironic way. We absolutely love them. Some of those influences coming out and presenting them to the public can sometimes be misread as us ‘trying’ to get a hit. But actually we’re just trying to sound like an Italian disco record from 1982.

What’s the connector between The Grid, Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve, Time And Space Machine and acid house?
I think mainly it’s the music of ‘sensation’. That’s the main thing. All studio-based rather than performance-led. For me, lyrics wouldn’t be the number one part of the song. It’s the melody and the sounds. Using the sounds as thematic hooks as well. It might just be an echo noise or a reverb or a little backwards sound. And then repeating that and making that the focus of the record rather than the singer or the performance of the song. It’s probably something that’s tied to the late 20th century and early 21st century. Recorded music is only something we’ve had for a short period of time. Recorded studio music is the link.

So live performance is not something that attracts or interests you?
It’s something I’d really like to do but we’ve never really found a really satisfying way of creating a great electronic sound live. I’m sure people can do it but it’s personally not something I’ve found.

Time and Space Machine is the first thing you’ve done on your own. You’ve always collaborated with people. What’s the difference?
It’s good because I don’t have to second-guess it. I can go up on my own path quite a lot more. It’s bad because you can lose perspective and you can go up alleyways that probably you shouldn’t. I’m really enjoying it. It’s probably the only record I’ve made where most of the decisions are mine. Not in a controlled way but in that it’s more ‘me’ than any record I’ve done before.

Where does the self-discipline come in when you’re on your own? Because the self-discipline comes from the collaboration usually doesn’t it?
I work in short bursts – I won’t work more than about six hours a day on the music because I think I get as much done as I would in twelve. Because you have to be on it and focus. I’m quite good at that, it’s never been a problem. Same for remixes as well. I kind of set a time and get that done. I think sometimes the opposite. Sometimes the collaborative ones can be a bit more unwieldy.

A bit more unfocussed… I suppose when you get two people trying say something….
Yeah, but also great as well. Certainly with Dave and with Erol, I’ve always found the things that we’d do on our own would be different. Some part of two people creating something else is really really useful.

What’s the difference between working with the two?
With Dave, it feels more like a duo, felt more like a band. Wizard doesn’t feel like a band. Wizard’s definitely more like a project than a band. But maybe that’s because of the way we approached it.

In what way?
In terms of we’d do gigs, it felt more like a band thing. With the Wizard it feels something we come together to do occasionally. Me and Dave have very different backgrounds but me and Erol, it does feel like two people coming from different places and the things that we get out of it are very much what we wouldn’t get on our own. Other thing with me and Dave, we’ve worked together a lot longer. I think with me and Dave we would just go and do something, we’d go and explore and just try stuff. With me and Erol, it’s a lot more considered, it’s a slightly different method of working. It’s quite difficult to describe.

Is that just to do with the different personalities involved?
Yeah, yeah I think so.

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=4088249139 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]

Which comes first, DJing or producing?
For me, definitely producing, making records comes first. But then again I go through periods where I get massively into DJing again. And it’d be down to one great gig, with one great sound system. And you’re like, “Right! I want to do that again and again”. In fact that happened last year, I just hadn’t played any warm, analogue, big room, electronic sets for ages and I just did one at Cargo and it just worked so well I was like, ‘I want to do this all the time…’ So I’d say production really. Going into somewhere with silence and then creating something.

How did you get into doing the Richard Noise writing for the NME in the late 1980s?
I was still working at Bam Caruso and I used to go out and take them our albums and the Strange Things magazine and James Brown was really interested and like, ‘Oh! You’ve done a magazine? Tell me all about it…’ Then I did the Jack The Tab album and I took that up to them. As I was taking the Bam Caruso records, I was saying to them – this was probably from September ’87 until the summer of ’88: ‘You’ve got to write about acid house, it’s really really important because this is our punk’. And I just remember people like Steven Wells saying, ‘Ah, nah that sounds rubbish, like bad Gary Numan’. There was no-one really championing it. And then Jack Barron started but it took a long time. It took almost nine months. It took until it was almost on the pages of The Sun before they did anything about it because it was quite strange because you’d have thought they’d be really on it.

So, why did you do the Paul Oakenfold book? It’s a pretty epic task writing one.
It started off as an acid house book…

So did you get commissioned or did you start something first?
I just met someone who was working at the publishers at a party and said, ‘Ah, I used to write’ and they said, ‘We’re looking for some more music books’. So I just gave them a few ideas. I was going to do a Scissor Sisters book at one point. They basically wanted to do books around acts really other than subject books as I initially came in saying I wanted to an acid house book. And that kind of mutated into the Oakenfold book. And it was their idea to hang it around Oakenfold. In hindsight I would’ve rather done the acid house book. Not knocking Oakenfold but it does set it in one particular time and space. I could’ve done a more general history, and it would still be about. Having said that, his career was quite useful, he’d done stuff at Profile and Def Jam and been in New York quite early on and the Ibiza bit and Goa. It had kind of wrote itself in the timeline of his career and so every pointer along the way I managed to get in a bit about the southern soul scene, pre-acid house, which hadn’t really been written about much. But I found him very generous really. He gave a lot of his time and was a really nice guy and I really enjoyed working with him.

What do you do when you’re not making music?
Look after my daughter quite a lot at the moment. There isn’t much time, I do make music almost every day. I listen to music is the answer to that! I have got interests outside – I just got a qualification as a psychotherapist actually so that’s what I do. I’m interested in the brain and how it works.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7pkjQZKRganbSyKPoeNRDa?si=629ea61b360f4a2e

The soundtrack to the book Strange Things Are Happening

How does that impact upon the music and making music?
I don’t know yet. It’s just a new thing. I’ve just got my first qualification. I think it impacts a lot on the way I just experience the world.

What do you use when you DJ?
I usually use CD and vinyl. I’ve not gone Traktor or Ableton as yet. It took me quite a while to even just work out how to be great at CD DJing. And then Andy Carroll showed me one trick, and that was it, I worked out the bit I was going wrong. I just thought of it as a Technics deck so when you’re trying to spin back and cue up. Basically he said, ‘When you do that start on the vinyl button and when you try to do the other bit and you just want a slight jog, switch it to the CD button’. That’s all I needed…

Where’s your favourite club that you’ve played at recently?
At Istanbul the other month. It was a tiny club, probably 100-120 people. It was run by about 8 people and it was the first night and there hadn’t really been anything like that in Istanbul for ages and so it was just an amazing atmosphere, they were all really, really up for it. And about 5 minutes before, they’d just finished painting it. They were all really, really nervous but it went really, really well. That was great. It’s ongoing and it’s quite a big thing. There’s some great DJs, there’s a guy called Baris K in Istanbul. A real kind of crate-digger guy for Turkish stuff. So we hung out together, looking for Turkish music…

What’s the most superstar thing that’s happened to you?
They did a decibel counter for the Smash Hits Poll Winners party in about 1994 when we were playing, it – the event, not us – got the loudest screams in history or in Guinness Book of Records or something. Probably when Take That were playing rather than us. I remember we were introduced by Superman, or rather the bloke who played Superman on the telly, so that was quite good. We’ve been introduced by some quite strange people. We’ve been introduced by Angus Deayton on TOTP, which was quite weird…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LavM8PLJ9-g

The Grid on Top Of The Pops, with added Angus Deayton

What’s the one record that never leaves your record box?
I really like that Hardfloor version of ‘Yeke Yeke’ by Mory Kante. I play that quite a lot. In fact, that has left my record box, in which case probably ‘Dirty Talk’ by Klein and MBO.

What do you hope to be doing in ten years time?
Music. I just recently decided that. I just want to still be making music in some way. Whether I get paid or not, it doesn’t matter, I’ll still be making music.

Pete Bellotte got everything in synth

Songwriter, producer and guitarist Pete Bellotte’s career was forged in the basement of the Munich hotel, the Arabella Sheraton, where Giorgio Moroder’s studio, Musicland was located. In a storied career as right-hand man to Moroder, as well as in his own right, Bellotte built up a catalogue of over 500 songs and two Grammy nominations (for Donna Summer’s Bad Girls album and single) after winding up in Germany as part of a touring R&B band, Linda Laine & The Sinners. His first hit was ‘Son Of My Father’, co-written and performed by Giorgio (it was a hit in Germany, before being swiftly recorded by Chicory Tip in the UK), but it was his work with Donna Summer that made his name. It was Bellotte’s passion for literature that provided the concept album ideas they utilised on Donna’s 1970s output, including I Remember Yesterday, inspired by Anthony Powell’s Dance To The Music Of Time series.

Both alongside Moroder and also independently, Bellotte built up a catalogue of over 500 songs, including writing for Tina Turner, The Three Degrees, Melba Moore, Roberta Kelly and Elton John (Pete also produced Elton’s 1979 LP, Victim Of Love). Here he reflects on his early days in Germany, the making of ‘I Feel Love’ and the influence on his career of Casablanca Records boss, Neil Bogart.

interviewed by Bill in London, 18.5.17

Is it true you bonded with Giorgio Moroder over facial hair?
It must have been ’74. I’ll always remember, I went to meet him and I had a huge, long moustache and I thought, because Germany was very conservative then, and I had very long hair, so I shaved off the moustache, just in case. Lo and behold he had the same moustache!

How did the meeting come about?
I’d moved from England to Munich and I met him through a mutual acquaintance: a photographer for Bravo magazine, Uli Weber. Bravo was the biggest German magazine for music, it sold over a million a week. And Uli told me that Giorgio was looking for someone to work with. I’d been a professional musician till then and wanted to move over to the other side. The very first day I started working for him he gave me his brief case and asked me to carry it and I said, I’ll do anything for you, but I’m not carrying your case. Maybe a stupid thing to do because I was desperate to get into the business. But he was okay. He took the case back and never asked me again.

I only worked for him for about a year or year and a half when Ariola Records in Munich offered me a job as an in-house producer, which was a great experience and while I was doing that I was still writing with Giorgio.

Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte up their moustache game

You wrote the lyrics to ‘Son of My Father’ which Giorgio sang in 1971, but which was a hit in the UK for Chicory Tip a year later.
I was actually at Ariola in my office when the phone rang and it was Elton John calling from London. He was one of my best friends and he said, ‘I’m in a record shop and I just bought this record and your name is on it!’ It was ‘Son Of My Father’. He said I’m so proud I’m telling everyone about it. Ironically, I was never proud of that song. After I’d finished working at Ariola, which was probably a year, Giorgio then asked me to go back with him as an equal partner.

How did so many international musicians wind up working in Munich?
There were quite a few backing singers, Americans, who were refugees of Hair the musical, which was touring everywhere. There were quite a few English musicians too. I think there were all there because, like Iceland and Holland, there wasn’t as much work. Munich was so busy and had so many studios so there was so much work going on for them. I guess it was the word on the wire. There were far more musicians in Munich than Berlin or Hamburg. When I originally went to Germany I was told to go to Hamburg because that’s the centre of the music industry, but when I got there, there wasn’t any work at all and they said, oh Munich’s the centre. So I went down to Munich and it was.

When was the first time you met Donna Summer?
I first met Donna in 1975 or ’74. She was a backing singer, singing with two Germans at the time. She sang backing vocals for me a few times. I’d written a song on my own, ‘Denver Dream’, and I paid her to come in and sing it as a demo. I sent it to a publisher friend of mine in France and within a couple of days he phoned me and said I’ve got a record company that wants to release it – but with the girl who’s singing it on the demo. Donna had been ripped off a few times but we knew each other quite well, she said I trust you, let’s do it. That’s when she changed her name from Donna Gaines to Donna Summer.

What was she like?
We weren’t like best friends, but we’d very often go out. We just got on really well, she was a lovely girl. In the whole time we worked together there was never the slightest bit of friction. And the reason we were so lucky is she wasn’t interested in the records at all. The productions didn’t interest her. She’d come in with the demos of the songs, lyrics all ready, keys not worked out yet, and she loved talking. So she’d come in the studio, usually at 4 o’clock in the afternoon and she would talk about the latest rumours and gossip. Then she’d look at her watch and say, ‘Oh I’ve gotta go,’ and she’d go in and sing it in one take – and be gone. The next time she heard any of these recordings was when it was physically a record.

The first time Donna came into writing was the Bad Girls album because she was with [future husband] Bruce Sudano by then and that was when Bogart had hired Rusk Sound Studios in Hollywood just to write in. It was so extravagant. We were writing in that studio, Giorgio and myself, and she was writing independently with her husband Bruce. And that’s where ‘Bad Girls’ and ‘Dim All The Lights’, they were her first writing efforts away from us.

Did you relocate to the States?
I would be there for months and months but I never lived there. ‘I Feel Love’ was produced in England. It was the Live & More album that took us over there in 1978. That was the first time we relocated. We only ever worked over there after that.

Pete Bellotte, Roberta Kelly, Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder

Tell me about ‘I Feel Love’.
I’ll tell you the whole story. After the Love To Love You album the next album we did was A Love Trilogy. I used to go into the English bookshop to buy books and I’d bought Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy and the idea of a trilogy appealed to me, so I came up with the idea of one side with three songs and the fourth track would be the three songs going into the fourth. This was our first concept album. So the next one had to be a concept too. This was Four Seasons Of Love and that’s because I’d just read Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, and I thought it would be good to do one song for each season. By the next album I was reading Dance To The Music Of Time by Anthony Powell.

Which was the original title of the album, wasn’t it?
Yes. It became I Remember Yesterday. I came up with the idea of going from the past through various periods. So we started off with a dance band in ‘I Remember Yesterday’ and ‘Love’s Unkind’; then a take on The Shirelles ‘Back In Love Again’, a Supremes style funk thing ‘Black Lady’; an up-to-date disco track with ‘Make Me’. And then I said we’ve got to go into the future and have a futuristic song. That’s when we got Robby Wedel in.

He’s one of the characters I want to ask you about.
We’d used the Mini Moog quite a bit. Robby Wedel was the programmer for Eberhard Schöner, who was originally a classical violinist and later a very famous modernist classical composer.

He later worked with Sting, too, didn’t he?
He did, yeah. Brilliant man. He hired his Moog 3P out on a daily rate with Robby Wedel.

What did you get for your money?
There were three cabinets, each two and a half feet by two feet. And a fourth cabinet was the sequencer. The others were voltage control, oscillators etc. Everything to get the sounds in pitch as well. When we laid down the first track, Robby asked for something else to be put down with it but I don’t think we were paying much attention. So we got the first line down. So then Robby says, OK do you want to synch the next track? We didn’t know what that meant. So he says I’ve laid down a synch tone from this Moog so that anything we record on the next track is going to lock it into that. When we put in the next track it was absolutely spot on. It was a revelation for us. And the most astounding thing about Robby Wedel, who is the unsung hero of all of this is Robert Moog himself didn’t even know about this, had no idea that this synching was even possible. This all came from Robby Wedel. And it’s not known enough how important this man really was.

That’s basically inventing MIDI. Is it all synthesised?
The whole track is all Moog except there’s a bass drum from Keith Forsey, because we couldn’t get a big enough bass drum sound.

And how about recording the vocals?
All the track was finished and Donna was never interested in the lyrics because they were always done. But we had this deal that she was a co-writer on all the tracks, which everyone is nowadays but she was one of the first. It wasn’t a problem; we wanted harmony.

This was in Munich?
We were in Munich when we finished it. And Giorgio said, Donna wants to do the lyrics with you. I said fine. That night I went round to her house and it was 7.30. I knocked on the door and she opened it with a phone in her hand. She said, ‘I’m ever so sorry I’m just on the phone, go in the kitchen and make yourself a coffee.’ Half an hour went by and she came down and said, ‘I won’t be a sec.’ I had about four of these ‘I’ll just be a minute’. So she said, make a start.

Anyway, I finished off the lyric, because there obviously wasn’t a lot of lyric in there. Eventually at about 10.30 she came down and said, ‘Look I’m really, really sorry but I’ve been on the phone to my astrologer in New York. We were discussing my relationship.’ She was with a guy called Peter Nieuwdorfer and but she’d just met Bruce Sudano of the Brooklyn Dreams who she’d fallen for. She’s called the astrologer because she wanted to know Bruce’s star sign and they’d gone though all the charts and the woman had said, no you have to go with Bruce. She came down and said I’ve made my decision. Then she just came in, sang the song in one take.

Was it always meant to be in that style? It feels like an incantation more than a song.
Donna was very inventive with voices. We had to curtail it sometimes. She’d do all sorts of funny voices. But yes, this is the way she sang it straight off the bat and it sounded right. The honesty that has to be given to this song, is that it was part of an album, it was the last track on the album. It was just a track and neither Giorgio nor I thought it was a single.

It was released as a B-side originally wasn’t it?
Neil Bogart [of Casablanca Records] got hold of it, he said could you do three edits on it and he told us where they were. I’d be lying if I said I remember what they were but at the time they were really good and they made it flow much better. And out it came. It was a big hit in the UK but it wasn’t so big in the States. It established us in the clubs. But we definitely did not think at that moment, when it was released, that we’d done something special. It didn’t feel revolutionary. It didn’t seem anything. The only revolution was the synching.

Were there other electronic records you were inspired by? Like ‘Trans Europe Express’?
No not at all. It was just concocted in the studio and it happened very fast. The programmer Robby was so fast, he was brilliant.

The Moog was notoriously flaky wasn’t it? Had a tendency to go out of tune.
Yeah except this was more stable than the small one. He arrived there an hour early to warm it up. He was a programmer but a musical programmer so he had a pitch relationship so there was no way it was going to go out off tune with him. Even now, listening back on good speakers, the sound of that Moog is just unbelievable. Unsurpassable. We were lucky.

When did you have the sense that it was history making?
It took a few years to be quite honest. Records come and go but it stayed alive in the clubs. It got in films in the background. Then there was Marc Almond and Jimmy Somerville who covered it. Started to get a few covers. Then suddenly, every cover band was doing it.

How did ‘Macarthur Park’ come about?
We recorded her live album at the Universal Amphitheatre in 1978. Rod Stewart was supposed to be duetting with her but it didn’t happen. We did two nights there. She insisted on having her three sisters doing the backing vocals and when we came to mix they had to come off, that’s the only thing we doctored. When we finished it, Bogart wanted a hit single but this was all our old stuff with a few covers. We did a brainstorm down at Westlake Studios, loads of Casablanca people down there, Donna, myself, Giorgio, Greg Mathieson, we spent the whole day tossing and turning songs, trying to come up with something. Every time someone suggested something no one could agree on it.

At the end of the day I thought I’ll say it, so I suggested Macarthur Park, even though everyone always laughs at me when I say it’s one of my favourite songs. I knew it from Richard Harris’ album. He’s not the best singer in the world but I love his version. So I said it, it went silent and then Bogart asked to hear it. So we found a copy, sat and listened, and Donna said, ‘Yeah I’ve gotta do that’. So Greg Mathieson, the arranger, didn’t go to bed that night. We recorded it the next day with all the string arrangement, and within two days it was finished. It was the first time I’d ever seen Donna challenged with a song and she’s an amazing singer.

You always worked fast. The I Remember Yesterday album was done very quickly too, wasn’t it?
It was all done at Musicland in Munich. And everything happened so fast. We had an engineer Jürgen Koppers, who’s a brilliant engineer. He was so fast, the musicians were fast and we were too. That album evolved so fast, we never hung around.

A very efficient team.
I’ve never drunk or smoked in my life. I’ve never seen Giorgio drunk ever. He’d have a brandy maybe but that’s it. Koppers didn’t drink. We were a working team and we just got on with it. We’d start around 10 in the morning and we’d finish around 6 or 7 in the evening. Total efficiency. I would just wonder how people could take so long on an album! I guess we knew what we were doing to a degree. Obviously it helps having two producers to swap ideas with. And Giorgio and I never argued. We’ve always been friends. There was never any nastiness with musicians it was just everyone doing their job, enjoying it and having fun. It wasn’t the rock’n’roll drug world.

How well did you know Neil Bogart?
No one knew Neil Bogart. He was a fantastic music man. An incredibly flamboyant 100% music man. At one point we thought he was ripping us off and we had him audited, and he was totally honest, which surprised us. But he was a larger than life figure. A sort of Donald Trump of the music world.

But not as dim?
Oh no. But he was ruthless.

And extravagant.
This is typical Bogart. When ‘Love to Love You’ came out he wanted to launch it in New York. The reverse side of the cover is Donna in a negligee which always made us laugh because that’s not what she was about, and even she used to say that herself, she was a regular girl, not sexy. Bogart decided to have a replica for the party in icing on the top of the cake, of Donna in the negligee. But his favourite cake-maker was in San Francisco. Bogart was in LA, the party was in New York. He had the cake made in San Francisco, flown to LA in a first class seat of its own with a minder. Then someone from Casablanca flew it to NYC in another first class seat. It got to New York and on the runway an ambulance with flashing lights was waiting for the cake to take it to the venue. So that’s the kind of flamboyance of this man.

No expense spared.
We never ever had a budget the whole time we worked for him. We could do what we wanted. Fly on Concorde or whatever, you just did it. When the time came to be reimbursed for the flight tickets, you went to the office, there were no receipts, and you were just given the cash. It was extraordinary.

There were a lot of drugs, weren’t there.
It was a pretty coke-fuelled office. But he had ears, he really did. We had a couple of number ones in Holland before all of this, but without Bogart I don’t know if we’d ever have made it with Donna. He was totally instrumental in the whole thing.

It was his idea to make the three-minute original into a 17-minute epic
When ‘Love to Love You’ first came out it was in the UK with Dick Leahy and it didn’t do a thing, then Bogart picked it up at MIDEM and you know the story of the orgy? It’s a true story. [Bogart had been playing the song repeatedly at an orgy, and grew frustrated someone had to keep leaving the action every three minutes to put the needle back on the record.]

Drum magician Keith Forsey, aided by Mr. Bellotte.

How did you discover disco? The first Donna album was not disco at all.
Because of the musicians we used. We used Sylvester Levay on piano, Keith Forsey on drums and on the bass was Gary Unwin. And they used to play the stuff they’d been listening to most recently. Keith had been listening to the Crusaders. And there’s a Crusaders track, ‘Sugar Cane’ and in the middle of it the drummer suddenly plays a four on the floor. That sounds like nothing now but back then it was revolutionary. Keith loved that. Also ‘Rock Your Boat’, with that tsss hi-hat sound. We called it pea-soup, because it made a psssp noise. So Keith was doing that hi-hat with the kick, Levay was playing a funky thing and Gary was playing something similar. So we used that. It didn’t sound like the Crusaders anymore. So four on the floor, and disco, as far as I’m concerned comes from ‘Rock Your Boat’ and The Crusaders.

Do you remember making that Norma Jordan album?
No. I’ve written 530 songs. I listened to it after you emailed and I remembered the song but not the session.

Norma Jordan’s Stay Change Your Mind

You were great friends with Elton John. How did you first meet him?
I met him in Hamburg at the Party Club, just around the corner from the Star Club. There were two resident bands there and every month there’d be a change. So for one month you’d be the band there. We’d played there once before. His band Bluesology came along. Elton had just left school and he was still in his school clothes. He was playing the organ at the back, he wasn’t singing, just accompanying a little. We became friends immediately. At the end of the first week, he got paid so we went up Karlstadt to buy clothes. It was the first time he’d got out of his school gear. We didn’t buy flamboyant clothes but they weren’t school uniform, so he was over the moon. We had a female singer at the time and he fell head over heels with her, he was besotted. That was before he found out what he wanted. So for many years we were close friends and I saw a lot of him.

What was it like working with him on his disco album, Victim of Love?
I didn’t work with him really. He just came and sang. It wasn’t my idea. I was at [Elton’s manager] John Reid’s house and he said we want to make a disco album; you write the songs and Elton will come in and sing them. I’d been in New York and there was this graffiti everywhere ‘Disco Sucks’ and I knew it was the end of disco at that point. I had the honour of using some great musicians, Elton came and sang it all but they didn’t do anything with the album. No publicity or anything. It was the wrong moment and I was the wrong guy. He shouldn’t have been disco-ing it, and I shouldn’t have been recording it.

(Elton John green shield stamps story right at end of interview)

Giorgio Moroder electrified us

The unstoppable beat of Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ marks a turning point: when synthesised sound showed it could rattle the bones of a dancefloor. With this 1977 hit, electronic music displayed a power over humans that was strangely different to anything made from wood, brass and steel. The mind behind this landmark tune was Munich-based Italian composer Giorgio Moroder. Before this he’d been creating sugary German ‘Schlager’ pop, and afterwards he would work on a long line of major movie soundtracks. But as disco hit the mainstream, Moroder’s Moog experiments defined the sound for millions and set future dance music on its way. In this 2015 interview, he revealed a little-known fact – while all the other sounds were electronic, the synthesiser hadn’t yet developed a convincing enough thump to deliver a kick-drum, and so for all their robotic intensity, those kicks on ‘I Feel Love’ are actually from a real, breathing drummer.

interviewed by Bill onstage at Audi-OOOO-Rama 22.11.15 and by phone 18.5.17

Tell me about how you arrived in Munich.
Well, before Munich, I was working in Berlin until ’69 or ’70. I was lucky because I had an aunt in Berlin where I could stay. That’s where my European career started. I had my first German hit in 1967, about three months after I decided to become a composer, a song called ‘Ich Sprenge Alle Ketten’, sung by an Italian Lebanese guy, Ricky Shane. But Berlin at that time was really claustrophobic. There was the wall, so you couldn’t leave. So I decided to move to Munich. I got a deal with a record company. And that’s where I continued. It was much closer to Italy, so I could go home [to Italy] much more often.

How did you meet Donna Summer?
I moved to Munich and I thought, OK I have to find some musicians. At the time there were two or three musicals, like Hair, going on in Europe, so there were some great musicians in Berlin. There was Michael Thatcher, who was an English great keyboard player. There was Dave King, an American great bass player; Thor Baldursson from Iceland; a great drummer named Keith Forsey. And among other those ex-patriots, there was Donna Summer, who was playing with Hair, which had closed, so she got married. And she was basically living in Munich without major jobs because there were no jobs.

So Pete Bellotte, my co -producer, one day we needed a singer with no accent, no German accent, because we did some demos for an American group. And so she came to the studio and, you know, Donna, all happy and enthusiastic, and she sang beautifully. We noticed immediately that she had a great voice. So we told her, if we ever have a song or an idea, we’ll call you.

Two, three months later, we had our first song together, which did okay, called ‘The Hostage’. And then another one, which did not do too well. And I told Donna, if you have an idea about a sexy song, really sexy, come in the studio and we work.

So one day she came and said, ‘Love to love you, ooh, love to love you,’ which we thought could be great. At that time I had a relatively famous studio in Munich, the Musicland, where we had Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Queen, Freddie Mercury. And that particular day, one of the groups was not playing. So I sneaked in. It was in the Arabella Hochhaus, a big complex. And the studio was down in the basement. So we did a demo with the idea of making it as much erotic as we can. I gave it to my publisher and the publisher brought it to Cannes for Midem. We thought there’s no way that anybody would possibly be interested. But she called me in the evening and she said, everybody loves it. You can sign her wherever you want now. And so Neil Bogart of Casablanca signed us and released the single.

The first version was just three minutes
Yes. It did okay, but it wasn’t a smash hit. Then one night Neil called me and said, you know, last night I had a party [by all accounts it was an orgy] and a girl kept saying, ‘Could you play it again? Could you play it again?’ And he asked if I could do a long version of it? So I did a 17-minute version. I composed some new parts, so it’s not just repetitive, but it’s one song. It was one of the first extended playing tracks…

And that song really made Donna and myself. First it started in the discotheques in America. For a DJ, what’s the best thing to do? You put the record on, 17 minutes, and you go out and have a cigarette. So that’s mainly the reason why this became a hit because everybody loved to play it. And it was a number one song everywhere. And thank God the BBC blocked it at the beginning. Later on they played it, they had to play it. But the BBC blocking it, that was a lot of promotion for the song.

What were you listening to that inspired the sound? It feels a lot like a Love Unlimited Orchestra production. Were you listening to people like Barry White at the time?
Yeah, I always liked Barry. I loved the Philadelphia sound? The kind of strings they use. It’s inspired by some of the songs, not so much of Barry White, but the Philadelphia sounds.

In the New Musical Express in 1978 you said that one of the things that inspired the long version was ‘In a Gadda De Vida’ by Iron Butterfly. Is that true or did you just make that up?
No. When Neil asked me to do it, I did not know about ‘Inna Gada Da Vida’.

I guess it’s important to put it in context. There was quite a lot happening in German dance music around that time.
Yes. A good friend of mine, Michael Kunze, had a big hit with the group Silver Convention? ‘Fly Robin Fly’, which was a German group at number one in America, which is extraordinary. All those dance songs coming out of Munich, they were all played by the same guys. The strings were all German, the Munich Philharmonic, the brass was Munich guys. Then there was Frank Farian who was in Frankfurt and he’d just get the Munich guys to come and play for him. Keith Forsey was happy to go there because they had a lot of girls there! He told me he always enjoyed going to Frankfurt and working with Farian. Then Harold Faltermeyer came a little later. He played with several groups. And we all used similar sounds, the keyboards, and especially the strings.

Tell me about setting up your record label Oasis? Did you do that specifically to market your own productions?
As a young producer, you always try to get your own label, which means you’re a made man. At the end it doesn’t mean anything. But it helped at the beginning. So the first three productions I did were on Oasis. Donna summer; I did an album called Einzelgänger; and there was a group produced by Pete Bellotte called Schloss. So those were the three things we offered to Neil Bogart. But the label just didn’t work out. We had a problem with the name because there was a very small label in America called The Oasis. So I gave it up. Actually, it continued, but not under my direction. It continued with Casablanca.

And did you build a personal relationship with Neil Bogart?
Donna moved to America. I was there for a few months or so. Then I went back. I think the second album was recorded in Munich with Donna. But I didn’t meet Neil that often. Pete Bellotte and I, we just did the recordings the way we wanted. He didn’t interfere at all. We would go there, ‘OK, Neil, these are the 12 songs.’ And he was always happy.

How did you move from that Philadelphia sound to using more electronic instrumentation?
Well, I discovered the Moog modular in ’71. I loved the Walter Carlos album Switched On Bach, where he – or now she – played all the classical instruments like violins, oboes, flutes, with the synthesiser. I thought I have to get to know this instrument, where could I find one? There was a German classical composer, Eberhard Schöner, who had one in Munich. I went to see him and he had a beautiful room, all quadrophonic, and he played me a composition of his. It was a bassline, it was beautiful, but it didn’t end. It was so long. It was at least a minute of the same thing.

Anyway, I rented the Moog and I rented Robby Wedel, who was Schöner’s assistant and engineer. Robby was the engineer on ‘I Feel Love’. He was the only person at that time who knew how to get any sound out of the Moog. It was a nightmare. Cables here, cables there. And so I rented him and I rented the synthesiser. I’d say give me a bass sound or a string and after a few minutes he was able to get me something. I needed him because even if I’d owned one i wouldn’t have been able to get any sound out of it.

The idea behind ‘I Feel Love’ was to deliberately create a song that sounded like the future. Is that right?

Yeah. In 1977 I came up with the idea of doing an album with Donna with the sound of the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s. With a sound which you could possibly call the future. The only way to do it is to use the machines. I wanted to create all the sounds of an orchestra using the synthesiser. I had the Moog, the modular, plus another polyphonic synthesiser. I had the bassline, then we produced a white noise [click track], we cut it and we did the hi -hat, the snare, some other percussive stuff. Everything except the kick, which with the synthesiser I was not able to get to kick enough to make people dance. It had a beautiful low end, but not dumm dumm, dumm. So we used Keith Forsey, the drummer, who did quite a job. He was there just with the bass drum for seven minutes.

I never realised it was actually a live drummer.
It was a live drummer mixed with the really big low end of the synthesiser.

And what about the rest of the song?
When I started the song, I started with three notes. I told the rented engineer [Robby Wedel], give me two Cs, a G and a B flat. So he got me those four notes. And previously I recorded a click track from a Japanese drum machine. So by synchronizing the click, which was on tape, the computer would play the exact same time as the time of the click. I think we recorded 20 minutes of the click on to tape on a 24-track. And I told him put the four notes on one key so I could play [a sequence with one key]. It worked like a loop. If I pressed one key, say C, and it would play dung-dung-dung-dung [the ‘I Feel Love’ bassline]. So if I then wanted to go up to E flat, I’d hit one key and dung-dung-dung-dung and the whole chord would go up.

So really how a sequencer works.
Yes. OK, now let’s compose the song. Let’s do 16 bars, 16 bars of the same chord. Do you want to know all the details?

I’m listening intently here.
I started with major chords. But the bassline could work with major and minor chords. I remembered Richard Strauss with the beautiful song, ‘Also Sprach, Zarathustra’, where he has a minor which becomes major and it sounds so well. So I had the same. Bum, yum, yum. I did 16 bars with that and then I guess four bars with E flat. And so I built up the concept, the chords of a song, not knowing the melody.

It was really fun to work but the problem was the Moog would go out of tune every few minutes. It was a disaster. I’d have to do 20 or 30 seconds then stop. Go back, tune it and drop it in. It was quite a job. The other tracks were pretty easy. The hi-hat was just white noise and was constant and didn’t need tuning for a note.

It’s a difficult song to sing live, isn’t it?
Yes. It turned out at the end when it was mixed it was a little too numerical. And by singing, Donna and I came up with the melody. But it was quite difficult to keep time because if you sing it, you have to count [the bars]. And there are some sections where I still think now there are two bars too many. One day I asked Donna, how were you ever able to sing and count the bars? And she said that her husband, who was playing piano at the time, would count for her in the headphones. Otherwise, for whoever sings that song live, it’s really difficult.

When we started to mix it, the engineer, Jürgen Koppers, added a delay. Now, suddenly it became [the delay gives the bassline an echo, doubling it]. Which gave it a totally different feel. So that was really the moment where the song took over. Which is what gave it that particular feel, which I don’t think anyone had tried before.

Yeah, I guess it gives it the swing.
The swing. And then I made another major mistake. I had the original track on the left hand side bass on the left hand side. And on the right hand side I had the up [strokes] like dum dum dum dum dum and if you hear it it’s great but the first time I heard it in a discotheque I was on the right hand side of the of the stereo and I was not able to dance because all I heard is what the up instead of the down and since I’m not a great dancer I was not able to dance. So now when I when I play it as a DJ I put it I make it much more mono. I put them much more together so at least at least I can dance a little bit.

And when you finished the production and delivered it, did you know that it was revolutionary?
Not really. I remember at the very beginning Neil Bogart was interested but not as much as I would have liked. Then the song really started to play well in England. And I mixed it again slightly different. The moment where I really thought it could be something great is when Brian Eno told David Bowie in Berlin, ‘David, I found a record and I think this is the sound of the future.’ And coming from Brian Eno, that was like, ta-dang, I had my stamp of approval. That was the moment I thought, maybe he’s right.

Why do you think so many of the electronic pioneers came from Europe, especially Germany?I don’t really know. I know that I liked Switched on Bach. That’s why I got in. But Kraftwerk, I don’t know. There was Kraftwerk, there was Jean-Michel Jarre, Klaus Schulz, Tangerine Dream, a lot of Germans. A lot of electronics were done in Dusseldorf, Cologne, Berlin etc. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s in the German’s blood to have something more mechanical.

Maybe that’s why they make good cars!

There was a feeling in the post -war period in Germany of rejecting the R&B traditions of America. A lot of the Krautrock Groups, they were trying to create a new course for music in Germany.
I personally don’t go that deep. Let’s take Kraftwerk. They found this instrument. They said, ‘Wow, this is a great instrument. Why don’t we do something?’ There was no singer. They’re all just speaking. I don’t know how great they were as instrumentalists because what they play is very easy. So I think they just started. And Jean-Michel Jarre, he’s a good keyboard player and he had all those great sounds. I think there was just the possibility of doing something with a new instrument and that’s what they did.

When you were making songs like I Feel Love, did it feel inevitable that that was the direction popular music would go in?
Well, at the very beginning, I didn’t think that ‘I Feel Love’ would have that impact. But then, months later, you hear some basslines inspired by it. And I must say, it is quite difficult to have a electronic dance song where you don’t have some kind of, what’s the word… that feel.

The DNA of ‘I Feel Love’ is in so much music.

After your work with Donna Summer, you started to move into composing soundtracks. How did that come about?
Alan Parker, the producer, the director of Midnight Express, he liked ‘I Feel Love’. He called me and asked if I was interested in doing a score, and I was absolutely happy because I never did any. And to be honest I did not have a clue how to do it, but I said yes. The main thing he wanted is a song which has the driving feel of ‘I Feel Love’. He said, do whatever you want. There is a scene at the beginning where the kid runs away, and so that’s when I composed ‘The Chase’ and it worked very well. The guy is running and the music propels it. I think it was one of the first all synthesised scores.

Here’s my copy, Giorgio. £3 .49 from Our Price! Still got the price sticker on it.
That’s good.

I remember going to see the movie at the Empire in Leicester Square, which had a really great sound system. And you really felt the power of the music. The combination of the music and the visuals was quite stunning for the time.
It was so unusual, especially for Hollywood. And it was, I guess, for the Academy too, because they gave me my first Oscar.

How long did you work on it?
The main theme, ‘The Chase’ that was a job of like two days. And the rest I guess about three, four weeks. Alan Parker came to Musicland in Munich and we did a whole mix in a day or so. He was really concerned about the main theme. He said, this is all great but here, I hear an oboe. It was a Sunday, so I couldn’t find an oboe player. But in one of the synthesisers, there it was: the oboe. It only sounded a little bit like an oboe, but if you tell somebody, this is an oboe, then they believe it.

Obviously getting an Oscar for your first soundtrack meant you were offered many more. Which are you most proud of?
There are three. One is Flashdance, where I did the music and the songs. And American Gigolo. But then the soundtrack which had the most impact was Scarface. The movie did not do too well at the beginning. But then the video came out. And the video was a huge success.

But you know, I did not really want to do Flashdance when Jerry Bruckheimer first asked me, because nobody really knew what does ‘flashdance’ mean. Is it something slightly rude? I wanted to see a tape first. My girlfriend was in the living room watching the movie. And I came out and I see her crying. She said, oh, what a great movie. It’s so romantic.

Giorgio and friends enjoy their disco lifestyle, LA 1979

You’ve recently become the world’s oldest DJ. How did that come about? I think you did actually DJ in the early ’70s didn’t you?
In the late ’60s I would have four, five, six songs on tape and I would take some 45 records and I would play them, but that wasn’t really DJing.

So tell me about your recent entry into the DJ market.
As so often in life it came as a little bit of coincidence. A good friend of mine, an Italian in Paris, who works for Louis Vuitton, he and Kim Jones, asked me if I could do a 12-, 15-minute DJ set for one of his shows. So I did that in Paris, and it was a nice hit, people applauded. But on the same day, they asked me if I wanted to do a DJ gig for Elton John’s AIDS benefit in Cannes. It was an hour DJing, and I wasn’t really prepared. I had a friend of mine who was helping me out, and it was a disaster. It was this beautiful L‘Hotel du Cap’, and they had dinner, and then I was trying to make them dance, and nobody would dance. It was very Hollywood, all drinking and talking about what’s your latest movie, and they couldn’t care less about me playing.

There were quite a lot of famous people there weren’t there to watch your disastrous debut performance.
A lot, but I guess they didn’t probably even notice me, so the damage in Hollywood was not that bad. But that evening I got another offer from the Red Bull Music Academy, to come to New York and teach for an hour Q&A. I said, I can’t charge you just to come there for an hour, couldn’t we do something else? So somebody came up with the idea of DJing. They organized it at Cielo, but after a week, they said, no, no, Cielo is too small. Let’s go to Brooklyn to Output. And it was a huge success. It was absolutely fantastic. And since then, I’m traveling the world. Amazing. Yeah. God. Thank you.

What do you think has been the most important piece of technology for you in your career?
Well, I would say two. One is when Roger Linn came from San Francisco to Los Angeles and said, Giorgio, I invented a drum machine. It’s called the Linn. And he showed me this beautiful looking machine. It was analogue, so you could do all the sounds. You could play it by hand. That was one. And I overused that sound for too many productions. Once you find a great snare, a great kick, you use it over and over.

It was very popular with Prince too. He used it all the way through the 80s.
Now, if I hear some stuff from ’85, ’86, for example, Take My Breath Away, it still has that sound, I think I should have used live drums.

And the second piece of technology?
Obviously the main instrument was the Moog, the synthesiser. That defined a lot, I started in ’71. I had a hit with a song called ‘Son of My Father’, where I was one of the first, apart from Emerson, Lake and Palmer, to use the Moog as a solo. And then Chicory Tip in England did a cover and it became number one. But my song came out in America and went to number top 40. So that was a little bit of a revenge.

Did you stay close with Donna?
We became very good friends. She is – or was – an incredibly talented singer and not only for R&B. By singing in churches in Boston she was able to improvise but also from singing in musicals she had great discipline too. In a musical you cannot improvise; everything is very strict. So when we told her, don’t do that here, do this, she was very co-operative.

She was very funny. She always had a joke ready. Then of course when she left Casablanca it started to go a little down. It was definitely the time when disco was dying and then unfortunately she went with Geffen and that didn’t work. Even if disco was still on I don’t think it would have worked that well. We were still friends, although for a long period I didn’t see her because I was spending time in Europe and she moved to New York then Nashville.

But in the last ten years I saw her quite often and in the last six I saw her even more because she rented the apartment in a high-rise in Los Angeles where I was staying. So I could just tap the pavement with the morse code – dum dum dum dum – and communicate with her. I was playing the piano one day, just improvising and ten minutes later she called me: ‘What is it, what did you play? Play it again!’ I said, ‘I’m sorry I was just fooling around.’

I’ve read that before the disco era, when you were making German ‘Schlager’ pop music, you were a very strategic composer, you would analyse the hits of the moment, and try to adapt successful ideas into new songs. Is that right?
You know what? I don’t think that’s that right, because if that was right, I would have produced better songs!

Ha-ha
I did some good songs, but I did so many bad ones. An album came out a few years ago with a compilation of my very first song up to almost the last one. And it’s so bad. I was into bubblegum. I loved it. So that’s what I did.

I had one song which is exactly more than 40 years old, and it’s on that album. Two years ago, the company who owns the Audi, Volkswagen, they asked me if I could re -record a song called… Do-be-do-be-do… Do-be-do-be-do… And I said, no way. But then they said we want it for the big commercial of the Super Bowl. And that old song, which I completely forgot, made me a ton of money. I cannot even tell you how much.

I love your soundtracks. Which modern film composers do you admire?
Well, I love John Williams. John Williams is incredible. But the other guy is Hans Zimmer. He has these huge sounds. For example, for one of the movies he did not too long ago, he created a new drum sound. He had about ten, 15 people all with different sounds and a microphone in the middle. So he is really looking for new sounds. I worked with him on the song for the Academy Award about three years ago, and he’s incredible. Incredible. Very talented.

How long did you used to spend in the studio?
At the very beginning in Munich, I would spend a lot of time, like 12 hours a day, at least, maybe starting midday and then working until midnight, 1, 2, 3. Then later on a little less, but eight or nine hours. And I remember in 1987, 1986 when I did Top Gun, I worked all year. I would start around 11, 12 o ‘clock until 7, 8; then I went home for dinner. I had my guys finishing at night and I came back in the morning.

What is the best moment of the day for you?
For me to work it’s during the day. Maybe starting early afternoon. Once you get into 10, 11 o ‘clock, I think you lose a little bit. But sometimes you have to. The difference between songs for groups and movies is with songs, if you’re a week late, usually you don’t have a problem, but with movies you have to deliver on time. So it’s much tougher and that’s why with Top Gun, I worked so hard.

What advice do you have for musicians who want to pursue film scoring?
I think it’s a great time now for musicians. When I started, there was obviously much, much less competition, but you needed a certain amount to record a song. Even if you had friends who start with you, without money it was difficult to do a record. I didn’t have the money but I was lucky to have the first song, somebody produced it and I was able to get in. Now it’s almost a dream, for $2,000 you have a digital studio, complete with the best microphone, the best sounds, it’s all one package, you can take it with you, go on a vacation and still work.

What do you think of sample culture? There are songs that have sampled you that sold a lot of records.
I’m not really following it that much. I don’t really care. If somebody likes it, it’s okay with me. It’s not like ten years ago they would just sample, sample and not pay. I think they pay now because everybody’s checking now. I love one of the samples which Kanye West used in one of the songs, ‘The Mercy’. He did a very nice little trick. He used partially the chords from Scarface, but a slightly different sequence. He changed the order but you know immediately, this is the piece. I’m not like Keith Richard who says, why don’t everybody compose their own song.

It’s a bit rich given how much music the Rolling Stones have stolen and put their names on really. To my mind, sampling is a continuation of what we’ve always done in pop music, which is steal other people’s ideas.
The difference is if you steal a recording or if you steal a melody. If you steal a recording, that’s a little tougher, right, physically? There are so many articles which say this song has the sound of Giorgio here. Sometime I really listen to those songs, I think, how did that reviewer ever know it was a sample? They have much better ear than me. The writer just thinks, OK, there’s a little bit of Moroder here. But usually I don’t hear it.

There’s probably a little bit of Moroder everywhere. Thank you.

Prince Charles freaked the funk

Now that the other Charles is finally King, the only Prince Charles you need to care about is Prince Charles Alexander, he of ’80s Boston electro-funkers the City Beat Band. America’s Prince Charles was an early electronic convert, adopting the Lyricon woodwind synth and a battery of drum machines across his productions. He went on to engineer and produce hip hop and RnB groups including Jodeci, Usher and Mary J Blige, ending up as a recording studio academic and historian. His book Hip Hop Production: Inside The Beats is an insider’s view of the techniques and technology hip hop has adopted over the years. From wannabe pimp, via bare-chested funk star, to Puff Daddy’s studio wizard, to a full-on professorship, Charles Alexander has lived several lives to the full.

interviewed by Bill Brewster, 11.5.20

Your book is a very different take on hip hop.
Everyone thinks hip hop is just this organic thing, you know. You hang out in the streets for a while and then you start rapping and that’s all you need to know. But at the same time, as an audio engineer and a producer of hip hop, I knew a whole lot of technological concepts that make rap records sound the way they do. I was really writing about the technology. It’s not just a history book. It’s also a how-to book: how to use sampling in your composition.

There have been so many different phases in hip hop. I mean, all the early records were backed by bands. There were no electronics.
Exactly. I had to go from the live bands to drum machines, to sequencers, to samplers, to the ADAT home recording, to the digital audio workstation, to Auto-Tune to Melodyne. I go through all of that like it was an effortless choreography, trying to explain each one of these things and the motivations behind them.

So you explain how each piece of kit evolved
Yes. Oftentimes the new pieces of gear were inspired by work that hip hop producers were doing in their compositions. They didn’t know the underlying math, but they were pushing the creativity into places where the manufacturers would respond to. I’ll give you an example. The whole idea of chopping a sample up by either the transient or by the bar beat position was not something that was in the original MPC. It was added because that’s what Pete Rock was doing. He was getting a sample and chopping it up into eighth notes or sixteenth notes. So then the guys that made the MPC said, ‘Oh, well, we can actually add that feature.’ They added it, boom.

Producers will always push technology
It’s what hip hop has been doing for decades. Everyone writes about hip hop as fashion, sociology, culture. But I don’t know that I’ve seen a book that writes about hip hop as technology.

I guess one of the reasons is that hip hop was originally focused on the DJs, but it’s become all about the MC.
Exactly. So I tried to pen the book for all those people who buy Ableton and Fruity Loops and Logic, I tried to create the book that said, ‘This is why you just bought that DAW, and this is what you can do with it.’

Your career is almost a living example of all that: the transition from live instruments to electronic production.
I was there at the transition from funk to hip hop. I actually saw music turn into hip hop.

Stone Killers stands out as one of the last great funk albums, because of exactly that.
Stone Killers is a bridge album. The first half of it is a live band and the second half of it is drum machines. If you look at that album, the first four songs, it’s all a live band, and final four songs … I forget if there’s eight or nine songs on that album. But half of it was done in Boston and half of it was done in New York. That recording began the journey of me going down the drum machine route and the synthesiser route, and then eventually the samplers.

The early ’80s saw so many innovations.
Everything was moving so fast. That evolution of moving from songs that had guitars and pianos and bass and drums to songs like ‘It’s Like That’ by Run-DMC that just had a drum machine and a bassline with maybe an orchestra hit. If you’re a musician who’s been learning minor chords and major chords and dominant chords all your life so that you can put out music, and all of a sudden you listen to a song that’s just going [beat noises] for three and a half minutes, it’s like, what the heck is going on? So the first thing I needed to do was explore the instruments, explore the tools I was hearing in the new music. Had I not picked up a Lyricon, I might not have known how to even make the transition.

For anyone unfamiliar with a Lyricon, it’s a kind of woodwind synthesiser. How did you discover it?
I was a jazz musician and it wasn’t like now when jazz musicians look like they’re afraid of anything new. In the ’70s, if you were a jazz musician, you were curious about everything. I saw Rahsaan Roland Kirk at Paul’s Mall in Boston. And Rahsaan plays a tenor on one hand, an alto on another hand, he’s playing two saxophone simultaneously, sometimes three. He’s got a whistle in his nose, tambourine on his feet. And in front of Rahsaan, when I saw him, this was probably maybe six months to a year before I put out my first album. In front of Rahsaan, there were two Lyricon 1s and I’m looking at them like, ‘Oh, snap, I want to hear him play that. What the heck is that?’I thought it was like a shiny clarinet. But then I saw these cables coming off of it. So I went and asked some people. ‘It’s a wind synthesiser.’

That’s all I needed to hear, because I had already gone through the clarinet. You know, B flat clarinet, alto, bass clarinet. Then I went through the saxophones, alto sax, soprano sax, tenor sax, bari sax. Then I went through the flutes, because one of the people I admired was Lenny Pickett from Tower of Power, who has now become the bandleader for the Saturday Night Live band for the last 25 years. So, the Lyricon was going to open a door for me. I just went out and bought one, a cheaper version called the Lyricon 2, which had two oscillators on it and you could move between sine tone, saw tone and square wave. I don’t even think it had a triangle wave. I didn’t even know what that stuff meant. It had an LFO on it. I didn’t know what an LFO was. The low frequency oscillator, you know?

Kind of.
I literally recorded ‘In the Streets’ on the first album, two weeks after I bought the Lyricon. There’s a song called ‘Move Your Feet (To the Beat)’ which is an instrumental version of ‘Rise’, and you hear all these crazy sounds, right? That’s just me in there just moving knobs, trying to see what the thing could do. This was 1979. The rest of that year I was recording and learning and really, really getting into what this tool could do.

I eventually got a controller and was controlling an OB-1 one synthesiser. And that’s about the time I started to make [second album] Stone Killers. When I was touring in England, that’s what I had behind me: the OB-1 on a big keyboard rack that you could actually see the panel of. And at the bottom, there was a Lyricon 2. So both of those Lyricons. I would have one going through distortion pedals, and one for bass sounds and one for guitar sounds. I could turn the distortion on or off. So I could do, like, parallel fifth type of things.

How was it playing live with them?
I would get so sweaty that I would touch the presets and the liquid from my hands would move over and put another preset on. And every once in a while I would get electric shocks going up and down my arm because literally, it was a conductive unit and I’m standing in the middle of this conductive circuit, and you could actually feel the electricity going up and down my arm every once in a while. I was like, ‘Oh man, I hope I don’t get electrocuted on stage one day.’

So, the Lyricon opens the door, but it wasn’t the end of the journey, because… drum machines. I made my first album, Gang War, in 1979. I finished Stone Killers in 1981. Between 1979 and 1981, the Linn LM-1 and the Roland TR-808 had come out. I’m starting to hear records like ‘Planet Rock’ by Arthur Baker, who’s also from Boston. He’s got more of a DJ sensibility, and the bottom of his records sounds different. The drums sound different. And so, that began a second journey of exploration for me. What drum machine am I listening to? I found out about the Linn LM-1, and Prince used it on ‘Doves Cry’. So, my curiosity was so piqued that I rented that stuff after I got to New York and I’m finishing the album, and I felt a little bit… I felt like I was doing something unkind to the City Beat Band.

Because you’re using drum machines to finish the album?
I left Boston. I went to New York to find out how can I grow the brand of Prince Charles and City Beat Band. While I’m there, I’m like, ‘Man, the sound of radio in New York just sounds totally different than Boston.’ I asked the guys in the studio, ‘What is this sound?’ And somebody showed me a drum machine. ‘You can rent it for blah, blah, blah.’ So I got my money together and I started working on some songs. ‘Jungle Stomp’, New York with drum machines. ‘Bush Beat’, in New York with drum machines. ‘Video Freak’, drum machines.

[Production and business partner] Tony Rose came up with the whole video freak thing because everybody was playing video games. I’m like, ‘That’s a dumb idea.’ He’s like, ‘No, trust me.’ It’s 1981. MTV started in 1980. So I’m looking at MTV, fiddling around with drum machines, being told by Tony that this video thing is the new phenomenon, identifying a huge gay audience in New York that was really into me, what I did with it was create a musical landscape. And all of that came into that song, ‘Video Freak (Defend It)’.

There was another version of it released earlier in Boston I believe, under a different artist name. Trigger Finger And The Space Cadets.
Oh my god. Bill, you are taking me back, man. Wow.

There were some colourful interviews when you guys came to the UK. Were you and Tony Rose really leaders of rival Boston street gangs?
The truth is, I was in a gang and Tony was in a gang, but we didn’t know each other. So he put in the rival thing just to…

…Spice it up.
Yeah. I didn’t really know him until we started collaborating on music. I lived about six or seven blocks from the Combat Zone, which is a real place in Boston that I wrote the third album about. The tricks would come into our little apartment complex area, park their cars, and have the prostitutes blow them, screw them or whatever. And for fun, the guys in my gang would go and rob them. I vividly remember crouching down with a machete in my hand, getting ready to go and rob this guy. And one of the other guys in the gang says to me, ‘What the fuck are you doing, man? You just got into this great school and you’re out here getting ready to fuck your life up. Man, what are you doing?’ And I put the machete down and walked away and left it. Left that part of the lifestyle.

Wow.
But there was another part that I couldn’t get away from, that I really loved, and that was the whole pimp and prostitute thing. Because once again … okay… trying to say that I was in the life is a weird thing to say if you didn’t understand the context, right?

Right…
Where I grew up, all of this stuff was normal: to rob people, to be in a gang, to pimp, to have prostitutes. All of this was normal stuff, even though my mom, single parent, was striving to be middle class. But I’m out in the streets trying to gang bang. I was probably about 16 years old when I had that revelation with the machete and put it down. But I was still interested in pimping. And by this time, I was getting known as a musician also. And so I’m kind of like, ‘Okay, I’ll use my music thing to become the pimp musician.’

I started hanging out with a bunch of pimps and they would take me around to their different houses and their different women, and the women had babies from tricks and all this kind of stuff. And the guy would have four different cars and minks and cocaine and heroin all over the place, and it was just this incredible lifestyle. His name was Jerry, and he was … I called him my uncle. He wasn’t my uncle. He was just a pimp that had become enamoured of me and was trying to school me into the life.

But he realised I wasn’t really cut out for it, so he was trying to do a Scared Straight thing on me. He turned to me and he said, ‘Every day of my life that I wake up, I’m looking at 20 years to life if I get caught.’ And I’m in college by then. So after hanging around them and really, really thinking about this life is not what it’s cracked up to be. It looks interesting because of where I come from, but it’s a death sentence if you really play it out.

So once I went through what I’ll call pimp school, I came out the other end and was like, ‘Okay, I have gifts, and I need to exploit those gifts in order to really do what I was put on earth to do.’ So, what you got from the music was part me, but then some of the darker parts were songs that were written about people around me, if that makes sense.

Yeah. I always felt Prince Charles was a character rather than a person.
Yeah. It wasn’t all me, because if it had been me, I probably wouldn’t have been alive for those interviews. I had those two moments where I was able to pull myself back, but I had friends who didn’t have the opportunities that I had. They had to continue and go and rob that guy, you know? They had to continue pimping until they got busted, and then drugs and jail and all that. And there was something in me was like, ‘Music can help me to not be a destroyed human being.’

Was this all happening in Roxbury?
Roxbury was the ghetto, the hood. Roxbury is where New Edition comes from. I lived in Dorchester, which was the secondary version of a hood. Roxbury was the absolute hardest, Dorchester was a little less hard than that, and Mattapan was a little less than that. Mattapan is where all the light-skinned girls with the long hair are. And Roxbury was where all the dark skin girls that could probably beat you up were. And where I lived was the south end. Roxbury is adjacent to downtown Boston, and the heart of downtown Boston is where the Sugar Shack was, where all the musicians came and where all the pimps hung out. By the age of 13 I was in the Sugar Shack all the time. I was coming home hanging out with the gang, and my life was being coloured by the Ohio players, Kool & The Gang on the music side, and by a bunch of knuckleheads running around, running from the police on the home front, and going to a school that John F. Kennedy went to, Boston Latin School.

A lot of different inputs! How did you get into making records?
In college, it dawned on me that I couldn’t keep running back and forth to play in Boston on the weekends and do college kind of part-time. I had to really dedicate myself to college if I wanted to finish it. My sophomore year I had to take off from playing in order to get my grades up. Then third year, I started going, ‘Okay, my grades are back up. I wonder if there’s anything I can do during the summer.’ So during one of those summers, I met Maurice Starr.

He’s a Boston legend isn’t he: one half of electro-futurists Jonzon Crew, and the creative force behind New Edition and the New Kids on the Block.
Maurice Starr is a frigging musical genius. He can sing incredibly, play guitar, bass, drums, trombone, flugelhorn, and trumpet. So when I met him, he and his brothers were like the Jackson 5, but everybody played instruments. He was like a bull, brash, talking shit type of personality. And I was taught that to be a pimp and a gangster you’re supposed to shut your mouth. Gangsters move in silence. And now I meet this guy who is a musician entertainer, and he talks so much shit it’s crazy. But he was getting investors, and he put out a record. So I’m looking at him like, ‘Okay, so that’s how entertainers do this.’ You got to have a little bit of balls about you. You can’t run and hide behind the dark corners. You’ve actually got to be out front and talking smack.’

So, Maurice put out a record called ‘Bout Time I Funk U’. And when I heard it, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this song is just like Parliament-Funkadelic. So I don’t have to go and meet George Clinton in order to do this funk thing. I can just hang out with Maurice. So I joined Maurice’s band. I wanted to put out a record, and I knew this radio DJ wanted Maurice to do two songs on him. So I said ‘Do two songs on him, do two songs on me, have him pay the studio upfront, I’ll pay the back half of the studio.’ My song was ‘In the Streets’ and the other one was called ‘Fresh Game’. I didn’t have any money to pay the studio at the back end, so I go to this local investor in music Roscoe Gorham. Because back then, we didn’t have DJs. If you had a club, you had bands, right?

But Roscoe didn’t want to invest. Because he probably didn’t like the record. He probably didn’t understand the record. But he put me on to this guy named Tony Rose, who had just left Atlantic Records. Well, Tony heard my stuff and he just loved it. So then we went into a deal and we split everything 50/50 across the board, kind of like a L.A. Reid and Babyface deal, 50/50 down. It felt a little bit weird to me: ‘Why am I giving him half of my music when I’m doing all the music?’ But even though I didn’t feel comfortable doing it, the results were great. Tony was able to make moves with my music that probably no other human being on the planet could have made. Over the course of the next couple of decades and after meeting Puffy and people like that, I realise how intertwined the creativity and the business aspects of music are.

The band seemed to have much more success in Europe than it did in the US.
That’s true, yeah, very little traction in the US. We tried, but we were trying at the same time that hip hop was exploding. My first record came out in ‘79, a couple of months before ‘Rapper’s Delight’. Then you had Run DMC blowing up and Whodini and The Real Roxanne, and all of this kind of new sample-based music aesthetic. By 1985 with ‘Walk This Way’ hip hop was no longer an underground phenomenon. It was now the major selling point of black music in America. So from ’79 to ’85, there was a lot of shifting ground going on in the music industry. And I was not part of that hip hop shift in America. In 1986, Cameo’s album Word Up came out, that’s the last funk album. That’s the last funk album a major label invested in.

The idea that somebody could actually play new music [on instruments] was starting to wear thin. Piano solos and sax solos went away. I mean, I grew up when Lionel Richie was playing alto sax in The Commodores, and then he stopped playing alto sax and started singing. When I grew up, Kool & The Gang had a bunch of horns. They didn’t have JT Taylor singing. When I grew up, Tower of Power was about horns. Lenny Williams wasn’t singing on ‘Squib Cakes’. Everything was instrumental. 1984 was the last instrumental hit. Axel Foley, the theme from Beverly Hills Cop. I teach this stuff now and I’ve been doing a lot of historical analysis of what the hell happened to me. And 1984 was the last big instrumental hit. Everything has been vocal-centric since then. And rap has definitely pushed the envelope of the vocal-centric composition.

How did you get over to the UK?
How we got to England was… we’re in New York with Stone Killers and Tony’s running around New York, and he meets Neil Cooper from Reachout International Records.

That was the cassette-only company.
Yeah. He inks a deal with Neil for the cassette rights, and the vinyl rights were still available. And Greyhound Records in England picked it up, picked up ‘In the Streets’. And as ‘In the Streets’ is getting some traction in England, there starts to be a bidding war on some small level for Stone Killers. Virgin eventually won the bidding war and bought the vinyl rights to Stone Killers and gave me a budget to do a third album.

’83 is when I got the deal with Virgin, and they tried to move me into America by going through John Luongo, who was a DJ who started a label, Pavillion. He was a good well-known DJ and Arthur Baker was a well-known DJ also. Tom Silverman is from Boston too. You know, Tommy Boy Records. All of these guys were in Boston and we were all hanging out together.

England took to me right away because of the name, to kind of make fun of Bonnie Prince Charles in England. You know? And it worked for me as a marketing tool. Having this black guy in leather and chains being paraded as the new coming of Prince Charles. And the funny thing is, when I was in Boston 20 years old, that was exactly why I chose the name Prince Charles. I thought that maybe somebody in England would pick up the records and do something goofy with it, like make me famous.

Well, it did a pretty decent job then. So how did your career go into working with R&B and hip hop bands?
Oh, man. I would go and tour in Europe, make some money, come home, and then after about three or four months, my money was depleted and I’d have to figure out what to do until my next tour. I’m in New York and everybody’s a star, so I took a couple of part-time jobs just to bring a couple of hundred dollars in, and then it dawned on me, what the fuck am I doing sitting here telemarketing? There must be a way for me to make fucking $10 an hour doing music.

So, instead of me trying to get my money up so I can go into the studio, imagine if I was an engineer and I’m sitting there working with other producers, learning engineering. I’m getting the best of both worlds. I won’t be behind the curve. I won’t be late on drum machines. I won’t be late on synthesisers. I won’t be late on samplers. I don’t think the sampler had even come out yet, but I won’t be late on the emerging technology. I’ll be up to speed with everything.

So, I committed to a place called the Center for Media Arts, and I went to Tony and said, ‘I think I’m going to have to leave the stage. I really, really want to learn this.’ And Tony looked at me like, ‘No, no, you’re Prince Charles.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, but I ain’t got no fucking money, man.’

So, I went through this eight month program, and I interned at a couple of studios I had produced at, and everybody was like, ‘Aren’t you the guy that had that shiny gold suit?’ I got a job at Sound Ideas studio in 1986. I worked with different people. I eventually ran into a guy named Kashif and another guy named Paul Laurence who were some pretty big R&B producers, and I was the assistant engineer on their gigs, and eventually, I became their engineer.

Was it hard to leave the stage behind?
While I was on tour, I was saying to myself, I’m just too bright for this running around the world, begging people to love me as a recording artist. Because that’s kind of how it feels when you’re on stage: ‘Hey, love me!’ So, I made a pact to myself that that was going to be my last tour and I was going to become a studio rat.

How did you get involved with Bad Boy?
After Paul and Kalif I left Sound Ideas, and I was in the world of freelance audio engineering. I bumped into this guy named Dr. Seuss: Chad Elliott. He was a junior partner with the Swing mob, DeVante Swing and Jodeci. I started working with Jodeci in 1990 on Diary of a Mad Band, and their A&R person was Puffy at Uptown Records. And when Jodeci went to Rochester around ’93, ’94, and they took the whole group with them, including Timbaland and Missy Elliott, and they left me in New York, Puffy approaches me and says, ‘Do you want to work with me?’ And that was the beginning of 10, 11 years of working with Notorious B.I.G., Craig Mack, 112, Black Rob, Mary J. Blige, Faith Evans, Total, G. Dep, the whole Bad Boy roster.

You didn’t miss being an artist?
Some of my motivation for my move from the stage into the studio rat thing was I didn’t feel respected as an artist. The conversations with my record company were conversations with Tony Rose. They weren’t being had with me. I felt that I’m too intelligent to not have that kind of audience with the record label. And once I started doing the audio engineering thing, I started making a hundred times the money I was making with Prince Charles and the City Beat Band.

And I didn’t have to be pigeonholed into just being a funk artist. I could work on a hip hop act. I could work on a pop act. I could work on work on R&B, on some French hip hop. I could do so many different things. I could do so many different things from the engineering and producer’s chair that I wasn’t able to do from the artist producer chair. And like I say, this was a pivotal time in music. In 1983, ’84, ’85, a musician didn’t become a rapper. No, you’re either a musician or a rapper. Even though I tried to rap. You know that I rapped on ‘Tight Jeans’ and ‘Don’t Fake the Funk’. But it was just rapping as exploration, like George Duke explores funk or Herbie Hancock explores turntablism. I was just exploring. I didn’t live and breathe for hip hop. That was never the thing. Even when I was associated with Puffy.

I hate to burst people’s bubbles that think, ‘Well, you’re an artist and you do or die for art.’ I’m like, fuck that shit, I do and die to keep food on the table for Prince Charles. There are a lot of great musicians that in their later life didn’t have medical insurance and couldn’t take care of themselves. I will not be embarrassed because I’ve taken care of myself by stepping off of the stage. The stage was an illusion. Reality was, this fucking bill is not being paid. You know? You’re getting ready to be homeless. I just couldn’t go through that, so I had to figure out a way to balance my art and my creativity and my technology, which started with the Lyricon and my sense of business acumen. And that seemed to make more sense to me being behind the scenes as a producer and an engineer.

Judy Weinstein made dance music count

Interviews

David Morales feels it

Tony Smith did it Barefoot

Danny Krivit rolled through disco

Eddy Grant defined the frontline

Strange Things Happened To Richard Norris

Pete Bellotte got everything in synth

Giorgio Moroder electrified us

Prince Charles freaked the funk

François K hasn’t stopped

F**k me I’m Fabus

Johnny brought the disco

Judy Weinstein made dance music count

Bruce Forest brought Better Days

Junior Vasquez ruled the Factory floor

Normski shot the stars

Norman Jay has his groove rare

Features

Larry Levan and the Lost Art of DJing

The life and death of the Sound Factory

The Four Aces: Legacy in the Dust

Ballroom Blitz, 1991

Sleeping Bag went bang

Chi Chi Valenti took back the night

Ruf Dug romps the Furtive 50, 2023

Body & Soul was NYC

Men in sheds started things off

What is Balearic?

Reviews

Welcome To The Club – The Life and Lessons of a Black Female DJ

Party Lines: Dance Music & The Making Of Modern Britain

Gay Bar – Why We Went Out

Ibiza ’89

Yo! The Early Years of Rap, 1982-84

Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor

Love Goes To Buildings on Fire – Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever

Rebel Threads – Clothing of the Bad, Beautiful & Misunderstood

Long Relationships – My Incredible Journey From Unknown DJ to Small-Time DJ

Last Night a DJ Saved My Life – The History of the Disc Jockey

Breaks in the Air – The Birth of Rap Radio in New York City