We licensed this amazing photo (by Slim Aarons) for the new edition of Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, but we knew very little about Slim Hyatt, shown here DJing at the Egyptian-themed Shepheard’s in New York’s Drake Hotel in 1964, other than the important fact he was America’s first discothèque DJ, having introduced the French-derived craft at Le Club on New Year’s Eve 1960. The only source we had was Albert Goldman’s book Disco. Now, thanks to the mighty powers of the internet, and the tireless detective work of our friends Mark and Barney at Rocksbackpages, we know a lot more. Check out the 1965 piece from Hit Parader below. As well as a night out with Slim, it contained another nugget of gold: the mention of Annette Clark and Orell Gaynor, discaires at swanky members club L’Interdit.

Slim Hyatt was a former military man from Panama who was butler to pianist and bandleader Peter Duchin and who fell into the role of pioneering club DJ by accident. When wealthy French hotelier Oliver Coquelin opened Le Club, the first Parisian style nightclub in New York, he asked Duchin to find him a DJ and Duchin recommended Hyatt. At 416 East 55th Street, Le Club opened its doors on New Year’s Eve, 1960 with Hyatt at the turntables. Musically, however, things didn’t go so well that first night. We’ll let Goldman pick up the story:

The society girls were delighted by the host’s good taste and found the ladies’ room especially kicky: on the vanity was a one-gallon jug of Arpège secured to the table by a gold-link chain. The men were impressed by the clubby atmosphere and the wine list. The plan of entertainment was to start the evening off on a low key by playing the then-fashionable continental music (which had taken hold in America thanks to the currently popular French and Italian films), then escalate gradually to more and more lively strains till the belles and the beaux were doing the Twist.

Everything went to plan and the opening was adjudged a success, but Coquelin was deeply aggrieved by the music, which instead of describing a smooth arc of mounting excitement, started and stopped, faltered and fumferred, as if the discaire hadn’t the faintest idea of what he was doing. In fact, he hadn’t.

America’s first disco DJ was a very pleasant and deferential black gentleman named Slim Hyatt. He had been recruited for the club by society bandleader Peter Duchin. Coquelin had asked his friend Peter for an unemployed musician to spin the discs. Duchin had replied: ‘I have just the man you want.’ When everything went wrong on opening night, Coquelin called Hyatt on the carpet. ‘What sort of instrumaint do you play?’ he demanded. ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t play any,’ confessed the embarrassed Hyatt. ‘Then, you are a dansair?’ queried Coquelin. Again the reply was in the negative. ‘A singair?’ persisted the perplexed proprietor. ‘No, sir,’ replied Hyatt. ‘As a matter of fact, I am Mr Duchin’s butler. You see he didn’t have the money to pay me jes now, so he said I should take this job.’ Coquelin hit the ceiling, but after he had tried a couple of real musicians with uniformly dismal results, he went back to Hyatt and gradually trained him in the old French art of spinning.

Coquelin, known as ‘Disco Daddy’, would go on to open a series of society nightclubs, most famously the kaleidoscopic Cheetah in 1966. Hyatt continued as a DJ and after his shaky start, by 1965 was an impressive forebear to DJs like Terry Noel and Francis Grasso, ‘creating moods, manipulating crowds, playing God in the universe that is Shepheard’s,’ as we read here in this vivid snapshot.

SOMETHING’S happened to dancing that never happened before, all at once several million people of all ages, on several continents, have discovered that their hips can do all kinds of wonderful new things they hadn’t even thought possible. Why? Some say it’s the sound: Ray Charles, the Beatles, Trini Lopez. Some say it’s the high cost of floor space; you can’t move your feet so all that’s left are your hips and arms. And there are others who will tell you it’s because boys don’t want to dance with girls… because dancing this way expresses our turbulence and releases our tensions… because teens are setting the standards these days.

Everybody has a theory — but what it all boils down to is this: the whole world’s doing the Frug, the Watusi and the Monkey and having a ball!

I recently spent three weeks around New York looking, listening — and dancing. Here’s what’s happening at the swingingest places in town.

SHEPHEARD’S
Shepheard’s is the most popular place in New York, and don’t accidentally stroll down those two little steps between the bar and the tables, or it’ll cost you four dollars. It’s only been open since New Year’s Eve, and it hasn’t had a less-than-capacity evening since. It’s the only true discotheque, with no live music at all, only records. There used to be live music: six musicians who’d switch off, three playing along with every record. But then the union had to find out about it, and now there aren’t any more musicians at Shepheard’s.

But there is Slim Hyatt, a popeyed Panamanian who presides over Shepheard’s three turntables and 2,000 records. I slithered around in back to talk to him, and believe me, he’s an artist. He doesn’t just play records; he creates moods, he manipulates crowds, he plays God in the universe that is Shepheard’s. ‘I got to keep them on the floor,’ Slim says, in his slightly manic but very personable way. ‘I got to keep them dancing.’

‘Do you introduce each song like a disc jockey?’
‘No. No time for talkin’. Talkin’ kills the whole scene.’ Slim looks through a peephole at the dancers, studies their reactions to his music like a scientist studying the reactions of animals undergoing an experiment. ‘I start to compile the whole thing together… minute I see them fading away, I change it. My job is to keep all people on the floor,’ he reiterates, sliding records on turntables, looking at ‘his’ dancers, turning knobs, gauging, judging. ‘You got to pick the right moment, the right time. I might even play a bunny hop — if it was the right time! The whole thing is psychic.’

What’s big at Shepheard’s?
‘French songs… The Beatles…mambo… cha cha. This one’s good: “Where Did Our Love Go,” by the Supremes. I know music,’ Slim says, watching his turntables and, like a puppeteer, using his music to control the people dancing out in front.

THE PEPPERMINT LOUNGE
It all started with the Twist, and the Twist started at the Peppermint lounge. After nearly four years, they’re both still going strong. The place was packed. The twisters were twisting, Sharon Gregg was singing, the Epics were playing, the tape machine was blasting, and I was sitting there wondering where you do an interview in a place that’s never quiet.

In the kitchen, turned out to be where. Among the glasses and the waiters and the sinks, Ralph Saggase told me how it was in those days. Saggase, a former policeman who come out of retirement to try his hand at running a nightclub, showed me a Cholly Knickerbocker column dated Friday, October 6, 1961. Dukes, duchesses, millionaires and just plain movie stars were coming every night, it said, to do the Peppermint’s own dance called the ‘Twist.’

Well, you know how it is with us followers; everybody rushed over to West 45th Street and started twisting. Mr. Saggase thinks it had a lot to do with megatons: ‘People got tired of all that testing, all those megatons.’

Anyway, Hank Ballard wrote a song called ‘The Twist’, Joey Dee played it every night. Chubby Checker recorded it. I needn’t tell you what happened then. The Peppermint Lounge and the Twist set off an explosion all its own. There was a lag for a while, then — Pow! Along came The Beatles who, Mr. Saggase believes, have rejuvenated the whole entertainment industry. Twisting, he thinks, is an egotistical dance. ‘You can have a lot of fun all by yourself.’

I thanked him, squeezed past the waiters, and went back to the Lounge. The dancers were still dancing (today it’s all Frug and Monkey at the Peppermint as everywhere else). Tommy Hunt was singing, the Young Philadelphians were playing, Herkimer Strubbles was monkeying, the audience was clapping, and the noise was deafening. But it looked like fun, so I dropped my pencil and pad and started dancing. As Ralph Saggase says, ‘It takes two to tango, but it only takes one to Twist.’

TRUDE HELLER’S
Once upon a time there was a woman named Trude Heller, and she had a place in the Village called The Versailles, and it was a bomb. So she turned it into ‘Trude Heller’s,’ put in continuous live twist music, hoisted her house twisters halfway up the walls [one of these paid dancers was pioneering DJ Francis Grasso], and stood back in awe as it took off like a rocket. There’s always something happening at Trude’s. The lights flashing on and off, the bunches of colorful balloons, the smallness of the room, all makes it seem more like a very swinging party than a nightclub. When the Larks aren’t playing, the Jimmy Castor Quartet is. Trude’s is where I learned the truth about feet-on-the-floor dancing. I chanced a cha cha, and a girl wearing the sharpest heels in the world stepped on, if not through, my right foot. So even if you get the chance to move your feet, take my advice, don’t.

THE EIGHTH WONDER
If The Eighth Wonder, around the corner from Trude Heller’s, looks something like it there’s a good reason; Trude’s son Joel owns it. I stopped in early to talk to him before the noise started (having learned my lesson at the Peppermint Lounge), but there was a group onstage auditioning so we had to vell anyway. After the group had plugged themselves in (‘Meet the arranger: Con Edison. They get ten per cent’), Joel shouted to me across the tiny table, ‘I come from the Nina Simone, Count Basie school, and I always looked down on this kind of music! But it gets to you after a while!’

‘Do you dance yourself?’ I screamed.
‘Yes! I’m basically shy, but this kind of dancing makes you lose your inhibitions. It turns you on. They’re things anybody can do. You just look at somebody and get up and pretty soon you’ve got it. And if you don’t, so what? Nobody cares.’

Who’s dancing at Trude’s and the Eighth Wonder?
Everybody, says Joel Heller. Models, socialites, college kids, young people, old people. ‘The older ones come to watch and end up dancing. One night we had a woman here about seventy. Maybe eighty. She didn’t even look like she could walk! But she got up and started dancing.’

The auditioning band left and the regular band, the Starlights, came on. The house dancers jumped up on their little boxes and started doing the Frug. ‘See that girl?’ Joel said, pointing. ‘She’s putting herself through medical school by dancing here.’ The dancers are to inspire customers and for entertainment. If they start getting too intricate, Heller makes them simplify their dancing so as not to discourage the customers.

At that point somebody asked me to dance. He didn’t dance like me, and I didn’t dance like him, but as I say, it doesn’t make the slightest difference. There’s another clue to dancing’s new popularity; the number of possible partners has multiplied by the thousands.

THE GOLD BUG
A few blocks further downtown, on West 3rd Street, one discovers the Gold Bug, the only club in New York City with dancing plus a big rock ‘n’ roll show every weekend. Bob Santo Pietro, a former dealer in Las Vegas, took the club over from his father not long ago.

‘First we had jazz,’ the 25-year-old Santo Pietro says, ‘And it died. Oh, did it die. Besides, I hate jazz with such a passion I had to leave every time they started to play. I used to feel like I was in the Twilight Zone. You know what? They never played the same song the same way twice!’ (The jazz, needless to say, had been his father’s idea.) ‘I figured it was my place, I’d do what I want. I put in rock n roll, and it was packed from the first night. They do the Monkey, the Frug, the Hully Gully, the Dog…. They’re still Twisting… the Swim…’ Mike Scott and the Nightriders play for dancing; on weekends Santo Pietro presents such stars as The Bobettes, the Ronettes, little Anthony, Ruby and the Romantics. ‘Strictly top selling acts, million sellers.’ Everybody from celebrities to tourists come to the Gold Bug, but Santo Pietro has a special place in his heart for teenagers, and the crowd there is the youngest of any place I visited.

L’INTERDIT
L’Interdit is another of the three or four true discotheques in New York City. Like the others, it was inspired by the discotheques the Jet Set saw in Paris three or four years ago. A private club, L’Interdit is not the sort of place one could just stop in at on a short visit to New York, since you have to make application for membership first. The atmosphere is truly European: small, dimly lit, intimate. Orell Gaynor and Annette Clark, the disco-technicians, play a great many French and Italian records, plus the Beatles and Trini Lopez. Sometimes records are discovered by far-roving socialites who bring them back for Orell and Annette to play, perhaps for the first time anywhere in this country.

At L’Interdit all the men are handsome and all the girls are pretty. Incidentally, I saw more real discotheque dresses here than anywhere (discotheque dress: a dress that, the first thing a girl does when she puts it on, is wiggle). Everybody you ever wanted to be belongs to L’Interdit, and Robert, the charming, handsome European manager, is groovy too.

The champion dancer of New York is Killer Joe Piro, so one bright day I hustled over to his dance studio on West 55th Street to see what the master had to say.

Killer Joe sits behind what looks like a bar but is actually a desk. Several lithe young men hovered around, and behind closed doors a Frug played over and over. I hopped on a bar stool and asked Killer Joe how come everybody’s doing the frug.

‘The twist caused the explosion. It’s not new, you know. Cab Calloway was doing it thirty-five years ago. But all of a sudden everybody discovered they have a bottom.’

‘Sound is most important. The sound makes you move. The boys are happy because they’re not touching the girls — boys are scared of girls, did you know that?’ (I didn’t) ‘The girls don’t care as long as they’re dancing. And what the kids do, the parents do. The trend is to youth. The youngsters are running the country!’

The phone rang, and while Killer Joe was talking, one of his assistants came over and gave me a quick dancing lesson ‘We call this contra-body motion,’ he said, doing the frug as taught at Killer Joe’s. ‘It’s just like you walk — the arms swinging just the opposite of the feet.’

Killer Joe, off the phone now, said, ‘The dances start in the Negro sections and on the Coast. I learn them in Harlem, or St. Louis. And whenever a new sound comes out, I see what my kids are doing. They’re the ones that know what’s happening.’

The Killer cited space — or rather the lack of it — as a major reason for stationary dancing. He also said, ‘When wars break out we dance together… between wars we dance a part.’

‘Anything else?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Everybody should learn the fox trot. It’s our national dance.’

I thanked him, slid off my stool, and took my leave. I never did see Killer Joe dance.

Here are some other comments I’ve heard about the new sound and the new dancing. An older friend — who doesn’t like it — says, ‘They’re not doing anything, they weren’t doing anything before, but at least they were doing it together.’ Another: ‘You used to touch a girl once in a while — now you just send signals.’ But the teenagers at the Gold Bug say, ‘It makes you swing. It makes you happy.’

Everybody’s got something to say about the Frug-Watusi-Twist-Monkey Craze, that’s for sure.

Me? I just think we should all turn on some music — and dance. It’s like Slim Hyatt says:

Talkin’ kills the whole scene.