Category Archives: Downtown Kings & Queens

Chris Stein delivered the rapture

Chris Stein is the quiet genius (and guitarist) whose interest in New York street culture drove his band Blondie in all kinds of interesting directions. For many kids in the suburbs, ‘Rapture’ was their first contact with hip hop, while ‘Heart Of Glass’ was their homage to disco and producers like Giorgio Moroder (with whom they later worked). We talked to Chris in 2014 about hip hop, hippies, heroin and financial calamities.

interviewed by Bill in London, 28.2.14

What was it like growing up in New York in the ’60 and ’70s.
It was great. I was a teenager in the middle of that folkie scene, going to New York every day on the subway, it was a great period. I saw Hendrix walking round the streets. I saw Richie Havens all the time, he was always hanging out on Washington Square. The West Village, Bleeker Street, MacDougal Street was the nexus, where everyone went to hang out. It was the December’s Children period [psychedelic rock band from Ohio]. That was a really big record when it came out for all of us. I was born in 1950 so my life parallels the rise of rock’n’roll to a certain extent. I was at Woodstock. I went to Haight Street in 1967. I was at home in my communal house there when someone came running in shouting, ‘George Harrison was just on Haight Street!’ I went to San Francisco in ’67 and ’68. I got to LA the weekend of Monterey Pop, and I was so horny to get to San Francisco I didn’t go to the festival, which I’ve always regretted. Debbie went to Woodstock, too.

How did you move from the flower power to the Velvets.
Well you know my Velvets story is from 1967. My friend was working for Andy Warhol as like a gofer. He was a kid, just 16. He came to my house in Brooklyn one night and said the opening act for the Velvets has not shown up, do you guys wanna do it? So we went to the Gymnasium which was uptown on the west side and opened up for the Velvet Underground which is really a great moment for me. They let us use their amps. Maureen Tucker let us put her bass drum right side up. They were awesome. We were always aware of them in that period. I went to art school in like 1968 then I took a couple of years off and went back in the ’70s. Then I started seeing flyers for the New York Dolls in the lobby and I thought it was a drag act. And I went to see them and fell in with Eric Emerson and the Magic Tramps. Everything was connected to Andy Warhol, everybody had some connection to him.

Was that stuff widely known outside the downtown scene?
The art scene was only downtown. Max’s was an art hangout but there was a music situation a little bit later. We got the Velvets record when it first came out in the middle of the flower power thing.

You came from an arty background didn’t you?
My mom was a painter and my dad was a frustrated writer but he just had to have a normal job. They had met in the Party, and he was a Labour organiser. They were pretty leftwing. The FBI had come to my house when I was just a baby, was the family story!

What was the vibe when you left school?
My mom got me into this private school uptown called Quintano School For Young Professionals. It was across the street from Carnegie Hall. There were actually a few kids who were in showbiz. I think Patty Duke went there. Johnny Thunders went there later, too. They just wanted to get you through high school successfully so you could take a degree.

What was your ambition when you left school?
I’d always been into music, I’d been playing since I was 12 and being in bands. But you didn’t think of it as a career in those days. It wasn’t like the kids now who see themselves like that now. It was just what we did. I was still involved in that revolutionary hippie ethic, too. Now, everyone aged 20 – 30 is a hipster. In those days, if you were a hipster you were an outsider. You weren’t part of the mainstream.

Tell me how you first discovered hip hop.
[Fab Five] Freddy brought us to this event uptown in 1977 and it was a big moment. It was me, Debbie, him, Glenn O’Brien and Patti Astor. It was just exciting. I’d never seen it in person before, you know? The energy level was phenomenal. It was a kind of a festival in a police athletic league which is kind of like a civic centre. It was just great. And it was like a parallel of what was going on downtown, but they were completely separated. So it seemed like a no-brainer to do something with a rap in it. It just seemed the obvious way to go.

Where did you meet Fab Five Freddy?
Maybe TV Party [Glenn O’Brien and Chris’s cable access show] or hanging around on the scene. He used to do that TV show with us. I’m not exactly sure of the timeline.

Steinski discovered you through a WPIX guest slot.
Yeah we got close to the Funky 4 + 1 and Rodney and Sharon. We went on Saturday Night Live and they let us pick another guest artist and we brought those guys on, Funky 4 +1, and the guys on the show just couldn’t get it together to get the turntables to work so they wound up with a tape and it was really disappointing because they didn’t get to do real scratching. But that was still the first hip hop act on either local or national TV on America. They still put them on at the end over the titles. They were just nervous about the whole thing.

Why do you think they were nervous?
Just all this fucking stuff. The late ’70s that period I talked to a lot of people in record companies and 100% of these guys told me: hip hop is a fad and it’s going to go away. Everyone of these fuckin’ guys. And it was racial aspect to it, gang kids etc.

So tell me about the new album. Debbie says it was a more long distance.
Remote, yeah yeah. For most of the record I was in New York and Jeff the producer was in San Francisco. So we’d be sending things back and forth all the time, for about a year. I would send him a track, programmed, and Clem would come in a little later and play some drums, and we’d play some of the instruments, real instruments, but it just kept going back and forth.

And a lot more programmed?
Oh yeah there’s a bit of my programming on almost all the tracks.

So how does Clem work around that?
We just put him in and he plays on top of that and it makes it sound more organic when you put the real instruments on. Real guitarists replacing programmed guitar, but I have a tendency to use guitar samples, it’s just easier to get a sound with a sample but I play it with a midi guitar. It’s just easier than plugging an amp and trying to get a sound, the sound can take an hour sometimes. If you use a sample it’s five minutes and it’s right there.

Do you prefer working like that?
Now I really prefer working with the computer. Or I’ll just write in a guitar part with a keyboard frequently too. There are all these programmes now that will play a chord by using one finger.

How long have you been working this way?
I was really lucky I had the guy who runs our fan club got me going with computers in the late ’80s/early ’90s. I remember when emails started and if I’d had any brains I’d have bought all those domain names! But then who the fuck thought of that? But this stuff I’ve been doing for six or seven years and still learning all the time. I’m not Skrillex, I don’t have that kind of skill, you know, all these songs that he writes just sitting on an aeroplane.

What was the imperative to get the band back together?
When we broke up, interest in the band built up over the next ten years. Early on, I never heard people talking about it, but as time went on more and more did and then other musicians started referencing it. It seems like we’re much more accepted now than we were 40 years ago. Certainly 30 years ago, at any rate.

When the band ended in the 1980s was it more to do with your illness?
Nah, it was management, bad financial advice. We ran out of money. We were just screwed over on so many levels. Bad management, bad accounting, our accountant, in the two year we made the most money, decided not to pay our taxes with these loopholes and we wound up owing $100k which kept going up every year with interest so it ended up being $1m. after five years. It was stupid, all that stuff. And we were doing drugs like crazy and there was no rehab in those days. Now it’s part of showbiz, the artist gets fucked up, you go to rehab

And then you write a song about it!
Send ’em away for two months and that’s it. In those days, at the same time all the A&R guys at the record companies were giving us loads of cocaine. But that was okay, because that was ‘non-addictive’ [smiles wryly] and there were tensions in the band and we’d been working for five years pretty much non-stop which didn’t help.

Tell me about the Latin influences on the new album?
It’s what got me really excited. I started with a couple of compilation records and I wound up listening to Mega, this great New York Latin station, and I’ve always liked tracking stuff that’s a little obscure and even though there’s a huge mass of people listening to Latin music all the time, it’s not in the mainstream in America because of the language. Americans are very stubborn about the language so to me even though my Spanish is very lousy, it’s just very exciting and those grooves are very sexy.

How did you find the collaborators.
I had been listening to the first Systema Solar album and I was using that to reference the tracks, and I sent a track I was working on, ‘Sugar On The Side’, to our producer Jeff and then I sent some of the Systema tracks saying this is what I’m listening to, this is what it should sound like. And he said, ‘Let’s reach out to these guys’, they came back right away and Debbie has since sung on their second album which is also a really nice track. They’re great. We didn’t hear from one of the guys for weeks and we were waiting for a track from him and he wrote us an email saying, ‘Oh I’ve just been in the jungle! I didn’t have any email.’

How long have you been getting into this because it’s been a sound in New York for decades hasn’t it?
I’m much drawn to the modern electronic Latin the newer generation rather than the old school Latin stuff, Cuban etc. You know I always loved that stuff but this is just very fresh.

How did your illness affect you and your creativity?
I had a lot of great visions while I was in the hospital.

Was that morphine?
No I was still doing dope (heroin) too, to make my hospital stay a little better and it would be mixed with massive doses of steroids so I basically tripped out. I mean I can’t say I was in a coma, but I was in a very deep dreamstate and I had a lot of very strange visions. Maybe that helped my creativity. I can’t say that I regretted any of it. It was interesting overall but there was a lot of annoying aspects to it. I had a spinal tap in the middle of all this. That’s fuckin’ painful. It was like getting shot. I certainly stepped back from the whole drug thing. But it still took a few years after that to stop doing coke all the time but at this point I can’t even have a toke on a joint I get too tripped out. Now I don’t do anything, I don’t drink anymore, nothing.

Does it alter the way you view the world or music?
I think that probably smoking pot all the time it makes you see small and big things of equal importance. So if you pour coffee on your leg it’s the same importance as signing the contract and I don’t think that’s a good mental state to be in.

How do you feel about New York with gentrification
Well it’s kinda sad, but financial everything is kind of sad. But you know it speaks more of the world situation. I really like Obama, and it’s exciting to break through. I don’t know whether 15 years ago I thought I’d ever see a black guy in the White House, but the banks still fuckin’ own everything including him. I don’t know what it’s going to take to change that situation.

Do you think Blondie would exist now if you were 19 or 20 in New York.
I don’t know. Who the fuck knows? If Debbie was herself and doing what she was doing back then we would stand a good shot. She was so striking and so amazingly gorgeous, nobody else looks like that but we would’ve still been in with a lot of other people doing the same thing. It’s kind of the inverse of what I would do if I could go back 40 years with all this knowledge.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3iScu9qhdzzlyd4sfERnPm?si=07375f0b5d9a4a30

Blondie’s musical influences

What was it like being part of the CBGBs scene, because they all seem to have Blondie as the write-offs.
Oh yeah yeah. We were very scattered. A lot of the bands had a real tight focus about what their style was and our style was all over the place, but that became the Blondie style, this eclecticism. People I admired, like Bowie, were all over the place, too and reinventing himself all the time. Certainly we weren’t in the forefront of that scene, or not early on. But as soon as we got the recordings out there that all changed.

Did that focus what you were doing?
Yeah it probably did. But we have this DVD coming out of us at CBGBs from 1977 which is terrific because these tapes are in colour, have been lying around for years., nobody’s ever seen it before. But it sounds very punk compared to what the recordings sound like, more fast and manic sounding.

I saw you play at Hammersmith Odeon when you blew Television off stage.
You were at that show?

Yeah! And they were the big guys in the neighbourhood and they stole Fred Smith from you.
Well yeah they were. I think their expectations over here (UK) defeated them and it’s always good to be the underdog. I remember it was written about and I remember a guy standing up in audience and yelling, ‘Prove it, Tommy boy’ which is obviously one of their songs and everyone was maybe a little sceptical as to whether they’d live up to those expectations. And fuckin’ Tony Parsons went and wrote how much he’d fallen in love with Debbie in the NME (he then proceeded to kill us next time we were over!).

A very British reaction in the music press.
That was standard procedure.

Coming over from small gigs in the US to Hammersmith Odeon must have felt like a breakthrough.
Well yeah, something about the brash American female. There’s the Lolita theory, which is one of my all-time favourite English language novels: young American seduces old Europe. So there’s an aspect of that in there.

There was also the strong vein of Anglophilia in Blondie.
Oh yeah. I’d been over here twice before. I went to the first reggae festival up in Portobello. I was staying in the house adjacent to the one used in Performance, on Powis Square, which was such a big deal for me because Performance is still my favourite music movie. It’s the only good music movie. I first time I came over in 1971, I visited the Isle Of Man, I was with a girl visiting her relatives in the UK, an aunt who lived there and it was like going back to the ’40s. She had a pump in the kitchen for water and stuff. Fuckin’ amazing. I went to the witches mill. I went to the Gerald Gardner Museum. I’ve always been into the occult. He was the first one to write about witchcraft in the ’50s.

What was it like working with Mike Chapman?
Mike was great, he was awesome. Recently I realised that one of the best aspects with Chapman was he wouldn’t let the fuckin’ record company anywhere near us. He wouldn’t let them send A&R guys in to tinker around with the music and try and influence what was going on. There was a point where he hijacked the tapes, I don’t remember why but he wouldn’t hand them over until we’d done whatever we needed to do at that moment. The famous story is he gave them Autoamerica and they said, ‘We don’t hear any singles on here’. It had two number ones on it! But he wouldn’t let the guys into the control room.

Debbie said he was chosen by the record company?
No Terry Ellis brought him round.

Did you know about his pedigree in the UK?
Yeah yeah, we knew Sweet and stuff.

What was he like to work with?
He was great. It was a whole different reality, we just learned so much on that first record because he just had so…. We hadn’t been in a situation where we’d been repeating things. And suddenly he was there asking us to do our part 20 or 30 times until it met his exacting standards. It’s something I’ve carried with me ever since. You have to be able to do something over and over and still keep it fresh and I think that goes into writing, it goes into everything. In spite of all his writing abilities he didn’t do that with us, he just drew out the best of our own material.

Why do you think Blondie succeeded when everyone was saying you were terrible?
I think the recordings helped a lot. I’d always worked with recordings on my own with my four-track. I think all our terrible references just came from the live period when we were only represented by our shows at CBGBs. When we started playing out after we’d recorded, it changed.

Did it give you self-belief hearing how it could sound?
Certainly, yeah. I always loved the idea of recording in multi-track. Even when I was a kid listening to the Beatles I was still always listened to the recording aspect of it, you know how they were doing this thing as well as the overall sound.

What inspires you now?
A lot of stuff. Pop music, but I’m always six months behind what’s going on. There’s such a mass of stuff. We saw Drenge at the NME awards. They were fucking great.

What’s the secret to your enduring partnership with Debbie?
We have a similar mindset. Some kind of connection in some past life, I’m not sure, it’s just what it is. We were just lucky to find each other.

Did you feel that when you first met?
Pretty early on yeah. We never really argued much about things. Both of us will see how much the other is wanting something and then back down. It goes to a point in the middle where both of us know not to cross.

You’d been through a few bands together before Blondie. You joined the Stilletos didn’t you?
Yeah I went to their first show.

At that stage did you have a vision of what your band would be?
No. There was no masterplan even on this record. It was just one song at a time.

So what’s the impetus for making music?
I’ve always had it going and trying to get it out. I spent a few months working on this photo book, working on music three months now, it’s out it in September, I wrote a lot of anecdotes in the captions for the photos. We did this other book Making Tracks with Victor Bockris, but it didn’t get much attention.

What’s it like being a musician now compared to when you were having number ones?
We release the music ourselves now. External pressures now are just to make a living. The kids [eight and ten years old at the time] have changed my whole perspective because if I didn’t have them I wouldn’t care about money. I spend a lot of time with those guys. But suddenly I have to think about making money which was never such a priority for me.

How did you meet your current producer?
Gee I don’t know. I can’t remember who suggested him, but he’s worked with the Killers and Fischerspooner. My wife is friends with one of the guys from Fischerspooner, so he gave him a big recommendation. It just worked out.

In the early days how did it feel when Television nicked Fred Smith off you?
Oh it was annoying. It was like starting all over again. There was a moment when Clem was very supportive, we were really defeated by it and he was the big pusher: ‘I know all these musicians from New Jersey!’ Which turned out to be Gary [Valentine].

Also Clem’s look was perfect for you.
We were all really attracted to the suits. We were all Anglophiles. He was a big Bay City Rollers fans. It really wasn’t thought out. In those days you could go to like fuckin’ Hoboken and these towns in New Jersey and there were stores full of ’60s clothing, tab collar shirts, narrow collar suits, it was there off the rack. There was amazing stuff in the thrift shops right up into the ’70s.

Debbie Harry has a heart of class

As well as being one of the most iconic pop singers of all time, Debbie Harry kept both feet in the underground club scene that had been the crucible for her band, Blondie. She organised a baby shower at the Paradise Garage for Grace Jones, was a regular attendee at both Jackie 60 and Mother, the legendary meatpacking district clubs run by Chi-Chi Valenti and Johnny Dynell, and was even know to occasionally put in a shift behind the bar. In our 2014 meeting, we asked her about the latest Blondie album, women in rock music, and her early love of hip hop.

So tell me about your new album, Ghosts Of Download.
It’s terrific. I love it. There have been a lot of contributors to this one, probably more than any other Blondie album before. Lots of different writers. Basically the musicianship was the Blondie group but there might have been some addition stuff that our producer Jeff Saltzman put on in San Francisco. The thing that’s interesting about this one is that it’s been done just through the internet. It was a very computerised delivery. Not necessarily the music on it but the way that we did it, we didn’t all get together and live in an area and go into the studio every day. Chris would build up the tracks and then he’d send it off to the producer and he would fiddle around with it back and forth; that kind of thing.

And how does that work creatively? How does it feel from a creative point of view?
It feels fine actually. It feels pretty much the same for me, because I always get the track sent to me either on a CD or online and I would mull them over and Chris would maybe suggest a melody line or I would add to it and work on some kind of a lyric and then we’d send that back and forth so it’s pretty much the same for me. At the end, when all the tracks were done I’d go and put on some vocals.

And how would it be finished?
Oh he would do that in the studio.

You’ve used a lot of modern – dance – techniques to make this and the last album. Is that a conscious thing? Is it something that’s inspired you a lot over the years?
Well you know, I guess it is. We’ve always admitted to being inspired by our peers and what’s happening. We’re very urban and open minded listeners, I think it’s not that you’re copying somebody, but the stuff just seeps in. So when you have an idea you think, ‘I like that,’ and then it carries through and becomes part of your thinking. You do have to be careful not to copy somebody. You think you’re coming up with something original but you’ve actually heard it somewhere before. But I’m not responsible for that. I only wrote one song on this album! So I’m pretty safe.

But New York is such a musical city, you have all these ideas and directions and sounds coming at you all the time, it must have some sort of influence on the music you make.
I don’t know. Growing up that way is one thing, but it’s the state of the world now.

In what sense?
Any kind of music is available instantly.

Is that a good or bad thing?
I think it’s great.

What music inspires you now?
Well, I listen to music mostly in the car. I really like it there. I put on music when I have people or friends over but when I’m running round the apartment doing things I don’t like having music on in the background. I like to listen to music. In that sense I listen to whatever’s on the radio. I surf. We have the satellite stations.

Do you still buy music? Do you download?
Occasionally. I have friends who are DJs who say, ‘Oh listen to this or listen to that’. I go out, I go to clubs and if I hear something. I’m lazy, I think!

I’m assuming the song ‘Mother’ from your last album was not about your mum but about DJ Johnny Dynell and Chi Chi Valenti’s club?
It’s something that I loved and I was bereft actually when they closed it. And actually this lyric happened so beautifully that I just think it’s completely succinct, and embodied what the club was about. Not in extended detail but “in a patent-leather life” sums it all up.

I’m assuming you went to Jackie 60 as well, which was a bit before my time.
I went from the beginning and performed there. It was fun and a great thing. When Mother closed I was really honestly… It was terrible.

How does it feel in New York now it has been made a lot safer and more expensive.
Well you know I think New York has that tradition of being some kind of a centre for communications and arts. Granted it has greatly changed and expanded. NYU has practically taken over the Lower East Side. But I sort of have faith in the tradition that New York will always excite people to come there and to look for people that are like themselves and do the communication thing or the arts thing. For a lot of artists, it’s the only place they can come in the US that makes any sense. Although there are some great galleries in LA, you know, it’s spoiled in a way. But it’s so expensive you can’t afford to live there unless you share an apartment with a couple of people. Where there’s a will there’s a way. It has spread out to Williamsburg and Bushwick now, though.

If Blondie was starting out now do you think they would be living in Manhattan?
Don’t know, can’t say. I think if Blondie were starting off now, we’d probably all just go into computers [laughs] I dunno, we used to say that in past because the music business is so dire but as musicians we’d probably be keen on playing. But starting out now? I don’t know.

Is that what drives you now as an artist, irrespective of an audience?
That’s the fun thing. It’s really satisfying. We like playing and having fun with a lyric that you can play with.

Blondie’s musical influences

Do you feel under less pressure now than when you had number ones and the record company breathing down your neck?
We’re our own worst critics – or best critics. We know when something is good.

Did you feel pressure from record companies?
Occasionally I’d hear a voice that said, ‘We wanna another ‘Heart Of Glass’ or we want another ‘Atomic’.’ You can hear artists that have tried to replicate those things on one of their hits. It’s never a good idea. It always sounds like a watered down version. I don’t think we’ve ever had that kind of ambition or reputation. We’ve always tried to move out and stretch out and I think this album is more of the same thing like that. Chris has been very influenced by some of the Latin beats and rhythms. We also have our keyboard player Matt Katz-Bohen and he’s a real pop songwriter and we worked purposely with him and the Blondie history and he’s written some really great songs. We have collaborated with quite a few people on this. Los Rakas from Oakland

Is that the one on Screwed Up?
Yes. And then there’s Systema Solar with ‘Sugar On The Side’ and I did that song ‘Mile High’ with Hector Fonseca. He’s a Brazilian DJ. He had a gig and brought the music down at this big rave party for 5,000 people and he got the whole audience to sing the ohs which was just fabulous. I think we met at the studio when I was working on the vocals. Jeff said, ‘Why don’t you make up a song?’ and I said, ‘I don’t play an instrument’ so he said, ‘Well if you have any musical lines call me up and put them on my voicemail’. So I did, just three different lines. Then he came back to me and organised them. It was very simple.

Tell me about your partnership with Chris.
Well, we can’t stand each other! I guess he’s my best friend. I love him dearly. We hit it off. And somehow it’s a good balance. It’s effortless.

Even now?
Yeah.

Has it been like that over the years?
I think there have been some rough patches and it was a little bit of estrangement when we first split up but I think both of us were pretty stressed out by that point. We talk every day. He’s a great guy.

Whose idea was it to get Blondie back together?
It was his actually. It wasn’t mine. It felt like it had had its day but he felt that if we didn’t put it back together at some point I think he was encouraged this guy who worked for a management company . He introduced us to Alan Kovac and he reassured us and was interested. He specialised in dealing with old contractual problems with bands.

Can you tell me about the first days you started playing at CBGBs and the atmosphere in New York around that time?
It was very fun, there was nothing precious about it. It wasn’t about the money, it was about getting your shit together, basically.

What was your relationship with other bands? Was it a cooperative situation?
In some ways, in some ways not. There was competition. It was kind of natural you know. You liked certain people and you disliked others. It was just a bunch pf people trying to make music. The credit should go to Hilly Kristal for allowing bands to play original music and that was probably one of the few places where you could do it. There was another bar called Monty Python and CBGBs became this mecca for bands who wanted to do their own material. Then eventually Tommy Dean Mills opened up Max’s, the second one, but by then the ball was rolling. There were bands who were formed and established, though not necessarily as recording artists.

I saw you play at Hammersmith Odeon with Television and that must have been a big breakthrough that tour, because suddenly you were playing in front of big audiences.
Sure, it was a big breakthrough. We were real Anglophiles. Wilko Johnson came over to New York when the Dr Feelgood album came out and their success was a real boost, you know. So there was definitely some sort of symbiotic relationship between New York and London.

I know Chris was really influence by glam bands, I’m wondering whether Mike Chapman’s background in glam was a reason for choosing him?
We didn’t choose Mike. He moved over to Hollywood and we were playing at the Whiskey for weeks and Terry Ellis said, ‘Oh you gotta come and see this band I want you to produce them.’ So he came over and he said he’d never laughed so hard in his life so he felt he had to do it. But he was so experienced at making songs and he was such a good songwriter he made us much more focussed. He was strict in the studio about recording techniques so we all had to knuckle down and work a little harder. He was used to making songs that sounded good on the radio.

And the way the songs seemed to respond to different feels and styles, like ‘Rapture’ and hip hop, ‘Heart Of Glass’ and disco….
No that was Chris, it was his responsibility. Chris is a genius.

Both of you were hanging out at hip hop jams very early on.
Well that’s what I was saying earlier about the beauty of living in a metropolitan area. You have the availability of all these different kinds of music. You know we benefited from that and it was very inspiring.

When I interviewed Steinski he said he discovered rap through hearing you and Chris guesting on WPIX and playing early hip hop.
Yes and we have heard that before from someone else… I don’t recall their name, but they were heavy duty rappers and they said ‘Rapture’ was the first thing they heard.

You’ve often explored the dark side of life in your lyrics which carries on that tradition started by Velvet Underground.
Yeah it’s also to do with being in a counter culture situation. We were breaking away from the flower power era and there was that little section of glam rock which was shortlived and not as big in the US. The Dolls never really got their full dues in the States.

How does it feel to be regarded as an iconic woman in rock music, someone who inspired and paved the way for Lady Gaga, Madonna and others.
I guess I feel lucky that I got in before them! [laughs] it’s funny, I’m glad it worked.

And it was an incredible time for women breaking through with X-Ray Spex, Raincoats, Slits and Chrissie Hynde. Did it feel like a wave?
Absolutely. On the other side, on New York, there was also Wendy Williams, Lydia Lunch, Helen Wheels, a bunch of girls that didn’t necessarily translate commercially but they were recorded. Also Annie Golden. A lot of variety, a lot of stuff.

ADDENDUM After the interview, I had brought an album for Debbie to autograph for a friend’s daughter’s birthday, which she did. I then interviewed Chris Stein immediately afterwards. At the end of the meeting, I collected my bag and said goodbye to Chris and Debbie came back out of her bedroom with an object wrapped in tissue paper. “Could you give this to your friends daughter for her birthday please?” When I got out of the hotel, I opened the wrapper and inside it was a lovely necklace with a heart-shaped pendant. A lovely gesture. Bill Brewster

Bruce Tantum went to everything

Nightlife writer, DJ and gadabout Bruce Tantum is New York’s undisputed champion clubber. Sometime in the late ’70s, as the city’s infinite nightlife possibilities spread out in front of him, a friend advised him to either go to one club all the time, or to every club once. A born contrarian, Bruce resolved to do both. Since that decision he has rarely slept, his metabolism requiring little to sustain it beyond oddball twelve-inch disco dubs and vodka. His band Moot started with a 13-strong line-up supporting New Brunswick’s very own Celibate Sluts in a local parking lot. With their guitar-free, bassline-heavy no-wave stylings – and nine fewer musicians – they went on to span the ’80s, playing at Mudd Club, Danceteria and the Peppermint Lounge, and holding down a dependable Saturday slot at CBGB. DJing then took the strain and for the last 30 years it’s been a rare week in New York when Bruce doesn’t spin records in a dirty basement, or increasingly on air. He can look back fondly on a life lived on the dancefloor, with a memory of it all that would be encyclopaedic if it wasn’t so gloriously blurred. Time Out New York cottoned on to his unique clubland expertise in 1997 when it made him Clubs Editor, a role he inherited from the late Adam Goldstone (who caught the job description from my good self), and in which he spun golden letters for an illustrious 17 years. Despite never having written for publication before, Bruce emerged fully feathered as one of the most informed and entertaining writers on dance music, a skillset he now employs as Editor of DJmag USA. His brilliant seat-of-the-pants DJing makes him a favourite at Low Life which he plays on a roughly biennial basis, or whenever we can afford the gilded sweetmeats in his preposterous DJ rider.

interviewed 19.02.23 by Frank on ZOOM

Frank Broughton: I have a lazy mental shorthand for the Mudd Club as a parallel to London’s Blitz, because it was ground zero for so many creative people. I was reading Johnny Dynell’s interview recently because we finally posted it, and he calls Mudd Club the cradle of civilization. Was it?
Bruce Tantum: It really was in a way. It wasn’t quite as much of a dress-up kind of place as the Blitz. What it was – it was one of the first, if not the first, instances of the down-and-dirty punk rock scene, and the no-wave scene, and the more artistic scene, all merging together. That had been happening at parties, but I don’t think there’d ever been a club that kind of formalised it.

And by the artistic scene, you mean the post-Warhol people. Like Basquiat – who actually DJed there.
Yeah, not the fine art scene, more like the various strains of the underground art scene. All the new-wave filmmakers, and people in various visual arts. But at that point, I still felt like I was on the outside looking in, because I was still pretty new to New York.

Where did you grow up?
In New Jersey, and where I grew up was very rural, a little village called Dutch Neck. We didn’t even have mail deliveries. We had a general store where you would have to pick up your mail. I remember it was a big deal when we got street addresses.

Was there a particular moment when you decided you had to move to the city?
That started when I was five years old. Because where I grew up in Jersey was close enough that we would get the New York television stations. And so I would see on the news, crime and homelessness and the city’s turning to shit. And for some reason I was like, ‘That’s where I want to be!’ I always knew I would move to New York as soon as I had the chance.

I went to school at Rutgers University, which is about 30 miles from New York. And so 1976 to ’80, that’s when I started going out in New York, mostly to punk clubs. CBGB’s, Max’s [Kansas City], a bunch of other smaller places. But I was very much a New Jersey bridge-and-tunnel outsider at that point. Some of my friends had cars, but we usually took the train and we would just stay out till whatever time and then take the first train back in the morning. We were considered the art-punks of Rutgers. T-shirts, ripped-up jeans and Converse sneakers. But I mean, that’s kind of what everybody wore. First I moved to Hoboken, which is right across the river. But my whole social life at that point was already in New York.

Did the punk thing really feel like a movement? Or was it just disconnected bands? What did it feel like?
Well, by the time I started going to these places, it was already ’76. And bands like The Ramones and Blondie were already pretty big. By the time I saw the Ramones I think they already had two albums out. Blondie had their first album.

What were the most memorable gigs of that period?
I remember having some fun at Richard Hell and the Voidoids. A friend of mine was friends with the Misfits and they used to play Max’s all the time. Those were very fun shows because there would be a very strong element of danger. Like there’d be tables flying through the air. For somebody 18, 19 years’ old it was a blast.

In addition to the punk stuff, we were also occasionally coming out to discos as well. Even pre-’76 when I was in high school, we were going to the local New Jersey discos. My whole peer group was listening to Led Zeppelin and Yes, and for some reason, Foghat was really big in my school. But I was always drawn towards slightly weirder stuff, like Bowie and Roxy Music. And I was also one of the few of my friends that had a real thing for whatever disco, or proto disco, they were playing on the radio. At our local mall, Quaker Bridge Mall, there was a place called Duke’s, and they would actually have live bands playing cover versions of disco songs like [Dr Buzzard’s Savannah Band’s] ‘Cherchez La Femme’ and [Salsoul Orchestra’s] ‘Tangerine’.

Amazing! Live disco bands in your local mall.
Yeah, and you could drink underage back then too, so we were like 16 years’ old and we’d go and get drinks and have a laugh.

And in New York you would go to disco clubs as well as punk gigs.
I went to Studio 54 when I was still in college. This was after it had already closed the first time, so it had lost some of its allure. There was one night where we actually went straight from Mudd Club to Studio 54. Shockingly, we never had much of a problem getting in. Even though there were still huge crowds outside.

Well, that’s because of your innate coolness.
I don’t know about that. I think they just went, ‘Look there’s some punks’.

https://soundcloud.com/brucetantum/jump-up-baby-3423

What were the other places?
I was going to Mudd Club a lot. I think the first iteration of Danceteria had opened, when it was on West 37th Street, I believe. That was great. We were still going to all the punk things as well, Peppermint lounge, and very soon, by 1981 I believe, Pyramid opened up. And that was a huge one for me. Because in ’82 or ’83, I actually moved into Manhattan, into the East Village. And Pyramid was essentially my local disco, my corner disco. And we were going there all the time.

I went to The Saint a few times. You supposedly had to be a member. But since we worked in what was their unofficial restaurant, they would let us slide in once in a while. I was working at 103 restaurant, which was right on the corner of Sixth Street and Second Avenue. And the building that kind of surrounded it was the Saint.

Of all the all the clubs I’ve heard described, The Saint just sounds astonishing, that whole theatricality. There are very few photos, was it as amazing as it sounds?
Yeah, it was. I mean, it really was a full on planetarium. I don’t know how they did it. Because it was originally a Yiddish theatre. Then it was Fillmore East, and then I guess, around ’79 it became The Saint. Some of those other big discos were pretty full on as well. Studio 54, of course, but I think The Saint was more impressive because they really did pay attention to the theatrical aspect.

Yeah, programming the light show to the music, it was all coordinated.
It was pretty amazing. But frankly, I was kind of happier going to places like Pyramid or the Mudd Club – with that dingy, falling apart kind of vibe.

Pyramid was where that alternative gender-fuck drag started.
That was sort of a thing. It’s where RuPaul and Lady Bunny and a number of others got their start. Johnny Dynell DJed there for a while, Mark Oates, Sister Dimension. The management always wanted the DJs to play new wave. But the DJs wanted to play more disco and funk and soul, and then early house once that started. So it was like a mix of all those things, musically.

And then Area opened in 1983 and from what I know about it, it kind of formalised things. It was like, ‘Okay, this really works. People love this kind of clubbing life. Let’s put some money into doing a really amazing version.
Yes. I do think they wanted to capitalise on that sort of uptown-downtown aesthetic. And they did it quite successfully for the maybe three and a half years that it was open.

People talk about the great mixing of people. Like Warhol coming down. Was he chatty? Was he hanging out?
I never saw Warhol at Mudd Club. I saw him at Area a lot. Yeah, he would just be hanging out. Usually just standing against a wall

And happy to talk to anyone?
Well, you could talk to him. He wasn’t going out of his way to talk to anybody. He would always have one or two of his assistants with him.

Who were some club characters we might not know of?
I don’t know, umm, Baby Gregor. He was always one of the people in the dioramas at Area. He’s no longer with us. He was a Pyramid person. And one of the co-founders of Wigstock.

And he’d be in one of the glass cases at Area.
He’d be in a glass case at Area. But so would a lot of people, a lot of that downtown underground art scene would eventually end up in a diorama.

Did you?
No, no, no. I wasn’t well-connected enough yet to sit in a fucking terrarium for eight hours straight. They probably paid people I think.

It sounds like clubbing was a full-time way of life. You were going out of your way to visit different places.
I was doing some of everything. Among my friends that was pretty much a normal thing. I mean, we’d just be out at clubs, easily, three, four nights a week, right? Not just out partying, but actually at clubs. My usual routine then was I’d go to Danceteria, which had cheaper drinks. Get kind of sloshed there. And then we had Area, where we knew the door people, so we’d get in really quick. And spend the rest of the night there.

What are some of the nights that stand out in your memory, blurred or not?
I don’t have many specific stories. I really don’t have all that many. Because it is all like a blur. One time somebody gave me some advice: ‘You can do it one of two ways. Go to one club all the time. Or just go to every club once.’ And for some reason, I’ve tried to combine those two things. Every club all the time.

So as I say, it’s all a swirl. Basically, my whole life from from 1980 to 2000 is a big swirl.

My first night of Paradise Garage was very much an anomaly of a night though. It was in ’83, New Order playing there. It was right after ‘Blue Monday’ got big.

I was at the Saint once for Sylvester to play a short little disco set. And I believe it was Two Tons of Fun as backup singers. Though I might be hallucinating that.

So you’re out everywhere, and as as new things came into view, like hip hop, you were aware of them?
Mudd Club was one of the first places that wasn’t a hip hop club that would play hip hop. And then right around that same time, first there was club Negril. Then the Roxy. We weren’t looking at it as a discovery. It was just the music that was swirling around.

How much were you aware of the earlier grassroots scene up in the Bronx, in Harlem?
Yeah, we were aware of that. I was fascinated by hip hop as soon as I heard of its existence, which would have been sometime in the late ’70s. Sugarhill Gang songs and Kurtis Blow ‘The Breaks’ – all those songs were huge on New York radio. Everybody knew where hip hop was at that point. By the time they actually started playing it in the downtown clubs, I was pretty well versed.

There were linking people who connected hip hop to downtown weren’t there? Like [scenester] Fab Five Freddy, [videomaker] Michael Holman, [promoter] Ruza Blue, who did the Roxy, people like that.
Yeah. And I think all of them were Mudd Club people as well.

Right. So it really was the cradle of civilization
Yes. Yeah. Johnny was correct about that. It was the beginning of a strain of clubbing that carried New York nightlife through the ‘80s, right up until the dreaded Giuliani time. It kind of laid the basis for clubs that were very different but that still had some of the same methods – like The Roxy, like Area.

Who were the DJs you were aware of?
Well, Justin Strauss and Johnny Dynell because they’re playing at Mudd. And I knew Anita Sarko, and Mark Kamins at Danceteria. And of course, everybody knew people like David Mancuso and Larry Levan. Then Tony Humphries over at Zanzibar. I don’t know if Tony had his Kiss FM radio show yet or not. But yeah, we knew the bigger DJs. But as great as they were, you didn’t really go to clubs specifically for the DJ, you went for the club. For most people DJing wasn’t really a thing. It wasn’t really a aspirational kind of career decision. Like at Danceteria, unless somebody told you, you wouldn’t even know where the DJ booth was. That was true of a lot of clubs. At the Pyramid, you were perched in this sort of crow’s nest about as far above the floor as you could get. Nobody could really see you.

What was your DJing debut?
That was a little bit later, around 1987. Me and my friend Mickey Hohl used to do a party in this little bar called Chameleons which was on Sixth Street near Avenue A. It’s now Club Cummings, a little venue owned by Alan Cummings. We were playing basically disco and house. People hated it. House hadn’t really caught on yet in New York, I guess? And disco… it was too soon for a revival. People would get into fights with us. But we stuck with our guns and we eventually started getting a crowd and had fun.

We did a night called Home Shopping Club, where we would have little shows and give away cheap, shitty merchandise. House, disco, and electro, dancier new wave. A mix of stuff. And eventually we brought that party to the Pyramid. Early ’90s.

Just how lawless was the city when you first arrived?
It was fully lawless. Yeah. I mean, there were like 3000 murders a year for one thing. So you could do whatever you want. There was very little police presence at that point. The restaurant where I worked at, one night somebody was shooting it up. So we had bullet holes in the window. You know, there was a lot of crime, there was a lot of homelessness. There still is a lot of homelessness.

That lawlessness brings freedom, though, doesn’t it? I always imagined that if I’d been there ten years earlier, it would have been even more amazing than the amazing time I had.
Well you’ll always say that. I wish I had been there in the mid ’60s.

The late ’70s just sounds so much fun.
Well you can see it, if you watch a movie like Downtown 81. Or any number of flicks from back then. There’s plenty of photographic documentation. And that is what it was like, that’s not an exaggeration. It was half bombed-out, people are shooting up all over. The trade-off is, you have 3000 murders a year – and you have $300 a month rent. You take the good with the bad. Actually, my first apartment was $300 a month, and I thought I was being ripped off because I had friends who had better places for $150 a month. Back then, even with the minimum wage being practically nothing, you didn’t have to work too hard to get your rent together.

So people were free to be who they wanted to be. You could do your art or your music, or just go out all the time. I mean, we really did party. I remember once we found an abandoned building, this would have been ’86, ’87. We found an open basement of a building. ‘Hey, this basement looks nice. Let’s do a party.’ I think there might have been some people living in the building, I don’t know.

There were all these little weird, like, not even after-hours. Some of them were like regular hours. There were places I didn’t even know the names of but like, basically, people would take a whole tenement building and turn it into a temporary after-hours club.

I was always amazed you and Adam [Goldstone] knew all these little speakeasies. That side of the culture was so established in New York, I remember going to that tiny place Brownies which was basically someone’s living room.
There’d be people snorting lines off the table. But if you swore, if you said ‘shit’, Brownie, or one of his minions would come over and say ‘You be careful.’

They were like, ‘You know the rule! No profanities!’
Right. They were very strict about that.

It’s a good way of keeping people’s voices down, because you’re trying not to swear so you watch what you’re saying.
There was another place called Frank’s, right on Second Street. between Second and First avenues. Classic sort of, knock on the door, the little thing opens up. And like, you have to say, I know Frankie, or something.

How were you making a living? What are you doing to pay the rent?
Well, I worked at at 103 restaurant until about ’85. Then I started working at the Museum of Holography, which at that point was still museum-worthy. Before they started printing holograms on cereal boxes. That was a really easy job. And paid fairly well.

What clubs really established house in New York?
There were already parties like House Nation and Wild Pitch, but I think The World was one of the first full-on house clubs. The World was a trip. Around 1990. That was another of my corner discos. It didn’t last very long. It was big, but it was incredibly decrepit, literally falling apart. Frankie Knuckles and David Morales were the residents. And that’s probably the first place I ever heard Frankie play. David Morales I’d heard one place or another before then. This was obviously well after the Warehouse, after Frankie had come back from Chicago. But I think The World was one of the first full-on house clubs in New York. House was being played everywhere. But there weren’t many clubs that were fully invested in it – yet. It was normal for people to mix house into their sets. It was unusual for there to be all-house nights.

Was that because of what drugs people were taking?
Well, there were a lot of drugs, everywhere. But it wasn’t like everybody was doing ecstasy, like it was in the UK. It wasn’t like a full-on ecstasy-rave kind of thing. There was a variety pack of drugs.

I think that’s the difference. The UK had this sort of Year Zero for this new thing of house music plus ecstasy, whereas New York had more varied drug tastes.
Yeah, we had much longer experience. I first did ecstasy in ’80, ’81 It was straight out of that club in Dallas, the Starck. Somebody had brought it up to New York – or Hoboken, ’cos I was still living in Hoboken at that point. And we actually, the first time – I hope none of my relatives ever read this – the first time we ever did MDMA, we injected it.

Oh my god. How come?
I think somebody had advised us to do it that way.

How did that turn out?
We had some classical music playing. And immediately the classical music in my mind turned into heavy industrial music. And I was floating in a universe of coloured bubbles. And then, after 15 minutes maybe, I settled down into a normal ecstasy experience.

So it was a kind of at-home thing, not at a club dancing?
Yeah. The first time I ever did it was at home. I mean, yeah, I had already been doing ecstasy for a long time before the summer of love over there. For you guys.

Tell me about your band, Moot. I guess a band was the more obvious route to stardom than DJing back then.
I think they were both highly unlikely. It was a band with some of my old Rutgers friends, formed in 1981. A minimalist pop band. We had a small degree of success. I mean, ‘success’ is being very relative. We had one 7-inch single come out, ‘Mavis’. But we played Danceteria, we played Peppermint Lounge. We opened for Toots and the Maytals once. Opened for the Bongos once somewhere. We played at Mudd Club once. This is in Mudd Club’s dying days I should add. For some reason Hilly Kristal took a liking to us and we would play headline slots on Saturday nights at CBGB’s. This is also after CBGB’s salad days, I should also add.

Too modest! Any chance of reformation?
I’ve sold my bass guitar. I just sold it like a year ago. It’s been sitting in the corner of the place for 20 years without me touching it.

When did you start writing for magazines?
That wasn’t until literally when I started at Time Out New York.

Seriously? Never before that?
Yeah. You had bequeathed the job to Adam. And it was still a part time job at that point. But it was getting successful enough that they were expanding. And I think they gave Adam a choice. You can either start working full time, or you can get an assistant. And Adam being rather, you know, allergic to work, said I’ll do the assistant route. And he asked me.

At this point, I was working at a shop called Air Market, which sold Japanese stuff, like Hello Kitty kind of shit. So I said, Yeah, I’ll give it a shot. I went in, the job interview consisted of the managing editor asking me, ‘So you want a job?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ She was like, ‘You’re hired.’ And then I started writing. And then immediately Adam stopped showing up.

Without any warning?
He had some battle going on. We had had to cut a lot of the listings because there wasn’t space. There was one party and some friend of the editor was like, ‘Make sure you get that in once in a while.’ And Adam was like, ‘He can’t tell me what to do. Until he backs down. I’m not going to show up.’ So the full-time gig was thrust upon me. And I was there for 17 years.

How did you meet Adam in the first place?
A party at Mickey Hohl’s house actually. Adam was already a known entity. He was Club Kid of the month in a magazine called Project X, which was basically the Disco 2000 fanzine. And he was friends with Colleen Murphy, DJ Cosmo, because they both went to NYU. And Colleen brought Adam to a party at Mickey’s House.

Disco 2000. That was the first club night I went to in New York. At Limelight, when techno was starting to be a thing.
Limelight had a pretty interesting history. They opened way back in ’84. It was owned by a Canadian guy, Peter Gatien, who wore a pirate’s eyepatch.

He’d supposedly lost his eye playing hockey and used the insurance pay-out to buy his first nightclub.
Yeah. There was a Limelight in London as well. Peter Gatien had two. In fact there had been a bunch of clubs called Limelight. There was a Limelight in New York beforehand, in the ’70s, that had nothing to do with Peter Gatien. The New York Limelight in a church opened in ’84, as a rock and roll club. well, different nights for every kind of music. But around ’89 or ’90 Disco 2000, which was Club Kid ground zero, was the big thing. That was actually kind of fun.

I remember at Disco 2000 they’d get regular clubbers to strip naked on stage as a competition. Was it Lady Bunny who compered?
It was Larry Tee. He was an oddball figure in New York clubbing history. He produced RuPaul’s ‘Supermodel’. He produced a Lady Bunny song too. I think I’ve got that.

Peter Gatien would hire the Club Kids as freaks to spice up his clubs. With Michael Alig as the prime mover. [Alig was famously jailed for murdering his dealer Angel Melendez, as detailed in the book Disco Bloodbath]
I used to go to a lot of the Outlaw parties. Michael Alig’s things. Michael Alig and his Club Kid minions. There was one in a McDonald’s, one at a subway platform. I think it was the First Avenue L train stop, if I recall correctly. Everybody got on the train. Up to Limelight, I think. There was one in a car park somewhere, I forget.

Did you go to the Sound Factory much? That was my home from home.
I went to the Sound Factory some. I didn’t go a lot at that point. What years was that?

I started going probably ’91. Junior Vasquez’ era. I missed Frankie Knuckles there.
Yeah, I saw Frankie there

What about Jackie 60. Did you ever play there?
I never played at Jackie. Johnny didn’t have that many guests at Jackie 60.

There was always a performance, so DJing wasn’t the whole story.
Yes. It was Johnny split up by various performances. Once in a while they would have other DJs. I know David Morales played there once or twice. I think Danny Tenaglia might have played a Jackie 60 night. But it was almost always Johnny Dynell. That was another of my real regular places when that was going on. I guess it would have been early ’90s.

I went to Jackie a few times. It was a Tuesday, wasn’t it?
Yeah, Jackie 60 was Tuesday. But they had the whole place, the building Mother, which was originally called Bar Room 432 before Johnny and Chi-Chi [Valenti] took it over. They had parties of various sorts every night of the week: Meat, which was their gay, techno night. Aldo Hernandez was one of the DJs. They had Click and Drag, which was their sort of proto cyber night. Clit Club, a lesbian night. And one or two others. Yeah, that was a real locus of fun, that place, while it lasted.

I remember a redneck bar next door.
Hogs and Heifers? That’s it. We’d often go there, get tanked up and then go to Jackie 60. That’s when the Meatpacking District was still the Meatpacking District. With actual meatpacking going on. And with the girls working the streets as well. They were all pretty flamboyant. And fun to talk to. That all went away, obviously. The Meatpacking District is a chi-chi upscale neighbourhood now.

We have to talk about Giuliani. Nowadays he’s known as Trump’s useless lawyer, but when he was mayor in the ’90s he was a real crusader against clubs. What was your experience of the whole Giuliani time?
The first half of it was fine. I mean, he had a war on clubs, but the clubs were still there. He really had it out for the Peter Gatien empire, which was Limelight and Palladium and Club USA. Palladium was opened by Steve Rubell and I think Ian Schrager still as well [creators of Studio 54]. Palladium was a great place. That was another of my corner discos, but on a much grander scale than Pyramid.

Yes. Giuliani had a real thing out for clubs – for closing them down. He would get red in the face and sputtering when he talked about them. And one of his Deputy Mayors, Rudy Washington, famously said, I’m paraphrasing a bit here, but not much, ‘We’re going to close down every one of these little buckets of blood.’ And he did close a lot of them down. With the Cabaret Licence thing. He enforced this law from 1926 that had been ignored for half a century that said you couldn’t have dancing unless a bar had this particular licence.

And this was at a time when suddenly there were scores of smaller places opening up: bars adding turntables and putting on interesting music nights, like a Brazilian night or a drum and bass night.
Right, this this little-used tool that he picked up on. He realised, hey, I can close places down with this. I was at a few bars, bars with turntables, that got closed down. They would come in like gangbusters, the Nightlife Taskforce. And there’d be like, 20 of them. They’d just come in and start shining flashlights in everybody’s faces asking for ID. Shut the place down.

Did that ever happen any way you were DJing?
Not where I was DJing, but parties I was at. So that started the era where every venue that did have music that didn’t have a cabaret licence had to have those ‘No Dancing Allowed’ signs up on the wall.

I’ve got one somewhere, for posterity.
Yeah, I should have saved a few. It got really petty. Then he was finally able to shut down the Gatien clubs and do some serious damage. Those got to be pretty dark days in New York clubbing. I remember doing the listings for Time Out New York around ’98 or ’99 and realising there’s not a single thing this whole week that I actually want to go to. It was a huge change. So Giuliani did a considerable amount of damage, then 9/11 happened, which also didn’t help things.

I remember, before he was mayor, on the day he got elected, all the police went crazy stopping cabs one night. Do you remember that?
What was the rationale for that?

A show of force to express solidarity. I got stopped. I was in a cab with Fritz coming home from Supper Club.
Oh, because you had a black fella with you.

I guess. They were literally doing roadblocks and looking into every cab. They got us out and we had to assume the position and everything, for no other reason. Giuliani was a nasty piece of work. The other thing I remember about him before he was mayor was when he led that police strike on the bridge. Whipping up a bunch of drunk off-duty cops.
Yes, he was rabble rousing. And rabble rousing in a very overtly racist way. Yeah, he was just an asshole.

I guess like Trump, everyone in New York knew that he was an asshole for a long time before the rest of the world figured it out.
Indeed. But one thing I should mention is that the crackdown on clubs started even before Giuliani. I really have to think of the Happy Land fire. At which 80-some people died. It was an illegal social club, that only had one exit. That was 1990. And that led the the fire department to come around and inspect every place.

Another thing that seemed to change in the ’90s, it just became a bit more mainstream. I remember when the Sound Factory reopened as the new Sound Factory around ’95. It was really above board, whereas before it had always felt like a big secret.
Yeah. Well, all of New York was being gentrified. It was been getting much more expensive to live here. Yeah. which meant the clubbing demographic was far different than it had been in the ’70s or ’80s or even ’90s. It was a more mainstream kind of crowd? So the clubs were more mainstream.

And that whole gentrification process has accelerated. I mean, it took the East Village 25 years. I don’t want to call gentrification a natural process, but it happened naturally or at least gradually. And nowadays, it’s just like, boom overnight. They just put a luxury high rise in the middle of a poor neighbourhood. And then the gentrification flows out from there.

But the club scene is fairly strong right now. Even with the pandemic having happened and a few economic downturns over the years. I don’t want to say it’s the strongest it has been since pre-Giuliani days – it’s definitely not as creative and full of wild abandon as it used to be – but it’s pretty good right now. There are clubs like Good Room, and Nowadays? and a whole bunch of smaller places.

They’re outside Manhattan generally. I guess that’s the biggest change, isn’t it?
Yes and I’m stuck in my rent stabilised apartment in the East Village where there’s basically no clubbing to be had. Mind you Nicolas Matar, who was the owner of Cielo, and co-owner of Output just opened a small venue in the Lower East Side, like 150 people. But yeah, it’s really strong. And they actually got rid of the cabaret laws. They’re not even a potential tool to be used.

That’s room for celebration.
They haven’t been enforcing them since Giuliani left at the end of 2001, but now they’re not even a thing. And the thought of it being gone is good. Now there are smaller venues that never would have gotten a cabaret licence back in the old days, a place like Jupiter disco in Bushwick, or Black Flamingo in Williamsburg. These are legitimate small clubs with small dance floors, where they no longer have to put up the no dancing allowed signs. And they get decent DJs. Yeah. It’s pretty kind of fun right now. I don’t go out to clubs three or four times a week, like I used to, but I’m out once a week at least.

Johnny Dynell is the Daddy of Downtown

Johnny Dynell’s huge influence on club culture outpaces his fame, thanks to a life-long love of connecting people and an incredible breadth of friends from all walks of creativity. He pitched up in New York as an artist in the late ’70s, quickly becoming a conduit between the uptown artworld of Warhol and Hockey, and the punky craziness happening below 14th Street. Johnny’s other great cultural connection was between the downtown scene and the emerging hip hop DJs from the Bronx. He once tried to get Grandmaster Flash to collaborate with Alan Vega of Suicide, reasoning that both made music about repetition. More enduringly, he ended up playing with Bambaataa, Jazzy Jay and Afrika Islam at hip hop crucible The Roxy.

Johnny’s DJing career started as a complete surprise, with a residency at post-punk epicentre Mudd Club, followed by a residency alongside Mark Kamins at Danceteria. Having a deeper taste for dance music than most of his peers, he developed a uniquely eclectic sensibility with serious dancefloor chops. A brilliant DJ, he was taught to mix by none other than Larry Levan, whose inspirational tuition he remembers here.

Johnny’s made some great records, too, like 1983’s ‘Jam Hot’, with the much-sampled line ‘Tank, fly, boss, walk, jam, nitty-gritty / Talkin’ ’bout the boys from the big bad city / This is Jam Hot,’ and 1989’s much-followed ‘Elements of Vogue’, and worked with Malcolm McLaren, Arthur Baker, Kenton Nix and Junior Vasquez. His DJ residencies read like a New York club history: Mudd Club, Danceteria, Pyramid, Area, BoyBar, Palladium, Tunnel, Limelight, The Roxy, Crobar, The Ice Palace on Fire Island, not forgetting the legendary beacon of Jackie 60, which he created with his wife Chi Chi Valenti and helmed through the ’90s and beyond.

Among loads of great stories, Johnny recalls the mastery of Levan at The Garage, a nervous Madonna preparing to go onstage there, living next to Sid Vicious, and Loleatta Holloway showing off his ‘pretty ass’ to an audience at Lincoln Center.

Interviewed October 1998, by Bill in New York

How did you end up living in New York?
I came here in the late ’70s to go to art school. I came from Syracuse. I was born in Chicago. When I arrived here I got involved in the performance art thing. I met a lot of people from the art scene, like Andy Warhol and David Hockney, right away. I went to Studio 54. The first clubs I went to were gay clubs – places like the Loft, the Chalice and the Paradise Garage.

When did you first go to the Loft?
I moved here in 1975, so almost straight away. It was on Prince Street.

What was your impression of the Loft?
It’s hard to say, because I’d just moved to New York and I was seeing everything for the first time, like Max’s Kansas City. I just remember that being very dark, sweaty and crowded. Very sexy. The music was really loud. But so were the other places, too.

Were you a record collector when you were younger?
No, not at all. Through the arts stuff I got involved in the performance thing. At that time it was very arty. I was in this art-rock band called DNA, who went on to become good after I left. I played the bass. We played the kind of stuff that ended up on Brian Eno’s No New York compilation.

With the Teenage Jesus and the Jerks tracks and other No Wave stuff?
Exactly. That was the stuff I was into. I was playing at CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City. At the same time I was one of the few people who was going to discos, too. They were all very rock, but I wasn’t just into that. I always went to these other clubs. Some of the gay people from that scene would go, too, because the gay clubs were the hottest clubs.

I would have this punky, downtown avant-garde sensibility, but then musically I was much more attuned to disco and dance music. In 1979 or 1980, I got my first DJ job at a club that is really legendary, the Mudd Club. It was a punky, arty take-off of Studio 54. It was like a disco, but it was a punk disco. It was totally genius.

When they were starting, all these people that hung out on the scene were given jobs. Like you can be a bartender, you’re a door-person. Somehow I was a DJ. I didn’t even own any records, so making me the DJ made no sense at all. But then the club made no sense at all. It was bizarre, and crazy. The fact that I was the DJ made sense in this context. I’d never even thought about it.

Anita Sarko is the one who taught me how to DJ in the beginning. She taught me how to go from one to the other and what a mixer was. I started playing the records I liked, which were disco records, Michael Jackson, Latin, James Brown and soul. I kind of made a name for myself by playing – but certainly not mixing – records to dance to.

The other DJs were playing punk and new wave and they were making a name for it as a downtown, punky, new wave club. I also played really early hip hop, like Grandmaster Flash. It was sort of unusual to do that, so I guess that’s why I was successful as a DJ. It certainly was not because of technical ability.

Who were the main DJs there?
David Azark and Anita Sarko. I certainly wasn’t the main DJ by any means. I was sort of the specialty DJ. What happened was people from Studio 54 were coming down to the Mudd Club later, after it finished. It became chic to go to this dirty downtown club. It was really hip. Lauren Hutton, who became a friend, started bringing friends from Studio 54 down to the Mudd Club to hear me play. She was a big supporter. That helped me out a lot. Not that I wanted to become a DJ.

You still had no interest in DJing?
Oh no. I was doing it for the money! I like it, but I never thought in a million years that 20 years later I’d still be a DJ. Then I started DJing at other clubs too. Club 57, where Keith Haring started. I began working in the after-hours clubs that were big at that time and I kind of got a following.

I always thought of myself more as an artist. DJing I never saw as artistic or creative. But then in 1979, I went with this friend to a church basement and I saw this battle with Grandmaster Flash, Hollywood and all those early guys. Flash was DJing with his toes. He was scratching, which I’d never heard before. He just rocked my world.

They were playing the same records I was playing, like James Brown, but what they were doing was taking two copies and going back and forth and making this new thing out of them. To me, coming from the art world, I thought it was brilliant. I thought, “I’m going to have to tell Andy [Warhol] about this. This is incredible.”

I talked to the DJs and invited them to the Mudd Club. I went to [Bronx club] Disco Fever with them. I actually became friends with all those early rappers, like Sequence. When I started working with Malcolm McLaren later, that’s how he started working with people like Angie Stone, because I brought them in. I guess it was on the opera stuff, the Fans album I think.

Seeing those early hip-hop guys was when I became interested in DJing. I just thought, ‘This is new.’ The feeling in that room was just so intense. You could cut the atmosphere with a knife. Just the tension of these battles was incredible. It also reminded me of seeing people like Suicide.

Alan Vega was the one who got me started first of all – him and his girlfriend. He was like, ‘Yeah, you can do it, just pick up a guitar and do it.’ Those early Suicide concerts were the same thing as these battles – that amazing, hot and sweaty atmosphere. What Alan was doing seemed so similar to me, that repetition. I tried to tell Alan about Grandmaster Flash and I tried to tell Flash about Alan, but they never… Whatever. You get the idea. I tried to get these people together.

The only other people from the downtown scene that you would see at these things [early hip-hop events] were Debbie Harry and Chris Stein. They were always at the same places I went to. They would be at CBGBs, but they also would be at Studio 54 and after-hours clubs. But they were into rap really early. Debbie and Chris Stein were on the same tip. We’re still good friends to this day.

In 1983 I made this record, ‘Jam Hot.’ John Peel was really the one who was playing it and it did really well. I ended up meeting a lot of English people through that record: Boy George, Leigh Bowery. I went to London and it was a big club record. Well, big in my world, which was perhaps three clubs! That’s all I cared about.

So then I was much more interested in DJing and the possibilities of what you could do. I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is art.’ So I started experimenting, putting turntables through phase shifters and all this crazy electronic stuff. They were good ideas. I did a show, which was so art school, where there were all these television sets that blew up while I was DJing. And I used to DJ with a live drummer. I started DJing with this guy who, to this day, still turns up with drums at clubs. I only did it a few times. I was trying to push it.

I guess it’s kind of good to experiment, but none of these things really worked. I mean, putting your turntable through a phase shifter was just a mess. Now, all DJs do that stuff with samplers and stuff, but I was trying to do that without the equipment. That’s when I first started wanting to be a DJ and to learn to mix.

I’ve basically worked in every club in New York. Not that I was some great DJ – I would just bring a crowd. These were mainly downtown clubs and what happened was the whole new wave/downtown scene took off. Then you get clubs like Danceteria, which really was one of those little downtown clubs, but now it’s like four floors and holds 2,000 people. So now, instead of DJing to 50 people on a Saturday night, you’re DJing for a lot of people. You’re being taken seriously.

When did Danceteria open?
’82 or ’83. There were a couple of Danceteria locations. There was one between 30th and 39th Street, but it was kind of illegal, then they opened the one that everybody knows on 21st Street. People like the Smiths, Fun Boy Three and Sade played there. It was really connected with London and they had the money to fly people over. As all this emerged, Danceteria became famous and all the DJs sort of became famous, too.

Who were the DJs?
Mark Kamins, Richard Sweret and Anita Sarko DJed there. Then they gave Mark Kamins and me the second floor. Mark was a very knowledgeable DJ. He played disco and he also played the other stuff. He really truly liked them both. The dancefloor was just open, decorated black, very simple. I would play dance music. Afterwards, I would go to the Garage.

Danceteria started getting a lot of Latin kids, the sort that went to the Fun House, and black kids, too. And now they were starting to get into the new wave thing. Because of Mark and I – who were really playing their kind of music – they could come to the club, go to the second floor and hear the music they liked and knew.

After a few months, they saw how the other kids were dressing and they started dressing like the new wave kids. So you started getting Puerto Rican kids with blue hair and leather jackets. Then there was this sort of connection between Danceteria and Fun House, which was really because of Mark and I. Arthur Baker and people like that were hanging out. The Beastie Boys were Danceteria kids who all used to work there. And then of course there was Madonna.

So she was knocking about then?
Oh yeah.

Was she going out with Mark Kamins at this stage?
Yeah. She used to work in the coat-check. Mark was starting to take off as a producer/mixer. So in 1983, he signed Madonna and me to make records. She was signed to Sire and [head of the label] Seymour Stein liked me. I think he really wanted to sign me, but the commercial side of him said, ‘No.’ He already had one arty person in David Byrne. It was basically, ‘This girl is gonna do good, the boy is not gonna do good.’ He knew.

So I waited and waited and in the end signed with this new label called Acme Records and I was their first release. My band, Johnny Dynell and the New York 88, was made up of a rhythm machine, tapes, electronic stuff, synthesizer, three black girls, horns, a percussion section and me. It was very Latino. It was very soulful, but there was no proper band.

Not unlike Pigbag, in fact?
That’s exactly what it was. The thing is I was getting these ideas, but I couldn’t always follow them through. Here’s my dilemma. I’ve got this Latin-influenced band and I’m playing at Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs, where everyone sounds like the Sex Pistols. I lived next door to Sid Vicious. I knew all those guys. Crass? I lived with them!

When were they in the States then?
In 1977 when punk was starting, they came to New York. Somehow they met me and we lived together. They thought it was going to be all punk like it was in London. It was such a clash of cultures. I was taking 16-year-old Steve Ignorant, the lead singer, to this black transvestite club, the 220 Club.

Did you take him to any discos?
Yeah, I took him to all these places. It was not what they expected at all. Of course, they went to CBGBs and Max’s as well, they just were not expecting Buttermilk Bottoms, a black after-hours club which we were next door to. I have to say that they were open to it. They were definitely different after being in New York, and I was different after meeting them. Steve Ignorant and I actually made a rap record together one time but it never came out. Living next door was Sid Vicious and Johnny Thunders. I knew all those people, including Nancy Spungen.

Anyway, so I was on the same scene as Sid Vicious and all these people, but I was playing this Latin-y stuff. It just didn’t really work. I wrote ‘Jam Hot’ in 1980 just after I’d seen Grandmaster Flash. It was a rap record when no one was rapping downtown.

If you look at the first records Madonna and I made, Mark used exactly the same musicians, engineers and studio. She thought my stuff was weird. My song [‘Jam Hot’] was all about the rappers and graffiti artists that I had seen. All about the different characters I was meeting in the after-hours clubs; it’s all about transvestite hookers, dealers, prostitutes, but nobody knows.

I never wanted to be a rock star. She always wanted to be star, so I guess we both got we wanted. I was just going along for the ride. Both the songs went on the radio in 1983, and it’s hard to imagine now since she’s just a huge star, but back then both our songs were on the radio equally. Of course, she was signed to a major label and I was on a label nobody had ever heard of.

At the time there were three main stations in New York, and because I had Spanish lyrics it started taking off amongst the Latin kids. Nobody was buying it downtown. One of the Latin DJs at WKTU was at a party and heard it and took the record and played it on a Saturday night. The phone lines started ringing like crazy, because it didn’t sound like anything. It had this cheap Casio on it, but I wanted that sound. Mark kept saying, ‘Do it on the synthesizer or Fender Rhodes.’ No, no, no! ‘I want it be a toy. I want it to sound like that!’ I was trying to be weird.

So Michael Ellis, the programme director, heard it, and he had every DJ on Monday play it as their opening song, which was really quite bold. After a couple of days it went on to heavy rotation. When you got all three stations playing your record, it was called a ‘grand slam.’ Then we started touring together, me and Madonna, going round the clubs. That’s when I started playing the Roxy with [Kool Lady] Blue and Afrika Bambaataa.

What was it like playing the Roxy?
It was fabulous. It was such a great feeling.

Deee-Lite’s Lady Miss Kier told me once she thought it was one of the important clubs because of the way it mixed up cultures and races.
They did. That was the great thing about it. For me it was great, it was like both of my worlds colliding. I would actually see both groups of my friends in the same place. That was really unusual. An American couldn’t do that. It took an English person. It did. Somebody American couldn’t have done it, I don’t think.

Why do you think that is?
There’s a lot of racial prejudice.

Do you not think that they’re scared rather than prejudiced?
Why wouldn’t Alan Vega go see Grandmaster Flash? When I went to London, I went to Brixton and all these other places. You’re right, you don’t have that fear. The Bronx means something. It’s really different when somebody comes from outside. Blue came in and she really pulled this whole thing together. It was a really exciting scene.

Do you remember musically what it was like?
A lot of classics like ‘Soul Makossa’ and stuff by James Brown. Bambaataa is very smart. He’s very knowledgeable about music. I would just watch him and listen to these records. It’s different now, but back then a DJ could really create a whole scene and take certain records and really make them popular. Look at Larry Levan. Larry played ‘Stand Back’ by Stevie Nicks. First time you heard it [at the Garage], you were like, ‘Stevie Nicks! Really?’ It was a huge club record because Larry liked it.

Bambaataa could do the same thing. He had this whole scene and he could dig up something, like Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans-Europe Express,’ which makes no sense at all. But he would play it, and play it, and play it. After a while it became a huge record. Certain DJs can take a record and make it their signature, make it their sound.

Do you think it has to be with the strength of their personalities?
Oh yeah. Talent, too. ‘Trans-Europe Express’ is a great record. Some of these records he pulled out, and lord knows where he got ’em from, they really were good records. He would see the brilliance and would have the conviction to know that. He pulled ‘Soul Makossa’ out and that is a great record, but it wasn’t trendy or hip.

Wasn’t that a Loft record?
Oh yeah, that’s right. It was a Loft record. Actually, you know what? David Mancuso’s another one who can take a record and make it a Loft record. Jellybean, too, could create a Fun House record.

Which ones do you think defined the Fun House?
‘The Mexican.’ The Babe Ruth one, then he remixed it later.

I thought Mancuso was the first to play ‘The Mexican’ as well?
You’re right, he did. Jellybean’s art, and Arthur Baker is the same I suppose, is to take things that are well known on the club scene and recast them in a more pop, mainstream context. Arthur is very honest about it. He really is.

Going back to the Roxy, we knew people there so it was great for us: graffiti kids, girls in sequins. They were coming downtown. It was really a great scene with a lot of warmth. The criticism I have of New York right now is that it’s so racially segregated. Modern hip-hop, for example: I wouldn’t play those records now, not in a million years.

That’s what David Mancuso was aiming for at the Loft, though, wasn’t he? The melting pot? He wasn’t critical of the Garage, but he said that introducing straight and gay separate nights was not something that should necessarily be applauded.
I personally like it better having a gay night and straight night.

Why?
Because you would get there and the gay night wasn’t 100% gay and the straight night wasn’t 100% straight. It was the orientation of it and you could choose which one you liked. The gay one was better because the Saturday was always better. That’s when the best acts were there, and Larry played better on a Saturday.

You told me recently that Larry Levan taught you how to play. What did you mean by that and how did you meet him?
So I joined the record pool, For The Record, and Judy Weinstein thought I was such a freak. Mark Kamins had joined just before me, but Mark was really more of a DJ than I was. Mark was a disco DJ first, that’s his background. Then when new wave came in he was really early on that sound.

But For The Record was it. All my idols, including Larry, were in that pool. When I say I went to the Garage, I wasn’t friends with Larry, I didn’t know him [at that time]. I didn’t know Judy – I was scared of her! When she used to walk into the Garage, all of a sudden Larry would start really playing. She was a goddess. I was one of those kids on the floor. I paid my admission and went to dance.

You got in free with a For The Record membership card, didn’t you?
Yeah. God, that changed my life. Getting in free to the Garage, oh man, I thought I was it! Then I started meeting these other DJs like Danny Krivit. I used to go listen to Danny at One’s, because he was an amazing DJ. Danny Tenaglia is another one of those.

He’s so shy that I never thought he would make it. He’s an amazing DJ, just like Danny Krivit.

They’re very similar, those two. DJing is all about what’s inside, because what’s inside is projected on to the floor. Once you handle the records, touch the needle, use the mixer, it’s like taking your soul and projecting it out on to the dancefloor. Whatever’s inside you comes out on that dancefloor. If you’ve got love inside you it just projects. And if you’ve anger and bitterness – not mentioning any names – it is bitter on that dancefloor.

So Larry sort of saw something in me. Somehow I made that transition and I would hang out in the DJ booth. That was probably because of being in the pool. At that point Danceteria started to become more famous. All of a sudden I was quite a big DJ and I had a record on the radio.

Did you ever take people like New Order to the clubs?
Oh sure. And Boy George.

Boy George said he did his first line of coke at the Garage with Larry.
It was just so funny, because George never took any drugs at all. I don’t take any drugs. I don’t even smoke pot. I took George to the Garage. I also DJed for Sean Lennon’s 10th birthday party. He had a little birthday party in his bedroom with some friends and stuff and I DJed in his bedroom. All the kids wanted to scratch and DJ.

Through Andy [Warhol] and Keith [Haring] in the art world, I sort of knew Yoko a little bit. At that party I said to her, ‘You’ve no idea, but “Walking On Thin Ice” is a huge record at the Garage.’ I said, ‘You should really see it. You won’t believe it.’ I explained what Larry did, taking the bass out and then slamming it back in. He played it forever. She was so interested, so she came and saw it. It was a big thing for her to see all these black kids. She loved it. And I think she went back a few times, too.

So Larry saw what I was doing and came to hear me play. Larry was another one who was very open. He saw my world, saw what I was doing, met all these different people and he basically said, ‘You gotta learn how to DJ.’ So he would take me to the Garage in the afternoon and he wanted me to learn on the Thorens. I was like, ‘Are you kidding?’ He had the headphones in monitor.

What do you mean?
I don’t know how to explain it, but he had his own way of doing things. He could have the headphone connection coming out of the monitor. I would get dizzy. I just could not use these Thorens turntables.

They’re very sensitive, aren’t they?
Oh, jeez. What he really taught me was practical. I would go over to his house and for hours he would say, ‘You’re too abrupt. You can’t just go from this to that.’ He explained to me that you’re taking people on a journey. I’d never even thought about that. I never thought of how much power there was.

He said, ‘You don’t realise how much power you’ve got up there. All these people you’re playing to and you don’t even realise what you’re doing to them. These people are on drugs. You go from this to that and you send them on a bad trip.’ He also said, ‘You’ve gotta be more sensitive.’

Larry was very critical. ‘That sounded like a chipmunk when you were through with it. What were you speeding up that for?’ All that kind of stuff. He gave me a crash-course in DJing which I never forgot. Then what he would do is come and hear me DJ and sometimes I wouldn’t even know he was there. Then he would come in and say, ‘Why did you change that thing there? Everyone was just getting in to it. You’ve got two copies right? Everybody loved it, so why didn’t you use them?’

If Grandmaster Flash was the first to make me see the possibilities, Larry was the one, I have to say, who took me and showed me what to do. But he didn’t want me to be a little him. He didn’t want a Levan clone, because he liked what I was, this punk sensibility that I had.

Well, he had that, too.
Totally. He would play my records at the Garage. He’s the one that brought ESG there. He played ESG. We were playing it at Danceteria, but to play it at the Garage was a whole different thing.

Which ESG tracks did he play?
‘Moody’ and ‘Standing In Line.’ That was a big Garage record. Records sounded so great at the Garage. Even my records sounded great at the Garage, I have to say. So then Larry brought me in and I even performed at the Garage with Loleatta Holloway. Oh my God, the fact that I was on stage with Loleatta Holloway was amazing.

Did you feel over-awed by it, or was it the fact that you felt you couldn’t sing?
Oh, I knew I couldn’t sing. The thing about my recording career is that I liked it and it was a lot of fun, but I just didn’t know how far I could go with it, really. But I was opening for George Michael and Wham! Sometimes I would play stadiums in front of 30,000 people. I don’t even remember the words to my songs, so I would write all the words on my arms. So I’d be up on stage in front of 30,000 people reading the lyrics off my own arms. It was pathetic. I’d be up there singing and all I’d be thinking is, ‘God, I am really bad!’

What do you think set the Garage apart from others?
The Garage was a real family place. This is it in a nutshell: one night, Chi Chi, my wife, she was bartending at the Garage, although they didn’t sell alcohol. Having worked at the Danceteria bartending, she couldn’t believe it when she saw these boys making everything so clean. The boys would take the garbage out and then wash and scrub the garbage can out, then dry it, and put a new garbage bag in.

She was in awe at the love those 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. For everyone there it really was the temple. It was sacred ground.

It always went through stages of being trendy for a little while, then for a while it would fall off. Which meant 50 people that used to go weren’t going. Of course, it was always packed. All of a sudden there would be Loleatta Holloway or Jennifer Holliday performing and they wouldn’t tell you in advance. They would come in the back of the club and walk through the crowd. It would be so magical. There was so much love in that place and that started at the top.

How involved was Mel Cheren?
He was involved, but I never dealt with him. To me it was Michael Brody. He was the owner.

What reception did you get when you performed?
It certainly wasn’t like Sylvester! It was probably as good as Madonna got. She played there and she was scared to death, because she knew that it was a tough crowd. If they didn’t like you, they would let you know. It was like playing at the Apollo.

I called it Loleatta’s blessing, because Loleatta really let them know. She just liked us. I don’t know why. One time, she invited us to Chicago. ‘Oh, you and Chi Chi gotta come stay with us at the house.’ We were like, ‘Yeah, great.’ So she says, ‘There’s just one thing. It just burned down, but don’t worry, the pool’s still there. We’re gonna build the house again.’

I just reminded her of this the other night when we did a show together at the Lincoln Center. She called me out onstage one time and I thought she was gonna make me sing. She said, ‘Johnny, come on up!’ I was petrified. I thought she was gonna make me sing ‘Love Sensation’ with her or something. Yeah, right. So she brings me out on stage, and she just goes, ‘Turn around, Johnny.’ So I turned around and she says, ‘Look at that ass. Ain’t that a pretty ass?’ And of course, everyone starts screaming!

I played at Area on a Wednesday and Larry would come, right to the very end just before he died. He would always come into the booth and yell at me. He would tear into me no matter who was in the booth. Not all bad, though. Sometimes he’d say, ‘You were great tonight.’

When Larry died we were in England touring around. We were with Arthur Baker. All of a sudden Larry came into my head and I started thinking about him. I think I fell asleep and I had a dream about Larry. Afterwards, Arthur and I start talking about Larry. And that was right when he died. There was more to the dream, something to do with Larry’s mother, but I can’t remember. It was very strange.

He was pretty sick by then anyway, wasn’t he?
Yeah. He hadn’t been in a good place for a while.

Do you think the Garage closing had an effect?
Oh yeah.

Danny Krivit said he felt that Larry had always been in control of the drugs, but once the Garage closed it was the opposite.
Yeah. Larry told me this story one time. He was dating David Mancuso at one stage. He told this story that one time he was laying in his bed asleep and David Mancuso put acid in his mouth while he was asleep. He would do things like that. When Larry woke up he was tripping.

That was the other thing about the Garage, the drugs. What made the Garage different from all the others was that it was always psychedelic. When you walked down the block and into the Garage, you would always find drugs. Acid, mushrooms and stuff like that. It wasn’t like Studio 54 and these other places, where it was coke. Awful and aggressive, nasty coke.

Being in the Garage was a psychedelic experience. Larry used to have his own lighting rig, which he could pull over and override the lights. If you saw that, it was, ‘Get ready for a ride. It’s gonna be a trip.’ If he was playing well and he was really into it, he would kick everybody out of the booth and slide this thing over.

They used to do these blackouts and they would switch all of the lights out – exit lights and everything. Totally illegal – you can’t turn exit lights out! You couldn’t see a hand in front of your face. And he’d be building up to this peak and then, Bam! The lights would go on and the vocals from ‘Weekend’ would kick in. There’s never been a club like that: the soundsystem, the lights.

Sure, everybody did blackouts, but nobody would do one like the Garage where every light would go out. I don’t even know how they did it. There was so much electrical stuff there. You see, Larry was originally a light man. When he would do the lights, oh man, it was fabulous. He would just take control. It was incredible.

I learned a lot from Larry. Other people like Junior [Vasquez], when he did the Sound Factory, he really tried to create the Garage. You know, physically. He even had the sign. It was a scandal! When the Factory first opened he had that neon sign, the Garage sign, and he put it up. He had to take it down right away, because people were like, ‘This not the Garage.’ I can’t believe he even did that.

Was he friends with Larry that much?
He was in the booth, because I used to see him. He even used to do lights I think.

So David DePino was doing Tracks and Junior was doing Bassline?
Tracks was great. Bassline was too. I liked what Junior used to play, certainly a lot more than what he’s playing now. Junior’s a good DJ. We worked together one time. Somebody wanted to remix ‘Jam Hot’ and Junior did a remix. Junior’s very funny when you get him relaxed. We were friends.

Sound Factory got good when it purged itself of its Garage pretensions, don’t you think?
You’re right. Then Junior started to get his own personality and not be a Larry clone. At this point, Junior has his own sound and scene. Junior’s a major force, just like Larry or David Mancuso. He’s an incredible mixer even with old-school records, like ‘Love Break.’ I’ve heard Junior overlay two old records with live drummers absolutely flawlessly. He can really mix. Stylistically, I tend to go more towards Dan [Tenaglia] or David or Frankie Knuckles.

One of the things I learned from Larry was to seize the moment. That’s what I’ve always tried to do with Jackie 60. One time we did this theme, Backroom Bodega Beeper Boys At The Barrio, with these gay Latino porno stars. We had India singing and Louie [Vega] did a little DJ thing. It was an incredible night.

Another night, India and Louie came just to say hello and she got up on the mic and started singing. I put ‘Love Hangover’ on and she started singing along with it. So I grabbed the other copy of ‘Love Hangover’ and ran it back and forth and extended it, almost like Grandmaster Flash. And India was singing, ‘Sweet, sweet love hangover.’ People gassed. That was very Garage: taking the moment and running with it. That doesn’t happen at these other clubs. It’s not that they’re not good, or not fun, it’s just that the Garage was built on love. And Jackie 60 is built the same way. The Garage ran 11 years and we’re on nine. I started DJing on a card table. The bar was a door. That’s how the Garage started. Did you know?

You’re talking about the construction parties, right?
Yeah, they went on for years. It was a really big deal when they opened the dancefloor, when they finally had a wooden floor.

Do you know when that was?
See, I’m no good at dates. It’s all a blur to me. There was always building going on, always something new. Any new technology, Larry was always the first to have it. Always. Any kind of new lighting, the Garage would have it.

Danny Krivit said Larry was really into flashing lights and bright lights?
Oh yeah. One time I walked in, it’s all full of smoke and all of a sudden you heard Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz: ‘You’re not in Kansas any more.’ This delay sound would come in. Actually I’m not sure if it was a delay, or the acid. It could’ve been in the mind, but there was definitely an echo somewhere.

You’d have all this crazy Wizard of Oz stuff and then Larry would just go into the music. Jungle stuff, what we’d call tribal today. He was the first to do all that jungle stuff. Wait a minute, though. Every time I say this one was the first to do it, I think back and realise that David Mancuso was the first to do it. He used to play that bootleg edit version of Rare Earth’s ‘Happy Song.’

Danny Krivit did that.
Yeah, that’s right, but I don’t know whether Danny would want this known.

He said he doesn’t mind. He wasn’t the bootlegger, just the editor.
What people think of as ‘Love Is The Message’ is Danny’s edit. Even though I know it’s not the real one, to me, that is ‘Love Is The Message.’ I also grew up with Larry playing Danny’s edit of Chaka Khan’s ‘Clouds.’ One time I was doing this show, DJing, where Chaka Khan was also performing. She did ‘Ain’t Nobody’ and all this newer stuff. The place was packed with 3,000 or 4,000 kids and as they were Garage heads, they wanted to see their Chaka Khan. They liked it, but this wasn’t what they wanted.

When she finished, I did what Larry taught me and took a chance. I played ‘Clouds.’ She almost fell off the stage it was so loud. She looked around at these kids going nuts, much more so than any of her other songs. She walked back and said, ‘I hadn’t planned on doing this song.’ But she started over the record and she turned it out. This was the real Chaka Khan.

The funny part is I was playing the Garage version, which is not the original song, and she didn’t know it. Larry used to play the bootleg, Danny’s re-edit. She started singing and then said, ‘Well, I thought I knew this song, but apparently I don’t.’ She looked at me in the booth. But I was re-creating Larry’s mixes, because that’s what the kids wanted to hear, too. To me, that’s DJing, when you’re creating that magic on the floor. When they’ve thrown their hands up in the air and they’re totally lost in this other world. And you’ve taken them to that other word. That’s what DJing is. Before that I was playing records, which is not DJing.

It’s changed a lot. Larry was one of the first DJs to mix a record. Before that they had mixers, there was no such thing as a DJ/mixer. So what happened was after DJs began making remixes, you didn’t need to be as creative as a DJ, because the DJ mixes added the drum break already. You didn’t have to add an intro, because it was already there. You could easily get into a record and you could get out of it. You could get out in the middle if wanted. Basically, DJs created on vinyl what they did in a club.

Today they don’t do the mixing like DJs used to do. I don’t even mix like I used to. I mean, what’s the point? It’s already done. Today you get a ten-minute record and it sounds good already. It used to be that you’d get a three-minute song with nothing else, and you would turn it into a ten-minute song with breaks, peaks, valleys, everything. The old-school DJs, the magic would happen live, in the club. Nowadays the magic is happening while the DJs are in the recording studio, when they’re mixing it. Today, with a few exceptions, they’re just playing records. You can still have fun, and it’s great. I have to say, even though I’m from that other generation, I do it too.

Chi Chi Valenti took back the night

A true goddess has the power of creation in her fingertips – able to conjure meaning and joy from the sludgy soup of life. One such deity is Chi Chi Valenti, writer, journalist, poet, performer. Her mind has willed into existence thousands of hours of reality substitutes, showing clubland how much artistry you can pour into a night out – not just music, lights and people, but art, poetry, theatre, costumes, choreography, drag, politics, comedy, theatre and cultural commentary. Guided by the confrontational philosophies of Situationism, and most often in partnership with her husband, DJ Johnny Dynell, Chi Chi brought us some of the most hilariously twisted nights in clubland history, most famously at Jackie 60, their long-running Tuesday weekly.

Jackie ran from 1990-99, founded by Chi Chi, Johnny, fashion designer and dominatrix Kitty Boots and dancer/choreographer Richard Move, with Pyramid Club legend Hattie Hathaway joining in its later years. With a devoted crowd adhering to the detailed xeroxed themes, the night was so successful that in 1994 Johnny and Chi-Chi were able to buy the building that housed it, renaming it Mother.

Do The Jackie Hustle: Chi Chi and Johnny and friends pose to promote their 1992 single

Like many downtown club faces, Chi Chi was sparked into motion at the dawn of the ’80s by the Mudd club, where she worked the door. ‘Those early years drew me in and began my life’s path,’ she says, recalling the grittiness of the city, when she had dead birds thrown at her, and was even shot at. Mudd club was their ‘cradle of civilisation,’ where Johnny cut his DJing teeth alongside Justin Strauss and Anita Sarko. As he enthuses, ‘Punk was new, disco was new – DJing, scratching, rapping, breakdancing, graffiti – it was all new.’ Johnny quickly found himself spinning at many an after-hours, and from 1982 at Danceteria, and he had a dancefloor hit in 1983 with ‘Jam Hot’. After marrying that year, the couple’s clubland ambitions grew, until they debuted the Jackie 60 formula at 14th Street nightspot Nell’s.

Nightlife power couple: Chi Chi Valenti and Johnny Dynell, early ’80s

As well as the weekly Jackie 60, there was its spin-off, the annual Fleetwood Mac extravaganza, Night of 1000 Stevies, and spoken-word extension Verbal Abuse, which became a poetry magazine, Motherboards, set up as an online clubbing directory and archive, and from ’96 the flourishing sex-positive Click and Drag night, billed as a ‘cyber/fetish/gender-hacking’ party. But with the rampant gentrification of ’90s NYC, Mother found itself surrounded by the forces of money and dullness, and the couple made the brave decision to end on a high in 2000 rather than wait for the inevitable pressure from their new neighbours. Mother closed on the last Tuesday of the twentieth century, with all concerned proud that while the Dadaists’ Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 had opened the ‘nightclubbing century’, they had closed it. Frank Broughton

Through the noughties Jackie went on the road, and the following piece was written in 2005 when the club came to London as part of Arthur Baker’s Return to New York party.

Taking Jackie Further, 2005

from Time Out London, by Frank

It’s no secret that in post-Giuliani New York, nightlife is not, shall we say, looking its best. Thanks to a resuscitation of the long-ignored cabaret laws, more than three people moving rhythmically can lose a bar its liquor license. Thanks to the new mayor’s puritanical anti-smoking rules, all sense of relaxation is out of the window, as nightbirds are forced to choose between their drink, which they can’t take outside, and their smokes, which they must. And most devastating of all, the accelerated gentrification brought about by the axing of rent controls means all the interesting, creative, warped or freakish people – all the different people, proudly incapable of holding down a nine-to-five – have been priced out of town. Today’s typical Manhattan joint has acres of interior design, a grave No Dancing sign, roped-off £200 tables, and a plague of identikit rich kids mewling into mobiles.

Given this atmosphere it’s great to hear that Jackie 60, New York’s omnisexual theatre of clubland provocation, and for a decade at the end of the twentieth century the unerring Tuesday end-up place, is still on its feet. Known for fabulous costumes, diverting performance, splendid music and above all, that rarity in clubland: intriguing ideas.

People wrote entire plays for Jackie 60, designed whole fashion collections, choreographed performances for its stage that went on to wow mainstream halls of culture, such was the creative energy it inspired. Jackie was a centrepiece for glamorous, decadent, thoughtful silliness, with drag, bondage, kitsch and sex never far behind.

Jackie lived (and occasionally died) on its elaborate weekly themes. How about ‘Santa Is Burning’, a Christmas vogueing spectacular; or ‘Backroom Bodega Beeper Boys’, or ‘Mermaids on Heroin’, or ‘Kittens With Attitude’ or ‘Fiddler In The Hood (The First Kosher Gangsta Musical)’. If you’re feeling a little mediaeval, there was ‘Jackie 1360 – The Dark Ages’, and at the other extreme, who could forget ‘Klingon Women’, with a dress code that included ‘Romulan formal wear’ and ‘Horseshoe crab foreheads’.

The club ceased trading as a weekly in 2000, forced out of its once grim meatpacking neighbourhood by clean streets, sushi bars and ‘yuppies with an angry sense of entitlement’. Since then the founders have had time to produce ever more opulent one-offs. ‘For the closing Wigstock, we did a complete Gilbert and Sullivan production,’ explains Chi Chi. ‘At Coney Island we took over the sideshow and did a club piece called Dreamland, based on exactly the kind of entertainment that would have been there in 1910. We did a Halloween night in a New Orleans wax museum, and we’re going back this year. We’re bussing people out from the French Quarter to this derelict ante-bellum plantation house.’

Jackie 60’s current events, titled ‘Jackie Further’ to distinguish them from the original club, are resolutely site specific. And so the London night, of course, is built around… Paris. Ever contraire, Jackie started its obsession with fin-de-siecle France just when mainstream America was rabid with Iraq-war-borne anti-French sentiment [France refused to join the invasion]. Johnny and Chi Chi persisted with the theme for Cabaret Magique, a weekly East Village burlesque soiree, and this is what they’re bringing us on Saturday. Ruling ‘big mama burlesque queen’ Dirty Martinez will perform, Kitty Boots and her House of Domination will give their split-knickered twist to the can-can, Johnny will be throwing French cafe music into the dance mix, and Debbie Harry, a Jackie regular (and occasional bartender), will drop by to join the party.

So start putting together your outfit. The (suggested) dress code includes ‘Twenties glamour, Full Evening Dress (Oughts through Forties), Montmartre Bohemian vs East Village Performance artist, Weimar homage or the ever-popular Moulin Rouge on Crack style.’

To get a flavour for the event, visit www.mothernyc.com, the huge online community they’ve created in the last few years. Here you’ll find a catalogue of themes, photos, graphics and dramatics from Jackie’s long, inventive history, not to mention a vast living, breathing collection of peacocks, deviants and creative freaks. New York nightlife may be spluttering a little, but this New Yorkest of clubs is doing just fine. Frank Broughton

2005, Chi Chi Valenti

interviewed by Frank

I’m sure you miss doing Jackie 60 as a weekly, but it must have been pretty frantic coming up with all those themes. That’s a decade where you’re thinking of something pretty in-depth, every week. How long did it take you?
Literally, it would take at least three full days. We’d come out of one – I’m sure for people that do certain kinds of TV filming, it’s the same thing – we’d be completely dead the following day, and then start production for our next night the day after that. For instance, the whole place would need to be decorated. The new soundtrack, the costumes, it was incredible. There was a bigger team of people through most of those years than just us.

What was the process?
We all kept separate themes that we liked… We all had ones that were on our list. Kitty’s tended to be very punk or Bowie or something, and mine were like the really intellectual ones that no one ever wanted to do, and Johnny’s were really accessible and boy-driven. Occasionally one of mine would really take off. Night Of 1,000 Stevies was mine.

Three Stevies among a thousand: Miss Guy, Chi Chi and Jackie 60 regular Debbie Harry in 2005. Photo Jackie Factory

That was a long-running theme, the Stevie Nicks thing? It’s like Steviestock.
That’s still going on. We get a thousand people a year now. That has outlived everything. We’re coming up on our 14th edition of that. It’s going to be at Irving Plaza. That is something. I just really love her and thought it was a really sick idea for a night. I had no idea.

We did a night called Low Life, based on the Luc Sante book, which was totally fabulous. That’s the kind of thing of somebody reading that book and then saying, ‘Let’s do this as a theme.’ Maybe because that was up my street, because I love New York history and stuff. We did the whole Suicide Bar on stage, with the girls. Interestingly, the actual Suicide Hall building, 295 Bowery, right by CBGB, is being torn down by the city after this long fight. One of the tenants is Kate Millett, the feminist author. She’s on the floor that actually was the Suicide Salon, and before it goes down she wants to give it to us to do a Jackie, so that will have to be very impromptu, and right before the wrecking ball.

Johnny’s themes were more accessible. like when Adam Goldstone’s record ‘Up All Night (Won’t Make The Gym)’ came out, he had an idea to do a whole night of Chelsea queens and rebuilt the David Barton gym onstage. David gave us the towels to put on everyone.

There were a few themes where we always said, ‘If we ever do this, it’s been so long in coming that either the world will end or Jackie will end.’ One of them was the thing that started Martha, the dance series that Richard Move does, and that was the Acrobats of God. He kept saying, ‘Next year we’ll do it,’ and then he finally did it. It was his Martha Graham – he performs as her but he speaks as her as well… and then he has a whole company doing Martha-like dancing. It got so big he started doing it as a series when we opened the club as Mother. It got so big, his next performance after Mother was at the Town Hall. That was one Jackie theme that took years.

We still speak a kind of shorthand with each other that no one else would get. Having done all that research, having learned about all of that music, has been incredible for everything we do. But I would never want to go back to that. We did that production for a decade. And we did it for four years, while owning a full-time venue. We probably aged a lot in that time. I feel a lot younger now.

And the city’s changed so much. Without dwelling on the negatives too much, New York nightlife isn’t what it used to be.
And that’s really why we started doing something again, for the very same reason we started Jackie. We wanted to have a place to go… but our work was subsidised in the beginning by Nell’s. It began as a free series. We’ve been lucky that it’s still important to people that we do our work in New York, so we get help from people, because it’s not even the financial climate that it was when we started Jackie. It wasn’t great then, but so many people have left… they’re not drop-ins and they can’t just walk across town any more.

I was reading an interview you did when you closed Mother, and one of the things was that there was no longer the local audience that would come and understand what you were doing. You also talked of the animosity of the people in the new Meatpacking District, even though you were the spearhead of why that was a cool place to live.
I’m glad we did what we did. We had no way of knowing everything else that happened. So many people have totally lost their businesses. We got to make the decision.

Are there silver linings? Is there anything underground emerging to react against what’s going on?
The tremendous silver lining for us… After we closed the club, we started this big online community called the Motherboards. That’s been the silver lining. A lot of the work we do… like this enormous art show that we did in May, which took club-based artists – costume designers and performers – from all over the country, and they collaborated on this show of the visual work that was at CBGB for a month, and it was a whole big performance night. A lot of them had never met until three days before the show, when they started coming into town. We did the entire Major Arcana of the tarot, with people portraying different cards in tableaux, and they created digital work, costuming. There were about 50 people who collaborated on it.

That’s been incredible, even in terms of feeding events, because people are so spread-out, to Philly and other places, but they can just read that this thing is going on, come in with their costume and introduce themselves as a performer. So there are these levels of collaboration that are possible, and ways for people to reach us and reach what we are doing that never existed before.

For me, that’s been a big old silver lining. It doesn’t tie us into paying these insane rents, or mean that we have to be at the same spot every night. You bring people together online, then throw occasional events and bring them together in the flesh.

Even the smoking thing, even though that’s been devastating in general for nightlife, it’s actually been really great for us, because we’re in the East Village and people are regularly driving by and see me standing out there smoking and they’re like, ‘Oh, this is where the new place is.’

Where is the new place?
Tapis Rouge [now permanently closed] is on Avenue A at 1st Street. It says ‘Salon Prive’ outside. We found it because they have this huge African night on Sundays, and we would go past and go, “Wow, what’s going on here?” It’s a perfect size. It holds on two floors, maybe 300 people, so it’s half the size of Mother, but two distinct floors.

Does it have a dancing license?
It has a dancefloor, let’s just put it like that. There are really interesting things going on with that, and I’m very involved with that ‘legalize dancing’ stuff.

People are fighting that?
It really moved forward in June, especially by Legalize Dancing NYC, which is an umbrella organization I’m involved with, which also includes the original Dance Liberation Front people. All the different organisations that were doing it on their own kind of banded together. That’s been a help. Norman Siegel has been involved in our legal stuff, the great civil liberties dude. We’ve been banging away, meeting with City Council people, doing these events, drumming up the press. Then in June, really out of the blue, Commissioner of Consumer Affairs Gretchen Dykstra, contacted the group and said, “We’re doing these hearings about the cabaret laws, because we’d like to remove dancing from the cabaret laws. ‘Well, that would be OK.’

So, it would no longer apply against dancing? You could dance without a license?
In venues below a certain size.

Well, that’s what it was all about, anyway.
Sadly, anything over that size is Webster Hall, and has the money to get a cabaret license. So, they had these hearings and in the public sections of these hearings 60 people spoke, including me and everyone from ballroom dancers to the director of Summerstage, agents for DJs that had gone out of business because no one was bringing people to play here, record store owners who have gone out of business… Everybody was saying, ‘Here are the numbers, and this is not related to 9/11.’ That didn’t help, but Giuliani had already destroyed it.

Post-Jackie 60, what direction have you taken things?
For these shows, which are actually called Jackie 60 Further, it’s been a lot of one-off, on-site things specifically for the site we’ve done them in. We did the Siren Festival at Coney island, where we took over the sideshow for two hours and did a long club piece called Dreamland, based on exactly the kind of entertainment that would have been there in 1910. So, it uses all the elements – the MCs, Jackie’s DJing, the House of Domination, the costumes – but it specifically makes it for one place and one time.

For London specifically, we’ve decided to do Paris. Johnny [Dynell] and I are also doing a weekly series here called Cabaret Magique, and we’ve got this repertoire of French incoherent, pre-Dadaist influences for the performances. People think it’s insane to be doing a French-influenced night in New York, especially since it started during the [Iraq] war.

Because of all the anti-French feeling…
A lot of the music we use for that is in French, but it’s also a tongue-in-cheek take on Frenchness, with lots of French cliches, like ‘Sexy Eiffel Tower.’ When we were thinking of what Jackie Further should do there, we thought it’s even weirder to bring Paris to London through New York. We always like to have that second twist in things.

You probably revel in being contrary, with this “freedom fries” thing going on.
We’ve always had close connections with Situationism and obviously Dada – this sort of bridge that we felt – and then, like a month before the war started, we thought, let’s actually do a French cabaret. This is more fun, because a French cabaret that you’re doing every week is great, but to take it one more step and bring it to London, I’m really curious to see how it goes.

What specific things can we expect?
Well, performance-wise we have several members of the House of Domination, and they’re going to do updates on the can-can, their own version.

The original was pretty risqué.
Well, they have the split knickers. We’re doing showgirl elements that are based on – not reconstructions, but definitely a homage to – the can-can costumes of Kitty Boots, who’s our fourth partner in Jackie and a legendary costume designer. We’re also bringing over a burlesque queen. I think she’s played in London before, she’s really incredible. Her name is Dirty Martini. She’s absolutely the best of the whole burlesque wave here, in terms of incredible reconstructions, being able to do all the physical things involved in burlesque.

There’s an enormous burlesque renaissance in New York. We were involved in seeding some of that, but there’s a whole thing that goes along with that other school of burlesque, that’s more like Frank Sinatra. It’s a little too straight, the ’50s, ’60s burlesque. So, even though Dirty is fantastic at that, what she loves to do, and we asked her to do, is step back. Our showgirl is much more tied in to the late 19th century and then 20th century, up to about the ’20s. Those are our references.

And this is what’s going on at your weekly night Cabaret Magique?
Yeah, and we have spoken word, and people do the shadow puppets that used to be done in Montmartre. It’s very retro, but picking out an incredibly wide range from, say, 1870 to 1950 at the absolute latest, so it’s not retro to one period. And even musically… Like, at Jackie, the way the dancefloor room always has a dance track, and there’s another room… There’s a lot of charleston, and Django Reinhardt and stuff like that, and you’ll actually see people doing the charleston. So that’s been fun, but we’re very clear about not wanting to re-do Jackie.

Take Back The Night, by Chi Chi Valenti, 1990

All who remember basement rooms or the promise whispered in afterhours stairways,

take back the night.

All who have lost their way to drugs or cures and all who have simply lost their nerve,

take back the night.

All who have grown up restless in a thousand sleeping cities,

only to come here and ask

‘Where is the magic city I have dreamed of?’

take back the night.

Take it back from mere attitude and return it to grand gesture.

Take it back from every futures trader yearning for a new life.

Take it back from sweater consultants and out of town investors.

Return it to ruined men with no feeling for the masses, and no stomach for the shameless sell.

Take it back from the understudies of understudies.

Take it back from little black cocktail dresses, and the girlfriends of near-famous men.

Return it to difficult women,ragers,top girls who blow smoke defiantly

and slouch in fashion’s face.

Take it back from gay-bashers and gay supremists alike,and return it to

lonesome cowboys and rock-and-roll fags.

Take it back from crusading police captains and self-appointed neighborhood saviors.

Take it back from vodka companies and crack dealers.

Take it back from New York Magazine.

We have heard it whispered every now and again.

Somewhere a monster is feeding that will raise its head angry and swallow

everything in sight.

Somewhere, angels wait in cheap rooms and lush apartments,

and even now they are dreaming.

Of a six o’clock dawn with the music beating down sheer voodoo and nobody ever again afraid of a disease. Take it back.

Of a great light returned to the city that never sleeps.

This light will burn away the usual well-placed spots and flashbulb radiance. Take it back.

Illuminating arches of perfect young spine on crumbling staircases,

Cigarettes held meaningfully as scepters.

And the grand march on that morning:

Glistening bleached blondes and righteous sissies

Boys with angel faces and checkered pasts

Exhausted painters/ Elegant junkies who fell off fire escapes too early

dreadlocked camel traders from afterhours black markets

the Teutonic diva who began with Madame Butterfly and ended up playing Camille

the obscure stars of super-8 movies and Times Square backrooms

Children so ancient at sixteen they seemed destined to die of old age

The fragile slum goddess who traded all her chiffon and fame for a gift of prophecy,

Kamikaze poets with tongues sharp as sacred hara-kiri knives.

At once they will rise out of restless beds and rush out secret doorways.

No press kits will proceed them.

They’ll come silently, by taxi, through the ruins of the night city, to a basement lost

to the sleeping world.

They will push past the doorway curtains

Back to a room where the real Loleatta Holloway is wailing and a baby Jean Harlow waits

in bias-cut satin just beyond velvet ropes.

They will roll down the rugs or sprawl carefully on couches.

Their makeup will be perfect.

They will take back the night.

Chi Chi Valenti, 1990

Originally published as the last page of the last issue of the original Details Magazine. Republished 1992 in Verbal Abuse #1

Justin Strauss was in the Area

interviewed by Bill in London, 17.5.18

Mudd Club, Danceteria, Ritz, Area… Despite having spun at many of the greatest spots in New York clubland through its transformative ’80s, Justin Strauss is not one to dwell on his past. He’s more interested in his next remix than the nearly 300 he’s clocked up; thinking forward to playing Panorama Bar rather than looking back to those dancefloors of downtown legend. Nevertheless, ask him about those sparkling years, when rents were cheap and Manhattan was a crucible of creativity, and the stories start rolling. And it all begins with an amazing tale of little Justin signed to Island as a teenage glam sensation. His recent production projects include Extra Credit with Marcus Marr and Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard; and Each Other, which is Justin and Max Pask. For the perfect reading soundtrack, scroll down for his great 1987 mix live from the last night of Area.

What’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to you in music?
Wow. You’re starting with the tough questions. When I was 17 years old, my band Milk ’n’ Cookies got signed to Island Records in the UK, which was unheard of back in 1974. We were a New York band, just making demo tapes in the basement. We loved Sparks, and we sent our tape to their manager, and they got back to us saying, ‘We’ve played your tape for Island Records, and they love you, [songwriter and A&R legend] Muff Winwood’s coming to see you play in your basement’. That changed my life. I’ve been doing music ever since,

What was it like performing for Muff Winwood in your basement?
It was quite fun, actually. We had all our friends down there and Muff was a fun guy, and he just signed us on the spot. He told my parents, ‘Well, we’re taking your son to England and he’s going to record an album with his band for Island Records.’

Amazing!
It was an incredible experience because England was always my musical inspiration, and it was my first trip to Europe. They put us up in a townhouse in South Kensington and we recorded our album in Basing Street Studios with Muff and Rhett Davis, who went on to produce B-52’s and all the Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry stuff. It was magic – just being here at that time, and with the people at Island at that time, like Sparks, Roxy Music, Eno. The Wailers were in there recording one of their early albums before anyone knew who they were. Someone took me into the studio where they were recording and I couldn’t see a thing. There was so much smoke.

It was just like a dream come true, but then everything went sour and the dream became sort of a semi-nightmare. The first single came out and it didn’t do what was expected. Then they got cold feet. We were this glam, pre-punk kind of thing. We recorded pre-punk and it was supposed to come out in ’75. Then the punk thing exploded in 1976 and they were like, ‘Wait, we have this Milk ‘n’ Cookies album, let’s put it out’. We imploded so I moved to LA with one of the other band members and re-formed the band out there.

Milk ‘n’ Cookies. Justin Strauss, Ian North, Sal Maida and Mike Ruiz

How did the band start in the first place?
I went to high school in Long Island, which is like the suburbs. This is mid-’70s. My classmates were into the Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead if they were into music at all. And sports. And I wasn’t that guy. I was into music 24/7. Every week I’d run and get Melody Maker, NME, every magazine I could … Cream, Rolling Stone, whatever it was. I was obsessed.

I saw this girl one day in the hall and she looked amazing, and different than anyone else. I had to meet this girl. I was kind of shy, but a friend of mine was in a class with her. She introduced me. We started going out and she somehow knew the other guys. So, we just got together. They said, ‘We want to get a singer. You look like a singer.’ I wasn’t a singer, but I gave it a try. My dad had a TEAC four-track tape machine, so I started recording them in my basement. I joined the band, and then we just started making demos and rehearsing. That’s how that happened. I mean, music has been my whole life, and basically still is.

When you were a kid, who was the first artist or band that really captured your imagination?
The Beatles. I was seven years old, and the Beatles came on Ed Sullivan. And that was the moment, this blew my mind. My dad was into music and I remember going with my dad to the record store. I bought my first Beatles single, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. to sing the beat. And from that moment on, all I cared about was music.

And every Beatles album was an event when you were a kid. You didn’t know what it was going to be… From Rubber Soul to Revolver, to obviously Sgt. Pepper. I mean, it was just insane how they developed. But I was also into James Brown and funk and Motown and soul records as well.

You said you were really into British bands.
Yeah. Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Who. Then all that followed. I super got into David Bowie. He was a major, major influence for me. Into glam, into Sweet, into T. Rex, David Bowie, Sparks. Then the New York Dolls happened, and I started going to all these New York Dolls shows, and that’s what kind of made it seem that something we could do.

They were pretty crap as well, weren’t they?
No, they were amazing. They were amongst the best things I’ve ever seen in my life.

In terms of the show, or…?
The Beatles and all that stuff seemed far away and didn’t seem like we could ever do that. But here’s this New York band who… They were what they were, but it was exciting. And they got a record deal. We started this little band and I was like, ‘Maybe we can do that.’ It made it seem possible for a New York band like ours to happen.

So how did you start DJing?
I was in LA after the band broke up and when I got a call from an ex-girlfriend. I said, ‘I want to come home.’ She said, ‘Yeah, come home. There’s this club that just opened, the Mudd Club. You should DJ there.’ I said, ‘I don’t DJ. I’ve never DJed.’ I didn’t even really understand. And she said, ’It doesn’t matter. You have tons of records and I’m friends with the DJ, so I’m sure you can try it out.’ Lo and behold, I came back and the DJ said, ‘Why don’t you come one night and bring some records?’ I played, and the owner of the Mudd Club said, ‘Hey, I like what you’re doing. Do you want to work here on Thursday nights?’ That’s how I started DJing.

What kind of music were you playing at the Mudd Club?
It was really just stuff from my record collection, which was a lot of soul, funk, early punk, all the new wave stuff, to the leftfield disco stuff and reggae. It was a real mix, and I was just playing new and old records together. I didn’t really know the concept of mixing records. The Mudd Club didn’t have 1200s or a real mixer. [The booth] was literally perched at the end of the bar, but it was an amazing scene. Studio 54 had been the focus up to then. Then that scene became very commercialised and people were bored. Mudd Club was the first place where a lot of the artists gathered, a lot of the cool people who didn’t want to go to Studio 54, because they thought it was too chi-chi and the music was boring.

What did the club actually look like? Whereabouts was it?
77 White Street in Tribeca, a few blocks below Canal Street, right by Chinatown, in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing happening back there. The guy who started it, Steve Mass, just got this building. The first floor was a long bar and at the end of it was the DJ ‘booth’. There was a small dancefloor, and then the bathrooms in the back, which were semi-notorious for tomfoolery. And upstairs was a space where they had some gallery shows, performance art. You had a lot of amazing people in New York at that time: Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf would all do things there. And there was also Club 57 going on in New York. So there’s this real new thing happening. Nothing planned, nothing organised, but it just felt right.

I mean, you could afford to move to New York back then in 1980. You could get a place for $200 a month, because no one wanted to live there because it was ‘dangerous’. The city was in shambles at that point. Real estate was more affordable. So, you had people who could come and do their art and go out at night, and it was a really special time.

What was the Mudd Club crowd like?
It was just a lot of kids dressed up. A lot of downtown artists and people. It was kind of your friends. It felt like walking into your living room or something, because you knew everyone. Everyone knew each other. It was a small scene. The New York scene back then was maybe a couple of hundred people.. It was like, on any given night, anything can happen.

And then the uptown crowd. Andy Warhol was kind of a connection between the uptown and downtown, because he could mingle with both. And so he became friends with Keith [Haring]. He became friends with Jean-Michel [Basquiat], and then people like Mick Jagger, David Bowie would come and hang out at the Mudd Club. And so you had a really great mix of people, which always makes the best club.

The doorman from the Mudd Club just put out a book, detailing his experiences. It’s pretty interesting; he had a little chain and he would let downtown people in before he would let the cool or uptown socialites. They’d be made to wait outside while some kid would just get in. It was well-curated, so to speak. It was a really fun experience.

When did you start to realise the possibilities for DJing?
I’d always been interested in dance music. I always collected a lot of records from funk to soul, I bought the first 12-inches that came out. Me and my girlfriend, we were 16. We would get let into Studio 54, and we went to 12 West. We went to Infinity, but it didn’t really hit me till I went to see François K. I had met him at the Mudd Club and he invited me down to see him play at this after hours club called AM/PM in New York. And he was the first one that I really saw mixing records together, and it just blew my mind. He showed me the basics. I didn’t have two turntables in my house, and I still don’t. I’ve never practiced DJing.

How long did you play at Mudd Club?
Maybe a year or a little less. And then I got the job at The Ritz, which was a much bigger club. It’s where Webster Hall ended up. It was massive. Mudd Club was maybe 100, 200 people in there tops. And The Ritz was like maybe a thousand. And they had three turntables there. By that point they had the early Technics. I forget what model it is before the 1200. And they had a Bozak mixer, so I started just doing it, trying to mix all these records together from different genres. The Ritz was primarily a new wave rock club, as they were called back then. But I was really influenced by what François was doing.

Then he took me to The Garage one night. And that of course just opened my mind to what a DJ meant, by listening to Larry Levan. What a DJ could do and what it meant to be a DJ and play that music for people, and connect with them. Emotionally and physically. And I tried to bring that to what I was doing, because it really had a powerful effect on me. And I developed my own style of all these genres and making it work together. You know, Arthur Russell records mixed in with Yazoo, or whatever was going on at the time. That was exciting.

Everyone played at the Ritz. Band-wise it was the dream. Everyone from Kraftwerk to Prince to Kid Creole and the Coconuts to Tina Turner, Depeche Mode, Human League, Gang of Four. Anyone you’d ever want to see, and I’d play before, in between, and after the bands.

Did it end at midnight?
No I’d stay till four. And they were also the first club to have videos, before MTV. They had a huge screen that came down, one of the first massive video projectors. It was huge and cost like $250,000. An amazing experience to be part of that and be part of something new.

You also played at Danceteria. Tell me about that.
Danceteria was an amazing place. It moved a few times, but it was multilevel, so you had different DJs on different floors. My friend Mark Kamins was playing there. He would also go to the Garage so he was doing some amazing stuff. But he brought his own thing to it where he’d take these acapellas, these Arabic things, Israeli records, play them over crazy stuff, mixing a lot of Euro disco with new wave and creating his own sound.

There was so much going on creatively in New York at that time, like it was just an explosion. It was a time where we had hip hop coming. It was a new art form. You had disco and left-field disco. You had punk and new wave, all new records, all new music just kind of happening at once. What was so special about that time and those clubs was that everyone was playing everything, because it was all new music and it didn’t matter. No one cared, and people just danced. It was a very free and open vibe.

There was this thing in New York called Rockpool, which was a record pool for more left-field DJs.Bambaataa was in it, which was crazy. You got some disco records, but you also got all the new wave stuff, you got early industrial records, you got… They somehow hooked up deals with labels from England, so we were getting all kinds of imports. Like I remember getting a white label of Bostich from Rockpool and I still have it.

Was Mark Kamins an important inspiration for you?
Danceteria was a legendary club in New York. Madonna would go there. She met Mark and he produced her first record. Mark was fearless. He reminded me a lot of Larry. He had a whistle around his neck. Mark was a party in motion, you know? He was quite an amazing force in the New York scene, and everyone looked up to him. He had this connection with Manchester, and became good friends with Mike Pickering and Graeme Park. So he was doing mixes for Quando Quango, and there was this great cross-pollination between Manchester and New York where New Order would come and play. I remember I was DJing at The Ritz when Section 25 and Quando Quango played their first gigs And Mark had done remixes for ‘Love Tempo’, which is an anthem, and a few others: ‘Atom Rock’. Groups like New Order were being totally influenced by the New York sound. You had 99 Records. You had Liquid Liquid. You had ESG, Konk, Bush Tetras. It was an amazing time musically.

How did your remixing career start?
Being a DJ, I started hearing all these records, and obviously I knew François and Larry, so remixing was something I was always interested in. And one day someone brought me a record from RCA. It was this group called Wax. I said, ‘Hey, well, I hear something in this song, but I don’t think it’s really right for the clubs yet. I’d love a shot at remixing it.’ And it just takes that one person that’s going to give you that shot, and hopefully you don’t mess it up too bad. Because you don’t know what you’re doing.

But at that time, you know, you worked with engineers, you worked in real studios. And so it came out pretty good. I formed a partnership, Pop Stand Productions, with another DJ I knew called Murray Elias. And I just learned how to do it. I bought an SP-12 drum machine and I found a keyboard player that nobody else was using. My girlfriend said, ‘Oh, I know this kid. His name’s Eric Kupper.’ And so she introduced me to him and he’d never played on a record before, so I sat him down and I played him a bunch of stuff, and he became my keyboard player and played on all my remixes.

How old was he then? Must have been pretty young.
Yeah, he was… We were all young, you know. This was all in the early ’80s. I worked with amazing engineers, amazing producers and editors, which is a lost art. I worked with Chep Nuñez, he edited most of my records, Tuta Aquino, a couple of the Latin Rascals. So it was really a team effort.

Who were the engineers?
I worked with Hugo Dwyer, who had done a lot of dance records. I worked with Jay Mark, who had come from Sigma Sound. I worked with a French guy who I’d met on a Duran Duran remix we did. His name was Daniel Abraham, we worked together on a lot of records. Frank Heller, who worked on 808 State with me.

Frank worked with Bruce Forest a lot, didn’t he?
Yeah. He also worked with Marley Marl. He did a lot of hip hop, worked with Def Jam. He was just an amazing engineer. I feel really lucky to have come of age when that was still happening, to work with engineers and editors and musicians who really knew what they were doing and knew their way around the studio. I learned so much from just being around them.

Which studios did you work in?
Right Track, Soundworks, Soundtrack. Those were the main ones. Soundworks was in the basement of the building where Studio 54 was. Teddy Riley worked there. Shep Pettibone did most of his stuff down there at that point. François bought a studio called Axis and put it up on the penthouse of the same building.

And back then record companies budgeted serious money for remixes
Yeah, it was crazy… I mean, you had budgets for remixes because they could actually sell them and make money, unlike today.

What would a typical major label remix budget have been?
Twenty to 25,000 dollars, which when you think about today, it’s insane.

I know!
People don’t get album budgets for that much. But again, like I said, you were paying for studios. You were paying for engineers, paying for keyboard players, paying for editors, paying for your tape. I mean, you’re paying for a lot of things. You’re paying your manager’s fee. I mean, you could still obviously make money at the end of the day. It was an industry, really. The studios were making money. Engineers were making money.

I worked at Electric Ladyland too a lot, which was an exciting thing because obviously it was Jimi Hendrix’s studio and they still had the murals on the wall, the psychedelic stuff. It was quite something.

Didn’t you come to the UK to remix some stuff?
I did a lot of records for the UK, but always did them in New York because my team was there. And a lot of my remixes did really well here in the UK. The UK dance culture embraced a lot of what I was doing, It was very exciting. I came over when Ministry Of Sound opened, and played there. I spent a lot of time in the UK. I became good friends with CJ Mackintosh. There’s this thing at that time: DJs didn’t travel. But Ministry brought Larry, Tony. And Mark came and actually was again probably one of the first people. He travelled to Manchester early on. He went to Japan before anybody did.

If you had to name one, which is your favourite remix and why?
I’ve done a lot of remixes. I’m super fortunate because I wasn’t pigeonholed, like, ‘Oh, he does disco,’ or, ‘He does alternative.’ I’ve been lucky enough to do everything from Luther Vandross to Skinny Puppy to Depeche Mode to Tina Turner. I mean, I’ve done probably close to 300 records. I really don’t have a favourite. They all have something special to me at a time and place. And one thing I’m really grateful about is a lot of people still play them. And I still play them, and they still sound okay. A lot of that sound is still referenced today, and it’s kind of in vogue, so to speak, or timeless maybe.

Who did you admire most as a remixer?
Shep Pettibone was my number one influence as a remixer. When I started hearing his records, and then when he started working with New Order and Depeche Mode… and Pet Shop Boys especially. When I heard his remix of ‘West End Girls’, I fell in love. His manager Jane Brinton approached us and said, ‘We want to manage you.’ Shep was super supportive, and that time, he was getting offered every record under the sun because he’d had so much success. And if he didn’t have time or want to do it, he would recommend me for mixes, which was really great and very nice.

What was he like as a person? Because he’s become very reclusive
He has, and really. I guess after the Madonna thing… [their professional partnership ended abruptly]

Yeah, I heard through the grapevine it really hurt him the way it ended.
Yeah. I mean, I don’t know the dirt. He was great though. At that time, he couldn’t have been nicer to me. He had this boyish charm about him, you know? He was a very handsome, very out, very friendly to me anyway, and super cool. And still an inspiration to so many people. He never was really a club DJ. He was this kind of radio DJ, and then became a producer. I would see him in studios or see him at a party. He had parties, his birthday party. He was very friendly, very warm, and then he just kind of disappeared. It was this kind of enigma, like…

He moved to Jersey.
Yeah, he opened this resort and this club, and he actually still spins there. I know people have approached him. Even New Order approached him again to remix a record or get in the studio, but he just doesn’t want to. And it’s pretty amazing because he is the top of everyone’s list. And I guess he wants to keep it that way.

The legend.
For me, Shep and Larry and François, who’s still going strong, they were my heroes for remixing and DJing. Larry’s life ended on a very sad note, and he was a god to me. And Shep’s still there, he’s preserved in this special place. And it’s okay. He doesn’t have anything to prove.

What do you think made Larry so special from your point of view?
There was a fearlessness and a confidence in himself as a DJ to do anything. If he wanted to play five minutes of silence, he could just have minutes of silence, or play the same record 10 times in a row. When he was working on Gwen Guthrie, The Peech Boys, he’d bring those tapes in. And those things really didn’t sound like any other records at the time. Like, you didn’t know what… ‘Heartbeat’ even, which was a slow 98 bpm … Who knows? He would just throw that on in the middle of the night and people didn’t know what to make of it at first. They would just stand there with their arms crossed. That’s the only time anyone ever looked at the DJ booth, when they were kind of upset with Larry or just didn’t get what he was doing, and they would stand there and look at him, and he didn’t care. He would just shut the lights, put it on again until it became the biggest record at the club.

He knew what a great record was, and he knew that you would fall in love with it too, and he knew how to make that happen. And that takes some kind of guts and some sort of confidence in yourself. This is not a jukebox! This is my creative output, and I’m going to share that with you. And obviously he turned me on to so much music I didn’t even know. Walking into The Garage for the first time, I walked up that ramp and I heard Martin Circus, which I’d never heard before in my life. And I said, ‘What is this?’ To François. And of course François mixed it.

He took me up to the booth and I met Larry and we became fast friends. I would hang out in the booth and learn records I didn’t know. And he would come hang out at Area. He would come to a lot of shows at The Ritz. So it was, yeah, a really great cross-pollination. But it was his fearlessness and his taste really that made him so special to me. And people say, ‘Oh, he wasn’t such a great mixer, and I don’t agree with that. I heard him mix his ass off if he wanted to. Or not. It didn’t really matter.

But he controlled that whole environment. I mean, even though they had an amazing light guy, he had his own light thing above the DJ booth where he could override. And he would just make the club pitch black. I mean, even turn off the exit signs, which is unimaginable today. It was beautiful. He just knew how to make that environment so special. I would go in there with him some days during the week, and he would just tweak the sound, getting it right for the weekend. He was obsessed, and I think that’s a very special thing.

Yeah, definitely.
So yeah, he was my number one. Saturday nights after Area, I would go four or five in the morning to The Garage and hang out till the wee hours. You would go check out François, what he was doing, check out Larry. People would go to New Jersey to check out Tony Humphries. Bruce Forest was an amazing DJ. But for me, Larry was the one.

So, tell me about Area. When did Area open?
1983. There were four guys. Eric Goode, Chris Goode, Darius, and Shawn Hausman. They had done some projects at the Mudd Club. They were doing these parties and then they found this space on Hudson Street. They showed me the space, and I was like, ‘Wow!’ And they told me their idea: that they were going to change the theme of the club every six weeks. It was incredible, really, what they did. They’d transform this club every six weeks into something totally different. It was an art project with a Richard Long sound system. It was only up three years. It wasn’t even supposed to be open that long. Other than the Paradise Garage, where I never DJed, it was the most amazing club experience in New York.

And the opening of a new theme every six weeks was a major event. The whole street was clogged with people trying to get into this party. I mean, you could walk into that space and not recognize things. Jean-Michel Basquiat would DJ in the smaller room at the bar. I was DJing in the main room.

Johnny played as well.
Johnny Dynell, who is amazing. He’s still going strong too, ruling on the dancefloor. And it was still a great dance club. Despite all the crazy art stuff… I mean, Andy Warhol could be in a display case, just standing there for six hours. It was unheard of. They did a book recently about the club, and looking at that book, it seems unimaginable. Even having even been there, I was like, ‘How did this even happen?’

I mean, just the expense of it, the space they had to do that with, the team they had. They literally had a workshop upstairs where it was like Geppetto’s. The invites, everything about it, the graphics, it was quite something. I would recommend anyone who’s interested in New York club life to pick up the Area book. The first invite was a pill: a little capsule that you dissolved in a cup of water, and the paper came up rising to the top with the details.

There was something going on in New York every night of the week. Area, Tunnel, Limelight, Palladium, which was a massive club, packed. There was an insane scene going on in New York.

You’d go out to the Mudd Club, you’d see everyone you knew, because this is where everyone went. It was just kind of the destination, or Area or Danceteria. Those were all clubs that people focused on. And we’d move around from club to club. You’d say, ‘Okay, where are we going first? We’ll end up at Area, and then we’ll start at Danceteria.’

Area was 10 or 11 till four, I don’t really remember, but normal clubbing hours. And then you had the New York after hours scene, places like The Continental, The Jefferson, Arthur Weinstein and The World. And you have The Pyramid, which is still going somehow. I mean, it’s very different, but there was a whole scene born out of that club.

You also played at Limelight. In the ’90s it was notorious for the Club Kids and techno; what was it like to play at in the early ’80s?
Limelight really was a weird place. I was there before the Club Kids took it over. It was opened by this guy, Peter Gatien and although I worked for the guy for years, I never really met him. It’s in a church. I never loved it. The DJ booth was really high up, so far from the dancefloor. There was an underground New York filmmaker who I was working with there who did the lights and videos, Beth B, so there was kind of an arty thing going on. But musically, it never really had an identity. It was never my favourite club. There were some fun nights. It later became this thing when the Club Kid thing happened and it got very ravey and candy coloured and very exciting at that point.

Yeah, yeah, with Keoki.
Keoki and Michael Alig, for better or worse. And I guess it was around when ecstasy was really taking hold in the clubs in New York. It was that place at that moment in time, for those kids of that age. When the Club Kids started happening, it was a major force in New York, but I wasn’t spinning there any more.

What advice would you give to someone who’s starting out in music?
God. Don’t do it. No. You know, it’s a different world. I meet kids, and I just say, ‘You really have to find your way to do something that stands out.‘ It’s hard. It’s finding a way to put your own spin on whatever’s going on. And be adventurous!

When I started this job, nobody wanted to be a DJ. I didn’t even want to be one. I just fell into it. I loved music, and I was able to find avenues to express it, whether it was being in a band, being a DJ, or being a producer. It’s harder now because everyone wants to do that,

I’m totally still excited by new music. As much history as I have, it’s the new music that’s exciting. I go out all the time, and I think that’s the best place for me to get turned on still to new music. It’s just keeping your ears open and keeping your eyes open too. I don’t feel any different than I did when I first walked into a DJ booth. You know, I never did any drugs and I don’t drink. It’s only music for me that’s still exciting.

Were you never tempted?
To me, it was like, I was at the Paradise Garage on a Saturday night. It isn’t getting any better than this, really. For me, that was enough. That’s probably why I am still here doing this today and still excited about what I do. I’m not burnt out. I’m not jaded. I’m still excited by music and it’s still my number one thing – from that time I saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan to DJing at Panorama Bar.

Taking Jackie Further, 2005

2005, Chi Chi Valenti

Take Back The Night, by Chi Chi Valenti, 1990

Chi Chi Valenti, 1990

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