Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (43 page)

In the hands of people like Arthur Russell and François Kevorkian, disco wasn’t the oversexed, airheaded clotheshorse that it became in the mainstream. It was no longer music for the belle of the ball, but for the wallflowers who danced to their own drummer. If this moment in dance music history can be seen as the revenge of the nerd, the class valedictorians were undoubtedly Was (Not Was). The group was formed in 1980 by Donald Fagenson and David Weiss, childhood friends from Detroit who had spent their adolescence locked in each other’s basements listening to MC5, Frank Zappa, John Coltrane, and Firesign Theater. Such listening habits inevitably led to a surfeit of ideas that came tumbling out every which way on their records: reggae skank guitar, Robert Quine–style solos courtesy of MC5’s Wayne Kramer, surreal, sarcastic lyrics via Dylan and Lenny Bruce, James Brown/Nile Rodgers chicken scratch, rudimentary synth riffs, bass lines that alternated between Jah Wobble’s work with PiL and Terry Lewis’s Minneapolis sound, paranoia that seemed to come straight from a 1950s public service announcement. It was all wrapped up in the brittle production values that marked the ’80s—the eggshell sound lending a piquancy to the rueful observations of Reagan and Thatcher age facades.

Of course, the goal of the best dance music is to get you to think with your entire body, and that’s exactly what Was (Not Was) succeeded in doing. It wasn’t merely the détourned words of Ronald Reagan that let you know that “Tell Me That I’m Dreaming” was not your ordinary hands-in-the-air disco stomper; it was the astringent guitar riff, the dub alienation, the comedic voices, the sibilant hi-hat that would soon become the hallmark of house music. “Wheel Me Out,” produced and mixed by Don Was and longtime partner in crime Jack Tann (who was in Was’s early punk bands the Traitors and President Eisenhower), represented everything great about the merging of postpunk, dub, and dance music in the early ’80s. It was cathartic yet eerie and uncomfortable, cryptically political, full of nuance and intrigue. “A few people, myself included, had started to listen to Jamaican dub reggae,” Was told Anthony Haden-Guest. “The result was a different kind of disco. It wasn’t this happy kind of thing. I think maybe the drugs changed. The first time I went to the Paradise Garage I was high on mushrooms. Which is distinctly different from going to Studio and doing a bunch of blow. It’s a very different kind of experience. It was enormous.
Man, it felt like the speakers were five stories high!
The place took on a really dark monolithic feel. And it wasn’t like … happy.”
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I went down to Paradise Garage

I took my place in line

The cashier said, “Are you alright?”

I said, “I’m feeling fine”

I’m a stranger to nirvana

I don’t box outside my weight

But when I stepped outside the taxi, I did not anticipate this feeling

—Tim Curry, “Paradise Garage”

When disco put on its loincloth and face paint in 1978 and went, frankly, a bit moronic, there was one club that upheld the early ideal of disco as a “Saturday night mass.” When disco was beaten up, stripped, and left for dead by the side of the road two years later, there was one club that kept the faith, refused to let it die, and nursed it back to health. That was the Paradise Garage, and although it doesn’t have the name recognition of Studio 54, both nightlife and dance music cognoscenti venerate it with the same devotion as a supplicant has for a saint.

On the surface, there was nothing particularly special about the Paradise Garage. As its name indicates, it was housed in a nondescript parking garage at 84 King Street in SoHo. There was a neon version of the club’s logo (a curly haired guy hiding behind his massive biceps holding a tambourine) at the end of a long ramp that led you from the garage to the club itself, but no spectacular lighting effects inside. The front and rear rooms where dancers went to cool off were covered in sawdust and sometimes showed movies like
Midnight Cowboy
and
Altered States,
but there was no lavish VIP room stocked with endless supplies of coke, blow jobs, or champagne (there was, in fact, no alcohol served at the club at all). The club’s centerpiece was the dance floor, not because it had multicolored lights or special wood imported from Sumatra, but because it was huge and people came to dance. “It was a different kind of dance floor,” writes Mel Cheren, who lent money to the club’s owner, Michael Brody, to help finance it, “in part because the people on it were so different from those at every other major disco at that time. For one thing, they were without question the city’s most serious dancers. There was no attitude here, no cliques defined by their muscles, no fashion victims, no A-list. These people were dancers.”
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While the Paradise Garage is shrouded in myth and mystique and held up as the pinnacle by people who never went there, one thing is certain: It is considered by many people to be the greatest discotheque ever because it was a temple to the music. The sermons to the flock were delivered by a sound system that has never been equaled. Designed by Richard Long, the system mimicked the qualities of David Mancuso’s setup at the Loft, but for a dance floor packed with a couple of thousand people rather than a living room with a couple of hundred. It was ferociously loud (some people say it was too loud) and, unlike the Graebar systems at places like 12 West and the Saint, the bass made your bowels quake, but it was also crystal clear and capable of remarkable detail. The leader of the congregation was the DJ, Larry Levan, who would spend hours fine-tuning the system and deploying little tricks like gradually upgrading the cartridges on his turntables throughout the night so that the peak would be overwhelming in its effect. With the amazing sound system at his disposal, Levan became a master at manipulating the EQ levels and teasing new nuances out of a record.

Levan is almost universally revered as the greatest DJ of all time. This is not because Levan was a great mixer (he was actually pretty lousy) or was a technological or virtuosic innovator, but because he was a master at creating a mood and had that trait of which most DJing legends are made: He had a telepathic relationship with his dancers. Stories abound of Levan’s “dance floor evangelism”: people he knew claiming that they felt certain records talking to them specifically and then looking up at the DJ booth to see Levan glaring at them or blowing them kisses depending on the message the song was conveying. Levan would drop ballads and a cappellas at peak times, leave seconds of dead air in the midst of a set, and let two records run together, creating a grating cacophony, but he also created an intensity on the dance floor that has yet to be replicated. Levan took risks—not only by restructuring records like Loleatta Holloway’s “Runaway” on the fly or by playing a single record for an hour as he did in 1984 with Colonel Abrams’s “Music Is the Answer,” but by constantly searching for records from outside of “dance music” that fit his aesthetic. He championed records like the Clash’s “Magnificent Dance,” Jah Wobble’s “Snakecharmer,” Manuel Göttsching’s
E2-E4,
and Marianne Faithfull’s “Why d’Ya Do It?”

To Levan, DJing wasn’t about mixing, skills, or taste. It was about feeling and, strangely enough, narrative. Levan often told stories or made comments through his song selection. “Out of all the records you have, maybe five or six of them actually make sense together,” Levan told Steven Harvey in 1983. “There is actually a message in the dance, the way you feel, the muscles you use, but only certain records have that. Say I was playing songs about music—“I Love Music” by The O’Jays, “Music” by Al Hudson—and the next record is “Weekend” [by Phreek or Class Action]. That’s about getting laid, a whole other thing. If I was dancing and truly into the words and the feeling and it came on, it might be a good record, but it makes no sense because it doesn’t have anything to do with the others. So, a slight pause, a sound effect, something else to let you know it’s a new paragraph rather than one continuous sentence.”
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While on one hand Levan attempted to become if not the Homer of the turntables at least the O. Henry, he was also aiming for wild abandon, trying to create epiphanic bursts of energy that shattered structures like narrative. Some of his signature tics—like cutting off a record midflow or his car-crash mixes—seemed almost like the DJing equivalent of punk rock dissonance or feedback. He was after what Roland Barthes defined as “punctum”: that moment of explosive insight where everything suddenly becomes clear, the crack of the Zen master’s cane across the back of your head, the divine contact that comes after a whirling dervish ritual.

As a teenager, Levan had frequented the Loft and the Gallery when they first opened, and got his first DJing gig at age eighteen at the Continental Baths in 1973. “I was doing lights and the DJ walked out,” he recalled to Harvey. “The manager who was like, a six foot three inches, Cuban guy, said, ‘You’re going to play records tonight!’ I told him that I didn’t have any records. ‘You’ve got five hours!’”
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Well, Levan managed to find some records and ended up playing the Baths for about a year.

Levan left the Baths in 1974 to play at Richard Long’s after-hours loft club, SoHo Place, at 452 Broadway. While Levan’s growing following ensured that the place was packed, the club was in Long’s workshop and was essentially a showcase for Long’s recently started sound equipment business. Unfortunately, the club’s booming bass ensured that it wouldn’t stay open for very long. As soon as SoHo Place closed, Levan was asked by Michael Brody to DJ at his newly opened club at 143 Reade Street in what is now known as TriBeCa. The club was situated in an old meat locker and still had the temperature control switch, which Levan would play with along with the DJ crossover that allowed him to manipulate specific frequencies of a record. It was at Reade Street that Levan would develop the techniques as well as the sound—the deep, dark bass, the queasy, dubby emotion that he would extract from records—that would make him a legend.

With an unsympathetic landlord and space issues, Reade Street was never going to be the right space for Levan’s rising star, so Brody closed the club in 1976 and asked Levan not to play anywhere else until he found a new place. The new place was the Paradise Garage and it was built explicitly for Levan—probably the only nightclub ever constructed for a specific DJ. The Garage unofficially opened in January 1977 with the “Construction Parties” that were held in the club’s small nine-hundred-square-foot Grey Room in order to raise money for the rest of the club’s construction. When the full club (with the second largest dance floor in New York) finally officially opened in February 1978, it was a disaster. There was a hitch with the sound system, and even though it was in the middle of a snowstorm, no one was allowed inside until it was fixed. Once they got inside, it was practically as cold as it was outside. Almost all of the A-list Flamingo crowd that Brody had invited left, vowing never to return.

It’s debatable whether the pretty boys would have stayed at the Paradise Garage even if they had stuck around to hear Levan spin. Their environment was the Flamingo, which specialized in relentlessly chipper music; Levan played darker, more bottom-heavy records that retained their connection to the gospel continuum. As time went on and “disco” became less and less popular, Levan’s music got darker, weirder, more disjointed, particularly the remixes that he made specifically for his own dance floor. Levan was one of disco’s true dub champions, and his mix of Instant Funk’s “I Got My Mind Made Up” and his production of New York Citi Peech Boys’ “Don’t Make Me Wait” are classics of dub technique used in the service of dance floor imperatives: delaying climax while building tension and stretching the beat, and as an impressionistic canvas to depict the club life dystopia of constant, but unfulfilled, temptation and unrequited desire. His most radical remix, however, just may be his dub mix of Smokey Robinson’s minor R&B hit “And I Don’t Love You.” One of the most famous voices in the history of popular music becomes nothing but a ghost, and a devastatingly haunting one at that, only mournfully intoning the title phrase a couple of times from behind a fog of echo and distended guitar. Levan uses echo to double the prevailing beat over itself and inserts a cascade of synth-toms, subverting a rather ham-fisted ’80s funk-lite groove to create an opiated palette of dance floor colors that gives the lie to naysayers who claim that disco is capable of only one, skweaming emotional timbre.

The Garage’s heyday was in the early ’80s, after disco had supposedly been banished into exile. “In the early ’80s no one seemed to have any direction. The [DJs] were all scattered around trying to find the new thing because disco was dead,” Paradise Garage regular Danny Krivit says about the Garage’s ability to continue to attract huge crowds. “They were really playing a lot of stuff that they didn’t feel … [Levan] was completely unaffected by this. He was playing stuff that he thought was good music. The club had a clear direction. Maybe the name disco or the trash disco was easy to throw away, but you couldn’t lump all this music together as bad music. There was a lot of good music there. The Garage got people back to that—this is just good dance music.”
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The gospel of the Paradise Garage spread quickly, particularly to a club in New Jersey. The Zanzibar opened in Newark in August 1979 after the club’s owner, Miles Berger, inspired by a visit to the Paradise Garage, got Richard Long to design a system in his club at the Lincoln Motel. Hippie Torales was the club’s original DJ, but he was replaced in 1981 by Tony Humphries and Tee Scott. While clubs like Zanzibar and later the Shelter in New York ensured that “Garage music” would become ossified, enshrined in the mausoleum of genre, they weren’t the only culprits. Even Levan’s own crowd got protective of what it thought Garage music was. Krivit remembers that when hip-hop first came out “quickly, people were like, ‘I don’t like this, don’t push rap on me.’ Certain people were getting a little standoffish, like, ‘This is Garage music, that doesn’t belong here.’ That used to bother Larry whenever anyone said that. He was like, ‘Good music is good music, so when I hear something that’s rap and it’s good, I’m going to play it here.’”
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Nevertheless, out of Levan’s hands and outside of its original environment, Garage came to mean only soulful New York dance music, especially with a jazzy feel; gone were the weird records, the messianic intensity, the messy mistakes. Garage soon was characterized by the same rigid beat and lack of inspiration that doomed disco—albeit on a smaller scale.