Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (6 page)

On Valentine’s Day 1970, Mancuso decided to make his parties a bit more formal. The Love Saves the Day party was heralded by an invitation decorated with a reproduction of Salvador Dalí’s
The Persistence of Memory.
While there was undeniably a hint of Timothy Leary about the proceedings (Mancuso uses Leary terms like “Bardo” and “set and setting” to describe his party philosophy, and there are stories aplenty about the punch and the fruit being spiked with LSD), Mancuso was also aiming at something more innocent, more childlike. As his invitation-only parties (which soon became members-only parties, with free membership) began to take off, the symbol of what would soon become known as the Loft shifted from Dalí to
Our Gang
(Spanky, Alfalfa, Buckwheat, Darla, et al.). Mancuso didn’t serve alcohol, only juice and food, which were included in the $3 admission fee (Mancuso’s motto was “life is a banquet”
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). “The ceiling was hung with colored streamers and balloons,” wrote Vince Aletti, describing the interior of Mancuso’s home-cum-club. “Other balloons bobbed around on the floor and in the next room there were tables covered with bowls of fruit punch, nuts and raisins, bananas, small candies, and gum … it was like being at someone’s—everyone’s—birthday party.”
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In the corner of the main room there was a Christmas tree with its fairy lights on year-round. Mancuso controlled the party from a booth above the dance floor that was designed like an old Wurlitzer jukebox.

It may have begun on Valentine’s Day during the tail end of the “free love” era, but that kind of love was never the focus of the Loft. After all, the back room hadn’t been invented yet. While the party was predominantly gay and far from sexless, it was not particularly cruisy and was far more racially integrated than most of the gay parties at the time. Unusually, there was also a significant female presence at the Loft. Even destitute members weren’t turned away—they were simply asked to write an IOU. “I remember going when it was $3.99 and they’d actually give you the penny back,” recalls frequent visitor Danny Krivit.
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Part Saturday night/Sunday morning hippie commune, part surrogate family, part Southern jook, the Loft represented the beloved community of the 1960s protest movements but had pleasure, beauty, and connectedness as its goals rather than social justice. Its success at achieving these goals can be measured by the fact that by 1975 Mancuso could remember only three small items being stolen from his house since he started running the weekly parties.
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Of course, this was also the beginning of the eternal, unresolvable contradiction of the dance music scene. On one hand, Mancuso was preaching inclusivity and innocent positivity; on the other, his party was members-only and defiantly underground—you had to be in the know even to be aware of its existence. It may not have been elitist like the jet-set discotheques, but in its own way it was just as exclusive.

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Where Francis Grasso was dazzling dancers at the Sanctuary and the Haven with his skill and working them to surging peaks of musk and sweat, Mancuso was using similar techniques to almost the opposite effect. According to Aletti, “Dancing at the Loft was like riding waves of music, being carried along as one song after another built relentlessly to a brilliant crest and broke, bringing almost involuntary shouts of approval from the crowd, then smoothed out, softened, and slowly began welling up to another peak.”
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If Grasso defined disco as a certain kind of rhythmic drive, Mancuso created its lushness, its elegance. But Mancuso was no baroque sybarite; he wasn’t after symphonic grandeur but rather warm textures that caressed the dancers, grooves that swelled and broke like tides lapping the shore. “He played records at a volume that was just below loud, so you had to train your ears to listen harder,” Krivit says.
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Mancuso was an audiophile, and with Alex Rosner, an electronics engineer who escaped Nazi Germany through Schindler’s list, he created the Loft’s legendary sound system. With highs that shimmered (thanks to Rosner’s array of tweeters that faced north, south, east, and west) and lows that cocooned the dancers, Mancuso was tuning into what he called “that natural rhythm, that three-billion-year-old dance—I just applied it through these artificial means which were amplifiers and records.”
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This almost Buddhist approach to sound was rounded off by Mancuso’s legendary Koetsu record cartridges, which were designed by a Japanese painter who also made samurai swords.

While Mancuso and Grasso shared many songs on their playlists—James Brown’s “(Get Up I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,” Olatunji’s “Jin-Go-Lo-Ba (Drums of Passion),” Little Sister’s “You’re the One”—Mancuso would play them in a different way: He would let them build and crash, rather than focusing on, and extending, the groove. These more percussive records would also be tempered by odder, often more ethereal selections. “The Loft had a real vibe, and they were playing records that I had bought and was really into, but I used to get a lot of trouble for playing,” Krivit says. “People would come up to me like, ‘What are you doing? This is stuff you play at your house.’ I almost started to believe that and lose faith in my own taste and had to second-guess myself and play a little safer. Once I went to the Loft, I thought, ‘Wait a minute, these exact records that I love are the peak records there. I gotta stop catering to these other people and concentrate on what I’m into’… A perfect example is War’s ‘City Country City.’ Mandre’s ‘Solar Flight’ was a good example of a record that people used to look at me like I’m playing drum ’n’ bass in the ’60s or something. ‘You can’t dance to this. There’s no way you can dance to this, it’s just impossible.’ And yet I go to the Loft and people just go nuts to it.”
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As DJ Larry Levan reminisced to Steven Harvey in 1983, “I used to watch people cry in The Loft for a slow song because it was so pretty.”
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An early Loft standby that had the dance floor in tears was a recording of the
Missa Luba
by Les Troubadours du Roi Baudoin, a group of forty-five young Congolese boys singing a Christian mass in a distinctly African style under the direction of Belgian Father Guido Haazen. No less spiritual, though rather less celestial, was Exuma’s “Exuma, the Obeah Man,” a funked-up junkanoo tune that offered an almost postmodern slant on the Caribbean religion of Obeah in a manner not dissimilar to Dr. John’s take on New Orleans voodoo. Perhaps the strangest Loft record of all, though, was Diga Rhythm Band’s “Sweet Sixteen.” While the record featured only an array of percussion instruments, “Sweet Sixteen” was no rousing stomper or infinite trance circle. Rather, it was dominated by marimbas and vibes and could almost have been an extended Martin Denny or Les Baxter jam session; even when the group got down and dirty, it sounded more like the music to a free-movement class for expectant mothers at some New Age spa than a fierce rhythmic throwdown for urban sophisticates. Its tie-dyed vibes could be explained by the fact that the Diga Rhythm Band was the project of Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart.
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Of course, Mancuso wasn’t one of the architects of the disco aesthetic because he managed to play slow songs without clearing the dance floor. He is credited with introducing what may very well be the foundation of the disco sound to New York’s DJ community. Unlike either James Brown funk or the emerging sound of the Philadelphia International label that dominated the black music scene in 1972, Eddie Kendricks’s “Girl You Need a Change of Mind” was an expansive track that slowly surged and then broke down (twice) and then built itself back up instrument by instrument throughout its eight-minute duration. There was no concentrated burst of percussive blare or gloopy sweetening to undercut the slow-burning groove, just the organic ebb and flow that Mancuso first heard sitting by a stream in upstate New York.

A further crucial disco component and Mancuso discovery was another hypnotic yet utterly celebratory record, “Soul Makossa” by Cameroonian jazzman Manu Dibango. Mancuso found the obscure imported forty-five in a West Indian record shop in Brooklyn in 1972 and played it frequently at the Loft.
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With Mancuso attempting to replicate the gentle flux of nature with his DJ sets, the swirling, mesmerizing rhythms of “Soul Makossa” fit in perfectly. While the track was only four and a half minutes long, it made clear the link between the African trance ritual of “Jin-Go-Lo-Ba (Drums of Passion)” and the James Brown groove. This elongation and elastication of the funk was the disco aesthetic in a nutshell, and other African variants on this theme (Fela Kuti’s “Shakara” and “Expensive Shit,” Osibisa’s “Music for Gong Gong,” Black Blood’s “AIE (A’Mwana),” and Buari’s “Advice From Father”) would become minor disco classics. The response to the first few airings of “Soul Makossa” was such that the few copies of the record in New York quickly sold out. One copy found its way to Frankie Crocker, a DJ at WBLS, the biggest black radio station in New York at the time, who played it on heavy rotation, creating such a buzz that at least twenty-three cover versions of “Soul Makossa” (including versions by Afrique, All Directions, Simon Kenyatta, Babatunde Olatunji, Nairobi Afro Band, the Ventures, the Gaytones, and the Mighty Tomcats—not to mention Armando Trovajoli’s reversioning of the song as “Sessomatto” for an Italian sex farce of the same name; the song became a cult disco hit when it was reissued in the States by West End) were rushed out to feed demand for this now impossible-to-find record. Eventually, Atlantic licensed the record from French label Fiesta and it reached the bottom of the American Top 40 the following year.

Mancuso’s crusades didn’t stop there, though. In 1973, while in Amsterdam, he stumbled across a record that appealed to him because it had a track called “Wild Safari” that sounded like it might feature tribal percussion. The album was the delirious and rather silly funk-rock debut by a group of Spaniards, led by drummer Fernando Arbex and percussionist Tito Duarte, called Barrabas. Tracks like “Wild Safari” and “Woman” were heavily percussive cod-Latin rock with loony vocals in a style very similar to that of another European funk-rock group that was popular among New York DJs, Norway’s Titanic. The sound was redolent of the first cheap European package holidays and of traveling the hippie trail to Ibiza. More important, the English-as-a-second-language lyrics made the songs unintentionally camp, and the slightly stilted but strangely funky grooves were a refreshing change from the straight and narrow of most Anglo-American rock. Once again, the Barrabas record was wildly popular with the Loft’s dancers, so Mancuso phoned the Spanish record company and arranged to sell the records at cost at the Loft because he simply wanted to spread the joy he found in their music.

Mancuso had proved that discotheques could sell records. The problem was that most of the record industry hadn’t caught on yet. Back in the days when
Rolling Stone
was still a novelty, when MTV was inconceivable, the promotional machine of the record biz concentrated almost exclusively on radio. The club DJ was an afterthought. While Mancuso was credited with starting the ball rolling on “Soul Makossa” and Le Jardin spinner Bobby “Bobby DJ” Guttadaro was given gold records for his contribution to making Love Unlimited Orchestra’s “Love’s Theme,” Carl Douglas’s “Kung Fu Fighting,” and Disco Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes’ “Get Dancin’” hits, disco DJs were generally given short shrift by the record labels. With its ties to consumerism and quantifiable audience figures, radio DJing was an honest, respectable business; the club DJ was an underworld pariah who only brought unwanted focus on the seamier side of the music business and was dealt with accordingly. With his communitarian ideals, Mancuso wanted to change this and set about organizing New York’s DJs in 1975. With fellow DJs Steve D’Aquisto (Tamburlaine, Broadway) and Paul Casella (Hollywood), and journalist Vince Aletti, Mancuso chartered the Record Pool in June at his new Loft at 99 Prince Street.
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The idea was that the record companies could save money by sending promotional material to one centralized office and wouldn’t have to deal with the DJ rabble coming to their offices in search of free records; the DJs would get all the new records without having to trek around the city and without being rejected because their club wasn’t important enough.

Many of the DJs who were part of the Record Pool were inspired to spin because of Mancuso and the Loft. Nicky Siano, Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles, David Rodriguez, and Tee Scott were all “Loft babies” who became the second generation of disco DJs, the ones who built on the foundations of Mancuso and Grasso and codified the sound and attitude of disco. David Rodriguez (along with Michael Cappello) was the DJ at the original Limelight (on Seventh Avenue between Christopher and Bleecker streets) in 1972. Making records like Betty Wright’s “If You Love Me Like You Say You Love Me” and the Pointer Sisters’ “Yes We Can Can” literally talk to each other by making them answer or complete each other’s phrases, Rodriguez was perhaps the first of the storyteller DJs, linking his records thematically rather than by beat or groove. Rodriguez was also one of the DJs to introduce the cod-Latin style of Titanic’s “Rain 2000.” Cappello, on the other hand, was perhaps more technically gifted and more rhythmically intuitive. Paul Casella spun alongside Richie Kaczor at Hollywood at 128 West 45th Street (on the site of the old Peppermint Lounge). Both gained reputations for their prowess at mixing (or, more precisely, slip-cueing) with primitive equipment, and picking up a trick from Grasso, one of Casella’s most popular transitions was mixing the short conga break of the Doobie Brothers’ “Long Train Runnin’” into the J. Geils Band’s reggae-ish “Give It to Me.” Levan, Knuckles, and Scott, all of whom played the Continental Baths (the most opulent pleasure palace of gay New York at the time) at one time or another during the early ’70s, would really make their mark on the scene from the mid-1970s onward.