by Grace Jones
Nicky was one of the first real DJs-as-stars, turning the process of playing records into a flamboyant performance. The decks and the booth were a kind of stage, and he was one of the first to make the idea of mixing records together an art. He was a big influence on Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan, who was a light man at the Gallery. Nicky later became a resident DJ at 54, before he was sacked after four months for—so they said—excessive drug taking. Some say it was because he played the whole of “Trans-Europe Express” by Kraftwerk, all seven minutes. A bit of both I think—too druggy and extreme, and too interested in less obvious music. Fifty-Four quickly became more about the hyped-up theater and horseplay than about new music; the creation of wild, limitless fun was becoming a very serious moneymaking business.
I think at its best in that New York period when it was being invented as something radical and noisy, disco was some of the greatest music ever. It had conviction and was as much about resistance as it was about escape; it was being invented by very creative and driven people. It drew variously from soul, funk, gospel, pop, rock, jazz, and musicals, and the breaks and segues introduced a very innovative approach to musical structure.
Obviously because of what it became, how it turned very fast into a novelty, it seems ridiculous to point out that in those years before 54 it was actually an experimental enterprise. Disco was damned and there was the anti-disco movement, and for decades before the retro-disco of Daft Punk and company there was a phrase “dead as disco,” but you went to those clubs to feel great, and those early disc jockeys were setting in motion a lot of the ideas that traveled through house and hip-hop and the freer versions of disco into the twenty-first century.
You have to separate the commercialized style of disco from the underground places where the ideas first appeared. Disco got a terrible reputation, like it was anti-music, but its beginnings were in many ways more radicalized, inclusive, and open-minded than rock. It was as much an assault on the corniness and narrow-mindedness of rock as punk. Where it ended up was the fault of the white, straight music business, which drained it of all its blackness and gayness, its rawness and volatility, its original contagious, transgressive abandon.
Those early New York club DJs were astonishing in the way they manipulated sound and emotion. The excellence and detail they put into spinning records was breathtaking. They were the originals, and their spirit is at the heart of the success of dance music as an international phenomenon. It took time, really, for that idea of the DJ as superstar to take hold, and once disco went from being a subcultural phenomenon with no real faces or identifiable personalities into the mainstream, it didn’t work, because it didn’t really have an identity. By the time it made it into the mainstream, the formula had been reduced to a very banal 4/4 rhythm, lacking muscle and erotic accuracy; the scintillating cut-up technique had been smoothed away, and the kinds of personalities who tended to front the tracks were usually quite middle-of-the-road or gimmicky. This was before Madonna took her version of the New York club scene around the world—she softened the edges, toned down the drama, moistened the excess, sheathed the flirtation, but in the outside pop world, it still seemed pretty racy.
Why did disco become so hated? Some say it was because almost everyone started to go disco to chase the dollar. Everyone jumped on the glitter wagon, from the Muppets to Kiss. Rod Stewart took it to bed. Ethel Merman even did a disco album when she was seventy-one, first track “There’s No Business like Show Business!” Where could it go after Ethel Merman?
The funny thing is, the first critique of my voice on “I Need a Man,” where I was trying to be theatrical and a little Broadway, said that it was like a combination of Ethel Merman and David Bowie. Maybe more because of my androgynous look than because of how it really sounded. Being a man and a woman all tangled up. I sang so low people thought I was a transvestite—there were definite suspicions that I was not a girl.
On my first album, I was doing pounding disco versions of the classic Broadway songs—maybe that’s where they got the idea from for Ethel. I sowed the seeds of disco’s own destruction even as I helped disco become disco. I did “Send in the Clowns,” after all. It was Tom’s idea. I don’t know if it was a gay thing, but I was happy to sing them. I knew and loved these songs because of my theater training, and any good vocal coach gives you those songs to sing to understand technique.
“La Vie en Rose” was not disco. It’s not the formula. But in the early days of disco there was more variety of music that would be played, not least because there weren’t that many disco records in the beginning. It was like a throwback to that, when there were different sorts of tracks being mixed in with the more blatant dance records. What counted was the mood they created.
In the disco era it became the song to finish off the night, when the clubs would play something romantic before the lights went up, a last round of fantasy, to slowly come back down to earth. All around the world. It was a mainstream hit everywhere except America.
The first person to play “La Vie en Rose” on the radio was the great and natty New York City radio personality and DJ Frankie Crocker, who made a name for himself by playing an eclectic range of music, from Led Zeppelin to Barry White, salsa to Bob Marley, Streisand to Lee “Scratch” Perry, crossing genres and color lines, before the barriers came down. He was the first to play Donna Summer, and no one played Queen before he did. He called himself the Chief Rocker; Hollywood became his middle name because he was so flamboyant and an absolute expert at grabbing attention. He was also known as the black Elvis, at ease in Studio 54 or Harlem. He had a hatful of nicknames, was adept at changing identities to suit different settings, and was a template for the show-off star DJ, driving around in a powder-blue Rolls-Royce, wearing a suit of the same color.
There were, he would say, seven wonders in the world. But if there were eight, he was the eighth. You can hear early forms of rap in some of his suave, seductive patter, a direct inspiration to those New Yorkers who created hip-hop—I am going to put more dips in your hips, more cut in your strut, more glide in your stride. If you don’t dig it, you know you got a hole in your soul. Tall, tan, young, and fly. He’s featured on the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.”
Frankie was responsible for defining WBLS, the early black progressive FM station in New York, becoming its program director in 1972. He was the kind of self-loving program director who would feature himself naked and smiling with groomed Afro and lover-man mustache on a huge billboard advertising the station—“If you want the best in New York, listen to Frankie.” It wasn’t just jive, though. He had a real belief in the power of music to change things.
He would play the disco just breaking out of the local clubs interspersed with classic R & B: Stevie Wonder, Aretha, Wilson Pickett, Marvin Gaye, and Isaac Hayes. He understood that a black audience wasn’t all the same, one single mass, but was a malleable collection of different tastes and desires. This was when DJs for black radio stations had a vital community role, as preachers, leaders, and reporters, communicating ideas, not merely playing music.
He was an idealistic show-business renegade, but he loved the ladies. Love Man was another of his names. On his show, which I appeared on a few times, he would pretend to take a bubble bath with a female guest, complete with sound effects. I had met him at the Hippopotamus Club, where my brother Chris worked, and he was a deadly charmer, with an eye for white girls. He liked that I worked in the modeling industry and could always introduce him to my friends. I loved his boasts—“Before me there were none, after me there shall be no more”—and took on board his method of making an entrance. Then again, I like to think I taught him a thing or two as well.
He would go out to find new records, not wait for them to be delivered to him. He was always on the hunt. By 1976, he was so powerful and black, having built up enough of a faithful following to have become mayor of the city, that there was an attempt to undermine him, with allegations that he took drugs and money to pla
y certain records. He was convicted, but the decision was overturned.
This was when radio was central to the American cultural experience and the shaping of popular music, and being played by Frankie made a world of difference, because he was famous for breaking new acts at a time when black artists were barely making pop playlists.
* * *
I still had an apartment in Paris and I still had a boyfriend there. I had nowhere to live in New York. It was after “La Vie en Rose” that I moved back to New York. Sy and Eileen put me in a dinky New York hotel called the Wellington, and that’s where I lived until I found my first apartment. They advanced me the rent. They were really taking care of me—Tom Moulton always thought it was too much, and he hated how they fussed over me in the studio. I was in New York at the right time, especially if you consider that I was living in midtown when Studio 54 opened. Studio 54 wasn’t uptown and it wasn’t downtown. It was, geographically, midtown. In truth, it was its own town.
The underground, downtown clubs weren’t palaces of dreams like Studio 54. They didn’t look like cathedrals filled with beautiful people; there were no exotic corners and secret rooms. They were seedy. There was a lot of sweat. The floors were soaked with spilled drinks and body fluids. There were holes in the wall that led God knows where. People passed in the night and never met in the day. No cleaning ladies doing the bathrooms. Funky spaces. Quaaludes, mescaline, acid, pretty much pre-coke. No liquor license, so you’d smuggle your own in, or take a pill, a little something to lift or distort your spirits. A bit of confetti, a few balloons, flashing lights, to make it all seem pretty. You wouldn’t know what it was really like unless you stayed to the end, when the lights went up and you could see what a shitty hellhole it was. The lights go up, and the fantasy is spoiled. You need to keep the fantasy intact.
Disco was seriously dressing up soul and funk, going somewhere to be seen, where the beautiful people went—Halston, Calvin, Liza, Bianca, the whole fashion world finding a fantasy that supported the fantasy they were committed to. The underground clubs in that part of Manhattan, where the streets have no numbers, were where you went to hear newer, edgier music that wasn’t so much about fashion. They were places for the more serious social dancers. Those early underground places, like the Loft, the jewel of the private parties, came out of gay rights, hippie happenings, Afro-American rent parties in Harlem—before it all became so commercialized.
Studio 54, on West Fifty-Fourth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, became the disco of all discos, those places to be seen, fashion displays with music, possibly because it was inside a theater, an old opera house with ceilings almost a hundred feet high. It took about seven years for the idea of what became known as disco to go from a few needy, speeding downtown revelers getting together in a stark, unpublicized warehouse in the middle of nowhere for raucous worship of rhythm to it being the overpublicized center of the celebrity universe.
A private insiders’ party, a close, small community, became monstrously public. It was going from a place where it was really tricky to even find the door to get in to a place where those desperate to get inside would crowd around the roped-off entrance. So you knew exactly where the door was. This was where disco became more full-on, and ballooned into the outrageous and, ultimately, the camp. I suppose I arrived naked so many times it was partly my fault. But at the time, Studio 54 seemed like the place I had been heading for since I had left Jamaica—not the promised land, but some sort of grand playground where I could really forget about those whips and prayers. It would become a new place with rules and rituals to break free from, but for now, I was speaking in very different tongues.
There was Studio 54, and there was Max’s and the underground clubs. Two approaches to glamour, one for the fashion people, one for the more intellectual people. One was more political than the other, but I was comfortable in both places because they were both about difference, filled with different people, and I liked difference. They represented different ways of developing the spirit of the ’60s as one decade of change mutated into another, one into pure escapism, the other more experimental and almost academic in its pursuit of musical perfection. The two grooves coexisted within a few New York City blocks of each other. Punk and disco were becoming themselves at the same time within the same small area of Manhattan. It was a very small community, New York. The club scene, the art world, the music people, the fashion freaks, the energized, dislocated misfits, the gay spirit, different generations, various tribes with no name, all overlapping and interacting and spiraling off into new shapes.
Studio 54 appealed to my sense of outrage; the underground clubs appealed to my sense of exploration and adventure. It was the two sides of me—or two of the many sides—craving freedom. Fifty-Four offered a self-indulgent, excessive, even amoral form of freedom, and was a place where I could let it all hang out; the underground clubs satisfied the explorer in me seeking new discoveries. The key was learning how to balance these two sides—the irreverent me who’d turn up at a nightclub like I was the circus coming to town, and the me who was always interested in invention and innovation.
Before Studio 54 became notorious, it was the epitome of a certain kind of divergent identity shape-shifting, so there were the beautiful people, the poseurs, the fantasists, but there were also those with more cerebral urges. It was about the mix of people, all in one place. But the club’s logo, after all, was the moon snorting coke off a spoon. Nothing was hidden. It was right out there in the open. You can’t imagine America without drugs of one form or another, without its drugstores, rock stars, dealers, bored housewives, or bankers, and Studio 54 blew that notion up your nose so that you couldn’t miss it. Made it so obvious that the country was on drugs, or it wouldn’t make it through the day, that it became a problem.
Up high in the seats above the stalls, because this was a theater, you could disappear into the shadows and get up to whatever. Up above the balcony, there was the rubber room, with thick rubber walls that could be easily wiped down after all the powdery activity that went on. There was even something above the rubber room, beyond secretive, up where the gods of the club could engage in their chosen vice high up above the relentless dancers. It was a place of secrets and secretions, the in-crowd and inhalations, sucking and snorting. Everyone was in the grip of what seemed like an unlimited embrace.
Celebrities headed for the basement. Getting high low-down. Not even those who got inside the club could all make it into the basement. You’d stumble into half-hidden rooms filled with a few people who seemed to be sweating because of something they had just done, or were about to do.
The music was magical and the DJs were crowd-grabbing showmen. All the best DJs wanted to work there; the sound system was the very best, and they had their own special horseshoe-shaped booth to control things from. It all contributed to creating this special atmosphere, and at its best democratized pleasure: The anonymous drag queen could dance next to the international superstar and there was no difference. The lights were integral, so that as the music became more animated so did the lights. These were rave parties years before there was such a thing. Everyone got on famously.
One of my best girlfriends at the time, Carmen D’Alessio, was there at the beginning of Studio 54. We were very close and went dancing together all the time in those places for the few for whom the idea that dance music could have such spellbinding nighttime momentum was growing. The blend of space, light, and sound, the hot mass of bodies, the obscure but definite sense of occasion, and above all the music constantly released this feeling that anything was possible. You could dance on your own just for the hell of it. I would go all dressed up and come home with my designer clothes in tatters from all the activity and movement. Going out was a very physical thing.
I went to see the premises of Studio 54 with Carmen before it opened. She found the place, in the daytime, when you really had to use your imagination to realize what it could look like at night, with the lights, peo
ple, and noise knocking it into something else. “Look at this place,” she said. “It’s fantastic!” The first thing I did was check the acoustics—singing at the top of my voice—and because it was a theater and had been a TV studio, it sounded fantastic. Carmen knew what she was doing.
Andy called Carmen the number one jet-setter among all the jet-setters focusing on New York as the essential center of pleasure. He said she had the best list of everyone beautiful, young, and loaded. She was hired by 54’s owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, to promote the club when it opened in April 1977, but obviously she would say that she created the whole idea of the club.
Ian was very quiet, not seen around much, but he had tremendous energy and paid very close attention to every little detail. He was a fan of Walt Disney and wanted to create a fantasyland for adults, a Magic Kingdom for hard-core sensualists. Steve was louder, always seeming a little drunk. Always spitting quaaludes into my face when he spoke, but sweet and lovable and into his family. They were still in their twenties, and the whole thing ran away from them. Oddly, they also went to college in Syracuse, my adopted American base, their hometown, where within a few years I would be celebrated in the city’s equivalent of the Walk of Fame somewhere between Alec Baldwin and Lou Reed.
Steve and Ian wanted their club to reflect back and outdo the actual excess of the city, be a continual stream of big, juicy parties, and Carmen knew how to arrange that. She was a genius at event planning and turned the whole thing into a rampaging concept. She brought to bear a mix of the PR ingenuity she had learned from working for designers like Valentino, and the things she had learned from going to the clubs in New York about what made an almost dangerously great night out: erotic energy, and the classic New York melting-pot mixture of personalities and ambitions, where there would be gays, blacks, Latinos, whites, straights, transvestites, celebrities, nonentities. It’s like an acid trip without taking acid, where you are provoked to such an extent by all the metamorphosis going on around you that it seemed the dressed-up, turned-on people really did have horns growing out of their skulls; that there really were centaurs, angels, and devils; and that the music was the sound of sex, foreplay to orgasm, first kiss to the little death.