Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

  Even though the place was an old Baptist church, Lord’s choice of decor attracted the ire of the New York archdiocese of the Roman Catholic church, which temporarily suspended their centuries-long feud with the spiritual descendants of Martin Luther and branded the Church a blasphemy. The Catholic church managed to persuade a judge to grant an injunction against the club, forcing it to close down, but not for long.

  The pressure exerted on the Church’s gates by the sybaritic hordes was so great that it quickly reopened under the name the Sanctuary, with plastic grapes covering the cherubs’ unmentionables, but it was now the clientele rather than the decor that was desecrating this former house of God. The club’s ownership, having fallen into financial straits, was taken over by a flamboyant gay couple called only by their first names, Seymour and Shelley, and the crowd changed accordingly. While the gay rights movement was ignited a couple of miles away at a bar called the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village,57 the Sanctuary, whose crowd was also peppered with Broadway actors (due to the club’s location near the theater district) and hip straights, would prove to be one of the sites of gay liberation’s first full flowering. No longer the victims of unchecked police harassment, with the birth control pill slowly changing people’s minds about the function of sex and a climate of “I’m OK, You’re OK” liberal tolerance, the Sanctuary’s gay crowd turned the former house of worship into a bacchanalian pleasure palace. “It was here that the Bump got its start,” Goldman wrote, “only it wasn’t the cute little hip-hugger, tushie-touching step that it became in the straight world. It was a frank pantomime of buggery. Two boys could get into it together or twenty could make up a daisy chain.”58 The sex wasn’t confined to the dance floor, nor was it confined to simulation. There were constant orgies in the toilets, and the club would be eventually closed down in 1972 because its patrons regularly used the hallways of neighboring buildings for impromptu “bump” sessions.59

  The orgiastic spirit of the Sanctuary was intensified by the music, a triumphal march of syncopated drums and keyboard fanfares—the ceremonial accompaniment to a tribal rite of intiation for people who were just beginning to conceive of themselves as a group, as a unified whole. There was Motown (particularly the Four Tops’ “Don’t Bring Back Memories,” a 1969 track that presaged the direction soul would take in the ’70s in its dynamics, percussion, and instrumentation if not its maximialism, and the slower “Still Water [Peace and Love]”) and James Brown and Aretha Franklin and Sly & the Family Stone and Booker T. & the MG’s, to be sure (after all, what was a dance party without the black voices and rhythms that made it all possible?), but the most striking aspect of the Sanctuary sound was the predominance of a heavily percussive psychedelia: Babatunde Olatunji’s pan-African drumming and chanting on “Jin-Go-Lo-Ba (Drums of Passion)”; the conga-heavy Latin- and Afro-rock of Santana and Osibisa; the jazz-rock of Brian Auger; Cat Mother and the All Night News Boys’ “Track in ‘A’ (Nebraska Nights)” (a fairly directionless, sullen hippie jam coproduced by Jimi Hendrix that becomes a wild, almost gamelanlike60 fire dance with the Phantom of the Opera on keyboards at the seven-minute mark); the Marketts’ surfbeat takeoff of the evergreen “Apache” called “Out of Limits”; British freakbeat band Timebox’s amphetamines-’n’-strings rave-up of the 4 Seasons’ “Beggin’”; high-energy Detroit rock meeting the Stax rhythm section on Mitch Ryder’s The Detroit/Memphis Experiment; and the horny, musky, cowbell-heavy “Mongoose” by Elephant’s Memory. An evening at the Sanctuary would always finish with the Doors’ epic of oedipal rage and pharmacological lunacy, “The End.”

  The DJ’s name was Francis Grasso and he almost single-handedly created what would become disco’s sonic hallmarks. DJs before Grasso played whatever was popular at the time. Grasso, on the other hand, was playing African music that was recorded in 1959 in the early ’70s and playing obscure British imports that he had to bug record shops to order specially for him. Grasso’s taste in percussive rock especially created the nexus that would eventually establish disco as its own musical genre, as something distinct from either soul or funk. Many of the records he championed were funky but definitely not funk: They weren’t as aggressive in either attitude or rhythm, and they often sounded as if they were wrapped in a patina of alienation. One of his favorite records was Little Sister’s “You’re the One,” a record produced by Sly Stone and featuring his sister Vanetta Stewart, Elva Melton, and Mary Rand. With an almost demonic voice repeating the title phrase over and over again, a deracinated James Brown horn chart, and a heavy, plodding bass line–driven groove that quickly reasserts groove’s literal meaning as a rut over its metaphorical, rhythmic meaning, the track would presage Stone’s move from token poster child for the hippie movement to dark chronicler of the African-American condition at the turn of the 1970s.

  But it wasn’t just the playlist that was revolutionary, it was what Grasso did with his records that helped define disco as a style and not just a place you went to hear records. Although Terry Noel was the first DJ actually to mix records, it was Grasso who would make the DJ set a unified whole rather than a collection of individual records. Fittingly, Grasso had replaced Noel as the DJ at a club on Central Park South called Salvation II one night in 1968 (when Noel showed up late), and it was here that he hit upon the idea of the DJ mix as “a journey,” as one continuous piece of music that the DJ himself created out of ready-made parts. Grasso’s signature mix of the percussion breakdown of Chicago Transit Authority’s “I’m a Man” with Robert Plant’s orgasmic moans and Jimmy Page’s eerie guitar effects from the middle section of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” compounded the ultramasculine atmosphere of the Sanctuary and set in motion the notion that a good DJ was a gifted musician in his or her own right and that a turntable and a mixer were his or her instruments. Grasso is generally credited as being the first DJ to beat mix (to sonically overlap two records so that their drumbeats are synchronized), and he introduced the technique of slip-cueing (holding the record about to be cued in place while the turntable underneath spins, so that the record can be started exactly where you want at the exact millisecond you want it started).61 He used this technique to extend the dancers’ pleasure potentially indefinitely by playing two copies of the same record on two turntables,62 lengthening the grooves of such crowd favorites as James Brown’s “Hot Pants” or Abaco Dream’s “Life and Death in G & A” (another Sly Stone record).

  It was a thrilling, intensely physical sound, particularly when blasted through the mammoth stacks that the Sanctuary had acquired from the rock band Mountain. The physical experience of the music was heightened by the pharmacopoeia provided by the dealers who mobbed the club and provided patrons with poppers, quaaludes, and Seconal.63 As journalist Peter Braunstein writes, “The drugs of the psychedelic 60s, particularly LSD, were now supplanted by the ‘body high’ drugs of the 1970s. Predominant in the gay disco scene were poppers, amyl nitrate vials, used originally by angina sufferers, which when broken open and inhaled caused a precipitous drop in blood pressure and near-loss of consciousness [amyl nitrate was originally used in the gay community as a means to enhance orgasm]. Poppers coexisted with that other quintessential 1970s club drug Quaalude, which suspended motor coordination and turned one’s arms and legs to Jell-O.”64 Borrowing the concept from the “events” of the psychedelic underground where groups like the Grateful Dead would craft their sets to coincide with the peaks and valleys of the acid trip, Grasso would program his “journeys” in such a way that they would maximize the effect of the narcotics of choice.

  With Grasso playing a kind of music that tempered the “head music” of the psychedelic era with “tribal” percussion that connected more with the feet and groin, and with the accompanying drugs moving away from mind-expanding psychedelics toward those that delivered a body high, the Sanctuary marked the transition between the expanded consciousness espoused by travelers going “further” in the 1960s and the near loss of consciousness that many commentators
said characterized the solipsistic 1970s. Disco was a retreat back into the body—both the newly liberated body of its prime constituents and the body politic. As Peter Carroll wrote, “Rhetoric ran freely in 1970—rhetoric about the war and about peace, rhetoric about social injustice and possibility. There was also considerable rhetoric about rhetoric.”65 After wars and traumatic events, American popular music has always returned to the body as a locus of meaning and turned its back on language: After the Civil War, barn dances and square dances were all the rage, and this was also when burlesque dancing began in the United States with the vaudevillean skirt dance; the end of World War I saw the dawning of the Jazz Age; World War II heralded rock and roll.

  But disco wasn’t simply an escape from the language that had divided America, it was at the same time an embodiment of the very tensions and schisms that the rhetoric sought to express and resolve. Disco was at once about community and individual pleasure, sensation and alienation, orgy and sacrifice; it promised both liberation and constraint, release and restraint, frivolity and doom. Disco was both utopia and hell.

  “COME ON OVER TO MY HOUSE AND LET’S HAVE SOME FUN”

  The Loft

  Throughout its history, disco was trapped between worlds. It wasn’t just caught in the tug-of-war between the opposite poles of gay and straight, black and white—though that, of course, was part of it. Disco’s very birth was the result of the big bang between contradictory impulses: exclusion and inclusion, glamour and dilapidation, buying in and dropping out, engagement and withdrawal, earnestness and frippery. Born just as the great liberal experiment of the post-Depression years started to be dismantled and as the ’60s hangover of disillusionment began, disco was seen by many commentators as the death knell for community and the harbinger of narcissism. There was at least one disco pioneer, however, who still believed in the ’60s dream, that the Summer of Love wasn’t over, that love could still save the day.

  David Mancuso was born in 1944 and grew up in a Catholic orphanage in the upstate town of Utica, New York. The orphanage was run by a Sister Alicia, who would often hold parties for the children where she would play records in a room decorated with balloons and crepe paper.66 When Mancuso wasn’t in a celebratory mood he would spend time in the surrounding countryside “listening to birds, lying next to a spring and listening to water go across the rocks. And suddenly one day, I realized: What perfect music. Like with the sunrise and sunset, how things would build up into midday. There were times when it would be intense and times it would be soft and at sunset, it would get quiet and then the crickets would come in. I took this sense of rhythm, this sense of feeling.”67

  Mancuso brought this sense of the ebb and flow of the country idyll with him to the concrete jungle of New York City in 1965. While spending time in the antiwar, civil rights, and gay rights movements, Mancuso started to further explore his love of sound at his illegal loft space amid the abandoned warehouses at 647 Broadway, just north of SoHo. “I was always into sound, and I was more into the psychedelic sound in jazz, R&B, and all that stuff,” Mancuso told London’s XFM radio station. “I started making tapes where what I would do was take a song, and as soon as the song ended I would put some kind of sound effect and then the next record would come. I would do it like that, so it was always a continuous flow of some kind of sound information. And I would invite my friends over and we would have only big parties this time because I had this big space, and it’d be 100 people. And it started to happen more and more frequently.”68

  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”69). “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.”70 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.71 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.72 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.

  * * *

  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.”73 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.74 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.”75 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 wou
ld 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.”76

  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.”77 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.78