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.79 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.80 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.
The most important of these “Loft babies” was Nicky Siano. Siano was a young kid from Coney Island in love with music who first went to the Loft at age fifteen. The following year he landed a DJ gig at a club called the Round Table but was so unimpressed with the setup that he decided to open his own club in the Loft’s image, but with a commercial imperative. Securing financing with the help of his brother, Siano opened the Gallery (also called the This & That Gallery) on Twenty-second Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues in 1973 (the club later moved to 172 Mercer Street). If Francis Grasso was the Chuck Berry of the turntables, Siano was the Jimi Hendrix. Siano built on Grasso’s innovations and took them to new realms of expressivity and intensity. Playing on three turntables (while controlling the club’s lights with foot pedals), he would take records like Gloria Spencer’s gospel stormer “I Got It” and stretch it completely out of shape. Siano would work the crowd up to fever pitch by playing two copies of “I Got It,” extending until breaking point the beginning where Spencer screams over the piston-pumping cymbals that would become familiar a few years later from both the Isley Brothers’ “Fight the Power” and, more bizarrely, Black Sabbath’s “Supernaut.” He achieved a similar crowd response when he mixed MFSB’s “Love Is the Message” (which he turned into “the national anthem of New York”81) with a sound-effect record featuring a jet plane taking off.8
2 Siano was also credited with pioneering the use of varispeed turntables in club DJing. Previously the preserve of the avant-garde (John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1 uses a varispeed turntable to create an eerie tone poem portraying an Yves Tanguy–style topography), the vari-speed turntable enabled Siano to create a world that was just as far-fetched as that of the avant-gardists, but he used it to create order and neatness rather than wild, otherworldly sounds. Taking advantage of the turntable’s ability to vary its speed, and thus the pitch and tempo of the record it’s playing, Siano was able to craft mixes and blends that were almost letter-perfect. In Siano’s hands, the transitions between songs were no longer the awkward herky-jerky, sputtering dance floor moments (like trying to change gears without using the clutch) they used to be; they were now taut, well-defined, and smooth—kind of like the ideal male body on the dance floor. It would be hard to overstate the impact of this on the DJing scene. A whole new world was created; reputations were destroyed and made in the flash of a cross-fade.
Siano also shaped the direction of what would soon be called disco music. He loved deep, deep bass and had Alex Rosner design him a sound system with forbiddingly dark, bowel-quaking bass reproduction and crossover points on his mixing board so he could isolate the treble, midrange, and bass of a record. Siano’s sound was reflected in the spartan decor of his club. Although it was decorated with streamers and balloons à la the Loft, the Gallery had minimal lighting that would be used only during key moments of certain songs. The occasional rhythmic flashes of light would punctuate the festivities, paralleling the surging energy of the records, and carry the dancers out of the penumbra up to heights of dizzying incandescence. More than any DJ before him, Siano homed in on the break. While the percussive breakdowns of records were focal points in the sets of Grasso and Mancuso, Siano pushed this aesthetic over the top. Grasso and Mancuso both built up to the breaks, but Siano attacked them right from the get-go and played his favorite parts of a record over and over and over and over again by using two copies at once. Like the free jazz cats who congregated in similar loft spaces to explore parallel limits of physical and spiritual release, punk rockers accelerating three chords into immolating infinity, and Bronx hip-hoppers contorting themselves into new shapes by dancing to their own, more explosive break beats, Siano created a dark whorl of sound, a vortex of tribal drums and propulsive bass murmurs that was at once exhilarating and menacing.
But he also loved over-the-top female vocals, and if anyone can be credited with bringing the diva to the dance it is Siano. Records featuring either rousing, “gonna wash that man right out of my hair,” don’t-do-me-wrong vocals, or breathy, soft-focus coos of postcoital bliss by Gloria Spencer, Genie Brown, Faith, Hope & Charity singer Zulema, Ecstasy, Passion & Pain, Thelma Houston, Minnie Riperton, Diana Ross, and LaBelle all got extensive airings at the Gallery. In essence, Siano was the bridge between the intense, rather serious music of the earliest days of disco and the cheery music of airheaded levity that it became in the popular imagination. The characteristic interplay between the sheer ecstasy or thrilling exorcism of the vocalist and a creeping, dark undertow that marked out the very best disco music was first pinpointed by Siano.
“YOU’RE JUST THE RIGHT SIZE”
The Art of the Mix and the Development of the Twelve-inch Single
While DJs always wanted longer records with longer percussive passages (one of the many reasons why album tracks, rather than singles, were so important in the earliest days of disco), Nicky Siano’s mixing advances at the Gallery made this even more imperative. The traditional seven-inch forty-five is difficult to handle when in the middle of the fray of a DJ set. On top of that, its tight, compressed grooves wear out faster than those on albums and they just don’t sound as good in a big room with lots of space to fill. The whirling dervish trance ritual that was developing in these New York clubs also demanded extended tracks of a more diffuse, prolonged intensity than the standard three-minute wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am pop single—dancing from midnight until six in the morning at the Loft or the Gallery was a very different proposition from the midday blood-sugar rush of the sock hops or the drunken, stumbling toga parties of old.
One of the first people to recognize this new paradigm was, ironically, an old music biz hand who had left the industry in disgust at its duplicitousness and was pursuing a career in modeling instead. Yet however much he was identified as Camel’s answer to the Marlboro Man or the face of classic tailors Hart, Schaffner & Marx, Tom Moulton always identified himself through music. “Without music I’m dead,” he says. “That’s my whole life. That’s who my lover is, that’s who my mistress is, that’s everything.”83
Moulton grew up in Schenectady, New York, about thirty-five miles down the road from David Mancuso in Utica, and was a music buff from a very young age. “I was always used to hearing the white versions of the black songs, but when ‘Earth Angel’ by the Penguins came out, oh, my God,” he reminisces. “I thought, ‘Oh, Lord, that’s really something.’ The next record I really went nuts over was ‘Slippin’ and Slidin’’ by Little Richard, and I thought, ‘Uh-oh, something’s happening here because white people sure don’t play like that.’”84 His love of black music eventually led to a job in sales and promotion for King Records from 1959 to 1961, where he worked with James Brown, Freddie King, and Hank Ballard.
But after similar jobs with RCA and United Artists, Moulton got fed up with “the bullshit, the ass-kissing, the insincerity” and started working for the Bookings and, later, the Ford modeling agencies. “There was this guy John Whyte who was at the same agency I was and owned the Botel on Fire Island [a predominantly gay summer community about fifty miles from New York City],” Moulton remembers of the fateful event in 1972 that would change not only his life but eventually the entire course of music history. “A friend told me I should go out there and check out the music that people were dancing to [at the Sunday Tea Party]. So I went out there and I thought, ‘Okay, this is very Villagey, bohemian.’ And they’re listening to soul music. I’m watching these white people really getting off on this music. And I’m really observing them, and, of course, all the songs are like two and a half, three minutes long, and I notice how everything is like ‘one-two-three-four,’ and they’d always leave the floor on ‘one.’ They’d always walk off [because the clumsy mixing interrupted the momentum and flow]. I’m thinking, it’s a shame, ’cause you could almost sense an emotional reaction there, but it wasn’t long enough to get it out. So I thought, ‘I’m going to try something.’ And I went to John and said, ‘You got a tape machine, right? I’m going to try something and see if it works.’”85
The result of his experimentation was a forty-five-minute tape of perfectly mixed music with no skips, no awkward transitions, nothing played at the wrong speed, no DJ saying, ‘Whoops!’ It took him eighty hours to make. “But it was flawless,” Moulton beams. He spent his two working weeks painstakingly reediting, recrafting, and blending with a razor blade, Scotch tape, and varispeed turntable records by Ann Peebles, Syl Johnson, the Detroit Emeralds, and obscure records on tiny labels that he found in Oakland, California. “He would do it on an old Wollensak recorder,” recalls Barry Lederer, a DJ and soundman who sometimes watched Moulton at work. “Since he couldn’t blend [i.e., he didn’t have a mixer], he would actually count out the beats of a song with his feet, and as it came to the end he would make the next song come in on the right one, two, three, four, beat … and this worked.”86 He doubled the length of the records and stretched out the grooves so that the dancers just couldn’t hide (or walk off the floor). “It was mostly new stuff,” Moulton remembers, “stuff that I liked, but I knew there were certain songs that had that ‘I’ve gotta get up and move to this no matter what.’ I’d always start with that kind of a song where people would want to dance to that, and then you could start taking them on this trip. What I would use was this varispeed and start speeding up slowly so you’d never know. And then I go into the nex
t song, so that by the end of the forty-five minutes you could peel them off the walls, they were screaming and yelling.”
Well, that didn’t exactly happen when Moulton gave the tape to Whyte. As Moulton recalls: “He wouldn’t play it. John hands the tape back to me and says, ‘Don’t give up your day job.’ So I had the tape in hand and I was sitting waiting for the boat to take me back to the mainland. This guy came over to me and said, ‘Did somebody just die?’ I said, ‘Why?’ ‘I’ve never seen anyone look so down in my entire life. What’s the matter?’ I kind of explained the story to him. He says, ‘Listen, I don’t do the music here [at the Sandpiper restaurant and bar], but my partner does. If you want, I’ll give him the tape and see what happens. Give me your phone number and address and we’ll send it to you.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ I forgot about it. A couple of weeks later, I get this call at quarter to one in the morning. ‘Hello.’ ‘They hate the tape.’ And I said, ‘Oh, okay.’ I guess I was on the wrong track here. The next night—I should say the next morning—I get a call at two in the morning. It sounds like someone in a stadium. ‘They love the tape.’ I hung up, thinking these people are sick. They call back like five or six times, and I keep hanging up. The next day, I get a call: ‘Hi, my name is Ron Malcolm and I love your tape.’ ‘But someone called me on Friday.’ ‘That was me.’ ‘I thought you said they hated the tape.’ ‘They did … You know when people come out here on a Friday night, they gotta fight the city traffic, then the Long Island Expressway, then they gotta take a boat. They just want to come down. They don’t want to come down to things they don’t know. They want things to be familiar. The next day, they’re ready to party, and they want some new stuff. That’s why yours worked so well because you got them with the one song and then you took them somewhere they’d never been before. What I’d like you to do is do a tape a week.’ And I was like, ‘Forget it. I don’t work eighty hours a week for anybody. That’s very difficult to do.’ He said, ‘We’ll give you five hundred dollars a tape.’ I said, ‘You can give me ten thousand a tape, that’s not the problem. It’s time.’ He said, ‘Can we work out an arrangement where you give us an hour-and-a-half tape just for Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day?’ ‘Oh, okay. I think I can do that.’ I didn’t realize how fast those holidays come. I just got one done and then it’s the Fourth of July. I had to make a living too. I said, ‘This is crazy. How did I agree to do this?’ That’s basically how it got started, but I had no idea what I was doing. I just had this idea to do something a certain way, and it worked. When I think about it now, I really had a lot of balls to do something like that.”87
Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco Page 5