* * *
With disco as a specific musical genre (rather than a state of mind) in sharp decline in the United States by late 1979, the only clubs that kept afloat in New York were ones that encouraged quirkiness and experimentation. A Certain Ratio’s first gig in New York said pretty much everything you needed to know about the bizarre combinations that were being concocted in the Big Apple in the early ’80s. In December 1982, a certain Madonna opened up for A Certain Ratio’s performance at the ultimate breeding ground among the disco, punk, and art scenes, Danceteria. The Danceteria was started by Jim Fouratt and his partner, Rudolf Pieper, in March 1980 at 252 West 37th Street. The club was short-lived but eventually reopened in 1982 at 30 West 21st Street. In its new incarnation, Danceteria was a three-floor space with a performance area and dance floor downstairs, another dance floor on the second floor, and a video lounge and restaurant on the third floor. Fouratt and Pieper had a staggeringly open-minded booking policy—everyone from salsa artists like Tito Puente and Típica ’73 to Sun Ra to Eric Bogosian perfomed there.
DJs like Bill Bahlman, Johnny Dynell, Anita Sarko, and Mark Kamins connected the dots among postpunk, disco, hip-hop, salsa, and New Wave. Fouratt, meanwhile, explored the commonalities between disco’s tawdry fleshpot and the rarefied world of modern composition—i.e., that nothing can violate the supremacy of the rhythm or pulse and a fixation on repetition—with a series of ambitious programs that brought composers like Philip Glass and Glenn Branca into the nightclub environment. “It’s all about mixing up these different kinds of people,” Fouratt told The New York Times. “We deliberately try to present serious music in a ‘vulgar’ format, to use the original connotation of the word. At places like The Kitchen [a high-brow experimental art venue], this work is perceived in a serious, reverential way. At Danceteria, if they like something, they cheer; if they don’t, they just move on to another floor.”15
If there was one artist, though, who truly characterized this peripatetic genre bending by spanning both the Kitchen and Studio 54 in a single bound, it was an avant-garde cello player by the name of Arthur Russell. Charles Arthur Russell Jr. was born and raised in landlocked Oskaloosa, Iowa, where, as the son of a former naval officer, he became obsessed with the ocean. In 1968, Russell moved to San Francisco to join a Buddhist commune. He was forbidden to play his cello, so he played in his closet. Russell then studied Indian music with Ali Akbar Khan and played cello on several Allen Ginsberg recordings. In 1973, he moved to New York and played drums with Laurie Anderson and worked with Talking Heads, Peter Gordon, and David Van Tiegham before going on to curate the music program at the Kitchen. Sometime in the mid-1970s, Russell went to the Gallery to see Nicky Siano spin. After his disco baptism, Russell immediately connected the dots between Hamilton Bohannon and the minimalism of Steve Reich, between a marathon DJ set and the sustained, subtly shifting harmonic clusters of Phill Niblock.
Working together as Dinosaur, Russell and Siano released “Kiss Me Again” in 1978. Talking Heads’ David Byrne played one of the most clipped guitar phrases in history, while Russell’s background cello was partially responsible for the record’s perplexing bass sound. “Kiss Me Again” was recognizable as disco, but it was also bafflingly weird: the muffled bass line that never resolved itself, the guitar solo during the break not unlike the skronk being played by Arto Lindsay in the No Wave group DNA, and the electronic sounds that acted as a shield during the chorus, preventing any sense of release from developing, creating the sense of longing and unfulfilled desire that marked many of the best disco records.
As bizarre as it was, “Kiss Me Again” worked within established disco parameters and became a fairly substantial club hit. Russell, however, would largely abandon dance music’s recognizable shapes in favor of a vision of disco as drift, as floating through and across waves and dimensions of sound. “He loved out-there stuff,” says engineer Bob Blank, who was a frequent collaborator with Russell. “He was a real artiste, and we seemed to work well together—he believed in first takes, and I was a fast engineer. We had similar musical sensibilities … Arthur walked in one day to make music, right after ‘Kiss Me Again’ came out, and we hit it off right away. He was always coming in saying that he had gotten three hundred dollars as a grant and could we do an LP—pretty wild. He once traded a 1951 Chevy that was his dad’s old car for some studio time!”16
In 1980, Russell hooked up with another early DJ, Steve D’Aquisto, and went to Blank’s studio to work on an album for West End Records, originally under the name the Little All-Stars, but they soon changed their name to Loose Joints. With an array of studio musicians and three vocalists they recruited from the dance floor of the Loft, the duo recorded countless hours of tape, but only three releases ever resulted. “Is It All Over My Face?” was originally released with a male vocal, but it didn’t do much, so label head Mel Cheren asked Larry Levan to do a remix. Levan got a friend to let him into a studio when the boss wasn’t around to work on the remix, but he was only three hours into it when the boss returned and Levan had to stop working. The unfinished quality of the remix perfectly suited both the track’s mantralike aspects and the spacey instrumentation. “Pop Your Funk” and “Tell You Today” were both even weirder than “Is It All Over My Face?” and didn’t have a Larry Levan mix to bring them back to earth—they were just left to float off on their own.
Russell’s greatest dance floor achievement, however, is probably Dinosaur L’s “Go Bang! #5,” released on the label he founded with Will Socolov, Sleeping Bag. “Go Bang!” originally appeared on the 1981 album 24-24 Music as “#5 (Go Bang).” The music was recorded in June 1979 with a lineup including Peter Gordon, Peter Zummo, Julius Eastman, the Ingrams, and Wilbur Bascomb, and existed in some bizarre nether region between Herbie Hancock, the Love of Life Orchestra, and D. C. LaRue. For the single release, the track was remixed by François Kevorkian, who, while restraining John Ingram’s hyper and sibilant drumming into a manageable shape for the dance floor, made it even weirder by stretching the space and focusing on Eastman and Jimmy Ingram’s Phantom of the Opera keyboards.
Indian Ocean’s “School Bell / Tree House” was Russell with Zummo and Walter Gibbons, and, if anything, is more dislocated and more disjointed than “Go Bang!” The track is largely Russell mumbling ethereally (if that’s possible) over some percussion loops (one conga loop and a nagging hi-hat) and a whisper of his cello in the background. As The New York Times’s Robert Palmer wrote about one of his performances, it conjures the image of “Russell alone on a sailboat, singing into the wind.”17 More conventionally club-friendly was Lola’s “Wax the Van,” a record Russell made with Bob Blank, his wife, former James Brown associate Lola, and their six-year-old son, Kenny. The enormous bass sound, water drop percussion, and windswept vocals continued Russell’s fascination with oceanic sounds. Both “Schoolbell/Tree House” and “Wax the Van” can be heard, even more buffeted by wind and salt, on Russell’s startlingly stark solo album of processed cello, vocals, and percussion, World of Echo.
Russell was a true original, but he was by no means disco’s only explorer of psychedelic caverns of low-end flux. François Kevorkian was a DJ from France (where he played Yes, King Crimson, and Mahavishnu Orchestra to hippies), who moved to New York in 1975 to study with jazz drummer Tony Williams after he was booted out of university in Lyon for starting a general strike. In February 1976, Kevorkian was hired by Galaxy 21 to play drums and percussion alongside DJ Walter Gibbons. Kevorkian had little knowledge of the music being played at New York’s after-hours clubs when he was hired, but being thrown in at the deep end forced him quickly to gain an intimate knowledge of disco structure. When Galaxy 21 closed, Kevorkian worked as a kitchen porter and toilet cleaner at Experiment Four, where John “Jellybean” Benitez spun before he made his name at the Funhouse. Jellybean gave Kevorkian access to his home studio, where he would experiment with tape edits, initially imitating the homemade edits that Gibbons used. After he got a fee
l for the equipment and the format, Kevorkian started to add effects to his edits—something that no one else in New York was doing at the time—an idea that he got from reggae. “The psychedelic multidimensional planetary Reggae that the people like Black Uhuru was doing with that one album ‘Black Uhuru in Dub’ [a dub of the Love Crisis album] really changed my whole way of thinking,” Kevorkian told writer Jonathan Fleming. “After I heard that album, it was like my life had changed. I saw landscapes that I had never knew existed before as far as the way to use effects in the studio or the way to use effects as music.”18
Kevorkian soon landed a gig at Sesame Street, a black gay after-hours club that used the Flamingo’s space while it was closed during the summer, and then at Studio 54 challenger New York New York. While playing at New York New York, Kevorkian was approached by former Scepter/Wand A&R man Marvin Schlachter, who had just started a disco label called Prelude, and asked if he would do remixes for the new label. Kevorkian agreed, and his first mix for the label was Musique’s “In the Bush,” which he did in conjunction with engineer Bob Blank. “François came in and was given three hours by Prelude to remix ‘Bush,’” Blank remembers. “I basically did my thing and he directed. He later was a very hands-on producer, but at the time he had never done a remix and actually did not know what to call the 4/4 beat that the bass drum provided—he kept saying, ‘Give me more poom poom poom.’ The sounds, dynamic, etc., was all me, but François created the intro progression from bass drum up.”19
Kevorkian did dozens of mixes for Prelude and was a constant presence in Blank’s Blank Tapes Studios. “I was passionate about the fact that we were working in a new medium,” Blank says of his time working with Kevorkian on remixes. “Previous to that, records were very dense, with three minutes of tightly integrated music. We were changing that by dropping out parts, adding loops of rhythm, making it sound more like we heard it.”20 Despite Kevorkian’s early edits, his love of Jamaican dub, and the example of Walter Gibbons’s mix of Bettye Lavette’s “Doin’ the Best That I Can,” most of his Prelude mixes were extensions and boosts rather than full-on restructuring work. It wasn’t until a British obscurity, the dub mix of “Love Money” by TW Funkmasters, became a huge club hit in New York that he fully realized the power that dub effects had over a dance floor.21 “Love Money” propelled Kevorkian to explore the farthest reaches of outer space on his remixes of Jimmy Cliff’s “Treat the Youths Right” and “D” Train’s “Keep On.” Kevorkian’s ultimate dub excursion, though, was a journey he took with former PiL bassist Jah Wobble, Can’s keyboardist and tape manipulator Holger Czukay, and U2 guitarist The Edge. “Snake Charmer” was egghead disco at its very best, a merger of Kraftwerk-style drum programming (from Kevorkian himself), dub bass lines, and tape collages reminiscent of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, also an early ’80s club favorite.
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.”22
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.”23
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 p
eople 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?”
Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco Page 33