gET THAT PERFECT BEAT

[ESG]

New York disco and the men who made it by Steven Harvey

 

 

"Lord knows Where my body goes Every night"

Nile Rodgers: "The Land Of The Good Groove"

 

 

IT IS POSSIBLE (and tempting) to perceive the recent ascent of new dance music as an isolated pop/style phenomenon - something like punk or new wave - that has emerged over the last few years and snowballed into an international fad. Yet to under stand the new mood in NYC dance music, you must go back into its history. Back into the disco..

 

Escape into the disco: an underground pressure-valve from the work week. The names of some of the underground dance clubs in NYC in the early Seventies expressed this function - The Haven and The Sanctuary. Places where those relegated to the margins of society - blacks, latins, gays and kids - could affirm their own existence through the shared abandon of the dance. And central to the dance was the DJ.

 

At both The Haven in '69 and The Sanctuary in the early Seventies the DJ was Francis Grasso. Albert Goldman in 'Disco' describes how, without a cueing system, Grasso would overlay two different tracks, superimposing "I'm A Man" by Chicago over the bass and drums from "Whole Lotta Love"; mixing soul like Bobby Byrd and The Stovall Sisters into rock'n'roll and ethno-beat like olatunji.

 

His audience soon spilled through the doors of the huge former church into the streets, where the kids would hang out practising steps and doing drugs. Regularly the police would arrive to close it down, but attempting to clear the 1,000 or so people inside and the same number in the street would take hours.

 

Francis Grasso was one of the first in a line that runs through David Mancuso of The Loft to Larry Levan of The Paradise Garage, John "Jellybean" Benitez at The Funhouse and others. Mancuso's first space opened in 1970, and he has been playing records at his once-a-week parties ever since.

 

But the tradition of the 12-inch single as the vehicle for disco only goes back to 1976, when Walter Gibbons remixed a three-minute album track, "10 Percent" by Double Exposure, for Salsoul, extending it into nine minutes of percussion landscape.

 

Gibbons was the first to really transform the material specifically for the NYC dance floor. He brought the mixing techniques that he had developed in live spinning into the recording studio.

 

Those early sexy swinging tracks like "10 Percent" or "Hit & Run" by Loleatta Holloway were the heirs to the Philly disco crown of the early Seventies. Anthems of the early dawn, they layered shimmering vibes, congas and electric piano into swirling, rapturous dance music. Gibbons played live at Galaxy 21 in 1976 and was influential with a number of the now mixers. Francois Kervorkian, DJ and studio mixer (who is now producing Hubert Eaves of D-Train for Island) had just arrived from France when he was hired to play drums along to Gibbons' live mixing. As he didn't know any of the tunes that Gibbons was playing, this was perhaps a less than successful experiment in mixing live and pre-recorded sound. Nowadays it is common for a DJ to have a synthesizer player accompany him, as Michael de Benedictus of the Peach Boys does with Larry Levan at the Garage, Jellybean of The Funhouse was 18 and already playing at a club called Experiment 4, run by the owners of Galaxy 21. "I used to jump in a cab after work, just to sit and watch Walter for three or four hours. Everything he was doing back then people are doing now."

 

"Everything" included the various turntable manipulations like phasing (two copies of a record played slightly off sync to produce a flange effect) and Gibbons' extremely fast cuts between percussion breaks. Like the scratch-mix DJ's, Gibbons played records that people wouldn't think of as danceable: "Flight" by David Sanborn, "What's The Story?" by Patrice Rushen (when she was still just a jazz keyboardist), "Changes Make You Want To Hustle" by Donald Byrd.

 

Nowadays, with some 50 new 12-inchers coming out each week, classic tracks are the connecting thread, a continuity of quality and feeling. A current trend is reproduction. Taking re-mixing to the next phase: everything old is new again. When Dinosaur Us "Go Bang" was remixed from an album for the 12-inch by Francois Kervorkian, Dance Music Report (the trade paper associated with Tommy Boy Records) noted its similarity to the Gibbons sound of Galaxy 21 in 1976. Shep Pettibone's re-production of old Salsoul tracks peel off their period veneer. "Let No Man Put Asunder" by First Choice updates the setting for Rochelle Fleming's cry for marital stability, yet holds on to the pathos and humour of Fleming's ferocious vocals.

 

Pettibone, who has resumed the KISS radio mastermixes that initially brought him recognition, also remade an old Salsoul Orchestra track (the same players as MFSB) "Chicago Bus Stop" into "Love Break". Both were inspired by perhaps the penultimate underground anthem, the fast instrumental section of MFSB's "Love Is The Message".

 

The best example of a cult classic achieving new commercial success is "Weekend" by Phreek. Leroy Burgess and Patrick Addams concocted this perfect dream fulfiiment of finding a friend for the weekend, which came out on Atlantic in 1978... sort of. There was never a proper commercial version of the final long mix of the song, and import and promo copies continued to command collector's prices. Observing the song's continuous cult status, particularly at Paradise Garage, Sleeping Bag Records released a modern cover of it by Class Action, but with the brilliant stroke of having the original singer, Christine Wiltshire, update her vocals. "You're staying home with the kids tonight, honey," she tells her man.

 

As critic Carol Cooper once said, it is easy for writers to forget that dancing is a metaphor for sex, and in disco the lyrics have been traditionally regarded as a throw away element because their primary subject is love and sex. In the Eighties, as the clamps come down on all kinds of freedoms, dealing with sexuality, particularly since disco has always had more room for women's views than rock, is a progressive stance.

 

The infatuation with sonic experimentation, the dub factor that has taken over the Bsides of most 12-inch releases, started with DJs moving from mixing live to the studio. Records like Bo Kool & The Funkmaster's "Money (No Love)" explored the possibilities of a hybrid West Indian/dub/disco, and NYC DJs were quick to learn. Larry Levan produced "Don't Make Me Wait" a landmark to equal his dense druggy mix of Taana Gardner's "Heartbeat". Pettibone slowed down "Thanks To You" by Sinnamon from its "Call Me" clone sound to an ocean of synth and guitar waves and echoing vocals, and Francois Kervorkian (perhaps the most open in his acknowledgement of Jamaican music) executed his perfect gleaming mixes for D-Train's "Keep On" and "D Train Theme (dub)".

 

"Nowadays," says Shep Pettibone, "it is the dub factor that creates excitement in 'Planet Rock' type music." And as Jellybean points out: "It's only because Djs have been in the studio. I think producers are looking for a more polished sound and Djs are looking for the effects that are going to get the audience off."

 

Along with the pure pleasure-play of aural re-doctoring, the salient characteristic of new disco is the total electronification of the music. While many longtime music fans despair of microchip music, the mass audience of modern dancers respond to it like automata. The nexus of this beat-box sensibility is The Funhouse, where Jellybean, who mixed many of the Tommy Boy/Streetwise records, spins every weekend.

 

Three thousand kids are out on the floor. The rhythms of the Roland and Linn drum computers build songs weekend after weekend, programming them into memory/response, creating a kind of cumulative choreography. There is a constant shifting of bodies throughout the huge space: girls with bleached blonde patches and "tails" (little ponytails hanging from otherwise short haircuts) wearing black leather, studs and spray-on pants; the men in cut-off shirts and baggy drawstring trousers.

 

The kind of cool macho look of the Funhouse kids reflects the demographic of this once mainly Italian disco. Nowadays the clientele is drawn from a network of kids principally from New York's boroughs who are serious about dancing. Men dance alone in an acrobatic mating of slamming and breakdancing. The women crowd the ladies room to change into fresh outfits and make-up, applying coat after coat of hairspray until the "tail" is perfect.

 

In the DJ booth - a clown's open mouth overlooking the dancefloor - Jellybean is seaming tracks together into a hard endless rhythm. His studio work with the principal electro-beat composers like John Robie, Arthur Baker, Lottie Golden and Richard Scher of Warp 9, with rappers like Sweet G and Kurtis Blow, and with Madonna (for whom he has done his first solo production, "Holiday", on her new album) make The Funhouse a testing-ground for artists who bring in tapes-in-progress to check out on the audience.

 

The new intercourse of English groups availing themselves of NYC producer/mixer acumen is centered around The Funhouse. Robie's reworking of Cabaret Voltaire's "Yeshaar" into arabic modern with metal edges, and Baker's grafting of perfect beats on to New Order angst in "Confusion" are Funhouse hybrids. New takes on a formula is what the audience there has come to expect. Herbie Hancock's "Rockit", produced by Material, with its metal machine sound and nervous vinyl scratching, is a record that sounds as if it was made for The Funhouse and underlines Jellybean's boast of the increasing influences of DJs on mainstream production.

 

The Paradise Garage when first experienced is likely to seem like the long-sought after Perfect Club. The courteous staff, clear (members only) door policy, awesome sound system and the audience of serious dancers to Larry Levan's highly individual musical narrative combine to create an ideal disco.

 

A vast ramp rises in blackness towards the club's interior in what was once a parking garage. Pinpoint lights guide you towards the neon sign, emblazoned with the club's logo. Inside it is like carnival in Bahia, with black and latin figures stripped down for the lack of air-conditioning. The main floor begins to crowd after 2am and stays that way through into the morning.

 

On the balcony above the floor, Levan alternates Garage classics (Bo Kool, Eddy Grant, ESG, "Evolution" by Giorgio Moroder) on three Thorens turntables (much lighter and harder to manipulate than Technics). In between, he dubs a bass-line here, a sound-effects record there. The Richard Long custom-designed sound system sends bass waves flying across the wide floor until the sound literally collides with you. When the maximum temperature in the room begins to takes its toll, you retire to the rooftop garden, or nap in one of the adjoining chambers, before returning to the lift-off point on the dancefloor.

 

The inspiration for The Garage is located not very far away in SoHo, in David Mancuso's home, The Loft. As far removed from the commercial concept of a club as possible, The Loft represents another seminal definition of the perfect dance space - a house party. For 13 years every Saturday, Mancuso has opened up his place (which was originally several blocks away on Broadway near Bleaker Street) to his guests who come to dance to one of the world's great sound systems. Every element - the Paul Klipsch speakers, the Mark Levinson amplification, the Mitchell Cotter turntable bases and line amplifiers, and the hand-crafted Koetsu cartridges - is custom designed to provide the clearest audio rendition of what's in the groove. Sound as science.

 

Mancuso is a magnetic personality, whose devotion to serving music has led him away from the mixing of records, which he used to do in the old Loft.

 

"David would make the most serious music," recalls Larry Levan. "He would make a mix and people would cry because it was so tender! "

 

He now uses neither headphones nor mixer, connecting the songs through narrative and rhythmic continuity or, as he says, by following a "sonic trail".

 

The Loft is like a children's party. Balloons cover every inch of the ceiling. The guests are open and warm as in no other club, and smiles adorn faces that know they have found some place special as they dance surrounded by the perfectionist Ouevo twirlers who spin around and drop with uncanny musical timing.

 

Mancuso has a host of songs that are Loft classics, like Fred Wesley's "House Party" (defining the Loft concept) or Third World's "Now That We've Found Love", and he has consistently fostered new music. In the early Seventies he brought the Barrabas album back from Spain; he has played Eddy Grant for years and his attitude of serving and supporting the music has influenced a generation of music people like Levan who came up going to The Loft every weekend.

 

A funky alternative to the membership dancehalls like The Garage and The Loft is Better Days, a black gay bar in Manhattan's Times Square district. For ten years a spectrum of black gay people have come to Better Days and the activity in the club's circular back room for dancing is a peak definition of nightdancing.

 

Originally the turntables were worked by Tee Scott who has now moved over to Zanzibar in New Jersey. He was replaced by Bruce Forrest, who plays a post R&B style of disco highlighting great singers like Loleatta Holloway, Chake Khan, and Rochelle Fleming.

 

When Shep Pettibone took a break from his KISS radio master-mixing, he would play at Better Days on Thursday nights. His extraordinarily active hands-on mixing style was amazing to witness. On the radio when he takes three different pieces of music and makes them fit together it seems comprehensible, because of the possibilities of tape editing. Live, however, it is different. He puts together three different versions of Diana Ross's "Love Hangover" or juxtaposes two different songs to create a third that remains impossibly in sync.

 

He is always slowing down and bringing records up to speed, or dropping-in parts from other discs. Pettibone is the perfect example of the DJ as remaker; a Dr Frankenstein for the modules of music within each record. His two-record set for Prelude of KISS Master Mixes (volume two is in the works) remains one of the best recorded examples of what creative club DJs are doing.

 

The NYC clubs come and go, disappear and reappear, yet the ones mentioned here have set the standards. They define a new/old music that has been shaped more by the audiences and the DJs than by corporate boardrooms. Even now, when there is the danger of a repeat of 1978's "death of disco" with the arrival of dance oriented rock and flashdancing gentrification of a black/latin/gay medium, the physical energy and tangible love of the music among the underground culture provides new disco with its continued impact. Disco, for a long time the sound that dared not speak its name, has now become the single largest influence in popular music.