Keep On interview with Tim Lawrence Vol. 1, Issue 2 (December 2003)
[Last updated: 07.06.2005]Buy from amazon.co.uk
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Jolyon Green interview with Tim Lawrence
Jolyon Green: Why did you decide to write the book?
Tim Lawrence: Well I was going to write a book about 90s dance culture, which is what I was experiencing at the time. I'd started going out dancing in the early 90s and this was the era of the Criminal Justice Bill, a time when dance culture was being criminalized. In the process of researching that book I started to go back to New York and Chicago in the mid-1980s, which supposedly formed the roots of 90s dance culture. The name David Mancuso popped up from one or two people I spoke to. So when I was interviewing people like Frankie Knuckles, Tony Humphries and David Morales, I asked them if they had ever met David Mancuso and whether they had been to the Loft. When I asked them the question, they started flipping out, saying David Mancuso was like a God to them, an incredible influence. I realised this was something I had to pursue. David really turned my world upside down in the course of our first three-hour interview. He had this whole range of references that I had no knowledge about. I thought, there's a real story here: if I don't know much about it then maybe not many other people do either. I realised that I needed to start the book not in 1985, but in 1970.
Why do you think the 1970s was so overlooked during the 80s and 90s, when it came to telling the story of House music?
Because disco was so stigmatised at the end of the 1970s. A line has run through House music culture from Frankie Knuckles onwards. Frankie saw early House as 'disco's revenge'. People like him attached a credibility to disco. But from my generation, whilst you'd hear the occasional good disco track when you were going out, you wouldn't hear the underground disco sounds at all. You'd hear Saturday Night Fever, The Village People, Donna Summer, cheesy stuff that you'd want to distance yourself from. Everyone I knew who was into House music felt House was a radical reaction to disco, instead of something that evolved out of disco.
So how difficult was it to track down some of these important early pioneers?
Very hard. A lot of the people had disappeared. Nicky Siano had disappeared. Nobody had interviewed David Mancuso in years. Generally speaking, what was a once a very tight-knit group, had slowly fallen out with each other or lost touch. It was a group that was very conscious of the contribution that it had made to dance culture - they introduced the concepts of DJ culture, remixing, dancing all night - these things didn't really exist in the same way before the 1970s - but no one had really credited them, so they felt quite marginalized and resentful. Initially some of my interviewees were wary and worried that they were going to be misrepresented, but I found that once I won the trust of one, I gained the trust of another and another. David Mancuso was one of the first people I spoke to and that was significant, because very quickly it became a network and doors were opened.
Your book is called Love Saves The Day - taken after the name of David Mancuso's first Loft party on Broadway. How important was David Mancuso to dance culture?
When I first met him I didn't really know how to quantify his importance, but what soon became clear is that David was the most important source of 1970s dance culture. That's not to say he was at the centre of everything and he wouldn't claim that either. But he was there at the very beginning. It was only after three years of research and crosschecking that I realised that the Sanctuary, which has always been seen as the first major disco venue, didn't effectively open before the Loft.
What attracted people to The Loft and The Gallery and the other early underground parties?
The core groups that formed the heart of the culture were predominately gay, black, Latino and women. These are all groups that found their voice in the1960s. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Loft and the Sanctuary came out of that time. At the end of the 1960s there was a conservative backlash against demonstrations and militancy and the groups I've mentioned, and many of these people went off the streets to explore their identities in a safer environment - to places like the Loft and the Gallery.
People often say that the early scene was black and gay and in some respects it was. But it was also mixed. It was a legal necessity - it was still illegal, even after Stonewall, for men to dance together, so there would be a lot of women going along too. There was a very open atmosphere at the time. Things did get very segregated, but at the end of the 1960s it was a lot more mixed. Into this mix came not just gay black men, but also women, many of them straight, as well as straight white guys. I have interviewed a lot of people who mentioned that the Sanctuary, which is seen as a very gay club, was actually quite mixed. If you ask David Mancuso about the Loft he'll say, "Nobody was checking your identity at the door." The whole idea at the Loft was that you could lose your identity and explore yourself.
How do you think that changes over the course of the book, throughout the 1970s?
The opening of Tenth Floor, the first white gay version of the Loft, was really significant. It opened just before the Gallery in 1972. There were no women and very few black men at Tenth Floor and really that was the start of segregation. Out of that grows the white gay disco scene, which became a major influence and I suppose one of the factors in the eventual disco boom - Donna Summer's core following lay in that scene. The people who went to Tenth Floor or Flamingo were the beautiful people, whereas if you went to the Loft or the Gallery you would see all kinds of people.
How do you think the disco boom affected the underground scene?
What's interesting is that there was a link between the mainstream and the underground. It's quite difficult to accurately describe what 'the underground' really was, or is. It's not always clear at what point a record was underground and what point it became mainstream. I like to think of it as a popular avant-garde. David Mancuso, Nicky Siano and the other DJs said, 'this is a culture that we want to spread," and they did. Nicky Siano , in fact, was an archetypal underground DJ when he opened the Gallery, but he was also one of the opening DJs at Studio 54, which was supposedly the archetypal overground club. Carmen D'Alessio, who was one of the main players at Studio 54, was a Loft regular. You can actually link the Loft to Studio 54. Instead of giving out invitations for free, which was David's system, Steve Rubell charged for invitations. But the idea of introducing an invitation system to make sure that your friends could get into the party was taken from the Loft.
One of the things that comes across in your book is that Studio 54 wasn't all cocaine in the back room with Mick and Andy, and Bianca Jagger on a white horse?
No. During its first year, hardened clubbers were saying that they really enjoyed themselves at Studio 54. Its resident, Richie Kaczor, was an extremely important DJ, one of the early inventors of beat mixing, and of course Richard Long installed the sound system there right after he worked at the Paradise Garage. It wasn't just about celebrities. There were nearly 3000 people there every week that weren't celebrities. It also had a weekly gay night. It's a more interesting place than people give it credit for, even if eventually its owner Steve Rubell did lose his way when he forgot what it was really supposed to be about - dancing all night to good music.
Studio 54's seen as one of the key moments in the hugely popular disco boom of 1977 and 1978. Do you think America ever really came to terms with the dance music culture that had grown up by that time?
Well everyone was making a lot of money out of disco, but I think that American society found it really hard to acknowledge gay people as one of the driving forces of the scene. That was a tension that carried on throughout the 1970s. I mean there was even a widespread belief that the Village People wasn't a gay group. There was a kind of denial, that this was just a theatrical drag show! You can read articles in the newspapers about disco that don't mention the gay influence at all. Then at the end of the 1970s there was a shift in the political climate and a deep reaction against the liberation of minority groups. The core constituencies of the New Right were starting to feel left out and swamped by minorities and it's at that point that people started labelling disco as gay and the homophobic jokes started to come out. People like the Chicago rock DJ Steve Dahl, who was part of the Disco Sucks campaign and organised the disco record-burning rally, started to become prominent in 1979. It was the beginning of a wider backlash against the liberating elements of disco.
Disco just carried on...
Yeah, there were still great clubs and loads of great music coming out while the Disco Sucks campaign was at its height. Disco just changed its name. Record companies closed down their disco departments and renamed them as dance departments. Hardened clubbers didn't really care and many of the important DJs were never really part of the 'disco' bandwagon in the first place. Mancuso, Siano and people like that had firmly established a dance culture before the word "disco" even came into wide use. In fact, the disco period only really lasted from the middle of 1974 to 1979 and it only had one really massive year, 1978. A year after Saturday Night Fever it was all over! DJs like Danny Krivit and Nicky Siano said to me that most of the commercial disco records released around that time did actually suck, but it didn't really matter because there were still fantastic parties and clubs going on. And some of the best years for the music were 1980, 1981 and 1982. Labels like Prelude and West End were making some amazing records in the early 1980s.
So will there be another book?