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"Love is the Message": Phil Thornton interview with Tim Lawrence


In the last issue of Swine we reviewed Tim Lawrence's superb history of disco, Love Saves The Day. Tim kindly agreed to answer some of our questions and we will hopefully be getting him up to the north west to talk about Love Saves The Day and his other projects; he's currently writing the eighties follow-up to LSD and a biography of Arthur Russell as well as leading the BA Music Culture : Theory & Production at University of East London. Tim has also written liner notes for the likes of David Mancuso, Marshall Jefferson and Masters At Work LPs and helps co-ordinate the London Loft parties. He's also just had his second kid. In short he's a very busy fellar, so we'd like to extend our porcine thanks to him and wish him all the best with his future projects.

 
Phil Thornton: Disco has been a much maligned and misunderstood musical genre, what gave you the impetus to write LSD?

Tim Lawrence: The initial plan was to write a book that focused on the late eighties and nineties. Then I was introduced to David Mancuso ⎯ who nobody had really heard of at the time ⎯ and he introduced me to this whole world of underground parties that I'd never heard of. Initially I was reluctant to get into the 1970s. Like so many early UK house heads, I just equated disco with cheese, but the more I found out about the downtown scene of the 1970s, the more I realised this was where nucleus of contemporary dance culture was formed. Plus nobody had ever written about the era. By the time I was done I realised that a great deal of contemporary dance music culture ⎯ DJ-ing techniques, remixing aesthetics, sound system technologies, etc ⎯ were established during this much-maligned era. I ended up getting so into the seventies that, after some 500 odd pages, I realised that the eighties and the nineties would have to wait for another book. My editor agreed!

How on earth did you manage to track down all the big players in the early disco scene and more importantly persuade them to talk to you?

I had moved to New York to get closer to my favourite DJs in the mid-nineties. I started buying records like crazy and developed a few useful "ins".  Stefan Prescott at Dance Tracks suggested I talk to David (Mancuso) and David then put me in touch with loads of other people. At the same time I was independently contacting the likes of Tony Humphreys and Frankie Knuckles. They were all happy to talk with me, probably because I already had a book contract and nobody had really given the scene any serious coverage at this point. I suppose it also helped that, having arrived from London, I was an "outsider" to the New York scene. If I'd lived through the seventies in New York, I would have become associated with one crowd or another. Coming from across the Atlantic, I was able to evaluate the history of the scene as an unencumbered outsider.

You make a big point of the Italian ethnic origin of many of the first important disco DJs. Did this surprise you and why do you think so many of the DJs came from Italian backgrounds?

Yes, this did surprise me. Like so many others, I assumed that all of the early important DJs were African American.  DJs like Tee Scott and Larry Levan were extremely influential in the seventies, and Frankie Knuckles became a significant figure in Chicago at the end of the decade, but these DJs were very much part of a second wave. I write about the reason the Italian Americans were so prominent in the discos in Love Saves the Day.  The most obvious answer is that a lot of the clubs were controlled by the Mafia and therefore Italian Americans found it easier to get employment. But there was also something about the Italian American community in the early seventies that encourage them to get into DJing. In terms of class, the Italian American community was more upwardly mobile than the African American community, yet it lacked the established professionalism of other ethnic groups such as the Jews and the Germans. So the "semi-skilled" and unrecognized profession of DJing suited a lot of Italian American kids quite well.  As it happens Love Saves the Day is being translated into Italian independently ⎯ it'll be out there by the end of the year ⎯ so I'm very excited about that.

In light of the gay sexuality of most DJs and therefore their experience of discrimination and oppression, were you shocked by the overt white/black schism that developed with the disco scene of the mid-seventies?

I don't know if I was shocked. Race divides America, and I was already aware that it was a divisive factor in the gay community. The idea that these racial differences should also be felt on the dance floor was disappointing, but hardly shocking.  I'm an idealist when it comes to integration but I don't think this separation really kicked in until the mid-seventies.  Before that, party spaces ⎯ the Sanctuary, the Loft, the Haven, Tamburlaine, the Limelight, the Gallery, etc ⎯ were extremely mixed. Plus I'm not sure the racism was ever particularly explicit, even from the mid-seventies onwards. What I did find slightly shocking was the idea that some clubs that have developed a reputation for being racially progressive in fact attempted to introduce some form of racial separation. That was why I wrote a fairly detailed analysis of the aborted attempt to make Saturday nights a white-only night at the Paradise Garage. The Garage eventually got over that sorry episode, but I thought it was instructive vis-