Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (5 page)

“It is a white room,” he goes on. “There are no tables and chairs. You sit communally on heavily carpeted ‘islands,’ each designed to accommodate up to six persons … No one talks. The idea is to ‘experience.’ In a short time your guide returns with a goblet filled with
water.
This is your drink and it must be shared with your date—only one glass a couple. With it comes a large plate of marshmallows … Later still, the guide comes and sits with you. She has with her a tube of heavily scented hand lotion, and begins to anoint your hands with it.”
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Of course, not every club was as sedate as Cerebrum. The club housed at 407 West 43rd Street between Ninth and Tenth avenues in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan would eventually become one of the most celebrated and outrageous clubs in the long and colorful history of New York nightlife. Arnie Lord opened the Church, which was indeed housed in a former German Baptist church, at the tail end of the 1960s as perhaps the most over-the-top of all of the hippie sensoriums. Lord “had the diabolical idea of decorating it for a Witches’ Sabbath. Opposite the altar was a huge mural projecting a terrifying image of the devil, his eyes drawn so that wherever you stood, his baleful orbs were glaring down upon you. Around the Evil One was a flight of angels with exposed genitalia engaging in every known form of sexual intercourse. Before the altar with its broad marble communion table and imposing range of organ pipes stood the long-haired DJ preparing the disco sacrament. With the throw of a switch he could black out the hall and illuminate it eerily with lights shining through the stained-glass windows. His communicants firked around or laid back on the pews, which had been arranged around the walls as banquettes.”
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As a sop to the building’s former occupants, the DJ would often play the theme song from
Jesus Christ Superstar
—lighting up each of the stained glass windows as he did.
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Even though the place was an old Baptist church, Lord’s choice of decor attracted the ire of the New York archdiocese of the Roman Catholic church, which temporarily suspended their centuries-long feud with the spiritual descendants of Martin Luther and branded the Church a blasphemy. The Catholic church managed to persuade a judge to grant an injunction against the club, forcing it to close down, but not for long.

The pressure exerted on the Church’s gates by the sybaritic hordes was so great that it quickly reopened under the name the Sanctuary, with plastic grapes covering the cherubs’ unmentionables, but it was now the clientele rather than the decor that was desecrating this former house of God. The club’s ownership, having fallen into financial straits, was taken over by a flamboyant gay couple called only by their first names, Seymour and Shelley, and the crowd changed accordingly. While the gay rights movement was ignited a couple of miles away at a bar called the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village,
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the Sanctuary, whose crowd was also peppered with Broadway actors (due to the club’s location near the theater district) and hip straights, would prove to be one of the sites of gay liberation’s first full flowering. No longer the victims of unchecked police harassment, with the birth control pill slowly changing people’s minds about the function of sex and a climate of “I’m OK, You’re OK” liberal tolerance, the Sanctuary’s gay crowd turned the former house of worship into a bacchanalian pleasure palace. “It was here that the Bump got its start,” Goldman wrote, “only it wasn’t the cute little hip-hugger, tushie-touching step that it became in the straight world. It was a frank pantomime of buggery. Two boys could get into it together or twenty could make up a daisy chain.”
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The sex wasn’t confined to the dance floor, nor was it confined to simulation. There were constant orgies in the toilets, and the club would be eventually closed down in 1972 because its patrons regularly used the hallways of neighboring buildings for impromptu “bump” sessions.
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The orgiastic spirit of the Sanctuary was intensified by the music, a triumphal march of syncopated drums and keyboard fanfares—the ceremonial accompaniment to a tribal rite of intiation for people who were just beginning to conceive of themselves as a group, as a unified whole. There was Motown (particularly the Four Tops’ “Don’t Bring Back Memories,” a 1969 track that presaged the direction soul would take in the ’70s in its dynamics, percussion, and instrumentation if not its maximialism, and the slower “Still Water [Peace and Love]”) and James Brown and Aretha Franklin and Sly & the Family Stone and Booker T. & the MG’s, to be sure (after all, what was a dance party without the black voices and rhythms that made it all possible?), but the most striking aspect of the Sanctuary sound was the predominance of a heavily percussive psychedelia: Babatunde Olatunji’s pan-African drumming and chanting on “Jin-Go-Lo-Ba (Drums of Passion)”; the conga-heavy Latin- and Afro-rock of Santana and Osibisa; the jazz-rock of Brian Auger; Cat Mother and the All Night News Boys’ “Track in ‘A’ (Nebraska Nights)” (a fairly directionless, sullen hippie jam coproduced by Jimi Hendrix that becomes a wild, almost gamelanlike
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fire dance with the Phantom of the Opera on keyboards at the seven-minute mark); the Marketts’ surfbeat takeoff of the evergreen “Apache” called “Out of Limits”; British freakbeat band Timebox’s amphetamines-’n’-strings rave-up of the 4 Seasons’ “Beggin’”; high-energy Detroit rock meeting the Stax rhythm section on Mitch Ryder’s
The Detroit/Memphis Experiment;
and the horny, musky, cowbell-heavy “Mongoose” by Elephant’s Memory. An evening at the Sanctuary would always finish with the Doors’ epic of oedipal rage and pharmacological lunacy, “The End.”

The DJ’s name was Francis Grasso and he almost single-handedly created what would become disco’s sonic hallmarks. DJs before Grasso played whatever was popular at the time. Grasso, on the other hand, was playing African music that was recorded in 1959 in the early ’70s and playing obscure British imports that he had to bug record shops to order specially for him. Grasso’s taste in percussive rock especially created the nexus that would eventually establish disco as its own musical genre, as something distinct from either soul or funk. Many of the records he championed were funky but definitely not funk: They weren’t as aggressive in either attitude or rhythm, and they often sounded as if they were wrapped in a patina of alienation. One of his favorite records was Little Sister’s “You’re the One,” a record produced by Sly Stone and featuring his sister Vanetta Stewart, Elva Melton, and Mary Rand. With an almost demonic voice repeating the title phrase over and over again, a deracinated James Brown horn chart, and a heavy, plodding bass line–driven groove that quickly reasserts groove’s literal meaning as a rut over its metaphorical, rhythmic meaning, the track would presage Stone’s move from token poster child for the hippie movement to dark chronicler of the African-American condition at the turn of the 1970s.

But it wasn’t just the playlist that was revolutionary, it was what Grasso did with his records that helped define disco as a style and not just a place you went to hear records. Although Terry Noel was the first DJ actually to mix records, it was Grasso who would make the DJ set a unified whole rather than a collection of individual records. Fittingly, Grasso had replaced Noel as the DJ at a club on Central Park South called Salvation II one night in 1968 (when Noel showed up late), and it was here that he hit upon the idea of the DJ mix as “a journey,” as one continuous piece of music that the DJ himself created out of ready-made parts. Grasso’s signature mix of the percussion breakdown of Chicago Transit Authority’s “I’m a Man” with Robert Plant’s orgasmic moans and Jimmy Page’s eerie guitar effects from the middle section of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” compounded the ultramasculine atmosphere of the Sanctuary and set in motion the notion that a good DJ was a gifted musician in his or her own right and that a turntable and a mixer were his or her instruments. Grasso is generally credited as being the first DJ to beat mix (to sonically overlap two records so that their drumbeats are synchronized), and he introduced the technique of slip-cueing (holding the record about to be cued in place while the turntable underneath spins, so that the record can be started exactly where you want at the exact millisecond you want it started).
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He used this technique to extend the dancers’ pleasure potentially indefinitely by playing two copies of the same record on two turntables,
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lengthening the grooves of such crowd favorites as James Brown’s “Hot Pants” or Abaco Dream’s “Life and Death in G & A” (another Sly Stone record).

It was a thrilling, intensely physical sound, particularly when blasted through the mammoth stacks that the Sanctuary had acquired from the rock band Mountain. The physical experience of the music was heightened by the pharmacopoeia provided by the dealers who mobbed the club and provided patrons with poppers, quaaludes, and Seconal.
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As journalist Peter Braunstein writes, “The drugs of the psychedelic 60s, particularly LSD, were now supplanted by the ‘body high’ drugs of the 1970s. Predominant in the gay disco scene were poppers, amyl nitrate vials, used originally by angina sufferers, which when broken open and inhaled caused a precipitous drop in blood pressure and near-loss of consciousness [amyl nitrate was originally used in the gay community as a means to enhance orgasm]. Poppers coexisted with that other quintessential 1970s club drug Quaalude, which suspended motor coordination and turned one’s arms and legs to Jell-O.”
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Borrowing the concept from the “events” of the psychedelic underground where groups like the Grateful Dead would craft their sets to coincide with the peaks and valleys of the acid trip, Grasso would program his “journeys” in such a way that they would maximize the effect of the narcotics of choice.

With Grasso playing a kind of music that tempered the “head music” of the psychedelic era with “tribal” percussion that connected more with the feet and groin, and with the accompanying drugs moving away from mind-expanding psychedelics toward those that delivered a body high, the Sanctuary marked the transition between the expanded consciousness espoused by travelers going “further” in the 1960s and the near loss of consciousness that many commentators said characterized the solipsistic 1970s. Disco was a retreat back into the body—both the newly liberated body of its prime constituents and the body politic. As Peter Carroll wrote, “Rhetoric ran freely in 1970—rhetoric about the war and about peace, rhetoric about social injustice and possibility. There was also considerable rhetoric about rhetoric.”
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After wars and traumatic events, American popular music has always returned to the body as a locus of meaning and turned its back on language: After the Civil War, barn dances and square dances were all the rage, and this was also when burlesque dancing began in the United States with the vaudevillean skirt dance; the end of World War I saw the dawning of the Jazz Age; World War II heralded rock and roll.

But disco wasn’t simply an escape from the language that had divided America, it was at the same time an embodiment of the very tensions and schisms that the rhetoric sought to express and resolve. Disco was at once about community and individual pleasure, sensation and alienation, orgy and sacrifice; it promised both liberation and constraint, release and restraint, frivolity and doom. Disco was both utopia and hell.

“COME ON OVER TO MY HOUSE AND LET’S HAVE SOME FUN”

The Loft

Throughout its history, disco was trapped between worlds. It wasn’t just caught in the tug-of-war between the opposite poles of gay and straight, black and white—though that, of course, was part of it. Disco’s very birth was the result of the big bang between contradictory impulses: exclusion and inclusion, glamour and dilapidation, buying in and dropping out, engagement and withdrawal, earnestness and frippery. Born just as the great liberal experiment of the post-Depression years started to be dismantled and as the ’60s hangover of disillusionment began, disco was seen by many commentators as the death knell for community and the harbinger of narcissism. There was at least one disco pioneer, however, who still believed in the ’60s dream, that the Summer of Love wasn’t over, that love could still save the day.

David Mancuso was born in 1944 and grew up in a Catholic orphanage in the upstate town of Utica, New York. The orphanage was run by a Sister Alicia, who would often hold parties for the children where she would play records in a room decorated with balloons and crepe paper.
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When Mancuso wasn’t in a celebratory mood he would spend time in the surrounding countryside “listening to birds, lying next to a spring and listening to water go across the rocks. And suddenly one day, I realized: What perfect music. Like with the sunrise and sunset, how things would build up into midday. There were times when it would be intense and times it would be soft and at sunset, it would get quiet and then the crickets would come in. I took this sense of rhythm, this sense of feeling.”
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Mancuso brought this sense of the ebb and flow of the country idyll with him to the concrete jungle of New York City in 1965. While spending time in the antiwar, civil rights, and gay rights movements, Mancuso started to further explore his love of sound at his illegal loft space amid the abandoned warehouses at 647 Broadway, just north of SoHo. “I was always into sound, and I was more into the psychedelic sound in jazz, R&B, and all that stuff,” Mancuso told London’s XFM radio station. “I started making tapes where what I would do was take a song, and as soon as the song ended I would put some kind of sound effect and then the next record would come. I would do it like that, so it was always a continuous flow of some kind of sound information. And I would invite my friends over and we would have only big parties this time because I had this big space, and it’d be 100 people. And it started to happen more and more frequently.”
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