Used to be rare to hear the word Disco uttered without a sneer. Happy to say the books celebrating classic era 1970s Disco are now beginning to pile up. For a couple recommendations: I liked Alice Echol’s
Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (2009) and Peter Shapiro’s
Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (2006); both very readable and investigate Disco from curious angles. And now adding to my stack of favorite disco books Tim Lawrence’s
Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979 (2003), less a book about disco music or dance records or even the Disco boom per se, and much more a study and history, based on over 300 interviews, of the underground gay dance club and DJ culture that blew up in New York City in the 1970s. (Otherwise popularly known as Disco!)
Lawrence begins this history on a particular day, Valentine’s Day, 1970, with invitations to a dance party at David Mancuso’s home, a large loft (called The Loft by devoted dancers) in Lower Manhattan, NYC. The invitations read: Love Saves the Day.
From the start, Mancuso was a love child of the original Psychedelic era; Dj-ing house parties as far back as the Summer of Love. Orphaned early Mancuso learned to make homes and house parties for himself and his friends. His education included Black rent parties (to raise rent money) and, crucially, contacts with Harvard Psychologist Timothy Leary and his manual The Psychedelic Experience. Mancuso attended Leary’s lectures and study sessions and especially his parties. These experiences were so formative that Mancuso’s original Love Saves the Day-party (acronym: LSD), and all his dance parties thereafter, for that matter, dance parties that deeply inspire subsequent gay dance club culture, help start DJ record pools and boost an expansive and inclusive view of dance music, these parties might be properly seen as Mancuso’s take on a psychedelic Happening or Human Be-in, a psychedelic experience via a DJ curated dance party.
The Loft’s psychedelic recipe for a Happening: Invite all your friends over; gay, straight, Italian, Black, Latino, etc. Inclusive, multicultural demographics were primary but by private invitation, where the unspoken No. 1 rule for entry dancers understood and sought was a LGBTQ+ safe space; low-rent artists and office clerks, party people and serious dancers, all rubbing elbows and getting down to the music. No bar. Balloons, party food, and punch (maybe spiked) were regular party trimmings. But central was always and forever and ever the dancefloor, surrounded by Mancuso’s state-of-the-art house party sound system. Going to The Loft meant getting together with friends and tripping to Mancuso’s wildly diverse and special mix of dance records.
And Mancuso had lots of friends. Dance parties at The Loft started at around 100 and grew to a bulging 500 capacity by 1972 and carried on, ebbing and flowing, with few interruptions for decades. Years later Mancuso was still bragging that he never had any bad violent incidents at The Loft, otherwise common in clubland.
In ’72 Mancuso and a handful of underground NYC dance clubs find Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa,” a largely overlooked B-side single, played it to big responses from their dancers and helped relaunch the song into the Top 40 and become a global smash. There is a good case for calling it the first Disco pop hit; i.e., the first charting single to be launched by dance club success as opposed to radio play or live performance or any other form of conventional music industry promotion.
The first underground club DJs in the early 1970s were inveterate record collector types, always digging around in record bins, trading news of obscure new finds with other dance music enthusiast friends, always trying to discover that unique turn-on record to drop on their dancers. They were discovering and making new hits on the dancefloor before an increasing number would go on to become big pop chart hits. This was new and after the success of “Soul Makossa” the music industry figures they’d discovered a new shortcut to pop chart success and so the money started to roll into Disco music and dance clubs. DJs appreciated the money, of course, but were not entirely down with the music industry’s Disco hype.
Mancuso played all the underground club DJ staples of the classic era: souped-up Motown, long Philly soul grooves, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes et al, big gay anthems like Double Exposure’s “My Love is Free,” all the iconic Disco Divas and various byroads of Eurodisco. But Mancuso’s playlists were also always a bit different too, personal, signature, he had his own style. And this was another way he was very influential on later DJ and dance club culture.
His playlists were unique. They tended towards hard-driving polyrhythmic R&B sounds, peppering dancers with a battery of JBL tweeters hanging from the ceiling and surrounding the dancefloor. The psychedelia was in the long epic sweep and flow of his mesmerizingly eternal (and multicultural) grooves and his
Love Saves the Day lyrical themes. He always included, for example, a big helping of esoteric stuff, what Vince Aletti liked to refer to as “left field,” proto-world music sounds from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, from anywhere really; crate digging gems like Manu Dibango, The Chakachas, Miraslav Vitous, Ozo, Exuma, etc. And it wasn’t all fast dance stuff at The Loft, either. Mancuso had a knack for playing the perfect mood-elevating, palette cleansing, warmup/cool down transition records; say War’s “City Country City” or Cat Steven’s “Was Dog a Doughnut,” for golden examples. And maybe most signature he had this uncanny ability—again, his psychedelic education likely played a role-- in finding long hippie rock jams that you wouldn’t think could possibly work on the dancefloor or in a disco but actually did: Babe Ruth’s “The Mexican,” Brian Auger’s “Listen Here,” and Traffic’s “Glad,” to name just a few examples.
Eventually, what started as Mancuso and a small circle of his DJ pals hanging out at a record store now and then, trading notes and record tips, turned into a record pool. And these record pools facilitated contacts between the new underground dance clubs and the music industry. This nurtured the development of DJ gigs, helping turn very few radio-crossover DJ jobs into a large fraternal and competitive organization. In 1972 there were 200 dance clubs in the NYC area; by 1975 over 2000. Also by ’75 the DJs were already having a big impact on the music industry; significantly more hits on the pop charts now began as hits on the dancefloors of gay dance clubs in NYC. And DJ complaints about the length and poor sound quality of dance singles produced by the music industry spurs the development of the 12-inch dance record, catering to the dancefloor DJ.
Following The Loft’s success, many dance clubs, many far exceeding The Loft’s moderate size and financial scale, pop up in NYC and eventually around the country and world; The Gallery, The Flamingo, 12 West, Le Jardine, Paradise Garage, all the way to Studio 54. There are many twists and turns along the way, drug casualties, brushes with organized crime, Velvet Rope excess, dreary assembly-line Mall culture, with many new bigger discos or dance clubs leaving behind any Love Saves the Day-vibe a distant memory.
Maybe most curious about the lasting influence of Mancuso and The Loft were what exceptions they were. For one, in the beginning The Loft was the only underground dance club that was in the DJ’s home or in a space owned by the DJ. It promulgated a house party spirit because, for one reason, it really was a house party. Just a very big one. Moreover, Mancuso wasn’t the prototype technical turntable whiz. He didn’t go in for a lot of mixing tricks; or that whole turntablism side of subsequent DJ culture. He even resisted being called a DJ and suggested “musical host” and other party planner alternatives. Nonetheless, following his own path Mancuso becomes something of an ideal for the records obsessive DJ, wildly diverse with a very personal signature style.
And despite Discos boom success there were DJs still trying to carry on in the spirit of The Loft’s model and none better than two gay, African American, original club kids, Larry Levan, resident DJ at the Paradise Garage, and Frankie Knuckles, the DJ behind the rise of House music, disco’s underground dance successor by another name in Chicago; both peaking in the 1980s and both at their peaks playing to thousands of dancers. And both regularly attended and helped support Mancuso’s dance parties at The Loft when they were coming up in the 1970s. (And both used to joke, affectionately, about the “hippie dancing” that still went on at The Loft.) So even as size and money degraded Mancuso’s original psychedelic house party values there is a gay dance club, LGBTQ+ safe space, mixed/multicultural ideal in The Loft, its story, myth and legend that remains a driving ambition in the dance club culture that spread from NYC in the early 1970s to most big cities in the country by the 1980s and beyond.
This is one of the central themes of Love Saves the Day: The Disco boom, the glut of records, the mountains of cocaine and celebrity decadence, were at most an epiphenomena to the rise of gay-friendly dance club and DJ culture in the 1970s classic Disco era. A gaudy distracting one, to be sure, but the underground dance clubs and devoted dancers barely noticed when classic rock people burned Disco records at a White Sox game in 1979, according to Lawrence and those he interviews. Nor do they so much as blink when so-called Disco records crashed out of the Top 40 in 1979. After the Disco boom collapsed the clubs were “underground” again, as they always felt they had been; and where, at this point, “underground” should be read as code for LGBTQ+ friendly dance spaces.
The point was that after 1979 discos in the suburbs shut down, sure, but not the gay dance clubs in cities. They kept spreading and growing, just not so much on the pop charts. Instead, as relatively marginal and modest dancefloor incubators where new dance music styles popular with dancers are worked out; the audience the DJs knew best all along anyway. And that audience was usually young and gay or gay-friendly and preferably very mixed. And in the 1980s and afterwards, scores of new dance sub-genres, called anything but disco (Hi-NRG, House, Latin Freestyle, Techno, Drum and Bass, etc) continue to proliferate from these underground dance club scenes at an astonishing rate.
The lasting impact of classic era Disco, in Lawrence’s estimation, wasn’t so much hit records or even this “underground” creativity, but the spread of gay-friendly dance spaces and dance club institutions as part of urban cultures more or less everywhere.
It's not very farfetched to suggest that echoes of the Love Saves the Day-vibe were still around in the ‘90s Rave scene, in rave culture principles like PLUR (peace, love, unity, respect) and the widespread use of psychedelics. It’s my understanding relatively gay-friendly “underground” dance music events of the 1990s reach tens of thousands of dancers. From David Mancuso’s The Loft of the 1970s to the Rave Scene of the 1990s, a psychedelic dance music tradition continues.
There is more to Lawrence’s book. He chronicles the highs and lows of a dozen or so prominent disco era DJs; beyond Mancuso and including: Michael Capello, Francis Grasso, Nicky Siano, Richie Kaczor, and the aforementioned Levan and Knuckles. Dance-floor maestros, all of them. DJs that could lift-up dancers with their signature mixes, extending, embellishing, transforming music into sweaty, joyous roller coaster suites of dance music euphoria. Lawrence includes helpfully playlists for a couple handfuls of DJs active and successful in the 1970s.
He also recounts the sordid details of the rise and fall of various clubs grasping for the distinction of being the hottest and biggest dance club destination in NYC. Organized crime if not running the clubs is always lurking around the business end of them. There are plenty of drug casualties in these stories of the 1970s Disco era. But mostly inspiring stories of crowds of dancers flocking regularly to dance to their favorite DJs as a therapeutic, if not religious, ritual.
Lawrence’s next book, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983, sounds like it might go deeper into the downside of the post-Disco era but I haven’t got to that one yet. I do know Frank Owen’s Clubland: The Fabulous Rise and Murderous Fall of Club Culture, investigates that downside in ‘90s underground dance club culture, lots of drugs and gangsters, as you might guess, with the bracing directness of a good crime novel.
If you like dance music or you’d like to understand what 1970s Disco was about as social history, beyond Saturday Night Fever and Disco Duck, Love Saves the Day is a vital source. Kudos to Lawrence for tapping into the psychedelic and liberatory origins of gay dance club music behind Disco.
