WORDS: NICK GORDON BROWN
“Time marches on never ending, time keeps its own time. Here we stand at beginning, and then goes passing us by.” (2) Such is the story of clubland - both ceaseless and restless, precious moments barely given time to register in fear of the next one passing us by. When time does afford us the luxury of reflection, those memories are often blurred. It is then that some are forgotten and others mythologised, and "myths which are believed in tend to become true." (George Orwell). Only this one is true. The Paradise Garage is deserving of the mythology that surrounds it, a musical oasis that both survived the disco backlash and offered succour to a city in the dark shadows of poverty and the AIDS epidemic. In so doing, it also created a seamless link between the disco sound it first championed and the seismic cultural shift created a decade later by house music – whilst also signposting us down all manner of sonic and scenic alternative routes. “They paved paradise,
put up a parking lot,” Joni Mitchell famously sang. This is the story of when the parking lot became paradise.
‘You gotta go to the Garage’ (1)
Our story begins with an up and coming DJ, a clubland mover and shaker, a record label boss, and a precocious young sound man. Michael Brody, the mover and shaker, had invited Larry Levan, the DJ, to spin at his after-hours at Reade Street. The two were keen to open a legitimate club. Brody’s former partner Mel Cheren (the boss at West End Records) agreed to invest. Richard Long, the sound man, was brought on board to create an aural environment like no other – this included Studio 54. The clubs would both open in 1977, both using disco as a musical springboard, and both would prove culturally significant – the similarities ended there. Studio 54 majored in glitz and pizazz. In contrast, the Garage, literally built on the site of a former garage in Soho’s King Street, “was not glamorous, it was built around the sound first and foremost and also total comfort for its members. There were two lounges you could chill out in and a movie theatre. It even had a cushioned wooden floor so your feet wouldn't get tired because wanted you to stay till the very end,” (4) says David DePino, sometime Garage DJ.
Danny Tenaglia tells Glitterbox, “To this day I still get goosebumps with the memory of it…early 1980 I remember becoming a member. ‘Danny you gotta go to the Garage, you gotta go to the Garage,’ I heard it a thousand times…when I finally went and walked up the famous ramp, turned right to enter the dance room, and there’s a huge stack right there, and Larry was playing Peter Brown’s ‘Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me’, and it was like going to DJ Heaven, ‘cos it was so crystal clear. It wasn’t very loud at the time, it was early, so just was beyond perfect.” (1)
This is a Journey into Sound
Both the Garage and Studio 54 determined to live up to the new benchmark in club acoustics set by Mancuso at The Loft and continued by Nicky Siano at The Gallery. The difference, as told by the Garage’s head of security Joey Llanos, was that “the room was built around the sound system. The sound system was designed first. That's how much attention was paid.” (3) This was at Levan’s insistence – Brody and Cheren were more than happy to support it, Long would make it a reality. As Danny Krivit, one of the handful of DJs given the opportunity to play alongside Levan at the Garage, notes: “The difference between the Garage and other places, was that he was controlling the whole environment.” (5) One of the beneficiaries of this was Francois Kervorkian, who would mix many a record that would become central to the paradisal soundtrack: “In 1978, most clubs out there had a decent sound system. At the Garage, it was like stepping into a temple of music. The bass drum and voices were so crisp, clear, well-defined and powerful. It would change you forever.”(3)
‘And you, you - you who make worlds collide’ (2)
Levan was always very open in his praise of Mancuso, Siano and others who had helped pave the way for the Paradise Garage to even be a viable proposition. This went for the musical soundtrack as much as the sound quality – as Danny Tenaglia told us: “ Before the Garage I was already a DJ, I’d go to many other clubs that were a great inspiration to me, that many people don’t talk about as they just don’t know the history, including the Inferno, Starship Discovery and a few others – of course the Loft as well. The Loft was the first place I went that was “garage-ish” if you will,” (1). A key difference was that whilst Mancuso believed in playing records from beginning to end, Levan liked to mix – and he gave himself challenges that peers such as Siano and Walter Gibbons didn’t, by looking to match, even exceed, Mancuso’s eclecticism. Asked to select a track that instantly transports him back to the Garage, Tenaglia doesn’t opt for a lushly orchestrated disco number: “’Wordy Rappinghood’ by the Tom Tom Club – a whimsical kinda song with their sort of like rapping but they’re doing it in their cheeky alternative hipster white band New York kinda thing – and the crowd loved it, as soon as they heard that intro with the typewriter.” (1)
The broad sweep of Levan’s musical tastes (he was quoted as saying that if you viewed his collection, you would think it was a composite of those from four different DJs) led him to seek out any track he thought would prove a good fit for his sound system and crowd. So it was that The Clash found themselves spun regularly at the Paradise Garage, not just for dancers but also, so word has it, as a means by which Levan would road test the system.
It was ‘Magnificent Dance’, the dub version of ‘Magnificent Seven’, that Levan favoured, but it wasn’t as if he was averse to the vocal delivery of Londoners, as evidenced by his championing of Ian Dury’s ‘Spasticus Autisticus’. He was most likely drawn to polio sufferer Dury’s by turns provocative and sensitive number, composed with his ever-funky sidekick Chaz Jankel, due to its being produced at the famous Compass Point studios, with the sought after Jamaican rhythm section Sly & Robbie and mix engineer Steven Stanley (who had also co-produced ‘Wordy Rappinghood’) at the helm. Fascinated by the dub sounds emanating from Jamaica, Levan increasingly took the influence into his own productions – including working with Sly & Robbie on a number of tracks by US diva Gwen Guthrie. Levan’s timekeeping when in the studio was poor, and he missed numerous deadlines while racking up large bills for Island Records. The mixes eventually saw the light of day on the ‘Padlock’ mini album, a must for Levan fans.
It was a style he perfected with one of the tracks with which he is most associated with, ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ by the Peech Boys.
Other producers were keen to hear their work on the club’s sound system. Arthur Baker was so inspired by hearing ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ at the Garage (“when those handclaps started whipping round the place…oh, man!”), that he immediately created ‘Walking On Sunshine’ by Rocker’s Revenge, “specifically made for the Paradise Garage. “(5)
The Story Teller
With such wide-ranging fascination with all genres of music, Levan also found kindred spirits in New York’s then thriving alternative scene. Anita Sarko, resident DJ at Danceteria, writing in the Beastie Boys’ Book, says: “My style, contrary to other DJs, was to play a vast range of music, rather than just one type. Most people thought I didn’t know what I was doing and was just slapping on any old record without any thought. Usually the only people who understood the thread within my segues were musicians. And Larry Levan. Larry later told me that I was the DJ most like him because even though we played completely different music, ‘we both like to engage in musical conversations with the dancers and fuck with their minds!’” It was often said you could gauge Levan’s mood, what was happening in his life, by his choice of music.
King Street regular Justin Berkmann, who on returning to his hometown was determined to set up a Garage equivalent in London and would succeed when helping to launch Ministry of Sound, says: “He was someone who was telling a story, it wasn't about which record sounded good mixed with this one, it was about creating a narrative through the sentiment and lyrics of the records themselves. So he'd tell a story with a beginning, middle and end and then the music would come off, everyone would clap and he'd start another one. It's totally alien to what DJing is today.” (4)
Record Breaker
Acclaimed vocalist Melba Moore, a Garage regular both on the dancefloor and the decks courtesy of her hit ‘Pick Me Up I’ll Dance’, told Glitterbox: “Paradise was always packed like sardines, jam packed – no social distancing ok! The music was always the latest music, there were underground hits as well, ‘cos the Paradise was actually one of the places that actually helped break records – the Garage was part of that club system that actually made records popular enough for radio stations to play them.” (1)
New York’s leading black radio DJ, Frankie Crocker, would frequent the venue, and soon struck up a rapport with Levan. However, Larry didn’t always need Crocker to help him break a track he believed in, as security man Joey Llanos explains: “He would play a record that would totally clear the dance floor. Like that Taana Gardner record, ‘Heartbeat.’ The first time he put that record on the whole dance floor just stopped and walked off the floor. He played the record six more times, back to back. Literally the record would finish and he'd pick up the needle and put it back on and play it again. The next day people were lined up outside Vinyl Mania Records on Carmine Street trying to buy it.” (3)
Danny Tenaglia picks up on the theme of Levan’s power as a record breaker: “I was in the Garage and I happened to be up in the booth – I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the song ‘Can’t Play Around’ by Lace, it was remixed by Larry, and it was their only song ever…they came up to perform it on the stage, the crowd was really giving it up for them…when the song was over you would think you were at Madison Square Garden.”
‘It was really a social experiment. No one else was willing to have people coexist peacefully together’
These words from Francois Kervorkian (3) are echoed by all. Take Peech Boys front man Bernard Fowler: “All the mothers’ children: the straight ones, the freaks, everybody in between. It was a place to go and dance and not be judged.“ (3)…David DePino, “it was like walking through the looking glass into a world of acceptance, a world where people didn't judge,” (4)…or another some time Garage DJ and Levan apprentice, Victor Rosado, “It was home, a safe haven and that shared experience brought us all together. There were gay people, there were straight people, drag queens, white, black, Asian. It was a melting pot. They all came to express themselves.” (4) The club cared about its dancers, and they in turn reciprocated - Danny Tenaglia: ”People would come to dance, there was a small room that had lockers in it, for people that changed their clothes when they got there, they’d get into their shorts and tank tops and sneakers, and they were there to really participate, they knew they were gonna sweat.” (1) It was all about those moments smack dab in the middle of the floor, feeling the music in every sense.
The crystal-clear sound; the Pied Piper DJ leading his disciples on a merry dance; the chill out areas; stories being told; records being discovered, shared and loved; the coming together of people of all backgrounds under one loving roof, in one safe space. That’s the crux of the very best of contemporary club culture as we now know it right there. Also, as in many of the best stories, there’s an element of right time, right people, right place. This combination enabled the Paradise Garage to surf the disco wave, but then move beyond it, paving the way for so much of what was to come. It closed its doors for the last time in 1987. We’ll never know whether or not Levan, who passed away in 1992 from heart failure aged only 38, would have followed a similar career trajectory to his best friend Frankie Knuckles, with whom he enjoyed so many adventures before Knuckles moved to Chicago and in many ways mirrored what was happening at the Paradise Garage with his own residencies at the Warehouse and Powerplant.
To close, we asked Danny Tenaglia to choose a characteristic Levan set closer. ”What comes to mind as a perfect end of night song from Larry, ‘Give It Up’ by Sylvester…and something that Larry remixed on RCA, ‘I’ll be Your Pleasure’ by Esther Williams…these were great, downtempo send the people home kinda music.”
Listen to / watch the Paradise Garage legacy
Larry’s Garage movie - trailer
Footage of the last night with soundtrack re-imagined by Levan’s friend DJ Harvey
1979 Larry Levan Paradise Garage set
Journey into Paradise – Garage classics compilation
Genius of Time – Larry Levan mixes compilation
One of many Garage / Levan playlists on Spotify
With thanks
1. Danny Tenaglia and Melba Moore interviewed by Melvo Baptiste for the Glitterbox radio show, May 2020
2. ‘Finally’ by Kings of Tomorrow ft. Julie McKnight
3. Time Out New York, August 2018
https://www.timeout.com/newyork/nightlife/paradise-garage-the-oral-history-of-nycs-greatest-club
5. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, by Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton