Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (12 page)

Most of the “decor,” however, matched the walls. Very few people of color and fewer women attended the Tenth Floor. “It was definitely a Pines crowd and a drug crowd,” recalls Barry Lederer. “The Tenth Floor, and soon other subsequent gay clubs followed, started the attitude you had to be hot, muscular, etc.”
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And with this crowd came the attendant look. As novelist Andrew Holleran wrote in his fictionalized account of the early days of disco and of the people who frequented the Tenth Floor, “We had our web belts and painter’s jeans, our dyed tank tops and haircuts, the plaid shirts, bomber jackets, jungle fatigues, the all-important shoes.”
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The clone aesthetic wasn’t just maintained by the tribal decorations, however. Sokoloff, Jessup, and Bruie imitated not only David Mancuso’s loft location but his members-only creed as well. Where Mancuso’s membership policy was largely pragmatic (a way of managing the crowd that came into his own home and as a way of circumventing the city’s building and licensing codes), the Tenth Floor’s membership policy was more reminiscent of old grande dame discotheques like Le Club—its purpose was to keep the hoi polloi out. The Tenth Floor effectively functioned as the gentlemen’s club of the gay elite. As Tenth Floor regular Bill Ash said, “It reminded me of the 400, New York society in the 19th century.”
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In other words, the Tenth Floor represented the four hundred people who “mattered” in gay society in the early 1970s.

Ironically, the DJ at this lily-white scene was black. Although he made his name by programming the music for Halston’s catwalk shows, Ray Yeates was one of the most experimental and uncompromising of the early DJs. His most famous record was Area Code 615’s “Stone Fox Chase,” an utterly bizarre record made by Nashville’s most famous session musicians that sounded like the backwoods family in
Deliverance
jamming with the percussionists from the Last Poets records (it was also the theme song of the BBC’s very old-guard rock show
Old Grey Whistle Test
—context was everything in disco). Yeates’s outrageousness, however, didn’t always go down well, particularly when it was the result of prodigious drug intake. “It was like he thought that the drugs would carry over his mistakes,” Lederer says, “but they didn’t … The crowd was very picky and really wanted it their way, and could be bitter if they didn’t get it.”
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Yeates’s erratic performances and eccentric taste in music notwithstanding, experimentation wasn’t really the order of the day at the Tenth Floor. While the sex and pharmacological ingestion were anything but, the conservatism that detractors would later claim characterized disco probably started here. Every attempt to move outside of an established culture succeeds only in reconfirming it, and with its embrace of masculine norms (albeit magnified to the nth degree), social hierarchy, and segregation, this was certainly true of the Tenth Floor. Two different strains of music would eventually emerge from this disco discrimination. One strand would retain a connection to the musical miscegenation started at the Loft and carried on by clubs like the Gallery, Better Days, and Paradise Garage. The other would blanch disco, not so much by bleaching its black roots but by striving for superhuman perfection, by pushing the clone aesthetic to its furthest possible limits in an attempt to attain a machinic state of grace. This search for physical transcendence would entail two things: an ever-escalating tempo (eventually mutating into a separate genre called Hi-NRG) and the exclusion of the imperfect. This attitude started at the Pines and the Tenth Floor, but it really took flight at the Flamingo.

The Flamingo was opened in December 1974 by the Ice Palace’s Michael Fesco. Fondly remembered by most regulars as a gay utopia, the Flamingo, although situated on the second story of the Ayer Building at 599 Broadway (next door to the Gallery), was one step above the Tenth Floor. From the day it opened to its final party on February 15, 1981, the Flamingo was the premier gay club in New York, if not the entire world. It was the A-list to end all A-lists (according to legend even Calvin Klein had to call in favors to get a membership, which was priced at $600 a year
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). Before weight lifting had become commonplace in gay culture, the profusion of chiseled, sculpted bodies at the Flamingo was like a Tom of Finland fantasy come to life. The intense, incredibly sexually charged atmosphere was described by journalist Andrew Kopkind as “extraordinarily assaultive; I have felt trapped forever in a theater of sound, of flesh, like a character in Buñuel’s
The Exterminating Angel,
unable to leave a party even after its positive appeal has fled.”
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Like the Tenth Floor’s, the decor was extremely minimal—with a pantheon of gods to rival Olympus, who needed it?—but it was constantly changing. The banquettes were rearranged every week, the artwork on constant rotation, the lighting always reconfigured. The loft space in which the Flamingo was situated was half a block long, fifty feet wide, with very high ceilings (and huge windows that were always kept open) and no supporting beams to clog up the dance floor or make redecoration a hassle. Fesco also brought with him the Fire Island tradition of theme parties, and once a season the Flamingo would host its famous Black, White, and Cowboy Parties. Writer Edmund White described one of the club’s Black Parties: “We went dressed in the requisite color, which turned out to mean leather to most celebrants. As we entered the club at one in the morning (the doors had opened at midnight) I saw a roomful of husky men, many of them shirtless, sipping beer or Coke and casually watching the entertainment: on raised trestles along one wall, hired musclemen garbed as centurions or deep sea divers or motorcyclists. They struck conventional body-building poses … ‘This place is all about touching,’ someone told me. ‘They kept fiddling with the design till they got it right, till everyone had to slip and slide against everyone else.’ … The blending of the records, the estimation of the crowd’s mood, the choice of music were superb—the most discerning I’d come across anywhere … The mirrored panels were frosted over with condensed sweat.”
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Whatever color costumes the crowd wore, it was always a white party at the Flamingo. And like the Tenth Floor, the DJs were often the only people of color in the place. The first season (the Flamingo shut down every summer, when the majority of its regulars went to Fire Island) the DJs were Armando Galvez, Luis Romero, Vincent Carleo, Ray Yeates, Frank Monteagudo, Bobby DJ, and Frank Hudon. While Galvez was a permanent fixture at the Flamingo, it would really become associated with two DJs: Howard Merritt (who started in 1976) and Richie Rivera (who started in 1977). The two essentially functioned as a musical good-cop/bad-cop routine, with Merritt playing the good-times, bubbleheaded high-energy music (Odyssey, Barry White) and Rivera playing slightly darker, more electronic and tribal music like Le Pamplemousse’s “Le Spank,” “Kings of Clubs” by Chocolat’s, and Roy Ayers’s “Running Away.” The two DJs catered to both of the main pharmacopoeias prevalent at the Flamingo: cocaine/speed (Merritt) and, surprisingly, angel dust (Rivera).

Before moving to the glamorous surroundings of the Flamingo, Rivera DJed at one of New York’s least salubrious discos. After leaving the slightly uptight Firehouse in 1973, Rivera moved about as far as he possibly could in the opposite direction. The Anvil, at 500 West 14th Street in the heart of Manhattan’s meatpacking district, was originally a go-go bar that had female dancers during the day to cater to the meat packers and male dancers at night. The Anvil soon turned completely male when it realized how many gay men came in during the day and left as soon as they saw the women. The premises upstairs from the Anvil was a fleapit hotel where many drag queens lived.

Despite the notoriety of the Tenth Floor and the Flamingo, New York’s gay discos weren’t all temples of elitism. Even though it was a members-only club as well, 12 West had a far more diverse clientele—it even let in women. 12 West was opened in 1975 in a former plant nursery at 491 West Street (right across the street from the notorious Pier 48) by Cary Finkelstein and Alan Harris. The three-story space featured an arcing roof with wooden beams that made it a far superior acoustic environment than most New York discotheques. Sound system designers Barry Lederer and Peter Spar (Graebar) took advantage of this and created one of the most celebrated systems in New York. Unlike the equally famous systems at the Loft and Paradise Garage, which focused on the bass, 12 West’s Graebar system had a “sweeter” sound—thanks to the twenty high-frequency tweeters suspended in a grid above the dance floor and the woofers that cleverly used the room’s curves to disperse the bass tones throughout the space—that was more in line with the high-energy music favored by 12 West’s crowd and DJs. The original DJ at the club was the consummately professional Tom Savarese, who blended the high camp of the Ritchie Family with more straightforward commercial tracks like Tavares’s “Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel” and Candi Staton’s “Young Hearts Run Free.” Savarese was replaced by Jimmy Stuard, who died in the Everard Baths fire in 1977, Alan Dodd, and Robbie Leslie.

The Anvil occupied two floors. Downstairs, there was a small theater where it screened porno flicks and the notorious unlit back room. “There was sawdust all over the floor and it smelled like an old barn down there,” remembers frequent visitor Ian Levine. “Everything that could have gone on in the world went on downstairs at the Anvil.”
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Upstairs was the bar area and small dance floor that was presided over by Rivera. Although the Anvil had an excellent sound system—the first to be designed by Graebar—it probably didn’t matter what Rivera played because, aside from the go-go dancers, the place was usually so packed with people that you could barely move, let alone dance. Unlike the Tenth Floor or the Flamingo, the Anvil, particularly the back room, was democracy—in its crudest, most basic form—in action. It was a plebiscite of the flesh: In the dark there were no class signifiers and the participants operated on a level playing field with the only law being “any hole will do.”

The Crisco Disco, at 510 West 15th Street, followed the Anvil’s egalitarian lead, although you had to pass a speakeasy-style entrance in order to be allowed in. It was pretty sleazy, with wanton open sex and drug use. The DJ booth, usually helmed by Michael Haynes or Frank Corr, was a mock-up of a giant can of Crisco, but with all the leather boys prowling the club it was pretty clear that Crisco was no longer about Mom and apple pie. “Of course, the Crisco was used for all sorts of nefarious purposes,” says Levine. “At Crisco’s, more probably than the Anvil, they were drugged out of their mind, completely drug fucked. No one ever got to go home with anyone because they were just out of it.”
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However, both the Anvil and the Crisco Disco paled in comparison to what was probably the Mount Rushmore of filth, the Mineshaft. Situated at 835 Washington Street, again in the aptly named meatpacking district, the Mineshaft was where the Al Pacino movie
Cruising
was set. Instead of a DJ, the club used tapes and the music was darkly erotic and rather unsettling in the cold light of day. Dancing was definitely not a major concern. A room off to the side of the main area was filled with glory holes cut into the wall, a row of shoeshine chairs and benches, with cans of Crisco beside them. A downstairs room was equipped with all manner of S&M paraphernalia and a big tub for watersports. “The Anvil looked like a vicarage compared to the Mineshaft,” remembers Levine. “It was a real Dante’s
Inferno.
”
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“YOU MAKE ME FEEL MIGHTY REAL”

Sylvester and the San Francisco Sound

Disco wasn’t about the stylized romantic love of classic pop or even soul, but overwhelming ecstasy, the complete and utter joy of being able to take pleasure from something that only a few years ago was forbidden. Of course, disco loved showbiz and was as stylized in its own way as any other genre of music, but the intensity of the (particularly gay) discotheque experience—the relentless rhythm, the poppers, the tight jeans, the mood manipulation of the DJs, the strobe lights—punctured the veneer of pop conventions. This carried over into the disco records themselves. Records like Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” and “I Feel Love” (see Chapter 3) or Loose Joints’ “Is It All Over My Face?” (see Chapter 6) reduced pop’s Tin Pan Alley conventions to a series of orgasmic moans and coos and translated decades of coquettish, flirty, ambiguous lyrics into a single mantra. If there was one artist, though, who truly exemplified disco’s new language of ecstasy it was Sylvester, whose use of his gospel-trained falsetto in the service of gay desire and pleasure is surely the most radical rewrite of pop’s lingua franca ever attempted.

The premier black gay club of disco’s early days was Better Days in the Times Square area at 316 West 49th Street. The club opened in 1972, with Bert Lockett as the DJ. When she refused to play a request for the boss’s wife one night, she was fired. Lockett was replaced by Tee Scott, who began his DJing career at the Candy Store on Fifty-sixth Street. Better Days was in a rough part of town and the clientele was almost exclusively black. The owner was cheap—but with admission prices as low as they were (as late as 1980, the $3 fee on Wednesday nights got you three drinks as well) it was hard not to be—and Scott had to bring in his own equipment. But because of this, Scott was forced to experiment, which would pay handsome dividends. Scott claims to be the first DJ to use three turntables,
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and his facility on a relatively primitive setup enabled him to become one of disco’s greatest mixers. The crowd at Better Days was fiercely loyal to Scott and would blow whistles as a sign of appreciation at high points during his mix. In 1973, Scott gave future DJ legend Frankie Knuckles his first gig on Monday and Tuesday nights at the club.

This isn’t to say that the out-and-proud Sylvester didn’t have antecedents or contemporaries in the R&B world, however. While many of the female classic blues singers of the 1920s were well-known bisexuals (Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter), the most outrageous performer of the era was Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon, a vocalist who performed with such jazz/hokum artists as the Harlem Hamfats, Tampa Red, Thomas Dorsey, Punches Delegates of Pleasure, and his own Hot Shots. Jaxon, who was barely five feet tall (thus his nickname), wore a skullcap, twirled a baton, was alleged to have been gay and performed very risqué material in a high falsetto dressed as a woman. Before Little Richard took the rock-and-roll world by storm with his shriek and makeup (and long before he came out), R&B duo Charlie & Ray performed their minor hit “I Love You Madly” (1954) to each other unabashedly on stage—they won the amateur night at the Apollo for five straight weeks thanks to their performances. Tony Washington of the mid-1970s Washington, D.C.–based vocal group Dynamic Superiors was gay and would sing “Me and Mr. Jones” in concert. In 1975, on the Motown subsidiary Gaiee, Charles “Valentino” Harris released “I Was Born This Way,” “a half-baked plea for tolerance dressed in mid-’70s disco bounce”
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(it was rerecorded in 1977 by future preacher Carl Bean).