Words by Rafe Arnott with Q&A contributions by Silvia Gin and Tim Lawrence. Photography by Silvia Gin and Thomas Borbás with personal images courtesy of Tim Lawrence unless otherwise noted. Photo above: David Mancuso (right) in discussion with production team members before a Lucky Cloud Sound Club show in London, March, 2007. Photo – Thomas Borbás.
This article is made possible through the support of Audio Note UK. Their assistance in enabling non-mainstream, high-fidelity journalism is key to Resistor Mag publishing the stories it does.
This is Part Two of Three articles/interviews with cultural bon vivant, and UK dance floor institution Tim Lawrence. Part One can be found HERE.
Tracing the evolution and defining credo of a global sub-culture and attributing it almost exclusively to the influence of one person is a tricky proposition as there will always be those who ask; “Well, what about X?” Yet, historical research cross-referenced with hundreds of interviews has led British author, co-founder of Lucky Cloud Sound System and All Our Friends, co-host of the Love Is the Message podcast, and professor of cultural studies Tim Lawrence to the conclusion that reluctant DJ, storyteller, dance party architect and Loft legend David Mancuso is that perso
Mancuso didn’t ask to be an audiophile/vinyl messiah whose massively influential arc spanned five decades, but like many soft spoken sentinels who harnessed the trajectory of history, society nonetheless deigned him to be the anointed one. If you are unaware of Mancuso’s bonafides, please read previous Resistor articles HERE, and HERE to get up to speed. In this instalment, Lawrence guides us through his first meeting with Mancuso and the many profound, culture, life and mind-altering moments he shared with him in the 20-year friendship that followed that first sit down dinner and interview. ”… let’s recognise David for what he was, which was distinctive, radical and hasn’t been replicated,” said Lawrence.
...David was the person who took the practice of selecting music in a live dance situation, this practice that most people refer to as DJing, to its ultimate form of expression, cutting across time and space as he pioneered a groundbreaking and transparently radical form of music-making that was inherently antiphonal, democratic, collective, improvised and unrepeatable, and therefore became the ultimate musical expression of the countercultural era."
–Tim Lawrence
Resistor Mag: In part one of this interview we discussed your books. The first one, Love Saves the Day, also led you to become involved in hosting Loft parties with David Mancuso in London. How did that come about?
Tim Lawrence: “Around the spring of 2002 David asked me (along with Colleen Murphy) to co-host Loft-style parties with him in London. At the time I was completing Love Saves the Day and had become pretty close with David. I’d interviewed him relentlessly for the book, we shared the same countercultural view of the world, and although my involvement in party culture could never be compared to David’s, it had come to form the focal point of my life. David also liked writers—one of his most influential mentors was the author John Carlson—and mentioned this to me often. I obviously wasn’t going to mentor David in anything, yet I was also the person who’d stepped forward to write a history of the 1970s, and soon became convinced that he should be positioned at the fulcrum of the narrative.
“That’s not to say that I argue David invented party culture or dance culture. I don’t, and David would have never made that claim either. The ritual of collective dancing to music goes back to the birth of humankind and predates verbal language. DJ culture can be traced back to at least the early 1960s if not before, predating the Loft by a decade or more. The rent party tradition that became a key reference point for David goes back to the Harlem Renaissance. The golden age of stereo emerged in maybe the late 1940s. Loft living goes back to the late 1950s. LSD experimentation also took root long before David held his first “Love Saves the Day” party in February 1970.
“What I do argue is that David brought all these elements together under the rubric of socialising and counterculture, and the result was unusually compelling, and for many who experienced it, transformative. David and the Loft effectively went on to shape a new way of partying, because there was nowhere like the Loft before the Loft. It’s true that discotheque culture took off properly in terms of DJ-crowd communication simultaneously, with Francis Grasso; the key DJ and the Sanctuary the key venue. I give Francis big credit in Love Saves the Day. Yet David took everything further—the sound system, the musical journey, the environmental setting, the creation of a community, the reimagining of the dance floor as a utopia—and he went on to have a profound influence on a number of the people who would go on to shape the future of DJ-led dance culture: Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles, Michael Brody (the owner of the Paradise Garage) and Robert Williams (the owner of the Warehouse). When Grasso went to the Loft for the first time he more or less said, “Damn, I no longer think I’m the best in New York.”
“David became highly skilled at selecting records in a way that encouraged his crowd to enter into an immersive, ecstatic ritual that could trace its origins to the beginning of human existence. As Barbara Ehrenreich explains in Dancing in the Streets, soon after humans first came into existence they learned survival was more likely in a group than alone, and in order to hold these groups together they turned to music and dance. David would note that music and dancing came before the spoken word again and again, and at 647 Broadway he attempted to create the perfect environment for the emergence of collective joy on a weekly basis. He was really fascinated to note that somehow or other a form of collective joy would be experienced at every single party. He was like, “What’s going on here?”"
Photo above: Moving the people emotionally is a key tenet to Loft-style parties, it's not just about the corpreal pleasures, it's the metaphysical; a foundational stone of Mancuso's philosophy. All Our Friends party, Giant Steps, London, 2018. Photo – Silvia Gin.
“So the book encouraged David to think more about London, as David was a survivor and London was his latest stop. At the age of a few days old his mother placed him in a children’s home. He had the good fortune to be cared for by a nun who had recently arrived at the idea of throwing birthday parties for the kids under her care, but at the age of five he returned to live with his mum, and she along with her new partner—David never got to find out anything about his biological father—abused and neglected him. David started to run away, ended up in reform school and, when he turned 18, went to live in New York City with a couple of dollars in his pocket. He learned how to fend for himself, found work, explored the kaleidoscopic range of the city’s counterculture and rent party scenes, became devoted to high-end stereo sound, moved into a downtown warehouse space and on Valentine’s Day 1970 started the party that came to be known as the Loft.
"David enjoyed an extraordinary run for the next 14 years, first at 647 Broadway, then at 99 Prince Street. But in the middle of 1984 he moved to Third Street and Avenue C in Alphabet City just as the area’s drug war was intensifying, with promised regeneration money whipped from the area by Ronald Reagan. David held out until 1994, at which point he lost the building and found himself on the outer-periphery of the dance scene. Attempts to reopen on Avenue A followed by Avenue B were only fleetingly successful. It was during David’s short run on Avenue B that we first met. That day he was full of beans, but it soon became clear that he was extremely poor and his situation quite precarious.
“Less than a year later David lost Avenue B and with it the last home that was big enough for him to host a Loft party. I remember visiting the tiny flat he moved into on Avenue C—barely big enough to fit a single Klipschorn. But David wanted to find a way to either move back to Avenue B or find an alternative home/party space, and when an offer came through to play in Japan he agreed. David had dedicated most of his adult life to hosting house parties and had never played outside his home, because he really believed that house parties could go further than anything that took place in a club, so this was a big deal. “My car’s off the road,” he explained in May 1998. “That’s why I’m going.”"
“The trip didn’t go well—I don’t remember the details—but it did lead David to meet Satoru Ogawa, a like-minded soul who lived in Sapporo and owned a venue called Precious Hall. Satoru proceeded to arrange for David to make annual trips to Japan, and he even opened a second spot called Fillmore North that replicated David’s Prince Street sound system. This encouraged David to accept other invitations to play abroad. Some of the trips went well, but Satoru had set a high bar and David soon came to understand that he only wanted to establish long-term relationships with hosts who did their best to implement his ideas about how a party should be organised. That involved the introduction of a mind-boggling number of changes to standard club practice, a number of them expensive and potentially unpopular. So, even if David was in survival mode, he wasn’t taking short cuts.”
Photo below: Part of Lawrence's personal record collection. Love Saves the Day compilation LP on Reappearing Records. Photo – Silvia Gin.
Tim Lawrence: “David asked me to co-host parties with him a year later. I remember replying with the words, “But David, I’m not a party promoter,” to which David replied, “Exactly.” In other words, David didn’t want to work with someone who was part of the music industry, or who was part of the club scene, which he really had no affinity with whatsoever. He wanted to work with friends and build a community. Then David told me that he knew Colleen and said he’d like us to work together. I wasn’t closed to the idea but was also unsure. I knew Colleen from my visits to Dance Tracks in the East Village, where she worked for a while, but we’d never exchanged a word. I told David I’d think about it.
“My fast-developing friendship with Jem Gilbert, a colleague at the University of East London, helped me make up my mind. Jem had recently published Discographies, which offers this very sharp philosophical analysis of club and rave culture, and I’d invited him to be my guest at the Nuphonic party—he was blown away. Several months later Jem suggested we invite David over to London—this was before David came up with his own proposal--but at that point it seemed as though Nuphonic might want to take things forward with David. Then he delivered his proposal and I picked up the conversation with Jem, realising that I’d feel much happier about the project if he was involved. David agreed, Colleen brought in Nikki Lucas, her co-partner at the label Bitches Brew, and Adrian Fillary, who’d organised the decorations at the Nuphonic party, and the five of us began to host Loft-style parties at the Light, with the first one held in June 2003.”
Resistor Mag: Was David happy with the Light?
Tim Lawrence: “David’s primary concern was to find the right venue so he sent through a long list of preferences that we needed to look out for. The venue had to have a wooden floor, because that would make for comfortable dancing. It had to have good acoustics, because no amount of high quality stereo equipment could compensate for a poor room sonics, and the whole point of the party was to have music lead the dance experience. It also had to feel comfortable, which David defined in terms of how it made you feel when you entered the space. He would ask: if you had to spend the night there would you feel comfortable? Did it have a warm or homey feel?"
Photo above: Mancuso setting up a Koetsu cartridge. Lucky Sound Club, London, 2007. Photo – Thomas Borbás. Photo right: Jem Gilbert helps with balloons at the Light party location, London, 2007. Photo – Tim Lawrence.
Tim Lawrence: “David liked the Light, in part because it had the requisite wooden floors, an ex-industrial aesthetic that was reminiscent of his Broadway and Prince Street locations. It also sported a linked outdoor space that was great for taking a breather and surrounding windows that overlooked Liverpool Street station and the financial district. The view was quite dramatic. I remember walking by the venue one day with David and asking him if what he thought about the gleaming glass-and-steel buildings that dominated the street. He shook his head in disapproval. Moments later we passed the Bishopsgate Library, a beautiful, ornate stone building built in the late nineteenth century. “This is the kind of building I like,” David told me. So David liked the Light, not the financial district. He was also unhappy with the room’s imperfect symmetry, and the fact that we wouldn’t have complete control over the building during parties, because the ground floor bar would remain open to the general public.”
“There was also the question of what would happen to the bar in the upstairs attic. David never sold alcohol at the Loft, in part because he didn’t want to have to adhere to New York’s restrictive cabaret licensing laws, in part because he believed once someone paid the entry fee everything inside the party should be free, so no money would be exchanged, and utopia could edge a little bit closer. There was no way we could close the downstairs bar, but the venue agreed to close the upstairs bar. That also meant that the bar wouldn’t suck energy away from the dance floor.
“Part of the eventual appeal of the upstairs attic was the sheer amount of light that flooded into the space. The windows that surrounded the room and were set into the roof ended up playing an interesting role because we scheduled the first party to run from 5 p.m. to midnight on a Sunday evening in late June and it only occurred to me during set-up that it wouldn’t become dark until maybe 9:30 p.m. I asked David if he thought we should try to blackout some of the windows because Londoners were used to dancing in darkened nightclubs. David paused and then said, “It’s OK if it’s light. The venue is called the Light.” At the end of a party a friend came up to me and said how much she’d enjoyed the atmosphere. “It was amazing,” she said. “People actually made eye contact with each other.” So the Light helped people socialise and relax."
Photo above: Far right, Lawrence speaks with Colleen Murphy while Mancuso spins in the background. London, circa 2005. Photo – courtesy Tim Lawrence.
Tim Lawrence: “Coincidentally, I lived around the corner, having moved to Shoreditch shortly after returning to London from New York because the area reminded me of downtown and was also the cheapest place to live in central London at the time. Artists had started to move into the area in the early ‘90s, around the time of the property market crash—Rachel Whiteread became the most respected, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin the most renowned—and I joined a mainly youthful, alternative professional second wave. There was only one coffee bar in Shoreditch at the time—the Bean. David would stay in a nearby hotel, which worked well, and he loved shopping in local food stores and striking up conversations with the cashiers. For a while David insisted that we continue to search for a better space only to then be disappointed at whichever alternative we took him to. In the end David became quite attached to the Light. Despite the attic’s technical flaws the acoustics were good, even very good, and it was a great space for an intense and intimate party.”
Resistor Mag: What else did David ask for?
Tim Lawrence: “He wanted to stay in London for five days so that he could manage the jet lag and have time to develop relationships. He wanted a hotel room where he could smoke. He wanted us to send out invitations by letter—something we never did. He wanted us to provide food for our guests on their arrival. He wanted to use high-end/audiophile/class A stereo equipment. He wanted to organise the speakers so they created the impression of a stereo sound stage that would encourage dancers to dance with one another rather than face in his direction. He wanted to decorate the room with big, colourful balloons. He wanted his turntables and booth to be positioned directly in front of the main sound stage, so that, again, dancers would again dance with each other rather than face in his direction. David would play a game with me when we visited a venue. He’d ask, “Where would you place the speakers and the booth?” I became reasonably skilled at understanding where he thought they should go. The key was that when a dancer entered the room they’d see the party space and only lastly the booth, so again the focus was on the floor and not the DJ. Then there were all the conversations we’d have in-between and following parties, because I was the one who’d take David and his records back to the hotel. I’d then cook dinner for David and the team the following evening, always a Monday, and party talk would punctuate those gatherings. In the end I felt I learned almost as much from organising parties with David than I did from interviewing him for the book. That’s a bit of an exaggeration but the learning curve was definitely steep.”
Resistor Mag: Could you say more about David wanting to work with audiophile equipment?
Tim Lawrence: “First let me say a few words about David’s approach to sound and the reproduction of sound, which was unprecedented in the history of party/discotheque/club culture and I’m quite sure hasn’t been replicated since. Obviously there are plenty of wealthy people who’ve spent obscene amounts of money on systems that they use for their own enjoyment, but nobody else has set out to run a weekly dance party using only high-end stereo components, and the lengths to which David went at seemingly every party for a run that ended up stretching to 46 years, with few breaks in-between, were pretty extraordinary, almost inhuman. David had stamina.
“The purpose of trying to perfectly amplify the sound of a vinyl recording was always social. David believed that music has the potential to transform the life energy of the listener as well as transport the listener into another dimension, carrying them closer to the beauty, complexity, interconnectedness, dynamism and vibrancy of the universe. David discovered something extraordinary when he started to throw parties regularly in 1970: that if you organise the gathering in a certain way there will always be a moment of transcendental collective joy, in which dancers experience the loosening of their egos and in so doing experience a sense of release from the grinding trajectory of having to live as an individual, because we are evermore relentlessly individualised in this world. David told me once—I paraphrase—“You know, the funny thing is, it always works. We always get there.”
“David’s deep love of music goes back to the experience growing up in the children’s home, where the nun in charge of him, Sister Alicia, put on regular parties for the children under her care in order to cheer them up. This was one of the founding arguments of Love Saves the Day: that David effectively went on to become a bearded Sister Alicia, repeating as well as reshaping her example. Over time David came to understand the importance of Sister Alicia, but when I first interviewed him he avoided talking about his time in the children’s home—it was no-go territory. When the episode eventually came up I realised immediately that it should form the opening of the book.
“As David spent time listening to the ambient sound and rhythms of nature, attending live performances, heading to rent parties, and developing a refined stereo system he became convinced that the attempt to maximise the fidelity of sound reproduction would enhance the musical experience and accordingly enhance the life energy of the listener—and if the listening happened in a party setting then also the energy of the dancer. His breakthrough experience with stereo sound came when he visited a friend called Jimmy Miller in Brooklyn Heights. “He invited me into his living room and there was this beautiful music, but I couldn’t see any equipment,” David recounted. “I asked him where the sound was coming from and he pointed toward his windows. I said, ‘What the hell have you got behind those curtains?’ He drew them back and I saw my first-ever Klipschorns. I said, ‘Wow!’ I’d never heard anything like it. He had matched the speakers with McIntosh equipment. It blew me away.”
Photos above: Lucky Sound Club gear. Left – UREI 1620 rotary mixer. Right – Koetsu Coralstone moving coil cartridge.
Tim Lawrence: “In terms of the components that shaped the Loft system, David started out with a set-up that featured two Klipschorn speakers; two Klipsch Cornwalls, two Klipsch Heresies, McIntosh amplifiers and AR turntables. He went on to create his own custom-built mixer, which he had audio friend Harry Muntz design and emerging sound system engineer Richard Long build—as it happens Richard sold David his first pair of Klipschorns and went on to build the Paradise Garage’s legendary sound system alongside DJ Larry Levan. David also pioneered the practice of assembling tweeters in clusters, or tweeter arrays, and hanging them from the ceiling over the dance floor so that he could boost the high end output of a record when he so chose—he had the sound system engineer Alex Rosner build these. David subsequently came up with the idea of building bass reinforcements to enhance his control over the lower end of the frequency spectrum; Long also built these and soon went on to become renowned for his work with bass.
“The entire discotheque and club industry went on to embrace these innovations only for David to start to lose interest in them around the late ‘70s onwards, mainly because at that point he became devoted to the pursuit of perfect sound through the acquisition of what he sometimes referred to as Class-A stereo components, namely Mark Levinson pre-amps and amps, Cotter B1 bases, Fidelity Research FR-66 tonearms and Koetsu cartridges. To these he added a new custom-made mixer that he commissioned from Lyric Hi-Fi, the Upper East Side audiophile equipment store where he purchased most of this high-end gear. David also used Technics direct drive turntables, which he liked for their operability as well as their quality. He eventually got rid of his mixer when he moved to Third Street on the basis that it introduced unnecessary electronic stages into the sound system’s circuit and therefore led to a dilution in the quality of the sound. Specifically, David believed that if he removed the mixer the gain in volume was three per cent. That might not sound like much but it’s a lot if the goal is perfect. “Why would you only climb 97 per cent of the way up a mountain?” he asked me. “Why would you only want to hear 97 per cent of what a Koetsu can reproduce?”"
Resistor Mag: Presumably when David travelled ended up entering into situations where he wasn’t able to work with his preferred set-up.
Tim Lawrence: “Yes, absolutely. Japan turned out to be relatively seamless because Satoru purchased a replica set-up for David. But it was more of a struggle in other settings, where promoters either didn’t have the mindset or the resources to replicate the Loft system. It’s important to also remember that David was still a relatively unknown and unheralded figure at this point, so it’s not as though there was a pre-established pool of apostles who wanted to introduce Loft-style parties wherever they happened to live and hoards of dancers scrambling to go to them. David had behaved like a recluse for the longest time and only now, due to circumstances, was reaching out. For the first three years of Lucky Cloud, maybe longer, demand wasn’t overwhelming.
Photo above: Setting up one of several Klipschorn for an All Our Friends part in 2019. Photo – Silvia Gin.
Tim Lawrence: “For the early parties in London we spent the max on hiring the best gear available and borrowing some components that weren’t for hire. David also started to bring over his ML1, his Mark Levinson pre-amp. But David was never happy with the speakers, turntables, cables and other gear we were providing him, and he particularly objected to anything that resembled PA equipment. He absolutely hated big boxes that contained the kind of controls you’d normally see in a recording studio—scores of knobs, the slides—as well as gadgetry to equalise the room. All he wanted was a set of stereo components, and when it came to his pre-amp he didn’t even want treble and bass controls. “Most of the equipment used at this phase other than the front end, which I provided, was almost entirely not necessary,” David commented on deephousepage.com in response to a post about the party. “My recommendation re all this unnecessary equipment, etc., was to zero out everything and neutralise all settings, allowing the room acoustics to take over. The results were quite good.”"
“Time and time again David would argue with the sound engineers who assembled the gear and on one occasion he pretty much reduced these skilled, hard-working, dutiful guys to tears because they couldn’t provide him with what he wanted or even entirely understand what he wanted—because the components David hoped to use and what he hope to achieve were so alien to existing club sound. I did my best to mediate and remember taking David to stereo stores and equipment depots as he tried to source the right kind of equipment. Along the way the party saved up enough money to buy him his preferred front end—Technics 1100 turntables, Koetsu tone arms and Koetsu cartridges—but the tension with the sound engineers continued and we all understood that the situation was unsustainable, and not because of these somewhat battered guys. We had to buy the rest of the system.
“Around the beginning of 2005 Colleen, Jem and I decided to convert the money we were spending on hiring gear each party into a five-year loan, or something like £60,000. The model was a good one. We just needed the parties to bring in the same money we were already spending for the entirety of the loan period and at the end of it we’d own our system outright. David was obviously very pleased and managed to get us a reduction on the three sets of Klipschorns we purchased, because David liked to use five speakers, with one placed in the centre. There was no way we could afford Mark Levinson gear so David continued to bring over his ML1 and we settled on some Musical Fidelity amps—the best we could manage, even if they were probably the weakest link in our system. Jem oversaw the entire purchase and from this point on oversaw more or less everything to do with the sound system. He continued to do that until June 2008, at which point Colleen picked up the role.”
David wasn’t really someone who was into expressing happiness with anything other than certain musical recordings, good food and a welcoming, intimate social situation."
–Tim Lawrence
Resistor Mag: So how did the purchase of the remainder of the system change things?
Tim Lawrence: “The 2005 purchase had a very interesting and important impact on the social organisation and structure of the party. We already had a team of enthusiastic and knowledgeable friends who would help us set up on the day of any party and join us for a post-party get-together meal at my place on the Monday evening before David returned to New York on the Tuesday—they were always really fun and spirited gatherings. The level of work increased exponentially after we purchased the speakers, amps and cabling, and following an unmemorable one-off event that involved us hauling a good deal of our equipment to Brixton, Jem and I had a conversation in which we concluded that we were now dependent on voluntary help because we certainly couldn’t afford to pay anyone to lug our gear around, and in return we should make the system available to the team members who were most dedicated to the cause so they could organise their own satellite events. During this whole process we became a trio (Colleen, Jem and I) plus David’s de facto silent partnership within Lucky Cloud Sound System, which would involve us holding regular team meetings where we would devolve decision-making as much as possible, with Colleen, Guillaume, Jem, Simon and I often in conversation with David making interim decisions when we had to. Given the complexity of what we were doing and David’s very specific way of going about his involvement, we enjoyed a pretty smooth ride. We hosted many fantastic parties--thinking back it really was amazing. How privileged I feel and lucky I was to have been part of it.
“The “Lucky Cloud” part of the name referenced Arthur Russell’s song “Lucky Cloud”—at the time I was researching the Russell book and thought that the title captured something about the airy, sweet, light output of the Klipschorns, plus Arthur used to take his recordings to the Prince Street Loft in-between parties to hear them on New York’s finest stereo system. “Sound System” referenced the fact that we’d formalised ourselves as a collective and that this was rooted in an agreement to share the equipment. Of the satellite events that have borrowed different elements of the Lucky Cloud system, the three that have endured are Beauty and the Beat (featured in an earlier Resistor issue, which started in 2005), Classic Album Sundays (Colleen’s audiophile listening event, which began in 2010) and All Our Friends.
Photo right: Lawrence at All Our Friends, London, 2020. Photo – Silvia Gin.
“I initiated and have run All Our Friends alongside Ced, Cyril and Jem of Lucky Cloud and Beauty and the Beat in 2018, as well as now many, many others—I wish I could thank all 40 or so of our amazing team but will restrict myself to deeply thanking Simona Ilincariu, Silvia Gin, Lee Zee, Steven Paul, Niki Orfanou, Emaad Sami, Leandro Fidelis, Luciano dos Santos, Mark Bower, Mark Allen, Christine Suzuki, Mantas Fresco, Wendy Maas, Simon Leung, Alessandra Pasqua, Maria Castro, Sam Jacob, Mike Hughes, David Solts, Jan Vaceanu, Igancio Castro, Kay Suzuki, Josh Beauchamp, Cloe Ofori, and many other friends when they visit from outside of London. An expanding network of parties that are focused on community values and high-end stereo sound have also sprung up in Europe, the UK, the United States and I imagine Japan, although I’m not up to speed with developments there. After the highpoint of the ‘70s and ‘80s followed by the collapse of the ‘90s and the scarcity of the ‘00s there’s definitely been a revival in parties that are directly or indirectly seeking to draw on David’s core principles.”
Resistor Mag: Was David happy with the sound system at this point?
Tim Lawrence: “David wasn’t really someone who was into expressing happiness with anything other than certain musical recordings, good food and a welcoming, intimate social situation. I know that he achieved really good sound at a number of his locations—some say the best was Third Street, which had incredible acoustics—but he often seemed to be irritable about something. On occasion he would compare us unfavorably to Sapporo and that grated a bit because we didn’t have anything like the money available to Satoru. So the sound system was always a work in progress, even after we’d spent all the money we could afford. David had long been obsessed with modifying his own equipment and exploring new ways to set up his system so that it would perform to its maximum potential, and he carried this with him to London. The attention he devoted to the sound system was absolute—it was like he was an obsessional parent, which made sense because the communities that formed around the Loft and its satellite parties in effect doubled up as his children. I think that about three years after we purchased the Klipschorns and the rest of the system David began to feel that the sound in London had reached a really good level. The sound was open, yet also pretty tight. In the Light there was an optimal energy on the floor and David felt and understood that. But in terms of the overall system we were never able to reach the heights of Fillmore North in Sapporo, and I don’t remember David ever showing up and not wanting to tweak some aspect of the set-up."
Photo left: Mancuso by Thomas Borbás.
Photo above: All Our Friends setup in January, 2020, London. Photo – Silvia Gin.
Tim Lawrence: "David only really managed to handle the situation in the first place because of his request that Glasgow-based sound engineer Iain Mackie travel down to London to oversee the sound at every party. Iain had worked alongside David at a Loft-style party that was being organised by Neil Mowat in Glasgow, beginning in April 2001. They must have held their third party in June because it was right after that that Iain joined us for our first party with the new Klipschorns and everything, and we agreed to pay for his help. David and Iain hit it off. Iain is very competent, very knowledgeable, very funny, very accommodating, and doesn’t take offence at anything. David loved spending time with Iain, especially when they worked on parties together in Europe. They would chinwag for hours and hours. Iain has an amazing depth of knowledge about sound and David picked his brains about everything. Having Iain come to London had a transformative impact on David and the party.
“Another Glaswegian, Andrew Pirie, the co-host of a party called Melting Pot, who was more into the audiophile end of sound than Iain, also started to travel down, bringing goodies with him in his bag—really good goodies. We remain immensely grateful. One of Andrew’s early visits—maybe his first—if it was, which I think it was, it was some entry—saw him bring along some kettle leads—some incredibly expensive kettle leads—that were designed to block out polluting elements from a building’s mains supply. During that afternoon’s sound check David turned to Iain and asked to borrow his dB meter because his had become faulty, with the system playing at a much louder volume than his meter was showing. Iain checked and sure enough David’s wasn’t broken. Instead the kettle leads were generating a cleaner frequency output that gave the impression of increased volume. To put it another way, the sound was being amplified in a way that was truer to the original recording, with less polluting interference, and its impact on the ear and the body was enhanced. It was like magic. David was definitely happy on that occasion.
“I can’t say the rollout of the full system was immediately revelatory. I’d already heard Klipschorns in New York and loved their warmth, precision and dynamism, but like almost everyone else I’d been shaped by two decades of bass-heavy electronic music and initially the Klipschorns seemed to lack the body and punch of the top-of-the-range D&B speakers we’d been hiring for the London party. It should also be acknowledged that many highly-influential and knowledgeable figures from within the scene (including François Kevorkian) believe that, thanks to advances made in speaker technology, speakers such as D&Bs outperform older models such as the Klipschorn. Layered on top of this scenario, many of us also felt that David was playing the system too quietly, although for David that was simply because we’d become accustomed to listening to music played at a volume that would in all likelihood eventually damage our ears."
Photo below: Dancing as an expression of collective joy has been happening for tens of thousands of years, Mancuso's goal was to achieve these moments at every one of his parties.
Tim Lawrence: "Over time, our ears adapted and we learned how to listen in a different way. We came to appreciate the more open, more musical, more engaging experience of the newly-configured system. The requests for David to turn up the volume faded away. After a while it got to the point where many of us didn’t particularly want to head to a party if it didn’t feature Klipschorns or some other brand of vintage speaker. The relationship didn’t revolve around an idea of accuracy or neutrality or frequency range. It revolved around affect, emotion and engagement. It was interesting to experience the transition.”
Resistor Mag: So what did David consider to be the right volume for the sound system?
Tim Lawrence: “David was adamant that the sound shouldn’t run above 100dB, give or take a few dB. He believed that if we listen to music at a higher volume for several hours our hearing will deteriorate, and that if the volume goes particularly high there’s a risk of permanent damage. If the listening continues over a period of months or weeks then the likelihood of damage obviously increases. To place all of this in context, most clubs will run their systems at 120dB minimum, whereas the actual volume at which music can be played safely is supposed to be 70dB or under. General medical advice has it that listening to sound at 85dB for more than two hours can cause damage, and listening at 105-110dB can result in damage in five minutes. So the margins are tight and David, who was rooted in the countercultural movement and in particular the peace/anti-war movement, was adamant that the last thing he wanted to do to his guests was injure them. He always stayed below 105dB and kept a sound meter in his booth so that he could check that his ears weren’t deceiving him, because after the ear is exposed to music for a period of time it tends to mistake ear fatigue for a reduction in volume. For David this amounted to a dangerous scenario because most DJs would respond by turning up the volume in order to maintain the music’s impact.
“David had his differences with Richard Long and Larry Levan. With good reason he felt that they prioritised power over accuracy, functionality over perfection, and bass frequencies over other frequencies. But mainly David was concerned about the volume the system was played at, which routinely reached 130dB. Because the Garage was significantly larger and more connected to the music industry than the Loft it became the primary reference point for the discotheque and private party scenes across the United States, Europe and beyond, soon after its full opening in September 1978. Having exerted an important, if ultimately niche, influence during much of the ‘70s, David came to find himself operating well outside the parameters of established practice during the ‘80s. Everybody became used to listening at 120dB-plus with reinforced bass and treble newly-central to the dance floor experience. The idea that a musical instrument should sound like a musical instrument, or the human voice a human voice, became antiquated, especially because music became increasingly electronic."
"But, by the time I tuned into what David was still doing, albeit in much more obviously constrained and anonymous circumstances, sound system culture was predictable and its limits more obvious, so I was ready for a change and ultimately found David’s approach to be holistic, sustainable and compelling. The system complemented David’s wider approach to partying: revolving around a sense of intimacy, warmth and spiritual elevation—terms that don’t always walk hand-in-hand with PA technology. Whichever way you examined David’s approach to partying, each element fed into an integrated, organic whole that helped generate a vibe rooted in collective joy and sustainability."
Resistor Mag: Could you say more about David as a DJ? Why do you sometimes use the term “musical host”?
Tim Lawrence: “David understood himself to be a party host. He never stopped thinking of himself as first and foremost a host. He only took on the role of selecting music at his Valentine’s Day party in 1970 because the person who DJ’d at the pre-Loft parties David hosted in his home on 647 Broadway—called Coalition in the latter part of 1969—had struggled to connect with the crowd. David concluded he had a better idea of what music his friends liked to dance to. When he started to throw regular parties after Valentine’s Day 1970, he discovered selecting the music enabled him to enter into a different form of communication. Despite his reluctance to take on turntable responsibilities, David instantly demonstrated a highly sensitised and developed aptitude for selecting music in relation to the energy on the floor. Everyone who attended parties on Broadway as well as 99 Prince Street reports David would take dancers on an unfolding, interconnected journey that complemented the shifting intensity of an acid trip, stretching out eventually from midnight to midday and beyond. But David was still inviting people into his home, making sure they were comfortable, and he viewed the selection of music as just one of his hosting responsibilities. He never wanted to be referred to as a DJ, but a little surprisingly he asked to be called a musical artist. At some point—I’m not entirely sure when, at least seven years into his run and very possibly longer—he began to refer to himself as a “musical host.”
“David exerted an unrivalled influence on the development of the DJ profession, at least until Larry Levan started. work at Paradise Garage (and even then Larry was 50 per cent shaped by David). In part because the Loft was able to stay open way past 3:30 a.m., when New York’s public discotheques were required to close due to city cabaret licensing regulations. This meant David could stretch out the musical journey, exploring the full potential of a relatively new practice that had led a largely stifled existence during the ‘60s, when DJs were expected to “work the bar” and so would intentionally interrupt any emerging flow in order to encourage dancers to buy a drink (because that’s how venues made money). David’s sound system, which was highly evolved from the outset, also enabled him to play a wider range of music than a regular discotheque DJ. Freedom of expression was maximised.
“David also tapped into the spirit of the countercultural times, which were opening up in unprecedented ways, both socially and sonically. He approached the turntables and music with the intent of expressing and enabling freedom, expression, peace and love while tapping into a universal, transcendental sensibility. It’s clearly no coincidence that the person who stretched this nascent art form to its aesthetic and social limit grew up in a children’s home and became deeply interested in the way that LSD could facilitate an interconnected, transcendental, universal experience. The Love Saves the Day party, as the Valentine’s party came to be known, didn’t acquire its initials by coincidence.
Although many of his peers were similarly minded, most notably Francis Grasso at the Sanctuary, David just went further. Francis acknowledged as much in one of our interviews. Responding to the surging energy of his crowd at the Sanctuary, Francis had already become the first DJ to beat mix between two records, and that innovation went on to reshape DJ culture. He had every reason to believe he was the most progressive and most loved DJ in Manhattan… and then he went to the Loft. But although David liked to blend between records, at least during his time on Broadway and seemingly for the first few years he was on Prince Street as well, he was much more interested in selecting music as a form of storytelling that revolved around linking lyrics, sounds and energies into an epic sonic adventure that stretched out across the course of a night. It was just so much more compelling than anything else out there—Nicky Siano and Larry Levan were really the only ones to match David’s range and ability to compel during the ‘70s—and by the time I met David in 1997 it was immediately clear that his approach was way more advanced than the house-music-all-night-long-plus-sometimes-a-bit-of-disco-with-everything-mixed-at-120-bpm approach of the overwhelming majority of NYC and London DJs, including those who were working in the drum and bass and UK Garage scenes.
“I like to argue David was the person who took the practice of selecting music in a live dance situation to its ultimate form of expression, cutting across time and space as he pioneered a groundbreaking, transparently radical form of music-making that was inherently antiphonal, democratic, collective, improvised and unrepeatable, and therefore became the ultimate musical expression of the countercultural era—much more so than rock, which continues to be seen as the truest and most important musical contribution of the countercultural movement. I generally avoid hyperbolic claims, but like to think of this one as “justified hyperbole.” I also like to argue that no form of music-making before or since has rivalled the expansive potentiality of DJing (let’s use the shorthand) in terms of sonic range and complexity. DJ sets can obviously be banal, but what piece of live or recorded music can match the ambition as well as engagement of one of David’s 12 or 14-hour sets at Prince Street? Maybe some avant-garde musicians have found ways of matching the epic scale and breadth of David’s sets since—I’d love to hear about parallel adventures—but the question that naturally follows is: if they did exist have they generated a meaningful listenership?"
Photo below: All Our Friends, giving back to the community. May 2019, London. Photo – Silvia Gin.
Tim Lawrence: “David often told me that he had nothing against the DJ profession—to coin a phrase, many of his best friends were DJs. In fact he placed a very heavy emphasis on DJ camaraderie, to the point where he was the key initiator along with Steve D’Acquisto of the first Record Pool, which enabled DJs to unite in order to obtain free promotional records. It was a fairly remarkable development. But David also believed that what he did behind the turntables was quite different from DJ. During his run on Prince Street he concluded he no longer wanted to interfere with the original intention of a recording artist, so he started to play records from beginning to end, and he also refused to change the speed of a record. Throughout a run that ended up lasting 46 years David also demonstrated no desire whatsoever to play out. In part that was because he cherished the comfort of his own home, where he could perfect the sound system and enjoy a level of privacy and comfort that cannot be recreated in a public environment. But, in part it was also because didn’t want to be a performer who entertained audiences, for instance by executing turntable tricks or trying out affected mannerisms. In terms of playing out, he felt that if he selected music at another venue that could only harm the Loft. It would mean that people could dance to his selections in a private venue and would detract from the energy he could put into his own party.
“David resembled a biblical prophet in his singular dedication to the Loft. He organised his weekly schedule so that by midnight on a Saturday everything would be in place so he could fully immerse himself in the party. He would never go out the night before a party—that was unheard of. During the course of a party David would also studiously absent himself, avoiding the temptation to acknowledge any applause either during or at the end of a party; for David the only people worthy of applause were the recording musicians. He once told Tina Magennis, a Loft regular and close friend, that his preferred situation when musical hosting was to wear a black T-shirt in a booth set against a black backdrop because that way he’d be almost invisible to the crowd. He loved communication but avoided all forms of self-promotion, so while he was an avid contributor to the deephousepage.com forum he never ventured onto social media. He didn’t create a single flyer or post a single listing for the NYC Loft, preferring to communicate through photocopied letters delivered by post. David once told me that if he couldn’t host parties in the way that he wanted, he wouldn’t try to earn a living as a DJ. Instead he’d try to find work on a vineyard in the mountains. He didn’t like transience. He wanted to be part of an organic, sustainable community."
“The point isn’t to argue that DJs should either follow David’s example or be judged to have fallen short. The point is that there are lessons to be learned from David’s example and it’s clear that many have been taking careful note. Mainly, let’s recognise David for what he was, which was distinctive, radical and hasn’t been replicated. I can’t think of anyone who has the single-minded way that David approached selecting music and hosting parties across four decades, never mind matching his wider contribution to the culture. If David was a prophet then the wider his example in all of its layers and nuances is adopted the better.”
Resistor Mag: What came of David’s visits to London? When did he stop travelling over and why?
Tim Lawrence: “David’s visits became bumpy during 2011. He came over for the March party, but his mother fell ill preventing him from travelling to the June party. He came to London in September but caught a heavy cold and stayed in his hotel room; Colleen stepped in that night and did a great job. Then in November David cancelled a trip to Japan, went to see a doctor and received instructions to stop traveling for health reasons. David hoped to return to London, but that never happened. A year later he started his gradual withdrawal from the New York party, even if he still made a point of attending the set-up. The story of what unfolded in New York and London from that point on is quite complicated. The short version is that Douglas Sherman picked up musical hosting responsibilities in New York and Colleen did the same in London, where after much discussion Simon and Guillaume also started to play one party a year. David’s dream that the parties could take place according to his specifications, yet without him being present or the focus of attention, had come to pass.”
Resistor Mag: How do you define David’s legacy? How has his legacy resonated outside of the Loft, Lucky Cloud and Fillmore North?
Tim Lawrence: “That’s an interesting question. Do you mind if I make myself a cup of coffee before I answer?”
Tim Lawrence is the author of Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979, Hold on to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92, and Life & Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983. He is a co-founder of Lucky Cloud Sound System and the founder of All Our Friends, which he co-hosts with Cyril Cornet and Cedric Lassonde. He also co-hosts the Love Is the Message podcast with Jem Gilbert, available on Apple podcasts, Spotify and Patreon. Read more HERE, including his recent article critiquing Louis Vuitton’s appropriation of David Mancuso and the Loft.
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