Words by Rafe Arnott with Q&A contributions by Silvia Gin and Tim Lawrence. Photography by Silvia Gin, with personal images courtesy of Tim Lawrence unless otherwise noted. Image above: Lawrence selecting music at an All Our Friends party, Chats Place, London, 2019.
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.
Can a cultural analysis along with the connection of historical, interstitial circumstances obtained through hundreds of interviews with those directly involved reveal the birth of utopian dance floor culture in a little-known Manhattan loft five decades ago? Many feel Tim Lawrence – British author, co-founder of Lucky Cloud Sound System and All Our Friends, co-host of the Love Is the Message podcast, and a professor of cultural studies – has done just that. Lawrence traced the revelatory, quasi-biblical origins of DJ culture while researching and writing Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-79, and developed the story of New York City’s groundbreaking contribution to music culture in Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983. Often referred to within the global dance music community as bibles, the books offer what many consider to be the definitive, encyclopedic account of a period that witnessed music, dancing, sound systems and art intersect with such ferocious and creative intensity the results have since captured the hearts and minds of millions of around the planet.
For some of the backstory to what I’m referencing, I will point readers to a previous article that touched on the rise of dance floor culture and a specific London party – Beauty and the Beat – HERE. Over the course of the next few months Resistor Mag will feature a three-part series with Lawrence at its core, chronicling his experiences and research into this fascinating world of DJs, musicians, dancers, audiophiles and artists as well as the backdrop of a democratic New York City. It will delve into high fidelity and the role it, and most importantly, the music, played in the evolution of dance floor culture, as well as the way the key figure of David Mancuso, host of the Loft, working with Lawrence and others, sought to take his idea of the utopian dance floor to London and beyond. I hope you’ll join me on this journey and glean as much insight and knowledge into this influential subculture as I did through interviewing Lawrence.
“Previously I’d mainly danced in my bedroom, having purchased my first stereo, an Eagle, at the age of 13 with bar mitzvah money. Like everyone I used the pause button to create mix tapes and dance with friends."
–Tim Lawrence
Resistor Mag: Who is Tim Lawrence and when he’s not listening to music, playing music, or on the dance floor, what is he doing?
Tim Lawrence: “I write books about music, host dance parties and co-host Love Is the Message, a podcast about music, the dance floor, sound systems and counterculture. As the Loft party host David Mancuso once told my good friend, party collaborator and LITM co-host Jem Gilbert, “Maybe there’s just one big party going on all the time and we just tune into it once in a while.” ie; It’s through music and dancing that we come closest to synching with the underlying, vibratory nature of the universe. We’re ultimately nothing more than an agglomeration of vibrating atoms that interact with other vibrating atoms, so I try to acknowledge and enjoy the vibration. As the Love Is the Message buzzphrase has it, “Tune in, drop out, get down.””
Resistor Mag: Your books – Love Saves the Day, Hold on to Your Dreams, and Life & Death on the New York Dance Floor – are considered ‘bibles’ by many. They provide a history of New York dance, music and art scenes of the '70s and early '80s that is arguably unprecedented in scope, bringing together rich micro-detail and sweeping socio-economic analysis. Could you tell us about the personal journey that led you to start research into what became Love Saves the Day?
Tim Lawrence: “I studied politics and modern history at Manchester University, became a journalist and within two years landed what was supposed to be a dream job at BBC Newsnight. But within weeks I resolved to leave. I’d already become frustrated by journalism’s deadline cycle and aversion to depth as well as disillusioned with mainstream parliamentary politics (This was the early '90s and it seemed as though the Conservatives were going to remain in power forever, which more or less turned out to be true). Mostly, I’d constructed a successful career on the debris of a life that had experienced the death of my dad followed by my mum while I was still at university. It was on the back of their deaths, at a point when I was feeling particularly low and even nihilistic, that I’d started to go out dancing on a weekly basis and it was on the dance floor that I’d gained a powerful, if somewhat fragile sense of hope. I threw myself into hope.
Photos above: Left – Muriel Lawrence (left), Tim (centre) and Leo Lawrence (right) at a family gathering in London, c. 1983. Right – Lawrence in his bedroom jamming out with his new Eagle stereo, c. 1980.
“Previously I’d mainly danced in my bedroom, having purchased my first stereo, an Eagle, at the age of 13 with bar mitzvah money. Like everyone I used the pause button to create mix tapes and dance with friends. Nothing much changed until I stayed in Manchester at the end of my second year to run a summer camp for kids and got to go to the Haçienda on a Wednesday night to a party called Hot, which is now recognised to have been one of the most influential parties of the 1988 Summer of Love. Within maybe 10 seconds of entering the venue I’d climbed onto a podium and thrown myself into the tribal ritual. This was it and it was instinctual, involuntary, magnetic, mind-blowing. Unfortunately, I was also much more knowledgeable about the workings of student union politics than dance culture, so when I returned to the Haçienda on a different night of the week in the early autumn I couldn’t understand why I was suddenly surrounded by Goths. I went home. It was also my final year and time to apply myself.
“Something like three years passed before a friend from student union politics took me to my first rave. Whatever I took that night must have been partially laced with a hallucinogen because I witnessed my own conception. Then, after six months of pretty hard dancing, I went to the Feel Real night at the Gardening Club and I’d say that that turned out to be the first night of the rest of my life. I felt immediately at home in the intimate contours of the basement space, and the enveloping aesthetic of the acoustic space and sound. Having grown up as the only Jewish kid in a monocultural suburban WASP environment, I also got to experience being in the midst of a multiracial crowd for the first time and understood that this was how things should be. Then there was the seemingly limitless complexity and openness of the New York house music sound that was favoured by the collective of four DJs who hosted the night. It turned out that it was on the Feel Real floor, and only there, in that space of togetherness and collective joy, that I felt that things could be OK.
Photo below: David Mancuso, barely visible, as was his preference, musical hosting at a Lucky Cloud Sound System Loft-style party at the Light, London, spring 2007. Photo by Thomas Borbás.
"Developing patterns that were addictive and religious, I started to buy house music from the Rhythm Doctor, aka Chris Long, one of the Feel Real DJs, who also ran a store. Then, after hearing Louie Vega make a guest appearance at the venue – I still remember several of the records he played that night – I decided to go and live in New York City so that I could hear Vega play at the Sound Factory Bar every Wednesday night. I’d grown up in quite a literary family. My dad, who’d fled Nazi Germany for the UK on the kindertransport as a 15-year-old, ended up becoming an English teacher. My mum, who’d grown up in Hendon, northwest London, the daughter of a Jewish family that ran a tiny lampshade store in the heart of Soho, was deeply devoted to the arts. So, I applied to study for a doctorate in English Literature at Columbia University so that I could reconnect with the spirit of my parents while gearing up for a life away from journalism. I arrived in the autumn of 1994 and started to head to Dance Tracks every Friday evening, where Joe Claussell and Stefan Prescott fed me hot vinyl. I purchased decks, made mix tapes, went out dancing, and read literature and cultural theory. I felt very at home in New York.
“Some time during my second year at Columbia a professor-mentor who knew about my parallel existence suggested that in addition to my doctoral studies I write a “quick book” – I’ll forever remember those words – about the history of house music and rave culture. Journalism had already instilled me with a certain fearlessness as well as a decent sense of a good story when it slapped me in the face, so I sent off a proposal to Ken Wissoker, the editor at Duke University Press, which was already the favourite university press of everyone I knew. It turned out that Wissoker had already rejected the opportunity to sign the book that became Sarah Thornton’s Club Cultures because he wanted to publish something that was less – what can I say? – distant and sneering about dance culture.
“Meanwhile Prescott suggested I interview David Mancuso, then an obscure, out-of-synch party host who had – I paraphrase – “been around somewhere towards the beginning of DJ culture.” I agreed to get in touch with Mancuso but had my doubts because my ears were “electronic” and I had no desire whatsoever to begin my history in the 1970s. After setting up a time to meet Mancuso another friend who happened to be writing an ethnomusicological account of house music advised me that I’d be wasting my time if I interviewed Mancuso because he’d long ceased to be relevant: he didn’t mix; he didn’t like electronic music; his sound system was constructed out of stereo components that weren’t suitable for a club experience; he didn’t play at above 100dB; and his party, the Loft, was all but dead.
“I met up with Mancuso all the same and during the course of a three-hour interview held over lunch in a family-style restaurant in the East Village on April 9th, 1997, Mancuso transformed my understanding not only of the history of dance culture but also what might be involved in running a progressive, socially inclusive, intentionally utopian party. Mancuso suggested that I start my history not with the birth of house music in mid-'80s, nor with the birth of disco in mid-'70s, but instead with the birth of underground DJ culture – and back then it really was underground – at the beginning of the '70s and, in particular, with a “Love Saves the Day” party he hosted on Valentine’s Day 1970, which became the de facto inaugural party of what came to be known as the Loft. David reeled off the names of scores of DJs, venues and records that I’d never even heard of, even though I read everything I’d been able to lay my hands on. Along the way he outlined the history of downtown, pre-disco party culture. It was clear that Mancuso had an obvious self-interest in arguing for the history to begin in 1970. At the same time the journalist in me understood that I’d walked into a potentially major story and posed a simple question: Did his argument stand up? It quickly turned out that it did.
Photo above: David Mancuso and Tim Lawrence at Lawrence’s Columbia University rental in New York, c. 2017-18. The interviews for Love Saves the Day were underway and Lawrence was dancing at the Loft.
“Soon after our first interview Mancuso invited me to attend a Loft party. It was indeed barely operating and only a handful of people filed into the Avenue B space that he would soon lose. Yet the precision of Mancuso’s stereo-based sound system, the range of his selections, the unfolding journey they assumed, the welcoming quality of the environment and the notable lack of any DJ performance felt radical. At the time I was heading every Sunday evening to Body & Soul, which most people agreed was the most happening party on the post-Paradise Garage scene. But I was beginning to grow just a little bit tired of house music, mixing, pounding volume and playing with the EQ as an art form. Through the Loft a new dawn beckoned via a bygone era that, extraordinarily, nestled almost entirely outside of written history.
“I threw myself into the task of excavating, cross-checking, narrating and analysing the evolution of the downtown party scene as well as the much-reviled culture that came to be known somewhat reductively as ‘disco,’ which had also, almost as extraordinarily, yet to receive a serious historical treatment. I ended up interviewing about a hundred people and diving into the archives as I clocked up something like 500 pages on the '70s alone. At that point I realised that the history of house music would have to be put on hold. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979 was published in February 2004. By then Mancuso had invited me to form and co-host a Loft-style party in London, but we’ll probably get to that later.”
Resistor Mag: So how did you end up segueing to the book about Arthur Russell and the downtown music scene of the early '80s?
Tim Lawrence: “Early into researching Love Saves the Day, Steve D’Acquisto, a pioneering Italian American DJ and close friend of David Mancuso – as well as a forceful personality – told me I should write a book about this incredible musician Arthur Russell. When I say “told me” he really did tell me – it was an order. D’Acquisto had co-produced the very alternative post-disco dance track “Is It All Over My Face?” with Russell and went on to provide this impassioned, whirlwind outline of Russell’s songwriting skills, his multi-instrumental range, his cross-genre instincts, his links to the dance scene, his friendship with Allen Ginsberg, his association with John Hammond, all sorts, ending with his premature death from AIDS. I remember being taken with the story but also unsure how something so obscure and eclectic could be told. I was also conscious that I was still at the beginning of researching Love Saves the Day so I told D’Acquisto that it would have to wait.
“Maybe six years later, as Love Saves the Day was going through production, I found myself at a last-night party at a pop music conference in Seattle and started to talk with Ned Sublette, the author of the forthcoming Cuba and Its Music, who had given what felt like a groundbreaking talk about the unrecognised influence of Cuban music on United States music. When Sublette asked me about my research I told him I wrote about dance culture. Sublette delivered a disdainful imitation of dance music – “Boom, boom, boom!” – before he started to sing, “Is it all over my face? / I’m in love dancing…” Then he said: “Now that’s dance music!” I told him I’d interviewed the co-producer of that song and that the idea of writing a book about Arthur Russell had been floated to me. The conversation picked up. Ned had been close friends with Russell, had performed with him, was a fan of Russell’s and could put me in touch with two of Russell’s closest collaborators, Peter Gordon and Peter Zummo. I thought, “wow.”
Photo left: Lawrence signing copies of Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983, Donlon Books, Broadway Market, London, 2016.
“To be honest I hadn’t given the idea of writing a book about Arthur much thought since Steve D’Acquisto first touted the idea some five years earlier, and when D'Acquisto tragically passed away from a brain tumour while I was still writing Love Saves the Day I assumed that the way into writing that book had died as well. But I’d come to realise that I didn’t want to become a train, writing a book about the seventies followed by the eighties followed by the nineties. The experience of meeting Mancuso, going to the Loft and writing about the '70s had also transformed my relationship to music, opening my ears to just about anything. Russell, whose entire musical being seemed to move according to a huge, unfolding tangent, offered me a way to explore interconnected sounds as well as avoid teleology. And here was Sublette.
“I remember turning to Ken Wissoker, my editor, who was at the same party, and putting the Russell idea to him. He replied that it sounded cool but didn’t think it was viable. People would say, “Arthur who?” It was a fair point; Russell remained a largely unknown figure. But back in London I conducted a long interview with Peter Gordon all the same and not long after readied myself to travel to New York for the launch of Love Saves the Day. In the time running up to the trip Audika released Calling Out of Context, a collection of unreleased Arthur Russell songs, and Nuphonic released The World of Arthur Russell, a compilation of his dance recordings. Instead of cancelling each other out, the albums stirred up press interest. David Toop published a feature in the Wire. Articles in the New York Times and the New Yorker quickly followed. At that point Wissoker said something along the lines of: “About that Arthur book you were mentioning…”
Photo right: Arthur Russell photographed by Jeanette Beckman. Another photo from the series was used on the front cover of Calling Out of Context, released by Audika in 2004.
Photo below: Lawrence’s heavily-thumbed copies of the three books. “Duke University Press produce books that are beautiful to look at, beautiful to hold and beautiful to read,” says Lawrence. “My editor gets culture, gets politics, and has given me maximum freedom."
Resistor Mag: Did your journey into Arthur Russell's music lead you to write your book about the early ‘80s, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, which develops a similar set of themes?
Tim Lawrence: “I started out to write a book about the '80s that would cover house and techno as well as continue stories that I’d started to narrate in Love Saves the Day. After concluding that narrative at the end of 1979, I expected to be able to race through 1980-83 with some ease because it was widely accepted that the opening years of the decade had been a fallow time in dance culture. Legendary figures such as Frankie Knuckles, the mythological godfather of house music, described house music as “disco’s revenge” while recounting just how hard it had been to get hold of dance music following the backlash against disco. But although the paucity of writing about the early '80s suggested Knuckles was right, the opposite turned out to be true.
“As I trawled through archival material and notched up another hundred-plus interviews I stumbled into two big stories. First, instead of paucity there was proliferation, to the extent that this time 500 pages of writing took me only to the end of 1983. Second, although historians and fans of disco/dance, hip hop and punk had invariably assumed that these sounds and scenes were distinctive, oppositional and even antagonistic, the cultural proliferation of the early eighties turned out to be defined by convergence, with post-disco dance, post-punk and hip hop culture interacting and overlapping in increasingly creative ways. Afrika Bambaataa, Anita Sarko and David Mancuso were supposed to represent the apex of hip hop, punk and dance DJing, but all three played across genres, radically so. The same was true of the breakthrough bands, musicians, producers and remixers of the era. Much of the era’s culture didn’t really have a name or fit into a box, and that, somewhat obviously, is one reason it hadn’t been properly historicised.
Photo below: Lawrence going through records at his London home, 2021.
“It had been reasonably straightforward to write the hidden history of downtown DJ culture and disco without telling the stories of hip hop and punk. Rap didn’t break out of the Bronx until the summer of 1979, and punk didn’t begin its dance turn until the late '70s. But the only way to write Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor was to explore the interaction between the post-disco, post-punk and nascent hip hop scenes and the way they influenced one another. That in turn required a different kind of storytelling as well as a grassroots analysis that explained the widespread refusal of genre. In the end the prolific and creative nature of the era led me to conclude that the 1980-83 era in NYC amounted to arguably the most influential, as well as the least reported, cultural renaissance of the 20th century. As with the downtown dance scene of the 1970s, as with Russell, it had taken me and maybe others a while to catch up with the advances of the past."
“The overarching argument of the three books runs: between 1970-83 New York City was one of, if not the most, innovative and progressive city in the history of the 20th century in terms of music and art. Party spaces, discotheques and dance floors operated as the uncelebrated hubs for much of the activity, even in the art world. Groundbreaking developments in sound systems powered the movement. Why New York and why 1970-83? Because the city was the most demographically mixed in the world; it was a cheap place to live; it was the cultural capital of the most advanced economy in the world; and it also existed at the apex of the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy – a transition that was experienced as liberatory as well as collective, even if it’s gone on to be largely coopted by corporate/neoliberal capitalism."
Photo above: The dance floor at All Our Friends, Giant Steps, London, 2018.
Resistor Mag: Your books include numerous voices, perspectives and contributions. They make one think of a party where many characters, elements and factors come together to create a harmonious whole. How has your knowledge of dance floors influenced your writing?
Tim Lawrence: “Maybe the energy that infuses the writing comes from the dance floor, but I don’t pretend that my writing in some way replicates the aesthetics of DJing, as other writers occasionally claim for their own work. Instead, I’d say that the dance floor has inspired me to want to write about music and to pursue certain lines of enquiry. Clearly I’ve been drawn to a New York sensibility and this has led me to write a somewhat obsessional 1,500 pages on a relatively slim 14-year period. If that seems excessive to some, my own feeling is that I’ve written these histories in quite an economical way. I’ve also wanted to give voice to the hundreds, if not thousands of people who’ve made these dance floors and music scenes happen and, through interviewing them relentlessly, convey the energy of their work. The powerful influence their contributions have had on me has motivated me to highlight the importance of these previously hidden, marginalised histories.
“Academic writing can be dense and theoretical, and I’ve learnt more from books written in this way than more obviously accessible books. But back at Newsnight I’d decided I wanted to be outward-facing writer, with Edward Said, a Columbia-based Palestinian activist and author of the best-selling Culture and Imperialism, my role model. Along the way Love Saves the Day accidentally became my doctorate, because it wasn’t possible to write that book and a PhD. Ken Wissoker then picked up on some of the inaccessible sections that were a requirement for a doctoral thesis and asked me if I wanted the people I was interviewing to be able to read the eventual book. It felt like a breakthrough question and from that point on I’ve tried to hone a style that strikes a balance between colour, dynamism and analysis, combining complexity and accessibility. I’ve encouraged the protagonists of my books, many of them advanced thinkers as well as practitioners, to deliver the analysis. I’ve also aimed for a style that integrates multiple voices and registers. As with the dance floor, flow is everything.”
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 the founding host of All Our Friends, co-hosts the Love Is the Message podcast, available on Apple podcasts, Spotify and Patreon.
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