Greetings all
Yesterday evening word started to get out that one of the true originators of DJ culture and founder of the Loft, David Mancuso had passed away at the age of 72.
Mancuso’s is a name that does not elicit a great deal of pop culture recognition these days, but if you are a DJ, student of the culture, or one of the people lucky enough to have experienced any of his NY-based Loft parties, in the 70s or beyond, it is one that demands respect.
To call David Mancuso a DJ is an acceptable shorthand (because in the most superficial way, that’s what he was) but a careful examination reveals that he was much more than that.
These days, if you call someone a DJ, it has a number of meanings, from the guy trying to get people to do the hokey pokey at a wedding, hardcore collectors/selectors in a wide variety of genres, and all the way up to the electronica selectors playing music for tens of thousands of people at a time around the world.
Mancuso has some tenuous connection to all of them, but was in essence something much deeper, closer to a musical conjurer/shaman than anything else.
He started The Loft in 1970 (though he had been doing something similar periodically since 1965) as a series of rent parties, based around his love of music and his devotion to presenting it via high end, audiophile sound. He used the music, the sound system, and a variety of environmental enhancements (up to and including drugs, it was no coincidence that the first part was called ‘Love Saves The Day’ – dig the initials).
That he did all of this in the days when the DJ equipment we take for granted existed only in primitive forms (if it existed at all), and that he presented it all through the gateway of his particular, expansive, inclusive (in all ways) sensibility is what made it special.
I first read about Mancuso in Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s essential tome ‘Last Night a DJ Saved My Life’ in 1999, and I was entranced by his ideas about what kind of music to put together, how to present it (he barely mixed his records, if ever), and especially the sounds on his playlists.
Today, it would be unthinkable for a club DJ to play records all the way through, and then not mixing/beatmatching. Mancuso would play long, dynamically diverse records, filled with highs and lows in energy and volume, emphasizing his belief in the power of the musis, as opposed to lashing himself to the shortened attention span of a crowd and pushing them along.
He played soul, funk (there wasn’t any real ‘disco’ to speak of when he started), rock, world music, sound effects, all assembled to create a mood and take a crowd into his embrace, lifting them up, and placing them down gently.
In an interview with Red Bull Music Academy, Mancuso described it thusly:
From the beginning, your parties were designed to bring people together.
I was very frustrated. A lot of times I wouldn’t enjoy things about going to certain places, from the soundsystem to the door policy. I was able to prevent that, and by having a certain way of doing things, we promoted social progress.
To this day, there’s no dress code. There’s no age control. You don’t have a liquor license. Once you have the different economical groups mixed together, the social progress starts to kick in. You have people from all walks of life coming together.
The music also had a lot of crossover. We had all kinds of music being played, from one end of spectrum to the other, and people found out that, “Hey, I like Led Zeppelin and I like James Brown.”
People just want to have a good time. They want to feel safe and have a good time. That’s always rule number one for a place, to be safe. But it’s more than not just doing things like overcrowding, it extends all the way down to protecting the ears.
After reading about Mancuso, and exploring the kinds of records he played (many of which were new to me), I always tried to emulate him. I rarely got to DJ the kind of nights he did, but even playing a straight up soul or funk night, I always try to take chances, and to grab a crowd and lift it like he did.
And really, any DJ, in any style or setting ought to carry that simple formula in the back of their mind.
The world is full of DJs that can hammer a crowd with a steady BPM and a list of guaranteed crowd pleasers, but having been on both sides of the DJ booth, I can attest to the fact that there is nothing better than being genuinely, pleasantly surprised by a DJ who simply focuses on good music, sequencing obscurities (high and low dollar), with classics and mixing in things from the margins of (or only peripherally related to) a genre in a way that fills you with joy and makes you want to get up and dance.
Because that, and only that, is what it should be all about.
If you want to go into a club and floss your record collection for the heads in the crowd, with no regard for whether or not they’re going to make anybody dance (or at least smile), then don’t call yourself a DJ.
I have been fortunate enough, over the years to have been given the opportunity to spin at gigs (especially the Asbury Park 45 Sessions) where I was allowed some degree of latitude in what I played, and I’m proud to say that I took chances whenever I could, always with the spirit of David Mancuso, and the Loft in air.
Today’s post is composed of a series from 2010 called ‘Disco Not Disco’, where I spent a week taking about Mancuso and exploring a couple of his signature records, by Booker T and the MGs, Eddie Kendricks, and Cymande.
I will return later in the week with a few more things, including a repost of a Mancuso-inspired mix from 2014, and a special edition of the Funky16Corners Radio Show (dedicated to Mancuso and the Loft) this Friday.
So read up on your read ups, pull down the ones and zeros, and remember that love does indeed save the day.
Keep the faith
Larry
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Booker T and the MGs
Listen/Download – Booker T and the MGs – Melting Pot MP3
Greetings all.
This week is another one of those Funky16Corners ‘theme’ extravaganzas, in which I dip into the vault and run a Sesame Street – ‘How are these things like one another’ – game on you, but provide you with the answers (or at least my version thereof).
Last year, one of my major reading experiences was Tim Lawrence’s book “Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979”. Lawrence’s tome, along with Peter Shapiro’s ‘Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco’ (since retitled) and Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s ‘Last Night a DJ Saved My Life’ when taken together form a de fact encyclopedia of modern DJ culture. All three are well written and deeply informative, but more than that, they introduce you to a couple of seminal personalities without whom DJ-ing (and dance music) would not exist as it does today.
Because of these three books, I came away with a deep and abiding respect (bordering on idolatry) for the work of David Mancuso. It was Mancuso (pictured above), who in 1970 threw the first dance party in his loft (which became The Loft), calling it Love Saves the Day (get it? Nudge, nudge say no more…). Though there were many other important figures in DJ culture (especially Francis Grasso who paved the way for Mancuso in New York City), for me, Mancuso rises above all others.
From the very first time I entered a DJ booth, I’ve endeavored to create an experience for the people on the dance floor turning solely on the gears of good music. Some of it was rare, some of it extremely common, but the idea was to drop the needle on something that the dancers would dig, and do my best to lift the room. Years later, when I became aware of Mancuso through the books listed above I realized that he was in many ways the ur-DJ.
If you’ve spun records for a crowd, you already know (or should) that nothing feels better than laying down some quality sounds and feeling the energy on the dance floor build, incrementally, layering record on top of record, shifting the tempo up (most of the time anyway) but always attempting to build on that increase with a parallel increase in the quality of the music coming out of the speakers. There’s something to be said for the idea that on a perfect night, a DJ is something akin to the ancient cats drumming around the fire, whipping their fellow tribesmen into a lather, drumming harder as they dance faster until the lot of them were participants in a musical hive mind of sorts, connected by the beat. When you’re spinning records, sometimes it only comes together for a couple of songs, sometimes not at all, but when it does there’s nothing better.
Certainly the vast majority of people in a dance club are there first and foremost to have a good time, but there’s no reason in the best of all possible worlds that it can’t also be elevated to the spiritual level.
Before you can get to that specific place, a DJ has to do two fundamental things.
First and foremost, keep your ears (and your mind) open. The more you listen to, and the more time you spend among others that really know and seek out good music the larger your internal repertoire/reference library is going to be.
Second, and if you’ve spent any time following the going on here at Funky16Corners you probably picked up on this one: keep digging. The more time you spend actively seeking out new music in the field, the more likely it is that when the time comes to pull some heat out of your crates and drop it on the ones and twos that you’ll be making a good choice.
Certainly there’s the issue of taste, but even that can be improved with enough study.
That all said, what I came away from all three of those books knowing about David Mancuso, was that his tastes were expansive. A look at his playlists reveals that alongside many accepted classics (many of those placed in the canon by Mancuso and his contemporaries) there were a lot of – for lack of a better term – ‘unusual’ choices. Half a decade before guys like Kool Herc and Flash were cutting rock breaks in the Bronx, Mancuso was playing all manner of rock, jazz, world music and pop sounds at the Loft, alongside a healthy portion of what are now considered ‘consensus’ dance records.
Remember, we’re talking about an era where the large majority of genres that rule the dance club world today hadn’t yet been codified. ‘Disco’ was years away from common usage and 12” singles – with their dance floor specific extended versions – did not yet exist. Though there were some records on his playlists that are now considered part of the vanguard of what would come to be known as disco (especially some Eddie Kendricks jams, one of which will be featured later this week), Mancuso mixed in just about anything else that made sense in the context of his sets.
The Loft parties, though conceived on an intimate scale, were hugely influential, with regular attendees/devotees including Nicky Siano (the Gallery), Larry Levan (Paradise Garage) and Frankie Knuckles (the Warehouse, from which ‘house’ music got its name) all of whom went on to marks on dance music culture in their own ways.
The first track I’m going to bring you this week is a perfect (capsule) example of all that was great about the Loft. Oddly enough, the first time I heard Booker T and the MGs doing ‘Melting Pot’ it was on a 45, with the vast majority of its power stripped away. After reading about its place of honor at the Loft, I sought out the 1971 LP of the same name. I finally scored a copy when I was DJing down in DC last year. Once I got it home and had a chance to drop the needle on the LP version of the title song, it became obvious why Mancuso used it at the Loft.
‘Melting Pot’ is, inside of its eight minute playing time, a microcosm of an entire set. The song opens with rimshots by Al Jackson, but it’s Steve Cropper’s pulsing rhythm guitar that sets the pace. When Booker T’s organ and Jackson’s drums come in the groove is locked down. The band – one of the tightest of the classic soul era – only really works up a full head of steam at the three minute mark, which explains why the 45 lacks the punch of the LP version.
It’s important to note the atmosphere in which the ‘Melting Pot’ album was created. It was the last album by the classic MGs lineup. Booker T Jones was fed up with the new regime at Stax and was on the verge of leaving the group. He refused to record in Memphis, so the album was recorded on the road in NYC. The sound of the album is a serious departure from the band’s earlier work, revealing a more expansive, more progressive Booker T and the MGs. While tracks like ‘Chicken Pox’ – with the MGs channeling the Meters – show that they might not have been leading the pack anymore, a cut like ‘Melting Pot’ shows that had they stayed together, they might very well have moved to the front once again.
As I mentioned before, ‘Melting Pot’ is almost like a small, self-contained DJ set. The song has several distinct sections in which the MGs bring up the tempo gradually, hit a peak and then chill out, only to re-state the groove again and again, bringing the dancers along for the ride. Listen at around 4:15 where Jones and Duck Dunn fall back, leaving Jackson and Cropper to rebuild the song from the opening statement. Dunn drops back in with a repeated, almost circular bass line, and Jones solos over the top of it all. I can only imagine what Al Jackson’s punchy bass drum accents sounded like pouring out of the Loft’s sound system. While ‘Melting Pot’ is clearly not ‘disco’ as it came to be known, the second half of the song is definitely a prototype for extended dance mixes to come. The temptation, as the song fades out just past the eight minute mark, is to cue up a second copy and keep the groove going.
‘Melting Pot’ which was the last 45 by the classic Booker T and the MGs line up, and strangely enough the flip side is another drastically truncated long jam,’Kinda Easy Like’ which also runs over eight minutes on the LP. It grazed the Pop Top 40 and hit the R&B Top 20. Following the ‘Melting Pot’ album, Booker T Jones would leave the group and relocate to California where he would work with artists like Bill Withers.
Cropper would also leave the fold, with Dunn and Jackson reconstituting the MGs with a new organist and guitarist.
All in all, ‘Melting Pot’ is – at least for those that haven’t heard it – a revelation, and a great way to start a week of Loft tracks.
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Eddie Kendricks
Listen/Download – Eddie Kendricks – Girl You Need a Change of Mind MP3
Greetings all.
It’s time to continue our week long tribute to David Mancuso and the records he played at the Loft.
Earlier this week, not long after I finished writing the post about Booker T & the MGs, it occurred to me that the vibe I got when reading about Mancuso, and his work as a DJ reminded me of a phrase I learned from a friend many years ago.
Back in the day, though (wisely) I never set foot on a surfboard, I became fascinated with the history of the sport – especially the big wave riders – and I had a couple of friends (thanks to living and working by the beach) who actually surfed. Now, the “waves” (quotes added for sarcasm) at the Jersey Shore rarely rise above a height considered safe for small children and old ladies (aside from those whipped up by the occasional Nor’Easter or hurricane). Despite this fact, no matter what time of year it is, if I take a ride along the beach –especially in the morning – there are surfers out there, making the best of what the ocean has to offer.
Why do I mention this? Because, (also) back in the day, my buddy Joe introduced me to the concept of the ‘soul surfer’. Obvious puns aside, what this refers to is an individual who is technically adept enough to compete with the big dogs, yet rides the waves solely for the sheer pleasure of it, making it into a spiritual endeavor. The more I thought about Mancuso, the Loft and the ideas he brought to the game (and how he inspired me) the more it occurred to me that it made sense to apply that term to Mancuso and those that follow(ed) in his footsteps.
I realize that there are all kinds of DJs out there, separated not only by genre, but also by their approach to spinning (though god knows the cats that actually use records are becoming an endangered species). Ideally, when you enter the DJ booth, your ultimate goal ought to be that the folks dancing, listening or both, have a good time. How good a time they have is dependent on a number of factors, the most important being the quality of the music, and the way you (the DJ) present it to the crowd.
The corner of the musical universe I tend to kick around in is generally concerned with soul and funk, of the vintage persuasion. The folks that come to hear and dance to this music are usually a mix of aficionados, i.e. your Mods and soulies that know their way around and are probably already acquainted with some of the rarer discs in my record box, and regular folks who just want to hear something they can dance to.
It probably goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that the vast majority of DJs in this field are – like myself – what our friends in the UK refer to as anoraks and trainspotters, i.e. detail-oriented obsessives with an eye turned to the rare an obscure. The duty of this type of DJ is to balance their own love for the obscure against the true quality of the records in question (on account of the rarity of a record often- not always – has an inverse relation to the quality), and to offer up a playlist that is interesting, but ultimately satisfying to the largest possible number of people. Finding this balance isn’t always easy. I’ve seen people with incredible record collections step up to the tables and drop one ultra-rare stinkbomb after another. I’ve also seen people with less impressive crates (but spectacular taste) light up a dancefloor with dollar bin wonders.
Today’s selection from the Loft, Eddie Kendricks’ mighty ‘Girl You Need a Change of Mind’ is from the less-obscure end of the spectrum. The song appeared on Kendricks’ landmark 1972 LP ‘People Hold On’ (the 45 version was a Top 20 R&B hit). Kendricks was well known from his years in the Temptations, and had scored a chart hit with that album’s opening track ‘If You Let Me’. Like Monday’s tune ‘Melting Pot’, I first heard ‘Girl You Need a Change of Mind’ as a 45 edit. Unlike ‘Melting Pot’, ‘Girl…’ made an impact on me, even in its shortened version.
Written by Motown legend Frank Wilson and Anita Poree (though the 45 credits it to Poree and ex-Radiant Leonard Caston, who co-wrote a number of other songs on ‘People Hold On’), ‘Girl You Need a Change of Mind’ is the ultimate illustration of the ‘disco/not disco’ tag.
Eddie Kendricks is unquestionably one of the fathers of what came to be known as disco. The two years after ‘People Hold On’ saw him have big hits with two of the genre’s important early songs, ‘Keep On Truckin’ and ‘Boogie Down’. While ‘Girl…’ isn’t quite as explicitly “disco” as either of those tracks, all of the stylistic cues are present, albeit not fully formed. Like ‘Melting Pot’, ‘Girl…’ contains multitudes in its seven and a half minute span. Though it works wonders as a three and a half minute soul single, it passes over into the realm of dance floor epic in the album version.
The opening riff, with a simple piano riff over spare percussion – soon joined by snare drum and horn flourishes, opens up into a relatively slow (yet danceable) verse. It’s around the two and a half minute mark, with Kendricks repeated ‘What you say to that?’ refrain, that the tempo escalates, backed by a muscular rhythm guitar (right about where the 45 version fades out). Things change again around 3:45, where everything except the lead guitar and tambourine drop out, the band gradually coming back in (the piano and rhythm guitar are especially sweet here) until the drums come in strong at about 5:10. It’s at this point where the picture of ‘Girl You Need a Change of Mind’ as dance floor epic comes into full focus. Unlike many 12” singles that would drop in the coming years, ‘Girl…’ is both song enough for the radio, and (in it’s LP form) long enough for the dancers.
Things change yet again at 5:55 – and again this must have been absolutely magical over the Loft’s sound system – as we’re left with just the congas and Kendrick’s falsetto, followed in short order by the band returning to full power by the end of the record (sounding – at this stage – several years ahead of its time).
Interestingly enough, as proto-disco goes, it’s another ‘People Hold On’ track, ‘Date With the Rain’ – another big hit in the clubs that failed to score on the radio – a remarkable (but tragically short, at 2:40) dance record, that more closely fits the mold. It is also available (but much rarer) on 45.
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Cymande
Listen/Download – Cymande – Bra MP3
Greetings all.
The end of the week is here, and so is the final installment in the ‘Disco/Not Disco’ series.
It’s been interesting – at least for me – in that this is something that I’d been wanting to do for a long time, and kept putting it off until I had enough time to give it the thought it deserved.
The original intent was to present a couple of what I considered to be representative tracks from David Mancuso’s Loft repertoire, so that those of you reading, who may not have heard of him before might go a little bit further and as they say, read up on your read ups. Check any and all of the books I mentioned: Tim Lawrence’s book “Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979”. Lawrence’s tome, along with Peter Shapiro’s ‘Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco’ (since retitled) and Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s ‘Last Night a DJ Saved My Life’ for a comprehensive history of club DJs, including Mancuso and his NY scene contemporaries.
The third and last song of the week is perhaps the most challenging of the three selections.
I’ve written about Cymande (a band I love a lot) in this space before.
Though they never rose to the prominence of either Booker T & the MGs or Eddie Kendricks, Cymande did hit the charts here in the US, twice in 1973. First with ‘The Message’, a Top 20 R&B hit, and then again (and for the last time) with today’s selection ‘Bra’ which hovered outside the R&B Top 50. They did make it onto the outer reaches of the Pop charts, but nothing significant, which is shame because they definitely had crossover potential.
Earlier I suggested that ‘Bra’ was the most challenging of this weeks selections. I don’t mean to suggest that it was in any way far out, but rather that its off-center groove, with stop time interplay between the percussion and the bass, with a less than ‘straight ahead’ rhythm. It’s not that I can’t imagine people getting down to ‘Bra’, but it’s definitely the kind of record that dancers might have to warm to, gradually, as opposed to a stereotypical floor-filler.
And therein lies the rub my friends, because that’s precisely the kind of chance that Mancuso would take, i.e. pulling an LP out of the crates and dropping a track – like ‘Bra’ – that while unquestionably danceable, is as valuable a listening experience as it is for dancing.
Co-written by guitarist Pat Patterson and bassist Steve Scipio, ‘Bra’ does open with rhythmically unusual riff – backed up by the song’s signature horn riff – but by the time the chorus comes in, the addition of a strong rhythm guitar propels the beat, rounding its sharp edges and settling into a more conventional groove. This is not to say that the tune loses any of its complexity, but rather, like any dozen James Brown records, the polyrythms are woven together so tightly that even someone with two left feet would be compelled to move.
The first time I had a chance to listen to Cymande’s three album discography in depth (via an old CD comp) what I got out of the experience – aside from lots of quality music – was the impression that despite the group’s marginal chart success, the listening public really missed the boat. The old saw is to indicate that an artist was ‘ahead of their time’ but in the case of Cymande I wouldn’t say that this was entirely true. This is how I described their music when writing about this track almost exactly three years ago:
“Their music was a sophisticated mixture of American soul and funk, African pop, Latin sounds, rock and all of the various and sundry intersections of those sounds. A close listen to their first LP is like a drive through Harlem in the early 70’s with your car windows down, letting snatches of Curtis Mayfield, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, Santana and a thousand lesser groups (woven securely into the fabric, but essentially lost to the ages) drift through the windows and into your ears.
There are elements of early-70’s prog-cum-stoner rock guitar, hard drums, jazzy bass and horns as well as a bedrock of polyrhythmic percussion.”
If my approximation of their sound is accurate, the conclusion you would reach is that they were very much of their time, and looking back, it seems amazing to me that they weren’t more popular. There were plenty of black acts incorporating elements of rock music into their sound, and by and large, though there are Jamaican influences (which had been popping in and out of radio playlists for much of the previous decade), they never overpower the band’s funky groove. While it’s understandable that a pop audience might not get too far into their sound, I’m puzzled that they didn’t make more inroads with the more progressive rock audience.
That said, placed against the other tracks in this week’s series, it’s ot hard at all to see why ‘Bra’ was so popular at the Loft. Earlier this week one of the readers requested that I post a Mancuso set list, so I pulled out ‘Love Saves the Day’ an retyped the list below, which doesn’t seem to represent any one night, but rather an amalgam of Loft favorites for the years 1970 to 1973. There are a fair amount of what one might consider to be ‘obvious’ dance records (James Brown, Beginning of the End, Manu Dibango*), a couple of less obvious tunes for the trainspotters, including jazz rock like Traffic’s ‘Glad’ and Brian Auger and the Trinity’s version of Eddie Harris’ soul jazz classic ‘Listen Here’, the breakbeat fave ‘The Mexican’ by Babe Ruth, as well as unusual (likely transitional, mood pieces) like the Beatles’ ‘Here Comes the Sun’ and Exuma’s ‘Exuma the Obeah Man’. While there’s a fair amount of info out there listing individual records as ‘Loft favorites’ I was unable to find any specific playlists from the venue’s early 70s heyday.
Interestingly enough, Mancuso has kept some version of his Loft going (at a number of different locations) continuously (though with decreasing frequency) right on through the disco and house music eras. He still travels internationally, putting on Loft parties around the world.
If reading in-depth studies of dance music culture isn’t your bag, see if you can track down the 2003 documentary ‘Maestro’, that follows the development of New York DJ culture from Francis Grasso in the late 60s, all the way through to the end of the Paradise Garage (with Larry Levan) in 1987.
It manages to touch on most of the major players, and there are lots of interviews with people that witnessed the development of DJ/club culture while it happened.
The Loft – Selected Discography 1970 – 1973
From ‘Love Saves the Day’ by Tim Lawrence
Brian Auger & the Trinity – Listen Here
Babe Ruth – The Mexican
Barrabas – Wild Safari
Barrabas – Woman
The Beatles – Here Comes the Sun
Beginning of the End – Funky Nassau
Booker T & the MGs – Melting Pot
James Brown – Get Up I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine Pt1&2
James Brown – Give It Up Or Turnit a Loose
Chakachas – Jungle Fever
Cymande – Bra
Manu Dibango – Soul Makossa
Equals – Black Skinned Blue Eyed Boys
Exuma – Exuma the Obeah Man
Aretha Franklin – Ain’t No Way
Al Green – Love and Happiness
Willie Hutch – Brother’s Gonna Work It Out
Intruders – I’ll Always Love My Mama
JBs – Gimme Some More
Eddie Kendricks – Girl You Need a Change of Mind
Morgana King – A Taste of Honey
Gladys Knight & the Pips – It’s Time To Go Now
Little Sister – You’re the One
Curtis Mayfield – Move On Up
Dorothy Morrison – Rain
Van Morrison – Astral Weeks
O’Jays – Love Train
Olatunji – Drums of Passion
Osibisa – Survival
Edwin Starr – War
Traffic – Glad
Tribe – Koke
Troubadours du Roi Baudouin – Missa Luba
War – City, Country, City
War – The World Is a Ghetto
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