The Dancefloor

Love is, love is, love is the message. Hello, this is Love Is The Message. This is a podcast about music, counter-culture and related things. I'm Jeremy Gilbert, I'm here with Tim Lawrence. Hi. And today we're going to be thinking about the emergence of the idea of the dance floor and the sound system as new types of cultural, social, aesthetic practice. Again, really around the turn of the 70s. So I guess the first thing to ask in thinking about this, Tim, is what would dance floors like in the 60s? Well, apparently they weren't that great. So this is why the 70s had to happen, of course. The history of social dance goes back hundreds of years, if not thousands of years. So people have always looked to come together dancing, obviously for the longest time it was all about the only dancing that could take place would be to live music. Cross the course of the 20th century different forms of amplification developed. So the main one of the main ways that this was kind of used in the United States. And obviously there were kind of live concerts, but then there were also these kind of record hops where people would gather for social dance. But the main things, maybe one of the main things to kind of note at this point anyway is that the absorption with sound, the idea that sound and sound reproduction was absolutely central to the experience of the dance floor. As far as I'm aware, didn't really get going until the 1970s. There might have been different precursors in the 1960s. So the grateful deads and office reference point here, to what extent were they kind of also exploring new ways of reproducing sound that would kind of elevate the musical experience? Well, both the grateful dead in California and also Pink Floyd, the sort of flagship band of the acid rock scene in London in the late 60s. In their respective scenes, they were both famous for having the best sound system, having a kind of customized PA system. But it's obviously technically it has some similarities, but it's pretty different from a system for playing records because you're amplifying live music. It's not exactly the same thing. But the overall idea is pretty similar that you want to create a sound that really fills the room, but also has a real sense of clarity that doesn't sort of disturb people. In both those cases, but especially in the case of the grateful dead, it was, I mean, it was very much motivated by a sense that literally most of the people in their crowds who were dancing to their music were assumed to be tripping, received to be on acid, and the idea was that it was more the acid experience if you were listening to dirty, noisy music sounds, lots of interference, and the more clarity, as well as the more power you had, the more you would have a kind of fulfilling experience. Of course, the grateful dead sound engineer, and to some extent also their manager, was also the most famous LSD chemist of the late 60s Augustus Ausley. This really sort of fascinating figure who, you know, he was famous as a kind of self-tour chemist. He was arguably, I think, the first of the LSD chemists sort of experiment with the idea of making LSD that was pure than ordinary pharmaceutical grade. In the hope that that treating it is this sacred substance that had to be the production of which had to be attended by these sort of chemical rituals and prayers and things within harms its spiritual effectiveness. But even more, he was really preoccupied with sound. He was preoccupied with the idea of sound as a kind of technological magic and sound amplification. And also recording, actually. He was quite influential in sort of stop pioneering some use of multi-track recording. So these kind of complex elements really went together in that context, I think. Yeah. I mean, I guess there's a sense in which, you know, on some sort of level aspects of the technology had existed for decades. Yeah. The clips from Speaker that became so important to Deloft and, you know, and the number of other parties was widely regarded as the best, certainly one of the best stereo speakers available at that particular time and also one that was efficient enough to be able to play a party. This kind of technology had existed for a while, right? What changes is a social scenario, a wider cultural scenario in which there's a new demand for high quality reproduced stereo sounds to exist not only in someone's front living room, which was what it was kind of almost originally designed for and actually to become something which is shared publicly. So this is, again, something that the demand for new ways of listening and indeed new ways of dancing come out of this thing that we keep referring to, counter culture, the mass movement demanding for social change. Yeah, I think you're right. And I guess, I mean, I guess the counter culture itself draws on the things which immediately precede it, but which are include a sort of whole redefinition of what constitutes art. Like, what forms of cultural and musical practice you can take really seriously. In all these cases, we're talking about music to dance to. So you go back to the 50s. I mean, yeah, exactly. But already in the 50s is a pretty well established idea. Like, if you're going to hear a jazz band, like if there won't be, probably won't be any good amplification, but you want to hear good acoustics. And then if you're a jazz fan, listening to your LPs at home, indeed, that's why you would buy a clip shot. That's what the clipsions are designed for. You probably use a valve based amplifier, which many high fire fish, you know, those in 2021 would say has never really been improved upon in any significant way. So you're already having this experience at home, pointing to sort of a military type of sound, but nobody would think of treating music that's designed primarily for dancing to that level of seriousness. So it's music to dance to. There's rhythm and blues. There's been jazz, some hot jazz to dance to for years and big band jazz. There's rock and roll. But then what happens in the mid 60s is you get the emergence of the concept of rock. To some extent, when the concept of rock has distinct from rock and roll. It emerges, you know, I've always said it emerges pretty fully formed on like one half of Bob Dylan's first electric album. Subterranean homesick blues. That is the moment when the idea of rock as an art form as opposed to rock and roll as a dance form. It really emerges and you know, I've never heard of anybody dancing to any of those Bob Dylan records and the Beatles completely stop making music anybody would ever dance to because they want to aspire to this kind of artistic seriousness. But then in some other strands of rock culture, the idea of rock music has still being sort of derived from rock and roll and still being something you might dance to, but also aspiring to a certain sort of level of spiritual or political seriousness. It does carry on. I've never really thought about that before actually, but that, I mean, really that's what characterizes acid rock actually. I mean, that is what sort of defines acid rock and most obviously the grateful dead is that on the one hand, they're part of this, this moment is going to produce ideas like progressive rock, like the idea of rock as a serious art form, but also they are really committed to dance and partly they're committed to dance because they commit, they are committed to this idea of a sort of psychedelic, you know, the concert. Or the gig as a sort of psychedelic collective ritual, you know, something more than just just a chance to get drunk and get laid. There's an interesting parallel with the way in which we've talked about before at the same time James Brown and funk is also sort of redefining what happens on dance floor. It's sort of also changing what's happening on on soul dance floors so that you know, it might not be thought about in quite the same terms of sort of artistic or spiritual seriousness, but it has a sort of a new level of intensity, doesn't it? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I'm also also related to what you're saying is this kind of, I think there's a sense that I mean, rocks kind of main intention doesn't quite seem to be dancing. There's something else intertwined that is to do with a kind of sense of subjectivity or the self. It's about an outlook on society. It's kind of somewhat rebellious, wanting to be expressive, having a sense of politics, having a sense of kind of pent up energy. I mean, from the point of view of what we want to start to also think about in this particular show, I guess, is the way that sound also goes and develops in conjunction with the dance floor. And that dance floor moment had sort of, you know, started a breakup around the latter part. Well, it starts with rock and roll being, I think one of the last forms of partner dancing to kind of break through in the United States before this moment in the 1970s when free form dancing becomes the way that people go out dancing. So there was this sense with rock and roll is only just a part of dance. There's often no physical contact between what would normally be a man and a woman. So this is kind of sense of the dance floor opening up with rock and roll, but not going to be. going to the point of freeform dancing, this coinciding with the social movement, of which rock was part or a counter-culture movement or which rock was part, but didn't quite know how to channel this dance energy and disco becomes this thing or pre-disco dance culture of the early 1970s. It becomes this thing that brings together as whole series of developments in sound, but also liberates the dance floor. And it partly didn't liberate the dance floor, I guess, in part because of the spirit of the times, the sense that freedom was so important to the era, the idea that you'd be dancing in a couple and you'd have to be following basically all of these established moves and practices in order to carry out any social dance. That kind of all goes out of the window and it coincides with amongst other things, a significant proportion of gay men flocking into the dancing, having been previously excluded from public discatex until the sanctuary re-opened at the beginning of 1970. So it was this combustor that's coming together of all these different channels, which was indeed quite explosive and happened at the beginning of 1970. - Yeah, I think you're right. I think we have to acknowledge, I mean, otherwise we'll get a complaint. So for example, in the late '60s, there were clubs like the Twisted Wheel in Manchester where people are getting pretty intense, dancing to soul. I think people would say it wasn't just kind of ritualized partner dancing. I mean, I think that sort of intensity on the dance floor and the kind of move away from ritualized partner dancing was happening across quite a broad spectrum. And also, I'm just saying people are going to want us to qualify this. And of course, on disgay dance floors and on rave dance floors to this day, you know, people do partner dance. - Of course. - People who found each other dance with each other and they use it as a sort of mating ritual. So, but I think even then, even in those, I think we sort of have to be clear to people what we're talking about. I think we are talking about a significant change, which is a change really away from a situation where even when that happens in the kind of dance floors we're talking about, usually it's experienced just having a degree of spontaneity, that it's a sort of, you know, it's a sort of emergent property of the dance floor experience that you end up in a kind of semi-erotic display with somebody. It's not that you're sort of following a pre-programmed, ritual dance, which certainly for white people, we could sort of raise questions about it within sort of other communities. Certainly for white people, this is like a big change. It's a big change that takes place over the course of the '60s, basically. And of course, it's a change that, you know, people have resisted. I mean, it's a change with, to some extent, arguably people have seen coming for decades. That's why rock 'n' roll in the '50s was considered shocking in the segregated southern states. They thought it was going to, you know, people were going to get it, people were getting all excited and dancing like black people. And we're dancing with black people. You can't have that. So, yeah, but I think, but clearly this critical moment, you're here, of course. Clearly the real sort of transitional moment, according to us, is basically around 1970, the kind of the moment of the turn of the '70s, basically. Yeah. But we just know from videos of, you know, watching Woodstock, it was sort of festival, whatever, that there, you know, people were not always clearly not always dancing within partners, and that this was coming under concerted pressure within the second half of the 1960s. But if you went to a discotheque in the second half of the 1960s, you would largely, or almost exclusively, have seen people dancing in couples. That was a social regulation at the time. You would never see two men dancing, even if they were straight, it was illegal for two men to dance with each other. One of the interesting things is just how conservative discotheque culture was in the 1960s in some respects, compared to what was going on, you know, within, you know, the wider counter-cultural movement, you know, 1969, if you had the chance to kind of go to Woodstock for the weekend, you know, or go out to a discotheque in the New York City for the weekend, you would have been absolutely mad to stay and go on to the discotheque in New York City because the promise of change and excitement and radicality and, you know, different forms of sociality, that was all happening up at the festival. You know, what it didn't do is create a scenario in which people willingly decide, I mean, this is really what we're talking about, is they willingly decide at the beginning of 1970 that each week they want to go out dancing all night, and in some cases, and in some spots, they will go out dancing for 10 hours or 12 hours, and they will do so in spaces that are designed with extreme care and intelligence to maximize this experience, the experience. This is new. And so that's what we're, that's what we're talking about. It is new, yeah, it is new. Well, so as an aside, you know who is the self-styled king of the discotheques in Britain in the 1960s? No, Jimmy Savoel. Well, I was going to guess at that, but it's a name I'll try not to lie. Try 'em around, actually. Well, it doesn't, in no way undermines your case that the discotheque wasn't a space of freedom. Yeah, no, I never quite understood the argument about Jimmy Savoel being kind of the world's first DJ in the rest of it. Well, nobody's making that now, nobody's making that claim now. I mean, let's do this another time, you know, but I'm not just a Jimmy Savoel. No, no, no, everybody who said Jimmy Savoel was the first DJ. Music, dance, sound systems, counterculture. This is Love is the Message. This chapter that I'm writing at the moment on disco and labour, I'm going over some of the themes that obviously were established in Love saves the day, but also trying to introduce a few twists, a bit more analytical in place, it's thinking through the theme in particular work. Anyhow, in the process of doing this, I started to just kind of like toy around with an idea that I think I'm almost certainly going to have cut from the piece because it's already too long. But it's to compare like the past time of jogging with, you know, the acts of going out dancing. And I really, I think we should come back to this, but they are both phenomenal in the '70s. Yes, true. Whereas one is all about, you know, it's quite, finally, it's about individual flexibility, keeping yourself healthy, to basically the idea is be a good worker or be a good family member, going out dancing, you know, contrast in a, you know, which happens in parallel effectively. Happens, you know, has a very different set of values, ones which are much more obviously kind of collective apart from anything else. You only get your thrill on the dance, or if you're surrounded by other people. I'm sure if you go out jogging and you're in a big, you know, you're in a marathon or something, I'm sure that unquestionably would bring its own. So anything that's public has its thrill. But basically, when people start to get out dancing of the early '70s on a weekly basis and wanted to go out all night, they knew that it had the crowd. This is the other thing that happens. We start to have a sense of this thing called the crowd, or what we would call, you know, what sometimes gets called the vibe of a collectivity that hasn't influenced over the DJ. This is where it all starts. In a sense, it's from the dance floor, rather than the DJ booth, the kind of discotec culture. No, well, that is really interesting. And that is relevant, actually. Because, I mean, Jimmy Savile does. I mean, Jimmy Savile talked about being a DJ in really creepy terms. You know, he talked about it in terms of, like, controlling the crowd. Yeah, like he's just-- Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. He just-- he described himself with some interviews where he's talking about being a DJ, and he's just-- I mean, it is kind of-- he just-- he'd already sounds like an evil villain. No, that's really interesting. And, you know, what you say about Jimmy Savile Parallels is, you know, the most famous DJ in New York City, during the 1960s was a guy called Terry Noel. And I interviewed him for Love Saves the Day. And his entire analysis of his own approach to DJing was to position himself or depict himself as a puppeteer. But, of course, the contrast here is we're dead. It's we're dead, David. And with this kind of emerging idea. But also, actually, the contrasts as well. Sorry, go on. Yeah, okay, yeah. Francis, go tell us. Yeah, we'll talk about the Grateful Dead. That's what you're going to be. Well, with all of these guys, I mean, the Grateful Dead, are basically a sort of-- I mean, I always say, actually, as a sort of long-time enemy of rock culture, I always want to claim that the Grateful Dead are not even a rock band. But actually, they play a kind of unique form of white jazz. But they're basically what they are doing is what they are known for is this improvised music. And they would always talk about how absolutely indissociable from the crowd, the experience of the crowd, the relationships of the crowd, their performances were. They didn't like making studio records. And the reason-- the precise reason why they encouraged this whole culture of trading tapes, like bootleg recordings. But they weren't bootlegs because they encouraged it. Of their life recordings, of their concerts was precisely because they always said, look, our art only really happened at the moment when we're playing with a crowd. Like, it can't be done in any other way. And it was absolutely informed by these ideas coming out of the counterculture, coming out of stront and mysticism that it informed the counterculture, coming out of the counterculture critique of elitist, heroic, mature individualism. Yeah. and it all based to some extent on this idea that the person who's up there performing or up there DJing is not a heroic individual who is sadistically doing something to the ground, but rather they are just a channel, they're like a shaman or what's happening is something almost mystical and what they're doing is actually letting go of their ego, they're evacuating any sense of personal identity and control and just becoming a channel through which the crowd expresses itself to itself. Enjoying the show if you can please consider supporting what we do via our Patreon so we can stay for it. You can find the link in the show notes thanks and back to the show. So this is so let's listen to some music and let's start with Ola Tungi drums of passion and this is a really interesting record in terms of thinking about this emerging matrix that kind of involved basses, sound systems, music and people dancing. And France's dresser had been the DJ at the sanctuary at the point when it was running as basically failing discotech for Straits who'd even kind of been a semi-accol eye of Terry Noelle's at one point, although they're sort of becoming rivals. And it was on those at the very beginning of 1970 that these two guys Seymour and Shelley who owned a bunch of gay bars in the West Village decided to buy the sanctuary, reopen it and turn it into the first discotech in New York City that would openly welcome gay men into its midst. The only employee they kept on following the buy-out was Francis Grasso, the DJ. Francis therefore had to kind of respond to or had to understand what was going to be involved in the transition from playing to this kind of exclusively straight crowd to playing one that was very, very mixed and also included a significant number for the first time of gay men. And what he found is that the kind of energy on the dance floor was transformed when the new crowd came into the sanctuary. I mean, it was this kind of, it was a moment of a sense of, you know, the pursuit of freedom and liberation was already quite intense, generally speaking within the late 1960. This was what was on many people's minds. But then you add to that the sense of the need for freedom of, you know, not only the kind of gay lesbian bisexual and trans crowd, which was, you know, already marked, but also the participation in this setting. And it was pretty much the same as the loft, of course, of significant numbers of women and people of color. These are all people who've kind of been oppressed historically and have also experienced this oppression through the body, through being told that you can't go in certain public spaces, or you can't, you're not allowed to kind of kiss that person, or whatever it might be, or you've got to kind of because you, you know, you can give birth, therefore you have to follow all of these social codes. So these group, these people also would want to release, in addition to the general desire for release. So it's doubly kind of intensified, if you like, at the sanctuary. And Francis had come from this, from this background, which was just like the established praxis within discotheque culture in New York City at the time, whereby DJs would play five or six records. And then I've said this in an earlier episode, where then kind of the job was to kind of clear the dance floor and get everyone to go and buy a drink. So they put on a slow number. And so this was the rhythm. When Francis got into this, he found himself playing to this new, this new crowd at the sanctuary, he said he didn't even dare put on a slow record to kind of make them go and play at the bar, because he was worried that they would be kind of, you know, they'd be a rebellion. The people would boom, boom off the stage and it'd lose his job. So this was an, you know, it wasn't like Francis Grassau invented the kind of idea of mixing between two records, but because the energy became so enhanced with this new crowd, congregating on the dance floor, you found himself needing to respond in the way he played as the kind of the artist or the performer, I guess you could say. And he did this by no longer putting on slow records in order to kind of work the bar. And secondarily, indeed, tried to find a way of maintaining the energetic flow by being the first DJ to mix between two records. And one of the records that really captures this kind of historic development. And they were very similar developments also at the loft, but David hadn't been operating in the, or opened in the same way. Prior to 1970 that the sanctuary had, so the kind of the parallel at the sanctuary is, or the contrast I should say, the sanctuary is more interesting. And one of the records that came to embody this, this, this transformation, or this change I should make should say, which David also liked to play at the loft was Olatinji's, Drums of Passion, recorded in 1959 in New York City as it happens, but it was kind of, it was a classic, it was a classic example of West African drumming styles recorded by Olatinji, who was the son of a diplomat, I believe, who was based in New York City. Anyway, up to this point, Francis Grasso had been playing Santana's Jingo, which is the kind of, is the Santana, Mexican rock bands, cover version of the original of Drums of Passion. But it still remains a rock track, even who had certain, certain, you know, latinized aspects to it, perhaps quite mild. Whereas the Olatinji just full on polyrhythmic drumming is very intense, very stripped down, very tribal. And, and Francis like, you know, well, if, you know, who's like, well, he didn't feel he could play the Olatinji to his previous straight crown, he already loved this record, but when the gay, you know, the mixed slash gay crowd came into the sanctuary, Francis like, yeah, this is the moment where I can, you know, this crowd is limber enough. They want to party hard enough to get into this record. One of the things I was thinking about when you're talking about how the Grasso is playing records in a way, which is no longer organized around the periodic consumption of alcohol, it's the fact that just on a purely on a bio material basis, what's going on, as we said, before is this is a crowd of people getting themselves high on endorphins, like whenever else they're taking, they're getting high on endorphins, because alcohol complicate kills your endorphin. I mean, alcohol just kill your endorphin high, however much exercise you've done, you know. And so it didn't, and that, that as a sort of dot as dancing as a collective practice, which is part of the organo, eyes around collectively raising your endorphin levels through dance, it always has a very tense relationship with alcohol. Yeah. And of course, that's one reason why other drugs get taken up. And, you know, if people are going to take drugs in those circumstances, they want to take drugs, which are going to enhance, rather than suppress their experience, kind of raising their endorphin levels collectively on the dance floor. And that's where LSD comes in at this day, because actually it turns out LSD will massively amplify, you know, LSD just acts as a sort of amplify to whatever's happening rather than be a sort of suppressant like alcohol. And so, and it's David who really does this, isn't it? It's David Mancuse, the love, who really brings together the sort of the grateful, dead idea of dancing on LSD with this kind of emerging New York idea of dancing collectively to this very rhythmic music. Yeah. Well, as, as you know, as well as anyone, David became, you know, deeply interested in sound reproduction and developing as sound system. Even during the, he brought his first pair of clips from during the 1960s, we've, we've mentioned this in passing before. So, he was already interested in kind of, you know, the elevated experience of life that good quality sound reproduction can give you, you know, just the sound of music, heard as if it was music effectively. I mean, I'm not only just thinking about this now, but, you know, when David first heard a pair of clip shots, he couldn't see them actually because apparently they were behind a curtain. And he brought them from a friend called Jimmy Miller, who's got them from Richard Long, this kind of guy who will go on to talk a bit more later on in this episode. And Dave, I just, I don't remember the exact words that David used or what he told me, but he, what, effectively, when he heard these clip shots, but couldn't see them because they were behind a curtain, he was blown away. He's like, where, what is this sound? So, it was a pure response to beautiful music that sounded musical. That was the beginning point for David, you know, putting his ear to the, the whirlpool in the stream while tripping and hearing all the sonic information, you know, all the information in the universe, David said, or something along those lines. These are, it's a very kind of, it's a very instinctive kind of innate response to sound. I think, and I guess, you know, I mean, this is something you better at talking about, the me, but there's this sort of, we should be going forwards, but to go backwards a little bit, there's something about the human body, about vibration, about the beginning of the universe, beginning with sound, the bang. about music being basically a fundamentally vibrational experience that is core to who we are as human beings and it's why I guess we feel that this is interesting to kind of go back to this culture in the 1970s because this was a transformative way for us to kind of through the human body experience vibration in the form of music and find ways to take that further. Yeah well you're right and also I think and it's one reason why the idea of the counterculture of that moment still holds its appeal it's because it's partly about trying to hold together of this sort of spiritual and this sort of biological and this political dimensions of that way of thinking at all together because you were saying earlier quite rightly how one of the things that's going on at the time is all these groups of people who have experienced depression through their bodies are seeking forms of liberation and we could even add to that well it's also true straight why men who had to have a very constricted restrained way of inhabiting their body in the mid 20th century you know you sort of a specific kind of build you were not supposed to be very emotive you absolutely not supposed to dance and enjoying dance well and enjoy it in quite the same way I mean there was there were class dimensions to that as well but but also like in kind of in in sort of philosophy and in sort of political theory you know people are also trying to think about exactly this set of issues at that time aren't they this is the moment when Jean-Phause Leutard right is put the libido and the economy and people are really trying to sort of get away from the mid 20th century idea which is really a sort of product of certain strands of psychoanalysis which is the idea that well sort of repressing your body controlling your body it was the necessary cost of being modern like civilized human being and instead people are thinking about starting to think that you know a lot of the ways we are encouraged to inhabit our bodies are the product of sort of oppressive social power dynamics and so you've got to lose in Guatari they're going to French philosophers trying to try to rework psychoanalysis and and mix it with radical strands of Marxism and they're thinking about you know they have these completely impenetrable phrases like the the body without organ which is sort of a way of describing an experience of the body in which your body your experience of the body is no longer defined by the sort of cultural norms which determine you know your gender your sexuality or identity this is correct use of the body those marcus as well but marcus was kind of yeah well yes they were good well marcus is much more yet marcus well marcus had this quite complicated idea of what he called repressive desublimation and he's more writing in the early 60s and he's talking about the way in which kind of consumer culture encourages are very kind of regulated like increasing your appetite so he's saying that people are that sublimation for Freud is the process by which you you take your natural urges to kill people or fuck people and you then you you you push that energy into other areas of life so the reason you produce great art or you do the washing up or do anything really is because it's mainly because you can't actually do you can't express your animal energy in other more primitive civilization is based on repression yeah that's right yeah that's right and that is called sublimation and then marcus it talks about desublimation in other words in advance consumer capitalism you're actually sort of encouraged to you know indulge your appetites you know for sex or for food or for drink but he says in a capitalist society you get what he calls repressive desublimation this idea that that you are you are being heard to sort of desublimate but in a way which ultimately isn't really liberatory because it's completely privateized it's completely individualized you're just being trained to be a good consumer who's who's sort of an addict actually I mean the ultimate repressively desublimated person is an addict somebody who's yeah they're not they're not they're not living life like a sort of Victorian sort of pure return like repressing all their desire for pleasure but but they're even more repressed because they just hooked on smack or whatever so and then but then the count of the part of the project of the counter culture is well how do we get desublimated in a non-repressive way and I would say that the most the the most immediate answer to that is well we do it together we do it in groups we do we don't just do it at home watching TV we don't just do it like you know at the shopping mall kind of buying stuff we do it in some other way and of course the loft is like one expression very pure sort of expression of that notion but but also there's something about the sort of control nature of the loft and indeed the sound system the fact that the sound system the careful very careful management of the sound system like the careful curation and you know the precision engineering quite literally of the sound system it becomes a way of cultivating an experience within which that desublimation won't be repressive it will be liberating and empowering we're making this podcast because we believe that alternative history and radical ideas should be given as much airtime as possible yet it's increasingly difficult for knowledge of this kind to circulate through the mainstream media or university sector we love doing it and we're committed to making sure it's available for free to anyone who wants it but at the end of the day for our standout producer map this is what we do for our jobs this kind of work isn't just a hobby and we've each permanently lost a significant chunk of our regular income due to the pandemic we won't be able to carry on doing this without some financial support so if you have the means and you like what we're doing please consider supporting us via our Patreon you can find the link in the shown notes so Eddie Kendrick's girl you need a change of mind is one of the most important records to be played at the loft and the wider downtown party scene during the first half of the 1970s there's very much a record that kind of David picks out it's it's long it's got a rousing falsetto it has two crescendos and it's just a beautiful beautiful record but it presented some interesting a sort of interesting dilemma for David so David started to and that started to develop his sound system in in these different ways and one of the most significant ones was that he started to feel that it was in the certain records that he was listening to were a little bit muffled needed a bit more kind of a great a greater degree of kind of you know treble input so he devised this piece of gear which which became known as a twitter array he got an engineer Alex Rosner who had bought a second pair of clips from to build them according to David's own specification and he hung them from the ceiling and of key moments in a party or in moments where he felt that records needed a bit more sharpness he would kind of turn on these twitter rays but that created an imbalance and he felt that there needed to be offset with bass reinforcements and he built Richard along he asked Richard along to build him some bass reinforcements that would offset records that seem to maybe have a bit more too much treble and Eddie Kendrick was one of these records David just came to you know as much as he loved the record he felt it lacked a kind of bass presence so so bass reinforcements were partly introduced for that reason this went on to transform the world of sound within within party culture and discotech culture before this point no one had thought about tampering with sound and you know one could say enhancing it in these particular ways but the interesting thing with David is that after doing this for a while he eventually decided to pull back and get rid of the twitter rays and the bass reinforcements because he decided that that was involved too much interference too much ego on the part of the DJ and the most important thing he could do was to let the music kind of speak for itself but by that point twitter rays and bass reinforcements are out on bass as we know has gone on in particular has gone on to define a great deal of party culture so bass obviously has this long lineage going back to also not just New York City and David Mankozo asking Richard along to build bass reinforcements but obviously Jamaica what do you know about what was going on with the development of sound system culture in Jamaica when did that accelerate as a technology designed for dancing effectively well it's pretty much precisely coterminist with the other things we've been talking about happening at the same time so in the second half of the 60s and already very strong and well established culture of social dance and especially social dance often outdoors because you know it was warm and dry whether a lot of the time in Jamaica that very well established culture of social dance including dancing to records really sort of develops and takes on a new level of intensity. With the development first of rock steady really, sort of the immediate precursor to sort of reggae proper in the second half of the 60s and then the development of reggae, under development of dub reggae and roots reggae is very heavy, heavily sort of politicized and sort of spiritualized versions. And so there's a very similar, very comparable attention to the mechanics of amplification as if that is itself for sort of almost spiritual exercise, it's like getting the sound, or getting the best sound. It's also competitive, of course, it's also driven by the fact that the Jamaican sound systems are competitive with each other. But this concept of this distinctive concept of the sound system that emerges in Jamaica, in some ways as a sort of organizational concept, I think in some ways it's sort of better developed than what develops in New York, because it's interesting, because of course when we started doing events with David in London, eventually the collective that organised those events decided to call ourselves as a sound system. And David didn't understand why he wasn't familiar with that Jamaican usage. But that Jamaican usage in a way is of that concept of the sound system, I think it's a better developed as an organizational concept, because in that usage the term doesn't only refer to like the high five. It refers to the idea that your speakers and amplifiers and turntables are central to what you do, and they're distinctive, and you're constantly working on them, and the role that engineer is one of the artists in the collective. But also it's the whole collection of elements together, it's the equipment, it's the records, it's the DJ, and it's the MCs of course, and that's where MC over records really begins as an art form in that moment. And so this notion that the whole assemblage of elements all together are what makes the experience, and what has a sort of collective identity, becomes a kind of central feature of reggae culture and dub music culture, that also becomes an important idea with Jamaican immigrants in both in the States and especially in Britain. And if I'm in New York, DJ Kuhl-Hirk is one of those who is often credited with the invention of hip hop is one of those guys, he is basically MC over funk records instead of over reggae records, and that's the only difference. And then also there's this idea of the now base takes on this really specific significance in dub and reggae culture, because really what you're trying to do is you're trying to create this experience, this experience of what the critic and theorist Julian in re-cares, called sonic dominant, this experience of kind of being sort of overpowered by the sound, but also empowered by that experience at the same time. And it's this experience of having the base kind of shake your bones, shake your skin. And of course, base is, you know, this isn't what I've written about, other people have written about, you know, but our experience of heavily amplified base is our experience of sound as a physical force, as a bodily force. You know, your eardrums and your brain register the treble frequencies, but your whole body registers the base. And so it's a sort of experience of materiality, but it's also the experience which is supposed to be engendered, you know, the ideal situation in which you're supposed to listen to dub or root reggae is listening to a sound system, smoking weed, you're supposed to experience the state of what is called IRE, which is a sort of elevated state of consciousness, at the same time, as a state of sort of absorption in the sound and in the moment. It's really kind of interesting parallel. And I guess, I mean, one of the most interesting kind of depictions, not just of this kind of music and dance, actually, but of any kind of music and dance, was actually the film that was shown on the BBC just a, just early this year when, last year, 2020, this is part of Steve McQueen's series of films about the Black British experience. The series was called Small Acts and the film that everybody talked about, there's a film called Lovers Rock, which is a film about a house party. And it is, you know, it's the greatest cinematic representation of a house party ever. You know, it was one of those things, actually, when I watched it, I thought it's so, I wish David had been around to see it. He'd just, he'd have loved it so much. And of course, the track that everybody went crazy about, like on social media the day after this was this track with the revolutionaries, Kuntikin Daydub from 1976, a really classic piece of, classic piece of heavy dub, you know, really designed to incite an experience of collective intensity on the dance floor, which is, which is parallel to, but also very different from the kind of experience that people try to get, you know, on the great for their dance floor at the loft at the sanctuary. So if we had to move on with this history, sort of thinking about the history of sound systems into the, into the 70s, to the club in New York, which becomes globally famous for its sound system, isn't the loft? The loft actually, the loft only becomes really famous for its sound system outside is sort of cognizanty underground circles in New York after you did your book really. I mean, I, you know, I knew about the loft, but what I knew about the lot before you did your book, what I knew about the loft was, there were these hippies on acid dancing to soul music. That's kind of weird and interesting. But it wasn't, but the idea that they have this fantastic audio, the sound system wasn't really known, but everybody knew about the paradise garage. Absolutely. Everybody knew that the paradise garage, this legendary New York, this New York nightclub, had supposedly had the best sound system in the world. So what's going on with that? Well, what's going on with that is it's not altogether distinctive, distinctive from the loft, as is so often the case. So, you know, as I was saying just before, David Mancuzo befriended sound engineer called Richard Long, bought his first pair of Clipshawns kind of from a person who Richard Long had sold them to Jimmy Miller. And then David asked Richard Long and not Alex Rosner to build him the base reinforcements when initially David decided he wanted to offset his Twitter arrays with some extra base. So already in the very early 1970s, Richard Long was becoming was becoming known as a person as an engineer, specialising in the reproduction of base. And he went on to with a guy called Mike Stone who was a loft regular open party space called the Soho place. In many respects, mimic the loft, it was one of numerous parties that kind of re, you know, you know, borrowed David's kind of template to avoid selling alcohol in order to stay open all night and used and held these parties in his own home, which effectively was also, you know, his own kind of place for, you know, testing and developing and experimenting on equipment. So these parties became known for their base kind of elements, their base components. And then Richard kind of got, and this kind of the role of base in New York City party culture, got to be re-engaged and developed significantly after Michael Brody, also a regular on the dancer of the loft decided to open the Paradise Garage and started construction parties with his DJ Larry Levan, also a regular on the dancer of the loft. Are we, am I getting repetitive? And in January 1977, now the construction parties were in the kind of side room, a side room of this kind of very expansive parking garage, which is where the name the Paradise Garage took part of its name from. So there was a real challenge on what to do with the space in terms of its sound. And it was kind of, I mean, we'll return to, you know, this is worthy of, you know, more detail than or more, a bit more talk than we can give it here. But the short version of the story is that up until this point, Larry Levan had basically worshipped pretty much everything that David had done, and when he had gone to, for example, play at a Michael Brody's first party, which is called Greed Street, you know, a part of the whole deal was that Michael Brody was going to reproduce the system that David had at the loft using clipshones. But by the time Michael Brody moved to the Paradise Garage and the challenged emerge of building a system for this, you know, huge room that, I'm not sure how many times bigger it was than the loft on Prince Street, but I don't know, it could have been, than if it's six or eight. Certainly, the capacity was was around about 3,000 people in that space, whereas the capacity at the loft probably was around 400, 500. David might have 1,000 to 1,200 people going through in the course of a night, but that was, you know, there was a different scale at work here. And Larry Levan initially was, you know, the initial idea was was to get Michael, sorry, to get Alex Rosner who would sort of assisted David with the development of the system of the loft, to get Alex Rosner to be the over it, to be the engineer who installed the system at the garage. And Alex was coming committed to basically working with, you know, an expanded version of David's model, filling the space with Clipshorns. And this is what David thought should happen. David was kind of vaguely friendly with Michael Brody, and they've actually introduced him to the Paradise Gaurar space in the first place. So that all got underway, but at some point, Leridavan changed his mind and decided that he didn't just want the kind of warmth and precision that we identify with David's system, but he wants to kind of have power. He wants to have force. He wanted to have a, you know, create a sense of urgency, just sheer intensity. Well, the things you were saying about the trumpet, about the Jamaican setup, that there's parts of, you know, being almost you be over, you've taken over by sound. There was this, there was this kind of essay by Walter Hughes, which was one of the first good essays written about disco called, in the Empire of the Beat, you know, it captures it quite nicely. It's just this idea of, there's a territory, it's an expanding territory, and it's driven by the beat. And you're basically, you know, there's a, you are compelled to follow that beat. You kind of give up some of your agency, basically. Yeah, I think, and it's worth, it's worth noting that, because we're constantly saying how great the Clipshorns are. They're definitely going to be high-fi heads out there saying, no, Clipshorn, darn like great, because their bass response is terrible. And it is worth noting that, for people who's preferred kind of musical experience, is more this one of total immersion, that indeed you associate with post-Paradise garage, like club culture, or we kind of reggae, the lost system, they experience the lost system as a bit frustrating, you know, because it, because the bass isn't heavy enough. And you can, you can balance that, like a lot of people with a lost style system now use subwoofers and stuff as well, but it's just worth acknowledging. I don't know, absolutely. Well, I think we're going to, so Larry felt that way. Larry also, Larry wanted more of that loud immersion experience. Well, he wanted to explore that possibility, you know, basically it was the acolyte deciding that he wanted to kind of change a few things that his teacher had told him. And, you know, I think Larry and David had a bit of an argument over this effectively. David was insisting that you could get the sound levels that required the Larry wanted by just putting enough clipshorns in the room and getting the right amplification for them. By this point, David was quite committed to this, this sort of zen, this zen about amplification. He shouldn't do anything. He shouldn't have any EQs. He shouldn't have any mixing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And anything else is sort of is the ego of the DJ interfering? Absolutely. Absolutely. No, it's a good time to mention. So, yeah, it's a really important point is that, you know, David decided indeed to get rid of the tweeter rays and to get rid of the bass reinforcement. And this whole change happened around the time that he moved from Broadway, having been the party, having been shut down on Broadway, six or seven Broadway, and moved to 99 Prince Street. And it was a much bigger space than he needed to buy a lot of equipment. And very early on, into that move, a friend kind of told him about a piece of kit that David found out he could buy or was told he could buy at litters, a very expensive stereo shop on the upper east side called Lyric High Fi. And David ended up dealing with this sort of sound engineer there called Larry Velasa. And this took David to the next level and set off a whole new train, which we can't go into too much detail here, but a whole other train of revisions that saw him effectively start investing. What's, and you know more about this than I do, but what sometimes is referred to as kind of Class A sound, sometimes is referred to as audio file sound. But basically it means that you spend as much money as you possibly can on trying to create perfect sound reproduction. And this in fact led David, indeed, to start undoing a system, get rid of the tweeter rays, get rid of bass reinforcements, start to kind of buy very high end gear. Eleven, the leavenson equipment became particularly important to him. And David was always very impressed that Mark leavenson started out as a musician as a as a cellist and basically made a start of an eight amps because he wasn't happy with the, with the musicality of the amps that were out there. So David loved this idea of buying equipment for someone who was so dedicated and immersed in music. And he just, he just constructed this system, no one that just simply didn't exist in public anywhere in the world in terms of the degree of precision for your mind and your ass following. So one of the things that emerged, of course, with David's tireless attempts to improve his sound system and effectively spend whatever spare money you might have on improving that sound system is the, you know, he just kind of, the system became this, this, this awesome thing. David was, you know, would would regularly get in sound engineers to come and, you know, see his set up and listen to what he created in order to get their advice on, on how he, how he could improve things. And, you know, usually the response was actually, I can't improve this. Can, can I borrow some of the things you're doing for systems I'm about to work on? So there was this kind of useful, quiet magnificence to what David was doing. And so an example of one of the records that David got to play in the loft that simply would never translate into any other kind of situation was the Chuck Manjone featuring S the Satterfield, land of make believe. And it's a record that became one of David's favorite records. I mean, the land of make believe captures so much about what the, what the loft was all about, about kind of magical utopian space. There's, it's the kind of, it's the, there's very quiet aspects of the record that meant that it was just, as I already said, couldn't play it in a public disc or say, people would just not go on. Sorry, sorry. No, no, go for it. I think it follows from what we said about the limitations of the loft sound system for some people. I mean, the strength of that sound system, it's lack of, of, of overall power, it's lack of base is it had a kind of delicacy and deep level of detail, especially in the mid range and the treble, which meant that you, you could play a whole set of records that would probably just sound sort of banal on a normal sound system, but actually come across as having this beautiful, this without fairy lights of crystalline clarity and the mangy only record is a really typical example. Tana Gardner worked that body in 1979. This is a classic example of a disco record about dancing in which people are explicitly celebrating the idea of dancing, but of course, also it absolutely for the lyric work that body, it completely resonates with what you were saying earlier about about disco as a sort of alternative to jogging, about disco as kind of inherently physical experience, about an experience of physicality as a source of joy. It kind of goes back to Marcus really, you know, Marcus was saying, you know, the entire life was repressive because we were told that we had to constrain our desires and our drives in order to kind of, you know, to be civilized and go out to work and work was part of being constrained and the idea was all of it, you know, if we start to work less, we can sort of liberate this, these energies, these potentiality, and so work that body is like, it's not that people didn't want to do any work, they just wanted to kind of work and you know, there was an understanding that you put effort into something, you can get rewards from it. But it's a permanent tension, isn't it, the relationship between dance culture and work, like is dance culture the thing that is your compensation for having a shitty job and a shitty life and that reinforces the society and re helps to reproduce a society in which those things are accepted and normalized and definitely at certain times in its history dance elements of dance culture have willingly embraced that social role and that disgust and appalls me every time it happens. On the other hand, dance culture has also been seen as you said as sort of experimental space within which different modes of being, different ways of channeling our collective effort and collective energy, different ways of feeling what it feels like to do something active can be experienced. And for me, this is the crucial point actually, I think to finish on today and it's reiterating what you just said a minute ago, which is that all what's going on across the seventies is that these dance spaces, sound systems, dance floors, they're like laboratories, they're experimental spaces, they're spaces where people are trying to answer questions, like I think we said on an earlier program maybe. that you know the question the loft was trying to answer was the question one of the key questions of the counterculture at the end of the 60s, how do we take acid together without going crazy or but there's a whole other range of questions that are also being investigated from the funk dance floor to the northern soul dance floor to the disco dance floor to what you know what does it mean to have a fully a form of physical expression you know which isn't constrained by previously received ideas about what bodies should do or particular kind of bodies should do well what does it what are the ways of being joyful together that we can experience using contemporary technologies you're using new kinds of music new kinds of amplification and all that stuff and I think it's that it's the experimental status of the dance floor and sound systems in the 70s that I think makes them still so important for us because to some extent we're still we're still working through some of this sort of experimental agendas that they set out for us [BLANK_AUDIO]