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Information found in Vibe Magazine 1992
page 1
For over a
decade, Larry Levan ruled the Dance Music world from his roost in the DJ
booth at New York's legendary Paradise Garage. Last November his weak
heart - made weaker by years of excessive drug abuse - gave out. Was it a
gradual suicide? Pages 2 and 3
Because of the Garage's door policy, membership (which wasn't easy to come by) was highly prized. At a prearranged time on a weekday, hopefuls, would line up outside. There a stern-faced Michael Brody would quiz them on their sexuality and why they want to come to his club. The so-called core membership - the predominantly gay Saturday night members - could also attend the mainly straight Friday nights, but not vice versa. "There were straight guys who would swear to Michael that they were gay so they could get a Saturday-night membership," Mel Cheren recalls.
A frequent visitor of the booth was radio jock Frankie Crocker, then the program director for WBLS, when the station was the most progressive black-music outlet in the country. Crocker would hear a left-field dance track such as Loose Joints' "Is It All Over My Face" in the wee hours of Sunday morning and have the record all over the New York airwaves the next days. "Larry was always ahead of the latest trends," Crocker says. "He was the first person to turn me on to Madonna." Levan didn't play just the R&B-flavored dance tunes - "garage music" or "deep house." "Larry would play the latest underground cuts from Chicago, then he'd put on "Jump" by Van Halen or "Love Is A Battlefield" by Pat Benatar," remembers David DePino. "People would be gagging. but eventually they accepted it. He was the braves DJ I ever knew."
But it did. after the Garage closed, Levan was unable to recapture the glory of the early '80s. His drug use - cocaine and heroin mainly - his chronic lateness, and his extreme mood swings had always been notorious, but now his erratic behavior intensified. He would DJ intermittently at clubs in New York, London and Tokyo, sometimes so stoned he'd forget to put records on. One night at Trax, Levan was found asleep in the DJ booth in a pool of his vomit. As Mel Cheren, the Garage main financial backer, puts it: "Larry Levan was the king who lost his kingdom."
Larry
Levan was born Lawrence Philpot on July 20, 1954, at Brooklyn Jews
Hospital, when his older brother and sister, twins, were 18. Philpot which
he would later drop, was his father's name. His parents never married and
Levan, was in effect, raised as an only child; he lived with his mother,
Minnie - a dressmaker - in a rambling house in Bedford Stuyvesant,
Brooklyn, and inherited his love of music from her. She listened,
constantly, to blues, jazz and gospel singers and caught her youngest son
how to use the household record player when he was three. "I'd make him
put records on so that we could dance together," she remembers. Levan played his first engagement at five. "It was a birthday party for a neighborhood kid," Minnie Levan says. "He was so small they had to put the record player on a low chair so he could reach." As a child, Levan was an acolyte - a type of altar boy - at a local Episcopalian church. He was also a beigh kid at school, excelling in math and physics, and so adept at taking apart and putting back together various mechanical gizmos that his teachers predicted he would become an inventor. Born with a congenital heart condition and prone to bad asthma attacks, Levan was a fragile boy, who would sometimes faint in class. As a result, he fell behind in his work and eventually became a perpetual cruant. One day in his mid teens, walking through the neighborhood, Levan had a revelation. Hearing music coming from the window of a house, he stopped to listen and was amazed when one song meshed seamlessly with the next. Knocking on the neighbor's door, be introduced himself to the would-be-DJ, who owned a primitive mixer. Levan became fascinated whit the idea that the music should never stop. He began attending a private dance club - The Loft - and was quickly befriended by the bearded, long- haired owner and DJ David Mancuso, who encouraged Levan's interest in stereos and lighting. Housed in the factory loft where Mancuso lived, the club - after its inception on Valentine's Day, 1970 - was the prototype for all the late-night dance dives that followed in its wake, including the Garage. Its basic format - members only, no alcohol, minimal decorations, and great dance music played on a clean-sounding system - was widely imitated. "I was very much into the underground thing," says Mancuso, who has never advertised or promoted. "Maybe it was my hippie background."
From The Loft, Levan moved on to The Gallery,
and then to the famed Continental Baths where Bette Midler got her start.
One night when the DJ walked out, Levan, 19, went from working lights to
turntables. In the fall of 1974, he began DJing at Soho Place, another
lower-Broadway loft - this one belonging to technical whiz kid Richard
Long, who would go on to build the Garage's state-of-the-art sound system
(Long passed away in the mid '80s). Next came Reade Street, where owner
Michael Brody and Levan hatched plans to launch a much bigger venture, The
Paradise Garage in an indoor parking loc in Soho.
The Garage was relauched with a string of so-called construction parties later than year, but it was not an immediate success. "The club didn't really take on the atmosphere that people remember it for until 1980," says Cheer. In the meantime, Levan began doing remixes. His first was "C Is For The Cookie" by Cookie Monster, a disco novelty record based on a song from Sesame Street that was released in 1978. The next year he remixed Taana Gardner's debut single "Work That Body." His first big dance floor hit was "I Got My Mind Up (You Can Get It Girl)" by Instant Funk. The record went gold and Levan's studio career took off.
Levan's most prolific period came in the early '80s. Working for the cream of New York dance labels - West End, Salsoul, Sleeping Bag, 4th&Broadway - he remixed a string of records that would change dance music forever. Sublimely soulful and musically adventurous, such cuts as "Give Your Body Up To The Music" by Billy Nichols, "Serious Sirius Space Party" by Edna Holt, and "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" by Jocelyn Brown showed that dance music could appeal as much to the imagination as to the body. Levan's quintessential work come with the N.Y.C. Peech Boys, the group he cofounded and coproduced with Michael De Benedictus that featured the glorious vocals of Bernard Fowler. the group's best know song, "Don't Make Me Wait" - with its clap tracks and acappella segment - took nearly a year to records because Levan - weekend after weekend, testing new versions at the Garage - never finished until the single was absolutely undo Larry Levan.
But the crispy pop-soul didn't go over too well with the hardcore dance devotees. They had come to hear the sound Levan made classic during his 11 years at the Garage. Some dancers folded their arms and stood still, staring up at the DJ booth in the balcony. Others squatted on the floor. Enraged, Levan hurtled down the stairs, yelling and screaming, ordering people to "get up and dance," Returning to the booth, he let the record end before putting it on again. When this drew even more protests, he played the Jackson Five tune for a third time. "That's when I knew I couldn't use him anymore," recalls nightlife mainstay Steven Lewis, then the manager of the World. "It was no easy thing sacking the greatest DJ on the planet." But it had been a long time coming. The final two years of the Paradise Garage had not been Levan's best. He confined himself largely to Fridays with its less demanding audience. His production career was in the toilet: record companies shied away because he missed sessions or fell asleep in the studio, and when he was awake, Levan took so much time with each song that he recording bills were astronomical.
Levan seemed to deliberately court trouble. He routinely spent his rent money on drug, and one time had to go into hiding, fearing for his life, after threatening his Chinatown landlord with a loaded pistol. His relationship with Michael Brody, who had been his father figure, rapidly deteriorated. And then when Brody was diagnosed with AIDS, it seemed inevitable that Garage would have to close. Says David DePino: "When Larry knew the Garage was going to close, he freaked. He went on a self-destructive binge. He took drugs to spite people, to hurt them. The more you would say, "Larry, please don't do so many drugs, the more he would do them - right in your face."
MoonRoof Records owner Will Socolow, who employed Levan at his old label Sleeping Bag, puts it this way: "When you are a genius like Larry, people cater to yours every whim and allow you to do whatever you feel like doing." Larry Levan was encourage to behave like a spoiled child by the people who surrounded him. First by his mother, then by Michael Brody, and then, when Brody died soon after the Garage closed, the extended entourage that accompanied him everywhere - they took care of the adult responsibilities that Levan refused to deal with. One moment, he would be the most caring and generous person imaginable. The next, he would turn into an ogre. "Larry was so mean to Michael in his final days," DePino says. "He got Michael so mad that he took him out of his will so Larry didn't get the lights and sound system he was supposed to."
Under the spell of Levan's narcotic mix, people seemed to transcend human limits. Men crawled about on their hands and knees howling like dogs, while ocher's gyrated and leaps as if they could fly. After a 24-hours marathon, an exhausted crown gathered in front of Levan's DJ booth and pleaded, "Larry, please don't go," Standing in the middle of the dance floor littered with "Save The Garage" stickers, they dreaded a future without this "church-cum-cooperative for space-age Baptiscs," as John Iozia dubbed the club. The death of the Garage marked more than the end of a single disco - it was part of a ride change in club culture. It was around the same time that the first Todd Terry records appeared, as dance music headed in a harsher, more frenetic direction that appealed to a younger, straighter crowd.
The deejaying tour of Japan that Levan took just before he died was the highlight of his grim last days. In the two months he was in the country, Levan was treated like a star, a living legend. Fans waited for hours outside clubs to catch a glimpse or an autograph. "We have the best time in Japan," remembers Cheren. "It was like the old days again."
One night, in the hotel room in Okinawa, he and Cheren had a heart-to-heart. "Promise me that I'll live to see you back on top," Cheren said. "You will, " said Levan. "And this time I won't screw up." It was a promise he couldn't keep.
Near the end of Japanese excursion, Levan fell and hurt his hip. Returning to JFK Airport in a wheelchair, he checked himself into Beth Israel Medical Centre. He soon fled, claiming that people with TB were wandering the corridors without mask. After a brief stay at his mother's place, Levan went back to Beth Israel, complaining of a bad case of hemorrhoids. At 6:15 p.m. on Sunday, November 8, 1992, four days after Levan had been admitted to Beth Israel for a second time, Mel Cheren received a phone call from a doctor. Larry Levan, too weak to survive an operation, had died of endocarditic, an inflammation of the lining of the heart, that had been exacerbated by the massive amount of illegal pharmaceuticals he habitually snored, smoked, swallowed, and shot up during his lifetime. Why Levan - who had known about his heart conditions since childhood - continued to use drugs long after it was clear he was killing himself is a mystery. That it amounted to a gradual suicide is not. "Larry did exactly what he wanted to do, which was to destroy himself," says Socolow. "He knew he was going to die." Just before his trip to Japan, Levan had told his mother: "Mom, I've only six months left to live. I'm dying." He was gone in less that four.
"HIS TASTES SHAPED DANCE-CLUB-MUSIC" read the headline to the obituary that appeared in the New York Times the Wednesday after his death. A more personal note was sounded at the funeral service at St . Peters Lutheran Church on Lexinton Avenue in Manhattan. Mourner after mourner - some who had flown in from Britain and Japan - testified to the positive effects that Larry Levan had on their lives. "785 people showed up to Larry's memorial," says David DePino. "Of them, 150 were friends, the rest were Garage kids. He was the last DJ who could touch people that way."
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Last Update: February 15, 2005 |
The
initial opening of the Garage, in January of 1977, "was a disaster,"
recalls Mel Cheren. "The sound equipment got stuck in blizzard at an
airport in Louisville, Kentucky. And people were kept outside in 17-degree
weather. Some of them never came back."
One night, in 1988, barely six
months after the closing of the Garage, Levan was spinning at the World in
the East Village when, on a whim, he decide to play "ABC" by the Jackson
Five.
Veteran
DJ David Mancuso sees it differently: "People made drugs available to him
because it kept him in check and under their control. Larry was very
frustrated. He could have grown - and he wanted to grow, but he was held
back," Mancuso explains. "I talked with Larry about why he did so many
drugs and he told me it was because he was lonely - spiritually lonely. He
had none to turn to who didn't want something from him."
September
26, 1987, the last night of the Paradise Garage, was a bittersweet affair.
The previous night two people were killed and one was wounded while
standing in line. People traveled from all over the world to attend the
closing weekend. Keith Haring, whose trademark graffiti squiggles covered
every avilable surface in the club, flew in from Tokyo.
To
this new generation, weaned on more brutal sounds, Levan's essentially
integrationist message of love and peace seemed old-fashioned. and without
the arena that the Garage provided, Levan's talent seemed less special,
less relevant. New York City, with its fickle tastes, had found a new
soundtrack.
