Mr T takes us back to Brooklyn, and explains the obsessions that make him “the DJs’ DJ”.

 

They raided Vinyl last week. The cops shut down the party, made some arrests, confiscated (allegedly) $15,000 of door money and (also allegedly, legal fans) planted all manner of unlawful things on the premises. They did the same at ten other clubs across New York. It’s clear that, as ecstasy scare stories become a staple of American newspapers, someone important has decided that the city’s nightclubs must be strangled. After years of oppression from Mayor Giuliani, and with no liquor license to bring in the cash, Vinyl (home also to Body & Soul) was already suffering badly. This could easily push it into closure. And word is, Officer Dibble might be heading back tonight for a return match. Even now, the police could be loading up on coffee and donuts to see them through a long night of harassment (allegedly).

 

So no-one’s expecting a great night. “It probably won’t affect the big clubs, their crowd don’t care,” says one of the promoters, “but our kids know about it. A lot will stay away.”

 

Surprise then, as we gradually forget about the long arm of the law, to find the night shaping up nicely. And to see just how loyal a dancefloor Danny Tenaglia has finally built for himself. A Vinyl night for Danny used to be a rag-bag of leftovers from other scenes. There were a few old Garage/Shelter-heads, putting up with the tracks till he got to the churchy classics at the end of the night; old Sound Factory regulars who’d finally given up on Junior and his Elton John antics; plus a school-bus-load of candy-ravers, doing their best to look unhappy and wishing for some 140bpm breakbeats to shake their piercings to. Before that, when Danny played Tunnel, he found it even harder to play anything too funky, and at Twilo, as K became the Chelsea boys’ drug of choice, he was forced to play harder and harder, just to pump a little energy into their catatonic torsos.

 

Tonight however, though the club is never rammed, the cops haven’t scared too many people off, and everyone present is most definitely here for Mr T. It’s a good gaystraightblackwhitegirlboy mix, from manga teens to tall black queens. There are hardly any bystanders, and even some above average voguing going off in a corner. The track is ‘Signals’ by Microworld, (relax, spotters, it’s on his new Global Underground collection, easily the best representation of Tenaglia live to date), and as it starts building into a minimal monster, the dancers begin to whoop and holler. The lights go right back to black and all of a sudden we’re getting down and dirty. Danny is playing exactly the music he loves best, and the whole room is truly getting it. The name of his night is ‘Be Yourself’, and finally, in his home town, Danny can do just that.

 

“Words can’t describe it,” he growls, Tony Soprano meets Bugs Bunny. “Words can’t describe the feeling. All I can say is it’s really overwhelming. It’s got to be every DJ’s dream come true. To have their own residency, to have the whole night, to play from beginning to end, and have that whole crowd want you from beginning to end.”

 

New York used to be a city of residencies. DJs played in their club, for their crowd. It was what gave them their mastery: learning as much about their congregation as they knew about their records. Now the UK-born cult of the guest spinner has won over and this kind of weekly ritual is almost a thing of the past. “You can tell that they’ve anticipated this the whole week,” he beams, referring to his new clubland family. “And I’m the same. By Saturday I’m already anticipating Friday again. I’m like a kid along with them: I just can’t wait again for Friday that following week.”

 

He’s there when the club opens, arriving at 11 o’clock to set up his records, “That way I can start off with Sly and the Family Stone if I want. Just vibing, putting myself in the mood, pulling out music that has been sitting on my shelves for maybe 25 years. So I can warm myself up. By the time the crowd is there, I’m fully ready for them.” Playing long sets is another dying art, another lesson in greatness. “That’s an important part of my success,” agrees Danny. “And my enjoyment.” Few DJs have the subtlety to lead a club on a real journey, the guts to take the room down as well as up, or to play with emotions besides full-on frenzy. Only with a long night ahead of him can a DJ hope for any real interaction. So magnificent DJing is rarely a sprint. “Start out with a slow groove, the way it used to be and the way it should be,” he says. “I call it the appetiser, the entrée and then the dessert. The end of the night I come back with the classics. The last hour I’ll pull out all those surprises.”

 

They call Danny Tenaglia “the DJs’ DJ”. Every time he hears that, it feels like getting a Grammy. Mind you, he really doesn’t know how to react. He knows he’s great at what he does, but he still can’t handle it when people make such a big deal of him. He’s still surprised that kids bug him for an autograph, recognise him in clubs, want to shake his hand. He can’t get over the fact that so many industry types turn up to hear him play – so many off-duty DJs and producers, people he admires himself – they’ll be there on the dancefloor having the time of their lives. Ask a roomful of DJs who’s inspired them most, and Danny Tenaglia is one of the five or six names you’ll hear over and over. What makes him so respected among his peers? Why has he become so name-checked, so admired? What makes a great DJ great?

 

1972. Metropolitan Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s late on a Friday night and eleven-year-old Danny is leaning on his window-sill listening to the world go by. A truck thunders down the nearby Brooklyn Queens Expressway. Some off-duty cops laugh, drunk, as they roll out of Kellogg’s Diner on the corner. Danny’s side of the street is Italian; his family have lived in this house, above a deli, since his mother was a girl. He has three older brothers, but his mom just gave birth for the fifth time, and he’s no longer the baby of the bunch. The other side of the street is Spanish – Dominican and Puerto Rican – so his childhood has a constant Latin soundtrack. That’s what’s holding his interest tonight. There’s a social club in the basement of the building opposite and Danny’s soaking up the atmosphere as it spills out onto the sidewalk: watching the sexy couples, listening to the tumbling rhythms and the brassy stabs of the salsa.

 

“I loved music since birth,” he says. “Wherever I was. Whether it be radios, restaurants, jukeboxes, I was just naturally attracted to music.” When summer came people would be out on the streets. There were Latin block parties and Italian street festivals, like Our lady Of Mount Carmel, filled with food and music and giant Catholic statues. “If there were musicians. If we would go to weddings or parties, I was always the kid by the stage, looking at the band.”

 

There was never any trouble finding Christmas presents for Danny. Get him something musical: a tape deck, a guitar. He played some sax, struggled with piano lessons, knew music was to be his life, knew he had a great ear for pitch and rhythm, but could never find the discipline to really master an instrument. Finally, when his cousin Kelly played him an 8-track cartridge of a local DJ named Paul Kasella, the first time he’d heard records sewn together, Danny knew what it was he would devote his life to. “I heard it go from one record to the next, mixed, and I was like, ‘Oh shit, what was that? How did they do that?’ I already had this passion for vinyl, I loved collecting records and playing records, but never even knew there was this concept of continuous beat-matching – the art of DJing.” His cousin explained it to him. “He told me about the DJ, the nightclub, and all that. I was like, from that moment – ‘This is it!’”

 

And that’s probably the key to Tenaglia. His love of music, and his desire to play it, is so extreme it makes other DJs look half-hearted. It borders on insanity.

 

“Hi Danny, how are you?”

 

“Hi Mr B, I just woke up.”

 

“What did you dream about?”

 

“Records, records and more records.”

 

He’s never wanted to be anything other than a DJ. It’s the only serious job he’s ever had. Once he knew that mixing records had been invented, his destiny was fixed. His first rig was made from two toy decks plugged into the balance control of a stereo. “So one turntable would be on the left and the other on the right”. Desperate to see a real DJ, at 13 he made his brothers sneak him into a local club “I was just mesmerised by the lights and the people dancing. I knew from there on that this was my calling.”

 

The way Danny plays often takes things far beyond the notion of one record after another. He’ll use a small snatch of a track, loop it and let it progress imperceptibly, building a composition from a series of elements. If it’s not proper musicianship, it’s something very close. He has perfect pitch and has occasionally freaked musicians he’s worked with by spotting something their years of training missed. “I can’t describe it. It’s just knowing music. It’s understanding it.” Like many great DJs, Danny could probably have been a fine musician – if it wasn’t for records being a lot easier to play.

 

“I always felt like a musician when I was a kid,” he says.

 

You just never practised!

 

“I know,” he laughs. “If I sit down at a piano, I really feel natural with it, the way I am behind the decks. But I don’t know what I’m doing. I can find chords, basslines, but I can’t play with two hands, I can’t do solos, I can’t do string arrangements. Yes, I’m a frustrated musician at heart.”

 

The young Tenaglia bought a proper DJ set-up and was soon playing neighbourhood gigs: birthdays, weddings, pubs with mirror balls over the pool table. He even played his brother’s high-school prom. But he never got to play at his own – DJing had dragged him down from A-student to high-school drop out. “It wasn’t like messing up with drugs or drinking or anything. I just wasn’t interested in anything else but music.” Hanging out at the handball courts, he’d plug his gear into the street lamps for parties at McCarren Park. Pretty soon he was earning a living playing at a rollerdisco, emulating the music he heard in Manhattan clubs like the Loft, Inferno, Starship Discovery and the main vein, Larry Levan’s Paradise Garage. He wasn’t always a hit with the skaters. “I’d often arrive straight from the Garage, start playing weird disco like ‘Go Bang’ or ‘Moody’ and people are banging on the glass asking for ballads.”

 

More than anyone, it was Levan who showed him what greatness as a DJ was all about. Danny found inspiration in others – in David Mancuso’s masterful selection, in Bruce Forest’s technical wizardry, even in the harmonic perfection of the hi-NRG DJs at the Saint – but Larry Levan was his model.

 

“I really learnt the art of entertaining a crowd from him. I watched how he made the whole crowd just light up, feeling what he was feeling. It’s like a whole journey involved. How to take people from one plateau to the next. A proper set. It really wasn’t so much about technical things, ’cos he didn’t have all the toys we have today.”

 

The other lessons Tenaglia took from Levan were about sound. “I learnt about headroom: It’s not about always being on maximum volume, give yourself that headroom. That’s really important. A lot of DJs just want to go to ten. The fucking Garage. It was massive, with six stacks, and the quality, the clarity! I’m standing in front of it, feeling it from head to toe. Oh my god. I just wanted to put a mattress down and never leave.”

The best DJs have one foot in the booth, and one foot on the dancefloor (So be wary of the ones who enjoy being on a pedestal). The greatest are the ones who want to be down there dancing with the rest of the party. A great DJ knows how to combine music and people. And a surprising number of the greatest DJs are quite shy or awkward around people. Playing music is often their way of overcoming that, their way of communicating.

 

Today, people get inspired from listening to Tenaglia, the same way he was enthralled by legends like Levan. He’s one of a dying breed: he’s been playing records for more than 25 years, he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of dance music stretching back to disco and before, and yet he is still feverishly excited by new styles. And when Danny hears a new record, because he has such a vast body of knowledge to draw on, he can hear references, hints, reflections of other tunes, which even the person who made the record might not be aware of. It’s often said of Tenaglia that even if he plays a record you don’t like, it makes sense. That’s what it means to be the DJs’ DJ.

 

His advice to others is pretty practical. Ask him what makes a DJ great and he’ll tell you: hard work. “You got to make sure you’re going into this for the right reasons. If you’re partying, if you’re getting high, that’s mistake number one. You got to do this with a clear head, because the competition is fierce. Today, when you’re playing you’re looking at a roomful of DJs. Half the people here want to be doing what I’m doing. So you got to work that bit harder.”

 

Tenaglia himself is probably the hardest working man in showbusiness. With most DJs that just means getting on a lot of aeroplanes; with Danny it means working obsessively on material for his set. Not just things he intends to release, but little re-edits and remixes for his box, clever reworkings of tunes which aren’t quite perfect. For example, he loved ATFC’s Onephatdeeva Adeva remix but felt they’d laid down the vocals slightly off. Rather than play what he thought was a flawed record, he spent a day in his studio tweaking the original vocals and reattaching them to the dub mix (also on the Global Underground CD).

 

Such driven behaviour comes to a peak in his preparations for his annual blow-out at the Winter Music conference in Miami. This was where he first made it big, having left New York 1985-90 for a residency at Cheers, the only after-hours in town. Playing Miami is a little like coming home. And no other DJ in history has ever put so much time and effort into a single night. Almost everything he plays will be a unique remix. Things like his version of the Stones’ ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ or his uniquely twisted mix where Robert Owens’ ‘I’ll Be Your Friend’ meets his own ‘Elements’ head on, or his amazing version of Love Is The Message with a Moog solo layered over it.
So greatness? “You better work” is Mr T’s message. “But as far as creativity and feeling. That I can’t instill in a person. The bottom line really is talent. And I do spiritually thank God every day for this gift. I do feel blessed.”

 

And Danny is enjoying his gift like never before. He’s lost a lot of weight, he’s travelling a lot more, and he’s come back from Ibiza infected with a new spirit of abandon. “I was always a little bit twisted but those British people have really brought it out of me” he laughs over the mic at Vinyl.

 

“I’m approaching 40, and it’s only really hit me hard this year. Oh my God, I’m really making an impact on the world. I’m travelling to Moscow, Tel Aviv, Sydney, Tokyo… My god, I really am touching people’s lives.” He says he feels like a kid again “I look out there and I see myself in these kids. That was me 20 years ago, just looking up at the booth. Cheering on the DJ.”

 

You’ve just got to keep one foot in the booth and one foot on the dancefloor.

 

“And I always will. I always will.”

 

© Frank Broughton

Originally published in DJmag, 2000

 

 

 

 

 

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