He’s there each night from ten to closing time,

With sights and sounds to help the crowds unwind,

And from the booth each night he blows your mind

With his mix and tricks

Forget – for the moment at least – Donna Summer, Silver Convention, Brass Construction, Gloria Gaynor, Bohannon, Love Unlimited – that endless ever-changing, slippery starstream of names shooting through disco heaven. The real stars of the seventies disco boom aren’t on records, they’re spinning them.

Discotheque DJs are no longer mere human jukeboxes – they’ve become tastemakers, record-breakers (several have received gold records in recognition of their influence on sales), mood magicians, performers with personal styles. The new DJ doesn’t just change records, he creates a “total evening,” a musical “journey,” blending records into “one continuous song, one story.” As Tom Savarese, one of New York’s top DJs puts it, “From the moment I go in there to the moment I leave – that’s my canvas.”

To conjure up this kind of vibrant, volatile aural landscape the DJ has to be part artist (the medium: musical collage), part technician, part crowd psychologist. Some would say a total madmen. You have to know your records inside out, they say: the intros, the fades, the breaks, the changes, then maybe you’ll understand why disco DJs talk about “my music.” This intimate knowledge allows them to weave record into record, making one seamless tapestry. Like any artist, a talented DJ develops an individual, idiosyncratic style. One is famous for his drum collages – his hot pulsing evocation of the urban jungle. Another has a trademark sound that’s cool, loose and sweetly ecstatic. Still another will purposely break the floor “like a billiard table,” shifting the crowd for a record he feels they should hear, nudging them into unfamiliar music. Others are abrasive or frenzied or cheerfully crowd-pleasing, but they all stamp the music with their personal taste. The best inspire passionately loyal followings that trail them from club to club. (In New York, where discos open and close at the drop of a Thorens tonearm, most experienced DJs can reel off a list of past jobs – Sanctuary, the Haven, Machine I, Machine II, Tambourlaine, Limelight, the Ice Palace, Le Jardin, Make-Believe Ballroom – that reads like an index to the city’s underground high and low life for the past ten years.)

But if disco DJing is an art, it’s solidly based on technology – not only on the mastery of elaborate systems of turntables, mixers, speakers, amps, filters, headphones and lightboards but on a sensitivity to the technical pluses and minuses of the records. DJs quickly develop a sharp critical ear for the quality of a mix or a pressing, if only because disco equipment is sure to exaggerate flaws. When record companies realized that a muddy studio mix or a drastically reduced sound level was keeping their records off disco turntables they snapped to with special pressings “For Disco DJs Only,” usually single long tracks on limited edition, high-quality twelve-inch discs. This past spring, a number of companies began commercially marketing these discs – the first new record format in decades – and found them selling briskly to people eager for the same full length and quality they had heard in the clubs. (Appropriately, the first “disco disc” in the stores, Double Exposure’s stunning “Ten Percent,” was “disco blended” by New York DJ Walter Gibbons, one of a small but increasing number of spinners crossing over to the production side of the music.) Not only was the disco DJ the impetus behind the creation of the “disco disc” but he was the key factor in the development of the entire specialized disco market that record and equipment manufacturers are now turning into a goldmine.

Another necessary talent of the successful disco DJ is a subtle, spontaneous, sure understanding of crowd control. Even when he’s removed, often elevated above the dance floor, absorbed in the next blend, the next switching of knobs and flashing of lights, the DJ has to be simultaneously on the floor, in the midst of the crowd, anticipating its mood at the same time he’s channeling it. It isn’t a matter of simply playing a hot record. Anyone can do that. The DJ must sense the moment when it will have its greatest impact: when the crowd wants it the most and when they least expect it; when they’ll burst into delirious screams on hearing the first three notes. The DJ has to know how long to run them, when to ease up and smooth out, when to hit a peak and keep pushing, when to slip in something new so they’ll love it and not clear the floor. It’s an intuitive science. David Mancuso, famous for the private disco parties at his Loft in New York, describes his approach this way: “I can’t program myself to what happens because it all gets so spontaneous. I don’t plan it, I don’t feel I have any control over it. I’m only a part of the whole, a part of the dance.”

© Vince Aletti

Originally published in After Dark, Nov 1976

photo © Eric Stephen Jacobs.