Nicky Siano was dancing in Manhattan clubs at fifteen and by the age of 17 was resident and co-owner of the hottest club in New York: The Gallery. He mentored Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan, worked in the studio with Arthur Russell and was set to become another high-profile drug casualty until he got his life back on track with campaigning work for people with AIDS. He came out of retirement in the late 1990s and these days DJs all over the world.

 

How did you get into records?

From going out dancing. You know, from a very young age I met someone in high school and they took me to the Village; the first club I ever went to, which was the Firehouse. Immediately, I really dug the music.

 

How old where you went there?

Fifteen.

 

What year was that?

Do we have to discuss that? (Laughter) 1970. And about a year later, my brother's girlfriend... I was dancing around with her. And she said that if you really like dancing you’ve gotta come to the Loft. And she took me to the Loft and that was it. She took me and I was like in total awe. I was hooked on the whole experience. The Loft was such a controlled environment as well as the sound.

 

Describe it to me.

It was real crowded. Well, the first time I went there it wasn't packed like other times. First of all, I'm not talking about Prince Street, I'm talking about Broadway. The Loft was only 2,000 square feet, with 500 square feet of DJ booth. Maybe even more. It was tiny. First of all, the klippschorns; he put them in a way that they put out the sound and they reflected the sound. So they covered the whole area and exaggerated the sound. And his room was perfect to do this with. He used to be on the dancefloor and the lights would go out, there would be these little lamps in the corner and the tweeters would come on and the lamps would go out. It was freaky deaky. I don't know whether I was on acid. I met this girl in high school. I knew I was gay from a very young age, I was going out with men, and then I met her and started going out together. She convinced this club owner to let me play records. It was called the Round Table. I think it was 51st and 3rd Ave, but I'm not sure. I played every night for $15 a night.

 

Can you remember the first night you walked in?

Vaguely. I remember nights after that much better. Like I remember on night really tripping and being on the dancefloor and realising that the lights on the dancefloor went out and all of a sudden the lamp at the other end of the room, which was the only light on. And then I realised, I’m watching that lamp and I’m dancing and all of a sudden the lamp went out, and I realised, ‘Oh shit, he’s controlling the lamp.’ It was incredible.

 

Had you started collecting records when you were in high school?

Yeah, I used to drag my girlfriend round the city looking for them. But there was really only one record store that was carrying these records: Colony.

 

How did you go from being a dancer clubber to playing records?

I wanted to play records more than anything else in the world. I mean I was possessed by it. I’d go home. I had a little hi-fi, and a stereo and I would mix records back and forth between these two separate units. I had to do it. All I could think of was records. I remember I heard ‘Rain’ by Dorothy Morrison, I could not get it out of my head until I could get it in my hand. And not many record stores had it. And I just searched and searched and searched until I found it. And it took me coupla days, and I’m hitting record store on top of record store.

 

What kind of stuff where you playing at Round Table?

I guess stuff like ‘A Little Bit Of Love’ by Brenda and the Tabulations, War ‘City Country City’, ‘Girl You Need A Change Of Mind’. Listen, if you remember everything, you really didn't have a good time! (Laughter). That's totally not true, but I got that from that Studio 54 thing.

 

Was it primarily a dance club?

Yeah. It had two turntables, and no headphones. And a little home-made mixer; and big old speakers.

 

So it was quite a primitive set-up?

Well, not many clubs had headphones.

 

Had you come across some of the other DJs like Steve D’Acquisto and Francis Grasso?

I never came across Francis. And I never heard Steve D’Acquisto play. Steve played at Tamburlaine and Tamburlaine burnt down, Christmas Eve I think, right before I turned seventeen. I remember we went that night and we watched it burn down, Robin and I! Then we went to a club called the Tambourine, but Steve wasn’t playing there; it was Michael Cappello, at least as far as I remember. Now Michael and David Rodriguez; those were the people I’d go hear all the time.

 

Why were you attracted to those as DJs?

Well you know, Michael was so easy to look at.

 

I have heard this.

Oh my God. He was so easy to look at. Michael used to go out to dinner with us and he would take a Coke bottle and put the whole fucking thing down his throat. He did that so well. Michael was not a very talkative kind of person, but he was just really good at playing records. I mean, one of the things I really remember was that his mixes were like really really smooth. At that time, they had the Thorens; they had the TT125, not the direct drive. They were really old and were built into a casing which they would float in. I used them on at the Gallery because the DJ booth was on the floor and when people jumped up and down the turntables, the records would skip. It was very hard to cue records though, because they were belt-driven, so if you put your hands on the turntable, it would stop the record. You had to be really light with your touch. Anyway, they used to speed the records up a little bit to make them more exciting. Neither David nor Michael were into changing the speed of records, but they said to me: ‘Well, they didn’t record it that way, so why should we play it that way?’ They had a purist attitude to playing records, which I think people should heed a little bit more. Some of it is very good, but I don’t think every record has to match and I don’t think every record has to blend perfectly.

 

Michael played at the Limelight which was more of a bar. I dug his music. But, you know, everyone basically played the same records back then. It was just how people put them together. Some people would play what I would call a filler record, and then a good record and then a filler record and then a good record… But my style was to like link the fillers and let them build and then go into the good ones and just go off, on an hour of good ones until people were screaming so loud they couldn’t stand it any more, and then go back. David Rodriguez was more like that. He played back and forth in the field. He played at Limelight too. But Michael would peak the crowd. I call it peak records.

 

So he would take it up and down…

No he would take it up and it would stay up, and it would go up and up and up and up, beyond where you’d feel you could go. It was great, it was. It was great.

 

So tell me about David Rodgriguez.

David Rodriguez was the funniest, funniest person on earth. He could be very cruel. Sometimes the cruelty got to you. So then she’d take another Tuinal and the take it even further. Tuinal were like gorilla biscuits. That’s what we used to call them. And she used to get very mean. Someone would come up to me and she’d go ‘who is she, Mary?’ And this guy had come up to say ‘I love the music’. He would just go on. I got so mad at him one night. I was playing records. I didn’t need to fall on the turntables any more than I already did. Well, she's standing next to me doing ethyl chloride. I don’t know whether you know what this stuff is, but they spray it on you, it’s like a local anaesthetic; it freezes your skin when you’re getting a shot. Anyway, you used to spray it on a rag and stuff it in your mouth and inhale it. You’d get this buzzed out feeling; and you could pass out from it.

 

So anyway, he’s standing there with a rag in his mouth and he’s just spraying this shit – you’re supposed to spray the rag, put it in your mouth, get a little buzz and try it again. Well, he's got the rag stuffed in his mouth, and he’s got the bottle in front of the rag and he's just spraying the rag, and spraying the rag and inhaling. All of a sudden - BOOM! - right on the turntables. Everyone turns and looks at me. You got 600 people all turning around looking at you and I just looked at him: ‘You fat fucking bastard!’ And I pulled him by the hair, threw him on the floor and started kicking him. It was really sad because I was so mad and really I should’ve been concerned but I wasn’t, I was like, ‘You did this on purpose you fat fuck!’ He cut his head on one of the milk crates in the booth and he had to get three stitches.

 

He played at the Ginza, right?

And then at the Limelight. He also played at a couple of other clubs. Some oriental club.

 

How did he play?

Honestly, his music didn’t move me, to craziness, but he is the person who influenced me most. Like he was the person who came into my booth and said, ‘Don’t cut off the words, blend it here, blah blah blah’. He really stayed with me a lot and he was just a wonderful friend. He really helped me launch my career.

 

He probably discovered more records than anyone else. He was out there looking for new records all the time and would turn other people onto it. But of the five that he discovered that week, two were really good. He would turn us onto the same five and Michael [Cappello] and I would look at each other and we’d both pick the same two that were good, and then we’d play the same two over and over and really get the crowd going. Now at his night he would play all five, and sort of he never really left an impression on you but really he took more risks in playing new music than anyone else back then. He really did. He was a real innovator.

 

Is David still alive?

No. He died. He was one of the first people who died of AIDS.

 

When did you get Gallery going?

Well, about a year into playing at the Round Table I was very frustrated. My brother, and my girlfriend Robin were going to the Loft, and they were like, ‘Let’s do one of these, because there’s only one of them around. And let’s open it for a straight crowd, because this one already has a gay crowd.’ Coincidentally a friend of ours had just gotten this accident settlement $10,000. So we borrowed $5,000 more and built the Gallery. And then David [Mancuso] went away that summer and immediately people came. Alex Rosner did the sound system. It was awesome from day one. I think Gallery on Mercer Street surpassed anything at that time because the lighting system. It was like Studio 54 in 1973, we had the simplest lights going, built on three tiers, so it looked like it was going up into the ceiling.

 

Did you do that yourselves?

My brother is an architectural engineer; so I told him what we wanted and he did it. So I designed it and sort of did the structure of the building. And we had an electrician come in and do the wiring. It was really very simple, we had three different light colours on three levels, but they moved up in a triangle. If you looked up, the lighting would go up into the ceiling and that structure itself would be decorated, so you wouldn't see the actual lights, you'd just see the colours.

 

When did it open?

February 1973.

 

And you modelled it very much on the Loft?

Yes, but you know David’s place was his house and you can’t ever recreate in a club and compare it. Ours was like a club version of David’s… a more commercial kind of version. That feeling, that atmosphere was there. The caring about people and stuff like that; only thing was, we didn’t live there. I always feel like I took what David did onto a more commercial level. David had more of an underground. I mean when I played a record it was played everywhere. When David played a record, someone heard about it, and then if they played it was… It was more underground and it remained that way, although he had a tremendous influence on a lot of people, including myself.

 

What was the layout?

It was bigger than David’s. David’s was 2,000 square feet, we had 3,600. And what we did was, it had pillars down the centre, and there were three huge Altech Voice Of the Theaters, in what used to be windows, but which weren’t windows any more because it was built against the building next door. So they fitted perfectly and we got all this reflected sound from them. And then I put the speakers in the corners, four of them and then I bought bass horns and tweeter arrays. David was the first person to have those bullets and I was the second.

 

What crowd did you have; what was the atmosphere like?

Unlike a lot of clubs, the Gallery was a place to dance. Although people met there and went home with each other and stuff like that, that’s not why people came there. People came there to dance. They usually came with friends and if you met someone there it was a bonus but it was about the dancefloor and the music. There was always acid; that was the big drug. At the old Gallery, it was very intense, because it was much more similar to the Loft, because there was only a very small area. The dancefloor, I eventually built a wall totally around it. The sound was intense. I remember someone having an epileptic fit one night because they were just driving them self so hard. After about fifteen, twenty months, we got closed. All the clubs got closed for having improper fire exits. We moved. We went from a homely, close atmosphere to a club environment. And we did it very hi-tech. A lot of the clubs were very kind of homey, slapped together places and this really had a hi-tech look. I remember opening night. We had this dark and white, all this track lighting at the front area. There was a balcony that overlooked the dancefloor where people would hang out. And again, people did a lot of acid. I was doing a lot of drugs. And opening night it was packed; you could not move. 1,500 people. It was 5,500 sq. ft. which was bigger than the other space, but still those people in that space was a lot.

 

And by that stage, what sort of system, mixers etc were you using?

Well we basically moved our system, so we had these speakers but I thought they sounded too commercial, and I wanted it more homey. So what Alex did was he brought in this Spectrum Analyser and they shot white noise through the sound system; and they set up the EQ for the room and they bent the sound so that it was black. So rather than the room conforming to the speaker, the speaker conforms to the room. It made it sound it so warm compared to how it had been. But I blew a lot of speakers in Gallery and the reason was that we went from a smaller room to a much bigger room without increasing the sound.

 

Do you remember any of the great nights at the Gallery?

I think great is an understatement for nights at the Gallery. I think extraordinary. People got really out of control. I mean, there are points when the music was taking people so far out and getting so peaked out, that collectively people would be chanting, there’s this chant that people do on the dancefloor ‘TURN THIS MOTHERFUCKER OUT’. That started at the Gallery. Can you imagine 700 people doing that? They’re blowin’ whistles and screaming ‘Yeah yeah yeah yeah!’ and they’re going, ‘TURN THIS MOTHERFUCKER OUT’. Then I’d turn the bass horns and the lights would flash and go out and everyone would screeeam so loud you couldn’t hear the music for a second. They would be dancing so hard that if you went downstairs you would see the wood floor moving, because it did, wood floors give.

 

What was the soundtrack to the second Gallery?

I remember the songs I played that night (opening night): ‘What Can You Do For Me’ by Labelle was really really big, ‘Love Is The Message’ which was really my theme song; I had been the first one to really work that record; same with ‘TSOP’. David and Michael had been the first ones with ‘TSOP’ and then I turned the record over and fell in love with ‘Love Is The Message’. I had heard it some place else before, Le Jardin, I think. But then I ran with it.

 

I was with David Rodriguez and he went up to CBS and it was the CBS Christmas party and LaVerne Perry was our contact there and she played us ‘TSOP’ and I said, ‘Oh, I gotta have this’. She said, ‘Well, I only have one.’ I said, ‘LaVerne, honey, we play at two different clubs, you gotta give us two copies.’ Meanwhile, there was another copy sitting right there with her other records. So anyway, she wouldn’t give it up, so we just took the one. We walked off, she went back to the Christmas party and David went back and stole the other one. And then he took this big picture of the Three Degrees off the wall and put it under his jacket and walked out. I mean, it was huge. It had to be eight by six feet! Had it hanging on his wall for years. Yeah, those were big ones at the Gallery: ‘Dirty Ol’ Man’, ‘I Didn’t Know’, ‘The Love I Lost’, ‘Brothers Gonna Work It Out’.

 

So you were into the Philly sound?!

I loved the Philly sound, but then everyone did. They made great records. Early Trammps: ‘Love Epidemic’, ‘Zing Went The Strings Of My Heart’. You were talking about what I was playing at Round Table; that was what I was playing. ‘Koke’ by Tribe was back then. Then after that at old Gallery ‘La La The Peace Song’, ‘We’re On The Right Track’, ‘Listen To The Music’, ‘Long Train Running’, ‘How Can I Forget’ by the Realistics, Brenda and the Tabulations’ ‘Look Of Love’. These were Round Table records: ‘Rain’ By Dorothy Morrison and ‘I Got It’ by Gloria Spencer, ‘You’re The One’.

 

What would you do with a record?

Well, this whole third turntable thing. I had a dream one night that I was playing ‘Girl You Need A Change Of Mind’ and then I brought in ‘Love is The Message’ and I used to have this jet plane sound effect that I would play on ‘Love Is The Message’, and I had a dream that I was playing all of these together. So I brought in my turntable from my house and I hooked it up. No-one else was doing stuff like that. I had vision and creativity. There’s creativity about the music and then there’s creativity in the big picture. You know, noticing the lighting, noticing the decorations, noticing the way the sound sounds, and then taking the music beyond what it is and making it something better.

 

Did you use two copies of the same record to do your own mixes and things?

Well actually, Richie Kaczor was playing in Hollywood and he did this thing one night with Girl You Need A Change Of Mind. He offset two copies so it was going, ‘Girl you need a change, girl you need a change’. It was in perfect time and sync. It was just fabulous, it was incredible. But one of the things I would always do, was if there was a break on a record, I would like extend it back and forth, play the break back and forth over and over. Or if the beginning was hot I would play the beginning over and over, and then bring in the song.

 

What was the crowd, was it all drawn from people you knew?

Do you know Stephen Burroughs?

 

No.

OK. Stephen Burroughs was a fashion designer. Willie Smith, very famous fashion designer, Calvin Klein. I mean these were people who came when they weren’t really big. I mean we had at one point Mick Jagger and David Bowie there one night, Patti Labelle.

 

But it wasn’t a club that was about celebrity. They were ‘off’ if they were there that night.

Right. They were looking for a really hot spot to dance and people said go to the Gallery.

 

I heard a story about you dressing up in the Stars and Stripes.

It was the Bicentennial was the first time I did it. It was the 4th July and we had a big party and we made this flag of our logo and I dressed up as the Statue of Liberty making these faces as they read the new Declaration of Independence according to the Gallery, where everyone has the right to dance and party as they choose. As we unfolded the flag everyone screamed and all the lights went out and I had this crown on and it lit up. And one of my friends started screaming, ‘They’re electrocuting him!’ She was tripping her tits off and they were like, ‘Calm down Monica.’

 

How long did Gallery go?

Till ’77.

 

And you were there the whole time?

Yeah, I partially owned it. The beginning of 1978 our lease renewal came up and my brother said, ‘You know, you are totally strung out on drugs’. Which I was. ‘And I feel you’re killing yourself and I can’t watch this. Are you gonna clean up, or we gonna close the club?’ And I was an arrogant little drug addict, I just said: ‘Close it! I don't give a shit.’ And he did. Then I went over to Buttermilk Bottom for a year. And I went to Europe and when I came back I had lost my following. Then again, I was still on drugs and still all fucked up.

 

Tell me about your studio work. You said you were one of the first DJs to move into the studio.
Well, Kiss Me Again [by Dinosaur]. What other DJ did a record in 1977? No-one. There were no DJs producing or mixing then.

 

So how did that come about?

Arthur Russell used to come to my club and he came up to me one day and he said, ‘We should do a record’. And I was like, ‘Get the fuck out, leave me alone’. And then I started to think well this is a good idea, and I went into the studio and I didn’t know anything, and he basically did everything. By the end of the thing I think I mixed, I might have worked on a mix more than the recording process.

 

So what was he looking to get from you?

You know now that I look back on it, it was just financing! [Laughs] I financed the project. But I think he wanted to get from me, input on creating an exciting dance song. And…

 

So it was your knowledge of the dancefloor and how they would react?

Right, right right. And what happened was I ended up really pushing the record, too, and actually this record would have gone much further than it did, had it not been for Ray Caviano who took over all promotions for Atlantic when my record came out, he had just taken over, and he hated the record. And this record had sold 100,000 copies already. Records today don’t sell that but back then they did.

 

Did that lead to more remixing and production?

Well, they picked up our option on Sire, and this is how drugged out I was, I was sick from drugs so I went to California to recover and meanwhile they’re waiting for the next record and I was like, ‘What record?’ And then a couple of years passed and I got clean, and that’s when I started doing one record after another. That’s when I did Pick It Up, and all those other records. That’s really when I did my major body of work. Tiger Stripes. Honey I have a version of Tiger Stripes that is killer!

 

A lot of people got their start at Gallery. Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan were working there. How did you meet them?

They just came there and Robin came to me and said, ‘This guy Frankie wants to work for us’. I said there are 600 people here and we don’t have anyone working for us, maybe it’s a good idea. And then Frankie came to me one week and said, ‘I know this kid. He’s a little crazy but he’s very talented; could I bring him?’ I said, ‘Sure’. That was Larry. I was very close with Larry. We lived together; we were lovers for a while. I just loved him as a person. We would just roll down laughing sometimes. And he did the decorations and he worked the lights for a while and we would go on the off nights and play some records, and he would fool and around play some records. And I would tell him what David Rodriguez taught me: Don’t cut off the lyrics on a song, you know try to make the tempo match, and so on. I still think the selection is more important than the mix. I don’t know where all these people think every record has to match. I think that is the most retarded thing I’ve heard of.

 

Why do you think Larry’s myth grew so potent?

Do you want me to say the politically correct thing?

 

No I want you to say the truth. He was very much your protégé, wasn’t he?

That’s it. You said it. I didn’t.

 

What I didn’t realise until recently was that he had the ear of Frankie Crocker, who was looking to him to suggest records he could break on the radio.

And why did that happen? He was the only really successful black DJ. And they became friends I think because of the race issue. But you know I don’t know. You can’t do this body of work and not be talented. I mean, just look at his mixes alone. Can’t Play Around, Nothin’ Going On But The Rent, Is it All Over My Face… Some of these records are classic forever. Just incredible. Incredible work. There are certain things he did – Heartbeat – that will live forever. You can’t not be talented and not do stuff like that.

 

Did a Garage night ever compare to a night at the Gallery?

I certainly don’t think so. I mean it was just a whole different vibe and it was later on. I mean a night at The Gallery, people went insane. They lost their fuckin’ minds. I mean there wasn’t anything that wasn’t of limits. People at the Garage were very controlled. It was a very…

 

Really?

Oh yeah. They were screaming but not like Gallery. Larry was a very controlling person. If I saw it getting out of hand on the dancefloor, I would think, ‘Oh this is cool, show me how I can go further than this, cos this is out of control.’ That would scare Larry. And Larry would try to bring it back.

 

How did you first meet Steve Rubell?

First I met him at Enchanted Hellhole.

 

Do you mean Enchanted Garden, in Queens?

Yeah. Billy Smith, who was a promotion man at 20th Century Records, and he broke Love Unlimited Orchestra and Barry White when they were totally dead. So Billy invites me out to Enchanted Garden which is in Queen's. But when we get out there, it's got a golf course, and it's beautiful. And the thing was, from there, you could see Manhattan, a great view and it was wonderful. Steve Rubell comes to the table and introduces himself and says, ‘And this is my fiancée, Heather’ And I’m like, fiancée! You have a fiancée? I was very confused at that point. And then Steve asks (adopts hilarious Rubell accent): ‘Would you consider playing here?’ ‘Okay’ But I asked for $150 a night, when everyone else was getting $75.

 

So after the evening was over he gave me a lift back home. After that he was at the Gallery every Saturday night. A year later I finally couldn't take travelling out to Queen's every week. They were offering me coke and stuff, but by that stage I wanted heroin. I tell you though, honey, Steve Rubell was no longer straight when I got done with him. That fiancée? Fell to the curb shortly after.

 

But then he opened Studio 54 which was a total atmosphere. Like the Loft. The thing is they added this other dimension: It was about the body; it was about the look; it was about the drugs; it was about sex. Clubs before that, it wasn’t really the raison d’etre. And it fucked the whole thing up. It was so self-centred. All these things on Studio 54 recently, and not one of them has talked about the DJs. Never mentioned Richie Kaczor. I only played there for the three or four months, but I was so strung out on heroin, and I was only playing during the week, and Richie took it over at weekends. And Richie was a fabulous DJ. ‘I Will Survive’? He discovered that record. He made a hit out of it. He was incredible. I would go to Hollywood every single night while he was there, and this was while Gallery was open. And I’d hear a lot of things there. One of the reasons Studio happened was because he was so incredible and they never even mention him.

 

A lot of people said that Studio 54 was kind of the Antichrist…

It could have been me…

 

… but there were a lot of good things about it as well, there was a lot of money spent on the lights and the sound…

Steve didn’t start out that way. He started out with very pure motive, he was into the music. When he started, he was very into it. But then it all got fucked up. I mean ’cos he started doing a lot of drugs, but I think what fucks you up most is the fact that you set your goals and then you attain everything immediately and where do you go from there? It’s like at 16 I wanted to be a DJ and I wanted to be the best and at 17 here I am owning my own club and where do you go from there? So the first year was the most fabulous year. That movie is about the last year. And it’s very dark and kinda…

 

After it all imploded?

Right. And Studio wasn’t like that, it was bright, it was white, in the beginning. You coulda been outside in the sun. It was bright light in there. It wasn’t dark it wasn’t dingy. And the guns went off and you’d collect confetti, you’d be able to put your hand on the floor like this and pick up an inch-worth of confetti and glitter and everybody had glitter all over their hair and it’d be sticking to people’s skin. It was really incredible. But he changed and the club changed.

 

You had fun there right?

I had a ball. But I only played the first four months, five months.

 

It epitomised everything people didn’t like about disco.

It just made everything so commercial and out there.

 

With the Disco Sucks thing and Saturday Night Fever being released and everyone hates Studio because they can’t get in. Did it feel like the party was over?

The party was over. That’s what it was. I mean in the beginning there was no word disco. If you were going to David’s you were going to the party, if you were going to Tamburlaine or Limelight you we’re going to the club, you’re going out dancing, you weren’t going to a disco. I mean that word, I hate that word to this day. I think coining that phrase, Billboard starting the charts, and the disco forum and then Studio opening brought what was an underground kinda incredible party, into the mainstream, meant this big business, and basically, ruined it.

 

And I guess the sad thing was the party’s over and people started dying. That was round about the same time.

The reality of HIV. That’s right. And people didn’t have time to go out dancing. People were very concerned with taking care of their friends.

 

Was it something that suddenly came into view?

All within like two years. It was like, ‘Oh my God’.

 

 

© DJhistory.com

Interviewed by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton in Brooklyn, 7.10.98 and 29.1.99

 

 

 

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