Table of Contents

Preface  ix

Acknowledgments  xvii

Introduction  1

Part I. 1980: The Recalibration of Disco

1. Stylistic Coherence Didn't Matter at All  11

2. The Basement Den at Club 57  30

3. Danceteria: Midtown Feels the Downtown Storm  48

4. Subterranean Dance  60

5. The Bronx-Brooklyn Approach  73

6. The Sound Became More Real  92

7. Major-Label Calculations  105

8. The Saint Peter of Discos  111

9. Lighting the Fuse  122

Part II. 1981: Accelerating Toward Pluralism

10. Explosion of Clubs  135

11. Artistic Maneuvers in the Dark  155

12. Downton Configures Hip Hop  170

13. The Sound of a Transcendent Future  184

14. The New Urban Street Sound  199

15. It Wasn't Rock and Roll and It Wasn't Disco  210

16. Frozen in Time or Freed into Infinity  221

17. It Felt Like the Whole City Was Listening  232

18. Shrouded Abatements and Mysterious Deaths  239

Part III. 1982: Dance Culture Seizes the City

19. All We Had Was the Club  245

20. Inverted Pyramid  257

21. Roxy Music  271

22. The Garage: Everybody Was Listening to Everything  279

23. The Planet Rock Groove  288

24. Techno Funksters  304

25. Taste Segues  314

26. Stormy Weather  320

27. Cusp of an Important Fusion  331

Part IV. 1983: The Genesis of Division

28. Cristal for Everyone  343

29. Dropping the Pretense and the Flashy Suits  369

30. Straighten It Out with Larry Levan  381

31. Stripped-Down and Scrambled Sounds  400

32. We Became Part of This Energy  419

33. Sex and Dying  430

34. We Got the Hits, We Got the Future  438

35. Behind the Groove  449

Epilogue. Life, Death, and the Hereafter  458

Notes  485

Selected Discography  515

Selected Filmography  529

Selected Bibliography  521

Index  537
 

About the Author

Tim Lawrence is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London and the author of Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979 and Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–1992, both also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

"Lawrence goes into remarkable depth to portray this world which, during its few short years, gained expansive popularity and had a significant impact on art, film, literature, and culture. His meticulous research, with details on the leading figures, trends, events, places, and music that made it all happen, also provides critical/analytical commentary on the social backdrop of the times, the genesis of the emerging and eclectic music/dance styles, and the essence of this artistic renaissance. In addition to the well-selected photographs, notes, and bibliography, set lists, discographies, and a filmography add to the title's impressive breadth. Cultural historians and those familiar with the 1980s milieu will find this informative and insightful."
*Library Journal*

"Through a comprehensive and lushly detailed text stuffed with original photos from dance floors, DJ booths, and parties, Lawrence imparts the mood, the music, the faces and the places from that remarkable era, with a nostalgic nod to nights where 'a new kind of freedom was set to rule the night.' ... Dance music historians will want this book for reference, while others who recall these days with a sense of longing will close its covers and dream of the days when nightlife amounted to a line of cocaine, a Madonna remix, and a dark, packed dance floor in a basement club in the Village."
 
*Bay Area Reporter*

"Life and Death provides the most intensive mapping of this brief era of New York subculture we've yet seen. The book's strength is its depth of research, drawing on the realtime journalism of the era as well as many new interviews. The detail is fascinating, as Lawrence salvages ephemeral events, forgotten people, and lost places from the fog of faded memory."
*Bookforum*

"Exceptionally accessible (the author’s passion for his subject shows through on every page; it’s easy to imagine how his knowledge and genuine interest opened many a door and got people talking, telling tales recorded here that might not otherwise have seen the light of day), the raw, new energy of the city is accurately captured and conveyed. No small feat.... Seriously, when’s the last time you read a book you could actually dance to?"
 
*Lambda Literary Review*

"The focus here is clearly music. Mr. Lawrence even includes some D.J. playlists for the listener to investigate. But Life and Death is more expansive than that — it takes you deep into a time and place, the good-old-bad-old-days of pre-Rudolph Giuliani New York, which many have valorized for some time now. If the 1970s have been thoroughly examined, the early ’80s have been left relatively unexplored, and while Mr. Lawrence provides a lot of minutiae, he also delivers a story with some sweep."
*New York Times*

"[I]f you have no abiding love for New York, disco, hip-hop, studio techniques, or fast and dirty real-estate shuffles—there must be such people, statistically—perhaps Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor will not hold you. But if you care for any of those things, and even if that concern borders on the obsessive, you will benefit from Lawrence’s investigations."
 
*The New Yorker*

"The cast of characters in the book can be staggering, the exhaustive accounts overwhelming — Lawrence interviewed or corresponded with more than 130 people, and he makes room for their voices — but that's part of the point: He wants a crowded and motley party. This is a scrupulously researched, marvelously detailed history."
*Village Voice*

"[A] compelling tale, beautifully told. As one who was fortunate enough to have landed in New York during this timeframe, Lawrence does a cracking job capturing a time when even listening to the city’s black radio stations at noon could change your life. It was a surreal, magical period of ground-breaking activity which now seems hard to believe could actually happen at the same time in the same city. Finally, here’s the proof."
*Record Collector*

"[O]ffers fresh detail and insight on the clubs, DJs, parties and recordings that emerged from the scene. He even offers DJ playlists from different clubs."
 
*Wall Street Journal*

"Tim Lawrence's Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor 1980-1983, the definitive history of that fabled time in the city, is already taking on the status of a sacred text."
*Paper Magazine*

"Reading Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor as a clubber in the city is to reflect not only on what’s been lost over the past three decades, but on how the sounds, events and characters at the center of Lawrence’s story still influence NYC’s nightlife. . . . [W]hat Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor makes acutely obvious, as both volume and prism, is not just the cultural value of the city’s party scene, but how it also serves as a moral compass – and how it still can."
*The Guardian*

"Life & Death defines New York's unnamed era of invention. When Boy George was nicking from the cloakroom at Blitz, and everyone else was at The Batcave, this is how it ran in NYC. With hundreds of interviews, deep research and enlightening playlists, it's almost as invigorating as being there."
 
*DJ Magazine*

"Lawrence has mustered convincing evidence for the case that Madonna was not the most important cultural creation of early 1980s New York. . . . Lawrence is most convincing when he documents the remarkable variety and genre-blurring fecundity of sounds available to tuned-in city dwellers, a diversity that was even more bracing when contrasted with the monotonous airwaves stifling the rest of North America."
*TLS*

"Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor is a remarkably intense piece of 'community history writing.' It breathes life into an iconic historical epoch and sociocultural scene without ever retreating into nostalgia or naive celebration. In fact, there's something unexpectedly electrifying about reading Lawrence's exceptionally well-researched historical studies. It is the sensation of remotely yet meaningfully becoming part of something hitherto only secretly known. One becomes slowly yet unequivocally aware of how that specific era's cultural and sociopolitical conditions, so thoroughly reconstructed in these works, resonate with the current sense of cultural and political impasse."
*The Wire*