t/s : disco mastermixers masterclass - walter gibbons vs larry levan vs francois kevorkian vs danny krivit

(where can I hear that?)

oh:

http://www.igetrvng.com/shop_mx4.html

friend and I out of our gourds on lsd with cute girl who suspects nothing. Francois K has relinquished deck duties to someone else (Krivit?) and seeing the crowd going bonkers dancing, he proceeds to bounce around on stage himself.. until he bumps the setup causing the record playing to skip. very funny cool to see 2000 faces grimace in "oooh" moment and then all simulateously break out laughing.

and while no momentum was lost, whoever was up there decided to slay the crowd with "Funky Nassau" as a recovery.

ok anyway

can somebody tell me about the walter gibbons box on salsoul?

also, should i start a "love saves the day book club" thread? i just finished it but i did end up skipping pages here and there because parts of it ... dragged a bit. we should have a roundtable on it.

see also his new version of 'kiss me again' where he updates it to sound 'how he felt it should have sounded'. possibly the worst and most painful thing i have heard in recent memory.

Although ... all of the work he did with Gwen Guthrie is FANTASTIC. I love her voice.

would've loved to be present on the nights when Francois K was drumming while Larry L spun records at the Paradise Garage!

Love Saves The Day is an admirable effort but frustrating because to my old mind there's a lot of revisionist history and anachonisms in 21st cent disco scholarship. It'd be way more informative to go back and dig up the contemparary disco journalism.

based on sheer volume, and how much of it is still good ... FK.

jay vee - here's siano's rework of 'kiss me again', but be prepared for 13 and a half minutes of aural agony!

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/B00067ZPBG.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

here is his extended mix of "my love is free".

Is this thread about edits/reworking of tracks or productions of tracks?

LOL! Holy shit. "I Neeed You! *SHRRZAAKK!** " You know, I need to learn to keep my curiosity in check some times. I could have benefitted from never ever hearing this. Wow.

Thanks(?) though, Stir ; )

xpost

as in "are you sure this is the siano remix and not the big audio dynamite remix?"

thin 80s drums ahoy!!

i will start posting excerpts of "love saves the day" that caught my eye ... should i do it on the original LSTD thread or start a new one?

Yes Goldman's book has been tagged as "homophobic" by some subsequent chronichlers but this is wrong IMHO, evincing an unfamiliarity w/the over-the-top writing style of the 70s and the general outrageousness of the period. As Dan Seltzer points out, the Mel Cheren memoir calmly accounts for x-treme sexual behavior being seen as "the norm" for urban gay men at the time.

Bottom line: it's a rich underdocumented period in pop history and we need more books about disco, though perhaps some that consider the nationwide disco fad and subsequent record-business crash of 1979 along with the now-celebrated underground dance scene.

i will also admit to some siano affection in spite of the odd thing he might say or do that makes me think 'what the...?!?!"

I'm reading "Last Night" right now, and while I think it's a great read it's definitely skimpy on describing the technical changes in the music itself (I don't even think I've encountered the phrase "four on the floor" yet). Maybe that's deliberate though: less about the records, more about the DJ.

Anyway, wanted to mention that Rhino is putting out a Larry Levan comp next month:

http://www.rhino.com/rzine/pressrelease.lasso?PRID=375

wasn't love saves the day intended as more of a social history? i agree that it was a bit dry...i mean if it is a social history of disco there should be some salaciousness right? and then i've read criticism (maybe here?) of goldman's disco as being too salacious. i really want to read that one anyway. this thread is making me think that shapiro's book and LSTD are probably very complementary reads.

i couldn't get into last night a dj saved my life the multiple times i have tried.

Hang on, is that the same Albert Goldman who got ass-whipped for implying that John Lennon might have been, y'know, less than perfect? If so, I must read this!

. . . which I just realized isn't correct at all--LOTS of people do just that. I suppose I was reading it as "AG gets whipped around BY EVERYONE for that reason" and was trying to say, "no, no, some folks do it for pretty good reasons." Anyway, back to the disco.

lots of Goldman is indefensible. but I just came across an essay he wrote on Michael Jackson in 1984 that was more prescient than provocative and not unsympathetic either. In People magazine!

but the rockcritic hate for Goldman is still a bit hypocritical. ffs read L Bangs on David Bowie for old-fashioned fag-bashing phobia.

A few years back, I tried to get D@ C@p0 Pre$$ interested in re-publishing, but my (since departed) editor said the photo rights made it impossible and the text was too short to stand alone.:(

EROTIC HYPNOTIC

You remember it, of course. It was a record that spun day and night through the autumn of 1975. You couldn’t listen to the radio for half an hour without hearing a spacey, sexy woman’s voice chanting and gasping and moaning, as if in the rapture of passionate lovemaking. At first it was startling, almost embarrassing – even in this age of rampant pornography. The reason was that no artistic medium has been more oppressively censored than recording. The excuse was the presumed fact that the primary market for pop records is comprised of teenagers (an assumption which has now been proven false by statistical analysis but which – even if true – should not have barred adults from listening to whatever they pleased.) The record companies therefore have enforced for generations a moral code that would make the comparable codes of Hollywood and network TV seem loose and licentious. Just recollect the ruckus that was kicked up the Stones singing “Let’s spend the night together” or the hullabaloo raised a few years since by the Isley Brothers’ attempt to use that dull vulgarism, “bullshit.” (The offending word was eventually bleeped out, making it far more titillating.) With this tradition of Victorian prudery to combat, it is a wonder that a major record company undertook the Donna Summer album and a miracle that so many radio stations gave it room on the air.

From the aesthetic standpoint, the extraordinary thing about the album was not so much the fact that it exploited the extraordinarily exciting effect of hearing a woman making love. The astounding thing was that the creators of the disc had composed an elaborate, exotic ritual. The sex ceremony unfolded slowly and deliberately, step by step, until it had reached its climax. Then – astonishingly – it passed beyond the climax to a post-coital trance that reflected back on the whole experience and transfigured it. It was pop Wagner. Experienced in the proper setting, late at night, stoned on Santa Marta Gold, with the mind relaxed and open, susceptible to imaginative voyagings, the grand effect was what we glibly call “cosmic.” More than any recording in recent years, Love To Love You Baby restored to pop music its highest goal: the inducement of ecstasy.

The vision that informed the composition was one of the oldest myths of pop culture, the erotic sacrifice – pop’s delightfully debased version of the love=death equation. The myth first surfaced back in the days of the Cotton Club, whose speciality was the production of what were called “jungle shows.” The rich and lubricious white slummers would roll up to Harlem in their Pierce Arrows well past the midnight hour, after cocktails, the theatre, and supper, when it was time to set the crown on the evening by giving the girls in their cloches and white foxes one last thrill before bedding them down. The jungle shows, designed to fulfill the nostalgie de la boue of the white clientele, were marvously cynical entertainments contrived by geniuses like Duke Ellington to exploit the white man’s fantasy of primitive black sexuality.

The particular show Donna Summer’s record suggested was that horny old classic, the Sacrifice of the Nubile Virgin. Anyone who visited Acapulco in the good old days can supple the rest: the high flaming altar; the implacable-looking priests in their S/M drag; the fabulously lithe and animal-like girl, writhing voluptuously in the grasp of cruel attendants; the drummer enthroned at the peak of the dais, pounding on his skins; the thrilling moment when the desperately struggling maiden is bent over the sacrificial block and pinioned, and the high priest approaches with his primitive knife…the story tells itself to a slow hypnotic rhythm pounded out upon those jungle drums. It was this ancient spectacle that loomed behind the disco drama as it unfolded from the shiny vinyl, embossed quite appropriately with a palm-tree logo and the word “Oasis.”

What no one realized at the time of the immense vogue of Love To Love You Baby was the very interesting fact that it had been recorded in Munich – of all places – and that its star was a young black singer who had gone to Germany, as so many American singers have done in recent times to sing Porgy and Bess and Hair. Love to Love You Baby -- produced by a Swiss-Italian, Girogio Moroder, in a Bavarian studio – was a pioneering effort of what was shortly to be called “Euro-Disco.” The tag designates what has proven to be one fo the most fruitful sources of the new music: the sophisticated European record producer employing black American artists to create “concept albums.” These are vastly more ambitious than American pop recordings because their designers stand back at a great distance from contemporary America – as the British rock bands stood back at a great distance from the America of Elvis Presley and Little Richard – and perceive the larger and more mythic contours of our fabulous pop culture. The oddest revelation about this first essay of Euro-Disco was the fact that the original recording was designed for the American pop market and was, consequently, not the splendidly prolonged seventeen-minute track with which we are familiar but a measly little four-minute 45! It was not until the clever people at Casablanca’s subsidiary, Oasis, obtained the rights to the record that someone had the brilliant idea of remixing it and extending it to the length of an entire album side by purely mechanical means. As the old Marxists uses to say: “Quantitative differences become qualitative differences.” They sure do, Karl!

"composed a ritual"? I think I've changed my mind about reading this book.

All of this reminds me that there's a Rolling Stone rock history anthology from about 20 years ago that had a very positive, pro-dancing, pro-DJ chapter on disco, and it even talked about the then-developing House scene.

classic Village Voice thing from the banner yr of 1979: "The Dialectics of Disco: Gay Music Goes Straight" by Andrew Kopkind.

(dare I mention that chapter 7 of Playback deals with technological/record-biz impact of disco?)

krivit is so underrated

http://ilovedeephouse.imeem.com/music/U4IG-mRw/natalie_cole_tell_me_all_about_it/

for real

i <3 this

somebody buy the rights to Prelude's catalogue and reissue it. I'd even write liner notes for a nominal fee.

please.

not to be homophobic or something, but is any of them gay?

i thought all of them were gay

I think they are all gay.

I don't think francois k is gay

but, hey...it don't mean nothin' either way

oh yeah, didn't even notice francois k. Don't know about him.

will this be better (or very different) than the salsoul gibbons comp?
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_7352q37VRgM/TAYsNj6KlTI/AAAAAAAAAUE/Abg_S8Tuot0/s1600/WalterGibbonssmall.jpg

CD 1
01. Jakki - Sun... Sun... Sun... (Walter Gibbons Original 12-inch Edit)
02. Double Exposure - Ten Percent (Walter Gibbons 12-inch Mix)
03. TC James & the Fist O'Funk Orchestra - Get Up On Your Feet (Keep On Dancin')(Walter Gibbons Mix)
04. Gladys Knight - It's a Better Than Good Time (Walter Gibbons 12-inch Mix)
05. Salsoul Orchestra - Magic Bird of Fire (Fire Bird Suite)
06. Sandy Mercer - Your Are My Love (12-inch Version)
07. Bettye Lavette - Doin' the Best That I Can (Walter Gibbons 12-inch Mix)

CD 2
01. Arthur Russell - See Through (Walter Gibbons Mix)
02. Dinosaur L - Go Bang (Walter Gibbons Unreleased Mix)
03. Strafe - Set It Off (Walter Gibbons 12-inch Mix)
04. Arts & Craft - I've Been Searching (Walter Gibbons 12-inch Mix)
05. Luv You Madly Orchestra - Moon Maiden (12-inch Mix)
06. Stetsasonic - 4 Ever My Beat (Beat Bongo Mix)
07. Harlequin Fours - Set It Off (US 12-inch Version)

or, basically, what is his stuff from the 80s like?

07. Harlequin Fours - Set It Off (US 12-inch Version)

^ so lethal

Yeah, I was wondering about this earlier today. I guess the big draw is the unreleased Arthur Russell track I guess (according to Wikipedia this is "a dance version of 'See Through' on World of Echo). The Go Bang! mix is also on the Sleeping Bag Sessions comp from last year. Don't know most of the other tracks on CD2 though (besides Strafe).

I know about all of this stuff in such a scattered way, are there good overviewy collections for either Kevorkian or Levan?

for Levan, The Definitive Salsoul Mixes '78-'83 would be good, but be warned, the audio quality's disappointing. good range of material, though. There's a fair number of his mixes and/or production on Journey Into Paradise: The Larry Levan Story.

what about for francois k? how is this azuli presents comp?

krivit is amazing.

Great new piece on Gibbons here from Barry Walters:

http://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2016/05/walter-gibbons-the-first-dj-s-dj

this new comp of larry levan mixes looks good: https://www.discogs.com/Larry-Levan-Genius-Of-Time/release/8301678

compiled by bill brewster

xp really enjoyed that, lots of juicy details, thanks!

xp thanks for posting that... it looks great.

http://www.waxpoetics.com/blog/music/new-releases/mythical-remix-disco-legend-walter-gibbons-finally-sees-light-day/

https://bbemusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-men-in-the-glass-booth

I guess the big draw is the unreleased Arthur Russell track I guess (according to Wikipedia this is "a dance version of 'See Through' on World of Echo).

not familiar with this, anyone heard it?

Nice reading and listening. I hope one day for a Jim Burgess "best of" with this remix inside: https://www.discogs.com/Change-Searchin/release/4921237

dk added a bunch of volumes of his edits to bandcamp. best way i could find them was just googling bandcamp edits by mr k. they're gold imo.