Preston FM are proud to broadcast Parts 1-5 of the excellent documentary "A Piece Of Paradise" New York's Paradise Garage club and its DJ Larry Levan. This was first broadcast by BBC 6 Music earlier this month.
Produced by Eddie Gordon & Lenny Fontana. Part 1 features interviews with Michael Linder, Vince Aletti, Nicky Siano, Judy Weinstein and Tom Moulton. Reflections from NYC's top table who saw the era from the floor up through the disco daze past the Millennium.
Michael Linder a young news reporter in Manhattan pre 1975, who went on to create the hit TV show 'America's Most Wanted', gives the gritty view of life in a Big Apple bruised with the recession, the Stonewall Riots, the Hard Hat Riots, on the verge of bankruptcy, crime and grime rule the subway from 42nd Street to downtown - but there's a beat, created by Earl Young of The Trammps, that starts to reverberate from the DJ's playing in the five borough clubs which will turns the world on, seduces the world into a soulfully sexual, funky, grooving, dance music loving mass of human happiness.
The pinnacle of which was the Paradise Garage, situated on the aptly named King Street, a huge parking lot of a building turned into a club for over 3'000 dancers with the world's greatest club sound system, an owner creating a dream of unifying people with dance music and a DJ gifted with an intuitive grasp on the sense of love in the songs he played through the loudest collection of speakers known that could turn his dance floor fanatics, gay, straight, black, white, hispanic, asian, male and women, into a collective loving mush, like a hypnotist working the congregation from the church pulpit.
Music Beds:
The Warriors Theme
Miroslav Vitous - New York City
Vince Aletti, an American music journalist and photography critic who was the first person to write about disco music in a weekly publication with a column called Disco File in the Record World magazine, also instrumental in the world's first ever record pool, the New York Record Pool with DJ David Mancuso from Mancuso's home club christened The Loft by its devotees.
Aletti's five years of writing for Record World, from 1974 to '78, about the emerging new music in NYC is documented in his recently released book The Disco Files. Vince tells of his time in NYC as a young aspiring writer in those incredible days.
Music Beds
Booker T And The MGs - Melting Pot
Nicky Siano, Brooklyn born DJ, inspired by Mancuso's Loft creation starts his own legendary club The Gallery in 1972. Nicky is one of the founding fathers of DJ's blending music, reputed to be the first DJ to use three turntables in order to keep the sequence of the music flowing into a Nicky tapestry of sound, inspiring the inquisitive Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles. Much of what Larry learnt from Nicky at The Gallery was put to use on the bigger, grander stage of The Paradise Garage going on to shape dance music around the world.
Siano was one of the first DJ's to play at Studio 54, the infamously 'only for the beautiful' nightclub in Manhattan but it was The Gallery that Nicky will always be remembered for and he gives his views on running those Manhattan streets in pre and post Gallery nights and how he was one of the first dance DJ's to 'break' a record. Love Unlimited Orchestra's "Love's Theme" from being discarded by the major Record Company to hitting the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart.
Music Beds:
Billy Paul - War of the Gods
War - The World is A Ghetto
MFSB - Love Is The Message
Eddie Kendricks - Girl You Need A change of Mind
Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes - The Love I lost
Loleatta Holloway - Hit and Run
Love Unlimited Orchestra - Love's Theme
Manu Dubango - Soul Makossa
Barabas - Woman
John Davis Orchestra - Up Jumped The Devil
Odyssey - Native New Yorker
Judy Weinstein - If anybody can lay claim to being the Queen of dance music then Judy is head and shoulders above all with her experience covering so much as one of the first Loft devotees, secretary at New York Record Pool and then founder and owner of For The Record, managing DJ Larry Levan, organizing weekly live acts to perform at the Paradise Garage in the 70's to managing Grammy winning DJ's Frankie Knuckles and David Morales plus Satoshie Tomie still to this day. Judy gives us a quick JW view from her office in Manhattan.
Music Beds:
Diana Ross - Love Hangover
Rare Pleasure - Let Me Down Easy
Brenda and The Tabulations - Lets Go All the Way Down
Tom Moulton - If there were such things as Knighthoods for services to dance music Moulton would knighted for the changes he caused with his work. Aside from mixing some of the biggest dance records ever made like MFSB's "Love Is The Message" The Trammps "Disco Inferno" First Choice's "Doctor Love" plus many many more, Tom was also the originator of the 12" single disc, he was the first dance music writer for Billboard magazine in the US and to this day is worshipped by music fans all over the world for the happy music he helped to shape into joy. Tom's interview from the park outside his Upper Manhattan apartment reveals his memory to be lucid and his character to be one of spontaneous, mischievous laughter.
Music Beds:
Trammps - Toms Song
Jakki - You Are A Star
Gladys Knight - Make This A Happy Home
Eddie Kendricks - Date With The Rain
Carstairs - It Really Hurts Me Girl
Don Downing - Dream World
BT Express - Do It Any Way You Wanna
The Trammps - Disco Inferno
Monday 22nd August 2011
Preston FM
10-11pm
Listen online here or tune to 103.2fm
Parts 2-5 will be broadcast Tuesday to Friday this week - 10-11pm.
