This interview was conducted by MFSB over at " in da mix worldwide " IDMW. The sesson was done on Tuesday, September 25th 2007. I would like to thank MFSB for the posting and contribution of this interview.
    James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley!!! What do all these names have in common? The fact that their souvenir has been kept strongly alive in the collective memory along the years/decades, hot on the heels of an obivously prematurated passing.

   Would their aura have remained the same on other circumstances? Who damned cares, knowing how life ain’t a series of if, which doesn’t help the past from bein’ the subject of unevitable fantasies and eventually romancing…
     20 years have gone since the closing date of the Paradise Garage which, to many, stands as the cradle of the nightclubbing, far beyond those who’ve had the chance being its regulars back in the daze, occupying an unexpected # 1 position on the famous DJ Mag poll 100 in the mid 90’s. And the questions as to why and how have never looked so up to date. Elements of response with a series of reactions either received or left here and there from anonymous people to actors of the scene thereafter…
    It’s been some 20 years since last time I set foot in the Paradise Garage and I’m still hearing the music… .
And God knows how T’s far from being the only one, refering to the countless references to the vibes which the PG and his resident DJ ­ the late Larry Levan ­ made famous at the time.
    Larry showcased the most incredible acts, broke records like no one on this planet, and could create vibes like no other DJ ever!!!! Dark, happy, funky, soulful, gospel, uptempo downtempo, you name it... We all will acknowledge that he wasn't the most graceful mixer at times, however, his song selection, and penchant for the spectacular presentation is what makes him stand alone, adds TL. And the list seems endless with the addiction of the late radio jock Frankie Crocker who was to become the program director for WBLS, heavily contributing to make the NYC-based station the most progressive Black music outlet in the country…

     Frankie could spend hours in the both, eventually discovering new cuts that Larry was playing during the week end and have the record all over the New York airwaves the following Monday, recalls Godfather Of Disco, Mel Cheren. Larry was ahead of the latest trends. He’s been the first person who turned me on to Madonna, admitted Crocker. Larry knew how to get us to feel his love for music. It was not just about dancing, but about feeling the music that he bestowed upon us from his booth. We rocked, rolled, thumped, and grooved to his sound. It was innovative and it was new every weekend - we didn't know what to expect, adds M.
    NUTTIN’ OF A FAIRY TALE…
    At least at the beginning… As what makes an entreprise last over the years and eventually become A success hardly comes out of the hat, and that’s pretty much what happened to the PG whose official launch party in January 1978 didn’t turn at all the way it should have for Michael Brody and cohorts…  
    The grand opening of a New York City disco is like a Broadway debut, explains Cheren on his book (*). Both a declaration and a moment of truth. A great opening can make you. A bad one can guarantee empty nights and bankrupcy. Michael planned the grand opening of the Paradise Garage  in January of 1978 to be the moment he would finally take his place as the king of downtown. But in reality the grand opening was worse than bad ; it was a disco disaster so total that it took him at least two years to recover… Micahel dreamed about a cosmic opening where all the fabulous fashion, music, sex and beauty toys would flock to his creation and mingle with the home boys, the banjee boys and the fanatic Larry Levan dsiciples, and we would finally achieve disco apotheosis, paradise in a garage. But several funny things happened on the way to Paradise. Starting with the weather…
    'Why were all these people milling around in the subfreezing 17 degree wind? Why weren't they inside dancing? And I knew there could be only one reason. They were out here because it wasn't ready in there! . . . (Mel Cheren)
    The Paradise Garage officially opened in the middle of the great blizzard of 1978, reported a staff member responding to the name (pseudonym?) of Apollo on livingarts.com. Those who lived in NYC at the time remember this massive, freezing snow storm vividly. The great city was brought to a standstill for a few days. There were people skiing in the streets. The snow turned into mountains of ice when sub-zero winds came in from the North. It was brutal. There was no heat in the Garage yet and we were working with gloves to keep our hands from freezing…
    The snow moved on over the North East and airports were closed everywhere. Larry and Michael had ordered the new, most excellent sound system to be installed before the opening. It was stranded somewhere out in the Midwest (Louisville, KY) and by the time it got to NYC there was only a short time to rig everything before the best and most glamorous in NYC arrived. What a bloody mess. A reasonable person would have postponed the party when it was evident that the key component of a dance club -  the sound system - wasn't going to be ready. But no, we pressed on. I had to take my gloves off to work with the equipment and my fingers were numb. I cut myself several times and had to run out for band aids for myself and others who were injuring themselves.
     An already stressful situation turned to outright panic. It was a couple of hours before launch and nothing was working right. Michael screaming and crying. Larry throwing things about and making it clear he wasn't going to spin unless everything was flawless with the system. I just kept shouting: ‘Send the fucking people home until we get this fucking shit together.’ That was the most intelligent thing said that evening. Standing in the bitter cold, on icy sidewalks, the glitterati of the NYC club scene… Thousands of them! Opening time had passed. The sound system was nowhere near ready by Larry's standards. Hours passed. It seemed like an eternity. I went outside to see what was happening. In all the chaos, the door wasn't being managed well and all those fabulous people really had their frozen tits in a wringer. Many were leaving. Others were so angry I supposed all that emotional heat is what saved them from freezing to death!!!
    As our cab approached King St., we saw hordes of people walking down 7th Ave., their breath crystallizing in the bitter cold, pursues Mel. It seemed eerie and eclectic, a mass migration, but when we turned the corner it really hit us: 1000’s of people were swarming in the middle of the block in front of the Garage, its faced illuminated in bright yellowish glare. My first thought was that this swarm of people was like a scene from Day Of The Locust. My second thought was elation and success. Look at the turn-out! I said to some friend. This is bigger than Studio 54! My third thought, however was disaster… Why were all these people milling around in subfreezing 17-degree wind? Why were’nt they inside dancing ? And I knew there could be only one reason. They were out here because it wasn’t ready in there!…
     Michael was frantically trying to fix the bugs in the sound system and Larry, needless to say, was playing the grand diva, insisting things were not ready, insisting he would not spin unless they were. He had no idea of the conditions outside ­ he probably hadn’t been outside himself for days ­ and he could have cared less. He was an artists, the sound system was his medium, it had to be perfection or nothing. This insistence of his would make him famous. But on that night, it almost ruined everything.
    In retrospect, Michael made a major mistake. If he had just allowed the crowd to gather in the parking garage below, where it was much warmer and perhaps explained the problem and begged the crowd for patience, he might have been forgiven. But Michael was overwhelmed, and he had not thought to delegate anyone to deal effectively with the door ­ a fatal oversight… The terrible disappointment could have been the end of the Paradise Garage. For any club it probably would have been. But Michael was not about to let one desastrous night derail him. He still had his club, he had a growing clientele, and he still had Larry Levan.  
    I'm just interested in this aspect, explained Loft icon David Mancuso a few months ago on a deephousepage.com thread, because for a lot of younger heads, all you hear about are the positive, great aspects of the history of this thing… But you don't hear much about the day to day struggles and I think hearing about the overcoming of those things is the strongest sign of the power of the party and the music.
    NOTHING COMES FROM NOTHING…
When I first went there and saw the dancefloor, it was like a sea of heads and colour, said NYC jock Victor Rosado.
    And then you would have blackouts, costumes and people really going crazy. It was just one big festival and it was like that every time I went. They had a movie theatre, the lounge with fruit, snacks and coffee, and later you had the rooftop terrace.
For instance sometimes we would go watch a movie, have a sleep and then back to the dancefloor. It was just incredible!
     Ahh…  there’s this Halloween party in 1980 and as I walked in I was a little out there, if you know what I mean! Larry was playing Peter Brown 'Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me' and it went into the part where it goes 'It's so hot, I'm burning up', and everything you would see would be smoke, and red and orange lights, people moving slow motion all these earth tones… It was incredible. But you know it didn't matter what year, time or place it was ­ he would take you to wherever he wanted to take you.
  As a matter of fact, a success most likely results in the gathering of the right elements at the right place and the right time. And although the concept of the club started in 1976 in a space on Read Street, the more well-known version of the Garage didn't take hold until 1980. In other words with Michael Brody’s initial view at last fully concretized, offering Larry Levan the ideal environment to express his talent, with the help of famous Richard Long & Associates developped sound system, the style of which was to become a model in the world of superclubbing without achieving to be duplicated. Not to mention visual art which became a significant part of the PG experience as the walls became an ongoing exhibition space for the exuberant colors and celebratory energy of artist Keith Haring's work. This resulting in a bunch of multi-sensorial souvenirs for those who’ve experienced it and no doubt contributing to the legend (**) floating around the simple evocation of the place’s name…
    ‘The music was like no where else. The dancers were like nowhere else. I would return to my place and tell my buddies: You folks have no idea of what partying really is! They thought I was being snobbish, but I knew what I was talking about…’ (KS)  
    You may not remember the Garage had a distinct smell, remembers C. Not from the incense but something in the paint or that it used to be a garage.You would be on that rap and the smell told me: Yeah I'm at the Garage, it was a sort of critically smell…
    Everyone talks about the sound but also important to the garage were the lights. When I first went to the Garage in 1980, it had some track light grid design, but when they redid they lights into the five or seven circles in 1981 it was one of the best light shows in the city. That light show, the thunderous sound, the people, the music, the movie room, the snacks and the drugs (my pref: mesculine), all contributed to the making the garage to place it was and that I will never forget.  

   I was born and raised in NYC, says J. I am 39 years old. For those who don't know, the whole club scene from 70's to the 80's or who never experienced it, then you will never know what it is to experience a genre, a time and place like those days… PG was the place period. The benchmark of what a club, a DJ and a sound system was. As a straight guy, I found it hard at times to go, but the music and the mythological experience one had was transcending. I laugh at some of the people criticizing Larry Levan's ability. Everyone who really knows music, I mean really knows old school music, not even some sh*t that's played by so called DJ's today know that Larry Levan was not known for mixing. He was known for crossing over jams that no one would ever think of playing. The dude was a genius, and more importantly set the standard in the difference between a technical DJ and a palette driven DJ which, believe it or not, makes the DJ I know plenty of people who are great mixers but don't know sh*t about music. J

    There were many weekends when I would leave home at midnight and drive straight to King Street, arriving around 3am, keeps on KS. I would buy some mescaline for two bucks on the line, bat my eyelashes until a member took me in with him and I was off. The pounding sound at the door, the runway lights on the ramp to the box office, it was almost like a dream, but still to this day, I can see hear and smell all of it. The music was like no where else. The dancers were like nowhere else. I would return to my place and tell my buddies: You folks have no idea of what partying really is! They thought I was being snobbish, but I knew what I was talking about.  

    I remember women who I danced with week after week whose name I never knew or never asked, because it was all about dancing, enthused E-Man. One of my best friends is someone I met on a dancefloor in Antigua, because we saw each other doing the "Garage Dance" and instantly recognized a kindship.  

    Then it’s P’s turn sayin’: Larry, this master, knew what I liked but he honestly knew what each and every one of us liked, what your favorite was, and he decided when you were ready to hear it. He’d go from playing some nice lovely song, then cut in “Weekend”! Just cut it right in. So damn brazen! It wasn’t about beats.

 EVERYTHING COMES TO AN END…
      Like a vast majority of all classic dance venues, Paradise Garage did come to an end with an epic party which would last more than 48 hours on Sept. 26/27 1987, attracting an estimated 14,000 people over the 2 days. Whenever the official reason for closing was said by Michael Brody to be a failure to renew the lease with the owners of the building (Bell Telphone at the time, Verizon nowadays), because of protests from local residents who ‘didn’t want a Black club in the area, let’s not forget how he was also very diminished by AIDS at the time before passing a few months after the closing of the PG.
    Near the end of Japanese excursion (as a part of a Japan tour in 1992 alongside François K)  Levan fell and hurt his hip, explained Raven Fox on DHP (***).
    Returning to JFK Airport in a wheelchair, he checked himself into Beth Israel Medical Centre. He soon fled, claiming that people with TB were wandering the corridors without mask.
    After a brief stay at his mother's place, Levan went back to Beth Israel, complaining of a bad case of hemorrhoids. At 6:15 pm on Sunday, November 8, 1992, four days after Levan had been admitted to Beth Israel for a second time, Mel Cheren received a phone call from a doctor.
    Larry Levan, too weak to survive an operation, had died of endocarditis, an inflammation of the lining of the heart, that had been exacerbated by the massive amount of illegal pharmceuticals he habitually snorred, smoked, swallowed, and shot up during his lifetime.
    Why Levan - who had known about his heart conditions since childhood - continued to use drugs long after it was clear he was killing himself is a mystery. That it amounted to a gradual suicide is not. ‘Larry did exactly what he wanted to do, which was to destroy himself,’ said Socolov. ‘He knew he was going to die’. Just before his trip to Japan, Levan had told his mother: ‘Mom, I've only six months left to live. I'm dying.’ He was gone in less than four…    
 THE STORY CONTINUES…
    Paradise Garage was not only a club... It was a lifestyle of peace with one's self and others, something you do not and will not ever see again! said JR.
    Anyway for the folks here still trying to re-connect to that era, the vibe and its music you need to check out several DJ’s and their venues in NYC. François K (who used to spin at the garage), Louie Vega, Danny Krivit, Joe Claussell, Timmy Regisford and others who have carried the torch for the last 10/20 years. Albeit a different vibe/venue, they have come close to the “feeling” I had at the Garage on more than one occasion. They will throw down on both new and “old” incredible music that will have you say damn…. This brings me back. I say it can happen again if you let it!!!
    After the radio show at WBLS had finished around two in the morning we had nowhere to go, so Timmy (Regisford), Merlin (Bobb) and I started talking and said we needed a place, somewhere we could call home.
  We felt the only appropriate name to call it was The Shelter because with the Paradise Garage closing there was nowhere else for us to go to ­ we were homeless… (Freddie Sanon)  


    By the time the PG closed its doors, it was widely recognized as one of the ­ if not THE ­ geatests clubs in the world.
It’s still seen as the source of inspiration by a whole bunch of DJ’s beginning with some of the most talented names in the NYC area, with an aura which hasn’t been harmed despite Larry Levan’s passing nearly 15 years ago, judging by the many uses (abusively on most cases) which have been made of the PG name since. But also the transformation of the word ‘garage’ in terms of signification along those past years.
   As a matter of fact, those of you sitting on a collection of records from the disco daze, should pretty well remember the classic ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ as covered by Inner City (featuring Jocelyn Brown) on Salsoul Records. Well, the remix ­ done by… you’ve guessed it: Larry Levan! ­ happened to be followed by the mention ‘Garage Version’ for the first time ever. Is this the reason why ‘garage’ would become a term to describe house records (mainly produced in New Jersey) with soulful vocals starting from the end of the eighties? UK jock producer, Joey Negro who was running the Republic Records label, responsible of releases such as The Garage Sound Of Deepest New York, might pretty well being among those havin’ the response, despite attempts to have this kind of production known as the New Jersey Sound, such as notoriously explained in the memorable BMG Video Dance Mag series at the beginning of the 90’s.
  And so, it would remain for several years (and eventually til nowadays for some people), before getting another transformation in the mid-nineties by the likes of British DJ’s and producers grouped around London pirate radio stations such as The Artful Dodger, Scott Garcia and Ceri Evans aka Sunship to name a few. People who, for most of them, were sort of dissidents from the drum & bass scene, who happened to speed up the beats while takin’ elements from other forms of music such as hip hop and R&B on their will to come up with some urban feel, and givin’ birth to a genre alternatively named speed garage (or speed g), UK garage or 2step.
    Can we still talk about any form of linking to the Paradise Garage? There’s no real definition for the said garage music, said to me Tony Humphries when asked about it years ago.
 Simply because it was everything that was played at the club at that era from Talking Heads ‘Once In A Lifetime’ to the Rolling Stones ‘Too Much Blood’
I know people would say that these are not garage records, but those definitely were!.
As a matter of fact, ‘Garage’ has ended up being one of the most meaningless terms as far as dance music is concerned, because being given many different significations by many different people along the years, wrote Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster on their Last Night A DJ Saved My Life 2000 released book. Not to mention, as a part of the confusion, industry misappropriations added to various journalistic musinderstandings. The latest, to my humble opinion far from being the only ones, but that’s another subject to be discussed one day. MFSB
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