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Larry Levan
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Music

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  • 1.
    01 - Paradise
  • 2.
    Why Leave Us Alone (Remastered 12" Long Version)
  • 3.
    03 - Clouds
  • 4.
    Love Has Come Around (Remastered 12" Single Version)
  • 5.
    02 - Weekend
  • 6.
    04 - Haven't You Heard
  • 7.
    05 - We Got The Funk
  • 8.
    06 - Smack Dab In The Middle
  • 9.
    07 - Bad For Me
  • 10.
    08 - Heartbeat (Club Version)
  • 11.
    09 - You Can't Hide
  • 12.
    10 - Love Honey, Love Heartache
  • 13.
    11 - Don't Make Me Wait
  • 14.
    12 - Baby I'm Scared Of You
  • 15.
    Once In A Lifetime (2006 Remastered Version )
  • 16.
    Love Injection (Remastered LP Version)
  • 17.
    20 - Situation (U.S. 12_ Mix)
  • 18.
    A Lovers Holiday (Remastered 12" Version)
  • 19.
    It Should Have Been You (12" Vocal Version) (Remastered)
  • 20.
    Ain't No Mountain High Enough (The Garage Version) (Remastered)
  • 21.
    13 - Lost In Music
  • 22.
    Can't Play Around (12" Vocal Version) (Remastered)
  • 23.
    PullUptotheBumper(LarryLevanGarageRemix)
  • 24.
    BodyMusic(12 RemixbyFrancoisKevorkian&LarryLevan)
  • 25.
    Ain'tNothin'Goin'OnButTheRent(LarryLevanClubMix)
  • 26.
    EveryWayButLoose
  • 27.
    06SureShot(LarryLevanMix)
  • 28.
    IsItAllOverMyFace(LarryLevanRemix)
  • 29.
    YouCan'tHideYourLove(LarryLevanRemix)
 

Larry Levan's Page

Profile Information

About Me
  1. play Change — 01 - Paradise
  2. play Five Special — Why Leave Us Alone (Rem…
  3. play Chaka Khan — 03 - Clouds
  4. play Donald Byrd — Love Has Come Around (Re…
  5. play Phreek — 02 - Weekend
  6. play Patrice Rushen — 04 - Haven't You Hear…
  7. play Positive Force — 05 - We Got The Funk
  8. play Janice Mcclain — 06 - Smack Dab In The…
  9. play Dee Dee Bridgewater — 07 - Bad For Me
  10. play Taana Gardner — 08 - Heartbeat (Club V…
  11. play David Joseph — 09 - You Can't Hide
  12. play Man Friday — 10 - Love Honey, Love Hea…
  13. play Peech Boys — 11 - Don't Make Me Wait
  14. play Womack & Womack — 12 - Baby I'm Scared…
  15. play Talking Heads — Once In A Lifetime (20…
  16. play Trussel — Love Injection (Remastered L…
  17. play Yaz — 20 - Situation (U.S. 12_ Mix)
  18. play Change — A Lovers Holiday (Remastered …
  19. play Gwen Guthrie — It Should Have Been You…
  20. play Inner Life — Ain't No Mountain High En…
  21. play Sister Sledge — 13 - Lost In Music
  22. play Lace — Can't Play Around (12" Vocal Ve…
  23. play PullUptotheBumper(LarryLevanGarageR…
  24. play BodyMusic(12 RemixbyFrancoisKevorki…
  25. play Ain'tNothin'Goin'OnButTheRent(Larry…
  26. play EveryWayButLoose
  27. play 06SureShot(LarryLevanMix)
  28. play IsItAllOverMyFace(LarryLevanRemix)
  29. play YouCan'tHideYourLove(LarryLevanRemi…
Larry Larry Levan homepage
Eulogy

Remembrances

Jockey Slut article

Disco Years Timeline

Big Paradise Garage Records

Lawrence Philpot, aka Larry Levan, legendary disc jockey of the Paradise Garage, record producer and remixer died Sunday, November 8, 1992 at Beth Israel Hospital from heart failure due to endicarditis: he was 38. Larry is revered primarily as the DJ and driving force of the famous gay disco Paradise Garage. With engineer Richard Long, he custom-designed the Garage's monster sound system and DJ booth, complete with audiophile Thorens turntables. Larry's brilliance lay not only in his technical skill and audio expertise, but also in his unique and eclectic taste. He confounded and greatly broadened the "rules" of what "dance music" could be, mixing everything from gospel, reggae, Philly soul and Euro-disco to rock ("Stand Back"/Stevie Nicks and "Eminence Front"/The Who, to name but two), post-punk ("The Magnificent Seven"/The Clash, and Talking Heads), ambient/environmental music (Klaus Schulze and Manuel Gottsching, for example), and just about everything else. He augmented this aural collage with disorienting sound effects and mind-expanding audio manipulations, working the crossover and balance controls to throw sound around the room as if it had a will of its own. Larry was a shaman who opened a sonic Pandora's box when he Djed, with all kinds of beautiful, scary and indescribably bizarre sounds careening around the room like spirits flying out of the Ark of the Covenant.
Larry cut his musical teeth at The Loft, essentially the first underground, afterhours disco. Started by David Mancuso at the advent of the '70s, The Loft combined psychedelic culture with proto-disco music, which then consisted of longform, psychedelic-influenced soul ("Melting Pot"/Booker T. & The MG's, "Papa Was a Rolling Stone"/The Temptations, etc.), jazz-funk like The Blackbyrds, funky rock ("Woman"/Barabas, for example) and trippy head music like Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon. When Paradise Garage opened in 1976, Larry added gospel-and R&B-flavored disco to his musical menu.

Larry Levan Larry Levan spinning at the Paradise Garage
With Larry at the helm, the Garage embodied all that was beautiful about disco: glamour, unpretentiousness, excitement, hedonism, epiphany through music, black/white and gay/straight harmony, and the general concept of the dancefloor as family. Celebrities like Grace Jones, Keith Haring, Nile Rogers, Chaka Khan and Madonna hung out and danced the night away along with thousands more of Larry's dedicated flock. As a remixer, Larry applied his inimitable touch to countless all-time club classics, including "Got My Mind Made Up"/Instant Funk, "Ain't No Mountain High Enough"/Inner Life, "Can't Play Around"/Lace, "Heartbeat"/Taana Gardner, Gwen Guthrie's "Should Have Been You" and "Nothing Going On But The Rent" and many, many others. As a writer and producer, he helped create the sound of the innovative New York Citi Peech Boys and their seminal club hits "Don't Make Me Wait", "On A Journey", "Come On, Come On" and "Life Is Something Special", a joyous, mesmerizing celebration of life, love, and music. Larry's work has a spacious, epic, atmospheric quality, with a haunting blend of joy and pain. After the Garage closed in 1987, Larry kept a considerably lower profile, doing guest spots at various clubs, including Studio 54, Palladium and Mars, and Djing regularly at The Choice, arguably the inheritor of the Garage's underground legacy. The Choice didn't have the grandeur of the Garage, but Larry made it his home, casting his psychedelic spell on a diverse crowd of devoted Garage heads and various other afterhours types. Although his remixing work (and, according to some, his spinning ability) diminished, there's no doubt that Larry, even on a bad night, was still infinitely more creative, interesting and unpredictable than any other jock around. It was that unpredictability that was the reason for many of his followers disenchantment by the mid-and-late '80's: it was also the reason that legions more literally lived to hear him play, or were inspired to make their own careers in music and the music business. Larry's legacy is more than just a legendary nightclub and a fistful of club classics. Larry Levan was the ultimate DJ: he didn't just excel at his job, he reinvented the concept of the DJ, blurring the boundaries of music, race, sex, sexuality, and changing thousands of people's perception of music, sound and the world around them. Adam Goldstone (used with kind permission) ..and from another angle:

Levan was openly gay and got his start alongside DJ Frankie Knuckles at the Continental Baths, as a replacement for the DJ from The Gallery, Nicky Siano. Levan's DJing style was influenced by Siano's eclectic style, and by The Loft's David Mancuso, who briefly dated Levan in the early 1970s. As Knuckles was still trying to make his way in the New York club scene, Levan became a popular attraction perhaps due to his "diva persona", which he developed in the city's notoriously competitive black drag "houses".

At the height of the disco boom in 1977, Levan was offered a residency at the Paradise Garage. Although owner Michael Brody, who employed Levan at the defunct Reade Street, intended to create a downtown facsimile of Studio 54 catering to an upscale white gay clientele, Levan initially drew an improbable mix of streetwise blacks, Latinos, and punks.

Open only to a select membership and housed in an otherwise unadorned building on King Street in Greenwich Village, the club and Levan's DJing slowly engendered themselves into the mainstream. The DJ and programming director from WBLS, Frankie Crocker often mentioned the club on air and based his playlists around Levan's sets. The PA system of the club included custom-designed "Levan speakers".

Filling the void left by leading remixer Walter Gibbons, Levan became a prolific producer and mixer in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with many of his efforts crossing over onto the national dance music charts. Among the records that received Levan's touch were his remixes of "Ain't Nothin' Goin On But The Rent" by Gwen Guthrie and "Heartbeat" by Taana Gardner, as well as his production work on "Don't Make Me Wait" by the Peech Boys, a group that Levan formed and was part of (and who became the New York Citi Peech Boys when the Beach Boys threatened a lawsuit due to the similar sound of the name). With a strong gospel tinge in the vocal arrangements and driven by a tinkling piano, the latter song is a quintessential example of the deejay's soulful aesthetic. One of the first dance releases to incorporate a dub influence and an appended vocal-only edit, Levan tinkered with the song for nearly a year to the consternation of Mel Charen, whose label, West End Records, was nearing bankruptcy. When it was finally released, much of the song's momentum had been lost and it stalled in the lower reaches of the charts.

As the popularity of the Garage soared in the mid-1980s just as many of his longtime friends lost their battles with AIDS, Levan became increasingly dependent upon PCP and heroin. While performing, he began to ensconce himself within a protective entourage of drag queens and younger acolytes. As beat-matching and stylistic adherence became the norm among club DJs, Levan's loopy sets (ranging the gamut from Evelyn "Champagne" King and Chaka Khan to Kraftwerk, Manuel Göttsching, & British synth-pop) elicited criticism from some quarters. Nevertheless, he remained at the vanguard of dance music; recordings of Levan's later sets at the Garage demonstrate his affinity for the insurgent sounds of Chicago house and hip-hop.

The Garage ended its run with a 48 hour-long party in September 1987, weeks before Brody died from AIDS-related complications. The closure devastated Levan, who knew that few club owners would tolerate his quirks and drug dependencies. Although Brody had verbally bequeathed the club's sound and lighting systems to Levan, they were instead left to Brody's mother in his will. This change was reportedly instigated by the late impresario's lover and manager, who reportedly despised Levan.

Despite protestations and pleas to the Brody family from Mel Cheren, the systems remained in storage as their property. Unable to secure a long-term residency after a stay at the short-lived Choice in the East Village, alongside DJ/Proprietor Richard Vasquez and Joey Llanos, Levan began to sell his valuable records for drug money. Friends like Danny Krivit would buy them back for him out of sympathy.

As the nineties dawned, Levan was on the brink of a comeback. Although dismissed as a relic in New York, his popularity had soared among connoisseurs of disco & early American electronic dance music in Europe and Japan. In 1991, he designed the sound system for London's Ministry of Sound nightclub and DJed alongside Knuckles in its opening weeks. Although he was still dependent on heroin, Levan's 1992 tour of Japan garnered gushing accolades in the local press. Encouraged by Cheren, he entered rehab and made a tentative return to the studio. On the contrary, he informed his mother in June 1992 that he had "lived a good life" and was "ready to die"; Francois Kevorkian described Levan's final Japanese sets as nostalgic and inspirational, imbued with an air of bittersweetness and closure.

Death

Shortly after returning home from Japan, Levan voluntarily entered the hospital. He died four days later of heart failure caused by endocarditis. In September 2004, Levan was inducted into the Dance Music Hall of Fame for his outstanding achievement as a DJ.

http://www.jahsonic.com/larrylevan.html

Comment Wall (2 comments)

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At 2:57pm on August 8, 2009, Edie2k2 said…
fiddler.m3u
At 10:05am on June 13, 2009, Edie2k2 said…
  1. play Intro-Amp Fiddler
  2. play Amp Fiddler Feat. Neco Washington — You Could Be Mine
  3. play Superficial-Amp Fiddler
  4. play I Believe In You-Amp Fiddler
  5. play Amp Fiddler — Dreamin'
 
 
 

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