A Brief History of DJs and Dance Music

I’m going to tell you about Dance Music but I don’t come in until a little ways into the story. I don’t go back to the beginning, nor do I claim that I do. I come in just before House Music was conceived. Dance Music goes back to way before what most of the world considers the birth of House Music in Chicago, I’ll explain. Just stick with me for a little while as I discuss the early history, so we have some context.

Worldwide modern Dance Music culture really began with the Loft in New York City, on Valentines Day, February 14th, 1970. The party was called “Love Saves the Day” an acronym for LSD. Not every party was a giant drug den, but the concept of opening your mind and being receptive to music was something that would carry forward. 

David Mancuso had what started out as rent parties in his spacious loft in Manhattan at 674 Broadway--just north of Houston. They were “members only” events where members could bring friends. This ensured that everyone knew everyone else in the party by only a couple of degrees of separation. 

David was the DJ and the sound architect of the Loft and his work in both roles made him a legend. 

In his role as a DJ, David played one song after another from beginning to end, not mixing one song into the next but fully letting one run out and then playing the next. Even though David did not mix, he relied on his song selection and the order of those songs to keep the energy level explosively high on the dance floor. 

In his role as a sound architect, David had Alex Rosner (who invented the first DJ mixer) set up the sound system so that you could hear all parts of the song with absolute clarity but still be able to engage in a conversation and not have to raise your voice. David’s vision, made possible by Alex, was for the listener to hear the song as the artist/producer intended, with no more bass or treble than the song sounded like in the studio of it’s making. The ability to discuss music and how it made you feel, hearing it like you were in the studio when it was made, while you were sitting and having a conversation and still have the same sonic experience on the dance floor created a communal atmosphere and made the patron/members feel enveloped by the music and that they were a part of a family. It was the beginning of the Dance Music Community in the Modern era (1970 and forward). Many of history’s most prolific DJ’s got turned onto great songs and learned to appreciate music at David’s Loft: Nicky Siano, Frankie Knuckles, Larry Levan, Tony Humphries, Louie Vega, the list goes on.

The songs David played were pure and organic. People danced freely and the Loft’s atmosphere can be summed up as all kinds of people, many Hippies, dancing to music with Soul, with teens to adults, lost in grooves. Spinning, flailing, everyone could dance with no scrutiny as if they were alone with no one watching. People could finally be themselves in this oasis from judgment. The embodied response of dancing coupled with simultaneously experiencing an entire room of people feeling the same vibe, and validating the swell of emotion inside, is a chance to feel as if we are one with the divine. The Loft changed people.

Francis Grasso was the first known DJ to do what is known as beat matching. Beat matching is where you speed up one song or slow down another to make them play at the same BPM (Beats Per Minute) as each other and the end of one song would overlap with the beginning of the next. Thoren made a turntable that had a pitch control that allowed the DJ to control the speed of songs and the concept of beat matching (generally, just know as mixing) was born. 

Alex saw the few early DJ’s trying to DJ with live sound mixers. A live sound mixer allows more than one turntable (or other sound source) to be heard at the same time and so the overlap that mixing necessitates was possible, but not being able to hear the incoming record made every DJ mix a hit or miss proposition. DJ’s were struggling. Alex Rosner added a cue (a way for the DJ to listen to the channel/song they wanted to mix in) and the first DJ Mixer was born. He called it Rosie because it was red. 

Francis Grasso invented the concept of “mixing two records together” in 1969/70 and he put together whatever worked that people were willing to dance to. Soulful Rock songs with a good beat were mixed together with R&B songs, Soul songs and Jazz songs that kept to a 4/4 time signature. Pretty much every song you’ll ever listen to keeps with 4/4 time (except for Jazz and some Art-Rock). 

4/4 time is as follows: find the first kick drum or usually just the first beat of the song (if it starts off without drums). Then count every beat after that like this for the first four beats “1-2-3-4”. Then, for the next four, like this “2-2-3-4”. Then “3-2-3-4” and finally “4-2-3-4” and then start over. Often songs will start off with a two bar intro but then 4/4 time starts. 

Usually, after that last measure “4-2-3-4”, when you start over with the next “1”, something will have happened on that first “1” (known as starting the beat on the “One,” thanks to James Brown), vocals start, the chorus starts or ends, one instrument (or more) will start or stop. Sometimes, you have to wait for the beginning of the next measure in a record to mix it in properly because mixing on measure creates an experience in which the records seem to “talk to” each other. 

Anyway, back to DJ history.

The 45 rpm record only allowed a little over 4 minutes of playing time. That wasn’t enough for the Dance Club craze that was all the rage in NYC in 1976 when Disco Music got its start. A studio producer and fashion model that had a love for Soul music named Tom Moulton was not content leaving songs with a length of five minutes or less. 

Tom started editing songs and after several people heard his edits, he was asked to mix master recordings of songs in the studio. His edits and then his original mixes of songs extended the best, most soulful, groovy parts of the songs. Instead of only letting that super-soulful part play for a couple of measures, he would turn 2 measures into 8 or 16 and really let you hear your favorite parts of the song where the music really takes you on an emotional trip. These extended mixes truly helped to create the magic of the entire experience. They allowed the listener to engage with the best parts of the music for a longer period of time and allowed a deeper imprinting of the memory of the music with the memory of the movement in the brain. House Music would use that same blueprint in the near future. 

Tom gave this gift to the newly named genre called Disco music in the early 70’s. He would bring his mixes on reel to reel tapes to clubs that had reel to reel machines. This limited the play of his studio mixes on reel to reel to clubs because radio only played songs that were commercially available and fit within a 3-4 minute timeframe. Tom’s mixes (often 8 minutes or longer) wouldn’t fit onto the 7 inch 45 rpm record that singles were released on. The exception to this was Frankie Crocker’s radio show on WBLS in New York, where he played Tom’s mixes on air.

Before the birth of the 12” inch single, one entire side of a vinyl record was reserved for half of a whole album, not a single song. Tom suggested that they use the whole side of what would usually be an album (12 inches wide instead of the 7 inches used for 45rpm singles) for a single song and the 12” single was born. 

Now, the world could experience and purchase 12” inch singles and those extended versions which could only previously be heard in clubs. Record labels were now able to sell a 12” inch single that contained the extended version of a song and also gain sales off of the original album. I’d imagine their profits soared. Tom Moulton and Walter Gibbons were the first studio producers who started remixing other artist’s work. Some artists found it to be blasphemous and did not like another producer’s interpretations of their work, however those artists didn’t have the last word and the popularity of the extended versions helped change their minds. Tom and Walter’s creations were magnificent, serious versions of the originals. 

Tom told me the story of Tom’s vision for the iconic song “Love is the Message.” Tom heard the original album version and said, “It needs something here, after it gets to the organ part, I’m gonna call (Leon) Huff and see if I can get him to come over and play. Huff said, ‘You know, we’re doing the Jacksons now, but I’ll come by when I get a break,’ ‘Yeah, I just want you to try something, it’ll only take 15 or 20 minutes,’” Tom said. Tom told the engineer to get a ladder so Tom could take out the red bulb that came on when an artist was being recorded so Huff wouldn’t know that Tom was recording the session. The engineer protested but Tom said, “Just go get the fuckin ladder”. Tom set it up so that Huff only heard the kick, snare, high-hat, bass and the organ in his headphones as he sat down to play. Before Huff started playing, Tom privately told the engineer, “I want a little more high-hat because I want him to play a certain way and it’s got that groove in there so I know he’s gonna play that kinda style. So he gets in there and that’s exactly what he does and I tell him to keep playing and then Huff says, ‘Lets hear that back’ and the engineer says ‘Ok’ and I said ‘Ok what?’ and the engineer says, ‘oh that’s right, we didn’t record that’. Then Tom says to Huff, “Nah, I don’t think that’s gonna work and Huff said, ‘yeah, I think you’re right” and Huff went back to his recording session with the Jacksons and Tom got busy putting Huff’s iconic Fender Rhodes solo into “Love is the Message.” Tom said, “When the Philadelphia Classics album came out” (with Tom’s extended version), “the New York Times wrote about Huff’s Fender Rhodes part and people were asking why it hadn’t been included in the original and I started avoiding Huff like the plague. Any time he was in there (in Sigma Sound Studios) in the daytime, I would be there at night and I would always go up the back stairs knowing he would go up the front stairs so I wouldn’t run into him but he caught me one day and said, “Hey Mo, I wanted to ask you something, Love is the Message, where did that piano part come from?’ and I said ‘it was (already) on the tape…’ One time when I was in New York, I asked Tom how he knew that if he (Tom) opened up that space for him (Huff), that Huff would deliver the part Tom wanted and Tom replied, “Well, that’s the only thing you can play..the thing about Huff that’s so great is that he grooves and when the groove is there, he just embellishes the groove…I knew I was gonna get something like that.”

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