Still Hanging on for Dear Life

la fête de Cata se poursuit quatre fois

James Graham

Nov 29, 2022

Piaf at the bar in Montmartre, ‘36. Photo : J-G Séruzier

Story With A Happy Ending

(See part 3 of Catalina’s Birthday for where we were last time.)

The lights came back slowly, the dancers climbed down from the bar after their impromptu, everyone took their seat so we were where we were before the melée began. The two ladies I’d escorted on the tour of the wine bars disappeared. Who knows where and who cares. What are you doing ? Going anywhere important ? Have time ? Might as well tell you a story.

Years ago the Mafia bought a decrepit old church in Lower Manhattan and turned it into a nightclub, not a saloon like the famous uptown places, like Jilly’s, but a baroque dancehall. For a while it was one of the places to be in the evening, if big clubs with loud music and flashing strobes were your thing. The different tribes came in in their different costumes and headed to their favorite corners. They only danced to the music they liked, the sounds that somehow expressed their take on life. There were different djs on different nights to play to different crowds, along with a hard core of people who came to dance, to work it out on the floor. Spiritual exercise. Later on in the evening, you might see a banker dancing with a transvestite, or a very straight slobby guy making time with a fashionette. At that point, with the liquor and the disorientation from the son et lumiere, it didn’t matter. The slaves were out of their traces and doing as they pleased, while the mob guys sat in back counting receipts and bouncers prowled the floor.

I was a travelling Dj in New York for a few years. We moved from bar to bar and club to club. We, being M. Gonzales and myself, covered a few sides of town, he with the latest sounds on the American spectrum and myself, fresh from a two-year residency in Latin America, working as an authoritative expert on music from Out There. We considered ourselves scientists of sound: we knew what made people move, and we were good at it, knew how to speed things up and how to slow ’em down. Bosses at the various clubs didn’t always agree. The dance floor was fine but they watched the action at the bar. That’s what counted.

We came with our crate of records and headed to the Djs table, which was on the top floor of a wooden scaffold erected against the back wall, where you could peer down at the crowds. I put one hand on the railing and the wall tilted towards me, like in a dream. It had a little too much give. The place would be crammed with people later. I cursed, saying I didn’t know how people got away with things like that. I turned around to look at M. as if to say, What’s this ? He shrugged. He was carrying the heavy end.

We stood looking two stories down at the dance floor where the pews had been, waiting for the crowds. Light evening music to get things rolling. Later, we spun the shiny black vinyl and if Prince didn’t get them on the floor, whoever was ruling the charts would. It didn’t always work out : we were frequently shown the door at the end of the night, good riddance. Why was that ? There was so much music happening and some of it is legendary now but nobody knew what it was then. Could you play Laurie Anderson or Defunct or Konk in a dance club without having the Manager ever so politely start making obscene gestures across the dance floor, or in this case, up to us in our little aery ? He usually sent one of the bonzes to deliver the message and soon enough Mr. Muscles would be jogging up the stairs to give us the bloody business. People were starting to talk…when they were supposed to be drink-drink-drinking. New York clubs don’t specialize in conversation. If you want to converse, you go out into the alley where you don’t have have to shout over the music.

So we rolled another cut from Sign O’The Times or a strictly danceable number from the house collection, Blondie, something innocuous. Nobody likes working while the boss glowers, dragging his finger across his throat. We should follow instructions to keep things moving. Employees can catch a bad cold in an atmosphere like that. The message had already been delivered a few times that night.

What we really wanted to know was if Vernon Reid, just then cruising towards the big time, would move the crowd. Maybe something more exotic. New York was a bubbling cauldron of sound. I had a stack of records I brought from club to club and never got the chance to play….So, if it really and truly is our last night at this joint, we could do what we want, couldn’t we ? Cue up some Willie Colon or one of the other badasses from the Bronx. Management hadn’t thought of that.

Crew cut security from Muscle Beach arrives and starts to yammer. We can’t hear him, of course, with headphones on. Eh, what’s that ? ‘Knock this crazy shit off or you’ll never work here again,’ something on that order. ‘What is this anyway ?’

We’d decided we didn’t care for the place, which felt like it was going to tip over at any moment, so we decided to go out with style. A bit of Klaus Nomi for the Emos in the crowd, throw on the downtown funk, James Chance and John Sex, unknown names outside the smaller circles. Some of the music was hard-hitting, some of it as garish as red lipstick. The bouncer was barely halfway down the stairs when he got the signal and turned around and started back. Any old fool can put a needle in a groove and he was going to get his chance.

Suddenly there it was spinning round and round on the turntable : the electric piano enters with mysterious jazz filigrees, quiet noodling behind a sustained bass, a cowbell in and out in the background. The Man was charging up the stairs, getting closer. The piano slows down and there’s that dreaded silence…What’s going on ? In a New York club where “the action never stops” or some other cliché of the business world, silence isn’t allowed. The heavy is getting closer.

And then… slowly… guitars… silence, just the hissing of vinyl, a cat, the four-legged kind, seems to prancing on the piano’s upper reaches. It practically screams, Not Club Music. The tune is going nowhere, speeds up a little and quickly slows down again… The whole thing seems to be taking an eternity before the ricky-ticky Nigerian Hi-Life guitars make their entrance with a boisterous saxophone not far behind. Still the piece refuses to charge at that 3-minute breakneck so beloved of music producers. Full of waves. What the hell is going on ? We stand there gloating. Church is in session and we are sinners. The Mafia will see you soon. The tune doesn’t stop, it covers the whole side, it chants Go Slow over and over, and let’s all the musicians take a solo, stuff you never hear in the two-minute thirty-second love extravaganzas people all over the world prefer. No, this one is militant, suave and feisty at the same time. Apparently it’s saying something. And what’s the title ? Go Slow.Can’t say we didn’t have a sense of humor up there on the gallows. Myself, I wouldn’t mind burning the church down at that instant.

Mike gestures down the scaffolding, over the head of the clubbers leaning out: the enforcer is almost upon us, pausing to catch his breath and straighten up before he delivers the final word. ‘Nice work guys, you can go now. I’ll take over.’

‘Thanks, James,’ my pal M. says. ‘Now we have to lug everything out….” We stand there, not budging.

Down below, the crowd were in a slow-grind frenzy, rafters shaking as dancers packed the floor. We felt the vibrations coming up our legs. Eventually the two of us and the heavy turned to look. The tune goes on for fifteen minutes, a lifetime, and everyone was in a state of abandon. It wasn’t just the fact that floor was full but the way they were moving, as if they’d broken through some final reserve that kept them neatly in their places. I didn’t expect that but something in the choogling, unhurried beat did it. You don’t have to go fast but you have get there. Oh, they’d be thirsty afterwards.

The computations were going on inside security’s tiny electron-collider. Dance floor spilling over, people shimmying to an African beat on a long slow burn of a tune that grinds along and takes people with it. Never heard it before, didn’t know the guy’s name, wasn’t well known.