West End Records

Larry Levan: Jockey Slut Article (pg. 3)

"He built sets with stories that went into one another," explains Kevorkian. "I'm not saying that he only played vocals, but there was a concept there that he studied and became an amazing practitioner of. He was able to truly use songs, and when I say songs, I mean songs. I'm, talking about songs with a voice speaking to you and inspiring you, sot some crappy sample repeating 175 times until you're made to feel like you're every bit as stupid because it has to be repeated that many times until you understand it. Songs with lyrics. And he used those lyrics to talk to people. It was very, very common for people on the dancfloor to fell like he was talking to them directly through the record. And was a two-way thing. Not just the DJ saying, 'Here is the law,' or the crowd saying, 'We'll only listen to this,' there was an unspoken mental energy flowing back and forth. I think, more than anyone else I've known, he was the one that could pick this up more than anyone else."

That ability to talk to the dancefloor is one of the main reasons why Levan is still revered today. He created something so special between the hours of midnight on a Saturday night and whenever the club closed on Sunday afternoon, that the crowd came back religiously, week after week, for more.

"You had 1000-2000 people actually on that dancefloor communing together, continues Kevorkian. "Sharing their energies together to the music. Singing the lyrics and ad-libbing on top of the music. Today I see 1200 people on the dancefloor each in their own little mental headspace. Isolated from each other most of the time. Sometimes clubs get of al little, but not at the level of the Garage. And if you haven't seen it, I'm sorry to say, but you can't understand it. It's like telling me you've seen a bicycle ride and I've seen racecars and rockets. It's a whole different thing."

"If there were 2000 people in every Saturday," adds Depino, "A good thousand of them knew each other by name. And it was the same, year after year."

The one thing, however, that really made Levan different from DJs today was that people actually loved him. Not just the hero figure. They love Levan the person. They loved the fact that he would stop the music and spend half an hour cleaning the mirror-balls. They loved the fact that on membership days, when Michael Brody, the owner, would hold interviews for those wishing to join the club, Levan would open the back door, let the huge queue of hopefuls into the club and start playing the biggest records of the week (much to Brody's annoyance). They loved the fact that he would put on a record, then run straight down to the dancefloor and join in the party. They loved it when he hooked up his radio to the sound system and play the Garage mix show on WBLS back to the crowd. The loved the fact that his passion for the party was completely all-consuming and that sometimes, he was just plain crazy.