It should come as no surprise that great things can happen when groups of people are brought together with the right music. Music promotes a sense of well being and radiates energy, which in turn is reinforced by the group. This positive energy is then expended in the form of dancing and social interaction and gives life to a party and its participants. While one may think that only adults can tap into this energy and well being nothing could be further from the truth as evidenced by the following story. Shortly after the end of World War II in a room in a Catholic orphanage twenty or so children up to the age of six gather around a table waiting for Sister Alicia to start the festivities. She takes care of the children on a daily basis and this is another of the many parties that the nun puts on for them. She's decorated the room with balloons and made it look as cheerful as possible. In the center of the table she has a record player and a stack of records all set to go. Despite the fact that some of the children are too young to even talk, the music is what brings them all together and gives them great pleasure. One of those children is David Mancuso, who years later would organize New York's longest running Disco parties known simply as "The Loft." David explains, "There was one room where these childhood parties would be held-I didn't remember the room, but forty years later when I saw the pictures of the room, they were geographically the same layout almost to the "T" of my Loft." he goes on to say that there are a lot of associations with the past like the invitations he uses for the Loft parties, which depicts four children gathered around a table with party hats, balloons and a record player.
/NY NOT NYC/
David Mancuso was born in October of 1944 in the small New York town of Utica. His first four years were spent in an orphanage and then he was reunited with his mother till he was fifteen and a half. Leaving home and shinning shoes to support himself he quit school at sixteen to get more work to pay the rent. Since he had no one telling him what he could and couldn't do, David was now free to do whatever he wanted. One of the things he was told not to do was go to the "other side of the tracks." This is the area that the Blacks and Hispanics lived in and Mancuso says, "I connected with some of them. It opened up a whole world for me and then I started finding out about Black music-The Shirelles, James Brown... I fell in love with these records and also made some very close friends who treated me very well. After school we would go to someone’s house and listen to music and dance. It's always about dancing and music." Asked if music was instrumental during his formative years Mancuso had this to say, "Music gave me a lot of piece of mind since there was a lot in my environment that was not stable. Music is therapeutic; it raises your life energy... If your life energy is raised then music is healing-what more can we want." Since many of his friends were from the "other side of the tracks" we spoke briefly about the racial climate in Utica during the late 1950's early 1960's and I asked Mancuso what his thoughts were. He replies, "I didn't agree with the status quo of the environment that I was living in. I knew instinctively that it was wrong. I liked everybody."
/THE MOVE TO NYC/
During the Labor Day weekend of 1962 David Mancuso and a friend took a trip to New York City. One of the first things that struck David was the openness and diversity of the people. It was a refreshing change from the socially repressive town of Utica. New York City was vibrant and the mixing of cultures and ideas appealed to him greatly. Mancuso says, "I immediately fell in love with the city." During that short weekend visit, he made some new friends. One of them offered him a place to stay until he got on his feet. About six weeks later on the first day of his eighteenth birthday and during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, David decided to move to New York City and take his new friend up on the offer. He spent his first two months living in the Bronx. Able to find a menial job at a fast food place he soon found his own apartment in Manhattan's Upper West Side. Asked if he had any plans when he came to New York Mancuso said, "I just want to live and be happy. I was happy to be able to pay my rent, to have my independence. This was like the best thing in the world for me. I had no real ambitions at this point... Just make friends, enjoy myself, and be responsible... Basically, I didn't get into any trouble. My independence was very important to me." David Mancuso remained in the Upper West Side till around 1965 moving at least twenty times. It was during this time that he began dabbling in interior decorating and later antiques through his many associations. Once he got into antiques he focused on small silver goods and traveled extensively to and from Europe and did very well at it. He continued in the antique field till around 1973.
/THE BROADWAY LOFT AND THE KLIPSCHORN'S/
Around 1965 Mancuso moved into his first loft at 647 Broadway near Bleecker Street. The loft space was huge. Mancuso recalls it being roughly 25 feet by 100 feet with 14-foot high ceilings and a wooden floor. When asked what attracted him to the loft space he had this to say, "I think it goes back to the orphanage… Somehow or another I always identified with large spaces, old buildings…" David further explains that the neighborhood at the time was very desolate compared to what it is now. After 6pm everyone would disappear since the neighborhood was comprised mainly of factories and warehouses. Since the area was zoned for commercial use people were prohibited from actually residing in the lofts. What Mancuso and others did was to hide their beds along with pots and pans from the prying eyes of the city’s building inspectors who would show up unannounced. Klipsch - Klipschhorn speakers One of David’s hobbies was tinkering with electronics and stereos, which gave way to his interest in high-end audio. One of his friends was the late Richard Long the noted audio designer who would later create the sound system for Larry Levan’s "Paradise Garage." Having a large loft space allowed Mancuso to purchase two pairs of Klipschorn ® loudspeakers in 1966-67. The three-way horn loaded speakers were huge units that needed to be placed in a corner and had a frequency response of 33hz-17khz. The Klipschorn's ® are known for their efficiency and ability to play clearly at loud levels. These were mated to a McIntosh amp and pre-amp and two AR (Acoustic Research) turntables. The loft space and high-end audio equipment were perfect for a party and a party is exactly what Mancuso had in mind. The gatherings and fun that he had with friends in his youth never left him and he soon was holding parties at his loft on a regular basis. It was strictly fun, music and dancing for him and his group of friends. The parties continued till around 1970 when economic constraints forced David Mancuso to scale back a bit and require his friends to "chip in." At first the parties were held about twice a month. Within six months this was increased to every Saturday night with the parties beginning at midnight and finishing at 6am. AR Turntable In the beginning there was no mixer so Mancuso merely switched turntables by using the "phono 1" and "phono 2" switch on the McIntosh preamplifier. Later he rigged two Shure phono preamps with a level control to fade between them. This eventually gave way to a custom built mixer around 1973. Apparently long overlays were never part of the equation as the mixer merely served as a means to segue from one record to the other or allow Mancuso to stitch together two copies of the same song to create a longer version. In due time however, Mancuso realized that he and his guests weren’t hearing the full potential of the vinyl record or stereo system. He explains, "Getting into high end audio I realized how much nuance there was in the record and also that the record should stand on its own. I don’t want to interfere with what the artist intended or the integrity of the recording cause that’s the artist’s message so I play the record from the beginning to the very end. Occasionally if I had one of those ‘DJ friendly’ records where it starts off going boom-boom-boom for thirty seconds or more I would time it to begin a little later… In order to get Class-A sound, you had to get rid of the mixer. So what happens is you find a way to keep the flow going so there’s no space unless you intended it to be that way." He continues by saying that he is not a beat mixer and doesn’t care for BPM’s and the like and NEVER uses the pitch control. When asked what kind of music he played at the loft parties Mancuso simply responds, "Dance music Bernie, dance music. I would play everything from Jazz to classical and everything in between." Mancuso made it a point to explain that he is not into categories and was and still is open to all forms of music. He went on by saying that he had no set playlist and played mainly by ear and from what he and his friends would research, discover and share. Many a times the guests would bring some of their records to have played at the party. Here is where Mancuso goes to great lengths to describe what these parties were and weren’t, "It was basically a rent party. Private: by invitation only. It was NOT a club-not a membership-none of that stuff. I made it very clear; this was an invitation and you made a contribution. The money only came into it because I had to do it. When the money came into it, I didn’t want it to spoil it. I wanted to maintain the integrity of the party and provide as much as I could and it worked." The Loft parties would be attended by as many as two hundred guests in the course of an evening, but around 1972-73 Mancuso was given permission by the landlord to knock down a wall and join two loft subdivisions together. This greatly increased the space and now attendance was as high as three hundred people.
/FORMATION OF THE NEW YORK RECORD POOL/
In 1974 David Mancuso moved the Loft parties over to a larger space at 99 Prince Street in Manhattan’s SoHo section. It was during this time that he and Steve D’Aquisto came up with the idea to unify the city’s Disco DJ’s by starting a record pool. This record pool would lobby the record labels to distribute promotional records to DJs who were members of the pool. Despite the fact that Disco DJ’s were becoming more instrumental in breaking new records without any support from radio, they were having a difficult time acquiring new product from the record labels. Mancuso explains the reason for forming a record pool, "There were about twenty six DJ’s at the time and it was getting harder and harder to get promotional records. You had to be on someone’s special list, there was discrimination going on as to who got in and didn’t…We made an announcement that if they (Disco DJ’s) wanted to meet to work things out they were welcome to come to my space to see what we can do. At that meeting I suggested a pool-somewhere we all join together and that’s where the record pool concept came in." Mancuso’s love for music was usually at odds with a business mentality so I asked if the pool was a business and he replied, "Not at all. If you go by today’s record pools, yes. First of all, I financed it for the first two years because DJ’s had no money. I had the space so I donated the space. I had moved to 99 Prince Street and it took 17 months to bring everything up to code so I had spare time to develop a record pool… We did it for the music." Mancuso proceeds to explain that he had the record pool incorporated as a non-profit venture and did everything democratically with the members voting on issues that affected them and the pool. Mancuso was voted president and secretary while D’Aquisto was vice president. In order for DJ’s to belong to the record pool they had to supply a letter from their employer with a corporate seal stating how many nights they worked… This was easier said than done since most DJ’s worked off the books. This letter helped to establish the legitimacy of the DJ to the record pool, but most importantly to the record labels since in effect the DJ’s had been prescreened. Some of the original members of the New York Record Pool included Steve D’Aquisto, Francis Grasso, Michael Cappello, David Rodriguez, and Nicky Siano. When asked if he realized the significance of the record pool at the time Mancuso responds, "All we wanted to do was get music and share it and do it as simply as possible. Some of these DJ’s were literally working seven days a week, 12 hours and not getting paid and when they did get paid it was like $20-50 dollars a night and on top of that they had to buy their own records." The New York Record Pool flourished and soon boasted three hundred members. This however was taking a great deal of time from Mancuso’s first love, which was hosting his Loft parties. He explains, "I had enough and I don’t mean that in a negative way. It’s like you can love your children and raise them, but there is a point… it’s gotta go on its own… I gradually let it (record pool) go." By 1978 Mancuso had completely divested himself of anything to do with the record pool. It is around this time that a Loft staff member by the name of Judy Weinstein would take over operations of the pool. She would later begin a revamped record pool called "For the Record" to which all the top New York Disco DJ's belonged. In a 2002 SpeedGarage.com interview Weinstein said, "I started to work for him (David Mancuso) at the Loft when it was on 99 Prince Street... and actually started running the record pool along with Mark Riley and Hank Williams..."
On September 19, 2005 Mancuso was inducted into the Dance Music Hall of Fame for his outstanding achievement as a DJ.
