Lawrence — Love Saves the Day

Author: Tim Lawrence
Title: Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979
Year: 2003
Type: Academic book (Duke University Press)

Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979 is a book by the cultural historian Tim Lawrence, published by Duke University Press, which dates it to February 2004; its DOI record dates it to 2003. It opens with David Mancuso’s “Love Saves the Day” Valentine’s party of 1970 and follows American dance music culture through the decade, from its downtown roots to midtown Manhattan and out to the suburbs and cities across the country, drawing on more than three hundred interviews. Its ten chapters run from house parties and discotheques through the downtown party network to “Disco Takes Over,” the ninth, and a last chapter on the backlash against disco. Lawrence presents Mancuso, who grew up in a children’s home where a nun threw parties for the children, as having become “a bearded Sister Alicia.” He writes that the 1979 Disco Demolition rally at Comiskey Park echoed “the fascist rallies of the 1930s and 1940s,” and he reads the words of the campaign’s leader as a sign that the backlash was above all homophobic, though it drew on a wider unease with gay men, Black people, women and disco’s excess. Reviewers praised its research. Mitchell Morris wrote that it should change how the history of popular music is written, and Paul Williams wrote that it “serves more effectively as a documentary record than a critical analysis.” It received an honorable mention for the 2005 Woody Guthrie Award.

Lawrence, who led the Music Culture: Theory and Production degree at the University of East London, published the book with Duke University Press. The press gives February 2004 as its publication date, and the book’s DOI record and Open Library give 2003.¹ The publisher’s description says the book opens with Mancuso’s “Love Saves the Day” Valentine’s party and follows the culture from its underground roots in NoHo and Hell’s Kitchen to midtown Manhattan and out through the suburbs and to cities such as Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Newark and Miami. It says the book draws on more than three hundred interviews, among them David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Tom Moulton, Loleatta Holloway, Giorgio Moroder, Francis Grasso, Frankie Knuckles and Earl Young, and that it includes more than twenty DJ discographies and a discography of some six hundred releases.¹

The book has ten chapters and an epilogue. They run from house parties and discotheques through the downtown party network and the new record pools and labels to the ninth, “Disco Takes Over,” and the tenth, on the backlash.¹ In Lawrence’s later account, Mancuso held the Valentine’s Day party at 647 Broadway in February 1970, and the party, which became known as The Loft, followed the Harlem rent parties of the 1920s, which had “established a template for putting on a private party that didn’t require a liquor or cabaret license.” Because Mancuso served no alcohol, it could run “until midday (and sometimes later).” Lawrence calls it “a moment of rebirth,” in which practices, “some of which can be traced back across the decades,” “came together in a new form.”²

The Loft’s influence spread through its regulars. One, from Broadway, started the Tenth Floor for a white gay crowd, and Flamingo grew out of it. Michael Brody modeled Reade Street on Mancuso’s party and later opened the Paradise Garage as an “expanded version of the Loft.” Another regular took the format to Chicago and opened the Warehouse. Larry Levan became the Garage’s DJ, and Knuckles the Warehouse’s.²

Lawrence said in a 2022 interview that Mancuso’s love of music began in the children’s home where he was raised, whose nun, Sister Alicia, held parties for the children. That Mancuso “effectively went on to become a bearded Sister Alicia,” he said, is “one of the founding arguments of Love Saves the Day.”³ In the book Mancuso is the “bearded Sister Alicia” who “kept control of his restless children by throwing parties.” When the two were reunited, she showed him a photograph of the orphanage’s party room, dated Valentine’s Day 1949, and he told her it was “a carbon copy of the Loft.”⁴

On the backlash, Lawrence writes that the Comiskey Park gathering of July 1979 had “its less comic side, echoing as it did the fascist rallies of the 1930s and 1940s.” Steve Dahl, the Chicago radio DJ who led the anti-disco campaign, had argued that it made people question the disco being forced on them, and Lawrence reads that argument as suggesting that “disco sucks” was “first and foremost a homophobic phenomenon.” He adds that the movement drew on “a far more flexible ideology than straightforward homophobia”: gay men had become too prominent for Dahl’s followers, but so had Black people and women, and disco had come to stand for excess, hedonism and physicality.⁵ Lawrence quotes Siano, who says that “in a way” he was with the “disco sucks” people, since a lot of the music, “although not all of it,” was garbage, but that the anti-disco crowd was “very white, male, and straight.” “After almost ten years of gay white men and gay black men pretty much owning the scene,” Siano says, “heteros wanted to take their power back.”⁵

Duke’s page collects reviews that praised the book’s research. Mitchell Morris, in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, called it “an extraordinarily rich work that ought to transform the ways we write the history of popular music,” and Jeremy Gilbert, in The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, praised it as cultural history. Paul Williams, in Cultural Studies Review, found it “exhaustively researched” and wrote that it “serves more effectively as a documentary record than a critical analysis,” though he found Lawrence’s interpretations mostly lucid.¹ It received an honorable mention for the Woody Guthrie Award in 2005.¹ Lawrence followed it with a biography of Arthur Russell, Hold On to Your Dreams (2009), and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983 (2016).⁶

Key contributions

• A history of American dance music culture in the 1970s, from Mancuso’s Valentine’s party of 1970 to disco’s dominance and the backlash of 1979.
• The parties that grew from the Loft, from the Tenth Floor and Reade Street to the Paradise Garage in New York and the Warehouse in Chicago.
• David Mancuso as host, read through his childhood in a children’s home as “a bearded Sister Alicia.”
• The “disco sucks” backlash as largely homophobic, in Lawrence’s reading of its leader’s argument, and drawing on a wider unease with the prominence of gay men, Black people and women.

See also

• The Death of Rhythm and Blues — Nelson George’s 1988 history of Black music and crossover
• Last Night a DJ Saved My Life — Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s 1999 history of the DJ
• The Underground Is Massive — Michaelangelo Matos’s 2015 history of American rave
• The color line in pop — the color line as industry infrastructure, from market categories to radio formats