Tim Lawrence (1967 - )
Biography
Here's a summary of my life. I was born in Ealing, West London, in 1967, and grew up in Winnersh, five miles outside of Reading, where my Dad, who escaped Nazi Germany on one of the last kindertransport, got his first job as an English teacher. I studied in Manchester between 1986 and 1990, and then returned to London, where I worked as a journalist for four years. In between times my Dad and my Mum died. During 1993 I realised I needed a change of scene and direction. I ended up travelling to New York to begin my doctoral studies, which I completed in Sussex in 1999. Since then I've lived and worked in London.
Here's how I divide my time. I hang out with my daughter, Carlotta, otherwise known as "Carlotta the Rotter", my wife, Enrica, who I met in New York, and my friends, who occasionally come out to dance, but who prefer to meet up for dinner. I write books, articles and liner notes, and through a strange turn of events my writing led me to run house parties with David Mancuso in London (the first one was held in June 2003). For my day job, I run the Music Culture: Theory and Production degree at the University of East London, which is based in Docklands.
I have lived near Old Street for the last seven years, and although friends tell me You must live in Crouch End, or You must come to Richmond, it's not going to happen ¾ even if they offer to cook every night. I like living in the city; I believe in living in the city. If we end up moving because, for instance, it's almost impossible to give a kid a decent education in the centre of the city once they turn eleven years old without going private, we'll go to Rome (where Enrica grew up) or New York (my spiritual home). -- Tim Lawrence via http://www.timlawrence.info/tl.html [Apr 2005]
Love Saves the Day (2004) - Tim Lawrence [...]
- Masters at Work: 10th Anniversary Pt.1 (1990 - 1995) [Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]
For those of us who did not have the connoisseurship to know better and buy the vinyls way back when, the old adage "Good things come to those who wait" applies. Four CD's for a pittance! And all of them better than each other! Is that possible? Just about every track features hip-gyration-provoking female vocals with back-up. India is on a few, and what a voice! Bass lines are aplenty, and all the tracks are uplifting. But, most importantly, Lil' Louie and Kenny Dope never lose sight of the fact that they're out to make MUSIC, and that means, all the tracks have that rich soulful musicality. No whimsical odd sounds or irritating "ain't it neat?" kinda "experiments". In other words, artists respecting other artists' work, putting together sounds and beats that, upon listening, can only make you feel good to be alive, and even inspire you to think that the world is a good place after all. One of the truly great achievements in the annals of modern music. Luxtiller for amazon.com
Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979 (2004) - Tim Lawrence [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Opening with David Mancuso's seminal "Love Saves the Day" Valentine's party, Tim Lawrence tells the definitive story of American dance music culture in the 1970s-from its subterranean roots in NoHo and Hell's Kitchen to its gaudy blossoming in midtown Manhattan to its wildfire transmission through America's suburbs and urban hotspots such as Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Newark, and Miami.
Tales of nocturnal journeys, radical music making, and polymorphous sexuality flow through the arteries of Love Saves the Day like hot liquid vinyl. They are interspersed with a detailed examination of the era's most powerful DJs, the venues in which they played, and the records they loved to spin-as well as the labels, musicians, vocalists, producers, remixers, party promoters, journalists, and dance crowds that fuelled dance music's tireless engine.
Love Saves the Day includes material from over three hundred original interviews with the scene's most influential players, including David David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Tom Moulton, Loleatta Holloway, Giorgio Moroder, Francis Grasso, Frankie Knuckles, and Earl Young. It incorporates more than twenty special DJ discographies-listing the favorite records of the most important spinners of the disco decade-and a more general discography cataloguing some 600 releases. Love Saves the Day also contains a unique collection of more than seventy rare photos. --amazon.com
[I]t’s only now, thanks to ‘Love Saves The Day’, that the Leary / Mancuso connection becomes crucial to our understanding of the origins of dance culture. Other writers have touched on it, but this is the first book to reveal the extent of Leary’s direct influence on Mancuso, and, as such, it’s author, Tim Lawrence, the director of the Music Cultures program at East London University, has unearthed a hugely significant missing link. --Greg Wilson reviews Love Saves the Day
Is It All Over My Face? The Life and Music of Arthur Russell
Is It All Over My Face? The Life and Music of Arthur Russell will tell the story of the vocalist, cellist, percussionist and composer Arthur Russell. Having worked and partied in the creative milieu of downtown New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Russell forms a symbolic bridge between Tim Lawrence's first book, Love Saves the Day , which examines seventies dance culture, and Paradise and After , which will focus on dance culture in the 1980s and early 1990s. Russell generated a remarkable roster of quirky, off-beat, radical recordings that relentlessly tested the boundaries of established genres -- and which are worthy of a biographical study. --Tim Lawrence http://www.timlawrence.info/writing-pages/wr_forth_is-it.html [Jan 2005]
In the spring of 2003 I travelled to Seattle for the first time to deliver a paper at the Experience Music Project. I had worked as a consultant for EMP's Disco Exhibit, which has subsequently travelled to the Lincoln Centre in New York, and was keen to seen the exhibition in full flow, as well as attend the organisation's second conference, which brings together journalists and academics. Having started out in journalism and ended up in academia while never feeling entirely comfortable in either profession, it seemed like an excellent conference to attend.
During my trip to Seattle I met Ken Wissoker, the editor-in-chief at Duke and my editor for Love Saves the Day (then a year away from publication), for the first time. I also met Ned Sublette, author of Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (then a year away from publication), who delivered the conference's outstanding paper on the hidden Cuban influence on North American music culture. At the final night party, we all met, and the conversation went something like this:
Tim: You're paper was great, Ned!
Ned: Why thank you! I'm sorry I didn't get to hear yours. What do you do?
Tim: I'm a lecturer at the University of East London and I write about dance music.
Ned: Boom, boom, boom, boom! That's not dance music ¾ that's a pneumatic drill! This is dance music. [Sublette sings the following] Is it all over my face, I'm in love dancing…
Tim: Arthur Russell! I write about that kind of dance music. Why "Is It All Over My Face"?
Ned: I knew Arthur Russell from way back. We met in the mid-seventies. We used to hang out together. We were musicians. We made organic music!
Tim: Arthur and Walter Gibbons ¾ those are the two music makers from the seventies/eighties that I really want to write about in a bit more detail. I'm just finishing this book on dance culture in the 1970s and one of the really frustrating things about ending it there is that I don't really get to write about Arthur. I talk about "Kiss Me Again", but most of Arthur's dance releases came out in the eighties, so he doesn't get much of a look-in.
Ned: Arthur was a genius and dance music was only small part of his work. He was an avant-garde classical cellist, he was music director of the Kitchen, he played in Peter Gordon's Love of Life Orchestra…
Tim: Arthur's life is kind of where I am at the moment with my work. I'm still neck-deep in the seventies and am about to charge into the eighties with the sequel to Love Saves the Day. Arthur kind of forms a bridge between the two decades.
[Ken comes up]
Tim: Hi, Ken. You know Ned, right? Ned knew Arthur Russell, who produced "Is It All Over My Face" and "Go Bang", which were big early eighties dance classics.
Ken: I think I have those records.
Tim: People are around who knew Arthur Russell. How would you like a biography of Arthur Russell before I write about the 1980s?
Ken: That's something we can think about.
Ken and I met again the following year, again at EMP. By that time Love Saves the Day had been published and, within two months, the first three thousand copies had sold out and reviews were starting to appear. We met to talk about that and future projects, including the Arthur Russell biography.
Russell had had quite a year, even though he died (from complications arising from Aids) in 1992. Having received next to no recognition during his life, Russell was suddenly receiving an extraordinary wave of press recognition following the simultaneous release of two complications: Calling Out of Context (Audika, 2004), which contained previously unreleased Russell recordings from the late 1980s, and The World of Arthur Russell (Soul Jazz, 2004), which brought together the musician's dance twelve-inches.
The media frenzy was ostensibly set off when David Toop published a feature about Russell in the Wire ¾ David quoted Love Saves the Day generously, noting that the main focus of the book, the downtown private party dance scene, was the milieu that inspired Russell's dance recordings and was the place where he would take his acetates for a first hearing ¾ and it was followed by extensive features in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and scores of other publications.
The media coverage took away the scoop-like element of the biography. Just as nobody had written about David Mancuso and the Loft when I started to research Love Saves the Day, so nobody had written about Russell up to this point. But t it was also clear that a book could go a lot further than any of the journalistic pieces that had been published, and the flurry of articles also made the publication of a book on Russell more likely. Having been sceptical about the potential of the biography about, Ken was now confident that an audience existed.
I have been researching Russell's life since the publication of Love Saves the Day in February 2004. When I travelled to New York for the launch of the book ¾ the first party took place at David Mancuso's Loft, the second at one of Danny Krivit's 718 Sessions ¾ I spent a good part of my time with Steve Knutson, the head of Audika, who is on an Arthur mission: to re-release as many of Russell's recordings as the music market can bear. Steve now holds most of Russell's tapes and archive files, and we spent many hours going through this hall-of-mirrors material. During my trip I also met up with the wry and radical Peter Zummo, Russell's favourite trombonist, as well as the lovely and indefatigable Tom Lee, Russell's long-term lover. We talked Arthur and by the end of the trip it was clear that there was the potential for a captivating and illuminating book.
Since that trip I have interviewed many of Arthur's family, friends, collaborators and supporters, including Mustafa Ahmed, Bob Blank, Joyce Bowden, Ernie Brooks, Rhys Chatham, Jon Gibson, Philip Glass, Peter Gordon, Steven Hall, Elodie Lauten, Eric Liljestrand, Gary Lucas, Phil Niblock, Chuck and Emily Russell, Will Socolov, Geoff Travis and Jennifer Warnes. I am nearing the end of the research process and will start to write soon. --Tim Lawrence via email [Apr 2005]
Walter Gibbons [...]
Tim Lawrence recently wrote a 13,000 word essay on Walter Gibbons for Suss'd/Salsoul for a CD of his Salsoul mixes) that is the most comprehensive account of Walter Gibbons's life and work.
Yet Walter Gibbons, against all odds, still became a DJ's DJ. "Everyone was going to hear Walter," says Smith, who would go down to Galaxy once he had wrapped up for the night at Barefoot Boy. "Most DJs finished at four so we could hear Walter from five until ten." After that, Gibbons and Smith would go for breakfast and, weather permitting, a trip to the beach, where they would talk about music. "DJs couldn't go and listen to too many people because we had played all night and didn't want to hear the same thing all over again. But we knew Walter would turn us on. Everyone showed up." --Tim Lawrence, http://www.timlawrence.info/writing-pages/wg_mixed-w-love.html [Jan 2005]
Performing in parallel yet unconnected universes, DJ Kool Herc in the Bronx and John Luongo in Boston started to play back-to-back breaks around the same time as Gibbons, but neither of them could match the Galaxy mixmaster's razor precision.
On Hit and Run: Having been restricted to carrying out a cut-and-paste reedit of the half-inch master copies for "Ten Percent", Gibbons was now able to select between each individual track, and he dissected and reconstructed the six-minute album version in the most sweeping manner imaginable: a swathe of strings and almost all the horns were sliced out in order to emphasise Baker, Harris and Young's exquisite rhythm track, and, in a high-risk move, the remixer shifted the focus of the song by cutting the first two minutes and all of the verses of Holloway's vocal.
Salsoul's bigwigs were aghast. "When Walter played me his mix I initially wanted to choke him," says Cayre. "Loleatta wasn't there anymore. Walter just told me that I had to get used to it." Always up for a party, the mogul went to listen to Gibbons play the twelve-inch in its intended setting and "after hearing it a couple of times" he knew that Gibbons "had done the right thing." --Tim Lawrence, http://www.timlawrence.info/writing-pages/wg_mixed-w-love.html [Jan 2005]
Masters at Work [...]
Tim Lawrence has written fairly comprehensive liner notes on the first ten years of Masters at Work (originally liner notes for the BBE compilations
'Little' Louie Vega and Kenny 'Dope' Gonzalez are New York's original Masters at Work. A unique urban species, they have listened to and absorbed the cross-cultural sound waves of Roy Ayres, John 'Jellybean' Benitez, George Benson, Jocelyn Brown, Chic, Celia Cruz, the Fania All Stars, Bruce Forest, Larry Heard, Loleatta Holloway, Tony Humphries, Jazzy Jay, Marshall Jefferson, Fela Kuti, Hector LaVoe, Larry Levan, David Mancuso, Eddie Palmieri, Tito Puente, Red Alert, the Salsoul Orchestra, Todd Terry and many more. Their record collections may have been hellish to organise, but by bringing these variegated pasts into an avant-gardist present Gonzalez and Vega have managed to negotiate the precarious sand dune of the dance music industry with such ease and originality that they must now be considered alongside the elite of contemporary dance music remixers.--Tim Lawrence via the liner notes to the 2000 Masters at Work: The Tenth Anniversary Collection (1990-1995), BBE records.
Louie Vega [...]
Vega was introduced to Levan by Jellybean, ex-DJ from the Funhouse, in 1986. "I'd stand in the booth and watch Larry work the crowd," says Vega. "He probably saw me as a young kid out there playing." If he did, Levan had changed his mind by the summer of 1987. "Larry said, 'I'd love for you to do a guest spot.' He told me at the Garage. I couldn't believe it." Vega suddenly found himself on the verge of joining an exclusive coterie that included David DePino, François Kevorkian, Danny Krivit, Joey Llanos, David Morales, Larry Patterson, Victor Rosado and Tee Scott. "Louie was coming out of the freestyle era and he didn't get respect from the more underground DJs in New York," says Gonzalez. "They considered freestyle music to be too commercial and that made Louie a bubble gum DJ. Apart from Larry Levan, who showed him a lot of love, I don't think they understood where he was coming from or what he was capable of doing."
By the end of the year the Vega was playing in the same booth as Levan— although not at the Garage, which closed in September 1987, and not at Heartthrob, which closed around the same time, but at Studio 54. "Heartthrob came to an end when an aggressive owner reopened Studio 54 for a younger clientele," says Vega, who was invited to play at the West Fifty-fourth Street venue. "My crowd from Heartthrob followed me there. I was playing freestyle, hip-hop, reggae, classics, and more and more house. Friday nights there would be twenty-five hundred and Saturday nights four thousand." Levan played on Thursdays. "Larry needed a new home. He was doing different spots here and there. His Studio night was packed. The Garage crowd came out to support him." --Tim Lawrence via the liner notes to Choice: Collection of Classics - Louie Vega [Amazon.com] [Jan 2005]
Marshall Jefferson [...]
The story begins, like so many of the best stories about Chicago house, on the dance floor of the Music Box, where Ron Hardy began to formulate a peculiarly manic blend of disco, new wave and electro when the venue opened at the end of 1983. Hardy had only been offered the job when Robert Williams, the ex-owner of the Warehouse, which had closed in June, failed to entice Frankie Knuckles to join him at his new club, but the relatively unknown spinner soon generated a reputation for generating ferociously emotive sets and Jefferson, who was lured to the venue by an attractive co-worker at the Post Office, was soon caught up in the DJ's bewildering slipstream. "I wasn't interested in dance music before I went to the Music Box," he says. "I was listening to rock'n'roll because it was so hard. I was young and disco wasn't rebellious enough for me. But at the Music Box the volume really swept me away." --Tim Lawrence via the liner notes to My Salsoul - Marshall Jefferson, http://www.timlawrence.info/writing-pages/mj_my-salsoul.html [Jan 2005]Nicky Siano [...]
The notes for the excellent Nicky Siano compilation on Soul Jazz.Loft parties, London [...]
He also organises the Loft parties with Mancuso in London, four times a year.
Mancuso experimented with several party formats before he conjured up the format that came to be known as the Loft. The breakthrough arrived on Valentine's Day 1970, when the irrepressible socialite staged a "Love Saves the Day" party in his Soho loft apartment. The event was a hit and quickly became a weekly affair, with the anti-establishment hippie determined to avoid nightworld's commercial trappings. "I didn't want to become a club or an after-hours spot," he says. "I didn't want to be categorised. I just wanted to have a house party."-- the original liner notes for the first Nuphonic Loft compilation, http://www.timlawrence.info/writing-pages/wr_david_mancuso_loft.html [Jan 2005]
Masters at Work: 10th Anniversary Pt.1 (1990 - 1995)
Mixed with Love (2004) - Walter Gibbons
Mixed with Love (2004) - Walter Gibbons [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
1. Ten Percent (Original 12" Mix) 2. Block Party (Original 12" Mix ) 3. Catch Me On The Rebound (Original 12" Mix) 4. Just As Long As I Got You (Original 12" Mix) 5. It’S Good For The Soul (Original Lp Remix) 6. Let No Man Put Asunder (Original Lp Remix) 7. Love Is Finally Coming My Way (Original 12” Mix) 8. We’Re Getting Stronger (Original 12" Mix) 9. Ice Cold Love (Original Lp Remix) 10. Cheaters Never Win (Original 12" Mix) 11. Law & Order (Original 12" Mix) 12. Catch Me On The Rebound (Original Lp Remix) 13. As Long As You Love Me (Original 12" Mix) 14. I Can’T Turn You Loose (Original 12" Mix) 15. My Love Is Free (Original Album Remix) 16. Hit & Run (Original 12" Mix) 17. I Wish That I Could Make Love (Original Lp Remix) 18. Nice N’ Naasty (Original 12" Mix) 19. Where Will It End (Original 12" Mix) 20. Salsoul 3001 (Original 12" Mix) 21. Moon Maiden (Original 12" Mix) 22. (Dance With Me) Let’S Believe (Original 12" Mix) 23. Catch Me On The Rebound Inst (Original 12" Mix) 24. Ten Percent (Original Lp Remix) 25. Rocket Rock (Original 12" Mix) 26. Magic Bird Of Fire (Original Album Remix) 27. Super Queen (Original 12" Mix) 28. Stand By Your Man (Original 12" Mix) 29. Your Cheatin’ Heart (Original 12" Mix)
Yet Walter Gibbons, against all odds, still became a DJ's DJ. "Everyone was going to hear Walter," says Smith, who would go down to Galaxy once he had wrapped up for the night at Barefoot Boy. "Most DJs finished at four so we could hear Walter from five until ten." After that, Gibbons and Smith would go for breakfast and, weather permitting, a trip to the beach, where they would talk about music. "DJs couldn't go and listen to too many people because we had played all night and didn't want to hear the same thing all over again. But we knew Walter would turn us on. Everyone showed up." --http://www.timlawrence.info/writing-pages/wg_mixed-w-love.html [Jan 2005]
Love Saves the Day (2004) - Tim Lawrence [...]
- Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979 (2004) - Tim Lawrence [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Opening with David Mancuso's seminal "Love Saves the Day" Valentine's party, Tim Lawrence tells the definitive story of American dance music culture in the 1970s-from its subterranean roots in NoHo and Hell's Kitchen to its gaudy blossoming in midtown Manhattan to its wildfire transmission through America's suburbs and urban hotspots such as Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Newark, and Miami.Tales of nocturnal journeys, radical music making, and polymorphous sexuality flow through the arteries of Love Saves the Day like hot liquid vinyl. They are interspersed with a detailed examination of the era's most powerful DJs, the venues in which they played, and the records they loved to spin-as well as the labels, musicians, vocalists, producers, remixers, party promoters, journalists, and dance crowds that fuelled dance music's tireless engine.
Love Saves the Day includes material from over three hundred original interviews with the scene's most influential players, including David David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Tom Moulton, Loleatta Holloway, Giorgio Moroder, Francis Grasso, Frankie Knuckles, and Earl Young. It incorporates more than twenty special DJ discographies-listing the favorite records of the most important spinners of the disco decade-and a more general discography cataloguing some 600 releases. Love Saves the Day also contains a unique collection of more than seventy rare photos. --amazon.com
[I]t’s only now, thanks to ‘Love Saves The Day’, that the Leary / Mancuso connection becomes crucial to our understanding of the origins of dance culture. Other writers have touched on it, but this is the first book to reveal the extent of Leary’s direct influence on Mancuso, and, as such, it’s author, Tim Lawrence, the director of the Music Cultures program at East London University, has unearthed a hugely significant missing link. --Greg Wilson reviews Love Saves the Day