Live at the Paradise Garage
Larry Levan, the DJ behind New York’s storied Paradise Garage club, was a resident there from 1977 to 1987. He played what he wanted, audience approval or no, and his DJ sets, official and unofficial, are high on drama and full of startling transitions. What made the release of Live at the Paradise Garage a major event is how thoroughly the packaging reconstructed the set’s milieu. A double CD of a set captured on reel-to-reel in 1979, Live’s gorgeously designed booklet (superb period photos, extensive notes) added depth and perspective to an already superb set — one already laden with drama, ipso facto.
Levan was not always a genius of technique: On Live at the Paradise Garage, his attempts at weaving Jakki’s “Sun … Sun … Sun …” in and out of “Trinidad” by John Gibbs and the U.S. Steel Band would get him laughed at today. But that only adds to the moment. Live at the Paradise Garage is a valuable snapshot of its moment, enormously suggestive of how effectively Levan could make his audience hear and respond to music the same way he did. I’ve even made my peace with the macho-histrionic vocals of T-Connection’s “At Midnight” — I now hear them as camp, a very dance-music adjustment.
Ashford & Simpson’s lush instrumental “Bourgie Bourgie” establishes the escapist cast of the thing. But Levan’s genius was for making the most machine-tooled pop sound personal: His technical inconsistencies and sudden, forceful mood shifts bulldoze the music’s smoothness like Redd Foxx’s Fred Sanford crashing a Gerald Ford fundraiser. I’m still not sure I’m hearing things right when Levan, brutally and without warning, slam’s Stephanie Mills’s springy, string-saturated “Put Your Body in It” into the Crown Heights Affair’s pounding, demented Moog showpiece “Dreaming a Dream.” Levan never loses the beat, but the segue is punk-rock violent.
The second-most effective transition here occurs when Levan drops Shalamar’s “Right in the Socket” just as it’s starting to heat up in favor of … Cher — a Studio 54 regular, no less! Her “Take Me Home” is a completely opportunistic rip-off of a then-current fad — her specialty — and it sounds absolutely excellent here. Right there is all the reason you need to believe Levan may have been, if not God, at least Christlike: making Cher sound good isn’t turning water into wine …
If anything, though, Live at the Paradise Garage isn’t long enough. The last song Levan played at the Garage, on its final night, was the O’Jays’ “Where Do We Go from Here?”; as disc two trails off on instrumental versions of long-forgotten Chi-Lites and Jermaine Jackson songs, you can almost hear Levan asking himself the same question.