It began simply as a way to pay the rent. David Mancuso had a big room at the top of a building on Broadway and he also liked going to parties. It was the early 1970s, times were tight and New York rents were high, so Mancuso decided to stay at home one Saturday night and throw his own invite-only party, writes Jim Carroll
Two dollars got you through the door and bought you a feed of organic food and freshly squeezed orange juice. There was also music, lots and lots of it.
In a corner of his loft, Mancuso hooked up a sound system and started to play records.
You could hear all kinds of things when Mancuso got going, underground tunes and uptown classics, future disco boom tunes and hip-shaking grooves from deepest Africa.
Mancuso played what he wanted to play. He wasn't a DJ, he'd say, he was a musical host. Mancuso didn't rely on mixing or turntable trickery to set a scene. He simply used the records he had at his disposal to create the mood in the room. The record would be played from start to finish so it was the programming and tune selection which forged the atmosphere.
What Mancuso's parties produced were thrills as natural as the orange juice in that glass. Every week, more and more people came along to check out the Loft, the crazy-ass sound system and the tunes. Queues to get into the building became the norm. Faces in the crowd became regulars in the room.
The neighbours didn't complain too much, but the police were none too happy with the emergence of unlicensed clubs in the heart of the city and a crackdown led Mancuso to move on.
He spent 10 years on Prince Street, another decade over on Third Street and a few more years on Avenue A and then Avenue B. In each place, he'd host a party and people would show up to be part of the buzz. It was a family affair.
Big family, though, and those in-laws and outlaws went on to start musical families of their own all over town.
You can trace the rise and rise of much of what subsequently happened on the more interesting fringes of the New York club scene back to those Loft parties.
The Loft, you see, was DJ central. If you were spinning records or even wanted to spin records, you went to the Loft and hung out. It was where Francois Kevorkian and Danny Krivit first found the buzz which music with body and soul could produce.
It was what inspired Larry Levan when he started spinning at Paradise Garage and Nicky Siano when he opened the Gallery. It was the first club Frankie Knuckles ever found himself going to week in, week out. It was where the first record pool emerged, the promotional process for plugging new tunes to DJs which is now the norm.
Clubland likes its myths and legends and yes, sure, The Loft probably has been accorded a stature hugely disproportionate to its reality. It was, after all, a party in a private gaff, the kind of thing which will be keeping neighbours awake up and down the country tomorrow night.
But few other private parties can have had the same impact as this one and that's why it's worth remembering it.
Today, Mancuso is still spinning records and throwing parties in various locations. He's in Dublin soon for some love dancing, though it will be in a club rather than one of those well appointed city-centre shoebox apartments..
A couple of excellent compilations were released on Nuphonic a few years ago, detailing and celebrating the Loft sound for a whole new generation.
For Mancuso, it remains all about music.
"Anything that is meaningful, that is musical, that is danceable, anything that has energy in it, you're drawn to it. If you're into music, you're into music unconditionally. The last thing in the world I was interested in was being a DJ, the DJ-ing part was just that we needed someone to put the records on the turntable. it was just about keeping the parties going and having fun."
David Mancuso DJs at the Sugar Club, Dublin on Bank Holiday Sunday June 5.
