I know that resurrection is possible because Disco is walking the streets of New York City again. She’s back throwing parties, and making records, and starting labels. She’s entertaining again. It’s surprising that she can openly show her face in this town given the way she went out. Her purge from the spotlight at the end of the 1970s was tragic and embarrassing, though likely deserved. Before she turned into a scene stealing, culture hogging pop product, Disco was born in New York City’s black and Latino gay communities, and raised by DJs in members-only clubs.
Then she got famous. Men put on suits with floral shirts, and ladies put on dresses and flowing skirts and people were dancing together all over the place. Average Joes waited for Doormen to pick them from the crowd on the wrong side of the rope line and wave them in. Everyone wanted to be in. A certain dinginess had taken over New York. There was crime and poverty and violence, so people just danced. They loved Gloria Gaynor and the Sylvester, they loved “We are a Family” and “Ring My Bell.” Rod Stewart was doing it in “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” and the Rolling Stones were doing it in “Missing You.” Disco made commercials, and TV themes, and novelty songs. It got to be everything from a duck to an inferno (burn, baby burn). Nightclubs were dedicated to it. It was all lights and music and outfits and drugs, and everyone was having it.
Until they weren’t.
Disco was so powerful, so ubiquitous by the end of the 70s that its foes had to resort to dramatic shows of discontent to end her reign. They knew they had to do something drastic. They settled on violent rebellion. Disco was burned alive. In a stadium. Like Ancient Rome.
In 1979 a Chicago radio DJ named Steve Dahl organized Disco Demolition Night at aging Comiskey Park during a double header between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers. Dahl had lost his previous job at a Rock n’ Roll station when it switched formats to Disco. He invited his listeners to watch him burn Disco alive. The price of admission, to watch Dahl’s cathartic explosion, was one Disco album and 93 cents (Dahl’s station was 93.1 on the radio dial). Over ten thousand people attended, and the only ones more surprised by that than Dahl were the Sox. They had not hired enough security guards to control the crowd. After Dahl’s first explosion, the crowd rushed the carefully manicured field, setting it ablaze as they burned more records, danced and cheered. They spilled out into the surrounding neighborhood and rioted in the streets. Disco had been attacked, and violently. It wouldn’t be last time either. Across the country, copycats joined in the catharsis. Pop turned its back on Disco and the word Disco started to leave a nasty taste. In 1979 it seemed that Disco finally laid her head down and died.
And until recently, I , too, believed she was gone.
Over the last few decades, the weirdest kids from Omaha and Sydney, from Mexico City and London have come here. They studied at Pratt Institute and were interested in performance art and like all the Columbia econ majors and Goldman Sachs summer interns they spoke the same language, if in different dialects. They spoke Youth. All they had in common was the desire to have a good time and, in their own ways, to be cool. And there were a lot of them. They needed places to go and something to drink. And music. A soundtrack.
Now, on any given night in Manhattan you can find the nicest, most professional young men and women in town gathering around tables in the Meatpacking District, Soho and Nolita. They are with friends and/or promoters who are paid to be their friends. They stand in a circle around a bottle that costs more than what some Americans make in a week. Sometimes they dance, but mostly they just sway or throw their hands up in the air. They wait in line outside on the cold concrete to do this. Only the coolest among them do not do that.
They go to places/venues owned by moguls. The moguls hire DJs who play the Top 40 hits that everyone is listening to, or the old Top 40 hits that everyone forgot about but is glad to remember. If the DJ is creative he may throw in a song or two that the weird kids like. Not too much though, because this scene is about being seen. Too much emphasis on the music might take away from the trendy clothes, from the brand, from the velvet rope.
At the No Ordinary Monkey party there is no Doorman, no guardian at boundary between you and your good-time. You might argue that that could be because often there is no door. At least, not when it is held in a Dim Sum restaurant on the second floor of a Chinese mall under the Manhattan Bridge. The sporadic nine-year-old party roves from venue to venue with little fanfare beyond an illustrated announcement on their website. All one really needs is dancing space, anyway. The tables where people otherwise eat shrimp shumai and fried sticky rolls are pushed to the back to make a dance floor on the carpet. A makeshift bar set up on the opposite wall serves mixed drinks for under ten dollars a cup. People smoke.
A Chinatown Mall is a Chinatown Mall. When you enter the fluorescent lights glare at you and suddenly you’re surrounded by hundreds of brightly colored posters of happy Chinese women, children and cartoons. The place smells like musty plastic and everything looks old. There are trinkets everywhere. Up the escalator everything gets darker and the bass is pumping. Even early on everyone is dancing to a familiar beat, and they can’t help it. That’s what Disco does.
The DJs perform front and center because that’s where the music is. Dancers dig their feet into the carpet and stomp and move however they wish. They wear whatever, they bring whoever. It’s a revival, it’s about connection, it’s about emotion and expression. Disco gets mixed with House and Electro, Funk and even Pop, but it is there, unmistakably present.
Some of the kids there are real music heads. They are the ones who collect vinyl records and probably know how to use their laptops to mix music. Some of the kids are just dance junkies and funk historians who like to dig for tunes without pretense. Both groups will tell you that Disco never really died. She just came home. They know that in the dark days, there were few Manhattan clubs that would claim her outside of the gay bars in the West Village and Chelsea. She was belittled as the hallmark of kitsch, a trend turned infection. In those days she was used, but never received credit for it. This, of course, was all after her glorious rise from a clandestine corner of Manhattan, to become dictator of dance floors across America.
Some of the kids at No Ordinary Monkey don’t know any of this at all, they just want to party.
Disco generally does not discuss her age. This has lead to some confusion about the nature of her origins. Another factor contributing to her mystery is the illicit nature of her beginnings. It is certain that Disco took her first steps in gay New York City clubs in the early 1970s — gay clubs that were not supposed to exist. But they did exist, naturally, in various forms of the underground. Some didn’t have liquor licenses, some were owned by the mob. The Stonewall Inn, in Greenwich Village, was both.
The riot that took place at the Stonewall Inn in June of 1969 and the year that followed changed the way the gay community interacted with wider society. Before the riots, the Village Voice did not print the word gay. Before the riots, undercover policemen went to gay bars and flirted with patrons in order to out them- entrapment. Before the riots, and even in the chaotic year that followed, gay New Yorkers had a limit to the places where they could go and have a drink, or simply be.
After Stonewall, the gay community would demand to be heard. That new demand intersected with a new movement in nightlife culture. Space was cheap and sound systems were getting bigger. The jukebox was out, the DJ was coming in. More space. More sound. That meant more people to dance. And gay people wanted to dance. They started this revolution because they were hungry for it. Those who had the desire and the time to learn how to command these new tools for mass revelry had the opportunity to become the vanguards of something truly different. This was a time when DJs, nightclubs, and parties were made from circumstance.
Before Stonewall, Danny Krivit was a Greenwich Village kid whose father owned a bar. After the Stonewall, the bar, The Ninth Circle, went gay. It also went from going through hard times, to being able to charge admission at the door. Krivit was curious, and he came from a musical family, so his father let him DJ there at age fourteen. Those were the circumstances under which Danny Krivit found Disco. Now he’s an internationally recognized dance DJ with a career spanning four decades and counting. He’s married to a Japanese pop star.
“It was a big change for me…in the next few years I noticed that any happening club was gay,” he said. “If it wasn’t gay it was pretty boring. They set the trend in music.”
The Holy Trinity of trendsetting clubs that came to embody the early spirit of Disco- The Loft, The Gallery, and Paradise Garage- came about because there were some New Yorkers who needed cultural space. They lit that space with atmospheric neon lights and filled it with sweaty, dancing bodies. The clubs were all private, members-only affairs with an emphasis on the music. They installed booming sound systems and perched DJs above the crowd with multiple turntables to wield. This deity above was charged with capturing the mortals below and taking them elsewhere. Once they got there, he was their guide. Refreshments, but no alcohol, were served.
The Loft came first, on Valentine’s Day, 1970. From then until 1975, it was held in the Greenwich Village home of a twenty-something antique dealer named David Mancuso. He had lots of records and lots of friends, so he got a serious sound system and combined them.
“The door opened with David Mancuso,” Krivit told me with casual conviction. “Before that, in the 60s, whatever discotheques or dance clubs that were happening were basically jukebox oriented and live bands, not DJs. David Mancuso opened the door and set the blue print for all the clubs today.”
The sporadic parties turned into weekly engagements, and the partygoers turned into parishioners. The church kept growing. Membership was necessary because everyone wanted the music, the spiritual flight piloted by Mancuso’s taste. David’s disciples would wake up the day after a party eager to go out and find the records they’d heard the night before. It was a new way of experiencing nightlife, and a new way of finding music.
Never before had house party made records. Loft lore has it that in 1972 Mancuso went to a Brooklyn record store and found saxophonist Manu Dibango’s funky Afro-beat anthem, Soul Makossa. (“Ayyy soul makossa!”). He played it at one of his parties, and the next day his people set about the city to find more of it…anywhere. By 1973 it had caught the ear of New York City’s WBLS radio jockey Frankie Crocker, and hit number 35 on the Billboard music charts. I fear no amount of reporting can prove this true or false.
Mancuso was the originator, and as such, the founder and keeper of the record pool. The pool was a share, a form of musical socialism for DJs who were required to play sets for hours and hours. Their transcendent powers were dependent upon their ability to find music that partygoers had never heard before but could not resist, music that seamlessly fit together in a narrative that would not be ignored. Emphasis was not only put on a track’s danceability, but on the kind of layered orchestration that ignites mental stimulation. Disco dominated that pool, and the pool was the first of its kind.
The Loft is where Mancuso met a teenaged Larry Levan. Remember that name. Black and wiry, flamboyantly dressed, Levan made his mark at The Loft early. He, along with other DJs like Frankie Knuckles and Nicky Siano, picked up the Mancuso style and ran with it. Siano went on to create The Gallery, the second in the Trinity, in 1972. Its first location was in Chelsea, on 22nd Street between 6th and 7th avenues. It stayed there until 1974 when it moved to Mercer and Halston. Siano was the first club owner to install three turntables in his DJ booth. There he spun, and there Larry Levan spun.
Disco chose Larry. At least, that’s how the story goes almost everywhere it’s told. Larry dyed his hair orange. He danced on cars. He picked up DJing easily because he knew how to tell a musical tale. He knew how to tell any tale. A man named Mel Cheren, the owner of West End Records, and his boyfriend Michael Brody hatched a plan to back Levan as a resident DJ at a club that would be the headquarters of Disco’s underground.
It was opened officially in 1976. Paradise Garage, as it was christened, was located on 84 King Street between Hudson and 7th Avenue. This place was Levan’s homage to the music, the ultimate manifestation of the underground Disco party. An ideal type. By that year, Disco was enjoying her popularity, and Danny Krivit was a fixture on the scene. However, the Garage, as it was known, was unlike anything else he had seen.
“I think Larry himself was visionary…He picked the customers, the sound system, he was hands on with the lighting — everything about the whole atmosphere. Musically, he was funky and raw and had the real essence of great dance music,” Krivit paused, then thoughtfully added, “And in the ten years that it ran, people worshipped him.”
Paradise Garage had two kinds of memberships, Friday and Saturday. A Saturday membership was most valuable, in that it granted the holder entrance to the club on both nights. On Friday the crowd was a mix of black, white, Latino, rich, poor, gay, straight, male and female. Doormen were entrusted with making sure the crowd was diverse and positive. In the morning empty poppers and ethyl rags lay strewn about the dance floor. Morning, it is worth noting, was after 7 AM. Every night, non-members stood outside the club waiting to bribe members into vouching for them so that they could pass through the doors, move up the stairs, and join the mad spree that was the Garage.
There were lots of these hopeful people on Friday, but even more on Saturday. This was the night, it was known, that Larry Levan did his best work. On Saturday the club was mostly black, Latino and gay. On Saturday, the music was so glorious, and the membership code so strict, that even Diana Ross had to humble herself and ask special permission to enter the club. It wasn’t that anyone who was anyone was at Paradise Garage; it was that anyone who knew anything wanted to be there.
Above ground, even the lamest laymen were beginning to catch on, but they ended up going to different clubs with different DJs and different values. That all started in 1973, when someone in the pool, who knows who, broke Barry White’s classic disco instrumental, Love’s Theme. In 1974 the song secured the number one spot on the Billboard pop chart. The underground broke that Disco record. And that record, in turn, broke Disco.
This story isn’t about tragedy, so I’ll touch only on the parts of Disco’s downfall that you probably do not know. Paradise Garage lived beyond the backlash, beyond the stadiums of burning disco records. It ran until 1987. The loyal came and the church was full. The end did not come from Disco. Mel Cheren was suffering from AIDS, and that, combined with personal issues between he and Michael Brody, lead him to sell Paradise Garage. Danny Krivit told me that Cheren called a meeting to inform his staff of the sale. After hearing that his space was gone, Larry Levan went to his perch, played a record, and turned the mammoth sound system up so loud that some of the speakers blew out.
As “dead” as she was after her public execution, Disco still managed to leave an imprint on music. In the Dance world, the money-counters on high asked that her name be stricken. What were once “12 inch Disco records” were to be called “12 inch Dance records.” Still, Disco influenced Boogie, House, Electro and an assortment of other Dance subgenres. Even more mainstream genres like Hip-hop, Pop, and Rock n’ Roll were accomplices in her endurance. But it was a rough treatment. What was missing in it was respect. Disco’s history was erased from public memory, and as a result, pieces of her were plucked up and placed elsewhere without much regard or care. She simply got used. Notorious B.I.G. used her in Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems, Madonna used her in “Hung Up.” Disco received little to no credit because her name was dirt.
At home, that was fine. New York City is a place where people go to find dirt. All kinds. If they can’t find it, they are disappointed. If it leaves one neighborhood for another, a group will try to stop it from moving. Some people will even follow the dirt- dirty art, dirty music, dirty hobbies- wherever it goes. In that way, New York City was the perfect kind of place for Disco to lick her wounds. Not to say that resurrection is easy business. Not only would Disco have to reinvent herself, but she would also have to find the right space to occupy.
In the Manhattan of Disco’s birth- in Soho, Noho, Chelsea and The Village- the last few decades have been rough on people who like dirt. City rules on cabaret licensing became stricter over the years, making it more difficult for people to legally put drinking and dancing together. That was only part of it, though. Mancuso and The Loft were forced to move to Alphabet City. The faithful still came, but he needed cheaper space. Everyone needed cheaper space. Rents were skyrocketing. To solve this problem, more and more clubs took the emphasis off the music and put it on the scene- the beautiful women, the luxury, the excess, the newest hottest song. They wanted to attract those who would want to be seen at the scene and could pay exorbitantly for it.
Almost 30 years after Comisky Park, indie rock was ruling the New York music scene, but the word Disco had gradually become more acceptable in polite conversation. Dance DJs did their part, especially in the international world of House music. It was natural for globetrotting musicians to pick up the New York sound and circulate it. It was natural for DJs to come to New York from abroad and hear the City’s sound.
It is a grueling lifestyle, to be sure. So for the most part, playing good Dance music is an occupation for the young- for those who spent childhood and adolescence listening to music obsessively and without pretension. Most of them started out playing in rock bands or learning classical music. They spent years hungrily collecting records to hear the crackles and pops of a track’s natural imperfection. They started parties everywhere they went so they could play music everywhere they went. If they didn’t find Disco growing up listening to the radio, they found her in record stores as they dug for tunes and learned about history.
The Internet made the record hunt easier. Computer software made cutting a long mix of songs or a re-edit of one song easier. DJs started sharing music online for free. They had to. There was getting to be so much music out there that DJs had to be prolific to stay relevant. Blogs and magazines picked these tunes up and critiqued them. The whole experience of engaging with music was changing. One could go to a DJs party, have a great time, and find more of his music online the next day for free, and probably with commentary.
In this environment, listeners end up being music geeks and beat detectives. Online, the discerning debate quality with like-minded listeners from Hong Kong to Bogota. Communities form. Parties became the stuff of legend in a matter of days. That’s how many came to know about Danny Krivit’s Body and Soul party, or his 718 Sessions, even though the locations were a bit on the dirty side. That’s how, since the early 2000s, many have ended up dancing in a Chinese Mall in Chinatown.
Or they ended up at a Motherfucker. A roving ball held eight times a year for six years until 2008. The party was thrown by downtown kids Michael T, Justine D, Johnny T and Georgie Seville — kids who grew up in New York’s House music mega-clubs of the 1990s. Motherfucker was a Rock n’ Roll party, but it made some room for Dance and Disco. Attendees ran the gamut from Goth kids, to Princesses, to Club rats. They wore elaborate costumes to take on fantastic personas until the early hours of the morning. Naturally, the music had to have that same power of transmutation. The essence of a good New York Dance DJ, passed down over generations, is to believe in that power and recognize it in others. It was mostly at those kinds of parties that DJs heard each other, met each other, and ended up playing together. That, in short, is how labels are made.
Rong Music, Wurst Recods, Wolf and Lamb Records- a few hometown labels that unapologetically claimed Disco as their own. DFA Records, also known as Death From Abroad, would come to be the best known of them all. It was formed in 2001 by Tim Goldsworthy, Jonathan Galkin and James Murphy. Ideologically, the label was founded on the “12 inch Dance” record. But the musicians were not just DJs and they didn’t just play Dance music. From the beginning, the label captivated the indie rock scene with bands like LCD Soundsystem (fronted by Murphy), Hot Chip and The Rapture. They purposely made Rock fans into dancers again and used Disco in this conversion process. They weren’t ashamed to say so, either. In the song “Disco Infiltrator” from the LCD Soundsystem’s 2005 self-titled album Murphy sang:
“Stop, what you’ve been told, is what your told/
is the disco infiltrator gone cold/
Oh stupid you, I bet’ told the truth/
but you dont want it no!”
But just because Disco was clean enough to be acknowledged did not mean that she was clean enough to be well received. This was especially true in her old territory. Around 27th Street between 9th and 10th avenues, just a few blocks from where The Gallery once stood, the tightest velvet ropes in the city coiled around doorways like hissing snakes. Bungalow8, Cain, Home, Marquee… some of those places still exist now, but not the way they did before the financial crisis. Then, they were clubs and status symbols. People had money at the time, and they wanted others to know it. The music was not the thing. The thing was to be like Lindsey Lohan — young, rich and free to do high kicks outside the club and dance on tables inside. But being in wasn’t enough- someone else had to be out. For some it made more sense that way.
Dirt was not a part of the scene at all, so Disco was out. The last dance floor Disco commanded in her old neighborhood was at Passerby, a stubborn outlier on 15tth Street and 9th Avenue. It was an art gallery that attracted people who like secret places and late-night spots. Once, artist Rob Pruitt showed his piece, “Cocaine Buffet,” at a group exhibition there. The work was comprised of a 16-foot line of cocaine on a mirror. The drinks were cheap, but mediocre at best. The bathrooms were notoriously dirty. The floor was a multi-colored tile that lit up, and even non-dancers danced on it. DJs who spun there also spun at No Ordinary Monkey parties every now and again.
In 2007, Gavin Brown, Passerby’s owner, announced that he could no longer afford to keep the space open. The neighborhood of scenes had no room for him. Brown was aware of this, and in an open letter to his clientele of artists and weird kids he spelled it out;
“…Perhaps the state of the art world can be adduced as a hotheaded analogy for the state of New York City. Nothing’s moribund; energy still abounds. But its timbre is strange. The poet’s voice is crumbling, and the pictures are just that: pictures.”
On the last night of Passerby those who remained until the bitter end were rewarded with the opportunity to vent their frustrations. Instead of leaving the space peacefully, the DJs, artists, and weird kids took whatever heavy objects they could find and smashed the incandescent floor to smithereens. Patrons stole into the building through the evening of the following day to take pieces back home for safekeeping.
Sad as Passerby’s end was for some, it did not leave a community homeless. The people who went there- and the people who were just one conversation, one acquaintance, from ending up there- had been moving away from that neighborhood for years. They followed dirt to Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. They followed it to the now defunct Greenpoint club Studio B, where Motherfucker’s Justine D was charged with booking music. There, they saw DFA’s Disco band Hercules and Love Affair debut live in May of 2008. If they didn’t see it, they talked about it. Hercules and Love Affair’s single, “Blind,” had already been making waves on the Dance scene and would eventually be voted the Best Song of 2008 by Pitchfork Media. New York City dusted Disco off and asked her to prove her worth.
So in 2008, another time when New York City had taken on certain dinginess, Disco set out to entertain. The magazines and industry what-nots were calling it, “Nu-Disco.” Really, they just paraded Disco around in electric and neon so the indie rock kids knew that she belonged to them. Kanye West busted out some old Daft Punk albums, bought tighter jeans and started “doing the D-AN-C-E, 1–2–3–4 Fight!” with Justice and others. In New York City, notorious party-boy musician Andrew WK opened Santos Party Haus in Chinatown. He promised a booming sound system, mid-priced drinks and music to make you work up a sweat. Danny Krivit and his 718 Sessions moved there.
DFA Records had most of the acts that laid the golden egg. Some were DJs and electronic musicians, like the Juan McClean and Shit Robot. Some were live bands, like Holy Ghost. Their songs were remixed and blogged and YouTube’d to the point where New York Nightlife had no choice but to get out on the dance floor. At the time, The Beatrice was New York City’s club du jour. The uber hip models/kids/socialites were in there staring at each other while listening to Joy Division tracks on someone’s IPod with club-owner Paul Sevigny (actress Chloe Sevigny’s brother).
An exile from Wall Street scandal, Sevigny was known for his distinct DJ style. He would sometimes play multiple tracks by the same 80s rock band, or flip over a record in the middle of the song. He did not want Disco, or any version of electronic Dance music, in his club. He made that clear to DFA DJ Justin Miller, and anyone else who asked him. But when Sevigny’s boyhood friend, Moby (yes, the musician), requested that DFA DJs play his Beatrice Birthday party, Disco went in and did her damn thing. The word is that shoes came off and there was dancing all over the place- floors, walls, tables- you name it. The Beatrice set met Nu-Disco, and loved Nu-Disco. Justin Miller was booked for all of Fall Fashion week.
But the problem with being called “Nu” is that it does not allow one to get old. Not even a little bit. Just one year later, in 2009 Miller’s phone was quiet during Fashion Week. Over in Chinatown, partygoers were finding that Santos Party Haus was not perfection as promised. By the end of the year the club had lost Mr. Saturday Night; a critically acclaimed Saturday night residency held by Justin Carter and Eamon Harkin.
Carter trained his ear on Disco and House going to Body and Soul parties and 718 Sessions. He went on to become musical director of the shuttered Chelsea dance club APT. Harkin moved to New York City from the United Kingdom at age 28 in 2004. He dove headfirst into the Dance scene, starting a party called “Calling all Kids,” spinning with Afrika Bambaataa at APT, and DJing Motherfucker parties among other things. Together, Carter and Harkin wanted to make music that drew on both their pasts, but focused on pushing Dance music into the future.
Santos Party Haus, they decided, was not the future. In addition to Mr. Saturday Night, Harkin and Carter started a summer afternoon outdoor party called Sunday Best. In 2010 both parties turned vagabond. Sunday Best was pushed out of BKLYN Yard, an outdoor performance space on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn to the courtyard at Brooklyn Fireproof. The move for Mr. Saturday Night, however, was not as simple. Most importantly, there was more at stake. New York had a gotten a taste of Mr. Saturday Night’s ideal type- an accessible, creative party where the music drove dancers to a satisfied fatigue. Leaving Santos meant Harkin and Carter were not hemmed in by the rules of New York Nightlife. Parties could go until the sun came up, and they did.
After leaving Manhattan, Mr. Saturday Night became quite mysterious. Rhythm stalkers and dance addicts followed the party through Brooklyn from location to location. Venues were disclosed to them after they RSVP’d to an email that was as much a notice as it was an invitation.
Specific location had little impact on what Mr. Saturday Night was intended to do though. Harkin and Carter crafted a distinct vision for the party. They directed the lighting, used their own sound system, and invited respected DJs from all over the world to join them at the turntables. Revelers enter rooms where the atmosphere is positive and music is mind control. Rooms where bodies courteously bump and shake on each other to the same end- the high that comes from complete surrender to the beat. Drinks are served at a makeshift bar where crowding is rare. Everyone is on the floor, smiling and talking to each other.
In Manhattan, the “Nu-Disco” craze died down, but Disco had made her point. Her niche was carved, and something of a home coalesced for her soon after. DJs formed relationships with bookers and venues that understood their value and their values. It just sort of happened.
The dancers sniff out their favorite DJs and follow them wherever they go. The party is the thing- the dancing, the positive energy, the creation of elation. Disco always advocated that. Promoters and bookers are catching on to the kind of party she’s into and picking her up around town. She’s out with Electronic music, but mostly she’s looking like herself again. Not herself with the gold chain and the leisure suit. Herself with the line of friends in comfortable clothes, carrying cards that permit them to enter a space where they get lost in music.
This story was originally published at The Big Roundtable.