One record Mancuso plays —Van Morrison's 1968 classic Astral Weeks—reveals the crucial, underacknowledged links between the proto-disco scene and the rock counterculture. Today, disco is often celebrated for its camp and kitschy plasticness. But the pre-Saturday Night Fever dance underground was actually sweetly earnest and irony-free in its hippie-dippie positivity, as evinced by anthems like M.F.S.B.'s "Love Is the Message." And the scene's combination of overwhelming sound, trippy lighting, and hallucinogens was indebted to the late-'60s psychedelic culture. Mancuso still uses the Timothy Leary catchphrase "set and setting" to describe the art of creating the right vibe at parties. -- Simon Reynolds
Since 1970, David Mancuso has been the DJ of the legendary New York private party The Loft. Click here to see some of the records he used to play.
David Mancuso, Stefano 'Steve' D'Aquisto and Vince Aletti wrote the charter for the very first record pool
Underground News - issue #19 (19??) (interview with David Mancuso)
Richard nixon: The way you play now you could almost play with one turntable, has that always been the way you played?
No, I went through the whole thing, with mixers, not to pat myself on the back, but I was experimenting, I did not know what I was doing, but tweeter and bass reinforcement was all originated from Broadway, it was developed there. No, the commitment is there because I'm not a musician, I don't play any instruments, but I have the utmost respect for the musician and for what his intention is. On the playback side, which is where I am, it must come through unobtrusively, without any effect on the original intention of that recording. In the beginning I used to mix and the one mixer that I had designed became the format of many mixers for years to come and things like that, bla bla bla, but that's not how I planned it, things just grew. But I outgrew that, because the last thing in the world I would want to be is a disk jockey. All I am is a player in this whole thing. It really doesn't matter. I see myself as an equal with everything, it's like we all play in the same band, it's musicianship, whether it's somebody cooking in the kitchen, somebody dancing, doing this, doing that, hanging up a coat, it's all part of the events that's happening. My responsibility is to make sure that at least on the technical side that the record goes on and that it goes as smoothly as possible. And it was tough, because I used to be very busy, with this, throw sonud effects in, this that bla bla bla. To go down to one knob, actually two knobs, Phono 1 and Phono 2. Come to think of it, before there were mixers that was how we used to do it, go from phono one to phono two. So I ended up going all the way back to that, because it's the cleanest way I can do it.
When did you decide to go back to basics?
When I started hearing the differences, first of all in the quality. When I really started to shed my ego in what I was doing. I don't interfere with what's happening. It was at Prince St., and it was about the time I started to advance to class A equipment, and I would say I was into my ninth or tenth year. You had to maintain a certain reputation, you had to stay, you had to be a little too competitive with other people, these were my friends. I finally took the mixer completely out in 1984, 1985. But once you start eliminating all these things out of the path in the playback, the more transparent the sound becomes. So for me to hear all these nuances in the recordings - I know other people do too. I was amazed. I can't get in the way of what the artist intended, I can't. I'm not happy. Not to say that if you're a disk jockey that's what you do.