They invented the remix

There were two artists, in particular, who took Walter’s crown away from him and in doing so began redefining the limits of the remix: Larry Levan and François Kevorkian. Both drew heavily on the dub influences coming from UK dance records at the time (one in particular, TW Funk Master’s ‘Love Money’, provided no little inspiration). The first, Larry Levan, had been around since the beginning of disco. As a teenager, he and his best friend Frankie Knuckles had worked for Nicky Siano, helping him set up his Gallery parties. He’d played at a few places including the Continental Baths and Reade Street, but the opening of Paradise Garage was a quantum leap in the trajectory of his career. His initial remixes coincided with this new residency, the first being a brilliant reworking of ‘C Is For Cookie’ by the Cookie Monster, turning a Sesame Street disco cash-in into a funk monster, that was also beloved by the nascent hip hop DJs operating in the Bronx and beyond.

In the early 1980s he began to change what a remix could be, both via the commercial remixes he undertook for the city’s disco labels, but also in his own productions under two pseudonyms, Peech Boys, whose ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ was hugely influential, and Man Friday. Arthur Baker, whose Rockers Revenge project was inspired by Levan’s work, says: “I was obviously influenced by the Peech Boys record. Everyone was. When those handclaps started whipping around the place... oh man!” But arguably the pinnacle of Levan’s remix career was what eventually became the ‘Padlock’ EP by Gwen Guthrie. This project was a sprawling set of sessions that stretched over many months.

Danny Krivit became close friends with Levan. “He was like a little kid. Very energetic. He had a thing about lights; anything special and big like that, he loved. Big, bright things. Disneyland. When Star Wars came out he was like, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta go to the opening.’ He liked that sort of thing.”

Krivit was present at many of the Guthrie sessions.“He was a record company’s nightmare,” he recalls. “He’d show up really late and while he was there it was about socialising and drugs. Eventually he’d get to the mix, but he would be distracted very easily. So the mix, instead of taking a day or whatever, would go on for weeks. I remember the Gwen Guthrie project wasn’t really even supposed to happen. He was supposed to mix one song, ‘Should Have Been You’, but he ended up doing all these mixes. It was probably one of the more productive sessions he had. But when he showed it to them, they were so pissed off at the price and how long it took that they just shelved it. For a year or two he was just playing it at the Garage.”