LOVE SAVES THE DAY

author:
TIM LAWRENCE

Non-fiction
498 pages
Duke University Press

On a recent trip to a party in Hackney, East London, my friend and I got to talking about how much we missed skimming for those old pirate-radio stations that filled the British capital’s airwaves in the days before wireless broadband. The songs sounded so wonderful, we drunkenly agreed, because they felt so fragile: only people here and now could hear this.

Anyway, I was reading Tim Lawrence, a journalist and academic brought up in eighties England, a day or two later. He wrote Love Saves the Day, the first volume of his grandly titled “History of American Dance Music Culture,” which covers the city’s disco scene in seventies New York. It’s a portrait of a time at once recognizable—Studio 54, Chic and Disco Sucks, the seventies’ economic malaise—and lost from view. The downtown scene he draws is full of beautifully rendered characters, from the utopian DJ David Manscuso, whose template-forming Loft was modeled on birthday parties thrown by the nuns who raised him in an Utica orphanage, to the shy, slight Walter Gibbons, who after single-handedly inventing the remix disappeared into evangelical Christianity. What makes this exhaustive account is not its three hundred interviews, countless unique photos and sometimes tiresome level of detail, but his raw passion to record, collect and analyze what happened.

Naturally, it suffers slightly from Lawrence’s desire to cover all bases: It’s at once an oral history, a semiotic analysis of underground dance culture, and a straightforward scene tour. Often the narrative gets bogged down in rather dry verbatim accounts of which-DJ-DJ’d-where-for-how-long, which hide Lawrence’s intelligent arcs on art, money and hedonism. It can sap the joy at the heart of this book’s story: Dancing is fun, and reading about dancing is fun, but reading minute details about the market take-up of the twelve-inch single in 1974 feels like getting stuck with the wrong guy at the party. Still, maybe that’s the price of an objective, thorough account: this story has never been told before and, understandably, Lawrence wants to get it right. Fit everything in and forget nothing: it is a history of scraps at the end of the day, and the best book about love I’ve ever read.

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