Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1894013 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 462 pages

From Library Journal
"Nothing happens by accident," Cheren repeats like a mantra in unwitting tribute to his own survival. The "godfather of disco" is one of the few left who remembers the innocent yet repressed pre-Stonewall New York of the 1960s, the orgiastic heyday of disco of the Seventies, and the deluge of AIDS that swept it away in the Eighties. This is the stuff of two decades of gay history, but Cheren (with Rotello) redeems the familiar material with his unsparing candor and forthright energy. As a founder of the influential West End Records, Cheren was present at the creation of disco, and his glimpses into the recording industry are fascinating. Despite a tendency to telegraph future events too emphatically, he evokes the sleazy glamour of disco precisely, with its symbiotic relationships to drugs and gay sexuality, culminating in the brainchild of Cheren's ex-lover Michael Brody: the fabled Paradise Garage disco. Recommended for libraries with large gay studies and pop music collections.
Richard J. Violette, Special Libs. Cataloguing, Victoria, BC
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Michael Paoletta, Dance Music Editor, Billboard Magazine.
"Stonewall. Gay Liberation. The early days of disco. The Paradise Garage. AIDS. House Music. Finally, a New York Story that is captivating, intriguing, and educational. The sights and sounds of Manhattan will never be the same."

Edmund White, author of The Farewell Symphony
"This book is about the every night fever of disco in the 1970s, the splendors and miseries of the A-List-and the brilliant social and musical innovations of Mel Cheren, fantasy impresario of that delirious epoch."