Larry Levan - The Final Night of Paradise Garage / 26.09.1987 ++ best sound quality

**The Final Night at 84th King Street NYC
the best DJ in Dancemusic History is on fire**

Levan was deeply involved in New York nightlife before landing at
the Garage: early on, he found a home in the ballroom community,
and at close friend Nicky Siano's venue The Gallery, he was tasked
with miscellaneous gigs like spiking the club's punch. His most
pivotal job in the pre-Garage days was working the lights at the
Continental Baths, where gay men unwinded with sex, disco and a
swimming pool. His DJ career began the moment the bathhouse's
resident DJ quit and he was asked to fill his place.

His accrued experience meant he knew how to cultivate an
atmosphere, and his innate Larry-ness is what made the Garage so
sacred. Stories abound of Levan leaving the booth to dust off a
disco ball hanging overhead, picking up the needle to play the
exact same song that was just on or not playing music at all,
instead opting to project Ken Russell’s body-horror flick, Altered
States. Even the Garage's legendary sound system was custom-made
for Levan's music. The stacked component system is said to have
achieved both massive loudness and shimmering clarity.

On The Final Nights Of Paradise, Levan is immortalised as sonic
commander in chief. The mix compilation doubles as a sketchbook of
a canon that remains largely embedded in dance music today. Garage
classics like MFSB's old-school vogue theme "Love Is the Message"
and First Choice's effusive disco hit "Doctor Love" promenade
alongside jacking Chicago-born staples like Adonis' 303 masterpiece
"No Way Back." If you wanted to give a brief history of club
classics to someone just out of a 50-year coma, this set could
serve as a terrific crash course.

Then there's moments where ingenuity and impishness blur. Levan was
a known prankster, and there are endless accounts of him playing
the same song on repeat for half an hour or more at the Garage. The
Final Nights Of Paradise features a dazzling 18-minute suite of Liz
Torres' "Can't Get Enough." Levan weaves the dub into the vocal
version into Torres' live performance that climaxes with the singer
ranting, "You can't get it up!'' in a back-and-forth skit with an
unidentified male-presenting voice. It's as though Levan took the
song's title as a challenge. Can't get enough? How about now? How
about ten minutes in? How about for almost 20 minutes?

Levan's messy mixing aesthetic is on full display here, but there
are stretches in which the mix advances without a
hitch—particularly a disco-heavy section on vinyl #3, where Levan
bumps things along with a series of quick, well-timed cuts. But his
scrappier mixing style yields an unexpected reward, even now,
almost 40 years in the future.

The Final Nights Of Paradise abounds with the kinds of shocks that
DePino rhapsodised. "I'm happy and I'm gay," a voice calls out as
HMJ's "Hyped" bounces energetically along and then, wham! an
explosion of glitter as the outro of Carl Bean’s early Pride anthem
"I Was Born This Way" takes over. The mix takes an abrupt left from
Loleatta Holloway's laid-back "Dreamin'" to Serious Intention's
dubby proto-house "You Don't Know," rendering a wobbly but
determined bridge between eras.

Sometimes you can hear Levan correct his overzealousness. When Man
Friday's "Real Love" comes in sloppily on top of Diana Ross'
slow-burning "Once in the Morning," he quickly fades out to resolve
the clatter. Elsewhere, he seems content to ride out a shaky
transition—for a good two minutes, the arpeggiated synths of
Chantal Curtis' "Hit Man" wiggle in and out of step with the
preceding track, Harvey Mason's "Groovin' You." A rambunctious hand
drum solo adds to the glorious cacophony.

While the The Final Nights Of Paradise doesn't contain the full
breadth of Levan's eclecticism—this was a DJ who was known to slam
The Rolling Stones in the middle of a house set, after all—Levan's
trademark between-track spaces do make it in. As Fingers Inc.'s
"Never No More Lonely" fades out, a spacey whooshing effect fills
the quiet before the optimistic piano chords on Rhythim is
Rhythim's "Strings of Life" chime in. It's brief, suggesting
nothing as much as a fleeting opportunity to take a breather. What
sounds like an attempted live edit of Chaka Khan's "I Know You, I
Live You" has clunkier results: the song plays, cuts off and then
comes back in a trainwreck mismatch. (In truth, it's hard to tell
which stops are Levan's and which are the compiler's. The bootlegs
cover less than five hours of a three-day marathon, muddying the
waters of our perception.)

Levan famously wove a narrative into his song selection; it was why
he was said to prefer vocal tracks to their instrumental
counterparts. There's a sense of finality on songs like Adonis' "No
Way Back," in which the baritone vocal whispers, "Too far gone,
ain't no way back." But there's also a starburst of hope for the
future.

Professions of undying devotion explode from Stevie Wonder's
monumental "As," forever feelings framed through ecological
extremes. Wonder's narrator will love his object of desire "until
the rainbow burns the stars out in the sky / until the ocean covers
every mountain high / until the dolphin flies and parrots live at
sea," and "until we dream of life and life becomes a dream." That's
to say, always. First Choice said it best in their emphatic stomper
"Let No Man Put Asunder": "It's not over between you and me / It's
not over, don't want to be free." Levan's song selection
simultaneously acknowledges the end while wondering aloud if it
really has to be so.

"That night, Larry played beautifully, like it wasn't the end,"
recalled Garage staple Michele Saunders in a retrospective piece on
the Garage's closing weekend for Document. "The only difference was
that it had been going for three days non-stop. People were
strolling in a daze. They did not leave. Later, everyone met at
Washington Square Park after the club."

If Levan had trepidation about the Garage's closing, it was
justified. Garage operator Michael Brody blamed local pressure for
the club's closure. Their lease wasn't renewed because, as he
explained, "they don't want a Black club in their neighbourhood."
Brody would die of AIDS three months after the Garage shuttered,
squashing the chances of picking things up in a new location.

As Levan's heroin habit steadily worsened, he lost his literal home
after the closing of the Garage, as well as his artistic one.
Towards the end, he was said to have lost many of his records,
either because he sold them to buy drugs, or because they were kept
in a storage unit that he ceased paying for.

In the interim, Larry played other spots in New York such as the
Choice, Mars and the Palladium. He toured Japan, where he was
idolised, and applied his touch to Nami Shimada's sparkling "Sun
Shower." Even as a remixer, that quintessential Larry brusqueness
was on show. Struggling to get the mix right, he thundered a
message through producer Soichi Terada's answering machine: "Mr.
Levan calling Mr. Terada. Mr. Terada, I need to know the key of
your fucking song!"

Levan's life ended on a bittersweet and unresolved note. In
Maestro, Knuckles recalled spinning at Sound Factory and having
Levan visit him in the booth after the Garage shut. "He said if he
had a choice of things happening for him now as opposed to ten
years before, he would have chosen now, because he would've been
able to appreciate it a whole lot better," he said.

Levan's presence is still keenly felt in New York nightlife, both
in the careers that he spawned and the songs he catapulted to
ubiquity. "He's the reason why this job is what it is, why it's a
career," Knuckles once said. And he's right: The Final Nights of
Paradise sounds radically contemporary nearly 40 years after on. So
many of these tracks continue to regularly fire up the dance floor
as if days, not decades, have passed since their initial
release.

Disco was given a mandate by the straight world to disappear, but
it never did and has, surprisingly, become one of the enduring
forces within American popular music. Since the '90s, it's been in
a regular cycle of coming back, fading somewhat and then coming
roaring back again, and today, the likes of Dua Lipa, Doja Cat and
Sabrina Carpenter have helped seed it within mainstream pop for a
new generation. It's not a fad, it's a life rhythm. It's not over.
It never was. Who knows how true that would be if it weren't for
Larry Levan.

Sashaying into the new week with these fab Larry Levan mixes
spotted on a recent dig in Shoreditch. Admittedly those are
bootlegs. Featuring the first ever superstar DJ of the
‘post-disco’-to-house era playing his final weekend sets at the
legendary Paradise Garage in the late summer of 1987.

Despite utilizing by now canonic and very familiar disco, soul and
early house productions with Levan it’s all about how he employs
them. Ultimately he was one of the key innovators (along with
Francois Kevorkian and Walter Gibbons) in remixing pop records.
Stretching the duration to epic lengths (useful for mixing),
introducing spatial studio trickery first pioneered by dub
producers and lightly defamiliarizing pop tunes with polyrhythms
lifted off Latin American and Caribbean records. The latter was
apparently more of a pre-disco technique that other fellow NYC DJs
of the same generation (like Nicky Siano) also used. Both, in their
rent-paying assignments for pop acts as well as to vary long night
marathon sets at gay saunas and nightclubs. This is all to say that
you can’t just “playlist” the same tracks (if you find all the dub
mixes that is) on Spotify and think that that’s how it sounded when
Levan played it. Effectively he moulds something that is way more
than the sum of its parts. As great DJs of his and a few later
generations used to. Now largely a lost art, beyond few rare
exceptions. So these artefacts, bootlegs or not, are very precious
indeed. Plus these come adorned with multi-coloured Keith Haring
artworks, so you can frame all or some of it into fancy
wall-prints.

P.S. A few people asked to ID the tracks in the clips. So the first
is a snippet of Derrick May’s production as Rhythim Is Rhythim.
Early Detroit techno classic known as “Strings Of Life”. Second
clip is the first minute of Larry Heard’s “Never No More Lonely”
recorded with Robert Owens and Ron Wilson as Fingers Inc.