Still Saving The Day: The Most Influential Dance Party In History Turns 50
It started somewhat humbly on Saturday, Feb. 14, 1970. Valentine's Day.
David Mancuso, a 25-year-old upstate-to-New-York transplant, was in need of money to pay the landlord of his downtown Manhattan loft, not yet The Loft, at 647 Broadway. A rent party, in the tradition of Great Migration-era Harlem sessions that involved music, dancing, and a donation to help the host make that month's ends meet, seemed about right. Especially as Mancuso was well-equipped to throw such an event; even then, he was innately attuned to the ingredients needed to foster the right atmosphere for a good party.
One needed music, of course — Mancuso had been a record collector since his teens, also becoming an accidental hi-fi stereo enthusiast by purchasing his first set of Klipschorn speakers, (handmade, audiophile catnip since 1946) when he was 21. One also needed a nice cross-section of people, enough to turn it into a happening — and having grown up in a Utica orphanage, Mancuso was adept at making connections in whatever milieu he found himself in. Often, that milieu was other private dance parties in people's homes all over the city, which he thought "more intimate [than bars and clubs] and you would be among friends... get to know people and develop relationships," as he told author Tim Lawrence many years later. Mancuso was also attracted to the psychedelic crowd of the nearby East Village, where he became friendly with, among others, LSD guru Timothy Leary, whose study groups ingrained in him not only ideas about psychedelic spirituality, but social progress. And contrary to popular history's later segregation of disco dancers and hippie rock freaks, Mancuso tuned them all in.
The lessons gleaned from his experiences of New York, as well as from childhood memories of the orphanage, where a mother-figure nun named Sister Alicia would entertain the children with balloons, food treats and music, were spinning through Mancuso's head when 36 invitations for his first party went out. The invites featured an image of Dali's famous surrealist painting, "The Persistence of Memory," and the words "Love Saves the Day," which not only acknowledged the holiday and served as a psychedelic-acronymic code for the spiked punch, but also put forth an idea of simple, emotionaluplift, that the times — two months after Altamont, seven months after the Stonewall uprising, with New York in the midst of economic decline, the war in Southeast Asia raging, and the nation increasingly on edge as '60s idealism receded — practically required.
The Loft subsequently became the rent party celebrated around the world, a launchpad for the musically, ethically and socially progressive wing of DJ and dance culture. It also embodied a hard counterpoint to the popular (and often racist and homophobic) history of disco as hedonistic and formulaic — even as it both presaged disco's glamorous Studio 54 years, and functioned as one of the disco era's secret engines of creativity. Half a
