LAWRENCE, Tim
Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979

Opening with David Mancuso’s seminal Love Saves the Day Valentine’s party, Tim Lawrence tells the definitive story of American dance music culture in the 1970s–from its subterranean roots in NoHo and Hell’s Kitchen to its gaudy blossoming in midtown Manhattan to its wildfire transmission through America’s suburbs and urban hotspots such as Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Newark and Miami.

Tales of nocturnal journeys, radical music making and polymorphous sexuality flow through the arteries of Love Saves the Day like hot liquid vinyl. They are interspersed with a detailed examination of the era’s most powerful DJs, the venues in which they played, and the records they loved to spin–as well as the labels, musicians, vocalists, producers, remixers, party promoters, journalists, and dance crowds that fuelled dance music’s tireless engine.

Love Saves the Day includes material from over three hundred original interviews with the scene’s most influential players, including David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Tom Moulton, Loleatta Holloway, Giorgio Moroder, Francis Grasso, Frankie Knuckles and Earl Young. It incorporates more than twenty special DJ discographies–listing the favourite records of the most important spinners of the disco decade – and a more general discography cataloguing some 600 releases. Love Saves the Day also contains a unique collection of more than seventy rare photos.

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Published by Duke University Press, 2004
Essays / Music & Sound / Cultural Studies