Buried Treasure: The Gallery

[Today: One of disco music's pioneering DJs...]

In the early morning hours of June 28th, 1969, eight plain-clothes police officers entered the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in New York City and began harrassing and arresting the homosexual patrons of that bar. The ensuing clash between gays and police touched off five days of rioting that grew to include more than 1,000 protesters, and lit the fuse on the gay rights movement.

After the Stonewall riots, gays were no longer willing to live a cloistered existence, and when they defiantly emerged from enforced hiding they were ready to dance. It’s not much of a stretch to say that the events of June 28th, 1969 started a dance party that has lasted nearly four decades. And at the center of that party has been a number of groundbreaking DJs who changed the way records were spun in clubs, while unearthing a steady stream of little-known songs that filled dancefloors for years in trendy New York clubs like The Paradise Garage, Le Jardin, The Grand Ballroom, and DJ Nicky Siano’s club, The Gallery.

Siano conned his way into a club DJ gig in 1971, when he was just 16 years old. A year later he opened his own club, The Gallery, which quickly became one of the premiere hot spots in New York City. Soul Jazz Records’ outstanding 2004 compilation Nicky Siano’s Legendary The Gallery features some of the Soul, R&B, Funk, and Gospel cuts that Siano spun in his club between 1973 and 1977. While none of the songs collected here are disco per se, they all strongly suggest the sounds that would unite the genre by the late 70’s.

“There is a force that connects us,” Siano says. “And if I connect with that force, which I think is love… and I’m playing from the center, we’re all gonna get it, we’re all gonna get off on it.” But disco’s inclusive intentions and easily replicated sound would be its undoing, as a bunch of outsiders would eventually crash the party, looking to make a quick buck on a hot trend. [Ironically, much the same thing would happen to punk music around the same time.] Fortunately there are compilations like The Gallery to remind the world of the spirit and sound of real disco music.

Listen: Big John Is My Name [by Undisputed Truth]

Tags: Nicky Siano, The Gallery, The Stonewall riots