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# The Godfather of Everything That Moves
- URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-godfather-of-everything-that-moves/
- Published: 2006-03-07T00:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2006-03-07T00:00:00.000Z
- Author: JewsRock
- Tags: Words, #Import 2026-08-16 01:56, Essays

*By Ethan Brown*

James Brown is the Godfather of Soul, George Clinton the Godfather of Funk, but Mel Cheren is the Godfather of Everything That Moves. Hip-hop, punk-funk, techno, house—anything with a beat—shares its DNA with the music played at the Paradise Garage. Cheren ran the downtown New York club with his lover, Michael Brody, from 1977 to 1987.

Photo courtesy Mel Cheren

And it was there, in a sprawling former parking garage at 84 King Street, that Madonna tried—and failed (she was booed off the stage)—to convince a crowd that a white girl could be a disco diva; that a Bronx DJ named Larry Levan played records like the Peech Boys’ "Don’t Make Me Wait" and Taana Gardner’s "Heartbeat," whose grooves would provide the backbone for hundreds of hip-hop and R&B samples; and that a Spanish DJ who went by one name—Alfredo—sensed the future in Levan’s across-the-board style and imported it back to his home in Ibiza, schooling young DJs like Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling in this eclectic ethos. They then shipped it back to home in London and gave birth to something called rave.

The Paradise Garage is the Eden of BPM culture, Cheren its Adam. It would be too easy to say that Cheren, a gay Jewish kid who came of age in the 1950s, is an unlikely icon of post-modern groove. But popular music history proves that agents of profound cultural change are just as likely to be behind the boards as in front of them (think Sam Phillips creating the spectral sound of Sun Studios or Phil Spector laying down the primal, kick drum beats of "Be My Baby.")

Like Phillips and Spector, Cheren both reacted against something and saw an opening for something new. As an employee of ABC/Paramount Records in the 1950s, he recoiled at the saccharine sounds of Pat Boone. Later, working at Scepter Records in the 1960s, after falling in love with the orchestral soul sound coming out of Philadelphia, Cheren imagined a moment when DJs (and dancers, too) would want those lush grooves extended over the length of an entire song.

So, in 1976, Cheren created a label of his own to fulfill that vision, West End Records. It didn’t take long for the label to open up the greatest beat-minded minds; one of West End’s first releases, Sessa Mato’s "Sessamato," was the first record that Grandmaster Flash set raps to. Meanwhile, Cheren’s lover, Brody, who shared his partner’s passion for the percussive sound emerging from discotheques, canvassed friends for financial help in opening a disco.

By the spring of 1977, Brody had cobbled together just enough cash to open the Paradise Garage on King Street in the West Village. The space wasn’t much more than an industrial shell (its most notable feature was a ramp leading up to the dance floor), but Cheren and Brody were savvy—visionary, even—about the talent they employed behind the decks. The pair hired Larry Levan, an up-and-coming DJ who had cultivated a small yet devoted following at the Continental Baths on St. Marks Place (also home to some of Bette Midler’s first performances) as the Paradise Garage’s resident spinner.

Even before the Paradise Garage opened, Cheren and Brody knew that they had made the right choice: Levan abandoned his apartment in the Bronx and actually moved into the club, helping to fashion its decor and sound system. Levan enthused to Cheren and Brody about the vision he’d bring to the club and even talked about creating his very own speakers for the Garage, which he dubbed "Levans."

From the beginning, it seemed that everything about the Paradise Garage would be different from its competition in clubland, right down to the opening night. Instead of an official premiere, the Paradise Garage opened its doors with a series of "Construction Parties," in which proceeds from the door went to defray the costs of the club’s launch.

But the atmosphere at the "Construction Parties" was hardly low-key: Levan thrilled revelers with his charismatic DJ’ing style, which emphasized song selection over mixing.

Rock, salsa, soul and, of course, disco blared from Levan’s booth with a sense of improvisation that no one (not even Cheren himself) could have predicted. Yet Levan wasn’t simply being eclectic or showoff-y about his vast record collection; he played a diverse set because he felt that the dancers’ emotions were much more fluid than the songs with a steady, 4/4 beat allowed. When the dance floor grew exhausted in the early morning hours, Levan would employ sound effects like rain and wind; when dancers needed a boost of energy, he would play anthems like Chaka Khan’s "I Know You, I Live You" complete with the high-pitched squeal of a siren.Under Levan’s hypnotic spell, dancers would stay at the Garage for 48 hours at a time.

Outside the Garage, disco was booming, most notoriously at Studio 54\. But Cheren and Brody refused to kow-tow to disco’s increasingly glitzy, classist sensibility. "Standing on a pedestal outside the door, picking and choosing, Mark the doorman resembled some elitist Nazi youth," Cheren wrote of Studio 54 in his autobiography Keep On Dancin: My Life and the Paradise Garage. Though the Garage had a membership policy, complete with photo ID cards, Cheren and Brody strove to maintain democracy on the dance floor. At the Garage, drag queens, outer-borough gays, and even celebs like Mick Jagger, Eddie Murphy, Diana Ross, and Keith Haring mixed.

Nostalgia for the Paradise Garage remains a powerful force in dance music culture, from British cultural critic Tim Lawrence’s recently published proto-disco history Loves Saves the Day to the Garage reunion tours (complete with the club’s warm-up DJ David DePino) that crisscross nightspots all over Europe. But it was really Cheren’s notion of dance floor as utopia that ensured the survival of the Paradise Garage long after disco’s late 1970s demise, the onset of AIDS in the early 1980s, the club’s closing in 1987, and Levan’s death from heart failure in 1992\. "Everybody was freaking," house music producer Cevin Fisher intoned on his tribute to the Garage, "The Way We Used To." Almost twenty years after the Paradise Garage’s demise, the club’s egalitarian spirit still fuels dance floors all over the world.

Ethan Brown writes for New York Magazine.

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*Ethan Brown is an investigative journalist and author (Murder in the Bayou) and a senior editor at Deep South Today.*