Bruce Tantum (Time Out New York, DJ Mag)
"There was a good chunk of the ‘80s where, unless I was going to Danceteria or Area or one of those clubs, I very rarely would travel more than 10 blocks from my apartment."
I was shamefully inattentive to bylines when I was young. So although I must have read Bruce Tantum’s work hundreds of times in the pages of Time Out New York throughout my teens and twenties, I regretfully only became aware of him when I was in the final stages of working on my book. Jonny Sender, a musician and deejay whose interview I’ve previously shared on here, suggested I talk to Bruce, who he described as an inveterate clubber and deejay. But by that point, I was already well past my due date and had nearly tripled the suggested word count, so I wasn’t looking for more material.
After the book’s release, we connected on Instagram. The name rang a bell, so I started digging around. Several people I’ve interviewed have described themselves to me as Zelig types, but as I discovered, it’s truer of Bruce than most. He first started investigating the city’s nightlife in the late ‘70s, when he would venture from his native New Jersey to check out CBGB and Studio 54, and he hasn’t stopped since.
There he was, playing at Danceteria and the Mudd Club with his post-punk band Moot, dancing at the Saint and the Roxy, deejaying at the Pyramid Club, and ultimately celebrating and documenting the city’s nightlife at TONY for seventeen years, a period in which clubs were routinely targeted and shuttered by the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations. Commendably, he’s still deeply entrenched in the dance music world, keeping abreast of all the new clubs and reporting on the culture for the British electronic music periodical DJ Mag, where he’s the U.S. editor. I can only imagine what kind of sleep debt he must have.
We spoke over Zoom in late October.
Where in Jersey did you grow up?
I was Central Jersey; Mercer County to be precise. The area where I grew up was very rural. Until high school, my life consisted of catching frogs and going fishing, stuff like that.
So then how did you get exposed to urban underground culture and music?
We were situated right at the midpoint between New York and Philadelphia, so we would get both [cities’] TV stations. So watching the news from both cities, there was something about New York that just seemed much cooler, even though most of the news stories back then were about how it was a hotbed of crime. Five year old me was like, That's the place I want to go. So I was always very New York oriented, though I didn't really know why.
At that point, there was a lot of fresh blood moving into where I grew up. It was becoming suburbanized. Now it’s very depressing, because what was farms and trees is now just McMansion after McMansion. But as a high school kid, I was very happy, because it was fresh blood. I was very music oriented, even before high school. I was listening to all the college radio stations, and I liked all the stuff that my friends liked: Led Zeppelin, Yes, Foghat. But I was also into other extremes: I was very much into glam rock. I was the biggest Bowie fan in my high school, and I was probably the only Roxy Music fan. I also liked what was becoming codified as disco, like the Philadelphia International sound, and even the cheesy stuff that was on the radio, like Silver Convention. I was always drawn to that much more than my friends.
Once I started hearing punk on college radio, probably from the get go in ‘74, I really liked that too. By the time I went to Rutgers University in ‘76, I just knew I was going to be in New York. When I got to Rutgers, which was a little bit closer to New York City, we were going into New York all the time and going to CBGBs, Max's, whatever else there was back then. I was still very much an outsider looking in, but just being in the midst of it was so wild and so far beyond anything that I had experienced at that point. It was just mind blowing for an 18 year old me.
Being into punk and disco simultaneously, was there any sort of tension?
If I was a real punk, I'm sure I would have hated disco, but I wasn't a real punk. It was one big musical mishmash at that point, and that continued on through my whole life. Also, unless you were a real punk, the music scene was a lot less segregated back then. You could listen to all different kinds of music and nobody would give you a shit about it. I remember, this must have been ‘79 or so, going straight from the Mudd Club to Studio 54 where a friend of mine was working - Studio 54 had already closed once and then reopened, so it was not quite the glory days, but it was still Studio 54 - and then being whisked right in. Steve Rubell was there, and I guess we looked like punks, so Steve motioned to [doorman] Mark Fleischman, who waved us in like immediately.
I graduated in ‘80 and briefly moved to Hoboken, as a transitional step to the city, I guess. Then I moved to the city in ‘83.
Your band, Moot, was that before you moved to the city?
That started when I was still in Hoboken. It was me and some of my friends from Rutgers. I would go down to New Brunswick, where they all still lived, and we'd rehearse. We played in New Brunswick a lot, and we played in Hoboken at Maxwell's, and then eventually we were playing the circuit: Peppermint Lounge, Danceteria. We had, I wouldn't say success, but a certain notoriety.
We were friends with bands who had gotten more popular, like Liquid Liquid. Scott Hartley, Liquid Liquid’s drummer, and Richard McGuire, the bass player, were Rutgers people. Sal Principato, the vocalist, his father was the police chief of a neighboring town. So Moot was part of that world. We had a single come out, which still gets a little bit of airplay. JD Twitch from Optimo put our song “Mavis” on one of his compilations a number of years back. It lives on among about a very small group of people. We stopped doing that around ‘84-’85. We never officially disbanded, but that's when it petered out.
Was there a club that felt especially like a home base for you during this period?
Pyramid. For me and my group of friends, Pyramid was like the corner disco. I was probably there several times a week in the early and mid ‘80s. The deejays were playing very open format kind of stuff, everything from disco to weirdo electronics and everything in between. Even though I was still to some extent outside looking in, it had a real family feel to it. I could go by myself and know that I would know some people there.
I was living right on 6th Street, so it was a five minute walk from my house. There was a good chunk of the ‘80s where, unless I was going to Danceteria or Area or one of those clubs, I very rarely would travel more than 10 blocks from my apartment. Probably 99% of my life was in the East Village and Lower East Side. I worked in a restaurant called 103 on the corner of 6th Street and 2nd Avenue, which was in the building that was surrounded by what had been Fillmore East, and at that point was the Saint. So I had literally a 200 foot walk to work at that point.
103 itself was kind of a big deal for me, because everybody was going there. Some underground filmmaker like Amos Poe would be hanging out, and then there'd be Keith Haring over there, that kind of thing. It was open 24 hours, so when once the clubs let out, it would just get packed. It was like a very down-market, East Village version of the Odeon.
Since the restaurant was next door to the Saint, was there any sort of relationship between the restaurant and the club?
I got to go to the Saint a few times without being a member. That was a nice perk. The Saint was pretty mind blowing, as you can imagine. It was a step beyond even Studio 54. It was set up like a planetarium inside, and they would set off the planetarium aspect of it at a certain point. But even without that, it was just this huge, massive place with no women, all men. Maybe like, literally two women in the place. Sharon White was one of the deejays, so I guess that's one woman. But beyond that, hearing high energy electronic disco at full volume over a pretty amazing sound system was [amazing]. That's when I finally understood Sylvester, after I heard “You Make Me Feel" or one of those songs at the Saint.
And in the very early ‘80s, I was going to Hurrah’s a lot, which was the rock disco uptown. I saw Pere Ubu there a number of times, and I was there for this famous night that Liquid Liquid and ESG played there. And then the Roxy, which was the whole Uptown-meets-Downtown aesthetic. Before that was Negril, which was so much smaller than Roxy. It was just a big swirl.
Were there specific deejays that you were following?
Justin Strauss, who I was first hearing at the Ritz. And then when we would go to Area, he and Johnny Dynell were both deejays there. There was Mark Kamins at Danceteria. But to tell you the truth, even though I knew a lot of these people and liked their music, you didn't go to a club so much then for the deejay, you went for the club. I didn’t go to Danceteria to hear Mark Kamins, I was going because it was Danceteria and it had a certain vibe.
It’s interesting that you mention Johnny Dynell and Justin Strauss specifically, because they're both people who were coming out of punk backgrounds before crossing over into dance music, which is not unlike the experience that you were having. Was that a larger shift that you were noticing within that community?
Not that I really was noticing at the time, but now that you're saying it, yeah, it makes sense. It was just part of the miasma that was happening. Dancing was becoming more and more of a part of clubbing. Obviously people were dancing at Danceteria or Area, but they were just as much places to hang out, talk to your friends, meet new people. I guess in the later ‘80s…and I might be just be talking shit here, because there were clubs like the Saint which were all about dancing and sex, and places like the Paradise Garage which was just one big dance floor. But with a lot of the clubs I was going to, or at least for me, it was more about hanging out. It was later in the ‘80s when clubs like the World were opening up where dancing was becoming more and more the main thrust of the thing.
You mentioned earlier that even when you were going to the Pyramid, you were still feeling like an outsider. Is there a point where that shifts?
Through 103, I was getting to meet a lot of people, and by the time I got out of that restaurant around ‘85, I was finally feeling like I belonged to the East Village. Which I was very happy about, because we felt like the East Village was the center of the world. Although my friends who had been around in the ‘70s were like, “It sucks now.” I would have loved to have been there in the ‘70s, but I'm also happy not to be quite that old.
At what point did you start delving into deejaying?
Around ‘88. A friend of mine, Mickey Hohl, had [started deejaying], and he was like, “Hey, dude, you got to get yourself a couple turntables and a mixer.” I went out and bought a couple of belt drive Gemini [turntables] and a Realistic mixer and learned how to do it. Then me and him and a few others started throwing these parties just around town as a mobile disco thing. We would take our shit to various bars and set up and do parties, playing a lot of everything. The first place we had a regular thing was this bar called the Chameleon on 6th Street, which is now Club Cumming.1
By the early ‘90s, we were doing this thing at the Pyramid called Home Shopping Club, which would be me and Mickey deejaying, and then us and some others would do these ten-minute Home Shopping Club parodies in between the deejay sets. A woman named Sharon Stone - not the Sharon Stone - was the lead actress, playing a character called Charmaine. This was [after] the glory days of the Pyramid, but it was still viable. Lady Bunny and Hattie Hathaway were still part of it; Wendy Wild and Mr. Fashion would join in as part of her shows.
Over the course of the ‘80s, the city, the neighborhood, and the scene all changed tremendously. How aware were you of the changes that were taking place, and how were they impacting your experience?
I first became really aware of the changes when the Holiday [Cocktail Lounge] changed their drink pricing from “everything is $1.50” to actually having a price differential between top shelf and well drinks. That’s when I was like, Shit, the East Village is over. It was becoming more and more expensive, and it was more difficult for friends to actually move to the Village. We saw it coming by the late ‘80s, but it was in the ‘90s when it really started having an effect.
And even pre-Giuliani, the city was clamping down on a) illegal places, and b) legal places that had some vague violation or another, no matter how innocuous. That started happening in the Dinkins administration, right after the Happy Land fire. It would just be the fire department coming in and saying, “Oh, your exit sign is too far in that direction by three inches. We're shutting you down.” So that didn't help. But the main issue was rents. That's when friends started moving to Brooklyn.
And, of course, AIDS had been wreaking havoc on the Downtown scene.
It was brutal. Even one of my roommates in Hoboken, if you want to go way back, was one of those very early casualties, well before I was being called AIDS. By the time I got into New York, it was in the thick of the whole Downtown scene, which had a very gay and drug-oriented vibe. A week wouldn’t pass by where somebody you were somewhat friends with would pass away.
One of the perks about 103 was that they would rent a house at the Pines for the summer that the employees could use whenever they wanted to. I remember one year going out, and I was like, Hey, the Pines! This is crazy! This is amazing! The next year, it was near empty. I was like, Oh, shit. This is not good. Sometimes I wonder about what it would be like if AIDS had never happened, or at least if they’d come up with a way to let people live with HIV. There were still parties, there was still fun, stuff was happening. But there was this specter of sadness that was always floating in the distance.
Now that we’re starting to get into the ‘90s, was that when you started writing?
In the ‘90s, I was still living my life, doing this and that. And then in ‘97, there was a magazine called Time Out New York that had started about a year or two before. My friend Adam Goldstone was already the second clubs editor; there had been a clubs editor before him named Frank Broughton. Time Out was becoming successful enough that they told Adam he could hire an assistant, so he asked me. The most writing I had done to that point was a couple record reviews. But we were friends, and he knew I clubbed a lot, so he [vouched for me]. My interview consisted of the Managing Editor going, “You want to work here?” I was like, “Yeah.” She was like, “Okay.” That was it.
I was doing some writing, but mostly Adam had me doing the listings, which was Time Out’s bread and butter at that point. But then suddenly, Adam had some argument with the Editor in Chief, and he just stopped showing up. For a while, I was doing both his job and my job. Finally, after two months of this going on, the Publisher goes, “Do you just want to do the whole thing? We're gonna tell Adam he's officially fired.” I was like, “Yeah, sure. Why not?” That's what I did for the next 17 years.
Time Out was getting more and more editorial content, so I was doing what I consider to be major interviews, although looking at them now, they're almost laughable. I was interviewing pretty much everybody that was in New York, but also big international people that were coming to town. This continued until 2014. In the interim, the internet got invented, and we had to start tossing even more content online, so the workload increased.
This is also a period where the conventional wisdom is that the city was not as fun as it used to be, or it's not as cool as it used to be.
Well, that's true, particularly in the early 2000s. I can remember doing the listings and thinking, There's not a single thing that I want to do this week. It was post-Giuliani, but Giuliani had done his damage. Tunnel was closed, Limelight had closed. The clubs that did exist were not as much fun.
There was still some fun stuff, like the club Life was kind of fun. Volume, which was the one club in Brooklyn then. There was Cielo, which was this small, but really nice dance club in the Meatpacking District. At least in its early years, it had a fairly progressive, interesting musical policy.
Then, most especially, there was a place called Apt., also in the Meatpacking District - like “apartment,” but just everybody called it “Apt.” - at 419 West 13th. It had a basement level with two long bars and a deejay booth and one end, and then the upstairs was set up like somebody's apartment, hence the name. They also had a really good musical policy. A lot of locals were playing there, like Rich Medina and Bobbito. They were also getting out-of-towners: Soulwax, Theo Parrish - I played with Theo Parrish there. Even Carl Craig, if you can imagine somebody like Carl Craig in this little narrow hallway of a room that fit maybe 150 people. They had a good six or seven year run during that period.
This was a bit further into the 00’s, but I think Studio B was a precursor to the center of gravity for New York nightlife, or a certain segment of New York nightlife, moving to Brooklyn. And then within a few years, there's Output, and then things started happening like crazy there.
Did you feel any sense of tension or conflict as somebody who was both deejaying and writing about deejays?
Not really. I probably should have. I'm sure I got hired [at clubs] once or twice because they thought I would like to write things about them or something. But it was all very elite. I mean, it was just a bunch of friends. I knew everybody - everybody knew everybody! The New York clubbing world, especially at that point, was not such a huge place. A lot of the old timers that were still with us, people that had been going to the Saint or the Garage, had either retired from clubbing or realized there was no place for them to go anymore. Places like Cielo and Apt., as great as they were, were not the kind of places that they would want to go to.
Having experienced all these different eras in the city,where do you see the state of things at this point? Does the New York scene feel healthy now compared to those days?
[In the late ‘90s and early ‘00s], a lot of us were being crotchety old people - like, “Oh, you should have been here eight years ago, it was amazing.” Once things started happening in Brooklyn, it was much different, but still really good in its way. I think you could say the dance club scene is pretty strong right now.
The standby is Good Room in Greenpoint; Nowadays in Ridgewood as a pretty progressive musical policy. Gabriela is great, opened by a longtime New York deejay, Eli Escobar, who doesn't get enough props. Bossa Nova Civic Club is still fun. A bunch of little places like Jupiter Disco and Mood Ring. Public Records, they have a really good progressive musical policy as well. Not just dance music, they get jazz singers and avant garde live performances and stuff like that. There was that period in the early 2000s where I would sit there and think, There's nothing I want to do this week; now there’s multiple things that I could see myself doing.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
---------------
Check out DJ Mag here
Listen to Bruce’s mixes on Mixcloud
Order a signed copy of my book This Must Be the Place here
Book a walking tour here
And of course, if you haven’t already…
The Chameleon is best known for being home to the early antifolk scene in the late ‘80s. An 18-year-old Beck Hansen performed original material for the first time on the Chameleon stage.