Pat Mahoney – brought up on an intriguing diet of folk music and, funnily enough, in the white suburbs of Ithaca, New York, reggae – developed an insatiable appetite for music and rhythm from the very start. When he turned 13, he traded in his saxophone for a PA and a mic, becoming lead singer of his first punk band, Distorted View. Three years of basements, garages, coffee houses, and his first manager (“It was fucking fun. We had a manager who was like 17 and had a car; he would take us to shows. He had a car that had no foot floor, it was just the street running by underneath it”), and eventually Distorted View made a turn for goth. Unhappy with this musical direction, Pat instead taped a pair of drum sticks to his hands and picked up a white Pearl Export drum kit for an onslaught of basement punk shows with his second band, The Five Deadly Diseases (each of the five members named after a disease – Chris Syphilis, for example). A few years and an art school education later, Pat was recording for his next band, Les Savy Sav and found himself a good friend in their sound engineer, the indie/punk home-studio recording guru James Murphy.
Raised in the equally sheltered streets of Princeton Junction, New Jersey, James Murphy had garnered himself a reputation as a live and studio engineer (“recording bands on my 4-track for sandwiches”) after a lifetime of starring in various bands himself. Subsequent to his first band at the age of 12, The Mystery Meats, the band names flew in over the years – The Extremes, ? (“We were just a question mark for a while, pre-Prince, just the symbol, I mean, not pre-Prince existence, but pre-Prince being the symbol. And pre-!!!”), Pony, Speedking – but James always found time to balance producing, recording, engineering and performing. Humble but foretelling beginnings for someone that, a decade later, is now heralded as a hugely important figure in electronic music; the “disco infiltrator” that’s considered largely responsible for fusing dance and punk music. As the leading man and lyricist of his musical project LCD Soundsystem, the quintet has celebrated two Grammy nominations (for their self-titled debut LP `LCD Soundsytem’ and the classic `Daft Punk Is Playing At My House’) and received fantastic critical acclaim for their second album released earlier this year, `Sound of Silver.’ Throughout it all, his best mate Pat Mahoney keeps time on drums and keeps his company on tour for LCD Soundsystem, and the two now have the divine opportunity to explore the globe with the band’s relentless schedule. But flashing back to the fateful day Pat first came into James’ studio, precisely at the point that dissatisfaction with noise bands and indie rock had reached a halting climax for both of them, their introduction to each other and to dance music was an ecstatic one.
James:”My DFA partner Tim Goldsworthy, he came over with David Holmes to work on a record and I was like, `This is new, this is weird, nobody plays this sort of thing.’ It was a very different way of making music and then I went out and did ecstasy when David was DJing and heard Liquid Liquid for the first time.”
Pat:”James helped me build a rehearsal studio for Les Savy Sav, who ostensibly speaking, he broke up, and this was the genesis of LCD and also me leaving Les Savy Sav.”
James:”So I played bass and he played drums and it was just like Liquid Liquid, and we were trying to wrap our heads around making people boogie.
Pat:”That was like ’96, with dubious results, totally foreign to us in a lot of ways because indie kids were not dancing.”
James:”No, they weren’t looking to boogie. But it was fun.”
Pat: “If you’d go to a noise show, some of it can be amazing, but most of the time it’s just fucking tedious. It’s a bunch of guys scratching their beards, while some other guys are making some ear-splitting nonsense that doesn’t go anywhere. Noise, like someone playing a Budweiser can with a pickup. It’s a self-reflexive, self-indulgent scene. If you could dance to it, it would be an anathema because it would be too crassly materialistic to actually enjoy something. It’s like music made for people who have $200,000 art school educations. That was what was around us at the time we came together, so we were trying to make a band where people could dance.”
James: “We were using the same sort of basslines over and over again and the people around us were like, `ugh, this is not ironic enough’. Anyway, DFA was my nickname doing sound for Six Finger Satellite, doing live sound, as in Death From Above, because I was and am still to this day, notoriously loud, some might say shockingly loud, and in some countries illegally loud. It’s just a phrase that the airborne use when they bomb places, Death From Above.”
Pat: “Like Death raining from the skies. I can personally attest to some of the Six Finger Satellite shows being inhumanly, biblically loud. Like so fucking loud that people are getting very upset. Physically ill. It was that loud.”
Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy paired up in 2001 to form the vital dance-punk label, DFA Records in 2001. In between writing the songs that would eventually become LCD Soundsytem classics, James had taken to DJing obscure disco records at rock shows, convinced that “rock n roll is dance music.” James soon forged his own platform for the now legendary DFA parties at APT once a month and, after a brief hiatus in Florida, Pat returned to see the vast changes that had swept over the uptight, scene-less city of New York. Each month James brought the sounds of Europe across the ocean – being one of the first stateside promoters to book the likes of 2manydjs,Optimo, Blackstrobe and Headman, amongst countless others – and the APT sessions clearly made its mark on history for all those involved. With a budget of $4,000, including a full bar and soundsystem, once a month over 700 people attended the DFA parties, which gave everyone a chance to play whatever they wanted, engaging in sets where The Fall danced alongside Donna Summer, and the technofied funk of Carl Craig boogied down with Can.
James: “That’s the thing – the big DFA party Pat first came to there was a bunch of techno kids, some really smelly punk kids and Rosie Perez. On crutches. She rolled in on crutches! That was a good time. The only problem I have with the modern DJ world is everyone wants to DJ for an hour. I used to DJ for like 6 hours, I’d literally have like 500-600 records behind the decks for those APT parties. The party would start at 9pm, it’d be rammed by 10pm, and it’d be over at 7:00 in the morning. You would’ve been forced to play every single record you owned. I love that. Otherwise it feels like a celebrity appearance. I’ve had people give me 35-minute sets – I could play one track for 35 minutes.”
Pat: “I do a party in Brooklyn 3 or 4 times a year and play for like 5-6 hours, and then you can really stretch it out. You can take it up and then take it way down…”
James: “You could go anywhere with that. We started DJing together relatively recently, two or three years ago.”
Pat: “We just did a DJ tour in Canada with Al Doyle from Hot Chip. Al plays straight-up minimal techno. We did a couple gigs where we were bouncing from disco to minimal, and back again, which was cool. There was a nice arc, going from pretty choppy old disco to more electronic disco to full-on minimal techno, some serious German shit. It was pretty fun.”
James: “With a band, you have to read each other because you can’t talk. But with DJing, you put on a record and turn to each other like, `Are you wasted?’ `Wanna put on this track next?’ You don’t have to read each other; you can actually talk to each other.”
Pat: “It is fun when either of us gets a new record and drops that into a set. We both have a love for some pretty gay-ass disco.”
James Murphy and Pat Mahoney delve into their New York roots for FABRICLIVE 36, a hot sweaty blend of seminal disco, deep rare grooves and edgy tech-infused funk from influential artists such as Donald Byrd & 125th St, Chic, Lenny Williams, Junior Byron and Love of Life Orchestra. A delightful nod to their future, past and present (including LCD Soundsystem’s own `Hippe Priest Bumout’), this mix is unashamed hand-clapping fun, full of upfront rhythms, obscure treats and heart warming guilty pleasures.
“We’re pretty excited. We find doing mix CDs horrifying to a certain degree because there’s nobody there, so it’s just like, `What are we doing?!’ It’s like you’re just yelling into the air. We bought an old Bozak for this – the first DJ mixer ever built, hand-built. It sounds incredible. Everything sounds nicer and bigger and smoother and beautiful. The mix itself will have a little bit of stuff that isn’t necessarily what we’d play in a club. But we’d like it to be fun. So we’ll just do it a bunch of times live. Do it until you like it, that’s actually our motto.” – James Murphy & Pat Mahoney
01. Peter Gordon and Love Of Life Orchestra – Beginning of The Heartbreak – Lust/Unlust
02. Baby Oliver – Primetime (Uptown Express) – Environ
03. Donald Byrd and 125th St, NYC – Love Has Come Around – Elektra
04. Instant Funk – I Got My Mind Made Up – Salsoul
05 Chic – I Feel Your Love Comin’ On – Atlantic
06. Was (Not Was) – Tell Me That I’m Dreaming – ZE
07. GQ – Lies GQ
08. Mudd – Adventures In Bickett Wood (Layne’s Head Stash Re-roll) – Rong
09. Elektrik Dred – Butter Up (Gimme Some Bread) – Sounds Of Florida
10. Lenny Williams – You Got Me Running – Geffen
11. Daniel Wang – Like Some Dream (I Can’t Stop Dreaming) – Daniel Wang
12. Gichy Dan – Cowboys and Gangsters – ZE
13. Still Going – Still Going Theme – DFA
14. City Of Women – Tablakone – Sähkö
15. Babytalk – Keep On Move – Stickydisc
16. Love Committee – Just As Long As I’ve Got You – Salsoul
17. Mouzon’s Electric Band – Everybody Get Down – Mouzon
18. Punkin’ Machine – I Need You Tonight – JC Records
19. LCD Soundsystem – Hippie Priest Bum-out – DFA/EMI
20. Junior Bryon – Dance To The Music (Dub) – Vanguard
21. JT – I Love Music – Vanguard
22. Jackson Jones – I Feel Good Put Your Pants On – Jackson Jones
23. NYC Peech Boys – Life Is Something Special – Island Def Jam
24. Peter Gordon and Love Of Life Orchestra – Don’t Don’t – Lust/Unlust
