Jock Rockin’

For a far more enlightening and entertaining take on dance music, its history and complex sexual and racial politics, pick up the new book My Life and the Paradise Garage: Keep on Dancin’ by Mel Cheren (as told to Gabriel Rotello). Cheren was a co-founder of the influential disco label West End Records. His lover, Michael Brody, founded the Paradise Garage, forerunner of the multiracial boundary-smashing dance tack and philosophy of rave and electronic cultures. Initially, the book elicits groans as it recounts a personal narrative that has already wilted into cliché: A good Jewish boy struggles to emerge from under his mother’s suffocating wing, giving furtive blowjobs to sailors as a teenager and feeling like the biggest freak on the planet. But it slowly evolves into a fascinating look at the inner workings of the music industry (Cheren’s Rolodex of business peers and acquaintances reads like a Who’s Who of the business), as well as a detailed overview of the gay-rights movement and the birth and decline of disco, as well as a riveting account of the people and tales behind the Paradise Garage (including much space devoted to Larry Levan and Tom Moulton, a founding father of disco and a hugely influential presence in modern dance music).

What’s most striking about this book is not the wealth of pop-culture history that is so richly laid out, not the gossip and name-dropping that fill the pages, and not even the painstaking remembrances of how the art of deejaying came to be, but the outlined utopian vision that dance music’s early fans were so sure they were ushering into existence. Beneath the endless drug use and sexual musical chairs is a heartbreaking naiveté. Cheren and Brody actually thought they were going to integrate the races, break down the forces of homophobia, and bring about a consciousness full of love, brotherhood and endless possibility. For a brief moment, with the help of some classic music, and in a hallowed space, they did just that.

MEL CHEREN | My Life and the Paradise Garage: Keep on Dancin’ 24 Hours for Life | 495 pages | $25 hardcover