Attn: Silverbull

[starscream]

thought this might interest you since your into the whole latty levan paradise garage era.this is an interview done with Junior vasquez about his and friend and artist Keith Harring.this was during Palladium days when they were talking about tearing it down.pretty interesting.anyone else feel free to critisize cuz im not going there today.thanx

JUNIOR VASQUEZ

Vasquez’s notoriety as a DJ began at the legendary Sound Factory in New York, which was closed down at the peak of its popularity amid a fanfare of media drama. In the past year, he has continued to create club mayhem, first at the Tunnel and now at ARENA. His production and remix credits list like a Who’s Who, from Madonna to Janet Jackson to his most recent coproduction with veteran rocker John Mellencamp.

Q:

Let’s start with going to the Paradise Garage- what it was and what drew people there and kept them there.

JV:

I remember that it was probably my awakening in New York. The whole Garage scene. It was only one room, Larry [Levin] was there and a lot of white gay men, but it was an event and the beginning of a lot of events. The speakers were huge. People used to make fun of me because I was this tiny little thing and I would go and live inside that bass speaker. I come from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and I wasn’t born or raised in New York, so everything that I was I left behind as Donald Mattern, and then in New York I became Junior Vasquez and that’s when I was born.

Q:

Do you think you lived sort of a parallel life to Keith Haring? He came from a small town in Pennsylvania and wanted to leave it all behind.

JV:

Yeah, I think so. Two white guys doing the same thing. And we lived and grew up in the same place and our values were the same.

Q:

Did you ever discuss that with Keith?

JV:

I didn’t think we had to put it in words, I think we knew that kind of thing but we had to go over a bridge to become two professionals. If we had been friends earlier there would have been way too much competition. He liked the same boys and he liked the same things and I’m glad that we came together when we did. But I think for me, and I’m sure for him, it all began with where we were from.

Q:

We talked specifically about the Garage’s clientele- white and gay. What changed?

JV:

That’s what [manager] Michael Brody wanted it to be. Then he put Larry in, and Larry wasn’t cutting it musically for those white queens, so they got rid of Larry for a minute, and tried bringing T. Scott in, and it didn’t work. Larry had his following so they got him back and then it became a melting pot of people and that’s what made it work. The melting pot of straight, gay, Japanese, Spanish, black, whatever. Everything would mix into that room by six, seven am. I guess, looking back, it was a place for me to get an education.

Q:

What was the education? Can you describe it?

JV:

You had that place to go and it was the beginning of a weekend and the end of the week at the same time. You forgot all about your problems. At that time I was on welfare, I was struggling to get through New York, but I was glad that Saturdays were there and I could meet all my friends and everybody was going to be there. I think the education was to subconsciously be aware of what Larry was doing.

Q:

Is that the first time the DJ was sort of the MC?

JV:

Yes, as far as I’m concerned. DJs didn’t really stand out until Larry.

Q:

Larry meant a lot to Keith because he was so intuitive and had this incredible immediacy.

JV:

Well, that’s it, it was art and music… I think what happened at the Garage during the ten-year period when Keith made an impact was that everyone, including myself, was trying to find an identity. I got snagged once drawing Keith’s little baby on a pair of jeans and he caught me. We were all trademarking. Keith had a big trademark and everybody wanted to have a piece of Keith and a piece of Larry. Not so much Keith’s drawings, but the energy that comes off them, and the same thing with Larry. You could always tell that he was in the booth. The minute Larry got on the turntables there was a definite signature. As an artist I can duplicate this, but there is something that radiates off the original and that’s how you can tell the difference. I would get pissed when people tried to do things like Keith. Oh please, trying to be Keith, you can’t do Keith’s stuff. We were very possessive then. When the Garage closed in 1987, when everyone was selling things, it got very ugly. Everybody was after stuff.

Going back, I think you had a lull period where everybody is creative and everybody is fashiony, and music is changing, and Keith hit right on that five and I hit on the five, Larry hit on the five. I think that it wasn’t just Keith’s art work at that time, it was the entourage, the boys, the girls, the women, that were around him. If you didn’t know Keith, you were always fantasizing about what was going on in his loft and in his apartment. When Keith got his apartment on Sixth Avenue, right next to the movie theater, I went there after the Garage one time, and I remember walking up those stairs, being really impressed that this guy can have friggin’ anything, but he had this walk-up leading into this yellow box. That was the first time I was really, really impressed. It was Keith Haring as an infant. The studio was his business, but maybe after nine o’clock when he was done working…well, I could do a whole book about what went on there, but I think that the apartment was Keith as a baby. This is where he lived and he didn’t need a lot. At that point Keith was like a different person. I can relate to this because I have gone through this in my life. And you sometimes want to run away to this womblike place, which I think is what the Waverly Place apartment was to Keith.

Q:

Can you talk about the music?

JV:

It was eclectic but danceable. Garage music was everything from Bee Gees to Diana Ross to War to Tramps’ “Disco Inferno.†Back then, Garage was recognized as a place where you broke records, broke artists. Larry had some credibility and young people wanted to come in there and have their record played or perform there. There weren’t a lot of clubs like that in New York.

Q:

Some of Keith’s works try to picture homoeroticism, almost like that you would see in a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph in a different form. Was that scene part of the Garage?

JV:

Oh, yes it was. It would happen at ten o’clock in the morning at the Garage. Most people would leave by six, seven, or eight am. There was a real after-hours, underground scene at the Garage and Keith was part of that. He was a gentle person but at the same time he was really part of the scene.

Q:

Then how do you get your work done? How did he come to work after that?

JV:

I think that was part of the whole mechanism. Look at me, I go from Saturday to Saturday, I don’t catch up until Wednesday. I have done this for ten or twelve years now. It’s routine. I do it on the sheer energy of that crowd and I think Keith did it on the sheer energy of his peers and his friends. You know, they’re thinking about closing the Palladium, and that infuriates me. You don’t know what it means to me to go and do what I love to do on a Saturday night. A lot of different people listened to Keith. People paid attention to him and what he did, what he said, and what his art said. He would have somehow gotten to Mayor Giuliani and said, “No, we can’t tear down the Palladium. I’m gonna paint the outside of the Palladium so you can’t tear it down.†Keith was a product of the whole street vibe. Paradise Garage was four walls to put the street in. He was what the street was. What percolated on the street was what Keith was about. I’m sure there is a Paradise Garage on the other side and they are all there. I know they are there. I truly believe that Keith is there painting up a storm and Larry is playing.