The fluidity of disco juxtaposed with the towering concrete of New York City makes for a compelling cultural phenomenon that has endured since the Seventies. Seldom celebrated with the kings of disco’s defining era, Walter Gibbons is remembered appropriately as a seminal contributor with Strut’s release of Jungle Music.  BY SEAN MURPHY

Before Francois K., before Shep Pettibone, before Tee Scott—indeed, before the divine Larry Levan himself—there was Walter Gibbons, a diminutive Queens-via-Brooklyn disco DJ whose unassuming comportment belied an outre production acumen comparable to the innovation of Teo Maceo, Lee Perry, and Brian Eno. Paralleling the career trajectory of Fifties auteur Nicholas Ray, Gibbons began to outdraw more established peers like fledgling gay icon Michael Cappello and histrionic Gallery kingpin Nicky Siano with intensely tribal sets that featured vertiginous segues between the percussive breaks of various records (rendering the DJ an important antecedent of hip-hop), all the while drawing upon a vast selection of home-brewed acetate mixes that were literally pressed by Gibbons and his partner on a lathe in the dishabille of their outer-borough apartment.
 
The milieu was as formative as it was strange; Galaxy 21, Gibbons’ primary DJ residency during these halcyon years, was situated on the bustling thoroughfare of 23rd Street in Chelsea, an area then teeming with the faded remnants of light industry, skid-row dives, and SRO flophouses. But the gilded remnants of the Warhol/Chelsea Hotel axis ensured interesting cultural collusions; Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were sharing a nearby loft, Arthur C. Clarke was putting the final touches on Rendezvous with Rama at the Chelsea Hotel before permanently decamping for Sri Lanka, and it was only a couple of years after Janis had given Leonard head on the unmade bed in that historic edifice. Nevertheless, unlike the more celebrated (and sexually polymorphous) clubs of the era in SoHo and the far West Side, David Mancuso’s Loft standing foremost among them, Galaxy basically catered to a predominantly heterosexual singles audience. Although it’s easy to imagine a bunch of Saturday Night Fever boors gazing at the frantically druggy, pirouetting with vexation, Galaxy improbably succeeded in spite of its demographic as a bona fide after hours club—albeit as something of a “commercial joint”—with Gibbons at the helm. It wasn’t long before Siano and his influential coterie began to stumble uptown after a night’s session on the wheels of steel to hear the reticent “DJ’s DJ” play. By 1976, the DJ’s cut-up method was so dexterous that a young jazz musician hired to accompany a chagrined Gibbons on live drums—one Francois Kervorkian, soon known merely as Francois K.—couldn’t dream of keeping up with the turntables.

“By the time the seminal undercurrents of Chicago house and Latin freestyle...began to re-appropriate his rhythmic and textural innovations to wide acclaim, he was relegated to a retail job at Midtown’s venerable Rock and Soul Records...”
 
Carrying the sort of quiet assurance that came from the validation of his abilities, Gibbons ingratiated himself to the staff at New York indie upstart Salsoul Records, and it was not long before he was chosen to remix a “special disco version” of “Ten Percent” by Philly act Double Exposure (a sort of ersatz, less socially conscious O’Jays), emblematic of a trend that galvanized the asses of post-Watergate America in the wake of the unexpected success of a long remix of B.T. Express’ “Do It ’Til Your Satisfied”. Although he did not have access to the master tapes (pedants will carefully the first 12” single ever pressed is technically a re-edit), Gibbons transformed a saccharine knockoff of the Isleys’ “That Lady” into a ten-minute, polyrhythmic exegesis on urban gay fidelity. The radical “jungle music” of Galaxy 21 had reached the record store. Gibbons would go on to become a prolific remixer throughout the remainder of the disco era, his body of work a hermetically lysergic yang to the yin of the more streamlined mixes proffered by “Do It” innovator and former model Tom Moulton.
 
Yet as detailed in a brilliant article on Gibbons’ life and oeuvre by dance historian Tim Lawrence, the unscrupulousness of Galaxy’s ownership and his subsequent conversion to evangelical Christianity would slowly alienate Gibbons from the dance floor. By the time the seminal undercurrents of Chicago house and Latin freestyle (not to mention the classicist, dubby strains of New York post-disco and a fair swath of hip-hop) began to re-appropriate his rhythmic and textural innovations to wide acclaim, he was relegated to a retail job at Midtown’s venerable Rock and Soul Records, enabling him to devote his free time towards his avocation: a collection of thousands of gospel recordings. But he continued as an eminence grise in the New York underground until his untimely death from AIDS complications in 1994; in addition to bootlegging the original Celestial Choir version of “Stand on the World”, Gibbons remixed Strafe’s epochal 1984 underground hit “Set It Off” (a forerunner of the hip-house subgenre that would blossom with the insurgency of Todd Terry two years later) and enjoyed an evanescent collaboration with fellow sonic magpie Arthur Russell. 
 
Although 2004’s exhaustive Mixed With Love collected all of Gibbons’ Salsoul sides, ranging from the sublimely transcendent to the outright gauche, much of his best work was done for other labels. While most of these “lost remixes” have circulated illicitly on the Internet for quite some time now, a niche for a career-spanning compilation did exist, particularly in the wake of a renewed wave of appreciation that accompanied the publication of Lawrence’s Russell biography (Hold On To Your Dreams) and the belated release of the remixer’s tantalizingly elliptical take on “Go Bang” (commissioned nearly four years after the Francois K. mix) last year. Hot on the heels of their recent Bob Blank/Blank Tapes compilation—arguably the best compilation of its ilk since Disco Not Disco a decade ago—and the cachet of the Horse Meat Disco series, Strut has endeavored to fill the void with little impertinence in Jungle Music, which attempts to blend neophyte standards (“Ten Percent”, “Set It Off”) with almost fabled unreleased and uncirculated recordings (the unfinished Arthur Russell dance single “See Through” and the “Beat Bongo” mix of Stetasonic’s “4 Ever My Beat”, Gibbons’ lone foray into straight hip-hop).
 
For all of his parochial tendencies, Gibbons was a figure who relentlessly defied categorization and inevitable canonization—the self-aggrandizing Siano would gladly claim that mantle, after all—and by necessity Jungle Music is far less engrossing on a track-by-track basis than such stylistically related anthologies as the Loft compilations, Siano’s A Night at the Gallery, or A Tom Moulton Mix. Jakki’s “Sun Sun Sun” (best known to casual listeners from its appearance on a Larry Levan mix CD) was Gibbons’ first actual remix in the wake of “Ten Percent” and lives up tenaciously to the potential of that record; laden with post-Exuma tribal chanting, breakneck drumming, and trippy Moog lines, it is vaguely redolent of Dr. Savannah’s “Cherchez La Femme” before giving way to the increasing psychedelicization of the New York dance underground circa 1975 (as the private parties were not beholden to cash bars, LSD, marijuana, mescaline and the proto-Ecstasy of MDA were the dancers’ drugs of choice). Three years later, Gibbons would do away with all of the filigree altogether on West End’s “Doin’ the Best That I Can” and Salsoul’s “Magic Bird of Fire”. The former, nominally a showcase for soul survivor Bettye Lavette, is a dilatory showcase of booming drums, ethereal celeste, and screeching diva vocals (can you say house already?) before an arpeggiated synthesizer riff yields to a primitive drum machine and Gibbons’ trademark congas. An adaptation of Stravinsky’s “Firebird”, “Magic Bird...” is all strings, drums, and bass; the high camp of the execution renders the track somewhat flaccid, but Gibbons’ adroit maneuvering of the bass demonstrates a clear fluency in dub technique. 

“...the reel-to-reel tapes of the Galaxy 21 sets that are likely collecting dust and slowly degrading in a Bay Ridge basement...”
 
Gibbons was clearly on to something with these final recordings, although the indeterminacy of the dance world ensures that amplitude will precede exactitude with respect to their historical longevity for at least another generation. Both of Gibbons’ singles with Arthur Russell are excluded from this compilation, presumably for logistical or licensing reasons (forget about the Celestial Choir or the Francois K. bootleg mix of the drum solo from Rare Earth’s “Happy Song”, based on a showstopping Gibbons segue). While there are several extant mixes of “Schoolbell/Treehouse” in print, the long-lost “Coastal Dub” of Let’s Go Swimming is a glaring omission, as are rumored and long out-of-print alternative mixes of “Set It Off” (one reputedly extending beyond fifteen minutes); his own version, recorded under the pseudonymous moniker of Harlequin Fours, is arguably definitive and included here.
 
It is the rarities, oddly enough, that are worthy of most of the excoriation here. On the Mantronix-like “4 Ever”, Gibbons stripped away much of the electronic programming in favor of 70s-style hand percussion; after several minutes, the components of the track finally coalesce into something resembling the off-kilter Balearic groove of Primal Scream’s “Loaded”. As always, the DJ was ahead of his time, although one can see why this was consigned to the archives. But until someone exhumes unreleased acetates (a la the recent liberation of Martin Hannett’s hitherto unreleased Joy Division mixes) or the reel-to-reel tapes of the Galaxy 21 sets that are likely collecting dust and slowly degrading in a Bay Ridge basement, listeners will never be able to appreciate the full range of Walter Gibbons’ gifts. Still, Jungle Music is an earnest tribute to the man who played an integral role in the development of electronic dance music. 
 
Sean Murphy is an esteemed and frequent contributor to Groovemine.


MP3: “Get Up On Your Feet” (Walter Gibbons Mix) - TC James & The Fist O'Funk