The Paradise Garage Retrospection; Sound and Lights - Pt3

Lighting Consoles and Dancefloor

What made The Paradise Garage stand out among all other nightclubs technically?

In our last discussion we went into some depth about the lighting system at the Paradise Garage. This section I will try to go over the lighting console, the controllers and how they affected the lights over the floor. I will also discuss the watch-tower effect of the DJ Booth and try to be as entertaining as possible.
Hello, my name is Ralph Curtis and welcome to my Blog.

During its run, the Paradise Garage boasted one of the best nightclub sound and lighting systems in New York City. In fact, some of the concepts that were developed for the Garage back then, in some way still cannot be matched in today’s more advanced sound and lighting designs. As hard as that may seem imagine, it seems that sometimes the old adage is relevant "If it ain't broke don't fix it".

The Lighting Boards and Controls:

Standing at the lighting controls in the DJ booth of the Garage was like standing on the bridge of the Enterprise. For someone who didn’t understand it, it could have been a bit over-whelming. Just imagine staring at 15 lighting control boards laid out on a console that measured over 3ft long and 5ft wide, with blinking LED's and a slew of switches and faders. People have commented before on how intimidating the lighting console was, and that it was too complicated, but like with everything else, its just a matter of learning. When I first started working on the tech crew, the lighting director at that time, Fortino Jimenez, suggest I take the time to understand and know exactly what was on the ceiling. So, in doing the pre-sets every Friday and Saturday night before the parties, I learned which boards turned on which effect modules, where they were located on the grid and how they were wired. Being on the tech crew meant I was also working in that grid and learning how to repair and adjust the fixtures properly. This went on for 5 straight months until I was confident I knew what I was doing.

This is an image of Michael Debenedictis of the "Peach Boys", standing at the Lighting Console, this console layout was prior to my employment in ’83. Additions were added to the dance-floor lighting which required more control boards to be added to the layout. The LED panel you see in the very bottom of the image was for the Ring System, this panel was moved to a vertical position on the wall to the left of Michael’s face. A separate Stage Board was placed against the console to the left as well.

The reason for this visual complexity, were those 10 Lighting modules over the dancefloor discussed earlier. This means there were 10 different lighting control boards, plus 4 sub controllers that managed the color switching and rate of speed for chase patterns.

Lighting boards in those days were more user friendly than they are today. The analogue boards back then were built to take a pounding, the constant toggle switching, and the brute force a light man uses when he or she is in the midst of doing a light show. You can’t put the newer boards of today under this sort of punishment due to the fact everything now is computer oriented, touch sensitive and digitized. I have laid many a light board to rest since those Garage days, so I have first-hand experience on how they handle under heavy usage. 

Lightboard Explanation:

Not every light on the grid worked the same, some were dimmable and could have their chase speed adjusted. Modules like the Rings, the Scoops, and Strip lights, could all be adjusted manually. In some cases, modules like the strip lights, required a separate board, that controlled speed and dimming.
Some controllers came with faders to adjust speed and dimming, some did not.
Other modules on the grid were just straight on and off, modules like the spinners, the beacons, the egg strobes, and black lights.  

In the case of the gobo rotators and the mirror balls there were 2 activations switches, one for the light itself, and a separate activation for the spinning motor. This was an awesome effect as you could anticipate the ending of a song, turn off the rotation motor and the lighting effect would come slowly to a halt.

Board Operation:

The concept behind the lighting flow at the Garage was being able to Preview a look or a chase before making it active on the dancefloor. The 15 or so individual lighting module controllers were mounted to a 3ft by 5ft lighting console.

In any other club they would be the main controllers unto themselves, but at the Garage they acted as sub controllers because they were linked to a Master Controller called the ND-5.  The ND-5 was a go, no go, switcher that enabled lighting effects to be active on the dancefloor.

If a lighting module controller was not switched on at the ND-5, it was not active on the dancefloor, and the module was in preview mode. The beauty of these module controllers was the LED's that showed the patterns and the rate of speed at which the chase programs were moving. This way you could match the speed of the music being played before you introduced it to the dancefloor.

 
This was a unique situation at the Paradise Garage because of the Bose 901's Larry used in the booth for monitors, you could actually hear the song Larry, David or Joey was queuing up to be played. Hearing this cue live, enabled you to pick a look you wanted, adjust the speed of the chase to the beat, and then introduce the lighting effect to the dancefloor when appropriate.
What I mean by the 901's being unique is the fact that most of the DJ's I have seen since, use headphones or something more personal to do their mixes with, in this way, the light man has no idea of what song is coming next, which is fine but it's a bummer not to be able to plan an effect in advance.

There were 2 ND-5 boards in the DJ Booth, one on the lighting console and the other was mounter on the traveller track for Larry, so that he could also control the light boards from the DJ's position. The only problem with this was Larry was stuck with whatever program currently running on the lighting module controllers, if he wanted to change the look or speed or intensity, he had to move over to the lighting console and adjust accordingly.

Without this Master Controller, I believe doing the lights at the Garage would have been less practical and harder to play. The ability to preview your lighting effect prior to releasing it to the dancefloor is something that was unique to the Paradise Garage. That to me is the best and only way to do lighting in a nightclub, seamless. . .

Lightman at the Garage

As I said before, I can only speak about my time working at the club. From 1983 until it closed in 1987, if we talk about who was the “Lightman” at the Garage, I can say to you that officially, there wasn’t one. There was no position.

In reality what you had was the Tech Crew who were in charge of the lighting maintenance and the lighting design throughout the entire club, from the front door entrance to the rooftop garden.
The tech crew consisted of: Peter Munoz lighting director, Derek Vazquez lighting tech, Harry Rodrigues lighting tech, me, Ralph Curtis lighting tech, Steven Ziegler lighting tech/head carpenter, and then you had the man who brought it all together, Larry Levan.

Larry pretty much did the lighting for himself as he was a lighting tech before he started to DJ. However, he did have a few people in his entourage who would from time to time stand on the lighting pedestal and do the lighting for him during the evening. Although, in the end Larry almost always did the lighting when he would play.

What ended up happening on most weekends was I did the lighting during the opening hours for David Depino and Joey Llanos as they opened the club before Larry came in. On the nights that Larry didn’t come in, Peter Munoz or I usually stayed and played for the entire party. There was a fair amount of politics over this title "Lightman at the Garage", there was also a certain amount of prestige in the title as well. No one in the tech crew coveted this title as we all ran under the radar when it came to the social scene at the club, so the glitz and the glam of doing the lights went to friends of Larry who had no idea of how the lighting system was actually put together.
   

The Dance Floor

This was an article I wrote in 2005 about the dancefloor at the Garage.

The Dancefloor at the Paradise Garage is a topic that has been ever present in my mind for the last 18 years. In my opinion that floor design was the best there could ever be for a nightclub space. As my good friend Peter once put it, "It's like a time capsule, you're totally isolated".

And he was absolutely right, the space was totally sectioned off from the rest of the club, totally self-contained. Even though it stood in the center of all the surrounding lounges, it still had an atmosphere of its own. No other nightclub I have ever seen has come close to capturing this isolation effect. Then again, no other club except the Garage would be committed to giving up that much real estate just for the sake of the dancefloor, but then the Paradise Garage was unique, wasn't it?

Yes. . .the dancefloor was just like a capsule, and just like every capsule you had to have a command center. . . And the Dj booth at the Garage was mission control. Positioned above the dancefloor like an observation tower, the entire rooms atmosphere was controlled from here. With the twist of a single dial, the room would go silent, as quiet as a country field on a summer night. no sound would you hear but the faint hum of the amplifiers in the control room above. With that same twisting motion, thunderous audio would burst through your heart like a bolt of lightning. . . the warm base vibration would lift you from the floor suspending you weightless, your heart would race, and senses would tingle. No where else could you be embraced in a blanket of sound, but right here. You wanted to move, you had to move, the music beaconing you to respond to it, it was impossible to ignore. You moved, you danced, you were alive and part of the basic primal instinct connected to mother earth feeling her rhythms pulsing through you.

Suddenly with the thump of the switch, you could be plunged into a sea of darkness suspended in time, your senses clouded by the deep expanse of black, you would be alone and the air around you would be still and motionless. Your only companion is the music covering you. In the dark you feel your body coated in the cool mist of the mushroom fog blown gently over your skin, you smell the smokes sweet cent and begin to lose yourself in this isolation. Suddenly the room explodes with flashes of light, swirling beacons of red and amber, the calm is gone, now the drive to dance harder grips you. Pools of warm colored light, swirls of magenta, streaks of white all trancing you to another state of mind. . . colors and energy driving you to move faster. You respond with all your soul, sweat pouring from your body as you surrender yourself to the sound.

Now that was the dancefloor at the Garage....

I hope I succeeded in bringing some of the Garage’s technical aspects to light. 

…….. if it was entertaining and informative then I did my job.

~ Ralph ~

originally published by Ralph Curtis in 2005 on my website A Garage Tribute