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Thunder and light

This page is dedicated in memory of award-winning sound system designer PETER SPAR and front office and marketing man BARRY LEDERER who were the GRAEBAR SOUND team of the mid 70's. They were the designers and the makers and the marketers of the historic sound systems used at the 12 West and the Sandpiper and the Trocodero Transfer and the Saint and others. Do you have a tale to tell or pictures or memorabilia to share concerning Peter or Barry? Or perhaps a story to tell about your experiences with them? Would you like it posted here on www.12westmemories.org? If so please contact me at twelvewest@netzero.com and thanks!

To remember Peter.

Robbie Leslie:  "...often you would see Peter in the clubs he designed systems for, and he would frequently come in the booth and "tweak" the equalizer, etc. to enhance the already awesome sounds...."

I have heard somewhere that Peter won a Billboard "Best Sound" award for his work at 12 West and the Saint but I regret that I have not been able to find any photos or pages about him to show here. There is some memorabilia for Graebar in the form of pictures sent to me by Barry Lederer. Peter and Barry have both passed away now. Peter back in the '80s, Barry in late 2008. They will always be missed!

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January 2003 Update;

At page bottom is a segment intended to better describe the methods used to create dance music mixes during the 12 West era and compare them to those of 2003.

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September 2000 update;

ROBBIE LESLIE who is one of the original 12 West Deejays and still active on the circuit and club scene today has given me permission to re-post an informative letter that fills in some significant gaps in my recollections concerning the technology of 12 West.  I'm very grateful to him for allowing it to be re-posted here.  Visit his web site! CLICK HERE: www.robbieleslie.com . Below his letter I still have my original essay from early 2000. Enjoy!... :-)

>I e-mailed you last night and am still working my way through your great site.... enjoying every minute.

>I wanted to offer a bit of info on the great sound system from the booth perspective.

>Graebar Sound, 920 Broadway, NYC created the system, as well as those of Trocadero Transfer, the original Salvation in Miami, Rudely Elegant in Columbus, and the Sandpiper in Fire Island Pines. As you noted, the Graebar sound was famously "sweet" and well balanced through all frequency bands, differing from the Richard Long systems of Paradise Garage and Studio 54, which were overwhelmingly bottom-heavy.

>The Graebar team was: Barry Lederer -- the "front man", and Peter Spar -- the sound engineer. Peter and Barry were friends of mine. Often you would see Peter in the clubs he designed systems for, and he would frequently come in the booth and "tweak" the equalizer, etc. to enhance the already awesome sounds.

>As well as these venerable sound systems, Graebar would handle the sound systems AND the music for New York's more upscale fashion shows; they kept a very complete record collection in their offices.

>The speakers common to all large Graebar installations were the famous COFFINS that were of their own design and manufacture. These were also utilized at the legendary Saint on New York's lower East Side, except, being behind the perforated skin of the planetarium dome, they were not so easily recognized. There was a smaller cousin to the COFFIN speaker which they designed for smaller club applications and their fashion-show work.

>One feature of the Twelve West sound system you overlooked was the sub-bass. This was truly an ingenious set up: Two sub-bass towers were installed in the southeast and southwest corners of the dance area... facing the brick corners of the room. Factor in the steep stadium-style banquettes in these corners and you have what amounts to two GIGANTIC folded horns facing the dance floor and in fact an integral part of the public area. The fact that the sub-bass was unbalanced, i.e. all on one side of the floor, was not a problem, as sub-bass is unidirectional to the human ear and its source undetectable.This was a great design achievement! It is to Graebar's credit that they did not exploit this advantage and kept their sound truly balanced throughout the sound spectrum.

>Additionally, a four-channel synthesizer was added to the sound system which would separate the stereo signal into four distinct quadrants. The quadraphonic effect was adjustable to the DJ and an oscilloscope was mounted between the turntables and above the Bozak mixer to help him "balance" the room.

>Arguably, there was not a sound system in New York that was more pleasant to dance to or less injurious to the ears.

>Robbie Leslie

THANK YOU ROBBIE...THIS IS TREASURE...NOTHING LESS!

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Here is my original technology essay of early 2000;

In my opinion, one of the more important factors to be kept in mind while reviewing the technology used at 12 West is that the club was designed and built with 1974 or 1975 era equipment and concepts yet gave a good preview of what was to come just a few years later. Nightclub technologies we take for granted now were not available then but later developed as a response to the success of dance clubs including our original 12 West.

Start with the sound system: A Graebar installation. (see link for TROCODERO and similar clubs.) A bank of eight then state of the art Phase Linear solid state amps producing a total of over six kilowatts of audio power. Such amps were only in their second generation of design in 1974. Had 12 West been built only six years earlier, We would probably have been listening to vacuum tube equipment - no transistors or "chips" - producing about half the audio output while consuming three times the electricity to do it. That DJ booth would have been a lot more uncomfortable with all that extra heat!

The amps were arranged and driven to provide quad sound distribution into four huge monolith-styled bass cabinets suspended from the ceiling and amounting to (accounting from memory as best I can...) forty eight bass transducers, four midrange cabinets on the sides of the bass cabinets with twelve midrange transducers, and a complex distributed grid of twenty four Plexiglass saucer-shaped mounts each supporting three high frequency transducers each for seventy two high frequency transducers and a total of 132 audio transducers overall in the club, all suspended from the ceiling.

The careful angular mounting of the bass cabinets, with their audio "backwash" placed so it poured into the corners of the main room, meant that no matter where you were in the club you could hear clean undistorted bass lines, very important with mid-'70s disco music. Compare this to the louder but muddier sound of the Paradise Garage, a larger club that was down on King St. back then. Audio engineers call this muddy loss of clarity the "standing wave effect". But our room became world renown for it's superb sound. Another neat trick was that additional acoustic dampening was derived from those large stepped and carpeted platforms in the corners of the room. This further redirected the bass cabinet backwash. The sound really was clean in that room!

Back in the DJ booth, turntables and pickup cartridges used by club Deejays were evolving rapidly. It was not uncommon to see them try out a new pair, keeping the original third. There was a rotary control type equalizer and mixer Jimmy used to do those dynamic sound jumps so widely used today but so unique back then. I never found out who built that.

Then there was the lighting. Specialized lighting equipment of that era was still evolutionary so 12 West was designed and equipped with tried and true theatrical quality lighting arrays. One of the first things that hit you about this installation when you walked into the main room was quantity. There was more theatrical style lighting packed into this room than many touring rock bands or Broadway theatres had at the time! The entire perimeter of the room was ringed with 600 watt color corrected theatrical bulbs in custom strip fixtures, all angled away from the dancer's eyes to play upon the painted brick walls. This feature alone represented over 150 kilowatts of lighting capacity or so I estimate.

Playing upon the stripe-painted walls, the lights would alternately wash out the red or the yellow stripe, causing the larger white stripe to appear to be changing in size or moving about. The whole room appeared to jump to the beat. Rings of intense icy blue and purple, reds and oranges, pastels, you name it, could be created. The floor could be surrounded with fire-like light or frozen in icy hues.

Overhead of the dance floor area there were three separate clusters of large mirrored balls, each with a full and separate compliment of lights. So complete were these individual clusters that any single one of them with their high powered theatrical lights would make an impressive light show by itself. There were some ten or twelve balls and each separately controlled. The balls and clusters were so arranged that they interacted heavily and created many different patterns that were much more complex than you would normally associate with a mirror ball display. The broad white stripe on the walls became a staggered projection screen for the patterns that framed the stepped platforms in the corners.

Add to this a custom built industrial grade lighting control panel that looked like it was built for a power plant and featuring multiple fade and chase patterns and multiple semi-automatic and manual overrides as well as the classic "color-organ" effect and you had the capability to create a fantastic amount of different effects from snowstorms to star-like fields to jumping rings of fire or ice-like hues and various eclipse patterns. At the time this installation was made, it was probably one of the most complex light shows to be found in a "disco" anywhere.

There was one additional effect that was man-made although not planned or installed! Due to various coincidental factors such as the type of ceiling the building had, the airflow caused by those big twin ventilators in the front wall, and the sheer heat and humidity pouring off of the dancers, a sheet of steam, flowing like a waterfall, could be seen falling from the ceiling on cooler nights! This was not a fog machine. The moist hot air was being pulled off of the dancers, rose to the ceiling, condensed into visible vapor, and sucked back down like a waterfall of steam before being whisked away by the airflow. It was an absolutely stunning thing to see and I've never seen that effect happen in such an unplanned way again since the club closed.

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January 2003: Here is a new segment on 1970s era mixing techniques. I will be expanding this as time and resources permit.

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Dance Music and "Re-mix" Technology during the 12 West era and compared to today.

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Those of you who read this and who happen to have been exposed in one way or another to the various dance music scenarios of the late 20th. / early 21st. centuries already know that most dance DJs prefer to work with twelve-inch vinyl dance music singles that contain either remixed versions of music that exists on other media, or, that was written and produced specifically for the various dance markets. That preference continues to this day. However, there are other technologies that continue to draw ever closer to replacing the "wheels of steel" and the vinyl recordings they spin.

The current contenders include highly advanced CD players such as the CDJ series by Pioneer,  And,  the ubiquitous personal computer running specialized software such as "Mixman Studio" among many others.

But regardless of the methods and machines it is certain that  today's DJs have it easier than those of the 12 West era. Not just because technology has come so far but also because the music they are mixing simply has a more stable tempo. Nowadays, the "beat" does not speed up or slow down or contain timing errors unless they are actually written or programmed into the songs to start with.

In today's studios including even the entry level "house" labs, percussion tracks are either generated or controlled by a computer or synthesizer. Even when a human percussionist is used the person is almost always provided with a reference tempo that serves a metronome of sorts. This allows a person to approach the consistency and precision of the machine generated beats while maintaining the small human timing errors that can actually give music an extra character and "flavor".

 When the human  percussionist hears that his or her tempo is drifting out of sync with the machine they can easily correct themselves on the very next beat. This is sometimes referred to by musicians as "jamming to the click".

Additionally,  much of today's dance music is composed and performed entirely on computer based production systems with musicians abandoning their instruments for the keyboard and the mouse to employ sequencing and sampling  software programs such as "Acid Pro" " Rebirth" "Soundtools" "Fruityloops" "Cakewalk" and many others.

Now take a look at 1975: Yes, computers, software, synthesizers all existed, and a few were quite good. But back then these technologies were still priced so high that only the most wealthy firms in the music industry could afford to field them as an integrated production system. The artist Giorgio Moroder or labels like Salsoul and Casablanca would be well known examples.

So what did the average mid-70s era DJ or dance musician or the smaller studios have access to? Open reel to open reel tape decks, Variable speed turntables (with painfully undersized pitch control knobs!!), and, the "acetate" disc cutting lathe.

A DJ desiring a customized version of a recording back then would typically play the recording alone or perhaps do a two turntable mix using two identical records or two that the Jock found to be complimentary in some fashion and feed the audio into the open reel machine. The next step was to make marks on the tape at the precise locations in the song or mix that you wanted to cut or rearrange. You could usually "jog" the tape back and forth using both hands on both reels (in the case of the lower cost gear. Better gear had mechanized "jog") and position the exact beat you wanted right over the tape pickup head and mark the tape there. Accuracy was critical!

One would then gently loosen the tape from the reels and position it on a tape editing block. This was basically just a contraption to hold the tape securely and act as a cutting and re-joining guide. You could then use a razor blade tool to separate out from the reels entire sections of the song or mix and put in entirely new sections as well as lengthen them by pasting in duplicate sections. The recording tape sections were then rejoined with an adhesive tape designed for the job and wound back on to the reels.

After verifying that the new hand-edited recording sounded the way you wanted it, you could feed the audio into a disc cutting lathe and cut a hard plastic phonograph disc that could be played on a standard turntable. Usually you went to a commercial studio for this as the lathes were precision machine tools, quite expensive, and required trained operators.

These remix methods required a very good ear, good eyesight, good organizational skills and a great deal of patience. There were more elaborate setups that could accurately cue and mix multiple open reel  tapes and mix them down to a master with less or no razor work but basically, the open reel machines ruled the day for such dance remix production work during that era. They could be simple home stereo units or elaborate multi track multi-pickup (multi-head) but they all spun magnetic tape that you could cut and physically manipulate.

You can read a very interesting report about 12 West DJ Jimmy Stuard using these techniques and the unanticipated ramifications of it in Mel Cheren's book: "Keep On Dancin: My Life and the Paradise Garage".

When playing out live at a gig, the styles and types of mixing a Jock would use typically varied depending on the type of venue and audience. In places like the 12 West parties or clubs like the Ice Palace, the emphasis was on creating a smooth, fluid journey of sound and lights. A "trip" was one expression used. Long gushing oozing overlays were a trademark. Two duplicate disks were sometimes used to create a natural phase shift effect or an echo or allow the DJ to whip the mixer knobs back and forth in time to the beat with one record trailing exactly two beats behind the other creating a very unique new sound from a familiar recording.

If you have gear, try that last trick with two of the original 12" 33 R.P.M. album mix versions of  "I found Love Now That I Have Found You" by Love and Kisses. Play around with the orchestral "jam" in the middle of the disc. What a mind blower! I heard this in 1977 at the Fire Island Ice Palace but do not remember the DJ. (Could have been Robbie L. or  Bobby DJ  G.?) If you remember hearing this out there back then and remember the DJ please let me know who it was. The man deserves a lot of praise and credit! Outside of 12 West, the 1977 season at the Ice Palace on the Island was my favorite time and place to dance.

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