“I was staying there with my friend Junior and he had this big living room, and we decided to do a party there one Saturday,” says Jackson. They had built these luxury apartments but nobody wanted to live there as it was a drug-infested area, but Charles had managed to get hold of one of the apartments,” says Collins. “I actually did the first party with Charles and another DJ Frankie Paradise in a place called the Taino Towers, a huge glass building in Spanish Harlem. So I had always really admired what he was doing and wanted to do something similar.”Ĭollins and Jackson soon started talking about doing their own parties. As he became a big promoter I would always hang with him and watch what he did. “We became really good friends and then he started having these amazing loft parties with Richard Long. Oh my God, we went to so many places together,” says Jackson. “He took me everywhere, to all these parties like The Gallery and The Loft. He went on to become one of New York’s most well-respected promoters, best known for Studio 54 and Bonds International.Ĭharles Jackson had known Mike Stone since the early ’70s. With resident DJ Larry Levan and guests like Nicky Siano, Frankie Knuckles and Tee Scott playing through Long’s bespoke soundsystem, SoHo Place established Stone as one of the big names in Manhattan’s underground party network. Inspired by David Mancuso’s Loft on Broadway, Mike Stone held his first party, called SoHo Place, in 1974, in the loft apartment of esteemed soundman Richard Long. That is where I met Mike and we became good friends.”
Places like The Loft, Buttermilk Bottom, The Chase, The World, as well as Mike Stone’s parties like Fantasia and Club Tomorrow. “Then we became close friends and we used to go everywhere together. “We met on the dancefloor at Paradise Garage,” says Collins. One of those he had met was Charles Jackson, who would go on to promote nights at Chelsea’s Tracks and Sound Factory Bar. I had learned a lot of things and had met some important people at all the different parties.” I used to get really deep and soulful in there with records like Inner Life’s ‘Moment Of My Life’ and The Fantastic Aleems’ ‘Hooked On Your Love.’ By the time I got there I think I was ready for it.
That was the first time I had played somewhere like that and on that scale – basically a room of 5-700 gay black men. “I was 21 at the time and the night was called the Marc Ballroom, on 15th Street and Union Square. “I had played a few spots here and there but still had not got myself on the map, but this promoter called Carl Lewis had heard me DJ and asked me if I would play for him,” he says. “I used to listen to the words in the songs and think, ‘How does he know that I am going through all these things?’” he recalls.Ĭollins started to amass enough of a record collection to start DJing himself at mobile discos in his late teens, and as he entered his twenties he got his first big gig in a Manhattan club. “The Gallery allowed me to be around older gay people and to hear music that was telling our story.” Nicky Siano was known for his love of female vocalists and for weaving together songs with a message, and Collins was transfixed as Siano peaked his frenetic crowd under a canopy of brightly coloured balloons.
“I had been brought up in the projects and being gay there was hard,” he says.
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I mean, they were mixing it well at Le Martinique, but Nicky used to paint pictures with his music.”Ĭollins found in The Gallery a sanctuary where he was free to express his sexual identity amongst friends.
I had never heard it put together like that and I was mesmerized. “I would stand there by the booth watching Nicky play. “When I went to The Gallery everything changed,” he says. That was my first real exposure to this culture.” But it was a more intense underground club in Manhattan that would really blow the mind of the teenage Collins. “I was underage but I was a good dancer, and my sisters used to like to show me off. “They used to take me to this place called Le Martinique,” he recalls. And for those that made the journey uptown to party in the raw, huge industrial building, Bronx-born DJ Andre Collins deserves his place in the pantheon of greats like Nicky Siano and Tee Scott, helping the Warehouse create its own myth which is only now coming out of the shadows of its downtown counterparts.Īndre Collins’ life on the dancefloor began as a teenager, when he would slip out of his home in the Gun Hill projects of the Bronx and into Manhattan with his older sisters. in Mott Haven, the Warehouse was the brainchild of promoters Mike Stone, of Studio 54 fame, and Charles Jackson of Sound Factory Bar, who took inspiration from places like The Gallery and Better Days. Better known as the birthplace of hip-hop, in the late ’90s the South Bronx became home to a club to rival Paradise Garage and New York’s other influential black gay parties.