A realization hit me some time in the middle of Danceteria Through the Decades, First Avenue’s DJ showcase on Saturday night: This is the dance floor where I got my education about DJ culture. Not just live music, not just records from rock and related genres played by knowledgeable selectors, but dance music, as through-mixed by skilled technicians and record nerds even more obsessed than I. The latter makes up the greater proportion of my listening and my life, and I hadn’t fully understood that it had started in that spot until this past weekend.

This was obviously not a total surprise. In addition to scripting four episodes of The Current Rewind podcast about the club’s history (1970, 1979 — when the first Danceteria era comes into view — plus 1990 and 1991), I also wrote eight years ago about the 7th Street Entry’s late-’80s party, House Nation Under a Groove, and that piece also takes in the Mainroom’s Depth Probe events from the early ‘90s. By all accounts, the club’s DJ-led weekends were what kept the place’s lights on during the lean early (and, I’d wager, later) years. 

But my mild surprise has two sources. One is that I went to as many raves during the ’90s as I did all-ages Sunday Night Dance Parties in the Mainroom (though the latter came first). At raves, the music was made for DJs specifically and was typically un-hearable elsewhere, creating its own mystique. The other is that when I worked at First Avenue in the late ’90s, there was still a highly vocal rock-versus-disco (or house, or rave) sensibility among many veteran staffers. Even the folks who weren’t totally dismissive of dance music tended to underestimate it. I can still remember an Entry stage manager initially figuring that putting on the night’s DJ event would be a piece of cake compared to a rock show — and then becoming alarmed as the door time approached and he realized just how much work was involved.

Right, blah-blah-blah: Everyone who’s been there has their own version of this story — First Avenue is an irresistible subject for just that reason. The pleasure of Danceteria Through the Decades was in getting to watch a well-chosen handful of those creation myths play out for an hour apiece — well, most of them; see below — as well as experiencing often radically disparate playing styles (not just eras) that define both DJing itself and also what the club was, is, and may become.

The layout of the night was both simple and ingenious. To celebrate the club’s 53rd birthday (a natural holdover for its 50th, marred like everything else was by the coronavirus, though the actual anniversary is today), First Avenue brought in six club-affiliated DJs to play for an hour apiece, each concentrating on a subsequent decade in order. Roy Freedom opened with the 1970s, Dean Vaccaro the 1980s, Bryan Gerrard the 1990s, TML the 2000s, Sophia Eris the 2010s, and DJ Keezy (of the Klituation) closed with the 2020s. It was an audacious idea, irresistible to anyone who’d ever spent serious time on that legendary Terrazzo dance floor — what would each decade sound like? Even if you have a strong handle on the club’s musical proclivities, and those of the specific DJs, there were too many potential variables to predict anything completely.

As with most parties, I missed the beginning and end. The former was not on purpose: For some reason I’d thought the doors were at 8, not 7, so when I sailed in at 8:18, after a Reuben at the Depot, I wondered what Roy Freedom was doing playing Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” (1981) into INXS’s “Need You Tonight” (1987) into Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls” (1986). I also wondered why he looked so different. Duh. (Later, Roy told me he’d begun the night with Kraftwerk’s “The Model,” a perfect choice.) 

Vaccaro looked studious in his checked shirt and tousled graying hair and glasses — you’d be forgiven for wondering when the lecture on artisanal cheese would start — and he limned the ’80s with aplomb. In that period, the rock-dance divide at First Avenue was heavily weighted toward the former, and that came across is his set: the Smiths filled the floor as reliably as Rihanna would during Eris’s set. That floor was impressively intergenerational — older folks reliving their youth (hi!), younger dancers gliding to music they were born too late for but loved just as much. Hell, I even broke my longstanding rule of never dancing again to New Order’s warhorse “Blue Monday.” Advantage: Vaccaro. 

My first LOL moment of the night came when he followed it with Time Zone’s “World Destruction.” The laughs were both at the track’s outlandishness and as a yes-of-course acknowledgement of the song’s status within First Avenue itself. You would always hear “World Destruction” there; how did I forget that? Another smile came when he followed the Replacements’ “I Will Dare” with Tones on Tail’s “Go!” — the song Moby sampled on his 1991 hit of the same name — another deeper cut with specific resonance within the building.

Vaccaro finished strong and smartly with M/A/R/R/S’ “Pump Up the Volume” (1987), a key rock-dance détente in its day (I wrote about that song’s history for Rolling Stone here). Bryan Gerrard picked it right up with Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart” (1990), a real touché moment. It was also a keynote — Gerrard gave us an hour of ’90s house classics, and the surprise for me was how many of them had been First Avenue staples: Hardrive’s “Deep Inside” followed mid-set by Armand Van Helden’s “Funk Phenomena,” to name two examples. 

There were literal screams when TML went on at 10. When he was running Too Much Love, First Avenue’s indie-dance (or, retroactively, either “bloghouse” or “indie sleaze”) party, in the 2000s, Peter Lansky went by the DJ name sovietpanda; his new moniker acknowledges his old party without trading on it. Prior to Danceteria Through the Decades, TML had posted that he’d sworn never to play a throwback set. But I’m glad he made the exception — it was great and shameless: Hercules and Love Affair’s “Blind,” Justice vs. Simian’s “We Are Your Friends,” Kylie Minogue/New Order’s “Can’t Get Blue Monday Out of My Head,” the works. Notably, the floor’s makeup changed when he came on: A lot of the people who’d basically come for the ’80s — the Transmission crowd — left and were replaced by mid-30-somethings ready to relive their salad days.

The era that TML celebrated was retroactively dubbed “bloghouse” for a reason — digital DJing tends to be a very different beast than its predecessors. That was made plain by Sophia Eris’ hour starting at 11. The “decades” idea went a little blurry — Ludacris’s “What’s Your Fantasy” is from 2003, for example — but whatever: TML wasn’t going to play that one. Instead, the 2010s that Eris displayed was about a playing style: the juiciest bits of big jams laid end to end for maximum party effect, in the longstanding hip-hop manner, but with a post-shuffle sensibility refusing to stay in one genre too long. One track sampled “Genius of Love,” a canny call-back to Vaccaro’s earlier set the way TML’s Kylie/New Order mash-up had also been.

The dance floor changed again during Eris’s set — younger, way more women — and held there for DJ Keezy of the Klituation. As noted, I didn’t stay too late — I had another party to get to before car fees skyrocketed — but when she dropped Lizzo’s “About Damn Time” at 12:13, my favorite single of 2022, I sailed out on a high. I hope they do Danceteria Through the Decades again, with different DJs. I also hope they do it again with the same DJs, but assigning each a completely different decade. Think of the possibilities.

Danceteria Through the Decades

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