There are nights when the dance floor beckons but the bones refuse. When the urge to party arrives, it may be too late to book a babysitter. Perhaps you’re already in sweatpants, or closing time is before midnight where you live. Possibly, the prospect of going out has been raised but vetoed by a cohabitant, and you don’t want to tango alone. You could also be the kind of person who is more interested in the idea than the reality of loud, sweaty, euphoric congresses found in clubs and music venues.
Fortunately, mood-altering substances are available at home — by which, of course, I mean books. A rich literature on pleasure-oriented nightlife is available for consultation or consolation on your evening in. These five books offer a bit of vicarious sweat and thrill to get you as close to the experience as possible without demanding that you leave your couch. They also invite readers to think more expansively about what exactly draws so many people to mingle in the dark — the club’s human stakes, its sensory pleasures, and its illuminating social history. Reading a good book is not the same as riding a social high into the wee hours, but it may equip you with a sense of possibility that you can apply far beyond the coatroom. On the right night, wise women attest, a DJ can save your life.
The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club, by Peter Hook
The Haçienda in Manchester was a catalyst of the U.K. acid house scene in the late ’80s, and a prophecy foretold: “The haçienda must be built,” the Situationist poet Ivan Chtcheglov wrote in 1953. Heeding these cryptic words some three decades later, the audacious (and well-read) impresario Tony Wilson opened the Haçienda together with the circle of post-punk musicians and designers involved with his label, Factory Records. Their attempt to decipher Chtcheglov’s mystical phrase lasted 15 years. Hook, the bassist for New Order, served as a kind of player-coach at the Haçienda, helping manage its madcap affairs while his band became the club’s cash cow. In this memoir of misbegotten business administration, Hook returns to the storied nights out that changed British culture even as they threatened to bankrupt him — and worse. Beset by gangs and guns, the Haçienda faltered in the ’90s despite clever-sounding schemes such as replacing the club’s security with the gangsters themselves. This is a scrapbook of utopian folly, yes, but also an insider’s look at what was, for a time, the wildest workplace on Earth.
Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979, by Tim Lawrence
“Disco sucks” was the cry of philistines, if not bigots, Lawrence argues. In this meticulous but inviting cultural history of New York nightlife in the 1970s, he follows disco’s rise from underground clubs such as the Loft to the vaunted lights of Studio 54 and the FM airwaves of American suburbs. Versions of this story have been told before, but what distinguishes Love Saves the Day are the more than 300 interviews Lawrence conducted with promoters, partiers, and legendary DJs such as Frankie Knuckles. It’s full of wisdom from the elders of American club culture: how to stagger straight and gay crowds on a Friday night, how to find the next great floor-filling single, how to build a DJ set like a furnace that can burn all night. Lawrence also folds in a number of select club “discographies” so you can reproduce Jimmy Stuard’s set from 12 West, circa 1976, at home (on nice speakers, perhaps, or an iPhone placed in a cereal bowl).
Some might say McInerney’s debut novel reads a bit long in the tooth four decades after it first offered the curious public a glimpse of Manhattan-yuppie hedonism. Still, no syllabus on clubbing could be complete without the opening chapter’s rendering of the dislocation and dread that may await the partygoer “on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M.” For the nameless protagonist — a young fact-checker recently separated from his wife — a punishing club itinerary provides the opposite of community and connection. Something important is being avoided, in fact, on the dance floor and in the many crowded bathroom stalls where lines of “Bolivian Marching Powder” are hungrily apportioned. Beyond its glitz and sleaze, Bright Lights is a sobering lesson on why partying does not always soothe a troubled soul.
Legendary: Inside the House Ballroom Scene, by Gerard H. Gaskin
One of the older photographs in Gaskin’s book, from 1998, finds an impeccably suited ballroom performer strutting the boards of what appears to be a community-center gymnasium. Scanning from head to toe, the viewer sees a banded fedora, cigar, jacket and trousers, and, finally, holding it all up (easily missed at first glance): vertiginously high stilettos. It’s an image of heroic poise, accentuated by the look of enchantment on the faces of a trio of young men watching from folding chairs. Gaskin has long enjoyed a reputation as the “Trinidadian Andy Warhol” of the ballroom scene in New York City, writes the scholar Frank Roberts, a subject of Gaskin’s; for those who performed in that world between the mid-1990s and the early 2010s, when these photos were taken, appearing in a Gaskin portrait was a “rite of passage.” His pictures illustrate the drama and grandeur of these events, but they also convey the importance of the club as a place where dignity — elsewhere denied — may be claimed without apology, and freedom can be realized for the length of the catwalk.
Wark’s sprawling intelligence is a pleasure to access on any subject. In Raving, Wark blends autofiction and theory to chaperone the reader through the trans rave scene in New York City — or at least the scene as she found it in the years before and after 2020. “First thing I look for at raves: who needs it,” she writes of these parties, “and among those who need it, who can handle their habit?” Vividly told, Raving is no gawking ethnography; it’s a sticky and tender little book with serious ethical contemplation at its center. Wark is attentive to the essence of raving as a Black art form and its special significance for queer people, but she approaches it as an activity open to anyone who can handle it — not a way of life so much as a way of creating new lives together.
