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“We had Patrick Cowley, Marty Blechman, John Hedges, Bill Motley, and a number of people producing records. “It was a unique sound that was happening, the ‘San Francisco Sound,’” Fabus says. This was the pre-AIDS period of unbridled revelry when backrooms were groaning and dancefloors reeked of sweat and poppers. Hi-NRG, the uptempo, harder style of disco pioneered in San Francisco and New York, had been creeping into clubs, and helped push dancefloor mayhem and drugged-out bliss beyond the wee hours. “I’d start with sleaze as the boys would arrive, 100-110 bpm, then bring it up a bit into a different attitude, very soulful: D-Train’s ‘You’re the One for Me,’ Donald Byrd’s ‘Love Has Come Around,’ ‘Can’t Nobody Love Me Like You Do” by General Johnson, “Can’t Fake the Feeling” by Geraldine Hunt, and Class Action’s ‘Week End.’ And then, because people had been up all weekend and wanted changes, I’d peak it with some Hi-NRG.” “On Sunday mornings, it became really about shaping a set,” Fabus says. 25 DJ Record Pool filled the 2 PM – 8 PM slot after Fabus to form a solid 14-hour block of debauchery Then we could take some of that over to the EndUp.”ĭJs Lester Temple, Randy Tyler, and Tommy Rogers would also spin on Sundays, and George Ferren of the T.O.P. It was slower stuff you couldn’t normally play in a dance club: Esther Philips songs, Chuck Mangione’s’ ‘ Land of Make Believe,’ big orchestral production numbers, anything kind of spacey. The music in the bathhouses was mostly sleaze, which was pioneered here by Bobby Viteritti. Rod Roderick had gotten me the job when it was simply called the Hotel. I worked there when I was learning my chops. There was one just down the street from the EndUp – the notorious Handball Express. “The other places that were open all night were the bathhouses, the sex clubs which had DJs playing music. The EndUp itself became so popular that the scuffed-over illuminated dancefloor had to be replaced, and, after a fire in 1979, a patio was built in the backyard to accommodate crowds. Struve, and Rod Kimbel, the Sunday afternoon tea-dance became a disco institution. Hosted by Randy Johnson with DJs Steve Newman, Peter D. Unsurprisingly, dozens of recent San Francisco transplants eager to earn a $150 cash prize by gyrating around in their underwear struck a chord.
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I think we were the first in the country to start a contest like that.” Sundays at the EndUp became the hottest place in the entire week. Well, we didn’t have a beach, but by osmosis, we somehow came up with the idea for a jockey shorts contest. “It was a tea-dance, with a wet t-shirt contest for the guys. The boys would come in from the beach on Sunday afternoons to drink and dance,” Pritikin says. “A friend and I had gone to Fort Lauderdale, and one of the bars there, the Marlin, was right on the beach. The EndUp was located in the South of Market area, a ways from the super-gay Castro, and some gimmicks were needed to fill weak spots on the schedule. (The club was a home – for example – for San Francisco’s huge Asian American community, which the gay scene had previously rarely catered to.) “Right from the very beginning, the EndUp was attracting a really diverse group of guys,” Pritikin says. “And a never-ending supply of new arrivals of gay men of all ages” were streaming in. “The Castro neighborhood was turning into the Greenwich Village of the West,” says Jerry Pritikin, the EndUp’s first promotions director and coordinator of the EndUp’s bowling team. The Roundup closed soon after the EndUp opened, the property folded into one of the city’s ongoing redevelopment projects, but the EndUp thrived, in part by welcoming a historic wave of gay migrants relocating to San Francisco, the new gay mecca, in the wake of the new liberation spirit. As gay men took to the streets in annual Gay Freedom Day parades and protest marches, dance floors were heaving with a new influx of out-and-proud men, expressing their newfound freedom and exploring the intimate ins-and-outs of gay life. The music was the sound of gay liberation, whose political launch had taken place at the Stonewall riots of 1969 (and, in San Francisco, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot of 1966), but whose sexual implications were playing out in gay discotheques and steamy bathhouses.