Donna Summer, Madonna, Gay White Men & Black Divas: Let's Chat With Longtime Billboard Music Writer Larry Flick
The Billboard vet reviewed or interviewed everyone from those divas to Mariah Carey, Adele and Britney. Now living in Wales, he geeked out with me about disco and his two noms for "the perfect album."
Hey there, Caftaners. Hope you're all hanging in there in these supremely stressful and scary times. I’ll admit it, it’s been a rough few weeks for me, especially as someone who’s spent their life reporting about care and services for people with HIV/AIDS and other health vulnerabilities. I spent Thursday in D.C. at a small but energized rally to try to get Trump and Rubio to salvage PEPFAR, the U.S. program started by George W. Bush that has saved millions of lives.
As you might’ve heard, Trump and Rubio froze the program literally when it had meds sitting in clinics in poor nations, mostly African, waiting to be disbursed to patients. Since then, they’ve supposedly given the freeze a waiver, but people in the field are still reporting that meds and other lifesaving resources (like equipment they need to to crucial testing) are still frozen. It’s a very bad situation, and of course it’s made worse by Trump and Rubio’s decimation the past few days of USAID, which overlaps with PEPFAR. Especially if you live in a red state (I wonder how many of my Caftan readers do!), please call your reps in D.C. and tell them to have mercy on this program that has saved so many lives and is considered one of the most successful foreign-aid programs in modern history. Even in last year’s Congress, Republicans came with hatchets for PEPFAR for the first time ever and chopped its funds renewal from the traditional five years to a mere one, which is not good for programs that need to plan long-term.
I have another request for you: I’ve been struggling workwise recently. Writing for the HIV/AIDS website TheBody.com has been my main gig the past many years, writing as many as 10 stories a month for them. But, because of budget issues, they’ve chopped me to less than half of the work I used to do for them, and despite herculean (and continuing) efforts on my part the past several weeks, I’ve been unable to fully make that up yet with other gigs. A gig I was going to start, as a writer for a national AIDS advocacy group, vanished just before I began because the funds for the project were coming from the CDC, which I’m sure you know has been totally gummed up and attacked (along with countless other federal agencies) by the new administration.
And I foresee feeling compelled to do a lot of crucial activist work in the months ahead that is generally not paid. All of which is why I’m asking you, if you’ve been a longtime free subscriber to Caftan and you enjoy it, please consider becoming a $5/month paid subscriber. Right now, about 10% of my thousands of subscribers are paying ones. And if you are one of them, thank you, and please consider renewing when the time comes. It’s really crucial to me right now, financially but also because, as we move forward in this perilous new year, I want to keep making this a place that balances practical ideas about how to deal with what’s happening with the original mission, which was to celebrate what gay men have done—politically, culturally, pop-culturally, both seriously and frivolously—the past 50 years or so.
The other thing I wanted to note is that if you have a book project (novel, memoir, etc.) you want help getting off the ground, having pages read, editing, etc., let me know at timmurphyncywriter@gmail.com. I like this work a lot, I’ve done a bit of it the past few years, I can have people vouch for me, and it gives me work in between reported assignments.
Okay, so now to tee up my latest Caftan interview, which is a bit of fun amid all the heaviness right now. When I was the young editor of the weekly gay club rag HX in the mid-nineties, we were lucky to have Billboard pop and dance writer Larry Flick do a special regular column for us called “Dance Tracks,” where he would talk about all the latest 12” DJ mixes of all the divas, like (I’m pulling this from my head, not from Larry’s HX columns) David Morales’ iconically dark, sexy remix of Mariah Carey’s pop-candy “Dream Lover”…
or Junior Vasquez’s remix of Madonna’s “Secret”…
He always wrote about the divas and the DJs with such love and passion. And he’s still around (living in Wales! now with his Welsh husband) and gives great, detailed interviews about his history of interviews and off-the-record talks with the above-named divas, as well as others like Donna Summer, with whom he was friends.
So I reached out and asked Larry for a Caftan chat and he said yes, and on Jan. 30, we talked for a good 90 minutes. I love this talk. I love anyone who can go this granular on dance music. Thank you, Larry! Your love of dance and pop, and of their connections to our gay lives, is something to cherish.
I hope you folks enjoy this interview. Again, if you have ideas for folks I should be interviewing for Caftan, especially in this really scary and fraught moment, please drop me a line via Substack or at timmurphynycwriter@gmail.com. I’m the first to admit that my lens is New York-centric and I want to be talking with gays in other cities in and beyond the U.S. I’ll never promise to do an interview but I’ll promise to give it close consideration! xo Tim
Larry, thanks for talking to Caftan today. So you're a NY native but you live in Wales now. How did that come about?
My husband and I just had our 21st anniversary together, and we've been married legally for most of that time. He's Welsh and gay marriage is legal here, so I'm able to be here with him the same as if we were straight. I'm on a spousal visa, which gets updated every three years, but eventually you can apply for a green card and a UK passport.
We've been bicontinental our entire relationship, but Covid was the final push for me to leave the U.S. permanently. So I quit my job as a host and producer at Sirius radio, gave up our apartment, rehomed my cat and moved. We live in a small town about 90 minutes outside of London.
What's a typical day like for you?
I work from home, in a room on the second floor next to our bedroom. I work eight or nine hours and then log off. I work now for a company called Vero, kind of like LinkedIn for creatives, but with an offshoot called Vero Music that has an indie label with seven acts that I manage. I also do A&R for the label and curate a playlist on behalf of our acts' albums called #newmusicmoves. (Here it is.)
What do you do when you're not working? Go to London?
No. We do what old married couples do—spend time with family, talk, hang out. It's a very simple and lovely life. I was lucky to be born and raised in New York during the best time to be there, but I was never really a city guy.
Wow, and yet you lived there your whole life. Were you aware while you were there that it wasn't for you?
The older I got, yeah. When I was a kid, I lived in the Bronx, what you would call the ghetto, which was phenomenal in the 1960s and 1970s—the racial diversity and knowing how to get along with everybody. I spent most of my twenties traveling as a journalist. In my forties, when I was working at Sirius and met Shane, I started plotting how I was going to get out of the city. I was never a run-around kind of dude. I was always a homebody.
But you were a dance music journalist. Didn't you live in the clubs?
Yes, because it was a rite of passage as a young gay man, and then eventually for my job, but I got tired of it fairly quickly. From my point of view, NYC is a young person's city and, as you age, there's a point where you have to decide if you want to be angry and bitter that it's not the city you came up in.
If NY had stayed the way it was when...I'm going to be 62 in June. I love being a man my age. I don't feel bad about it at all. If NY had stayed as it was in the 70s and 80s, I'd maybe have been less thirsty to get out. But by the time I left four years ago, my favorite places were gone. I was living in Jersey City because it was affordable.
Sure. So, I want to talk about your passion for music, especially dance music, which I share. I was thinking about what a lifelong graph of my musical passions would look like. It would probably go from a love of showtunes and American standards when I was 13 or 14 to a deep love of indie music, especially UK, in my later teens, to an intense love of disco, r&b and house in my twenties in NYC, then a love of new indie in my thirties and forties, right back to a love of disco, house, techno and new r&b like Frank Ocean and SZA in my fifties. What would your graph look like?
The very first 45 RPM record I bought with my own money, $1.50, when I was six was Michael Jackson's cover of "Rockin' Robin." I don't have any musical skills and nobody in my family did, but there was always music playing in our home. My mother was a pop and soul girl and my father was a hard rock guy. I was exposed to everything, from Hendrix to Janis Joplin. I also loved WATC, the Top 40 station—Maxine Nightingale, "Right Back Where We Started From"...
...and Leo Sayer, "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing"...
As I got older, I used to go to this record store in my neighborhood and the owner used to play music for me before it came on the radio. I was part of a little cadre of music geeks who hung out there. I ended up being the one who talked him into stocking 12" single records. I said to him, "There's this great new station called WKTU. It's disco. And I keep hearing about these 12" singles." So he ordered a few, like Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis' "Shine on Silver Moon," Dan Hartman's "Relight My Fire," Loleatta Holloway's "Love Sensation," Patti Brooks' "After Dark" (from the film Thank God It's Friday), Linda Clifford's "Runaway Love."
You're mainly talking tracks from the late-seventies height of disco. I'm really fascinated by this brief moment around 1972-75, coming out of Philadelphia Soul, when we start hearing what would become disco on various tracks before it was codified into the sound we surely know as disco. I'm thinking like First Choice's "Armed and Extremely Dangerous" or Eddie Kendricks' "Girl, You Need a Change of Mind." Songs that really gained traction in the first gay discos.
Yeah, that was funk. What Black people played at their house parties, like "Rock the Boat" by the Hues Corporation, "I'll Take You There" by the Staple Singers, Hugh Masekela's "Grazing in the Grass" (Tim: this is actually earlier, 1968), King Floyd's "Groove Me," Shirley & Co.'s "Shame Shame Shame."
What would you call the official first true disco track?
"Doctor's Orders" by Carol Douglas in 1975.
It was one of the first big disco records to be played on the radio—four-on-the-floor beats played live, which was not the case after a certain point, a smooth bassline, occasional strings and usually a larger-than-life female vocal.
How would you describe a disco beat?
It's repetitive to the point of probably being pretty monotonous for a musician to play, whereas a funk song has rolls, shifts and fills. But even a disco beat is not a perfectly steady tempo, because eventually the drummer's arms get tired, unless a producer like Tom Moulton would [create an extended remix].
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