Danny Krivit

Beginning in the mid-'80s, Clayton traveled to rinks around the US. "I heard about wherever the adults were skating in each city and I would just go. They knew me from Florida to Buffalo, but a lot of cities didn't know who I was when I showed up. I would just pay my money, come in and stand around and I say, 'Oh, they play this here, or they skate like this to that music.' I took notes, I wrote stuff down. Bill gave me the incentive to do that. He traveled all over the country and brought this jamma technique. And that's how I got into the game. So for almost two decades, there was nobody out there but me, because nobody else knew what to do."As Clayton made strides as a national skate DJ, he remained part of a coterie of NYC DJs and musicians that included Larry Levan, Nicky Siano and Boyd Jarvis. "Even though I was a skate DJ, they knew I loved club and house music, but I made my money in the skate world. Levan was the man. I'd leave Empire at four, five in the morning and go to the Garage. We learned from each other and I brought it to the skate world. When I first started taking out the bass and the highs, all the other DJs around the country at the rinks were like, 'What the hell does he keep doing to the music?'"Clayton played the adult prom at last year's Soul Skate, holding court in front of a room of skaters who had switched out their wheels for heels and patent leather shoes. He attends every Soul Skate and regularly advises the team of 14 who run the event, which includes Rafael Bryant (Smooth Skatin Ralph), Demarco Bearden (Gadget), Joann Johnson (JoJo), Marcus Gavin (Fresh) and Maurice Dortch (Moe)."Me and Kenny [Dixon Jr.], we met in the early '90s," Clayton said. "He was skating and hanging out then. This was before he had the record label... Kenny is a beautiful brother. He treats me like a god. He picked me up in a Suburban looking like I'm the president, being whisked through the city. They take good care of me and the respect is there."The Soul Skate hospitality isn't only afforded to skate legends like Clayton. When I told Dixon Jr. I'd attended various Soul Skate events in 2018, he asked with genuine concern if I'd had a good time and apologized for how hot it had been. "It was way too many people last time," he said. "Apologies for that."Speaking with Dixon Jr., who has agreed to only two interviews over the last decade, was never a sure thing. We were originally meant to meet up at Detroit Roller Wheels for a morning skate session he frequents, but he was due at DGTL Festival in Amsterdam the next day, and I was informed last-minute he wouldn't be able to make it. Undeterred, I drove out to the rink, a colourful building on an otherwise drab stretch of Schoolcraft St., on a cloudy Friday morning. Inside, a DJ played slow R&B jams like "Get To Know Ya" by Maxwell and "Insanity" by Gregory Porter. Regulars greeted each other with hugs on the side of the rink. A regal older couple glided by with one leg up in perfectly synced figure-skating style.Traci Washington, Dixon Jr.'s right-hand, turned up a little before noon. After greeting a few skaters, we settled into a booth at the snack bar. I asked her how she got into skating."My daughter is now 21, but when she was in middle school, probably 13, they'd have skating trips," she said. "Often times during the day the rinks are reserved for school parties, so I went as a chaperone. I told Kenny about the party and he came over and once I saw what his body was doing on skates I was like, 'What in the world is going on here? What is that?' He was skating around children, jumping over kids that fell, simultaneously helping kids up, adeptly cutting through crowds of children. It just made me want to acquire that level—if not that level of skill—just to use my body as a form of art."She went on: "No matter how tired he is he'll get off a flight from overseas and get to the rink that night. And he'll find skating sessions. If he's in London he'll find a place to skate. So it's a private way for him to enjoy himself. He is extremely humble, he doesn't promote himself or Mahogani Music." She gestured toward the rink. "These people in here don't know anything about Moodymann. They'll just say, 'Hey Kenny, how you doin'?' And he's always happy to see them and they're happy to see him."At the rink, the swagger of Moodymann's persona slips away. It occurred to me that he's not interested in interviews because he's not interested in self-promotion. He's concerned with giving back to the community, whether it's throwing a BBQ in his backyard or handing out copies of his latest, unreleased LP. After I left Detroit Roller Wheels, I spoke to him on the phone. We talked about Soul Skate, Big Bob Clayton and that morning's skate session. He told me to come over to his house in an hour. Knocking on the door of his house on Grand, purple curtains blowing in the wind, felt like finally meeting a mythical, Wizard Of Oz-like character."That party is for Detroit," Dixon Jr. said. "We take an L every time, it takes us two years to recoup, save up and get money. But we're in the negative every year."Due to the wave of rink closures, Dixon Jr. explained, skating has become a road trip culture. "For example, a lot of us skaters travel. But there are a lot of skaters that hear about the out-of-town parties and they can't travel. They don't have the means or the funds. We decided, why don't we just bring it to them? A lot of people ask me, how come you're not DJing or the regular rink DJ is not there? It's because, in a lot of ways, that's the same stuff we hear on a weekly basis. The idea of this here is bringing out-of-town people to Soul Skate is so, one, they can enjoy all the out-of-towners they don't usually get the opportunity to see, and two, so we can show them Detroit hospitality and make sure everyone's having a good time."At each Soul Skate there's an unannounced headliner at Northland on Saturday night. In 2016, Dixon Jr., dressed immaculately in a white suit and straw campaign hat, introduced hip-hop legend Rakim. In 2018, a curtain dropped, revealing soul music legend Ronald Isley to a screaming, adoring audience gathered on the wood floor of the rink.I asked Dixon Jr. if the Detroit skaters know he's a house music institution, jetting off to play festivals every weekend. "A few," he said. "It leaks out because you got the internet now. But have I officially come out and agreed to any of that shit?," he laughed. "Going over there is providing a way for me to do things like this. To give people a concert they didn't even know was coming to them. They might have not seen Rakim. Or, you know, believe it or not, you got people that skate and will skip out on dinner or provide for their children, and I got a full course meal, you know? Try to keep it all night. I got food. Don't leave talkin' about you're hungry, I gotta go and I'm hungry. I got that for you. Don't leave cause you gotta go to a club to see some other thing. I got a concert for you. You ain't gotta go nowhere, it's all tonight baby. Plenty of motherfuckers from all around on the floor."Back at Detroit Roller Wheels, Washington told me how the national skate community found out about Detroit and Soul Skate. "The largest party in the country was started by a woman from Detroit called Joi," she said. "It's this huge party called Sk8-A-Thon, held during labor day weekend in Atlanta. At these parties, sometimes they'd give the flyers back, they'd say, 'Detroit? No, we're not coming up there.' Because we're known to be aggressive. I mean, we have a very smooth style of skating, but you go to Royal Skateland, these people like to slide, they're very protective of their territory and if you can't skate that style, you might get injured. I would meet hundreds, I would dare say thousands of people who skate and eventually, they got interested in coming here and the word spread."She continued: "We're one of the few parties that's truly diverse. That's because we're serving house, techno, Moodymann fans and the black skate community throughout the country. Some of the parties around America, they're so big, you can't rent skates, you have to have your own, because they don't want anyone to get injured. We make sure at Soul Skate you can rent skates, because a lot of the people who made this party possible are fans of Moodymann."Soul Skate is unique in that Dixon Jr., known for producing and DJing club music, is now a recognizable figure within the black skate community. They recognize his afro and sunglasses from Soul Skate T-shirts, not the cover of. But skating culture is about music as much as it's about style skating and community."A good skate DJ plays like your parents at home,'" Dixon Jr. said. "They play like back in the '70s when you went to a club and they played everything. See, I can go to a club, get down, sweat, 'Boy, that shit was exciting,' me and my friends we would get down. We would have a great time, talk to the ladies… At the skate rink, they gonna slow it down, they gonna break it down, they gonna break it. You ain't gonna hear no slow jams at the club no more. Back in the '70s and '80s they'd rock you for about two hours and they'll break it back down."Dixon Jr.'s sprawling Prince collection was neatly displayed on the walls around us at his Grand Blvd. house. "You're telling me you're not gonna play no 'Do Me Baby' in this bitch? The fuck? Fuck that."The style of DJing Dixon Jr. is referring to has its roots in New York City's post-disco scene, when the loose, slowed-down sound developing on singles from classic Big Apple labels like Prelude worked just as well, or better, at the rink as they did in the club. The development of skate music from the late '70s up to the present is intertwined with the roots of dance music, as nuanced and colourful as any sub-genre.Big Bob was a member of Judy Weinstein 's record pool, trading records with the likes of Levan and Siano and bringing in Tee Scott as a resident DJ at Empire. Louie Vega laced up his skates as the late '70s, early '80s eight-wheel craze swept the black and Latino communities in his home borough, The Bronx."It was soul music, it was black music, it was R&B," Vega said of the era's prevailing skate sound. "It was Prelude, it was Salsoul, a lot of Patrick Adams. Boogie music, that's definitely rollerskating music." The Masters At Work cofounder's first gig was at a roller rink. He absorbed countless sets from the likes of Clayton, who he called "the Larry Levan of roller skating," and Danny Krivit.Krivit got his first pair of skates in the late '70s, as the introduction of rubber wheels made it possible to skate in the subways and on the then-abandoned West Side Highway. Already a successful club DJ with an unmatched pedigree in New York music, Krivit was hired to play for the Good Skates skate crew."When I played that gig, I'm seeing what's actually working for skaters," Krivit told me over tea in Brooklyn. "When I played in clubs, even though I was doing well, there were specific types of clubs I was good at. I was a funky DJ. I would play a lot of funky disco, R&B. DJing for skaters, right away I felt like, 'Wow, this is right in the pocket for me. In fact it's a little more my direction than a lot of clubs I'm playing.'"Krivit would go on to audition and land a residency at a new kind of skate club. In 1978, as roller skating becamefad of the moment, Steve Greenberg decided to open a skate club that embraced the velvet rope ethos of Studio 54: The Roxy. It was a far cry from the Empire Rollerdrome."There was a whole group of real skaters who waited a long time to go The Roxy," Krivit said. "There ended up being a kind of elite group at Roxy which was a generic and not-as-black crowd. There were token blacks, the manager was black. The music wasn't very good. The groove was a little light." Eventually, management changed. "Steve Hanael came in and was like, 'We're gonna ramp this up, it's public. Fuck all this red rope shit. I'm gonna have daytime stuff here, we're gonna really get going.'"Still, Hanael's music tastes leaned conservative. Frustrated with the music policy at The Roxy—the constant requests from management to play "Y.M.C.A." or "Le Freak"—Krivit took over the sparsely attended Monday nights, embracing a new kind of skate groove."I was playing what I thought was really rollerskating music," Krivit said, "and within a month it went from 30 people to 1000 people." Slow, druggy records like Taana Gardner's "Heartbeat" became hits at Krivit's night at The Roxy, and later, his residency at Laces on Long Island. Alongside celebrities like Keith Richards, Jim Brown and Rick James (who adopted the skate groove when penning songs like "All Night Long" by the Mary Jane Girls), dance music legends like Larry Levan and The Loft sound engineer Alex Rosner would show up with skates."Larry also came to Roxy a lot, and he in particular was really impressive on skates," Krivit recalled in Sound In Motion , a four-partseries in which A.J. Samuels laid out the deep ties between roller skating and disco, Miami bass and footwork, among other genres. "I told him, 'Wow, you're really good!' And he goes, 'Yeah, I used to be a skate guard at Empire roller rink!' He was talking to me at the edge of the booth, when I put on 'Girl You Need A Change Of Mind' by Eddie Kendricks, and he's like, 'No you didn't!' So he races to the floor on his skates. I'm not really paying that much attention, but then I don't see him for a few weeks. And when I went to the Garage, I saw him with his arm in a sling and I'm like, 'What happened?' and he tells me, 'You played that song and I ended up pulling my arm out on the rail because I wanted to get onto the floor so fast!' You had roller skaters hearing Garage music at Roxy and going to the Garage, like Abbie Adams, who ran the skate shop at The Roxy."Adams spoke to me over Skype from her home near Washington D.C. After falling in love with roller skating, she told me, she opened a shop called Movin' selling custom skates and clothing in East Orange, New Jersey. Eventually, she'd open up a pro shop at The Roxy, where, as she put it, "I went to college—the college of dance music, R&B, soulful music—listening to Danny Krivit and [The Roxy resident and famed skate DJ] Julio Estien. I learned so much from them on eight wheels... At about the same time I started going to the Paradise Garage, Red Zone, The Tunnel, so I knew about being in a club type situation with a crowded dance floor, but there was something about being on eight wheels and the freedom of the floor with this incredible music, and both Julio and Danny just had such an incredible ear. There was this very cool period of time, disco, post-disco, pre-house, and this R&B dance style music actually made for rollerskating, [Vaughn Mason's] 'Bounce Rock Skate Roll,' and some of these songs. I can't tell you how many times I ran up the stairs to the DJ booth, with skates on, and went, 'Danny, what's that?'"Adams became deeply embedded in the New York and New Jersey dance music scenes. Her partner and boyfriend at the time, an aspiring DJ, set up decks in the shop, where kids would hang out playingand breakdancing. Eventually, they started stocking records."Every Monday my partner and I would go to New York City and we would dig through crates for hours," Adams said. "We'd spend four or five hours going through, and mostly this was because he was building his record collection. I'd just start asking questions and I figured I could go to New York City and buy the records at Downtown or at Vinyl Mania or at Sounds and bring it back to my shop and charge 25 cents or 50 cents more and sell it. So we started with a little section of records and just started getting more and more, and as '81, '82, '83 went on, my world with the DJs and the scene started getting bigger."Eventually Movin' became to Tony Humphries and Zanzibar what Vinyl Mania was to Larry Levan and Paradise Garage: dancers and music heads would leave Zanzibar in the morning and head to the store to buy the records they'd heard Humphries play.