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Then, the good times of the late 1970's unravel with the AIDS epidemic, the decline of disco and his own setbacks. (It will receive the book's proceeds.) ''Keep On Dancin' '' details the makings of modern dance music in a tangle of friendships, aesthetic imperatives, business deals and sexual liaisons.
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Charen's autobiography, ''Keep On Dancin': My Life and the Paradise Garage,'' just published by 24 Hours for Life, the nonprofit AIDS relief organization he founded. Charen wasn't a musician, producer, disc jockey or club owner he was a fan who made it his business to get the music heard - ''the guy who put all the pieces together,'' he said. ''All now was turned to jollity and game/To luxury and riot, feast and dance,'' as John Milton wrote about a different lost paradise.
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Charen and many of the club's other regulars, the Garage's best years were the culmination of a utopian time for gay men in New York City, when it seemed that the pleasures of dancing, casual sex and recreational drug use could go on forever. Charen, it was created by his business partner and ex-lover Michael Brody just as disco music was heading for its commercial peak, pulling gay culture into the American mainstream.įor Mr. Charen, 67, who has been a promotion man, a record-company owner, a painter, a landlord and a philanthropist, the Paradise Garage was ''the ultimate expression of the whole fabric'' of gay night life. A friend salvaged it from a garbage heap after the club closed. In the garden behind his Chelsea apartment is the sign that used to hang over the club's door: a curly-haired figure with a tambourine halo, along with a disco whistle and an amyl nitrate popper dangling below. THE tattoo on Mel Charen's left bicep is the logo of the Paradise Garage, the club that occupied 84 King Street in SoHo from 1977 to 1987.