Nightclubbing: The Loft, Boston’s Birthplace of House

The Loft was opened in the mid-’80s and – until its closure in 1995 – the club operated in much the same way as the Music Box, the Paradise Garage, and the Warehouse, bringing together people from all walks of life around a burgeoning form of underground dance music called house. Home to gays, ravers, house heads, African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, gangsters, suits, skaters, and breakdancers, The Loft’s achievement was even more remarkable when you consider that Boston is one of America’s most deeply segregated cities.

In a series of interviews, members of The Loft community tell the story of their club, including three of the club’s resident DJs, Armand Van Helden, DJ Bruno, and Francis Englehardt, all of whom went on to enjoy long careers in music post-Loft, Van Helden achieving legend status through a series of classic productions and world tours, DJ Bruno holding down Boston’s soulful deep house scene for over 25 years, and Englehardt going on to co-found the influential record store Dope Jams. We also hear from dancer, musician, and poet Liza Zayas, Boston house music veteran Bob Diesel, and Nick Balodimas of Boston deep house duo The Shadow Kings.

Armand Van Helden

I didn’t get exposed to house music until I went to this club in Cambridge called Club M. It’s pretty safe to say it was the first house club in Boston. It was basically predominantly a black crowd and they were college students, it was close to the MIT campus and the DJ’s name was Jide Max.

Bob Diesel

Jide Max was the godfather of house music for Boston. He knew how to work the crowd, not just play music you know? It made them a participant rather than a patron – he was partying with them, not for them.

Armand Van Helden

I got exposed to house music and I fell in love with it, I thought it was the realest kind of spiritual, soulful thing that I could experience at the time as an 18 year old. At Club M they were playing “French Kiss” by Lil Louis and people were all dropping to the floor when it slows down in the middle, everybody just kind of dances like worms and snakes – it was totally insane. It was just an amazing time, the crowd was quite intellectual, there we no drugs or alcohol at the club. People brought backpacks for a change of clothes because you would sweat so much, it was a sweat box.

Bob Diesel

I heard about the Loft through an ex-girlfriend of mine. I went there in 1987, that’s when I first moved to Boston. I got to go to a few clubs that she introduced me to that played house music. It wasn’t really so much called house music then. In New York it was called club, be bop (re-coined from jazz), underground, newstyle and later it was being called house. But when I came to Boston, it was called underground.

Armand Van Helden

The Loft was originally opened in the mid-’80s, around 1984 or 1985. If you were owner of a nightclub back in those days you had to have political strings to pull, you had to have a detail cop, you had to work with the system. I don’t think the owner was doing that and he had booked Lisa Lisa & the Cult Jam one night and the police came in with no warrant. They raided the place and did a shakedown of the club, started arresting people. They waited for a big night and shut the club down. My friend eventually told me they re-opened the Loft and they had a house night, he was one of the promoters at the time and he came to me and said, “Do you want to possibly come in here and do a night?” I had a meeting with the owner, he told me about the club being open until 6 AM and I looked at him and said, “You have got to be kidding me.” I did the 2 AM closing time thing forever in Boston and I was so fed up with it. I was absolutely thrilled.

DJ Bruno

I first played at the Loft when the owner, Joe, called me and told me he had heard a lot about me from this guy named Jide. Jide was moving to New York. They had offered him a residency and he turned it down because he was going to be moving. He told them to give me a try, so I went there and I played, and one thing that really caught my ear is when the owner said, “I like the way you play because you pay attention to the dance floor, you look at and study the dance floor.” I never really thought of it that way because to me, that’s what you’re supposed to do. I guess he was really happy about the way I played, but then I didn’t hear from him for a couple of months.

Armand Van Helden

In a week or two I banged out some flyers, I did all the flyers myself in the beginning on some really bad computer program like MS Paint, but it didn’t matter. I would go outside to Landsdowne Street and pass out the flyers to people who were coming out of the clubs at 2 to get them over. I had a lot on my plate: we were open from 12-6, I was the DJ, I had to promote, and I had to watch the door. The first week they got way more people than they had before. They were bringing 75-100, and when I came in we got about 200. The following week we had 400 people and I realized I had to bring in another DJ. So I brought in DJ Bruno by the third or fourth week.

DJ Bruno

The next thing I know I’m back at The Loft and both of us are residents there.

Armand Van Helden

I was able to free myself up a bit as a promoter and kind of watch over the club. I was able to go out at 1:30 and pass out flyers, then I would come back and DJ Bruno and I would split the night doing one hour sets each until 6 AM. By a month in we basically had the place packed with a line down the street.

Francis Englehardt

I think that a huge part of that club was the fact that it was predominately a gay club, and that was sort of the driving force – giving the gay community a place to grow. Then I think they realized they could make money off the straight crowd too.

Nick Balodimas

When you went to go clubbing you had to look okay, but when you went to the Loft you would see people with a backpack, they would come straight from work, change their clothes in the bathroom, and go straight to start breakdancing. People were sweating their asses of in there, you had to find your spot and stay there. You had small spaces to do your moves, but people did it.

Francis Englehardt

I was snuck in because it was an 18+ club at that point and I was about 14 years-old when I started going. My mom was really into going out and dancing, and my stepfather was really into music and the house scene back then. They introduced me to The Loft and DJ Bruno. All the typical clichés about there being all types of people and stuff at The Loft, that’s all very true. Downstairs, the house floor, that was 90% black and Hispanic when I first started going there in 1992. On Friday nights on the house floor, there was usually a runway in front of the DJ booth where the queens were all dancing, and on the dance floor it would be completely mixed couples. To walk into that, coming from suburban Ipswich, was absolutely mindblowing.

Armand Van Helden

Deep underground house clubs existed, they were around in Boston or New York, but nobody was bringing in the ravers in a different section. I liked rave and I liked deep house, so I thought, “Why not combine them?” The rave vibe was as real as the rave vibe could be, I’m telling you. I know raves are about size, but if you could take a rave and compress it, that’s what that room was. It was dead on, it was real. Tom Mello was the guy, he brought in the right DJs for that room and when I brought him in to do that we changed the name of the party to be “Rise, at the Loft.” Tom introduced me to one of his flyer people, an insanely talented designer, and they started to do the graphics from that point on. They came up with the logo and kept the flyers fresh. A lot of people don’t actually know it as The Loft. They know it as Rise, especially the raver floor.

Nick Balodimas

At Dance Music Plus I would be buying some records and Bruno started seeing me come in more often. Bruno would tell me, “I do this night at the Loft” and he gave me a pass one time because you couldn’t just show up. It was a members-only club, but if you wanted to be a full-fledged member you had to go though some hoops. I got lucky, because after a while it got harder to get a membership. It was always packed.

Armand Van Helden

The membership card would allow one guest only, and the people who had the membership would bring friends in with them and tell them, “Look I’m going to bring you in with me, but you have to go find Armand if you want to come back, because I can’t do this every week.” When I would come out of the DJ booth there would be a group of people waiting for me saying, “Yo yo, what’s up with that membership?” [laughs] It was kind of a nightmare and, to top it off, huge guys would come up and I had to say, “Dude, I don’t know.” I had to be like that, and these guys probably wanted to kill me. I’m looking at them head-to-toe, the way they are dressed, and I know it’s super judgmental but I’m looking at their energy and I don’t want them to spoil the energy that’s happening here. I had to stand my ground and tell 6-foot 5-inch guys who were ready to almost fight me that what they are giving me right now is not what I want for this club right now, that they are showing me they are going to ruin the vibe in here. I told them, “Here’s the deal, come in with your friend next week and if you are dressed more like a house head, more on the peace flavor, I will think about it and if I see you here a couple more times having a good behavior I will come up to you and give you a membership card.” This is the crazy thing – it would totally work, it was insane! I wasn’t throwing my power around, I just wanted to make sure everybody was peaceful, and it would work! [laughs] People would come in and start to change, and when I gave them the membership card, almost as a reward, they were so happy and said, “Thanks man, I really respected you for saying that to me.” It was almost like an intervention, but they literally changed as a person and started to know the music, and brought happiness into the place.

Nick Balodimas

The bouncers looked at you funny, not because they thought you were going to do something, but if they hadn’t seen you before. You had to then walk up these old rickety stairs. It was so narrow that people couldn’t go up and down simultaneously, and that was the only way in and out. It never happened to me, but I saw people get turned away at the door, maybe because they had to trust the crowd, they didn’t want weird people showing up and screwing the place up. It was a delicate thing. It was a straight up gay club and Armand got there and it just changed the whole scene – you had blacks, whites, Asians, skaters, punks, gay and straight.

DJ Bruno

It was really a good time, a good era. We were all young and that type of music was new to us. It was just the energy and the different kinds of people in there, everyone just having a good fucking time.

Nick Balodimas

The first time I went in there, it was so packed and I bumped into someone and I was immediately expecting to have a confrontation. The person was like, “Are you alright, man?” And it threw me off. The next thing I remember I was right in front of the booth and there were queens doing catwalks. I remember Bruno was playing a song by Frankie Knuckles and people started to cry. Where do you see that? People were standing there crying with their hands up in the air and it blew my mind and I cried too. Here I was, 17 or 18, I didn’t know what’s going on with my life, and there are people expressing themselves to the fullest. When you go into a regular club, people are watching you and what you are dong – it was nothing like that. People would be screaming, the walls would fucking sweat. People would say that place was like a living breathing thing – and it was. It would get so hot in there because it was so small. There was exposed brick walls and the floor was wooden. I swear to God sometimes it was like that floor was gonna fucking fall.

Armand Van Helden

I had done parties in Boston before, I knew these crowds and I knew what they wanted to hear, but two months into the Loft, there was a line around the whole block – not at 2 AM but at 12:30. You would play a set and in the booth you were very close to the people, just hovering a few feet above them. They were right there. The Loft was a loud place: when they liked the music, everyone would scream and react, people would always sing, and the energy from the room would slam in your face. You would play and you would just get chills. You would drop a record and people would scream back at you – if you had a drink, you would almost drop it. It was a very give-and-take thing. This would go all night. You would think they would tire, but God, they would just go for hours and hours.

Liza Zayas

My prom date brought me to the Loft for the first time. I started going on the train every week, I would arrive when the doors opened, and I just remember feeling like I found heaven. I would just want to finish the next week and get there on Friday, into Saturday morning. Leaving and feeling the sun on your face, feeling sweaty and dirty and euphoric.

Armand Van Helden

People would come in and the ravers, predominantly white suburban kids, were scared of the first floor and the black and Spanish crowd. They went straight to the rave floor. But the interesting thing about the place was that the ladies bathroom was in the back of the rave floor, so I would park myself just at the entrance to the rave floor to watch the girls from the urban parts of Boston come up, and see the ravers with their platforms, fur, beads, throwing their arms out and glow sticks everywhere. They were petrified. It was hilarious. They would get through but they were forced to have exchanges. That’s the key element of The Loft and – in a sense – it was an accident. By the time I left The Loft, in the last few months I was there, I remember going up to the rave floor to check on things at 4:30 AM and seeing a lot of the kids from downstairs raving. Later in the set all the ravers would come downstairs and you would see the floors mixing, and by 4:30 or 5 AM the floors were mixed up and it was really cool. It was a beautiful thing to see.

DJ Bruno

After a couple of years, Armand moved to New York City. There were a few guests every now and then, but I basically played solo. We had guests like Sharam from Deep Dish come in, King Britt come in, there were a couple of names here and there but nothing much. Francis Englehardt, though, who used to come to the Loft a lot, there was something about him I liked, he was very passionate about the music.

Francis Englehardt

I was trying to teach myself to DJ and, growing up in Ipswich, there was absolutely nobody around there to show me how to do it. Bruno had me play at this Sunday night radio show he used to do, he has always been really cool about opening the door for new people. It’s one of the things he has always done. I was freaking the fuck out, I was a teenager back then and all of the sudden I’m playing a radio show with fucking DJ Bruno. I bombed the first three mixes so bad. I had the whole set planned out record-for-record, I practiced it a million times at my house, but once I settled in I was cool. He wanted somebody to play with him at the Loft and he started looking for different DJs in Boston. At the time I honestly thought I would never ever DJ at the Loft, I was a kid just starting out. The first time I played there I was a kid, 18 years old. The fucking asshole Bruno, he called me up on Friday night and it was the Friday night ritual, I’m getting ready, my sister’s getting ready to go out to the club that night. He called me up at 9 PM and he goes, “Why don’t you bring some records tonight?”

DJ Bruno

He was really passionate about the music, so then one night, out of the blue I said, “Yo, are you ready to play?” and he said “What?” and I said “Are you ready to PLAY?” That was his first night. I had seen him play a couple of parties, and he used to come buy records at Boston Beat and Dance Music plus too. I was always noticing how that kid was passionate about the music and I was like, “You know? Let me give this kid a shot.”

Francis Englehardt

Bruno said, “Yeah, why don’t you play for a little while.” You got to be fucking shitting me. Talk about putting me on the spot, it was a couple hours before and this place meant the world to me. I had to get my records together, I was freaking out. I got there I get into the booth and I asked Bruno, “Where are the monitors?”

Nick Balodimas

Bruno was amazing because that place didn’t have monitors. The speakers were on both sides of the booth and that’s difficult to do. You had to know the record. I remember seeing people having guest spots there once and a while and it would be a nightmare. Bruno put things together really well. It was about telling a story and he used to do that. That’s how he made people fucking cry because he was telling people stories through the records, he knew how to pull on people’s hearts. Sometimes Bruno would play a record more than once and it sounded even better the second time. He played shit that you probably couldn’t get away with at other places.

Francis Englehardt

One of the records that reminds me of the Loft is Jazzy’s “Lonely (Cajmere’s Underground Goodie Mix).” When I heard it, I thought a spaceship landed on my head, you couldn’t help but move to it, it is basic raw analog synth sounds and pushing the limits of them.

Liza Zayas

One of those special tracks that reminds me of The Loft was “Trouble” by Joi Cardwell. Bruno put it on a tape and he started the side with it, it’s kind of a song to the people of this earth, saying that they should take care of each other.

Francis Englehardt

I remember talking to the owners at the end of the night, they used to do between 800 and 900 people a night on Fridays. It’s totally unexplainable, because there is no way either room held more than 200 people. They had an office on the very first floor and I remember being in there one night, watching the entire floor, the beams bending as the people moved up and down. The last party at the Loft, Bruno had Louie Vega and he had me open. That party was fucking crazy on so many levels, it was so emotional because we all knew it could be the last night at The Loft.

Liza Zayas

After The Loft closed, I couldn’t really get into any other place. After you went to The Loft, there wasn’t really any other place for you because the clubs in Boston or anywhere else I knew of didn’t cater to house all night. For me, personally, it was just, “Where am I gonna dance now for seven hours? Where am I gonna learn music?” I was 13 when I discovered house and started going to The Loft when I was 17. When I walked in, I was already a devotee to that church. I wish I had known about it sooner.

DJ Bruno

When The Loft closed, I had just opened up my own record store, Biscuithead Records. I was doing events but a lot of people who used to go to The Loft still missed that vibe. The first Loft reunion was in 1996, and then from that point on I threw one every year at M80, the club on Comm Ave where I got my start. It was myself and a whole bunch of local DJs playing, everybody had a half an hour set. Fran played that night, Kevin James and Paul Nickerson – quite a few people played. It was a really good party and, from that point on, I said, “Fuck it, we are just gonna do one every year.”

Liza Zayas

I started going to The Loft reunion every year, I have been to most of them. The Loft reunion is one of those rare events that will bring out someone who is now a mother or a father, someone who was moved across the country, someone who doesn’t go out anymore. It’s not reliving your youth, but it’s totally recharging that part of you that represents dance, music, and freedom.

Francis Englehardt

I remember I would still show up at the Loft on the nights I wasn’t DJing and I would wait in line and pay to get in. I wasn’t trying to get people on the guest list or even get in for free, and the doorman was like, “What are you doing?”

DJ Bruno

The Loft was an incredible experience for a lot of people, and for me definitely. It was me being in the right place at the right time and I’m always grateful for it.

Francis Englehardt

It’s like your first love, you don’t forget that.