The Continental’s scope and influence was unprecedented, but the main thing that put it on the map was that it became a destination for Ostrow’s first passion: music. In the early days, the sound was supplied by a jukebox that played everything from rock and roll to gospel and was within earshot of the gigantic swimming pool. “You have to understand, there was no disco music at the time,” says Nicky Siano, a regular Baths patron and resident DJ at legendary dance venue the Gallery. The jukebox was later upgraded to a rudimentary pair of Thorens TD-160 turntables helmed by whichever staff member had the free time. “This was the unit that had a floating isolated turntable and tone arm, and was belt driven. There was hardly any torque, so mixing was near impossible,” says soundman Bob Casey. As the popularity of the club and spirit of liberation grew, the focus began to shift more to the entertainment. Splitting MC duties with manager Don Scotti, Ostrow would introduce the cabaret singers to serenade the crowd of towel-clad men taking a break from the back rooms. “Steve knew how to cater to the entire variety of customers; everyone had something. And those people were loyal. The crowd would follow you to Radio City Music Hall,” Scotti tells me. “It was the place to play—if you could get a gig.” The Continental launched many successful careers, ranging from Patti LaBelle to Andy Kaufman, but the most notable of the crop was Bette Midler. Then known as Bathhouse Betty and supported on piano by Barry Manilow, Midler and her bawdy stage persona was perfectly suited to the raucous crowd. As word spread, she began playing more prominent gigs, culminating in a performance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson . Mention of the Tubs on Carson raised the public profile of the club and drew attention from NewYork’s cultural elite, inspiring visits by everyone from Andy Warhol to Alfred Hitchcock. Midler’s final show at the Baths in 1972 was a disaster that led directly to the increased prominence of the DJs. The club was packed over capacity with men who’d come to hear songs off her debut album, The Divine Miss M . She wore a skintight pantsuit and heels, delivering classic bits where she would rip off a man’s towel and make fun of his manhood, twirling the towel around her head in impersonation of a beehive hairdo. The crowd loved it, but, unfortunately, the venue wasn’t equipped to handle the
show. The air conditioning broke down, the rented sound system failed, and Midler became frustrated to the point of no return. The following day, Bob Casey received a call to install a proper sound system. Casey had been used to adapting to complicated spaces when he installed the system at the Cherry Grove Hotel’s Ice Palace, the most popular Fire Island dance club of the time. Several of his ingenious adaptations included rigging air-conditioner hoses into the amplifiers to keep them from overheating and stabilizing the turntables by filling the foundation under the DJ booth with sand.The Baths was a new challenge— how to outfit a sprawling low-ceiling space to satisfy the crowd who’d followed the new resident DJ, Bobby Guttadaro aka Bobby DJ, in from Fire Island. Until then, the DJ booth was merely a bit of space that performers walked past between the dressing room and the stage. “As time went on, DJs became an integral part of the venue,” says Ostrow. The booth was upgraded to match the DJs’ increasing prominence at the club.“It was enclosed with big glass windows and covered in mirrors,” recalled Frankie Knuckles, who equated it to the grandiose booth in the 1978 film Thank God It’s Friday .Along with the booth came a serious rig of strobe and colored lights,as well as the soon-stereotypical LED dance floor. The system was still in many ways a poor man’s setup. Music played through a set of sixteen Boss speakers hanging like birdcages.They delivered an unprecedented 3000 watts of sound but couldn’t create the same level of bass becoming popular in other clubs. Instead of a more expensive Bozak mixer, the Baths used a pair of homemade equalizer preamps. The heart of the system was a Phase Linear amplifier, which was dubbed “the Flame Linear” for its tendency to over-drive the speakers to the point that they literally caught on fire, a problem that was made worse by DJs replacing the fuses with foil to attempt to pull even more volume. The DJ mixer was also a custom creation, with oversized RCA broadcast knobs, no crossfader (they weren’t popularized until the late ’70s), two channels for a pair of high- torque Lenco turntables, and a middle fader dubbed “the manager’s knob.” It controlled a tape deck to be used if the DJ passed out on the decks, which wasn’t uncommon thanks to a short Dutch door to the booth through which partygoers often passed a variety of “mind enhancers,” says Casey.
Early resident selector Bobby DJ brought an enthusiastic Fire Island crowd to the dance floor, causing it to become more than just a minor diversion from the rampant sex and drugs.“I always considered Bobby the best,” says Bob Casey.“He looked like a nerdy guy, but he was my favorite DJ because he was a party DJ. He had the balls that he could break out a Carmen Miranda record from the 1940s. In other words, he wasn’t afraid to laugh.” Bobby’s credited with popularizing records like Carl Douglas’s “Kung Fu Fighting” and Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes’“Get Dancin’.” 6 But perhaps Bobby Guttadaro’s most important contribution was in the field of record distribution. With the help of Baths manager Don Scotti, Guttadaro drafted a letter to the record executives petitioning for the same access to first pressings as radio DJs. “Bobby felt DJs in the club circuit should have the same rights as radio DJs, because they were just as effective at breaking hits,” recalls Scotti. Soon thereafter, broadcast- only 45 singles were making their way into the hands of club DJs. After Bobby DJ left the club, the turntables were taken over by David Rodriguez in summer 1973. He was acknowledged for breaking tracks like “Yes We Can Can” by the Pointer Sisters and “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination” by Gladys Knight and the Pips, and was known for trying to line up lyrics between songs to tell a story. 7 But despite his talents, alcohol abuse got in the way.“One of the mantras of the DJ is that too much is never enough, and that applied to David,” says Casey. To say that the Baths were conducive to indulgence is an understatement. In the recent documentary Continental , Steve Ostrow remarked that only ten to twenty percent of the crowd was there for the sex, while Frankie thought differently,putting the number of sex-driven clientele somewhere between ninety-nine and 144 percent. 8 When asked for his craziest memory of the club, Nicky Siano recalls a twenty-four-hour period in which he had seventeen different sexual partners (he couldn’t remember who was DJing). Knuckles recalled an anecdote where someone dropped LSD into the aquarium near the dance floor and the fish started jumping out. When the staff tried to put the fish back in, they’d jump right back out. After David Rodriguez left in spring 1974, the next person behind the decks was Joey Bonfiglio, a soundman who assisted
82 ( previous ) Ad for the Continental Baths and the film Saturday Night at the Baths . ( right ) Ad for the Continental Baths from a January 1974 issue of After Dark . Images courtesy of the author.
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