>> His reputation is bulletproof. The word underground follows him like a shadow.

He still plays house. He's not gay. Or black. Or from New York. What's DJ Mark Anthony's secret?

by MIREILLE SILCOTT

The first I ever heard of DJ Mark Anthony was in the spring of 1990. I was underage, working at a mixy gay-straight club on Ste-Dominique called Mekano's. I thought I had the best job in the world because, even though my boss considered me a "dancer," I considered myself something of a hired socialite.

In my retarded teenage brain, part of my work duties entailed going to loft parties when my shift was up at 3 a.m. We were encouraged. At Mekano's we got paid with party passes and drink tickets and other interesting things--never money. It was the golden age of naïve house culture, just when things were moving out of clubs and into sheer massiveness. We knew we were on the cusp of something. We thought we were really important because of that knowledge. Mark Anthony was the DJ at Mekano's and at many of those afterhours I attended. It took awhile before I knew that.

Someone had told me that Mark was gay. Gay and black. And originally from New York. That explained everything. For one, when he DJ'd he played deeeep house, smoothly, super-funka-soulfully, just as any great huge honking African queen from the Big Apple would. Secondly, there was always this woozy reverence for him, something usually reserved for important people who came from somewhere else. People would talk about Mark in hushed tones, they'd pick up his name with golden tongs, somehow different from the way they'd acknowledge the other local DJs of the era. After all, gay, black AND from New York were some pretty heavy cards in houseland '90. With those credentials, you could do just about anything. You WERE house.

People didn't know their DJs then. People didn't know what they looked like. I worked with Mark and it took me weeks, months, before I knew his face. DJs were just like cool ghosts hidden up in booths or behind the tapes that you dubbed from a friend who dubbed it from his sister who got it from the lightman at the club for 20 bucks. Now, you can have a look on the cover and see that Mark is white. And I can tell you that he's also straight. And half-Jewish, half-Italian, born and raised on the west side of Montreal. But clubbers still have that reverence thing for him. He still has that mysterious "underground cred" which spawned the flattering black/gay/New Yorker rumour. Even to this day, which I think we can safely call post-underground-anything, it's stuck. Like glue.

It's the type of thing you are born with. I believe that. It's the type of thing any DJ--any entertainer or artist really--would die for: unsinkable cool. Basically, the ability to get away with it, to play a cheese track and have people going, "You know, that's all right!" to work at a crap club and come out unsullied. To play commercial parties and still be known as the king of subterranean. Some famous DJs have it and always will: Danny Tenaglia. Some lose it: Junior Vasquez. Some never quite get it: Victor Calderone.

So what's the secret, Mark? You're a local boy, you can tell us, I've got a tape recorder right here: "Uh, I dunno. Maybe it's something like never compromising." Not much of a clue, that. And probably wrong. But anyway.

From house hater to local celeb

Ask any DJ, and I mean any DJ, in the club scene about how they started and they will always say the same thing, it must be in an interview manual somewhere: They lived for the next record they could buy when they were teens. They drove their parents crazy practising. They cut classes to make mixed tapes using "only a pause button and a shitty Realistic turntable." Mark says all these things too, and he means them, but it's still not interesting. Nor is the fact that he, like so many other housers, started off in hip hop. Or that he hated house when it first came into being. It was too fast, cold. He had to figure out that it was a new kind of soul, but soul nonetheless. They all say that. It's generic by now.

What is much more interesting about Mark is the way he became a local celebrity. The way he first formed the cred-that-stuck: through this bizarre set of illegal parties thrown between 1990 and 1992, now usually referred to as the Warehouse Scene. Looking back now, at old invites, flyers, tickets, it seems quite amazing that it was never written about more. I suppose until now it may've seemed inappropriate, like it would ruin things. Because, Club Business aside, the warehouse scene really was where the full package of a house underground began in Montreal. Business, which opened in 1986 and closed in 1991, often left DJ names off flyers. In the warehouse era, DJs were practically christened a special order of being. Streety gods playing for a closed circuit of gender-bender club kids ready for the mythological 'n' messy. The result was a effort to coax the word legendary out of every dusty floorboard in massive Old Montreal cackholes on Duke, Prince, William streets. It was majorly un-slick. But people, about a thousand at every party, said "faaaabulous" a lot. Much more so than at the rich-kid-run raves that developed in the years after these events.

"By 1990," says Mark, "Business, which was the first real house club, was thoroughly over, and things were moving on. I was DJing at this gay club, Bronx, where I insisted on playing house when the gay scene was still into Paula Abdul remixes and Bananarama. Anyway, that's where I first met Nicholas Jenkins. He was such a snob. He despised me. But his sidekick Cookie saw something in me..."

Nicholas Jenkins was the Warholian mastermind behind a spate of mega-kitsch one-off house parties, done mainly with his model-thin male helper Cookie, under the promotional tag Sterile Cowboys. His most famous event was called Sex Garage and featured loony slide shows and fags in fur bikinis swinging on fuck-swings from rafters. Nicholas was a humongous snob. One of those product-of-the-'80s queens with a glamour obsession, a superstar fetish, a loft and a mass of SoHo-inspired artworld genius under his Caesar cut. He was good at making "his people" celebrities. His dancers would stare right through you like you were transparent chopped liver. Transparent liver who had to pay to get in. "There were a lot of tag-alongs around him, but basically he was on his own," says Mark. "After our first party together, I became his permanent DJ. We did everything."

"Everything" by today's standards is getting a backer, renting a nightclub, calling the graphic designer, speaking to a fancy-office booking agent, reserving the coke bags, the appropriate flights and rooms at Hôtel de Parc. In 1991, "everything" meant insane work. Scissors and blisters in front of the TV for two weeks straight, cutting clear acetate strips with an address and date printed on them, to insert in test tubes full of colored water for the promotion of a party called Substance ("We did 2,000 test tubes, filled 'em, corked 'em... most broke when we went to pass them out in clubs"), searching for gullible landlords on your bicycle, cleaning spaces yourself. So DIY you could cry.

"We would go into the space a week before, start setting up bars, coat check, the decor, the lights would be delivered, the sound, and then we'd start camouflaging booze. Everybody did ecstasy at those parties, but those who knew how to ask could get booze, too."

Nicholas and Mark would only buy juice if it came in litre bottles with caps. When the boxes of cranberry, orange and grapefruit arrived, they would remove half the contents of each bottle and top them up with vodka. Then they would reseal the bottles, even managing to get the plastic safety seals back on, and put them back in their delivery boxes, lined up behind the bar, as if never touched. "The police would come in during the parties and I would always be high on ecstasy," says Mark. "They must have thought I was a very happy guy. I would give them a tour--'This is the bar, see no alcohol, just juice,'--and they would go away. Those were the days. Our most expensive party cost $6,000. Our bar would make $5,000 every time and the door would make like $18,000. I would go to the bank the next day with rolls of bills and, like, shitloads of change. God knows what they thought I was doing.

The Great Lost House Vibe

The airy 4/4 sound of the warehouse parties--"basically Frankie Knuckle's 'Whistle Song' repeated in all different shapes and forms," says Mark--is now considered "classic"; in other words, dino-ville. Extinct, like the parties it soundtracked. By the start of the rave era in Montreal, the winter of 1993, the warehouse honeymoon had finished. Mark had moved to formerly hardcore gay club KOX, where Nicholas Jenkins had taken over as artistic director and removed the men-only door policy and the spinning neon stallions in favour of something that might relay the warehouse feeling to the confines of a club. "Since it ended, people have been continuously looking for the vibe of those Old Montreal parties," says Mark, whose hometown status exploded after KOX, through his residency at Montreal's first legal afterhours club, Playground.

Mark is right. The sentimental hunt for the Great Lost House Vibe continues still. It's almost sad: when Mark played "The Whistle Song" at the opening of new afterhours Stereo last week, you could see some old heads twitch, maybe it felt like IT for a second, a fleeting bar or two. Yet even though the Stereo owners are calling their place some glorious return to the source, everyone--probably even Mark--knows it's just overblown nostalgia for an essential secrecy that's become an impossibility. This week, Mark will play the Black & Blue for the fourth year running. There will be over 12,000 people dancing to him at this house party sponsored by the city and airlines--so numbingly corporatized, people don't even notice how far from the sub it's gotten.

But Mark will come out unscathed. The next person who wants to do something cool and creddy in that historically housey way will call him still, to buy a piece. Maybe because he gave this city some pretty special dusty-floorboard sensations, but more likely because, well, when you've got it, you've just got it, eh?