By Carleton S. Gholz, PhD
Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
– William Wordsworth, 1805
Longtime DJ and record pool director Steve Nader died on Feb. 14, 2011, two days short of his 58th birthday.
His passing had been largely unknown to the dance community of which he had been a part for over 30 years. There has been no press mention.
According to Jeff Wentland, a friend and fellow pool DJ, Nader had been recovering from renal failure due to advanced prostate cancer. Nader is survived by two brothers but was estranged from his family at the time of his death.
Raised in Florida, Nader came to Detroit in the late 1970s via Georgia where he been DJing at Backstreet Atlanta, a club that emerged during that decade's disco boom. Nader's first Detroit gig was at Five West on Seven Mile and John R.
In December 1980, Nader wrote a column for Cruise magazine where he discussed his choice of DJ as a career.
"I suppose it all started with the first DJ that I ever met. He was a high school classmate of my mom, the shyest girl in town. The Elvis 45's that he brought her were marked 'Promotional Only' even though daddy never knew where they came from. He was a nice-looking man who never came inside, and rarely spoke to me, yet I knew ma got excited every time he came around. The records he brought were the ultimate playtoy and many hours were spent spinning them on the old Zenith with its wonderful 12 inch speakers. I wanted to share those moments with all the boys in the neighborhood, except they were all older than me. The very top of my Christmas list every year was my own phonograph. Finally, when I was 5 years old, my first major fantasy was granted. Mom frequently left me with grandma and she became my first captive audience — she eventually learned to love Elvis."
Shortly after he came to Detroit, he helped form one of the first record pools in Detroit called Disco Pool Detroit with fellow DJ Jerry Johnson, first at Escape (which later became Backstreet), then later as part of the Menjo's complex on Six Mile, and then finally Ferndale. Record pools were key organizational units of the emergent DJ culture of the 1970s. As record labels realized the power of the DJ to break hits and understand audiences, DJs organized themselves to receive promotional support and exclusive tracks. DJ Stacey Hale remembers joining the pool around 1976 with a group of DJs including Ken Collier. Almost 40 years after meeting Nader, Hale remembers those early Disco Pool Detroit days as a time of fun: "I remember that dues were $25 because that's what I made on a Saturday night at Club Hollywood back then."
Hale might be turned away for being a woman at black gay spots like the Chessmate or being asked for three different types of ID at Menjo's — ostensibly for being both a woman and black — but she remembers Nader as accepting and funny. "He was a cornball," she says. "He was hilarious. I would see him, he would come out of the DJ booth and give me a hug. I would talk about girls, he would talk about boys. We were busy being gay."
DJ, producer and early member of Dance Detroit, John Collins remembers a similar timeline, as well as early meetings, listening parties and promotional tours held at Menjo's where Johnson was a DJ. Collins also fondly remembers Steve during this period. "Back then Steve was humble, shy and fair. He was a good friend."
Nader brought a mixing savvy to Detroit along with his organizational energy. Both Hale and Collins took cues from Nader as a DJ during that period. For Hale, it was hearing Nader mix Michael Jackson's "Rock With You" with another instrumental. "It was slower than what we were used to playing. It played a major role in my thinking about DJing. It opened the doors. He was excellent." Collins shares a similar story: "He was an influence to me as a DJ. The first time I heard a DJ play two of the same record together was Steve at the Gas Station." The Gas Station was downstairs in the same club that housed Club Heaven on Seven Mile and Woodward. The record was Chic's "Good Times."
The pool eventually changed its name to Dance Detroit and had a small office on the third floor of Ferndale Center Building at Nine and Woodward. That's where Scott Gordon, a teenager at the time, met Nader around 1978. Gordon remembers the attraction of record pools:
"Record pools were the only way to get the coolest versions of records. They were also the best way to ensure you received virtually every record that was released by the major U.S. labels… The pools were also the way I was introduced to remix services like Disconet, Razormaid, Hot Tracks, Ultimix, Disco Mix Club (DMC) and more, which I invested in heavily. For me, pools were the 'in' I was seeking. They provided the best music, the best gossip and the best inside information on the dance music scene. The pools also introduced me to what becoming a Billboard reporter was, and how that would take my career to the next level. The pools were, at that time, a DJ secret of sorts. Few civilians knew of record pools, and many DJs weren't clued in either. In those days, having DJ secrets were invaluable."
As written here and elsewhere, by the time Nader arrived, Detroit was already feeling the DJ boom which had been incubating since the early 1970s in clubs that catered to gay men and women. However, by the time Dance Detroit took off in the 1980s, Nader was able to organize DJs of various sexualities and ethnicities who loved music and were able to translate that love to the dance floors of Detroit. These DJs included Ken Collier, Duane Bradley and Morris Mitchell, who had both been DJing as True Disco as early as 1973, and catered at that time to a largely black gay crowd; Stacey Hale who played to a predominantly black gay female clientele; Chad Novak, who played at Menjo's for largely white male gay audiences throughout the 1980s and 1990s; Greg Collier, Ken's Brother, who joined the pool after DJing in Chicago, who was a resident at Todd's on Wednesday and Saturday nights to a largely gay audience throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s; Deep Space which featured DJs like Juan Atkins and Derrick May, and later Detroiters like Art Payne, who catered to a young black straight set; or Scott "Go Go" Gordon, who spun throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s to a mix of all the above at The Shelter. Nader's network at one time encompassed much of what fans might now call the Golden Era of Detroit dance music.
At the same time, Nader continued his career as a DJ playing dozens of clubs across metro Detroit, including longer stints at the Detroit Eagle and the R&R. These last two clubs are now closed, as are most of the network of gay clubs of the last 50 years. (The Woodward in New Center and Menjo's on Six Mile are two of a handful of exceptions that prove the rule.)
Dance Detroit was not alone. There was Midwest Dance Association which, according to a Sep. 26, 1981 Billboard article, was founded by Dawn Porter, Larry Saunders and Lee Eckinger. Eckinger would later go on to open Advanced Music Promotions, or AMP. Both Gordon and Collins note that Enola Porter, Porter's daughter, was the leader of MDA while Porter stayed with Dance Detroit. Only Tyrone Bradley's United Dance Association Record Pool and La'Roc Bullock's Innovative Jocks made it into the current decade. UDMA has changed its name to United Digital Music Association.
Pools like Dance Detroit did not survive, chiefly because of major shifts in the record business beginning in the 1990s with the coming of the Internet and the end of service from major labels. After the closing of the record pool, Nader began withdrawing from friends and colleagues though he did DJ intermittently.
Fellow DJ and ongoing music retail employee John Kryston remembers seeing him during Nader's time at the Detroit Eagle. "I will forever remember his playing Natalie Cole's 'Pink Cadillac' and Cece Peniston's 'Finally' in his sets in the late 1980s and early 1990s — they became favorites of mine because of him."
Because of the time in which he lived — the renaissance of gay club life in the 1970s and 1980s — it's worth clarifying that Nader did not die of AIDs which struck many Detroit-area gay DJs of the era. According to Wentland, when Nader realized what AIDs was and what a threat it posed to the community, he took it seriously. "He was very careful about AIDs — we were all panicking. We all thought we were going to die."
It was another disease that eventually caught up with Nader. After struggling for years with drug addiction, Nader's undiagnosed prostate cancer caused his kidneys to fail in 2009. Nader then contacted Wentland for help. Wentland, a local nurse who had been a mobile DJ who worked at clubs like the E-Ramp, Gas Station and Gold Coast, amongst others, and was mentored by Nader during the 1980s, would care for Nader in his later years. Wentland helped Nader obtain Medicare and get food stamps. He visited him daily through the rest of his life.
During his final years, Nader made a conscious choice not to tell friends or longtime colleagues about this health. Wentland says, "He didn't want anyone to know. He was a private man. He wanted to do everything by himself."
Nader eventually died in February 2011 after being put on life support earlier that year. He had been living in a small apartment in Madison Heights. According to Wentland, Nader had thrown out any mementos from his time as a DJ when he had moved out of his house.
Nader, however, was not shy about being gay. "When people asked him where he DJed he said, 'The gay club Escape.'"
As Wentland and others remembered, Nader loved high-NRG dance music, as exemplified by tracks like Patrick Cowley's "Menergy" from 1981. "We couldn't get enough copies of that record," Wentland said. "We wore it out."
"He had the biggest and most popular record pool in the Midwest," Wentland said. "He was an incredible DJ. He could work that crowd like magic. He would work the entire bar. When he saw that the bar service needed help, he would slow down the music to empty the dance floor and then he would bring it back up. He could work that bar like magic."
In that 1980 Cruise column quoted earlier, Nader looked back on his career, then under a decade old, and thought about his path to DJing, his orange-orchard conservative father and whether he would be remembered.
"Many years passed and my career took me from easy listening radio, to college radio, to developing the first commercial progressive radio station in Florida, to straight discos and, finally, Atlanta and my first gay club. It was really ironic that we were having a benefit show for the gays in Dade County, because my own father was in fact a Florida citrus grower and indirectly paying for Anita's campaign against me and you. When dad did my taxes for me in radio the first few years, he classified my occupation as a 'Record Player.' I wonder to this day if he realized what a difficult path I was to follow and the inherent pain that usually outnumbered the joys in straining for acceptance and even stardom. I think that he glimpsed a little of my enthusiasm, though. I never knew that my happiness would probably be intermittent as it is today. Just as a shooting star, it may have only lasted a tenth of a second, but as it soared across the sky, it was the brightest spark in the heavens, only to disappear and be forgotten forever."
Donations to the Detroit Sound Conservancy made in Steve Nader's name will be used to preserve materials donated to the DSC from Detroit's record pools.
