David Mancuso

Mancuso died at his home in Manhattan on November 14, 2016.

In May 2008, Mancuso, with the help of Goshi Manabe, Colleen Murphy, and Satoru Ogawa, launched his own audiophile record label, The Loft Audiophile Library of Music. The music is mastered by Stan Ricker.

On December 23, 2006, a nightclub named after Mancuso opened in Tübingen, in southern Germany.

On September 19, 2005, Mancuso was inducted into the Dance Music Hall of Fame for his outstanding achievement as a DJ.

In 2003, British journalist and lecturer Tim Lawrence published an influential and comprehensive study of the New York roots of modern dance music culture that placed Mancuso at its narrative center. Entitled Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979, the book highlights the influence of Mancuso's late 1960s and early 1970s Loft parties on every major figure in the New York dance music scene, including Robert Williams, the founder of Chicago's Warehouse and Muzic Box; Nicky Siano, the founder of the Gallery; Larry Levan, the DJ at the Paradise Garage; Tony Humphries, the founder of Zanzibar; among numerous others.

He was an actor, known for Kill by Inches (1999), Love Is the Message: A Night at the Gallery (2014) and Maestro (2003).

Mancuso pioneered the private party, as distinct from the more commercial nightclub business model. In the early 1970s, Mancuso won a long administrative trial when the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs found that he was not selling food or beverages to the public and therefore did not need a NYC cabaret license.

Mancuso continued to develop a highly variegated social network (a characteristic that he ascribed to his unconventional upbringing), frequenting rent parties in such disparate milieus as Harlem and Staten Island, while also immersing himself in the hippie culture of the era at such East Village venues as the Electric Circus, the Planetarium, and the Fillmore East (where he was present for notable performances by Timothy Leary and Nina Simone). He became an ardent devotee of Leary's The Psychedelic Experience (1966) after his initial experiments with LSD.

He dropped out of high school on his 16th birthday and worked as a dishwasher for two years, to finance his move to New York City in 1962. Over the next several years, he was employed in a variety of capacities (including stints as head of Holt Rinehart Winston's Xerox department and as a personnel manager for Restaurant Associates) before pursuing a career as a freelance purveyor of antiques.

David Mancuso was born on October 20, 1944 in New York City, New York, USA as David Paul Mancuso.