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Michael Ely knew from the first moment he met James Allan Taylor that he had found someone special. The pair had separately hitchhiked to a gay bar, with fake IDs, in Sunset Beach, California. They connected, they danced and stepped outside for a kiss in the thick fog. “I was only 18 but I knew I had just met my soulmate,” says Ely.
The pair remained a couple until 2015 when Taylor, who was nicknamed Spider, died from liver cancer. A new collection of Taylor’s music, Surge Studio Music – electronic pieces he composed for gay porn films – has just been released. “I was like: wait, there’s a fanbase for 80s gay porn music?” laughs Ely. “I had no idea. When Josh contacted me, I found the cassette tapes in a box in the back of the closet. They’d been there for ever.”
Josh Cheon runs Dark Entries, a San Francisco-based record label that focuses on celebrating overlooked gay artists, including many who died from Aids-related illnesses, and releasing their lesser-known forays into the world of soundtracking gay porn. As well as Taylor’s Surge Studio Music material, there have been releases by the Hi-NRG and disco pioneer Patrick Cowley and the electro innovator Man Parrish, and the compilation Deep Entries: Gay Electronic Excursions 1979-1985, described as “10 tracks of obscure queer synth bliss”.
“This had been on my docket since day one of the label,” Cheon says. “There were all these compilations of people doing rare Australian synth pop or Japanese new wave but I’m like: ‘What about gay? Where’s the gay voice in all of this? It’s all been erased, forgotten, lost to Aids or thrown out.’ So I’ve literally been working on this for 16 years trying to amplify this underground gay music scene.”
The proceeds from many of the releases get donated to Aids charities but it’s also an opportunity to direct some money towards artists who maybe weren’t all that business savvy when they first took on the scoring work. “Man Parrish was like: oh, I think I got $50 and a blowjob,” laughs Cheon. “Which he then spent on drugs.”
Working with queer film historian Elizabeth Purchell to track down and unearth old films and scores, Cheon has found a niche within a niche. “There is so much amazing stuff out there,” he says. “If I wanted to, I could switch to just being a gay porn soundtrack reissue label.” As if by magic, his phone rings to prove his point. “Oh my God, this is crazy,” Cheon beams after quickly taking the call. “It’s another gay porn soundtrack composer that everyone thought was dead. No one has talked to him in 30 years. I literally have goosebumps right now.”
It was at a Los Angeles glory hole club, Basic Plumbing, where Taylor’s Surge Studio Music material was born. He was working at the club in the early 80s when he met Al Parker, who ran porn production company Surge Studios with Steve Scott – both of whom would die due to Aids-related illnesses – and began making soundtracks for their films. Previously, “Al and Steve really went out of their way, for the most part, to source original material for the music,” Cheon says. “But they also stole music from Brian Eno, B-52s and the Human League. They would cut up the Human League’s Being Boiled, loop it and slow it down, taking out the vocals to manipulate it as an instrumental. I guess today it would be called a cosmic or Balearic remix.”
Taylor’s film music has a similar vibe – slow, moody, textural, synthy – but despite its enduring appeal, Ely recalls it just being “a side job”, he says. “Neither one of us were really into porn. It was just something to earn as we were starving musicians.” Taylor was more known for his impressive guitar playing, with Eddie Van Halen reportedly saying he was the greatest guitar player he’d ever heard. Taylor and Ely were also in the post-punk outfit Red Wedding at the time (1981-85) which was made up entirely of openly gay men – a rarity in the scene.
The pair had been living openly from the off, even when same-sex relationships were still illegal in California. “We were very bold and part of a wave of young gay couples living out in the open just a couple of years after Stonewall,” Ely recalls. It was not without its challenges however. “I pretty much lost my family,” Ely says. “We encountered a lot of hostility and a lot of really fucked things happened to us over the years.” He then tells me a harrowing story of their cat being stolen, killed and returned in a cardboard box with “faggots” written on it and a noose around the neck of their pet.
But by the mid-80s, when these film scores were being recorded, they had a beautiful community of like-minded friends and were part of a thriving underground music scene. “Then Aids reared its ugly head,” recalls Ely. “One moment it was a little blip, something we heard was going on in San Francisco. The next thing friends of friends are dying, and then our friends are dying.” It was so traumatic that the pair ended up moving to Arizona and starting a new chapter away from bands and music. “We lost so many friends, and it did something to us,” Ely says. “We didn’t want to be in LA any more. There were too many ghosts. Everywhere we looked it reminded us of people that we loved that died these horrible deaths.”
Another release the label has just put out is Fallen Angel by Brandy Dalton, a collection of soundtracks – spanning melodic electronica to squelchy electro via minimal industrial techno – to the award-winning series of porn films under the same name. Dalton, who died from an Aids-related illness in 2006, had his roots in the more extreme and experimental part of the gay community in LA. His band Drance, an industrial and EBM outfit, would play venues such as the legendary Club Fuck!, a home for the leather, tattoos and body piercing crowd.
“It was absolutely wild,” says Dalton’s bandmate John Munt. “Drance was a very sexual band and we would have go-go dancers who were painted gold or accompany performance art pieces which would involve pretty extreme mutilation and mummification. I say it with affection, but we would always find out where all the freaks were and play there.”
With so much of this type of music forgotten, or never released in the first place, it’s significant to have the work of these late artists being celebrated. “It’s so nice to have Brandy’s work out,” says Munt. “He carried on making music, but things got tough for him. Aids really ravaged him and he needed to use a lot of drugs for the extreme pain. I loved him as a really close friend, and it was hard to watch.”
Similarly, for Ely this goes beyond just music for porn films. “It means a lot to me,” he says. “It celebrates Spider one more time. I’ll always be in awe of him, and I’ll always be in love with him. He was an incredible, gifted, loving person, and until the day I die I will keep talking about him. I want people to remember him. I want people to hear his music. It’s the least I can do for him.”
