George Freeman’s business and sales career began at WOR-AM in New York City. He later went on to conceive, design, build and re-program the following Venues:
- Galaxy 21, New York
- Experiment 4, New York
- Neighbours, Seattle
- Skoochie’s, Seattle
- Club Broadway, Seattle
- Vortex, Seattle
- Phantom, Seattle
- 2218 1st Avenue, Restaurant and Club, Seattle
- Soundstage, Las Vegas
- Phantom, San Jose
- King Performance Center, Seattle
In 1999 with the support of many in the community, George Freeman presented his Vision2000 campaign with his bid for a Seattle City Council Seat.
A force to be reckoned with on the New York City dance scene, Galaxy 21 was George Freeman’s first big music venue project. It was located on West 23rd St between 7th and 8th Avenues and was active from 1972 to 1976. It was a multilevel club perhaps most notable for the exceptional music sets put together by DJ Walter Gibbons. To add a soul-stirring experience, Mr. Freeman also hired Francois Kevorkian to play live drums on top of Walter’s mixes. Boasting a tunnel-like dancefloor, a restaurant, a movie screening room, several open bars, and a game room, this was a happening spot where a diverse crowd could enter for just about $10! You could even catch the occasional celebrity enjoying the scene.
BILLBOARD MAGAZINE Nov 27, 1976
This club’s vibrant past has inspired many essays about the caliber of music and the rising star of DJ Walter Gibbons including a piece on the onset of the DJ dance craze and a biographical work on the influence of Gibbons.
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A tiny, shy twenty-two-year-old from Brooklyn, [Walter] Gibbons didn’t have the charismatic pulling power of Cappello, Guttadaro, Levan, Mancuso, Savarese or Siano …” David Todd was Walter’s DJ hero,” says Kenny Carpenter, who got a job working the lights at Galaxy 21 on his first visit to the club. “Walter used to visit David in Philadelphia. He always said that David could hold the beat of a mix longer than anybody else.” Gibbons didn’t attract much attention until he started to push “2 Pigs and a Hog” from the Cooley High soundtrack, which he introduced to Hector LeBron (Limelight), Tony Smith (Barefoot Boy) and Tony Gioe (Hollywood). […] Gibbons also believed in the percussion-heavy “Happy Song” by Rare Earth and Jermaine Jackson’s “Erucu,” and by the end of the year his technique of taking two records and working them back and forth in order to extend the drum breaks beyond the horizon of New York’s tribal imaginary had earned him the reputation of being a highly-skilled original. “Walter was so innovative,” says Carpenter. “He would buy two copies of a record like ‘Happy Song’ and he would loop the thirty second conga section.” The rhythmic crescendo at Galaxy 21 intensified in February 1976 when the club’s owner, George Freeman, hired François Kevorkian, a young French drummer who had travelled to Manhattan the previous September, to play alongside the DJ. “I was very enamored with Hendrix, Santana, Jeff Beck, Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, and I came to the conclusion that I was wasting my time in France,” says Kevorkian. “I came to New York to establish a sort of beachhead for the rest of my band. My bass player came three or four months later with his girlfriend, and she decided that they were going to live in California. “The guitar player never made it.” Life picked up when Kevorkian began to fine-tune his technique with the Miles Davis drummer Tony Williams — “He traded drum lessons for French lessons” — and the new arrival landed his first serious job when he stumbled into Freeman. “I didn’t really have anywhere to live so I decided to search through the ads in the Village Voice. Instead of looking for a reasonable apartment to share, I decided to look for the most expensive apartment to share. I didn’t have any money and figured that if somebody had a big apartment and was looking for a roommate then they could probably afford to hire somebody to help them look after the place.” Kevorkian called the owner of the priciest apartment. “I explained my situation to this person called George Freeman and he said, ‘Listen, I’m not into sharing my apartment, but I’ve got this club and if you want to come down I’ll hire you to play the drums.’” Kevorkian agreed, much to the irritation of Gibbons. “Walter got terribly upset. He kept saying that I was throwing him off and that he couldn’t mix the way he wanted to, but I kept going. He tried to trip me up by playing all of the drum solos of all the records, although I managed to stay with it most of the time. It seems people liked what I was doing because if they hadn’t I would have been thrown out after the first night.” Kevorkian was in a perfect position to witness the DJ’s percussive-expressive agenda. “Walter’s DJing was very emotional, based on crescendos and drumming. His style was fiery and flamboyant. Walter’s thing was drums for days. I guess he preferred them when they were on vinyl.”
Rare Earth’s “Happy Song” remained his trademark record. “You would never hear the actual song. You just heard the drums. It seemed like he kept them going forever, although I would imagine it was actually about ten minutes.” Gibbons was the first Manhattan DJ to cultivate such a purist, percussive aesthetic, and his mixing technique was precision personified. “The break in ‘Happy Song’ is only thirty seconds long, and he knew exactly how to make it click because to me it sounded like one record. I was playing along with the drums and it was always the same pattern, always the same number of bars. He had this uncanny sense of mixing that was so accurate it was unbelievable.” The Galaxy DJ’s technical perfection disguised the difficulty of the mix. “When you listened to the record it was like, ‘Wait a minute, where do I cue up to know exactly where I am?’ It’s not easy. The record doesn’t just start. It fades up. You really have to have a very keen ear to pick it out through the headphones.”
December 28, 2008 Kailidascope Sound System
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Gibbons’s DJing career was comparatively troubled, however, the spinner having left Galaxy 21 towards the end of 1976 when he realized his sets were being recorded secretly. George Freeman must have delivered a fine speech because the DJ agreed to return to the after-hours venue, but he quit again when he discovered his reel-to-reel edits possibly including his sough-after versions of “”Girl You Need A Change of Mind” by Eddie Kendricks and “Where Is the Love” by Betty Wright (Alston, 1975) were being lifted from his booth and taken to Sunshine Sound, where they were being pressed up and sold on the black market. Following his split with Rich Flores, Gibbons had started to channel the acetate end of his work including a pressing of “It’s Better Than Good Time” by Gladys Knight (originally released as “It’s Better Than Good Time” on Buddha in 1978) through Sunshine Sound. Galaxy 21 ended up closing around the beginning of 1977 — the venue was never going to survive without its renowned spinner — and Gibbons spent the next six months bouncing around venues such as Crisco Disco, Fantasia and Pep McGuires. Gibbons’s quick-fire sequence of post-Galaxy 21 residences suggested his challenging playing style and awkward personality made it difficult for him to settle into a regular discotheque indeed he had already failed to hold down alternate positions at Limelight, Better Days and Barefoot Boy, where he played on his nights off from Galaxy 21 and in the summer of 1977 Gibbons travelled to Seattle, where Freeman had opened a predominantly gay discotheque called the Monastery.
Journal of Popular Music Studies, 20, 3, 2008, 276-329
Years after the venue’s closing, you can find people blogging of their fond memories of Galaxy 21:
“I regularly paid to party at Galaxy 21 then one evening during Gay Pride week (1975 or 76), Tom Snyder host of NBC’s “Tomorrow Show” wanted to cover the gay side of the dance/disco craze. He offered a free pass to anyone willing to be seen on television nation-wide (there was a time when people wouldn’t)…Gay Pride was just ramping up in 1975. I not only received a free pass but a “lifetime” free pass for myself and 3 guests anytime…no charge…ZERO…show the card and drink for free…and boy do the people line up 5 deep at the bars.”
“I remember Galaxy 21 like I was there yesterday! Walter used to rent from George on Tuesdays and we had wild parties – the way Walter enjoyed playing music is something I will never forget. I went to Phillie with him for the opening of a new club; it was great but the Galaxy 21 was like our home. Walter’s trademark was his farmer pants and he was always happy. I will always love him.”
“Even though I didn’t work there, one night they asked me to go over to Cento Vasco restaurant in the Chelsea Hotel to borrow a ‘real’ glass because Barry Manilow was in the house and he didn’t like to drink out of a plastic cup. Donna Summer rocked the house!
George Freeman is most notably recalled as the lead chaplain of The Seattle Monastery Church (1977-1985), which during its time was a controversial Seattle dance church. In part, this controversy stemmed around the fact that the cornerstone for the church was that of music and dance integrated into a religious celebration. Despite bias public opinion, the fact remains that The Seattle Monastery was a church, a social fraternity, a shelter for the homeless, and an open door to people from all walks of life. The membership to this day, recounts those memories from the past and those from the present as amongst the most spiritually uplifting moments of their lives. Freeman helped pioneer this movement of dance as a religious gesture in mainstream, modern culture. This fact is one of many that continue to confirm that the language of God is music. As such, music can bring together black, white, rich and poor, young, old, gay or straight in a celebration of life, regardless of any social differences. We were, and still are, children of the same Universe.
Besides serving as a refuge for the homeless, the Monastery also was a source of culture in Seattle. Anyone who was or wanted to be part of the it-crowd went to the Monastery to lose himself in the spirit of the music. 
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George Freeman ran the Monastery under the constitutionally protected cloak of the separation of church and state. The Monastery wasn’t a club but a religious sanctuary, free from the financial and legal restraints of the city government. It was an after-hours, all-night anomaly, defined and clothed in religious speak; one could only gain entrance to the place by becoming a member of Freeman’s church, paying tithes. There was a “baptismal” pool, and Freeman gave nightly sermons. Conservatives, however, ignore the fact that the Monastery was but one of a few clubs that were open and intended for all-ages shows. The one I remember best was a place in Pioneer Square called the Metropolis, because I frequented a reggae night they had there. The larger problem, though, isn’t the obvious fact that idle youth who have nowhere to go resort to drugs and crime, but rather that American pop culture and the larger politic is almost wholly dependent on rampant youth for its life and vigor. Rock, punk, new wave, and hip-hop are entirely youth entities. Without that deviant input, what we’ll end up is staid and fossilized–hence the Experience Music Project’s wholly fossilized youth culture.
The Stranger, September 14, 2000
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Walter Gibbons restored a degree of respectability to the label more or less single-handedly. The DJ, who’d become a born-again Christian sometime between the closure of Galaxy 21 at the beginning of 1977 and his return from a stint at a George Freeman discotheque called the Sanctuary in Seattle, delivered a landmark remix of Love Committee’s “Law and Order” in which instrumental phrases and vocal hooks faded in and out around an elevated, insistent, bongo-driven percussive track. He then produced a perfectly executed blend on Salsoul Orchestra’s Greatest Disco Hits before he added three minutes of discordant drama to Tom Moulton’s smooth mix of “Just As Long As I Got You” by Love Committee. “what he did was incredible, especially the break at the end,” says Moulton. “It was sheer genius. He took something I did and brought it to another level. I complimented him, and he was taken aback.”
Duke University Press, 2003
When asked what his favorite club of all time was to DJ at and why, Disco Hall of Famer Peter Reyes answered with “the Monastery in Seattle! The Monastery was an old church, very similar to the Limelight of NYC in the 80’s. It was owned by George Freeman, from the legendary Galaxy 21 in New York. The sound system was put in by Richard Long. It was a huge club that brought in 2000+ people Fridays and Saturdays. There I played 15 hour sets… The club became a haven for up and coming performers Madonna, Culture Club, Pointer Sisters, and other greats.”
Blogspot.com, 2009
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Many DJs, of course, were dancers; some, like Francois Kevorkian and Francis Grasso, were musicians, too. All had a deep understanding, whether learned or instinctive, of what made people want to dance, and what made people want to dance harder, longer, with more abandon. Without a doubt, disco heralded the arrival of a new figure: the DJ as high priest.
There had been hints of this before, in clubs with names like Salvation…[and] Sanctuary. Several earlier DJs such as Grasso, had been able to whip up their crowds into a devotional frenzy and had been compared with witchdoctors, priests or other religious figures. During the rise of disco, the relatively recent line which the western world had drawn between dance and religion was questioned and blurred.
By the mid-seventies, clubs, especially the gay ones, had truly become places of worship. For many, this was where you went to receive your weekly sacrament. “There is a lot to it,” agrees Alex Rosner (who, after having built many of the disco era’s more revered sound systems, now spends his time designing accustom amplification for churches and synagogues). “George Freeman at Galaxy 21 often talked about that. He said he was providing a venue for a spiritual experience.”
Interviewed for the New York Post in 1975, Steve D’Acquisto asserted, “Disco music is a mantra, a prayer – nobody goes to church anymore, and if you listen to those songs, like “Fight the Power,” “Ease on Down the Road” and “Bad Luck,” you’re getting religious and political instruction.”
Albert Goldman, in his insightful book Disco!, shared the sentiment: “The disco scene is a classic case of spilled religion, of seeking to obtain the spiritual exaltation of the sacred world by intensifying the pleasures of the secular.”
Grove Press, 1999