By Paul Shindler

Mel Cheren, a music executive whose career took him from a clerk’s position at ABC/Paramount Records in 1959 to his own company West End Records at the dawn of the disco era in the mid-1970s, and who was the financial backer for the fabled Paradise Garage on King Street, died on December 7.

Cheren, who was less than two months shy of his 75th birthday, died from complications of AIDS, an epidemic which he battled as a fundraiser and prevention activist for more than 20 years.

After earning a business degree in advertising and completing military service, Cheren moved to New York in the late ’50s to take a clerk’s position at ABC/ Paramount Records, a job that briefly led him to the Midwest as a sales rep, before the business turned bad. Several years later, however, he was back in New York heading up production for ABC/Paramount, a post he held until the company relocated to Los Angeles in 1970.

He moved on to Scepter Records to head up its production, where was he was a pioneer in the creation of the 12-inch single for DJs. His production of Jesse Green’s “Nice and Slow” earned him Billboard’s 1977 Best Disco Edit of the Year award.

When Scepter folded in 1976, Cheren launched West End Records and had an immediate blockbuster hit with Karen Young’s “Hot Shot.” With his longtime partner Michael Brody he opened the Paradise Garage, a membership-based disco that served no alcohol but had a reputation for musical innovation that earned it, and its DJ Larry Levan, iconic status in the late ’70s. The club stayed open until 1987.

Of the club, Cheren, in an interview with Claes Widlund published on undergroundarchives.com, recalled, “So many of the kids told me that Garage saved their life; that they did not go bad because they had the Garage.” His experiences with the club were chronicled in a 2000 memoir Cheren co-wrote with Gabriel Rotello and Brent Nicholson Earle, “My Life and the Paradise Garage: Keep on Dancin’.”

In 2005, Cheren was inducted into the Dance Music Hall of Fame.

With the emergence of AIDS in the 1980s, Cheren dived into activism early, giving Gay Men’s Health Crisis its first home in his Chelsea brownstone, where, after the organization outgrew the space, he operated a bed & breakfast, the Colonial House, for two decades.

Cheren also founded 24 Hours for Life, an AIDS charity that was the fiscal sponsor for LIFEbeat, the music industry’s response to the health crisis. On World AIDS Day earlier this month, Cheren appeared on a Logo channel special voicing caution about declaring victory over the epidemic too early, and losing sight of the need for continued prevention vigilance.

Cheren was also a painter, and his worked graced the covers of 10 music albums that he produced. Much of his painting in recent years memorialized friends he had lost to AIDS.

According to Richard Burns, executive director of the LGBT Community Center, Cheren’s will made the 13th Street institution his primary beneficiary. Burns said that donations in Cheren’s memory can be made to the Center, to GMHC, or to LIFEbeat.

An email circulated by Burns named Illya Dehktyar, Mark Cheren, and Barry Cheren among a large extended family of friends, colleagues, and fellow activists who will miss him.

One very close friend, Krishna Stone, recalled of Mel Cheren’s last hours, “I visited him on Friday morning, let him know that his extended family loved him and that he could let go and be with the more than 300 friends and lovers in the Heaven we call the Paradise Garage.”