by Bob Stanley
Another view. Disco boomed when the Vietnam war entered its terminal phase. When the last American boarded a helicopter out of Saigon in April 1975, Elton John topped the American chart with his paean to the home of disco, ‘Philadelphia Freedom’; the record it replaced was Labelle’s ‘Lady Marmalade’, a song about sexual abandon sung by a sixties girl group – Patti Labelle and the Bluebelles – reborn in feathers and garish space bikinis. The message was that the war was over and the freaks had won. From this vantage point, disco is as political as punk. More than John and Yoko, Bob Dylan or Phil Ochs, Elton, Labelle, Donna Summer and Chic knew how to celebrate the end of the Far East conflict that had cleaved American society in two. Democracy had won; outsiders could at last emerge from the underground. America now began a long cocktail party that lasted until the end of the seventies, and disco was its soundtrack.
While disco eventually fell harder and faster than any other major pop trend, it permanently altered the way pop was processed; for the first time the pulse of pop became the most important factor in a hit record, and that hasn’t gone away. You can go back to the amplified snare that opens ‘Rock around the Clock’. You can go back to Bo Diddley, who rode his patented chunka-chunk maracas and locomotive rhythm for a lifetime without usually bothering with a topline melody. Most significantly, you can go back to James Brown, whose style was to take a song and strip it of its fineries, pare it back until it was just a husk, nothing but shouts and rhythmic stabs. ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ (US no. 8 July ’65) had dispensed with verse and chorus structure and cut through the air like a knife; it could have been two, three, thirty minutes long – the endless beat, wound up tight and impossible to resist, was all that mattered. But disco brought the pulse into the pop mainstream, and it took over completely. Disco was populist, it knew no shame.
So the beat was fundamental to disco, but there was more to it. Its roots were, once again, in New York. And we can thank the city’s homophobic laws and a chicken plucker from Philadelphia for its creation. Men were forbidden from dancing together in New York until the 1960s; at clubs on Fire Island flashlights were shone at dancers to make sure they weren’t doing anything as subversive as even holding hands. Chubby Checker’s 1960 US number one ‘The Twist’ had been the very first record to encourage dancing solo, and so became a sensation at New York gay club the Peppermint Lounge. Soon the club’s house band, Joey Dee and the Starliters, wrote their own anthem, ‘The Peppermint Twist’, which was another number one in January ’62. The Lounge now became the hottest club in town, attracting – much like Studio 54 nearly two decades later – the A-list likes of Jackie Kennedy, Audrey Hepburn, Truman Capote, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Noël Coward, Frank Sinatra, Norman Mailer and Greta Garbo, and all of them were in thrall to Chubby Checker’s choreography. Discotheques began to spring up around the world.
Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff had cut the first true disco record – Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ ‘The Love I Lost’ – at Philadelphia International in 1973, but their heartbeat, the MFSB orchestra, left for New York after a financial dispute. Reborn as the Salsoul Orchestra they cut definitive disco, string-heavy instrumentals with the occasional female vocal and the ever-present hissing hi-hat of drummer Earl Young which were universally based on Gamble and Huff’s blueprint. When they weren’t with Bob Blank at his perfectly named Blank Tape studio in New York, the musicians recorded at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound studios; it was almost impossible to tell an MFSB production from a Salsoul one. PIR had been usurped by the older, wiser industry town further up the eastern seaboard.
The Philadelphia musicians’ lack of loyalty to their home town shouldn’t surprise us. Disco was essentially rootless; it was the beginning of pop’s internationalisation, something that would grow exponentially with the house revolution. Take one of disco’s greatest practitioners, Giorgio Moroder. He came from Val Gardena in the Dolomites, a culturally mixed area of Italy that has as much of a taste for Wiener schnitzel as pasta and meatballs. Donna Summer was a Bostonian, part of the cast of Godspell performing in Munich when she met Moroder. He had a notion of updating Serge Gainsbourg’s softcore hit ‘Je t’aime …’ and cut ‘Love to Love You Baby’, a panting, orgasmic three-minute single. The spirit of 1975 was for longer records, something pioneered by DJ Tom Moulton, who used spliced reel-to-reel tapes to give his favourite dance records – South Shore Commission’s ‘We’re on the Right Track’, Patti Jo’s ‘Make Me Believe in You’ – more space to breathe. When the head of Casablanca Records, Neil Bogart,1 heard ‘Love to Love You Baby’, he asked Moroder to make it longer – fourteen minutes longer. ‘He liked the song so much’, said Moroder, ‘he wanted to have a long version of it. The official story is that he was playing it at a party and people wanted to hear it over and over. I think he was doing something … other than dancing.’2 With Summer simulating two dozen orgasms over Moroder’s ebbing, flowing, super-clean extended electro backing, the frankly pornographic ‘Love to Love You Baby’ hit number two in the US as Linda Lovelace for President was playing in the country’s main-street cinemas.
An eighteen-minute song was never going to become a radio-airplay hit – disco was the first genre that created hit records through club spins. Disco’s first UK number one, in 1974, was George McCrae’s ‘Rock Your Baby’, a Miami production from the same stable as KC and the Sunshine Band’s ecstatic hit with a telltale title, ‘Queen of Clubs’ (UK no. 7 ’74); neither received Radio 1 support until they were already in the Top 10. Bobby ‘DJ’ Guttadaro of New York club Le Jardin was largely responsible for Disco Tex and the Sex-o-Lettes’ ‘Get Dancin’’ (US no. 10, UK no. 8) and the Love Unlimited Orchestra’s ‘Love’s Theme’ (US no. 1, UK no. 10) becoming hits in 1974 – and he received gold discs from the record companies to acknowledge the fact.
The same companies were slower to pick up on Tom Moulton’s reel-to-reel innovations. ‘Love to Love You Baby’ was a hit in its three-minute form – you had to buy Donna Summer’s album to get the full session. In 1974 Moulton was selling tapes of seamless hour-long mixes of soul and early disco for $50 a go; crafted with vari-speed record decks and careful tape splicing, these were fraught constructions and Moulton’s first attempt took him eighty hours to get right. The first label to cotton on to his underground success was Scepter, home in the sixties to the Shirelles and Chuck Jackson. They let Moulton loose on Don Downing’s ‘Dream World’ and BT Express’s ‘Do It ’Til You’re Satisfied’, which he stripped back and rebuilt starting with the drum track and bassline, creating space, drop-downs, euphoric peaks – the alchemy of dance music. As if inventing the remix wasn’t enough, the wizard Moulton then discovered the new physical format for his concoctions. In early ’75 he mastered his mix of Al Downing’s ‘I’ll Be Holding On’. The studio had run out of seven-inch acetates, though, so Moulton made do with one of the twelve-inch ones that until now had been exclusively used for albums. The dynamics, bass and clarity of the mix were light years ahead of the groove-crammed seven-inch singles – soon, Moulton cut all of his mixes on twelve-inch, and the industry followed suit.
Moulton, like most disco pioneers, is hardly a household name. Nor is Bob Casey, a soundman at Infinity (a former envelope factory at 653 Broadway) who solved the problem of records jumping when the dancefloor heaved. Inspired by the suspension on his 1947 Packard, he suspended the turntables with elastic bands, something which became the norm until laptops and iPods signalled the vinyl endgame for DJs.
Donna Summer, though, did become a star. The Goddess of Love, no less, was her soubriquet. ‘Love to Love You Baby’ had been a symptom of the need for longer records in discotheques and bedrooms. If Summer and Moroder had never made another record, their hit would still be wheeled out as often as ‘More, More, More’, accompanying footage of Britain’s pre-punk decadence: mirror balls, polyester, men in macs, wife-swapping, a squeaky-bum soundtrack for a country still struggling with its sexual identity. But then came ‘I Feel Love’, which
was something else entirely, the sound of now and tomorrow, still tomorrow; it was highly mechanised and deeply sensual, with the most unlikely chord changes, and minimal lyrics to rival the Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’ – ‘Ooooh, you and me, you and me, you and me … ooooh, I feel love, I feel love, I feeeeel love.’ Here was the future, and it seems to me that we still haven’t caught up with ‘I Feel Love’, still don’t fully understand it.3 It cemented Donna Summer’s status; by the end of the eighties she had scored fourteen US Top 10 hits, and four number ones, including a Dionysian remake of Jimmy Webb’s ‘MacArthur Park’.
Summer aside, the genre’s only real star act was Chic. And try naming their singers. Chic were effectively Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, smart arses with the chops and slyness of Steely Dan but with an understanding that the simplest way to get a message across on the dancefloor is to title your songs ‘Dance, Dance, Dance’, ‘Good Times’ and ‘Everybody Dance’ (rather than ‘Bodhisattva’, ‘Haitian Divorce’ or ‘Bad Sneakers’). They were originally called Allah and the Knife Wielding Punks, which gives you some idea of their politics, but changed to Chic because it had four letters, like Roxy, who they adored, and Kiss, who were maybe America’s hottest rock act in 1977 (and who Bernard also dug, rather unchicly).
Chic were all for celebration, but their evocations of American escape fantasy stood closer to the edge than most. Check out these lines: ‘Stepping to our favourite tune, the good times always end too soon’ (‘Everybody Dance’); ‘On your ladder I’ll be a peg’ (‘I Want Your Love’); and, most terminally, ‘At last I am free, I can hardly see in front of me’ (‘At Last I Am Free’). ‘Good times – our new state of mind.’ What was this, a psychology test? Well, yes. Disco could be so much frothy foot fodder, even its staunchest admirers would agree, but Chic were not going to be part of the pattern on the wallpaper.
Underpinning their pre-millennial tension were backing tracks of supernatural grace. So confident were Edwards and Rodgers of their guitar/bass/production skills that they took up an offer to produce a washed-up French yé-yé singer called Sheila, third-division even at her peak, who had most recently been terrifying the dancefloors of Europe with a disco-fied ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ (UK no. 11 ’78). The result was ‘Spacer’ (no. 18 ’79), a silvery miracle, a zooming aerodynamic flight path of a record with one of pop’s most flirtatious intros. Sheila? Yes, that Sheila. Good God. These boys were trouble.
Chic hit big in 1978, the same year that Saturday Night Fever glued – for one time only – celluloid and vinyl together in one trans-arts, megabucks package. With ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ (UK and US no. 1 ’78) and ‘Miss You’ (UK no. 3, US no. 1 ’78), Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones joined in by ‘going disco’. This was quite a media event, as if they had suddenly started singing in German. Unlike Stewart or Jagger, though, Chic’s run of Top 10 hits still didn’t guarantee Edwards and Rodgers could get into Studio 54; humiliated by the club’s exclusive-cum-fascistic door policy on New Year’s Eve, they went home and wrote a song with a chorus that ran ‘Aaaaaahhh … FUCK OFF!’ Amending the lyrics slightly to ‘Freak out!’, ‘Le Freak’ became their only US number one. Chic peaked in ’79. So did disco. ‘Le Freak’ became the biggest-selling single in Atlantic Records’ history, hitting the top of the Hot Hundred in early December ’78 and hanging in there over the Christmas period and into mid-January. It marked an astonishing eight-month period in which every American number one was a straight disco record, with the exception of last-dance smoochers by Peaches and Herb and the Bee Gees. In June Anita Ward’s ‘Ring My Bell’ deposed the Bee Gees’ ‘Love You Inside Out’. It was an infuriating record, Ward’s heliumated, come-hither squeaks buoyed by a relentless syndrum, on the beat, every beat. So thin and spindly it was almost a novelty record, this was disco in its decadent phase.
‘Ring My Bell’ was followed at the top by Donna Summer’s ‘Bad Girls’ (her second of three US number ones that year), then Chic’s ‘Good Times’. In many ways ‘Good Times’ rang the bell on Anita Ward and disco lite, warning that nothing lasts forever: ‘A rumour has it that it’s getting late. Time marches on, just can’t wait.’ It would gently usher in a new era when it was sampled at the end of the year on the Sugarhill Gang’s hip-hop breakthrough ‘Rapper’s Delight’. A year later it provided the pizza base for Grandmaster Flash’s ‘Adventures on the Wheels of Steel’, and Edwards and Rodgers’s rhythmic wellspring had smoothly, elegantly invented the future.
Yet by the time ‘Rapper’s Delight’ was in the UK Top 3 at Christmas, ‘disco’ had become a term of abuse. Since 1978 the back pages of American classic-rock haven Rolling Stone had featured ads for T-shirts that bore legends such as ‘Death to disco’ and ‘Shoot the Bee Gees’; one shock jock, WLUP in Chicago’s Steve Dahl, had even run into a teenage disco and physically broken a copy of Van McCoy’s ‘The Hustle’ on the night that McCoy died of a heart attack.4 This liberal-faggot music was fine for New York’s Sodom on the Hudson, but in the rust belt they wanted their rock back.
While ‘Ring My Bell’ was number one, Dahl got a call from the Chicago White Sox baseball team. They were having a rotten season and, on July 12th, they were planning a ‘Disco Demolition Derby’ to spice up the game against the Detroit Tigers. The game was a sell-out, with fifty thousand inside Comiskey Park and fifteen thousand locked out with disco records to destroy. ‘Disco sucks,’ they chanted. ‘Disco SUCKS!’ At half-time, Dahl – in full army fatigues – blew up a box containing ten thousand disco records, and the place went ballistic. The pitcher’s mound was destroyed. There were bonfires everywhere, urinating in the outfield and oral sex on the home plate. The White Sox forfeited the game. Simultaneously, the Knack’s bubblegum riff-rocker ‘My Sharona’ broke disco’s eight-month run of number ones and, with a sense of finality, ended up as America’s best-selling single of 1979.
Maybe Sheila B. Devotion’s ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ did suck. And abominations like Disney’s Mickey Mouse Disco album (featuring ‘Macho Duck’, in which Donald joins the Village People) made Frank Sinatra’s ‘Everybody’s Twistin’’ sound like ‘The Lark Ascending’. But disco didn’t go away because its roots were too deep, it had already changed pop fundamentally. The genre’s main acts – the Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Chic – suffered major sales dips, but only the term ‘disco’ died; the venues now became ‘clubs’.
At 84 King Street, west SoHo, in the echo-riddled spaces of a concrete parking garage, DJ Larry Levan was taking the sound back underground, away from the Studio 54 elite and part-timers. Once again, it was home for an extended family of outsiders, it was intimate, and soon became a religion. The Paradise Garage kept the flame burning, becoming the touchstone club for future generations. Levan’s innovative set lists – Taana Gardner’s ‘Heartbeat’, the Nick Straker Band’s ‘A Little Bit of Jazz’, Change’s richly atmospheric ‘Searching’, things he had made himself, things made exclusively for him – set the benchmark higher, higher.
A generation of British kids, weaned on disco, were also just setting out in defiance of Chicago’s disco inferno. Londoners Hi Tension had released a brace of Top 20 hits in 1978 (‘Hi Tension’, ‘British Hustle’) which laid the groundwork for the specific UK sound of Britfunk – a singer with no vibrato, a popping funk bassist, the occasional vocoder, and a keyboardist who kept sneaking in Herbie Hancock jazz moves. Freeez explored both Stevie Wonder and the blank spaces of Factory’s post-punk on ‘Southern Freeez’ (UK no. 9 ’81); better still were Linx, who showed a clear understanding of Michael Jackson, Latin percussion and Grange Hill lore on ‘Intuition’ (UK no. 7 ’81) and ‘So This Is Romance’ (UK no. 15 ’81).
In the South Bronx they were playing a new game with new toys; on the Lower East Side the art-school crowd were fiddling with hi-hats and disco’s unexplored spaces; in London, teenage Bowie fans were using disco as a template for something else again. And in the rockist rust belt – Chicago, where the funeral pyre had been built, and beneath the t
winkling hubcaps of Detroit – the mirror ball slowly turned 360 degrees; the next revolution was already under way.
1 Bogart had also been head of Cameo Parkway when it went down in 1967, four years after Chubby Checker’s last Top 20 hit.
2 Orgasmic girl vocals became common currency after the success of ‘Love to Love You Baby’. Two of the best came from Salsoul and Prelude producer Patrick Adams: Musique’s ‘In the Bush’ (UK no. 16 ’78) was as rapid-fire and single-entendre as Donna McGhee’s ‘Do as I Do’ was silky and seductive, based on the groove of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Miss You’ (US no. 1, UK no. 3 ’78).
3 This makes ‘I Feel Love’ one of a very select group of pop records – maybe a group entirely made up of ‘I Feel Love’ and ‘Good Vibrations’.
4 There is an ignoble American tradition – lost, thankfully, to history in the digital age – of breaking records that don’t conform. In January 1958, at KWK in St Louis, station manager Robert Convey purged the station of ‘undesirable music’ with a Record Breaking Week; all rock ’n’ roll records received a ‘farewell spin’ and were then ceremonially smashed on air. This made a satisfying noise with 78 shellac, but when John Lennon dared to suggest the Beatles were regarded by most kids as more significant than the church in 1966, the accompanying moral panic was satisfied with bonfires. The interview was five months old when it was picked up by Birmingham, Alabama, DJs Tommy Charles and Doug Layton of WAQY. They initiated a ban-the-Beatles campaign when Lennon refused to back down and simply clarified the quote – ‘I said we meant more to kids than Jesus did, or religion. I wasn’t knocking it, or putting it down. I was just saying it as a fact.’ Starke in Florida had the distinction of becoming the first place in the US to actually burn Beatles records; ‘They’ve got to buy them before they can burn them,’ sniggered George Harrison.