Good Booty
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A surfeit of manuals, polemics, and detailed confessions emerged to shepherd people through the realm of “adult play.” The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, a consciousness-raising group, issued Our Bodies, Ourselves, an overall guide to feminist well-being with explicit sexual content that also became a bestseller. Its polar opposite was psychologist David M. Reuben’s breezy tome Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, which betrayed extremely old-fashioned values, condemning homosexuality and suggesting that nonorgasmic women might simply be resentful of their husbands.54 Making Love: How to Be Your Own Sex Therapist, written by a woman, included feminist-inspired relationship advice, addressed homosexual men and women as well as straight couples, and acknowledged controversial subjects like rape and pornography. The Art of Sensual Massage offered what its title advertised and included an interracial couple among its photographed subjects. Pseudonymous memoirs like Loving Free and The Couple brought readers into real Americans’ bedrooms. Open Marriage offered a how-to for nonmonogamy grounded in the experience of its authors, anthropologists Nena and George O’Neill. There was even a diet book, How Sex Can Keep You Slim: “Reach for your mate instead of your plate.”55
Something had to play on the stereo while readers enacted the lessons at their fingertips. For many, soft rock variants did the trick. Throughout the 1970s, lyrics grew ever more directly focused on sex acts, exploring their potential variety and revelatory power. If hard rock took self-expression into freaky new territory, soft rock focused on relationships. “Hey, have you ever tried really reaching out for the other side?” crooned David Gates, the Oklahoma-born lead singer for the pioneering soft-rock band Bread, in a voice as light as one of the feathers Alex Comfort suggested couples use as a sex toy. A 1972 Valentine’s Day television special sponsored by the Hallmark card company featured couples reading Bread’s lyrics to each other as the music wafted through the background.56
Some soft rock was more assertive, especially by women singer-songwriters. On one of the most enduring albums of the decade, 1971’s Tapestry, Carole King updated the teen revelations she and then-husband Gerry Goffin had staged within girl group pop for the feminist era. Its opening song, “I Feel the Earth Move,” was a gospel shout-out to the feminist cause of orgasms for all. Joni Mitchell, the most sophisticated songwriter of the era, generally stayed away from explicit content but released one of her most overtly sexy hits, “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio,” in 1972; it blended images of the hit parade with provocative lines like “Kick off the sandflies, honey, the love’s still flowing.” Carly Simon, whose marriage to soft rock kingpin James Taylor received unending scrutiny from an admiring public, showed off her lanky body on her album covers and found success with the foreplay anthem “Anticipation” in 1971. These women, all of whom had very public relationships with male peers, presented an image of liberated womanhood that was also glamorous and appealed to men.
Though soft rock was dominated by male voices, other women found a place in its satin sheets with messages of sexually game self-awareness. Merrilee Rush and Diana Ross (no longer a Supreme) sang of gaining strength from breakup sex in the similarly titled “Angel of the Morning” and “Touch Me in the Morning.” Roberta Flack’s expansive version of Ewan MacColl’s folkie ballad “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” stretched out the phrase “the first time ever you lay with me” for the length of a languid orgasm. Karen Carpenter, shackled to a squeaky-clean image in the brother-sister act the Carpenters, had her own steamy moment singing Bonnie Bramlett and Leon Russell’s ode to groupiedom, “Superstar,” in 1971. And as part of the married duo the Captain and Tennille, Toni Tennille made connubial bliss explicit in “Do That to Me One More Time” and “The Way I Want to Touch You.”
Radical feminists, meanwhile, began creating a separate sphere in which gentle music presented an alternative to the aggressiveness of “cock rock.” Expressing what activists believed was a “universal female sensibility,” women’s music, as the subgenre was called, eschewed big drum parts and amplification, tended toward the confessional, and espoused a compassionate eroticism that was often explicitly lesbian. Women’s music was “a little different than David Bowie playing with androgyny,” said one of its first stars, Holly Near, noting songs that addressed political issues like income disparity and the rights of children. What many fans loved, however, was its opulent celebration of women’s love for each other. Artists like Near and the sultry Cris Williamson were sex symbols as well as role models.57
Radical softness served different purposes for different constituencies. For feminists, it allowed an escape from the pounding phallocentricity of rock. In country music, a realm as traditional as the women’s movement was revolutionary, soft rock’s intimacies created a way into modern mores. Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn had brought feminist consciousness into the genre with witty protest songs like “Dumb Blonde” and “One’s On the Way.” Male songwriters responded as their nonmusical counterparts did: by going behind closed doors, as Charlie Rich sang in one of the great ballads of the era, and trying to make themselves and their lovers glad that they were men. “Whatever the precise motivation, country music today stands as the most sensuous form of American popular music,” Chicago Tribune columnist Gary Deeb wrote in 1973. Deeb held up Conway Twitty’s single “You’ve Never Been This Far Before,” then No. 1 on Chicago’s country station WJJD, as an example of country’s daring stroll from the family room to the bedroom.58
The African American recording industry developed its own version of soft rock, eventually known as “quiet storm,” in league with what became known as the “Ebony lifestyle.” That term applied to a radio format that favored mood music and light talk over the soul sounds and political dialogues of the civil rights and black power eras. But it also invoked the magazine Ebony, the favorite among middle-class blacks, which was full of couples’ relationship advice. Proto-quiet-storm artists like Barry White and the Isley Brothers, with songs like the moaning “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby” and the soft-core “Sensuality,” simultaneously catered to women’s fantasies of an attentive lover and men’s need for sexual role models.
Many African Americans responded equivocally to the pornographic openness of the 1970s. Burdened by stereotypes that cast them as hypersexual, they often clung to a stricter moral code. The writer Nelson George, then a teenager, recalls in an essay about the action-packed “blaxploitation” movies of the era that the cartoonish sexuality of stars like Richard Roundtree in the cop flick Shaft embodied a fantasy that felt forbidden. “The white girl he picks up in a bar is just another conquest he can’t be bothered with the next morning. Shaft not only gave it to the man, but to his woman too; with his black leather battle gear and ever ready sneer, Shaft was our black id unleashed, realizing the worst nightmares of the NAACP and the KKK.”59 Artists like White, who described his own sexual technique in a signature basso profundo murmur over a lush string section, adjusted the Shaft stereotype in ways that still enticed, but also argued for elegance. Isaac Hayes, whose theme for Shaft captured the tensions of this moment with a chorus of soft female voices telling him to “shut your mouth” when his bragging turned profane, explored similar ground with his radiant covers of mellow pop hits like Burt Bacharach’s “Walk On By.”
Sensualizing soul or tenderizing country and rock, pop’s shapers of radical softness shared allegiance to a fairly formulaic songwriting approach. Tempos were slowed, electric guitars muted; the focus of arrangements often shifted to other instruments, such as Daryl Dragon’s keyboards in the Captain and Tennille or the oboe in the Carpenters’ version of “Superstar.” Harmonies became key, standing in for the thrill of relationships. Starland Vocal Band’s ode to daytime coitus “Afternoon Delight” featured two couples intertwining their voices in ways that mirrored the illustrations in The Joy of Sex. Male harmonies showed delicate prowess; in the Eagles’ “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” from 1972, Glenn Frey offers the key
line of the first verse, “I want to sleep with you in the desert tonight,” in solo voice, shored up in later verses by a building three-part harmony that takes the lyric from proposition to artfully realized union.
Jazz was the best mood music for Hugh Hefner acolytes of an earlier era, but soft rock suited sophisticates who liked their dreams a little more naked. Just as the “showing doing” of glam rockers exposed how gender roles were constructed and could be reimagined, narratives of radical softness mirrored the experience of better sex. As a product, soft rock and quiet storm complement the leisure toys of swinging 1970s consumers, sounding great on the pricey stereo systems extensively advertised in Playboy and other porn magazines and in tricked-out rides where fantasies like the one detailed in Sammy Johns’s 1973 hit “Chevy Van”—he picks up a hitchhiker, she obliges him with mind-blowing lovemaking, she gets off at the next town—could possibly be realized.
There was much pop-cultural evidence that men of the 1970s were getting down to soft rock. In Hal Ashby’s 1975 film Shampoo, promiscuous hairdresser Warren Beatty beds his female clients to a soft rock soundtrack; the style could signify sexiness in grittier movies, too, such as Midnight Cowboy, which shows Jon Voight plying his “stud” wares with Manhattan housewives as Harry Nilsson’s version of “Everybody’s Talkin’” echoes in the background. A profile of former Playboy marketing director Steve Byer presented him as the ideal sexy man: “The stereo is purring soft rock, the Tiffany lamp is glowing over the tournament-sized pool table, and the neon sculpture on one wall pulses a blue ‘hello’ to the Gallo bas-relief across the room while a 6-foot, soft-pine dude leans like a gunman on an opposite wall.” Frank Gallo was “the Nabokov of epoxy resin,” sculpting voluptuous nude Lolitas in a vaguely Italianate style; Byer’s mood-lit apartment, so adorned, was a love lair where he could wrap his lanky form around a companion while enjoying a little Bread.60
Radically soft music worked best in private environments partly because it was, like sex manuals and pornography, designed for intimate consumption. The music’s feeling of privacy also suited a time when Americans, if eager to buy sex-oriented goods, were deeply divided over the social impact of more open eroticism. The family values agenda that remains central to the New Right today emerged in the 1970s. With its less confrontational “adult” sound, soft music was aimed at the over-eighteen set, whose sexplorations, adventurous as they became, were contained compared to the teenage riots of the 1950s and the countercultural freakiness of the 1960s.
LOVE SAVES THE DAY
The spirit of radical softness did have a public counterpart: disco, which became the signal music craze of the later 1970s. Before it was a musical genre, disco was an environment where members of marginalized groups awakening to their own power could gather and interact freely. Earlier, discothèques were French record clubs, then they became venues focused on dancing. David Bowie’s early-adult musical education took place at one such disco. Catering to the fashion industry, the Sombrero was, in the words of Bowie’s then-wife Angie, “visual, dance oriented, and gay. David loved it, and so did I. It was the first club we’d ever seen with the dance floor lit from below, so it had a new edge of atmospheric excitement. It was set up for watching and being watched, too: a wide, curving staircase for making grand entrances, plenty of perches from which you could see the whole dance floor, and—very important—enough square-footage. You had room to move and breathe and circulate.”61
At the Sombrero, Bowie discovered that the spectacles he admired in rock and theater could belong fully to the audience. With no musical performer present, the dancers were the show. There was Freddie Burretti, a dashing gay dandy who would become Bowie’s personal designer; Mickey King, a club kid with wild red hair whose name Bowie briefly adopted as a pseudonym; Daniella Parmar, Burretti’s platonic teenage girlfriend, who changed her hair color from blue to pink to red on a weekly basis and helped convince Bowie to adopt his own neon hues. These self-made beauties danced to “hard American R&B—not a note of rock or anything British” and flaunted desires that the establishment might label perversions. “They were wilder than college kids, and more direct, and they cared a lot more about dancing and looking hot and flaunting their sex, and—the bottom line—they were the majority,” Angie Bowie writes about the working people getting loose in the Sombrero, whom Bowie always kept in his mind as an ideal audience.
The United States had its own Sombreros by the dawn of the 1970s. The prototypical early New York disco was the Loft, actual domicile of DJ David Mancuso, who threw “Love Saves the Day” parties with no alcohol but plenty of punch laced with LSD where he blended deep soul into hard rock into Latin jazz. Under the scattered light of a mirror ball, dancers at the Loft—as at the Sombrero, mixed racially and in sexual orientation, though mostly gay—engaged in a sensual round robin. “You could be on the dance floor and the most beautiful woman that you had ever seen in your life would come and dance right on top of you,” recalled Frankie Knuckles, later a leading New York DJ, of those early parties. “Then the minute you turned around a man who looked just as good would do the same thing. Or you would be sandwiched between the two of them, or between two women, or between two men, and you would feel completely comfortable.”62
At the Loft and other nascent discos like the Gallery and the Tenth Floor, New Yorkers explored a polymorphous pleasure principle similar to what therapists encouraged at woodsy self-help retreats like Esalen and Sandstone in California. In Thy Neighbor’s Wife, the epic tale of his ten-year immersion in America’s sexual subcultures, Gay Talese noted that carefully programmed stereo music was crucial to the mood at Sandstone, which founders John and Barbara Williamson envisioned as a sort of nude, orgasmic private club. There was even an area called the Ballroom where couples or groups could make love while up-tempo songs and ballads, carefully arranged on ninety-minute cassettes to enhance the rise and fall of libidos, played in the background.63 Early disco DJs like Mancuso and the Gallery’s Nicky Siano similarly strove to whet the loins of dancers, but with more nonlinear goals. On the dance floor, the release was more communal, even for couples moving together.
Being on a disco dance floor could feel like a public display and a private indulgence at the same time. For gay men, who embraced discos en masse, they allowed for privacy without the stifling claustrophobia of the closet. Women (gay, straight, and elsewhere on the spectrum) and people of color also felt freer to be expressive within discos, which often catered to particular clienteles; the harassment and even violence they faced on the street ran counter to the utopian mood disco sought to preserve. As the phenomenon spread, discos took over abandoned spaces or newly designed adult playgrounds. “We started at the Sanctuary, a deconsecrated church in Hell’s Kitchen, then proceeded to the Anvil, a raunchy backroom bar . . . and finally ended up at Le Jardin, a disco in the Hotel Diplomat,” recalled Patrick Pacheco, editor of the decade’s unofficial gay nightlife bible After Dark, of a typical disco night. “My own personal favorite during those years, however, was G.G. Barnum’s, a wild, Mafia-owned dance palace with a two-story-high dance floor over which ‘disco bats’—transsexuals and humpty Puerto Rican boys on trapezes—would fly.”64 Feeling protected by the music, Americans accustomed to walking with one eye peeled for harassers tripped through this fantastical cityscape without fear.
The music created for discos took similar risks. In 1975, Robert Plant’s improvised sex sounds were superseded by the moans of Donna Summer, an American stage actor who teamed up with Italian producer Giorgio Moroder in Germany to record the epochal “Love to Love You Baby.” Inspired by expansive Philadelphia soul hits like Eddie Kendricks’s nearly eight-minute-long “Girl You Need a Change of Mind,” and by “Je T’aime . . . Moi Non Plus,” the pornographic duet between actress Jane Birkin and singer Serge Gainsbourg, Moroder persuaded Summer to suggest the sounds of orgasm, which he set to pulsing music. Summer had the room darkened when she recorded, picturing herself as Marilyn Monroe . . . and as qu
iet storm progenitor White. “Barry White was the epitome of masculinity, voice-wise,” she later said, “and I just figured men needed something that was comparable to that. There were people singing ballads, but there was nobody singing erotic music for men.” Summer’s vocals are seductive, but also confrontational. Just as foregrounding women’s pleasure in pornography touched the intimate core of women’s liberation, Donna Summer’s love cries made clear that liberated females considered equality to be a full-body experience.65
The sound of women coming and going—enjoying sex or, in anthems like Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” testifying gospel-style that they would remain strong and independent in this new world of unconventional partnering—dominated disco, as men’s ecstasies and anxieties drove hard and soft rock. Some songs were explicitly lascivious, like porn star Andrea True’s good-natured “More, More, More”; others, like Chic’s “I Want Your Love,” dressed up erotic assertiveness in sophisticated sounds that reflected the glitter and satin women donned to go out dancing, their birth control pills in their evening bags. Sending messages that the changes wrought by sexual liberation wouldn’t utterly undo the power of the feminine—including the feminine as expressed by a biological male like Sylvester—disco’s soundtrack was daring, but also reassuring. Like the television heroines of the hugely popular prime time “jiggle” detective show Charlie’s Angels, who could wield guns while wearing Spandex and high heels, disco proved that “the New Woman was still a woman.” At the same time, the expressiveness of disco divas appealed to gay men, who saw in their insistence on dignity a mirror of their own desire to be openly themselves.66
Disco did have male stars, including its most successful Top 40 act, the Bee Gees, an Australian brother trio that rejuvenated its folk-rock-based career by immersing in the disco coming out of Miami. In 1977, the Bee Gees released the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever, starring a strutting John Travolta as Tony Manero, a Brooklyn Italian gangster of love; the movie and its songs remain disco’s most familiar—and straightest—artifacts. Sylvester also found within disco the success that had eluded him in rock. The sublime “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” one long shot of ecstasy peaking like Mahalia Jackson on poppers, was Sylvester’s signature song. Its remixer, Patrick Cowley, also wrote electronic music for gay porn films. In 1978, Sylvester and Cowley were contemplating taking sex sounds in music to a new level; he told a writer that “blatant sex disco music” would be their next move. “Sex disco music will be fabulous,” he said. “I want to have someone fuck on the record and record it, the sounds. Not moaning or groaning, but the sounds of sex, the sounds of touching, the actual sounds of penetration. Nice music and close miking. It’s not gonna be a record for sex, it’s a record for dancing, with sex.” Alas, it never came to pass. Both Sylvester and Cowley would die from complications of AIDS in just a few years.67