Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

  The first record Levine tailor-made for Heaven was Miquel Brown’s “So Many Men, So Little Time,” released in 1983 on a tiny label operated out of the Record Shack record shop in Soho. “I had been at the Circus Maximus in L.A. and I saw a guy wearing a T-shirt that said, ‘So many men, so little time,’ and I was like, ‘One day I want to make a record with that title,’” Levine recalls. “The concept was I sat down with my cowriter and arranger, an Irish guy called Fiachra Trench, and I played him ‘Relight My Fire’ and I said, ‘I want this kind of choppy piano, big powerful chords, and the idea is a woman is going to sing, instead of “I love you, I want you, you’re the man of my dreams,” I want the opposite. I want “I wake up next to this man and say, ‘Who are you?’” It’s so naughty but nice and everyone’ll love it.’”35

  Everyone did love it—to the tune of two million copies, according to Levine. While it had the aerobic rhythm that had come to define the body-beautiful gay culture and, as Levine puts it, the “naughty but nice” sexuality, “So Many Men, So Little Time” also added a hint of grit to the sanitary quality that Cowley had brought to the discotheque. It was a synth-dominated track, but “So Many Men, So Little Time” was more “musical” than the San Francisco sound—it was more melodic and you could actually hear another instrument besides the kick drum. “By the late seventies, there was an obsession with the separation of sound,” Levine says of the prevailing disco sound he was reacting against. “They would take the bass drum and key out all the other sounds, the snare, the hi-hat. They’d use very primitive sound techniques to isolate one sound (now you can do it much more effectively on a computer). Basically the bass drum would just go boom-boom-boom, and they’d take out all the ambient sound and just wallop that up. You had the early makings of electronic music by treating the live sounds. What it started to do was demusicalize it.”36

  In addition to the melody and dramatic chords, Levine decided to use a singer who had some grain to her voice as opposed to the plasticity of singers like Cynthia Manley and Paul Parker. While Brown didn’t have much range, the strain in her vocals at the high notes was reminiscent of honest-to-goodness soul pleading. And although the arrangement was indeed a Dan Hartman rip-off, particularly with the countdown (reminiscent of his “Instant Replay”) and the nearly identical piano chords to “Relight My Fire,” “So Many Men, So Little Time” resembled Northern Soul classics like Sandi Sheldon’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Love You” or Sister Sledge’s “Love, Don’t You Go Through No Changes on Me” or the Sapphires’ “Gotta Have Your Love.” “The concept was, go back and do things that you love, but always find a slightly new angle on them, but keep that beat there,” Levine says. “Forever keep that beat.”37

  After “So Many Men,” Levine produced records like Earlene Bentley’s “The Boys Come to Town” and “I’m Living My Own Life,” Eastbound Expressway’s “Primitive Desire,” and Laura Pallas’s “Emergency” all in a similar style. In 1984, Levine gave the new subgenre a name with a record by one of his old Chicago discoveries, Evelyn Thomas. “After having such a big hit with ‘So Many Men,’ I wanted to make an anthem to the music,” he says. “I fused the rhythm of the Village People, ‘In the Navy,’ chun-chun-chun-n ch-chun-chun-chun-n with the hand claps, cowbells, and chords that Frankie Goes to Hollywood had just developed with ‘Relax,’ but theirs was much rockier, and metronomic fours bass going doong-doong-doong-doong right on the beat. It really is a fusion of sixties Northern Soul, seventies disco, and eighties electronics rolled into one.”38 The record was “High Energy,” and it became Levine’s biggest hit, reaching #5 on the British charts.

  Soon abbreviated as Hi-NRG to make it more in keeping with its mechanical beat, the sound would come to dominate not only gay dance floors but the British pop charts as well. Given the genre’s Northern Soul roots, it’s unsurprising that most of its main auteurs were former soul boys. Wigan Casino DJ Kev Roberts would produce Velvette’s “Nothing Worse Than Being Alone,” Linda Lewis’s “You Turned My Bitter Into Sweet,” and Yvonne Gidden’s “In Orbit”—all Hi-NRG remakes of Northern Soul classics; Ian Stevens had a hit with Hazell Dean’s “Searching”; and then Pete Waterman, as part of the Stock-Aitken-Waterman production team, would become one of the biggest forces in the British music industry with a style based entirely on Hi-NRG.

  * * *

  At the same time as Hi-NRG was being developed in San Francisco and England, a New York producer was coming up with his own version of the sound. Where the San Francisco sound took shape from Patrick Cowley’s roots in academic electronic music and Hi-NRG was an electronic update of Northern Soul, Bobby Orlando’s brand of Hi-NRG was greatly influenced by a youth spent idolizing glam punkers the New York Dolls. Listen to Orlando-produced records like the Flirts’ “Jukebox,” Roni Griffith’s “Mondo Man,” or her cover of Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug,” and the bubblegum moon boot stomp of glitter rock is inescapable.

  Unlike Cowley or Levine, though, Bobby O (as he was generally known) wasn’t part of the gay disco scene. According to The Face, in fact he was a rampant homophobe who once pulled out of buying a house when he found out that the previous owner was gay.40 Bobby O, a rich kid from suburban Westchester County, was an unrepentant capitalist, a guy who would get into bed with anyone as long as it would make him a buck. Loving Alice Cooper, ABBA, and Giorgio Moroder equally, Bobby O saw a hole in the market when disco died in America in 1979, and he exploited it mercilessly with a steady stream of crass records—sometimes dozens a month—with the same synthesized clave and dramatic keyboard stabs from Griffith, the Flirts, Hotline, Claudja Barry, Oh Romeo, Hippies With Haircuts, the He-Man Band, etc., etc. Bobby O records were huge in the Benelux countries, particularly his records with Divine: “Shoot Your Shot,” “Native Love,” and “Jungle Jezebel.” Orlando is most famous, though, for helping to launch the Pet Shop Boys by producing “West End Girls” and “One More Chance” for them in 1984.

  * * *

  While Hi-NRG took over the European pop charts in the late ’80s, it was virtually ignored in the United States except on the gay dance floors of San Francisco and New York. Even though Levine would mix most of the records put out by Frisco’s Megatone label, if Hi-NRG had a home at all in America, it was at what may be the most famous gay discotheque ever: the Saint. The club was opened by Bruce Mailman on September 20, 1980, in the old Fillmore East at 105 Second Avenue. The dance floor was an enormous 4,800 square feet, and thirty-eight feet above it was an aluminum dome seventy-six feet in diameter. The place was so spectacular that people gasped the first time they set their eyes on it. “In the opaque surface of the dome they had like a diver,” remembers Levine, who was a frequent visitor. “It was like a three-D hologram and I don’t know how they did it. It looked like he was going up and then he’d go shoom down to the ground, and then all the lights would just go voom from every direction.”39

  In the center of the dance floor was a tower affixed with around fifteen hundred lighting fixtures, including a planetarium projector responsible for the image of the diver. The Saint, designed by Charles Terrel, was the most technologically sophisticated club of its time—not just in the lighting but in its sound system (yet another Graebar) as well. The 26,000-watt sound system, which had nearly five hundred speakers, was driven by an unheard-of thirty-two amplifiers. The club was incredibly expensive to run (it cost $4.2 million just to renovate the space) and had to be packed every Saturday just to break even. Luckily for Mailman, the Saint attracted something like five thousand visitors every weekend, and it became such a phenomenon that both 12 West and the Flamingo had to shut down because it was so popular, and so popular with the “right” people—the largely white gay middle class.

  The Saint was legendary for the live performances held there—Bonnie Tyler played decked out in black leather, Sarah Dash sang “Sinner Man” dressed in a wedding gown—but it was the DJs who drew the A-list gay crowd there with such fervor. Alan Dodd was the DJ on opening night,
and the club had a huge roster of DJs—Terry Sherman, Sharon White, Jim Burgess, Roy Thode, Michael Fierman, Chuck Parsons, Tony Devizia, Wayne Scott—but the Saint was really associated with Robbie Leslie and Shaun Buchanan. Leslie had learned DJing at the Sandpiper on Fire Island (under the watchful eyes of Wayne Scott and Howard Merritt) and at clubs in Florida where Bobby Viteritti played before moving to San Francisco. With this training, Leslie was an excellent mixer who, like his mentors, emphasized the midrange over the low end. Leslie played records like Carol Jiani’s “Hit and Run Lover,” Passenger’s “Hot Leather,” Kelly Marie’s “Feels Like I’m in Love,” and Brainstorm’s “Lovin’ Is Really My Game,” but his biggest records were the Saint’s unofficial theme songs: “Souvenirs” by Voyage and “Hold on to My Love” by Jimmy Ruffin.

  Buchanan also learned from Viteritti. Buchanan, a British DJ, was famous for his “sleaze” sets, which were pioneered by Viteritti at the Trocadero Transfer in San Francisco. As well as Hi-NRG, Buchanan played New Wave records like China Crisis’s “Working With Fire and Steel” and Sleeping Lions’ “Sound of My Heart” before his “sleaze” records like Johnny Bristol’s “Do It to My Mind,” Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life,” and Miquel Brown’s “Close to Perfection.” “Shaun Buchanan was the best,” Levine claims. “He was absolutely fantastic, the best taste in music you’ve ever heard … He played with the crowd; he pulled the strings. He used them as puppets to lift them up and … he was an absolute craftsman.”41

  True to its name, the Saint rapidly attracted a truly devoted following. “By the time the Saint was at its peak, it was a religion to people,” says Levine. “It was fuck yourself up senseless with drugs because you’d go at midnight and you’d still be dancing at noon the next day. Then they would go completely out of their minds to the St. Mark’s Baths [which were also owned by Mailman]. St. Mark’s Baths had like seven floors, and there was always about two thousand people in there at any one time. It was like something out of a Roman painting—all these chiseled bodies, like Michelangelo’s David, all of them. They’d walk around with just a towel hanging around their shoulder, not around them. If you didn’t have a body like that it was embarrassing, because so many of them did. The religion part of it, starting Monday, was recovery time. Monday to Saturday in the gym, every day, eating healthy, zero body fat. They completely worked on their bodies like a temple just to fuck it up on the weekend …

  “It was amazing,” Levine continues. “You’d go to Vinyl Mania [a record shop] on a Monday, and all these queens would be like, ‘Did you hear what Shaun Buchanan did’ or ‘what Robbie Leslie did with that record?’ And they’d be analyzing and criticizing. They’d remember every mix, they were so in tune with what was going on. They’d criticize someone, ‘Oh, he should have never mixed this into that. He lost it, he lost the atmosphere.’ It was obsessive. The problem with the Saint was that it stagnated. There were certain records that were part of the religion—like both sides of the Cut Glass record ‘Without Your Love’ and ‘Alive With Love,’ Theo Vaness’s ‘Sentimentally It’s You,’ Voyage’s ‘Souvenirs.’ If a DJ dared not play them, they were castigated for it. So what you got were these religious followers of a mentality that couldn’t break away from it, and the same moldy old records got played year in, year out. But there was a magic about the Saint; it was very special. I went to the closing party in 1988. It was a three-day event [it ran from April 30 to May 2]. Marlena Shaw was on and Thelma Houston and Candi Staton. It was packed for three whole days. We would go back to the hotel, sleep, go back, still packed, still dancing. Amazing. It was so packed at the closing party, I don’t understand why they had to close.”42

  Part of the reason the club had to close was what was originally called “Saint’s disease,” named “in honor of the downtown discotheque favored by the most beautiful and sought-after men of all—because so many of the best-looking were among the first to die.”43 Despite the ritual of going to the Baths afterward on Sunday morning/afternoon and the notorious balcony that brought the Anvil’s basement up to the penthouse, the Saint was more than just an enclosed Central Park Ramble with music. “We didn’t know we were dancing to the edge of our graves,” Rodger McFarlane, the executive director of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, told The New York Times about his days as a Saint devotee. “It was the headiest experience I’ve ever had in my entire life. And it is unrivaled still. It was liberating, spiritually uplifting.”44

  3

  “LIKE CLONES AND ROBOTS THAT WE ARE”

  Automating the Beat

  The adaptation to machine music necessarily implies a renunciation of one’s own human feelings.

  —Theodor Adorno, 1941

  We have grown used to connecting machines and funkiness.

  —Andrew Goodwin, 1988

  On their 1979 album Uncle Jam Wants You, George Clinton’s groove collective Funkadelic conceived of themselves as a funk militia, a phalanx protecting Afro-America from an outside invasion. This invading force was disco, and Uncle Jam and company were “the army with the mission to rescue dance music from the blahs.” Disco, they argued, was boring, it didn’t go anywhere, it just stayed on the same 4/4 beat forever. A funk fan, however, was “a dancing interpretation of the meaning of syncopation / She’s a big freak, got to be freak of the week / Don’t give her that one move groovalistic / That disco sadistic / That one beat up and down it just won’t do / Don’t give her that forever and ever foreplay / She’s not looking for the short way / She’s got to reach the point where she gets off.” Disco, in other words, was a cocktease that offered no climax. For Clinton, disco was the “Placebo Syndrome,” a pale imitation of funk whose machine rhythms were a fake substitute for the pleasure principle. Its sexless grooves were denuding black music of its funk and, by extension, black people of their humanity. As we have seen, though, disco’s endless throb turned plenty of people on and got most of them off. Disco may have been attempting to articulate a new kind of sexuality, but its insistence on machinic rhythms was hardly unprecedented. In fact, the standardized meter and mechanical beats of disco can be traced back to the very birth of African-American popular music, and even the growth of Clinton’s beloved funk music can’t escape this history.

  The rhythms of modern popular music were born in the late nineteenth century in New Orleans’s Congo Square, where brass bands composed of freed slaves and immigrants from Haiti and Cuba would congregate on Sundays. Not as well trained as the mixed-race Creole bands that enjoyed white patronage, the black bands developed a style of playing that was hotter (more rhythmically charged) than the European brass-band style played by the Creoles. These gatherings were the first battles of the bands, and the group that played the hottest would take the second line with it as it marched in victory. The second line were the people who marched behind the band and clapped, stomped, and shouted along with the music. The second line soon became an established rhythmic pattern. A combination of John Philip Sousa with Latin American clave patterns, this syncopation became one of the primary sources not only of jazz, but just about every form of African-American music.

  With its emphasis on regimentation and rigidity in order to foster the discipline necessary to create the perfect killing machine, marching band music is at the root of dance music’s proximity to mechanization. Even in the hands of the funkiest cats the Big Easy had to offer, the second line pattern couldn’t escape its roots in regimentation. With his conversion of the marching band style to the drum kit, New Orleans beatsmith Earl Palmer is the father of funk, yet rigidity and bounce were never very far away from one another when he played. Although it wasn’t issued until 1991, his drumming on Dave Bartholomew’s “Messy Bessy,” which was recorded in 1949, sounds like the font of modern rhythm. Palmer’s controlled torrent of triplets and snare rolls anticipated not only rock and roll and the funk of James Brown and the Meters, but surf music and the Burundi beat fad as well—and all this from a sound that probably wasn’t all that different from a fife
and drum band leading the Minutemen against the Redcoats at the Battle of Concord in 1775. Even more martial was Palmer’s angular version of the Mardi Gras beat on Eddy Lang’s 1956 single “I’m Begging With Tears,” but the ground zero of the militarism metaphor was Jesse Jaymes’s “Red Hot Rockin’ Blues” from 1958. Palmer’s percussive volleys were so punishing on this and Eddie Cochran’s “Somethin’ Else” from the following year that Palmer was recruited by Phil Spector to join his wrecking crew and help create the wall of sound. The drill-sergeant precision of Palmer’s drumming was primarily responsible for the creation of rock and roll’s monolithic backbeat—check his jackhammer pounding behind Fats Domino and Little Richard.

  Palmer’s backbeat may be the archetype of rock and roll, but the ultimate rock rhythm wore a tartan tux and was played on a homemade square guitar and maracas. A mathematical formula for the Bo Diddley beat might read something like: (John Lee Hooker + 1/2 Gene Krupa) × (hambone + clave). Within this equation is basically the entirety of American popular music, and the Bo Diddley beat has been at the heart of everything from the British Invasion to disco (check Shirley and Company’s “Shame, Shame, Shame” or Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley’s dance floor crossover “New York Groove”). While Louisiana has its own version of this souped-up “shave and a haircut, two bits” rhythm, the Slim Harpo beat, the roots of the Bo Diddley beat proper are also in New Orleans. Long before Miami and New York had Hispanic populations to speak of, Latin rhythms took hold in New Orleans’s cosmopolitan melting pot. With the city’s significant numbers of Caribbean immigrants, the practices of voodoo and Santeria were widespread throughout New Orleans and so were the cross rhythms that were used to summon the loas and orishas. Eventually, the clave, the basic 3/2 pattern that was the backbone of this music, spread outside the shrines and was integrated into the brass bands.