Part of the reason the marching band sound was so popular in New Orleans was that a large number of decommissioned soldiers ended up there after the Civil and Spanish-American wars, making brass instruments readily available. Elsewhere, though, people couldn’t afford tubas or drums, so they created bass lines by blowing into empty moonshine jugs and made beats by thrashing cheap guitars. The rhythm of life in most of America was created by the railroad, and prewar blues and country records were often little more than imitations of the locomotive using jugs and guitars: the Memphis Jug Band’s “K.C. Moan” from 1929, Lead Belly’s “Rock Island Line” and “Midnight Special” from 1940, Darby & Tarlton’s “Freight Train Ramble” from 1929, and Bill Monroe’s “Orange Blossom Special” from 1941. As the funkafied marching-band sound advanced up the Mississippi from New Orleans, it was smelted with these piston-pumping train rhythms, and the Bo Diddley beat was born. With its chugging momentum, Diddley’s first single, “Bo Diddley” in 1955, established his trademark rhythm. Everything, including the guitar that imitated both wheels on a track and a steam engine going through a tunnel, was at the service of the beat. “Bo Diddley” may have sounded a bit like The Little Engine That Could, but by 1956’s “Who Do You Love?” and 1957’s “Hey Bo Diddley,” the Bo Diddley beat had all the forward motion of a newfangled diesel locomotive.
Like Bo Diddley, the German group Kraftwerk created the end of the century’s most enduring rhythms by mimicking a train. Where Diddley’s guitar was a steam engine moving off in the distance, the synth lick on Kraftwerk’s 1977 “Trans-Europe Express” was the Doppler effect trail left by a Japanese bullet train. Strangely, though, the beat huffed and puffed just like the maracas of Diddley’s sidekick, Jerome Green. The reasons for this were twofold. First, by boarding the “Trans-Europe Express,” Kraftwerk wasn’t trying to escape this mortal coil like the prisoner in Lead Belly’s “Midnight Special”; it was celebrating industry’s ability to bring people together, its power to efface boundaries. Second, it was a demonstration of just how much the German power plant intuited the very essence of the machine. As Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hutter told journalist David Toop, “Sit on the rails and ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. Just keep going. Fade in and fade out rather than trying to be dramatic or trying to implant into the music a logical order which I think is ridiculous. In our society everything is in motion. Music is a flowing artform.”1
Kraftwerk wasn’t approximating only the machine pulse, but its very logic (if such a thing is possible)—the ultimate trance of perfect repetition. This is perhaps most apparent in the full twenty-plus-minute version of 1975’s “Autobahn.” That characteristic swingless rhythm of much Krautrock, especially the drumming of Neu!’s Klaus Dinger (a former member of Kraftwerk), was called “motorik,” and this was writ large on “Autobahn,” where the pulse just flowed and surged constantly on cruise control. Both “Autobahn” and “Trans-Europe Express” were underground disco hits and were, perhaps more surprisingly, very popular in the black ghettos of New York, Detroit, and Miami. Detroit Techno artist Carl Craig said that Kraftwerk “were so stiff, they were funky,”2 while the Great Peso from early hip-hop crew the Fearless Four called Kraftwerk “our soul group.”3 That Kraftwerk was so important to many African-American musicians speaks not only of the profound dislocation that postindustrialization and the fetishization of communication technologies wrought on the black community but also of the fact that, despite all appearances to the contrary, Kraftwerk touched on something deep in the roots of all music. The trance ritual is as ancient as humans themselves, and the eternal rhythm loop that could transport you across its waves of sound was the goal of the very first person to beat two rocks together. For Kraftwerk, these rocks were now machines. As Hutter told Toop, “We came from little train sets and Elektrobaukasten—the post-war generation with these little electric toy boxes. You immediately become child-like in your approach.”4 As with most of disco’s practitioners and celebrants, Kraftwerk was discovering the wonder, the elemental in the all-night flow motion of the machine. The ultimate aim of disco’s own trance ritual wasn’t the zombielike catalepsy that the naysayers claimed, but the most exquisite ecstasy. Despite its own machine roots, rock was man’s attempt to master his sonic surroundings—“to implant into music a logical order”—disco was a ravishing surrender to the clockwork throb.
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Another reason disco attracted so much scorn was that it was the combination of the seemingly utterly inhuman sound of Kraftwerk and the genre that is alleged to be the most organic—funk. According to its definition, funk is supposed to be greasy, dirty, stinky, redolent of sex—the epitome of earthiness. However, although funk is perceived of as being loose and free-flowing, the truth is that it’s as rigid as any time-regulated servomotor. Yet again, with his metronomic precision, Earl Palmer laid down the ground rules for funk. The finest exponent of the New Orleans swing that would eventually mutate into funk, though, was Charles “Hungry” Williams. As the drummer behind Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns on records like “High Blood Pressure,” “Little Liza Jane,” “Everybody’s Whalin,’” and “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu,” Hungry took the marching-band gumbo flavor into more polyrhythmic directions. Hungry swung like crazy, but however far out he went, he never forgot “the one.” “Everything on the one” is funk’s only commandment, and people who break it have their own circle in hell—a dentist’s waiting room where they’ll sit for all eternity listening to Perry Como.
Hungry taught Clayton Fillyau, drummer on James Brown’s Live at the Apollo, the New Orleans mandate, and in his hands the James Brown beat was born. On Brown’s 1962 single “I’ve Got Money”—perhaps the most intense and electric record of his entire career—Fillyau’s lightning-speed syncopated chatter notes behind the main beat are the foundation of funk drumming. Fillyau, and every drummer who followed him, hit “the one” with digital accuracy—if he didn’t, he’d get fined. From the impeccably shined shoes to the precision-tooled beats, every one of Brown’s bands was a well-oiled machine. With Brown policing funk’s cardinal rule like Draco and the hard-and-fast strictures governing the rhythm, you didn’t really need postpunk groups like Gang of Four to make obvious the connection between funk and control.
Funk really started to take shape on 1964’s “Out of Sight” with drummer Melvin Parker’s rim clicks and the rest of the band basically sitting on the vamp. However, it was Brown’s next single, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” that truly changed the face of music. For all of the naturalism that racists and Cartesians like to ascribe to Brown, the bone-rattling effect of “Papa” was largely due to the fact that the master tape was sped up, thus giving the record a claustrophobic feel that made the blaring horns, piercing guitar, and ricocheting rhythm section that much more intense. At the same time as “Papa” is all about glare and flamboyance (the horns, Brown reducing the gospel vocal tradition to nothing but the falsetto shrieks and guttural roars, the “chank” of the guitar, which is probably the genesis of reggae), it also posits the once anonymous bottom end (the bass and drums) as the be-all and end-all of music. The first rule of this new Brownian motion was that nothing—not even melody, harmony, structure, or texture—can usurp the primacy of the pulse. Brown’s new music was, in effect, Kraftwerk before the fact, just without the conceptual baggage. Disco’s never-ending beat would be unthinkable without “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.”
Probably the funkiest drummer to ever zing a Zildjian, the Meters’ Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste brought both the New Orleans tradition and the JB beat to hitherto unimagined levels of dexterity. He may sound like an octopus behind the kit, but the reason he’s such a bad-ass is that he keeps time like a Swiss quartz—it’s not for nothing the band’s called the Meters. Ziggy played on LaBelle’s Nightbirds album, the record that truly subsumed funk into disco. On the album’s two best tracks, “What Can I Do For You?” and “Lady Marmalade,” Ziggy’s drums are distinctly flat and angular, the N’orli
ns swing is only implied. Given funk and soul’s marching-band roots, this kind of severe regimentation was inevitable.
The hit factory at Motown got close to assembly-line interchangeability, particularly in its rhythm sections, and this was brought to the fore with what are often considered the first disco records. Eddie Kendricks’s 1972 single “Girl You Need a Change of Mind” was disco’s prototype even though its main beat, which was a snare rather than a kick, was a bit too human (the drummer is noticeably late a couple of times during the track). The following year, with the Temptations’ “Law of the Land,” producer Norman Whitfield made his apocalyptic funk even more dystopic with a strict 4/4 drumbeat that embodied the inevitability of human nature described in the song. The skipping hi-hats, the subtle but crucial conga fills, the hand claps, the dubby effects Whitfield puts on the horns, the hooky string lines, the deracinated gospel keyboards—this was almost the entirety of disco in five-minute microcosm. It was the rigid main beat, however, that really marked “Law of the Land” as a break from the soul continuum. Picking up on cues from Sly Stone and James Brown, Whitfield had broken from the Motown mold in the ’60s by inserting spaces in between the beats; the relentless, clockwork beat of “Law of the Land,” however, was perhaps his most Motown-like beat, albeit updated for a world quickly getting used to the certainties of the machine.
Motown’s greatest rhythm mechanic, however, never even recorded for them. Hamilton Bohannon used to drum in the Motown touring band, and when the label left Detroit for Los Angeles in 1971, Bohannon stayed behind in the Midwest. No one has taken “groove” as literally as Bohannon—there are no peaks, no builds, no intensity anywhere in the records he made for Brunswick from 1974 to 1976. Perhaps because of his time at Motown, Bohannon made dance music like an assembly-line worker—his hypnotrance rhythms were so monotonous you could get repetitive strain injury listening to them. Willie Henderson was a producer and arranger at the Chicago offices of Brunswick from 1968 to 1974 before he decided to start his own Now Sound label. There must have been something in the water in the Windy City during that time, because Henderson’s “Dance Master”—a favorite at the Loft—had the same machinic inevitablity as Bohannon, the same drone of the downtrodden funk worker. Rahiem LeBlanc, the guitarist of New York’s Rhythm Makers (note the workmanlike name), had the same sound as Bohannon and Henderson—what Bo Diddley would sound like given a wah-wah pedal and a flanger—but Herb Lane’s keyboards were far too engaging to make their disco classic, “Zone,” quite as hypnotic. What “Zone” did have, though, was the most metronomic cowbell ever—you can almost hear drummer Kenny Banks counting off to himself every quarter-note hit. Without the Eno-esque ignorability factor, this numbing regularity was taken up by “the human metronome,” Chic’s Tony Thompson.
Ironically, though, for all the talk of the disco robots removing humanity from black music, the disco beat is probably the least mechanistic of any of the rhythms mentioned so far. The battery for almost all of the classic Philadelphia International records, drummer Earl Young and bassist Ronnie Baker, were two of the most influential rhythm players of the ’70s. With the help of engineer Joe Tarsia, they experimented with all sorts of techniques in order to achieve the marvelously rich and full sound that characterized Philly soul. Baker would wrap a rubber band around his bass strings at the bridge in order to get a thumpy sound that not only anchored but propelled the music forward. Young, meanwhile, placed a wallet on his snare drum to give it a certain dynamic. Tarsia was obsessive about microphone placement, drum tuning, and which bass drum beater was the right one for a particular sound. All of these peculiar elements came together on Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “The Love I Lost.” The song originally began life as a ballad, but the session wasn’t working until producer Kenny Gamble told the musicians to let rip and crank up the tempo. Young unleashed a war dance on the kick drum with a shuffle on the snare, but instead of echoing this pattern on the cymbals, Young used a trick he had first used a few months earlier on an obscure record by the Fantastic Johnny C, “Waitin’ for the Rain.” Picking up a thing or two from jazz drummer Max Roach, Young accented the off-beats using an open hi-hat. The result was the hissing hi-hat sound that has dominated dance music ever since this record was first released in September 1973. The first drummer to pick up on this hi-hat pattern was New York session drummer Allan Schwartzberg. His beat on Gloria Gaynor’s version of “Never Can Say Goodbye” (and his later work on records like the Joneses’ “Sugar Pie Guy,” Disco Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes’ “Get Dancin’,” and the Wing and a Prayer Fife and Drum Corps’s “Baby Face”) ensured that the sibilant cymbal would become one of the hallmarks of disco.
“LES FRONTIÈRES SONT OUVERTES”
Eurodisco
With such a strong presence of automated beats and mechanical rhythms throughout the history of African-American music, the disco naysayers were on unsteady ideological turf when they criticized its repetitiveness and machinelike qualities. After all, they couldn’t very well denigrate their own beloved funk. So they found a scapegoat. It came from Europe like a marauding Ostrogoth in clodhoppers and a three-piece polyester leisure suit, and its name was Eurodisco. Journalist Nelson George described Eurodisco as “music with a metronomelike beat—perfect for folks with no sense of rhythm—almost inflectionless vocals, and metallic sexuality that matched the high-tech, high-sex, and low-passion atmosphere of the glamorous discos that appeared in every major American city.”5 Funk historian Rickey Vincent further characterized the dreaded Eurodisco parasites as “producer-made tunes [that] generally lacked any sense of sequence—beginning, buildup, catharsis, release—yet they were simple and catchy enough to bring rhythmless suburbanites and other neophytes flocking to plush dance clubs at strip malls from coast to coast.”6 Just as Native Americans thought that if you photographed them, they would lose part of their soul, the defenders of funk thought that if you made drumbeats with machines, music would lose its soul. Eurodisco was tainting the pure gene pool of black music with its goose-stepping stomp beats and beer-hall sing-alongs, and taming James Brown the way Pat Boone had wrapped Little Richard in a woolly grandpa cardigan. While there was no doubting that Eurodisco was seemingly made for the Stepford Wives and air-headed California girls aspiring to be Farrah Fawcett, it was equally true that many Eurodisco hits were practically note-for-note remakes of earlier records by Barry White, MFSB, and the Temptations.
The history of Eurodisco is inseparable from the history of the drum machine and the click track (the metronome beat that now plays in the headphones of all studio musicians while they’re laying down a track). The first electronic drum machine, the Wurlitzer Side Man, was released in 1959. The Side Man was designed as an accompaniment for solo organ players, and even significant advances like the Kent K-100 and the Keio Donca-Matic remained the preserve of albums like Ken Demko Live at the Lamplighter Inn until the early ’70s, when Sly Stone made the drum machine as expressive as a guitar or piano. Stone was an organist, and when he locked himself in the studio to record that masterpiece of pessimism and defeat, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, he took one of these primitive rhythm boxes to keep him company. But it wasn’t just for practical reasons: The machine’s stammering, staggered, punch-drunk quality was the perfect foil for lyrics like “Feels so good inside myself, don’t want to move.”
The most famous early drum machine hit, though, was born of purely pragmatic concerns. Timmy Thomas was a lounge musician who played at the club he owned in Miami, where he used a Lowrey organ and one of these beat boxes. His 1972 “Why Can’t We Live Together?” was essentially the same version that you would have heard any night at his club—just Thomas sobbing about racial injustice, almost funky organ playing not dissimilar from a jaunty cinema keyboard player, and a spooky bossa nova–ish preset beat. The instrumental flip side, “Funky Me,” tackled the rhythm box on its own terms and featured a beat eerily reminiscent of Suicide’s earliest records. Incidentally, a carbon copy of the rh
ythm box beat from “Why Can’t We Live Together?” would reappear, chained to a slowed-down Bo Diddley rhythm, on one of disco’s founding moments, George McCrae’s 1974 smash hit, “Rock Your Baby,” which was produced by Thomas’s former booking agent, Harry Wayne Casey (aka KC from KC and the Sunshine Band). Sylvia and the Moments (“Sho Nuff Boogie”) and Shuggie Otis (“Island Letter”) soon followed with their own “sophisticated” and trippy-tropical takes on the primitive drum machine groove. Strangely, though, the drum machine was used on these records precisely because it didn’t reproduce the uniform sound of a conveyor belt (heck, you could get Ringo Starr to do that). Instead, it sounded exotic, otherworldly, inebriated.
It wouldn’t be until the dawn of Eurodisco in the mid-1970s that the drum machine would live up to its name. Thanks to the Common Market, broadly similar social democratic governments, and the onslaught of the American pop culture machine, the distinct national identities of Europe began to dissolve after World War II. The lingua franca of this new pan-European identity became a combination of the deracinated Motown stomp beat first developed in the north of England, the sunny cod-Latino holiday music first developed by Titanic and Barrabas, and the bubblegum music started in the United States by Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz as an antidote to the “serious” rock music of hippiedom. Europop was relentlessly chipper, hyperstylized music that reflected the boundless optimism of a European union that would end all continental wars, the homogenized blandness of a culture run by bureaucrats, and the retreat into safety of a continent that was reeling from terrorist organizations like the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Brigade. It was lowest-common-denominator music, and its message could be understood by anyone, even if you had to wade through swamps of bad diction and even worse syntax to get there. It was a kind of musical Esperanto—designed for everyone yet seemingly loved by no one (at least in public). Europoppers hardly needed the drum machine to make their rhythms more metronomic (check the Equals’ early Europop classics “Baby, Come Back” and “Viva Bobby Joe” for proof), but when Eurodisco producers discovered the drum machine, the nightmare vision of a unified Europe was realized: The Germans were the drummers, the Belgians were the bassists, the Swedes were the singers, the French and the Italians were the producers, and everyone but the British wrote the English-language lyrics.
Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco Page 12