Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

  When the rhythm box fell into the hands of producers in Munich and Düsseldorf, it became the stern taskmaster it was always designed to be—“a regulator to tighten the pulse,”7 as journalist David Toop called it, and any derivation from a strictly regimented 4/4 was absolutely forbidden. Academic Walter Hughes has called disco “a form of discipline” in which, along with body building and safe sex, gay men turned the practices of regulation into acts imbued with eroticism. Hughes writes that disco “takes the regular tattoo of the military march and puts it to the sensual purposes of dance music.”8 Of course, as we have seen, this had happened in popular music all along, but with its own self-awareness, insistence on the 4/4 beat, and the development of the synthesizer and the drum machine, disco explicitly played on this aspect, perhaps never more obviously than on Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.”

  Little more than Donna Summer simulating an orgasm or twenty over a background of blaxploitation cymbals, wah-wah guitars, a funky-butt clavinet riff, some synth chimes, and what could be the most lifeless drums ever recorded (courtesy of a Wurlitzer Side Man), “Love to Love You Baby” was the aural parallel of the newly respectable porn industry. Even without Summer’s moans and heavy breathing, this would have been the case. Thanks to a thousand terrible love scenes in blaxploitation flicks, that wink-wink-nudge-nudge guitar riff had become permanently associated with a couple getting down in a wood-paneled room with leopard-skin throws and astrological bric-a-brac, while the piercing synth fills represented the more “spiritual” side of fornication. But it was that bloodless jackhammer beat that really screamed Debbie Does Dallas. Rock critic Dave Marsh once compared rock and roll’s backbeat with the rhythm of onanism, but this was the sound of a professional grimly, resolutely performing his task until it was time for relief, particularly in the song’s seventeen-minute marathon version.

  The original three-and-a-half-minute version of “Love to Love You Baby” was extended into a minisymphony at the behest of Casablanca Records chief Neil Bogart. “He liked the song so much he wanted to have a long version of it,” producer Giorgio Moroder told David Toop with some amusement in 1992. “And that’s when I did the 17-minute one. The official story is that he was playing it at a party and people wanted to hear it over and over. I think the real one was more like the bad story. He was doing something other than dancing.”9 Instead of just padding out the track, Moroder elongated it by using a new bass line as a tidal bridge between segments, creating waves that surged, climaxed, and crashed every four minutes or so. Moroder had applied the motorik autobahn aesthetic to the human body, and the resulting cyborg permanently changed the character of music.

  While “Love to Love You Baby” was Eurodisco’s most perfect expression, the calling card of this new subgenre was released several months earlier, in January 1975. Like so many Europop records, Silver Convention’s “Save Me” used the archetypal Motown pounding rhythm and tensile bass line as a starting point but erased any hint of gospel fury and righteousness or chicken shack sweat and sex from its structure, leaving only an anodyne bouncy castle for the air-headed vocalists to bop around in. What marked this out as something slightly different, however, was the prominence granted to the bass line and the way the string section was used. As Silver Convention producer Michael Kunze told Billboard’s Adam White and Fred Bronson, “At that time, a lot of disco music featured brass. We knew we had a problem there because there were no suitable brass players in Munich, but we had a very strong string section.”10 Where records from Philadelphia International and Barry White had used strings to connote luxury and upward mobility, Kunze and coconspirator Silvester Levay had flipped that notion on its head by using the most “European” instrumentation (courtesy of some slumming players from the Munich Philharmonic) as a replacement for disco’s “bluesiest” element.

  This became more pronounced on Silver Convention’s next two singles, “Fly, Robin, Fly” and “Get Up and Boogie,” where the strings became more scything, more punchy, blaring almost (although the ones on “Get Up and Boogie” were a bit like hoedown fiddles). Gone were the Motown bass line and the percussion fills; they were replaced by a robot’s version of the walking bass line (like following a square pattern on the floor) and rigid, four-square drums courtesy of Keith Forsey (and a Side Man). Despite the echo effects, vocalists Penny McLean, Ramona Wolf, and Linda Thompson were so flat they sounded like heads without torsos, like there was no resonating chamber for their voices. While the chorus of “Fly Robin Fly” had Silver Convention’s characteristic string stabs, the bridge used disco’s more standard lush sweeps and swoops (which borrowed extensively from Love Unlimited Orchestra’s “Love’s Theme”)—but on top of cymbal hits that sounded a lot like Kraftwerk’s ch-ch-ch-ch.

  Despite the assertion of Rolling Stone’s Abe Peck that “the musicians [on Silver Convention’s Save Me album] are so low profile that their record company could not identify them when asked for a photo caption,”11 with his motorik cymbals and almost oompah drums, Forsey became the Earl Young of Eurodisco. While his beats were relentless, more often than not his drum sound resembled someone playing two rolls of paper towels. Perhaps because of this rather weak sound, Forsey was a master of negative space: Listen carefully to his rhythms—the funk and swing reside in the area between the drum hit and the bass line. Forsey’s “I shall not be moved” style was probably developed as a reaction to his first notable gig—percussionist for commune Krautrock noodling freaks Amon Düül II. With less regard for structure than a toddler banging a piano, Amon Düül II jammed for hours on end, changing styles and time signatures at the drop of a hat and with no regard for logic or flow. It was enough to make anyone a stickler for order, and Forsey quickly became a 4/4 obsessive-compulsive. Giorgio Moroder, Michael Kunze, and Silvester Levay may have been Eurodisco’s architects, but Forsey was its foundation. Aside from Silver Convention, Forsey anchored records by almost everyone in the Euro pantheon: Donna Summer, Boney M, Giorgio Moroder, Munich Machine, Roberta Kelly, Trax, Suzi Lane, Sparks, Claudja Barry, Dee D Jackson, Madleen Kane, Patrick Juvet, and Gaz.

  While the British-born Forsey was the piston for the Munich Machine, the other major Eurodisco center, London’s Trident Studios, was dependent on a combustion engine from France. Parisians Jean-Marc Cerrone and Alec R. Costandinos first attracted attention when three hundred copies of Cerrone’s “Love in ‘C’ Minor” (which they cowrote), a brazen, sixteen-minute rip-off of “Love to Love You Baby,” were mistakenly sent to New York as record store returns and found their way into the hands of local DJs. While it featured some very familiar saccharine strings, cheesy synth motifs, wah-wah riffs, and choruses of G-spot vocals, “Love in ‘C’ Minor” did make some important adjustments to the “Love to Love You Baby” template. Where “Love to Love You Baby” was about Donna Summer’s pleasure, “Love in ‘C’ Minor” was Cerrone’s own adolescent fantasy in which some guy called “Cerrone” with the world’s largest trouser bulge (“I tell you money ain’t all he’s got a lot of. He just turned around, look at the front of him … That ain’t no banana”) picks up three women at a singles bar and proceeds to satisfy them all … at once. And, as if to drive the point home, Cerrone reinforced that pounding kick drum sound pioneered by Forsey, moved it way up in the mix, and sped it up about 30 bpm. Aside from being faster, Cerrone and Costandinos’s productions (with help from arranger Don Ray) were richer in texture than the Munich sound, heaping on the strings and FX with abandon.

  Cerrone and Costandinos first worked together in 1972 as part of a band called Kongas, which supplied party music for the jet set in St. Tropez. Working on the template first developed by Barrabas and Titanic, on records like “Anikana-O” and “Africanism/Gimme Some Lovin’,” Kongas fused pan-Latin percussion, Santana-style screaming keyboards, chunky bass lines, and frankly ridiculous he-man vocals in a language faintly resembling English. This faux Latin/Afro-rock sound was the more percussive but no less sterile flip side of the more c
harcteristic Eurodisco sound. Largely thanks to producers Ralph Benatar and Jean Kruger (who later went to Paris to work with the Gibson Brothers, Ottawan, and Italian-Egyptian diva Dalida), Belgium was the true home of this style, with records by the Chakachas (“Stories” and “Jungle Fever”), Black Blood (“AIE [A’Mwana],” “Chicano [When Philly Goes to Barcelona],” and “Wela Wela”), Nico Gomez (“Baila Chibiquiban”), Chocolat’s (“King of Clubs,” “El Caravanero”), and Two Man Sound (“Qué Tal America”).

  Despite this flirtation with syncopation, Cerrone, a former musician with Club Med (probably where he got his taste for concupiscence), spent most of his career exploring the relationship between technology and lust and trying to convince himself that he could answer yes to Philip K. Dick’s eternal sci-fi question, “Have you ever made love to an android?” He tightened his grip on the-king-of-disco-porn crown with records like the follow-up to “Love in ‘C’ Minor,” the not quite as lewd but equally orchestral “Cerrone’s Paradise,” the quiet storm “Time for Love,” and “Rocket in the Pocket,” which undercut its tale of masterful cocksmanship with half-man/half-machine vocals that would make Gary Numan proud. Cerrone’s flirtation with electronics was perhaps inspired by the French love for cheesy robot music: Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley, the Peppers’ “Pepper Box,” Hot Butter’s “Popcorn,” Space’s “Magic Fly,” Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygène,” Lilo’s “The Banana Split,” and Jacno’s “Rectangle” have all been hits in France. Maybe with this in mind, Cerrone’s best record saw him briefly change from directing aural skin flicks to becoming a sonic John Carpenter. “Supernature” turned the old “the freaks come out at night” tale into a bizarre sci-fi parable where laboratory mutants destroy the humans that created them. In other words, through the transformative power of disco (and especially that oscillating synth line that was largely ripped off from Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”), the freaks shall inherit the Earth.

  Cerrone 3: Supernature was not the only disco concept album to emerge from Trident Studios. When a spoiler cover of “Love in ‘C’ Minor” (by the Heart and Soul Orchestra) came out in the United States before Cerrone’s version could get decent distribution, Costandinos (who was also being pushed into the background by a limelight-hogging Cerrone) complained to Casablanca and was promptly offered a production deal to keep him sweet. Costandinos (who had previously produced records for Andy Williams, Paul Anka, and Demis Roussos) responded by following the blueprint of “Love in ‘C’ Minor” and creating disco’s most opulent fantasies for the groups Love and Kisses, Sphinx, and the Syncophonic Orchestra (essentially aggregations of London session musicians including Alan Hawkshaw, Don Ray, Katie Kissoon, Madeline Bell, and Sue Glover). Costandinos’s most opulent production was undoubtedly Love and Kisses’ staging of Romeo & Juliet, which was one of the first albums to be recorded using forty-eight-track technology.

  Costandinos was born Alexandre Kouyoumdjiam in Cairo, Egypt, in 1944 to a Greek mother and Armenian father, spent his adolescence in Australia, and moved to Paris when he was twenty-two. Like Cerrone (whose father was an Italian who fled to France to escape Mussolini) and the biggest Eurodisco group of them all (at least on their home continent), Boney M, which was made up of four West Indian session singers under the direction of über-producer Frank Farian, Costandinos had a hybrid heritage that was the perfect background for Eurodisco success. His schlocky epics where the singers were more wooden than the inflexible rhythms, where the string section never stopped zinging, where the melodies bored into your skull with more determination than an Andrew Lloyd Webber tune epitomized the feeling of enforced joy that Eurodisco promoted. Of the seemingly hundreds of producers who followed Costandinos’s blueprint, the most original was probably Russian-born Boris Midney. Instead of Shakespeare, Midney plundered Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (complete with song titles like “Don’t Leave Me Hanging” and “I Am Attached to You”) and instead of trying to out-irritate Lloyd Webber, he remade his Evita as the dance floor schmaltz it begged to be. Midney’s one moment of utter transcendence was Beautiful Bend’s “Boogie Motion,” perhaps the only time Eurodisco managed to incorporate a bit of sass into the vacant vocalists who were the subgenre’s raison d’être (plus perhaps the goofiest bass line ever).

  If there was a pied piper of Eurodisco leading the blankly grinning masses over the cliffs, though, it was probably Simon Soussan. Ironically, most of his records were recorded in America. Soussan, a French American of Middle Eastern heritage, was a legendary record collector and a notorious presence on Britain’s Northern Soul scene, accused of taking advantage of fellow collectors and bringing the scene into disrepute with his dodgy covers of soul favorites. When he entered the discotheque, the results were predictably disastrous. Soussan hooked up with Dick Griffey, the booking agent for Soul Train, and under the name Shalamar recorded “Uptown Festival,” a fairly horrific medley of Motown hits (“Going to a Go-Go,” “It’s the Same Old Song,” “I Can’t Help Myself,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” etc.) over a pile-driver kick drum that would have given even Keith Forsey a migraine. Another Soussan-produced medley was recorded by Kansan singer Pattie Brooks. “Pop Collage Medley” was a diabolical fusion of Hot Butter’s “Popcorn,” Steam’s “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye,” and Los Bravos’ “Black Is Black.” Brooks’s biggest hit was “Girl Don’t Make Me Wait,” a sort of Fiddler on the Roof version of a song written by Philly International’s Gamble and Huff. Toward the end of the ’70s, though, Soussan’s penchant for overripe strings and shudderingly loud bass drum was tamed by the synthesizer, and records like Arpeggio’s 1979 “Love and Desire” and French Kiss’s 1979 “Panic” became important hallmarks for the Hi-NRG sound of the 1980s.

  The keyboardist and drummer on many of the early Soussan sessions were Laurin Rinder and Michael Lewis, two longtime session men and fugitives from the hard rock band Joshua. With their own production deal for AVI (American Variety International), Rinder and Lewis jazzed up the Eurodisco sound for an American audience with records by El Coco, Le Pamplemousse, Saint Tropez, and Sweet Potato Pie. However, as Rinder told Bernard Lopez, “We were scared to death that someone would find out about us … We were very legitimate guys. We were rock and rollers and when someone said ‘You wanna do Disco?’ we thought it was the biggest cop-out that you could possibly ever do.”12 Perhaps another reason they were embarrassed was that many of their records borrowed liberally from other records: Le Pamplemousse’s “Le Spank,” which attempted to cash in on the Chicago dance craze the spank, swiped its intro and bass line from Barry White’s “It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me,” while their Tuxedo Junction project (discofied versions of big band classics like “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “Take the A Train,” “Begin the Beguine,” and “Tuxedo Junction”) owed more than a little to the glitterball nostalgia of Charlie Calello and Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band. The duo’s finest moment was El Coco’s “Cocomotion,” a pastiche of every disco style you could care to name with hi-hats that made explicit the connection between Earl Young and Kraftwerk and, on the twelve-inch version, the hand claps of the gods.

  The ultimate rapprochement of Eurodisco and the American original, though, came from a group from Australia and their Turkish producer. Arif Mardin had resuscitated the Bee Gees’ sagging career in 1975 with the album Main Course, which found Barry, Maurice, and Robin Gibb trying their hand at Philly soul–inspired songs rather than the dated Beatles and folk harmonies of their previous records. The following year they recorded the similarly styled “You Should Be Dancing” at Criteria Studios in Miami. While Dennis Byron’s kick drum sound was watertight and the cowbells were suitably metronomic, the track’s Euro feel was tempered by the conga-heavy break. There were also horns and chicken-scratch guitar riffs galore—you would have never heard that in Munich. What made the track so European in feel, though, was the bass line, which was clearly developed after listening to one polka record too many. The superball bass line po
ings and bounces so much it could have been lifted straight off of a happy hardcore track recorded in Rotterdam in the early ’90s.

  As redolent as this bass line was of lederhosen and Maypole dancing, it was actually originally developed by one of the goddamn funkiest players ever to pluck the round wounds, Sly & the Family Stone’s Larry Graham. While Graham is credited with inventing the technique of slap bass, and his abuse of the strings with a thumb that must have been made of steel provided new ways for bravura players to show off, his principal innovation had the exact opposite effect. With its deceptively simple, singsong vision of racial harmony, “Everyday People” topped the American R&B charts in February 1969. While Sly was begging for tolerance because we’re all “Everyday People,” Graham grounded his equality plea with a bass line that anyone with two hands and opposable thumbs could play. Graham certainly didn’t invent the one-note bass line on “Everyday People,” but he made it perfectly acceptable in the framework of funk by doubling every eighth-note he played, giving it a lurching but incredibly propulsive quality—sort of like popping the clutch on a car.

  On the Jackson 5’s 1975 remake of the Supremes’ “Forever Came Today,” Motown stalwart Brian Holland took this technique one step further. Instead of the note merely repeating, the slurred note was now doubled in a different octave.13 While relentlessly robotic, the bass line on “Forever Came Today” also has a galloping quality—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding grimly forward toward Doom. This bass line is the backbone of nearly everything we now think of as disco: Diana Ross’s “Love Hangover,” Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” Village People’s “San Francisco (You’ve Got Me),” Donna Summer’s “Try Me, I Know We Can Make It” and, of course, the Bee Gees’ “You Should Be Dancing.” While some 60 to 70 percent of all disco records used some variation of this bass line, T-Connection’s 1977 hit, “Do What You Wanna Do,” is maybe its ultimate expression. During the main part of the song, bassist Kirkwood Coakley fleshes the riff out a bit with some slap runs, but during the breakdown the bass becomes dizzyingly hypnotic and incredibly precise. It’s then doubled by a keyboard riff that follows the blueprint to the letter. While the Bahamian T-Connection thought of itself as a funk band and not a disco band, this was effectively the first step in the Frankenstein creation of Hi-NRG, the ultimate automaton boogie that would attempt to sever disco’s connection with funk.