Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

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  “ZIPPIN’ UP MY BOOTS, GOING BACK TO MY ROOTS”

  Disco and the Soul Continuum

  If history tells us anything about the black experience it is that the different expressions of black protest tend often to be a by-product of economic class position.

  —William Julius Wilson

  One night in mid-1974 at the Gallery, Nicky Siano mixed LaBelle’s feverish, desperate, ultrapercussive, shockingly direct plea for justice and unity, “What Can I Do for You?,” into MFSB’s lush, but no less rousing or straight-ahead, jazzy flower-child mantra, “Love Is the Message,” and the crowd went berserk. Perhaps no other single moment in the history of disco sums up the tumultuous changes that the new aesthetics of the dance floor and the post–civil rights generation would have on the soul continuum. Here was a gay Italian man mixing together two African-American records that each in its own way severed black music’s historical connection to the gospel tradition for a crowd that couldn’t have had less use for the church’s message of doin’ right by Jesus if they were there to hear one of the satanic black masses of DJ Anton LaVey.

  “The triumphs of the black civil rights movement in the first half of the decade—especially the March on Washington in 1963 and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964—provided the blueprints for a much broader national liberation, first for women, then for gays and eventually for practically every other oppressed group in America,” Charles Kaiser wrote.1 With the civil rights and Black Power movements providing not only the inspiration and impetus for the gay liberation movement but also its basic structure, sloganeering,2 and models for collective struggle, it should come as no surprise that the black music of the period would become the soundtrack to gay liberation. And, with the often less than savory views on homosexuality in the Black Power movement in particular, there should be no further surprise that subtle changes would be made to the formula.

  Although it didn’t feature either a shudderingly deep bass sound or diva vocals, “Love Is the Message” was in many ways the perfect Siano record thanks to its play of light and dark, the constant shift between groove and goofiness, and the tension between fluidity and unrepentant cheesiness. MFSB was the house band of Philadelphia International Records, the single most important influence on the sound of disco, and “Love Is the Message” first appeared on their 1974 album, TSOP. The track is almost completely devoid of blue notes—the slurry sax is so schlocky that it’s somewhere between a Vegas lounge act and the yuppie cabaret of Sade, Spandau Ballet, and George Michael’s “Careless Whisper”; the vocalists are so anodyne they could be from Munich; the churchy organ (which sounds awfully close to the roller-rink eighty-eights of Dave “Baby” Cortez) gets only a couple of look-ins and is completely swamped by the sweetening—and so syrupy that if you discovered that Lawrence Welk orchestrated it you wouldn’t be all that surprised. Yet it’s a record that is as epochal as “Mystery Train” or “Johnny B. Goode” or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a record that delineates a cultural and musical shift as surely as any acknowledged rock masterpiece. Almost the entirety of the next thirty years of dance music comes from this single record: the cheery bonhomie, the cloying fantasy of the good life, the doe-eyed spirituality, the cushiony, enveloping bass sound, the string stabs, the adoration of jazzy chords and jazz as a sound rather than process, the keyboards like pools of liquid mercury, the mantra as lyric. While the musicians were aiming for St. Peter’s harps, for music that soared like angels, it was certainly an earthly paradise that they were envisioning. This was no primeval Garden of Eden or the pristine “milky white way” of heaven; it was more like a luxury high-rise penthouse—a rather different kind of triumphant march to the skies, a different kind of crossing over.

  LaBelle’s “What Can I Do for You?,” meanwhile, is gospel as theater—the production values and brassy, over-the-top singing scream supper-club revue. While gospel has always had its fair share of showmanship, LaBelle’s campy, overwrought virtuosity (particularly when combined with the Starchild outfits) is far closer to Vegas than it is to vespers. While the song retained traditional soul’s view of love as salvation, “What Can I Do for You?” seemed primarily concerned not with dignity and basic humanity but with quality of life. Gospel’s ideal of noble struggle was replaced by an assertiveness, a stridency, a squawky friction (by the end all you hear is “What can you do for me?”) that was alien to the solemnity and the turning of the other cheek of the gospel-inspired civil rights movement. Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash sang “What Can I Do for You?” far more like Mick Jagger demanding satisfaction than Mahalia Jackson stoically moving on up a little higher.

  “What Can I Do for You?” was on the album Nightbirds, which also featured their breakthrough record, “Lady Marmalade.” The forcefulness and sexual forthrightness of the album stood in sharp relief to the prissiness and cutesiness of so many girl groups. Of course, LaBelle started life as the Blue-Belles, one of those typical girl groups wearing ludicrously frilly dresses and singing songs like “Down the Aisle (Wedding Song)” and, um, “Danny Boy,” but when they came under the stewardship of Vicki Wickham, a British woman who had previously produced the classic television show Ready Steady Go and managed Dusty Springfield, they metamorphosed into a feminist rewrite of the girl group blueprint. “It was my concept,” Wickham says. “I did know that the sixties girl groups were over—this was 69 going into 70—and they were having a hard time. The Ronettes, the Supremes, the Shirelles, and on and on, nobody was really doing anything—it was a whole new day. I also, though I absolutely loved that type of music, didn’t know that world particularly well. What I did know was a rock world, and so to combine the two seemed very natural to me. They had the greatest voices, they could perform on stage. If we took some of the more familiar rock type of attitudes, that would be a good combination.”3

  Instead of the usual girl group fodder like “Down the Aisle (Wedding Song),” Wickham had the group singing rock songs like the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,” the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and Cat Stevens’s “Moonshadow.” And with this rock approach came the rock uniform. “The thing that I really did wrong was at the beginning to put them into jeans and T-shirts because I thought we can’t do the same old dresses and wigs and all of this,” Wickham admits. “It really was dismal. I mean they looked pretty bad and it was horrible of me. Thank god for someone called Larry LeGaspi, who came to a show and said, ‘You are doing it all wrong. I make costumes.’ I said, ‘We’ve got no money.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry. I’d be delighted. I have friends, I can do it. If you let me dress them, you don’t have to pay at the beginning.’ And he came up with this whole concept—the silver, the feathers, everything—and it was wonderful. And that was what was missing … He was right, that these three women were larger than life. When you put the three of them together, the moment they opened their mouths everyone would just go, ‘Oh, my God.’ It was just enormous, their presence on stage … He saw this much more than I did: If we put them in wonderful clothes, they can carry it and that’s what’s needed. And indeed it was. I was trying to attract attention to them with the lyrics and the concept. Of course, what I was missing was the visuals.”4

  With the visuals in place, LaBelle started to attract a following among New York’s disco denizens. “Even when they were playing the Village Gate or the Bitter End, folky sort of places, the gay audience started to come,” Wickham remembers. “And, of course, with the costumes, that endorsed them as a potentially interesting diva group.” LaBelle’s gay following eventually led them to play regularly at the Continental Baths. “The Baths came about because there was a woman who used to come around to the recording sessions who was dating the drummer and she would sit in the corner,” Wickham explains. “One day she said, ‘I’m going out to L.A. to do the Johnny Carson show.’ We really didn’t know who she was and we said, ‘Oh, my God, why are you on the Johnny Carson show?’ ‘Well, I perform and I sing.’
And it was Bette Midler. Bette went into the Baths before us, and one day she said to me, ‘The girls really should play the Baths, they’d love it.’”5

  While the space age glitz of LaBelle’s image went down a storm with the gay community, it didn’t always jibe with the sentiment of their lyrics. “People want truth or nothing at all,” they sang on “What Can I Do for You?” “People want sincerity and nothing more.” Here in a nutshell was the conflict of African-American popular music in the 1970s: selling out versus tuning out, fantasy versus “reality,” movin’ on up versus movin’ on out. With the basic battle for civil rights and integration seemingly won, African-American music moved away from the influence of the church to an emphasis on the here and now. It was time for America to deliver on its promises; it was time for something solid and tangible and real. However, when the assurances came due, they were revealed as nothing more than lip service. With this shift from hope to disillusionment, black music began to eschew the integrationist aesthetic and practice of Southern soul and started to question the illusions of American society, to search beneath the veneer of the American dream and its myths and promises, to catalog the betrayals. Representing both the last gasp of the integrationist drive and the first breath of cultural nationalism, postsoul disco favorites like LaBelle were caught in this crossfire.

  “YOU CAUGHT ME SMILIN’”

  The Smiling Faces Trope of Seventies Soul

  In December 1963, at the beginning of a long New England winter, graphic artist Harvey Ball was commissioned by the State Mutual Insurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, to design a feel-good campaign to boost morale among the workers. What Ball came up with was two dots above an inverted arc on a vivid yellow, beaming sun background. The company initially printed up one hundred badges, but they proved so popular that Worcester was soon overrun with these caricatures of vacant cheerfulness. Ball’s fee for designing what is probably, aside from the cross and the swastika, the world’s most iconic symbol: $45 (even adjusted for inflation, that ain’t much more than a couple hundred bucks).

  However, despite the local success of Ball’s figure and its subsequent use in numerous advertising campaigns across the United States, smiley was truly born seven years later, a few hundred miles away in Philadelphia. In September 1970, two brothers, Bernard and Murray Spain, were looking for a way to make a quick buck. With America entrenched in the Vietnam War and riven by protests, generational conflict, and racial unrest, Bernard stumbled upon the image that summed up America’s Nixonite reaction to the ’60s in some old ad campaign. Bernard put the smiley on a badge and Murray came up with the slogan “Have a Happy Day,” which soon mutated into “Have a Nice Day.” Echoing such mantras of bland optimism as “Turn that frown upside down” and “A day without a smile is like a day without sunshine,” the “Have a Nice Day” campaign swept a country that was desperately trying to put the ’60s behind it and was looking more and more like The Stepford Wives, Logan’s Run, and Dawn of the Dead every day. The Spain brothers hooked up with New York button manufacturer N. G. Slater and the smiley face became the fad to end all fads, replicating the Worcester craze but on a national level. By 1972, some fifty million smiley badges had been produced, not to mention all the other paraphernalia the image appeared on.6

  But as smiley was zombifying the country, narcotizing it with an empty, blissful grin, a group of musicians recognized the symbol as the pernicious little yellow devil that it was. After centuries of betrayals and lies, the smile, handshake, and pat on the back are no longer ways of sealing a social contract. Instead, they become things to fear, temporary placations mollifying rage and resentment, until the inevitable U-turn, retraction, and cutback come. For African Americans in the early ’70s, the Cheshire Cat grin was all that was left of the promises of the ’60s—the substance of which had long since vanished into thin air, gone up in smoke like the ghettos of Watts, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. Instead of turning their frowns upside down and grinning and bearing it, soul artists of the early ’70s engaged in a remarkable conversation centered on the “smiling faces” trope, an imagistic minefield that played confidence games with centuries of caricatures, the beaming faces of the white liberal establishment promising civil rights and integration, Nixon’s dirty tricks gang and, yes, smiley himself. Invariably, these smiling faces told lies, but rather than being simple protest shorthand for the duplicitousness of the ofay oppressor that worked in a similar way to other pop music tropes—like, say, stoner/doom rock’s “Witchfinder General” trope (derived from the great Vincent Price flick of the same name, also called The Conqueror Worm), which attacks the hypocrisy of squares and Moral Majority types—it is infinitely more complex and confusing, filled with self-loathing, and hectors any number of targets. Whether the central theme of the song or merely a seemingly thrown-away line, the image of “smiling faces” was universally wrapped up in some of the tensest music ever made in the stunning succession of soul records that used it, creating the ultimate expression of paranoia and elevating the answer song tradition above the level of kitsch.

  * * *

  Motown producer extraordinaire Norman Whitfield was perhaps the first to see smiley as the lobotomized, jaundiced, signifyin’ so-and-so that he really was. But before he did this, he laid the groundwork for soul’s interrogation of America’s “Have a Nice Day” positivity. Soul may have blasphemed the church by using the language of salvation in the service of worshipping the flesh, but it never really strayed that far from the flock. Motown’s relentless optimism, the NAACP platitudes of the Impressions, the “dignity” of the Southern soul singers, the theatrical arrangements and singing of New York soul: Change a word here and there, and there’s nothing to mark this “devil’s music” from the gospel-based tradition of positivity and noble struggle. In 1968, though, Whitfield broke this bond by creating a sound that had more to do with the starkness of ancient spirituals like “Motherless Children” and pretty much defining the strain of paranoid soul that dominated black radio in the late ’60s and early ’70s with Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.” Whitfield had written the song with Barrett Strong in the summer of 1966, and Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, the Isley Brothers, and Gladys Knight & the Pips all recorded or released versions before Gaye. Even though Knight’s gospelly, Aretha Franklin–influenced version reached #2 on the American charts, it was Gaye’s version that would eventually become the classic. Gaye’s “Grapevine” was recorded in February 1967, six months after the versions Whitfield had cut with the Miracles and the Isleys. With Gaye, however, Whitfield slowed the tempo down, way down. In fact, he cut it in half. The new tempo created a coiled tension that perfectly suited the stinging string arrangement of Paul Riser, Earl Van Dyke’s somber Wurlitzer organ lines, and Richard “Pistol” Allen’s drums-along-the-Mohawk tom-toms. Gaye’s performance is every bit the equal of the arrangement. In order to get Gaye to sound truly intense, Whitfield used a trick that would come to characterize his productions: He set the song in a key that was beyond the singer’s natural range, so that he had to strain to reach the notes. The result was the greatest performance of Gaye’s career, unifying all of his gospel training and earthly sensuality in one sustained cry of desperate passion.7

  Inevitably, the Motown brass hated it. At the label’s legendary Quality Control sessions they would play the current pop Top 5, and in order to be released as a single a new song had to be able to segue neatly into one of them. Needless to say, “Grapevine” sounded like nothing else at the time and even went so far as to abandon nearly all the conventions of the Motown sound. (Holland-Dozier-Holland’s towering triptych of paranoia with the Four Tops—“Reach Out I’ll Be There,” “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” and “Bernadette”—while working in slightly similar terrain, still kept the driving beat that was Motown’s signature and thus escaped censure.) Motown boss Berry Gordy refused to release the song until they relented to Whitfield’s pleading and used it as filler on Gaye’s A
ugust 1968 album, In the Groove. The song would have died a quiet death were it not for Chicago’s legendary disc jockey E. Rodney Jones. The WVON spinner abandoned his usual singles format and played the album track on his show and the phones wouldn’t stop ringing. Gordy finally agreed to release “Grapevine” as a single on November 30, 1968.

  It quickly became Motown’s biggest-selling single up to that point, and was #1 for seven weeks. Nineteen-sixty-eight was the year that both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, the year that the Vietnam War became the longest military conflict in American history, the year that Chicago policemen savagely beat hundreds of protesters at the Democratic National Convention. It was also the year when the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, appointed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson and under the leadership of Illinois governor Otto Kerner, delivered its report on the causes of the race riots that had swept major American cities during the mid-1960s. The commission found that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” The report recommended initiatives aimed at improving education, employment opportunities, housing, and public services in black urban communities. Most radically, it recommended a system of “income supplementation.” This was perhaps the strongest acknowledgment by the federal government that America was, indeed, a racist society and that the grievances and anger of urban African Americans were justified. However, by the time “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was released, Nixon was in power and the backlash had begun. The Kerner report became yet another promise that had gone up in smoke. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” captured the mood of the country as a whole, and most especially the African-American community. Originally based on a motif inspired by Ray Charles, the new simmering, moody, scary, paranoid “Grapevine” now seemed to connect the slang expression back to its roots as a term for the means of communication that blacks used during the Civil War. The rumors, the whispers, the uncertainty, the fear—they were all summed up by “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.”