Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

  One year later, as John Shaft was doing his thing in Africa, former Motown lackeys the Four Tops were wailing, “There’s not a street that you can walk / You gotta watch just who you’re talking to / They’re out to get ya / Can’t turn your back on a smiling face / Next thing you know, there ain’t no trace of you … / Gotta keep your eye on the passersby, better watch your step / ’Cause you never know where the knife will go and they ain’t missed yet.” Produced by Chicago soul stalwart Johnny Pate for the Shaft in Africa soundtrack, “Are You Man Enough” was largely pro forma blaxploitation: surging Hollywood strings, gratuitous wah-wah, hand claps, and a wonderfully cinematic intro.

  For the most part, the lyrics are pretty pro forma as well. Except for two remarkable passages that add layers of meaning to the conversation, where the above lines merely reiterate the terms of the debate. If “Back Stabbers” was all suggestive metaphors and uncanny timing, “Are You Man Enough” was unquestionable intention: “There’s no pretending it goes away, with every step that you take you’re paying your dues / And I ain’t lying / You got to struggle to see the light ’cause someone’s looking to steal your right to choose / And they don’t stop trying.”

  If Nixon was the perfect symbol of the changing same of Afro-America, then “Someone needs a friend just around the bend / Don’t you think you should be there? / Are you man enough when the going’s rough / Is it in your heart to care?” is a plea for new paradigms, echoing the critique implied by the O’Jays and forcefully stated by the Temptations and Norman Whitfield on “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.”

  * * *

  Long before Harvey Ball ever dreamed up his little yellow man, America was full of even more pernicious smiling caricatures. The pickaninny was a depiction of a black child with nappy hair, bulging eyes, enormous lips, a wide mouth usually being stuffed with watermelon and, almost inevitably, a huge, stupid grin. Most scholars date the origin of the pickaninny to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Topsy character from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but Topsy was a solemn girl meant to symbolize the brutality of slavery. The caricatures, both literary and figurative, that followed, however, universally depicted the “good-for-nothing gator bait” pickaninny as mirthful and more than happy with his or her lot. The pickaninny was a fixture in American popular culture until very recently, with such notable examples as Little Black Sambo, Buckwheat from the Our Gang films, and numerous minstrelsy characters. In 1932, Cab Calloway recorded a version of the old minstrelsy number, “There’s a Cabin in the Cotton”: “I got a feeling so sentimental / And I see a smile so gentle / When I think of old Virginny / And my pickaninny days.”

  Almost forty years later, Sly Stone was slightly less sentimental when he sang, “You caught me smilin’ again,” on his 1971 album There’s a Riot Goin’ On. Sly & the Family Stone’s early music was probably the greatest music of the ’60s because it actually practiced what it preached. A mixture of rock and soul, pop and funk, whites and blacks, men and women, Sly & the Family Stone represented the words of the ’60s dream made flesh. While the rock community paid lip service to tolerance and loving each other (probably only because they thought they could up their groupie quotient), the Family Stone was living it. The protest singers filled their songs with a self-righteousness that made their world a drag to live in, but the Family Stone made a joyful noise out of collectivity.

  By the end of 1969, though, Sly & the Family Stone was no longer the voice of a shiny, happy, new, integrated America. “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” of 1970 was a snarling record that intimated that Woodstock, and the group’s triumph there, was a sham: “Thank you for the party, but I could never stay.” The group’s new album was endlessly delayed: Sly wasn’t showing up for concerts, he was wrestling with drug addiction, there were rumors that black nationalist leaders were trying to force him to make his music more radical, he was getting death threats. When There’s a Riot Goin’ On finally emerged in November 1971, the joy, the gorgeous mosaic of voices, and the “different strokes for different folks” tolerance were all gone. In their places were scorn, derision, and dead spots so vast you felt like you’d just fallen off the end of the world. The deadest spot of all was the title track, which clocked in at 0:00. While Marvin Gaye was making What’s Going On as an article of faith in the power of pop music, Sly was highlighting his pessimism by sardonically pointing out that nothing was going on.

  With Sly turning to cataloging the betrayals of the ’60s dream, America needed a new black icon to make it feel good about itself. Instead of someone who still believed in the possibilities of the American experiment, this new icon was an eleven-year-old boy who didn’t know any better. While Michael Jackson was electrifying the world with his innocent charm, Sly was retreating into himself because he knew a lot better. “(You Caught Me) Smilin’” was a sketchy, slo-mo groove with deconstructed and incomplete JB horn charts, too wasted to try to fight their way through the narcotic haze—like Sly & the Family Stone in dub, or maybe in photonegative. Sly gurgled and wailed like a hungry baby, and sang like he was talking to his chest, railing like an incoherent drunk against the prevailing notion that ignorance is bliss. The song was a kiss-off—both to a lover and to his old constituency that didn’t want him to stop smiling; he had been dragged through the wringer and he was going to take you with him.

  The protagonist of the Persuaders’ 1971 hit, “Thin Line Between Love & Hate,” had also been left for dead. With Douglas “Smokey” Scott’s overenunciated lead vocals and the old-fashioned melodrama of the arrangement, “Thin Line Between Love & Hate” is a pretty standard cautionary tale. Until the last verse, where the put-upon wife exacts her revenge and sends the cheating bastard to the hospital. As the record fades out, Scott gets on his knees and belts, “Every smiling face in a happy world…,” like he’s got old-time religion. Unlike Willie Hutch’s 1974 “Theme From Foxy Brown,” which contrasts Foxy’s smiles and “foxy looks” to portray a sex bomb who’s not to be trifled with, it’s not too much of a leap to suggest that “Thin Line Between Love & Hate” can also be seen as a warning of what lurks behind the goofy grin of “the lazy, shiftless coon.”

  By the summer of ’75, Nixon had been pardoned, stagflation had set in, the leaders of the Black Power movement had been rounded up, exiled, or retreated into academia, and Van McCoy’s “The Hustle” was heralding the disco onslaught. However, replacing “The Hustle” at the top of the R&B charts was the last gasp for overtly political black music until the Furious Five’s “The Message.” “Fight the Power” was the Isley Brothers’ second biggest hit, and, of course, everyone remembers it for the “all this bullshit goin’ down” line. If the record company had its way, however, it would have been heard only in a bowdlerized version. Even if the DJs didn’t ignore the biz’s advice, however, the chorus made the point just as forcefully, so forcefully in fact that Public Enemy would borrow elements from it more than a decade later: “Time is truly wasting / There’s no guarantee / Smiles in the making / Fight the powers that be.” Despite the song’s militancy, “Fight the Power” amply demonstrated the tricky politics of crossover, particularly when a large portion of the record-buying and dancing public seemed to have no connection to the struggle. Journalist Frank Robertson recounted a fairly common scene at discotheques all across America in 1975: “The Chinese guy in a vest, no shirt, Levi’s bellbottoms and his dancing partner, a white girl with a pert steno permanent and a red hot pants suit … he’s arched backwards on his hands and feet and she is straddling him, pumping down and up to the beat of ‘Fight the Power.’”14

  Of course, there’s only so long you can stare down the barrel of a gun before you start to blink, but this is hardly to say that disco wiped the ambiguous smile off the face of black music. In 1977, a hopelessly obscure group called Smoggs released an example of that uniquely 1970s phenomenon fueled by the hysteria of the gas crisis, the comedy protest record. Produced by Joe Simon (that Joe Simon?), half of “Gotta Have a Little Talk With the Peanut Man”
was taken up by a guy calling himself Willie Ray Paul Sam Robert Jones Dunlap with a low, Southern drawl trying to make a phone call to the White House, insulting the operator when she won’t put him through to President Carter. The other half was an admittedly lightweight, James Brown–influenced plea for a helping hand in the face of escalating unemployment and high taxation, and it featured our pernicious little friend again: “Peanut, my life is in your hands / This ain’t no time to play no games / A handshake and a grin might mean goodwill / But a handshake and a grin don’t pay my bills.”

  In 1976, on its hit “Cherchez La Femme,” Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band’s Cory Daye sang, “They’ll tell you a lie with a Colgate smile, hey baby / Love you one second and hate you the next one / Oh ain’t it crazy, yeah / All I can say, of one thing I am certain / They’re all the same, the sluts and the saints,” on top of music that referenced both the controversial white “King of Jazz” Paul Whiteman and camp sex kitten chanteuse Eartha Kitt. On the surface, “Cherchez La Femme” was a straightforward, if very witty, cautionary tale of the deceit that is ever-present in sexual relationships, but its intimations of class and sophistication, its odd racial dynamics, its urbane wordsmithery spoke of a profound sense of dislocation. It wasn’t as wracked and wrought as “Back Stabbers” or “Smiling Faces Sometimes,” or as full of extramusical connotations, but as a pop-informed examination and exorcism of everyday treachery, “Cherchez La Femme” was just as powerful, despite its flapper dress, mink stole, and caked-on makeup.

  Admittedly, this was a rarity in disco. Naturally, in a genre all about pleasure, it would be hard to write songs that talked ambivalently about smiles, but pleasure itself was certainly talked about ambivalently. Disco’s lifestyle was inherently perilous: Its pleasure principle was the same as its mechanism of punishment and pain; clubgoers were seemingly imprisoned by fate; its black constituency was caught between two worlds; young people were trying to make their own culture but were trampled by the oppressive weight of the ’60s, by the sense that everything has been done already. Disco songs were awash in addiction and S&M metaphors (Black Ivory’s “Mainline,” Chic’s “Can’t Stand to Love You,” Tamiko Jones’s “Can’t Live Without Your Love,” Dee Dee Bridgewater’s “Bad For Me,” etc.) and imagery in which pleasure was as bad as pain (New York Citi Peech Boys’ “Don’t Make Me Wait,” Inner Life’s “I’m Caught Up [In a One Night Love Affair],” Loose Joints’ “Is It All Over My Face”).

  This sense of being trapped, of being a prisoner of fate and doom, was the ghost in disco’s machine, haunting the corners of the dance floors, wafting through the dry ice with every broken popper bottle. Despite disco’s happy-faced exterior, the sense of chill and foreboding of the “smiling faces” songs lurked underneath every percussion break, every snazzy string arrangement, every rhinestone synth fill. This was true from the very beginning. With its strict, unwavering 4/4 drumbeat mirroring the immutability of human nature described in the song, the skipping hi-hats, the conga fills, and the hand claps, the Temptations’ Norman Whitfield–produced 1973 single “Law of the Land” is perhaps the first disco single. Thematically, too, the song’s dark pessimism marks the bridge between disco and soul. Dennis Edwards preaches about the impossibility of escaping your fate, that life sucks and then you die: “What goes around comes around / What goes up must come down.” Soul had never been this defeatist before; it may have abandoned the church, but its language and force still came from gospel’s faith that deliverance was just around the corner. This new stoicism transferred over to disco, where the theme of predestination was writ large: Teddy Pendergrass’s “You Can’t Hide From Yourself” (“You can’t hide from yourself / Everywhere you go, there you are”), Chic’s “Good Times” (“Silly fool, you can’t change your fate”), Carl Bean’s gay pride anthem “I Was Born This Way” (“Nature did this to me”). Even the disco denizens themselves seemed to act according to some power that was beyond their control. As Andrew Holleran described the hard-core dancers at the early New York discotheques, “They seldom looked happy. They passed one another without a word in the elevator, like silent shades in hell, hell-bent on their next look from a handsome stranger. Their next rush from a popper. The next song that turned their bones to jelly and left them all on the dance floor with heads back, eyes nearly closed, in the ecstasy of saints receiving the stigmata. They pursued these things with such devotion that they acquired, after a few seasons, a haggard look, a look of deadly seriousness. Some wiped everything they could off their faces and reduced themselves to blanks. Yet even these, when you entered the hallway where they stood waiting to go in, would turn toward you all at once in that one unpremeditated moment (as when we see ourselves in a mirror we didn’t know was there), the same look on their faces: Take me away from this.”15

  “DON’T LET THE GREEN GRASS FOOL YOU”

  The Sound of Philadelphia

  The inventor of the concept of the white man’s burden isn’t the most likely of influences for one of soul’s most dramatic paradigm shifts, but then again the music that emerged from Philadelphia in the late ’60s and early ’70s often made for strange bedfellows. Jerry Butler, the original lead singer of the Impressions and one of the mainstays of the smooth Chicago soul sound, was in the offices of his record company sharing a corned beef sandwich with Philadelphian producers and songwriters Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. They were talking about soul artists who had managed to sustain their careers over many years when Butler mentioned the Rudyard Kipling poem “If—” (“If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…”), and the lightbulb went on in Gamble’s head.16 The idea became “Only the Strong Survive,” an R&B #1 and pop #4 for Butler in April 1969.

  With its creamy, Wes Montgomery–style guitar licks (no chicken scratch—the definitive R&B lick—here), resonant vibraphone, prominent string section, and a kick drum that sounded like a timpani purloined from the Philadelphia Philharmonic, “Only the Strong Survive” was a unique presence on the American airwaves in 1969 (the only element that sounded secondhand was the bass line, which was lifted directly from Fontella Bass’s “Rescue Me”). The record was preceded at the top of the R&B charts by the Temptations’ “Runaway Child Running Wild,” James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose,” and Sly & the Family Stone’s “Everyday People,” and immediately followed by the Isley Brothers’ “It’s Your Thing”—all examples of uncompromising psychedelic soul or hard funk. In comparison, “Only the Strong Survive” was like slipping on a smoking jacket and relaxing in front of the fire with a snifter of brandy. The warmth, pinpoint instrumental definition, and gently uplifting momentum of “Only the Strong Survive” heralded the Philadelphia sound as the new direction for African-American music.

  Philadelphia had been a presence on the national soul scene since 1961, when the Pentagons recorded “Until Then,” a tentative stab at the mix of dinner-club orchestral arrangement and storefront-church passion that would be perfected when Philadelphian Garnet Mimms recorded “Cry Baby” in New York in 1963 with fellow Philadelphian exile Jerry Ragavoy. Equally significant, though, was Philadelphia’s jazz community—which boasted such titans as John Coltrane, Philly Joe Jones, Sun Ra, Jimmy McGriff, Bill Doggett, and Jimmy Heath, and their values of serpentine lines and intricate harmonic relationships—and the city’s teen idol production line at the Cameo/Parkway and Chancellor labels: Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Bobby Rydell, Chubby Checker, and Dee Dee Sharp. Thanks to the close-knit nature of the City of Brotherly Love’s music community, many of the musicians who spent the day working on Frankie Avalon and Chubby Checker sessions would play with Bill Doggett and Philly Joe Jones at night, and this mix of jazz style and pop vernacular would come to characterize the Philadelphia soul sound.

  The song that really put Philadelphia soul on the map was Barbara Mason’s “Yes, I’m Ready,” a pop #5 hit in the spring of 1965. The record—a torrent of virginal teen longing—was produced by the Dyno-D
ynamic Productions team: organist Johnny Styles; Luther Randolph; lead singer of the Larks, Weldon McDougal III; and local radio DJ Jimmy Bishop. They used the Larks’ backing band—guitarists Norman Harris and Bobby Eli, drummer Earl Young, and bassist Ronnie Baker—as their house band, and on “Yes, I’m Ready” the backup singer was a young songwriter called Kenny Gamble. While not entirely stylistically apposite, the record established both the talent pool and the impossibly lush strings that worked with the rhythm rather than against it (on “Yes, I’m Ready,” they sound as close to Bollywood’s gushing string cascades as any Western recording) that would characterize the Philly sound.

  Equally crucial, although not as popular, were a series of records by a vocal group called the Volcanoes, featuring the same musicians. Released a couple of months after “Yes, I’m Ready,” the Volcanoes’ “Storm Warning” was the first step toward the revolution of “Only the Strong Survive.” While the beat and the interplay between the drums and piano were straight out of Berry Gordy’s songbook (which helped it become a Northern Soul classic), the jazzy guitar that introduces the record and the vibraphone chimes throughout mark this as a significant advance on the Motown blueprint. This was where Philadelphia’s jazz scene really made its mark on soul music, particularly the influence of George Shearing’s legendary quintet recordings of 1949. Shearing was a British pianist who brought a vibes player, Marjorie Hyams, into his group, and the block-chord interplay between the two introduced a new sound to jazz. On “Storm Warning,” it is vibist Vince Montana fleshing out the melody led by an undermixed piano. The lead being played by the piano and vibraphone would become the critical component in the Philly sound. As Weldon McDougal said, “The Volcanoes records were really like when Philadelphia started developing their own thing. Up until then most uptempo Philly records were based on Detroit things … The vibes sound, the way the strings sweetened things without getting in the way of the beat, all the rhythm sounds started coming together on those records. The songs were pretty good too. Kenny and Leon wrote some of ’em.”17