Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

  The Latin element was distinctly played down on Salsoul Orchestra’s next single, but it was sacrificed for the rhythm engine that drove that best of the Philly productions—Young, Baker, Harris—as well as a large portion of the rest of MFSB, including Bobby Eli, keyboardist Ron Kersey, string section leader Don Renaldo, and vocalists Barbara Ingram, Evette Benton, and Carla Benson. “Tangerine” was a disco reworking of the old Johnny Mercer number that was a hit for Jimmy Dorsey and featured Young reprising the beat made famous on “The Love I Lost” along with guitar comping from Harris that was somehow reminiscent of a roller-rink organ. With the mass defection of MFSB, this upstart New York label was suddenly in possession of the most sought-after studio musicians in the world and very quickly became the most important disco label on the New York scene with Double Exposure’s “Ten Percent” (the first commercially available twelve-inch single),30 Silvetti’s “Spring Rain,” Ripple’s “The Beat Goes On and On,” Anthony White’s “Block Party,” First Choice’s “Let No Man Put Asunder,” and “Dr. Love,” Gary Criss’s “Rio De Janeiro,” Judy Cheeks’s “Mellow Lovin’,” and Salsoul Orchestra’s “You’re Just the Right Size,” “Nice ’n’ Naasty,” and “Magic Bird of Fire” in its first couple of years.

  Montana’s arrangements for Salsoul Orchestra were, well, more orchestral than most of the MFSB records. Perhaps because he had anticipated the arrangements that would characterize disco—particularly the string stabs and the way the strings, wah-wah guitar, and vibes all interacted—in 1969 when he arranged a bubblegum funk record called Keem-O-Sabe made by a group of Philadelphia studio stalwarts (including Eli, Len Barry, Jon Madara, and a certain Daryl Hall) under the name the Electric Indian, strings were given a more prominent role in Salsoul Orchestra. It was hardly as if the records were drowning in saccharine orchestration (certainly less than almost all of the Thom Bell productions), but the records attracted scorn from people accusing them of denuding black music of its thrust and vigor. “The same players who performed with such fire on ‘Bad Luck’ and the anthemic ‘I Love Music’ made, recording as the Ritchie Family and Salsoul Orchestra, a series of incredibly insipid records, eventually helping drown the Philly sound in clichés,” wrote R&B historian Nelson George. “The sales of … the fake Philly sound of Salsoul Records—with a stamp of approval by prominent deejays [who, notes George, are mostly gay, and he castigates them for championing female vocalists over male singers]—made the majors believe that these musical technologies would accelerate the black crossover process. So the new dance music inspired by the inventions of Gamble and Huff, came to celebrate a hedonism and androgyny that contradicted their patriarchal philosophy.”31

  Yes, Salsoul Orchestra used female voices to utter single entendres that wouldn’t be out of place in a Carry On movie, but to say that a few tongue-in-cheek references to sexuality defiled Gamble and Huff’s vision of racial uplift, particularly since the MFSB recordings were primarily instrumental, is preposterous. Furthermore, the soft soul sound of Gamble and Huff associate Thom Bell was certainly as androgynous and antipatriarchal (or at least apatriarchal) as anything released on Salsoul, or any other pure disco label, for that matter. What George really seems to miss, though, is that Salsoul Orchestra records are quite simply hotter than the MFSB records. Perhaps George thinks that the fiercer rhythm section of Salsoul Orchestra is somehow more hedonistic than the penthouse jazz of MFSB. Sure, Salsoul Orchestra recorded medleys of Christmas songs and backed Charo, but regardless of the chintz it had to work with, Montana shined the spotlight on Young and Baker. “Basically, I’m a percussionist, and I like to hear my drums,” Montana said. “They’re what people dance to … I know what my vibes sound like one foot from my ear, and that’s what I expect it to sound like coming out of the speaker. And I think that’s what the people want too, the real sound. They’re buying sounds today.”32 Using a grain-brain, an electronic gate that cuts out certain frequencies, on each different percussion sound, Montana was able to achieve even more instrumental definition than Gamble and Huff, particularly on the bottom end. As journalist Davitt Sigerson said at the time, “Unlike the masters Gamble & Huff, whose MFSB productions are often frankly vapid, drowned in slick and unimaginative strings and horns, Salsoul keeps the rhythm tracks as hot as Wick Fowler’s Three-Alarm Texas Chili, and brings up Earl Young’s fine and usually undermixed snare drum … Wah wah guitar, clavinet, bongo and conga cook with exceptional clarity.”33

  “DON’T LET ME CROSS OVER”

  Disco, the Black Middle Class, and the Politics of Crossover

  Philadelphia International’s inability or refusal to wholeheartedly embrace disco caused the label to fade from the mainstream after 1976. While the label continued to have R&B hits with the O’Jays, the Jones Girls, and Teddy Pendergrass, its last significant pop hit was perhaps unsurprisingly the record that most unequivocally espoused the disco aesthetic—McFadden & Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” in 1979. Written and performed by the pair behind the O’Jays’ “Back Stabbers,” who claimed that the song was simply a celebration of the fact that Gamble and Huff had finally let the pair into the studio as performers in their own right, “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” was one of those all-purpose cheerleading disco anthems like Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” (which followed it at the top of the R&B charts) that seemed to fit any circumstance and any cause. Less plush, less preachy, less bluesy than most Philadelphia International records, “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” ditched the ambivalence of old in favor of firmly buying in. The music was positively triumphant—more like Bill Conti’s version of the Philly sound on the Rocky soundtrack than Gamble and Huff—while John Whitehead dispensed NAACP platitudes like a hip guidance counselor: “There’s been so many things that’s held us down / But now it looks like things are finally comin’ around / I know we’ve got a long way to go / And where we’ll end up I don’t know / But we won’t let nothing hold us back / We’re puttin’ ourselves together / We’re polishin’ up our act / And if you’ve ever been held down before / I know you refuse to be held down anymore.”

  This vision of upward mobility disguised as an assertive statement of black pride fit in perfectly not only in the discotheque but on black radio as well. By 1979, black radio in the United States had changed its complexion from a more grassroots, community-oriented medium to one that more closely resembled the mainstream American dream. The instigator of this trend was one of the most iconic DJs in the history of American radio, Frankie Crocker. In the mid-1970s Crocker was the afternoon/evening drive-time DJ and, more important, the program director at New York’s biggest black-owned radio station, WBLS. Instead of waiting for the promotion men to come to him to pitch records, Crocker went out on the disco circuit—frequenting places like the aspirational black disco Leviticus at 45 West 33rd Street, Studio 54 and, most famously, the Paradise Garage—to discover his own, and the playlist changed accordingly. Crocker’s mix of music was elegant, suave, sophisticated and, most important, color-blind. Crocker played off-the-wall (for black radio) stuff like Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” and long album cuts as well as singles. Under his stewardship, WBLS changed from “the total black experience in sound” to “the world’s best looking sound.” When he went on air, Crocker locked the studio door, turned off the studio lights, and lit a candle in order to create the right mood for his chic style. At the time Crocker called himself “Hollywood,” and he envisioned a post–civil rights world of cocktail parties full of urbane chatter around swimming pools and debonair brothers in earth-tone suits making business connections. “Hollyw-o-o-o-d!… is not in California; it’s the main thought stream of the new disco scene, a seductive freeway straight to the heart of all hard partyers,” was how journalist Mark Jacobson described Crocker’s world. “It’s got nothing to do with drugs, although one might bring some along for the ride. Hollyw-o-o-o-d! is a suspension of reality, not an escape from it. It’s modulated blues and browns, not
flashy pimp oranges. It’s Walt Frazier dribbling through all hostile hands, playing ah-fense and dee-fense so smoothly you can’t tell which team has the ball. It’s Superfly and Shaft, not Martin Luther King and Malcolm X … Frankie [Crocker] says, ‘Hollyw-o-o-o-d! is just something good, very good … it’s just another dream … we all need to dream.’”34

  Just like Philadelphia International’s, Crocker’s fantasy of the good life was fueled by technology as well as the music itself. “None of the FM radio stations were really utilizing stereo back then; WBLS were the first to really bring that home,” remembers Danny Krivit, a budding disco DJ at the time. “Even with their announcements, they would go [mimics stereo panning] ‘W-B-L-S’ and really make you understand it. They were starting to play records that other stations weren’t; radio was still a 3:45 maximum-length medium, very formatted. BLS was breaking out of that, playing album cuts, the album versions of hit records. ‘Love Is the Message’—a long album-only instrumental that’s also kind of disco, basically it just isn’t radio—became kind of popular, and BLS jumped all over it to show how different they were.”35

  WBLS’s plush stereo sound demanded a new kind of music. Of course, the sumptuous arrangements of Philadelphia International and the lavish orchestrations of Barry White fit the bill perfectly, but even relatively straightforward R&B that didn’t have symphonic pretensions started to become more “refined,” more “Hollywood.” “The result has been a new genre of black rhythm-and-blues music that is totally different from the driving, maximum pentration of ‘danceable’ 60s R&B,” Jacobson wrote. “The new songs are like big barroom fans that sweep the air around you as you dance. They make you want to roller-skate. They’re softer, more playful, almost approaching mirth. The lyrics have little to do with the blues … The singing, in the Smokey Robinson tradition, is lilting, spacey, filled with otherworldly falsettos. Very few tunes have bedrock, gravelly blues voices. Horn parts aren’t low-life and King Curtis–Jr. Walker things; they’re brassy and up.”36

  This new sound was epitomized by a vocal group from Los Angeles, the Hues Corporation. St. Clair Lee, Fleming Williams, and H. Ann Kelley first got together in 1969 and named themselves after the company owned by billionaire recluse Howard Hughes. They released a couple of flops in the early ’70s before appearing on three tracks on the soundtrack of 1972’s Blacula. In 1973, they went into the studio with the Crusaders as their backing band and recorded Freedom for the Stallion. The album went nowhere, but one track, “Rock the Boat,” was popular at discotheques and generated enough buzz to propel the track onto radio playlists and, almost a year after it was released, to the top of the American pop charts. The song was a tortuous extended metaphor about a love affair on the rocks, but the title phrase, which was repeated ad nauseam, seemed to echo the message of upward mobility that stations like WBLS were projecting: “Don’t rock the boat.” The music—gently lilting bass line, trade-wind string washes, breezy ersatz gospelisms straight out of the supper club—certainly wouldn’t have done any damage to any seafaring vessel as it lapped against the hull like the tide going out.

  Crocker and disco musicians like the Hues Corporation, Barry White, George McCrae, the Joneses, the Originals, Van McCoy, Jimmy Ruffin, and Carol Douglas supplanted soul’s roadhouse with the penthouse and the church with the discotheque. In many ways disco represented the ideal of integration as laid out by the civil rights legislation of the ’60s. “Disco, unlike many other entertainment mediums, has exhibited an extraordinary ability to bring together people of varying colors, races, ideologies, sexual preferences and social financial levels, in an ecumenical dialog of music and dance which transcends many of the limitations of petty everyday prejudices,” wrote Billboard’s Radcliffe Joe.37 Even during the heyday of the ’60s, it was still remarkable that Otis Redding, Richie Havens, and Sly Stone would appear on the same stage as rock artists. As Rolling Stone’s Abe Peck said, by the mid-1970s, “black style [was] more accessible to whites than it was during the Smoldering Sixties.”38

  This accessibility paralleled the rise of the black middle class; it signified the transformation of Afro-America from underclass to full participation in the American dream. The percentage of black families below the low-income level shrank from 48.1 percent in 1959 to 27.8 percent in 1974.39 “From 1965–69, the percentage of blacks making less than $3,000 decreased, while the percentage of blacks earning over $10,000 increased to 28%. In 1965, ten percent of all young blacks were in college; six years later that figure was 18%. By 1972, 2,264 blacks served as elected officials, the highest number in American history at that time. The total annual income of black America was $100 billion.”40

  The problem with this economic and political miracle, though, was that civil rights legislation largely delivered what it promised: the equation of racial liberation with entrée into corporate America. It was a vision of success and salvation that had nothing to do with uplifting the African-American community as a whole, but rather sought to encourage individual achievement and to promote equality and justice as the attainment of white standards of excellence. As a result, Nelson George wrote, “the amount of [black] income invested in black communities was minuscule, and most of that college-trained talent became workers in established white businesses, not independent entrepreneurs. Moreover, many of the economic gains were created by government intervention and monitoring. Blacks were not, then, growing into an independent economic force, but were becoming an increasingly lucrative market for white-provided commodities.”41

  But even this imperfect position was perilous and difficult to maintain. As journalist Ellis Cose wrote, citing the research of sociologist Sharon Collins, “For blacks, middle-class status was largely a ‘politically dependent condition.’ A disproportionate number of blacks worked for the government, often in ‘black-related’ agencies, others owed their jobs to ‘legislation that forced employers to hire blacks.’ Still others were in positions that ‘depended on money being funneled from the government into the private sector in all sorts of ways,’ from job-training programs to minority set asides. If the government had not been looming in the background, ‘these people would not have been hired for the most part.’”42

  The fragility of status and the sacrifices of assimilation have long been conditions suffered by immigrant groups throughout the world. Of course, the vast majority of African Americans weren’t recent or voluntary immigrants, and it took them hundreds of years to attain a position that most ethnicities reach within two or three generations. Although disco mostly championed assimilation, the tensions and resentment of the new black middle class were articulated in two extraordinary records by one of the original prophets of the integrationist aesthetic.

  As one of the principal songwriters at Motown, Lamont Dozier had been one of the architects of the “sound of young America,” applying Fordist production methods to the gospel tradition. Dozier left Motown, along with songwriting partners Brian and Eddie Holland, in 1968 and started writing more political material that would have never made it past Quality Control under Berry Gordy’s regime. “Fish Ain’t Bitin’” (1974), Dozier’s second single as a solo artist, begins like a standard early ’70s “times are bad, woe is me” complaint before turning into one of the few records to openly attack Nixon’s racial policies head-on: “Tricky Dick is trying to be slick / And the short end of the stick / Is all I’m gonna get / Tricky Dick, please quit … lord, when will I overcome or am I just destined, destined to be a bum?… can’t afford to be lazy when the cost of living’s gone crazy.” Where other soul records that explicitly critiqued Nixon—the Honeydrippers’ “Impeach the President,” Weldon Irvine’s “Watergate,” the JB’s’ “You Can Have Watergate Just Gimme Some Bucks and I’ll Be Straight”—were aimed more at Watergate and his duplicity, the lyric referencing “We Shall Overcome” gave “Fish Ain’t Bitin’” a different dimension. The flip side was “Breaking Out All Over,” which smushed together a model stunted funk groove (short, really
clipped guitar riff and undermixed horn exclamations) in one channel and more sophisticated chord changes and instrumentation (flutes, soaring strings, a piano somewhere between the church, supper club, and Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert) in the other—a near-perfect exposition of the “Hollywood” style even if the lyrics about the after-effects of trying to kick an addictive love affair were darker than the norm.

  On 1975’s “Going Back to My Roots,” Dozier sought to resolve this double consciousness: “Zippin’ up my boots / Going back to my roots / To the place of my birth / Back to down earth … / I’ve been living in a world of fantasy / I’m going back to reality / I’ve been searching for riches I had all the time / And finding out that happiness was just a state of mind / I’m going back home, back where I belong … / I’ve been standing in the rain / Drenched and soaked with pain / Tired of short time benefits / And being exposed to the elements / Picking up the pieces of what’s left of me / Going back to nest in my family tree.” The arrangement shifts almost imperceptibly from a standard, but admittedly very funky, disco-era Crusaders (both keyboardist Joe Sample and reeds player Wilton Felder played on the session) groove—the big, blocky piano chords, the lush guitar effects, the stringlike synth fills, Paulinho da Costa’s run-of-the-mill percussion runs and, most important, the very straight-ahead main rhythm—to, all of a sudden, at about the five-minute mark, percussion and the tightly coiled (very African sounding) guitar riffs. Then the breakdown (all Brazilian percussion and vocal whoops and a massed African chorale) just builds and builds, but never resolves itself—it just fades out. The song was covered in 1981 by Odyssey, but that version begins with part of the African chant and a guitar riff and a bass line that are distinctly more African than at the beginning of Dozier’s version. In other words, there is no journey in Odyssey’s version, whereas Dozier’s original reenacts the restlessness and strains at the heart of the new black middle-class dream.