Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco
Page 20
Dozier’s notion of going back to one’s roots is escapism as surely as Crocker’s cocktail-party paradise, but it was escapism based on betrayal rather than a desire to buy in. Although “Going Back to My Roots” was a smallish disco hit, its message ran counter to disco’s prevailing discourse. The problem was that disco was championing a view of the world that was being dismantled as it was being celebrated. The economic crises of the 1970s disproportionately affected African Americans largely because their economic gains were heavily dependent on government intervention. As sociologist Bart Landry declared, “Without prosperity, the civil rights laws lost much of their impact.” Indeed, Landry found that the recession in the early ’70s resulted not only in a slowdown in the expansion of the black middle class but also a rollback: “Close examination of the data from the 1973–75 and 1980–82 recessions reveals that middle-class blacks not only fared worse than whites during these periods but they actually lost ground relative to whites.”43
While disco’s view of the world was faltering in the black suburbs, it was positively collapsing in America’s urban ghettos. Even the growth of black political power (or, at least, representation) couldn’t help the condition of the inner city. “The dilemma for urban blacks is that they are gaining political influence in large urban areas (in 1975 blacks were mayors of 11 large metropolitan cities with populations of 100,000 or more) at the very time when the political power and influence of the cities are on the wane,” wrote sociologist William Julius Wilson. “The growth of corporate manufacturing, of retail and wholesale trade on the metropolitan periphery; the steady migration of impoverished minorities to the central city; the continuous exodus of the more affluent families to the suburbs; and, consequently, the relative decline of the central-city tax base have made urban politicians increasingly dependent on state and federal sources of funding in order to maintain properly the services that are vital for community health and stability. Whereas state and federal funds contributed about 25% to major-city revenues a decade ago, their contribution today amounts to about 50%. Thus, America’s metropolises are increasingly controlled by politicians whose constituencies do not necessarily live in those cities. It is this politics of dependency that changes the meaning and reduces the significance of the greater black participation in urban political processes.”44
This trend was repeated in the music industry. Disco held out the promise of crossover success on a mass scale. It never materialized. In fact, the exact opposite was true. As Radcliffe Joe wrote, “It is one of the great ironies of the multi-billion dollar discotheque phenomenon that while the whole concept has its roots in black music and black lifestyles, it has emerged as something of a mixed blessing for blacks.”45 According to Joe, in 1973 (just before the disco boom took off), black artists accounted for thirty-six of the one hundred best-selling singles in the United States; by 1978, the number was down to twenty-one. Nelson George expressed the same trend slightly differently: From 1967 to 1973, the average R&B number one would reach #9 on the pop charts; between 1974 and 1976, the average fell to #15; and in 1978, it was down to #22. While this average roller-coastered up and down, it hit a low in 1981 of #30. As Joe concluded, “A survey of the leading charts shows that disco has not, as had originally been anticipated, made it easier for black artists to enjoy crossover … to the pop charts.”46
This sense of betrayal, shattered hopes, and fear was the dark heart behind disco’s glossy veneer. Disco was a party, but it was celebrating a world that was slipping away; it was movin’ on up at the same time as it was imprisoned by fate. Salvation, whether by the grace of God or the power of the dollar, was no longer something to believe in or hold out for. The only solidity was provided by the “changing same”: No matter what they promise, they just find another way to pull out the rug from under your feet. While this theme popped up from time to time on many of disco’s finest records—“Going Back to My Roots,” the Temptations’ “Law of the Land,” Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “Bad Luck”—it would become writ large by disco’s greatest group.
“DON’T BE A DRAG, PARTICIPATE”
Chic
It’s New Year’s Eve 1977. Bassist Bernard Edwards and guitarist Nile Rodgers have had the year of their lives. The two studio musicians abandoned a lifetime of anonymous session work to make a name for themselves by wholeheartedly embracing the disco boom. Working with a few other musicians and singers as Chic, the two have scored two of the year’s biggest dance floor hits, “Dance, Dance, Dance” and “Everybody Dance,” and released an album with the giant Atlantic label. To top it all off, singer/model/actress/New York nightlife queen Grace Jones wants to work with them on her next record and has invited them to her gig at Studio 54.
Edwards and Rodgers are dressed to the nines. “That night both Bernard and I were in black ties,” Rodgers told journalist Anthony Haden-Guest. “I had a Cerutti dinner jacket and Bernard had an Armani. We were killin’. I probably had a wing-collar shirt, with a decorative front, but not lacy. Pleated, with studs. The whole bit. Spectator shoes. You know, two-tone … You know, Grace Jones! And we were Chic. We wanted to look Chic. We wanted to smell Chic!”47 However, it’s snowing and the slush is ruining their threads. They make their way around back and tell the doorman that they’re on the guest list. He doesn’t find their names. After pleading their case to no avail, Edwards and Rodgers go to the main entrance to join the throngs desperately hoping that the doorman, Marc Benecke, would deem them worthy for entrance into the hallowed confines of Steve Rubell’s pleasure palace.
Rodgers’s girlfriend at the time knew Benecke, who would frequently get him into the club. “I’m waving and jumping,” Rodgers said. “But Marc totally disregarded us. He didn’t give us a second look.”48 They stayed around till one in the morning, hoping that Jones would realize what was happening and make an effort to get them inside. She didn’t, and Rodgers’s precious Spectators were ruined.
Frustrated and dejected, they made their way a few blocks through the snow to Rodgers’s apartment on Fifty-second Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues. On the way, they bought marijuana, cocaine, and a bottle of champagne and had their own party. “We resorted to using music therapeutically, which is what we had always done up until that point,” Rodgers said. “Bernard and I started jamming, just guitar and bass. We were just yelling obscenities: ‘Fuck Studio 54 … Fuck ’em … Fuck off … Fuck those scumbags … Fuck them!’ And we were laughing, entertaining the hell out of ourselves. We had a blast. And it finally hit Bernard. He said, ‘Hey Nile, what you’re playing sounds really good!’”49
After working with Rodgers’s guitar part for a little while, Edwards came up with a bass line and then a chorus. “We said, ‘Damn, that sounds like a song,’” Rodgers said. “And we wrote a whole obscene song about fucking Studio 54 and those assholes. But it had melody and texture and form. And we said, ‘This is hysterical.’ So we recorded it. We made a little demo. And after we laughed, we said, ‘You know, this is really catchy!’
“We changed ‘Fuck Off’ to ‘Freak Off,’” Rodgers continues. “But that sounded lame. Then we realized that the biggest dance in America at the time was called the Freak … We changed one word, ‘Off’ to ‘Out,’ and the floodgates opened up.”50 They used Chubby Checker’s version of Hank Ballard’s “The Twist” as a template, reworked the lyrics, finally changed the title to “Le Freak,” and those floodgates opened to the tune of six million copies sold. “Within 25 to 30 minutes we had the biggest hit record of our lives. It’s still the biggest hit single in Warner Brothers’ history. And as far as copyrights are concerned, it’s the third largest in the history of music, after ‘White Christmas’ by Irving Berlin and ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ by Johnny Marks.”51
So the biggest non-Christmas record ever and disco’s most popular anthem started life as a snarling guitar vamp that married funk groove with punk attitude. For most musicians, particularly disco musicians, this would merely be an amus
ing anecdote, a story rehashed and retold time and again on nostalgia television programs. However, for ex-art rockers Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, the story of “Le Freak” is emblematic of a career spent caught between different worlds, daring to peer beneath disco’s glittering surface and chronicling the heights and depths of the disco dream.
* * *
Rock fans talked about disco denizens as if they were lemmings marching to the cliffs, while soul patrons lampooned them as robots who were faking the funk. They criticized Chic for being escapist music when pop music is meant to be all about escape in the first place. (Why these same people didn’t say the same thing about Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell singing “If I Could Build My Whole World Around You” while Detroit was burning around them is a mystery.) Regardless, the mid- to late ’70s demanded that kind of music, particularly in New York. In a climate of stagflation, when the country at large was being held hostage by OPEC, when New York City owed fealty to the bond-issuing robber barons who bailed the city out of bankruptcy, when the mercenary laissez-faire capitalism of the ’80s was just starting to take hold, when Reagan and the rollback of civil rights legislation was just around the corner, and without the moral consensus of the ’60s, the only possible reaction was escapism. But Chic wasn’t just about escape. While they enjoyed shaking their groove thing as much as anybody, they also recognized hedonism’s limitations and saw its dangers.
Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were both twenty years old when they met in 1972 as members of the Big Apple Band backing the vocal group New York City, which had a big hit in 1973 with “I’m Doin’ Fine Now.” Breaking off from New York City, the Big Apple Band—when it wasn’t backing up Luther Vandross’s group—began to play a ferociously metallic brand of Miles Davis–esque jazz-fusion that would have cleared the floor at Studio 54 in the blink of an eye, but even that was nothing compared to the black rock maelstrom that Rodgers and Edwards concocted in their other group, Allah and the Knife-Wielding Punks. It was a long way indeed from Rodgers’s days as a guitarist in a Sesame Street touring band.
Before laying down some tasty licks over which Big Bird and the Cookie Monster would drop science, however, Rodgers had played guitar on original Last Poet Kain’s Blue Guerrilla album in 1971. The album’s psychedelic soul and lounge-jazz arrangements and surreal black arts–inspired poetry hinted at Rodgers’s adolescence as an acid freak and member of the Black Panthers. “The very first time I took acid was with Timothy Leary, and I didn’t even know who he was,” Rodgers claims. “I was just this little black kid in Los Angeles who wanted to be a pimp or the Temptations because that’s what the music stars looked like to me—they were all pimped out with the suits and the ruffled shirts and the wraparound cuff links and the white shoes. At thirteen years old, that’s what I wanted to be like. Then one day I went out to this thing called the Teenage Fair and it was all of these hippies, and I had never seen hippies, never seen white guys with long hair like that. They really looked like they had come from another planet, but they looked so cool to me … These hippies said to me, ‘Hey, wow, you guys want to take a trip?’ We thought they meant to like go someplace, so we were like, ‘Sure.’ We’re thirteen, we don’t care about anything, let’s go, ‘Where you guys want to go?’ ‘Oh man, we’re gonna go take a trip.’ We’re like, ‘Great, let’s go take a trip.’ And they took us up to the house in the Hollywood Hills and Timothy Leary was there and we took LSD. We couldn’t believe anything so small could do anything: ‘Oh, yeah, we’re gonna get high on that.’ Meanwhile to us, we used to drink quarts of vodka and entire bottles of wine and vomit and all that stuff. ‘Okay, this little piece of paper’s gonna get us high. Yeah, sure, no problem.’ Two days later I show up back at my house. My grandmother’s got the cops looking for me and everything. So I went from Motown to totally into the Doors in one day. I went from ‘Don’t Mess With Bill’ and ‘Hunter Gets Captured by the Game’ and ‘Ain’t That Peculiar’ to, the very next day, ‘This is the end / Beautiful friend / Mother, I want to [he screams].’ So needless to say, my grandmother thought I was psychotic. And then what happened was that the music also affects your social scene. Now if you start to gravitate to other kids who listen to that type of music, there’s usually a certain philosophy that goes along with it all. Then you get political, then you get radical, then you get old, right? [laughs] So I got political and we’re all ‘Peace now,’ and the cops and National Guard would beat us up. So you take that for a few years, and then you go, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s try to fight back.’ Politics in America got very radical, people got killed at Kent State and stuff. I joined the Black Panther Party when I was a senior in high school.”52
While for many, the disco era was the death of politics and struggle and meaning in popular culture, Rodgers views disco as almost the inevitable result of the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement. “We were tricked,” he says. “The music was the reflection of society. We were tricked into believing that we had really made all these leaps and bounds. In other words, the Vietnam War stopped. When the Vietnam War stopped, it made us feel empowered—we made that happen, it was all the protesters. The protesters joined forces: It was the Black Power movement with the gay power movement with the women power movement. We were all out there protesting together. And when that ended, it masqueraded as liberation for everybody. It masqueraded as ‘Whoah, we did it. Guess what, we’re equal.’ And then they stopped the draft. So there’s no more draft, it’s a volunteer army, so black people aren’t gonna be pulled into the service unfairly and in unfair numbers and blah blah blah. And gay rights and women and everybody—wow, this is great! So what happens? You celebrate. And that’s all that happened. In the middle seventies, we started celebrating the victories.”53
In 1976, with disco celebrating at full force, Rodgers and Edwards recruited drummer Tony Thompson and vocalists Alfa Anderson and Norma Jean Wright to produce a record called “Dance, Dance, Dance.” After toying with the names Boyz and Orange Julius, Edwards suggested the name Chic to the new group. “Tony and I thought it was the most absurd name we’d heard,” Rodgers remembers. “Tony and I were rock guys, we wanted to be, you know, the Punks and the blah blah blah. ‘Hey, we could be the Chic Punks, the punks who dress up in whatever.’ But Bernard explained to us why it made sense. We were big Kiss fans, and Bernard was like, ‘Check this out: Kiss is a k, an i, and two s’s, and Chic has an h, an i, and two c’s.’ In the world of rock-and-roll logic, that was as clear as a bell to me and Tony … ‘Wow, hey, ’Nard, you’re on to something here. This is cool.’ And in the other band we loved, Roxy Music, Roxy’s got four letters. ‘Wait a minute, we got four letters—Roxy, Kiss, Chic—phhh, done. Done. We got it. You’re on the money here. We understand. Bernard, our fearless leader, you’ve got it.’ That’s it, that’s the beginning of Chic.”54
The newly christened group proceeded to shop the demo, and after a string of rejections, the record was finally picked up by Buddah and then by Atlantic. Why anyone passed on the record is an absolute mystery: A more perfect club record has yet to be devised. Tales of music causing speaker damage are routinely bandied about regarding all sorts of records, but when you play them at home they barely tax your subwoofer. In the mid-1970s, however, “Dance, Dance, Dance” destroyed many a cabinet: It was the first record to feature subbass. Before “Dance, Dance, Dance,” bass tones below a frequency of 60 Hz were taken out in the process of mastering a record, but Rodgers and Edwards realized the effect that these shuddering tones had in a club and insisted that they be kept in. Combine these bass quakes with Tony Thompson’s punishing, metronomic drum technique (as Rodgers has said, “He hits the drums harder than anyone I’ve ever seen”), and you have a record that practically bludgeoned you into submission on the dance floor.
Over this galloping rhythm that sounded like, well, lemmings marching over a cliff, Anderson and Wright intoned the title phrase like deers caught in the headlights. To drive the point home, they borrowed Gig Y
oung’s catchphrase “Yowsah, yowsah, yowsah” from They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Sydney Pollack’s filmic attack on the American psyche that uses a dance marathon as its setting. “When you talk about ‘Dance, Dance, Dance,’ after we had seen that film, we realized that it was about these people who were trying to survive during the Depression,” Rodgers declares. “It was spectacle entertainment, it was like being in the Colosseum in Rome. People were going to watch these people, and a lot of them died from sheer exhaustion, so they were entertained ’cause they could hear the music and all that stuff, but it was torture, it was physical torture. It was interesting that it was so popular to watch people endure that kind of stuff.”55 Typical of the mind-set that these art-rockers at heart were lampooning, no one got it, and “Dance, Dance, Dance” reached #6 on the American charts in 1977.
The million-selling success of “Dance, Dance, Dance” landed the group an album deal with Atlantic. Their self-titled debut album contained the first disco song that Edwards and Rodgers wrote together, “Everybody Dance.” As with “Dance, Dance, Dance,” the song was based around a couple of outlandish concepts; this time, though, they were a bit closer to the heart of the disco denizens. “Everybody Dance” clocked in at around ten minutes. While the extended twelve-inch single had just been invented to satisfy the needs of the disco DJs, Rodgers and Edwards were trying to satisfy a rather different imperative. For decades, the first rule of the pop song was that it last no more than three minutes. Of course, the “progressive” late ’60s temporarily changed that, but that was only for “mind-expansion.” Chic’s idea was “pleasure-expansion”: Why hold someone you like close for three minutes when you could dance cheek to cheek for ten minutes?