Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

  By 1980, though, Chic was apparently too alienating. Disco was dead in the water as far as the mainstream was concerned, and Chic was thrown out with the bathwater. Real People was bitter and sniping, but this time it wasn’t disguised by elegance or pop hooks. The music is an astringent kind of funk, sour and sharp—Rodgers almost sounds like punk guitarist Robert Quine at times. Anderson and Martin’s robotic vocals are largely absent; instead, they sound more assertive, even straining. The veneer had been sanded down and stripped away. The record is at once a plea for help, succor, and shelter (“I wanna be with some real people”; “You can’t do it alone”; “I got protection from your infection”) and a lashing out. The remarkable “Chip Off the Old Block” would have fitted in perfectly alongside records like “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” and “Don’t Call Me Brother” in its interrogation of masculinity: “Just like a robot he’ll do / What he’s programmed to … Some of us think these qualities are grim / To be just like the one before him.” Rodgers and Edwards even used some of the language that the “disco sucks” brigade used to denigrate disco: “A plan to make humans act synthesized / I think we’ve homogenized.” “That was the downfall of Chic,” Rodgers says of the album. “That was the first time in our lives that we made records listening to other people. In the beginning, no one cared who we were, but now that we’re selling millions of records, everyone had an opinion. All of a sudden, we’re forced to do stuff that we don’t really want to do. The powers that be at the record company were changing, and the next thing we knew there were new people involved in our lives telling us what to do and how to do it. And we’re like, ‘What are you talking about? We never listened to the record company.’ We wanted to say, ‘You’re the same geniuses that when we played “Le Freak” everybody in the conference got up and walked out and told our attorney, “Oh, my God. What else do they have on the record?” Ummm, it’s only the biggest-selling record in the history of Warner Brothers, but still you guys now want to start telling us what to do. Where are your credentials to back that up?’ At least if we fail, we fail on our own. But now, that was the downfall. Now they could play the divide-and-conquer game, and they could say to Bernard, ‘Man, Nile’s not listening to us.’ And then they could say to me, ‘I don’t know what Bernard is up to, man.’ We started listening, and we were confused. That’s why in ‘Real People’ we said, ‘Real people, man I want to live my life with some real people.’ It was really out of character for us because we were really protesting. And that was something I always promised Bernard that we would never do because he knew my whole Black Panther past and we made a pact that we were going to do celebratory music. But if you listen to the lyrics of ‘Real People,’ it’s uncomfortable for us to say that shit. We even say, ‘Rebels are we, we are the rebels baby.’ We tried to make it funny because I stole that from Woody Allen. If you see Bananas, they say, ‘Now let us sing the song of the rebels: “Rebels are we / Born to be free / Just like the fish in the sea.’” I kept thinking, ‘Man, Woody Allen is cool. He never sued us, he never went, “Hey, wait a minute, those are my lyrics.”’ It was a joke to us, but at that point we were angry and bitter and it was real, but we weren’t real, we weren’t being rebellious, we were going along with the bullshit. So now we were listening to people who didn’t know. They were afraid and ‘disco sucks,’ so they were trying to make us not disco.”64

  “STRANDED ON THE ISLAND OF RACE MUSIC”

  August Darnell

  What a row the brute makes!

  —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  In America during the ’70s there was only one thing that could compete with the disco juggernaut on the cultural front: nostalgia for the 1950s. American Graffiti and Grease cleaned up at the box office, while Happy Days was a constant presence in the top five of the Nielsen ratings from 1975 until the end of the decade. Heck, even duck-tailed greaser throwbacks Sha Na Na managed to get a nationally syndicated TV show. America was trying to put the chaos of the ’60s behind it and hark back to a more innocent, less divisive time in its history, a time when father still knew best and the good guys always wore white. The ’50s may have been the era of rock and roll and doo-wop, Brown v. Board of Education, and Governor Orval Faubus’s stand at the door of Little Rock Central High School to prevent desegregation, but conflict (other than gentle generational) and black faces were scarce in any of the ’70s representations of the ’50s. As we have seen with Chic, though, African Americans too were looking back to the past, but not to the strife of the ’50s, and they certainly weren’t doing it to rescue some mythical golden age. Instead, such remembrance was done in order to bring historical experience to bear on the present, to wrestle with tradition, and to poke holes in its often suffocating fabric. Cloaking themselves in the suavity, élan, and romanticorealist style of the age of Cab Calloway and Lorenz Hart, disco’s most extraordinary revivalists, if you can call them that, were Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band.

  The group was the brainchild of two mixed-race half brothers from the Bronx hung up on George Raft and James Cagney movies. Pianist/vocalist Stony Browder Jr. was the musical mastermind, while bassist/vocalist Tommy (aka August Darnell) Browder, fresh from drama school, was the wordsmith. Allegedly inspired by one Dr. Carrash Buzzard, an itinerant musician who had a minstrel show in the ’40s, and the multiculturalism of their house (a French-Canadian mother and Dominican father) and environs, the two started toying with the conventions of “race music” and formed Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band with singer Cory Daye, percussionist Andy Hernandez, and drummer Mickey Sevilla in 1974 to explore it further. At the time, there were plenty of hapless artists attempting to mix disco dazzle with Jazz Age pizzazz—Tuxedo Junction’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” Wing & a Prayer Fife and Drum Corps’s “Baby Face,” Salsoul Orchestra’s “Tangerine,” New York Rubber Rock Band’s “Disco Lucy,” Ethel Merman’s disco album, Taco’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz”—but as Browder told Black Music magazine in 1977, “I thought of the Dr. Buzzard project as being a High School thing, a Dead End Kids thing, not tails and Manhattan Transfer … We aren’t interested in nostalgia.”65 Instead, the fraternal coconspirators constructed a fantasy world in which show tunes actually swing, the ghetto is filled with Golden Age Hollywood glamour (or the glitz of 1940s Hollywood is tempered by hardened ghetto realism), and heartbreak can be exorcised with a witty turn of phrase. Granted, on paper it sounds like the most regressive, retrograde, revisionist kind of record, but on the turntable their self-titled debut album was one of the most fully realized, dazzling artifacts from the black bohemian intelligentsia.

  The first words that you hear on Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band are “zoot suit city”; the first couplet rhymes “if that would get me ovah” with “equivalency diploma”; the first sounds are the rum-tum-tum of the tom-tom and some Glenn Miller (not even Count Basie) brass razzle-dazzle. Stony Browder lays the penguin-suited–big-band schmaltz on thick, with help from veteran 4 Seasons arranger Charlie Calello.66 Daye displays a winning combination of Great White Way razzmatazz and uptown soul: She rolls her tongue à la Billy Stewart and Jackie Wilson, gives the lyrics some Rita Moreno sass, and oo-poo-pah-doos like Betty Boop. So far, so tacky. No wonder the album went gold.

  After you get used to the Cotton Club shtick, though, you start to notice the Latin rhythms, realize how great the bass is throughout the record, and discover that beneath the children’s chorus on “Sunshower” is a skeletal Nigerian juju track complete with Hawaiian guitar and talking drums. You remember that the phrase “zoot suit city” doesn’t refer just to some idealized beau monde, but that it recalls the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles in 1942–43 when military personnel clashed frequently with Mexican-American youths. Instead of wallowing in rhinestone kitsch or indulging in disco escapism like their contemporaries, the brothers Browder use the Busby Berkeley glitz both to interrogate the present and rehabilitate the past. This was glamour as fashion pose and archness, to be sure, but when Sto
ny Browder told Black Music’s Davitt Sigerson that “Lyrically … there used to be wit. People could say things without getting flustered. There was none of the pure aggression of more recent music,”67 it became clear that the pose was just a deflection mechanism. This was glamour as defiance. Browder and Darnell were daring to dream of a world that they were locked out of as a matter of course (unless they wanted to be Butterfly McQueen or Stepin Fetchit), but they were equally locked out of the world traditionally ascribed to them because of their mixed race and light skin. Caught in between two worlds, they chose the path that would alienate both.

  Darnell may fetishize the glory days of Tin Pan Alley, but there’s nothing approaching moon-June-spoon here: Darnell has Daye singing lines like “I’ll grow a tail or two for you / Spend the rest of my days locked up in a zoo”; “They’re all the same, the sluts and the saints”; and “Now the sun must rise / With her bag of tricks and cheats and dirty lies.” But it’s not just the wordplay that zings. Aspiring to and self-consciously aping the cultured bons mots of Cole Porter is about as radical a gesture as a black songwriter can make. Of course, if Darnell merely staked a claim on that world of yacht clubs, Central Park West cocktail parties, and frolicking around gaily on a crisp autumn afternoon in the Connecticut woods, it would be a mark of unseemly aspiration and the false consciousness of class. However, Darnell wasn’t writing whoop-de-do songs to be sung in Gramercy Park penthouses. He was dragging Porter away from the confines of Yale and the Astor Bar and into the ghetto; he was elevating an equivalency diploma—that symbol of substandard education—to something with the transcendent power and ennobling force of the Mona Lisa or the Colosseum in Rome. But he’s also realist enough to know that love can’t transcend the material world, that there’s always “Lemon in the Honey,” that “the sun must rise / With her bag of tricks and cheats and dirty lies.”

  Of course, Browder’s music helps. The strings swirl, swoop, and swoon like Veronica Lake has just walked on camera when Daye sings, “She’s sick and tired of living in debt / Tired of roaches and tired of rats.” On tracks like “Sour & Sweet / Lemon in the Honey” and “Cherchez La Femme,” his synthesis is so perfect that, just like Chic (with different conclusions), Browder sees no difference between stomping at the Savoy and bumping at Studio 54. To Browder and Darnell, miscegenation was not something that merely diluted the gene pool, but something that offered endless possibilities. Rejecting such hoary old stereotypes as the “tragic mulatto” and the “wild half-caste,” these half-breeds asserted that fusion was strength, not adulteration, and refused to have their fates defined by pity or revulsion. Their version of the disco beat recognizes all the rhythms of the New York melting pot that simmered down to create it: rumba, mambo, funk, tango, compas, calypso, cha-cha-cha, merengue. “To me, the beauty of music is its possibilities for mutation,” Darnell told The New York Times in 1981. “And that mutation represents a larger ideal: global coexistence.”68

  After two more Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band albums that went way over the heads of just about every audience with their sharp, acerbic lyrics, brittle sarcasm, occasionally discordant jazz arrangements, and oblique Spanish-language non sequiturs, Darnell, fired up by sibling rivalry, pursued this larger ideal as a songwriter, as the in-house producer for Ze Records and in his own postdisco project, Kid Creole & the Coconuts. Working with the fairly nondescript disco/R&B group Machine in 1979, Darnell cowrote (with Kevin Nance) disco’s finest morality play, “There But for the Grace of God Go I.” On top of hysterical, urgent keyboards that are halfway between the Isley Brothers and Hi-NRG, Darnell weaves the tale of Carlos and Carmen Vidal, who move from the Bronx in order to raise their child somewhere safe. Inevitably, their move backfires and their daughter “turns out to be a natural freak” who runs away from home at sixteen, leaving her mother to bang her head against the wall and wail that “Too much love is worse than none at all.” Darnell would continue to write and produce artfully crafted, deceptively airy pop baubles for artists like Aural Exciters, Cristina, Gichy Dan’s Beachwood #9, and Don Armando’s 2nd Ave. Rhumba Band, but it would be as his alter ego Kid Creole that he would gain most attention.

  When Darnell joined Ze Records, most of their roster was taken up by acts from the postpunk scene: Suicide, Lydia Lunch, James Chance & the Contortions, Mars, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, and Les Garçons. While he was too much of a craftsman to incorporate their anything-goes approach to music, their championing of the “non-singer” and their abrasiveness appealed to this born cynic, and Kid Creole became a mixture of Ziegfeld Follies fabulousness and Johnny Rotten scrape ’n’ grate. With Andy “Coati Mundi” Hernandez (from Dr. Buzzard’s) and three European ice queens in tow, Darnell created a three-ring zoot suit circus that oozed glib erudition, gently poked fun at sexual pathology, viewed Manhattan as the northern-most Caribbean island, read from Bobby Short’s supper club lexicon, and played confidence games with racial stereotypes. Darnell’s debonair but roguish sophisticate was teased and mocked every step of the way by Coati Mundi and the Coconuts, never letting the rakish mountebank get the upper hand. Darnell constructed epic travelogues in order to revive archetypal images from the recesses of American cultural memory—Carmen Miranda, Fay Wray, the pith-helmeted explorer—and unmoor (and un-Moor) them from their traditional associations to speak for themselves.

  By using these archetypes, dance music, comic scenarios, and the language of Broadway and Hollywood, Darnell attempted to universalize the plight of the mulatto misfit. Darnell’s two great themes—being out of place and everyday human cruelty—essentially made all of his characters into half-castes, all of them wrestling with the cost of selling out, all of them resigned to the fact they’re doomed to be fish out of water no matter what path they choose. Darnell explored these themes most effectively on his two masterpieces, Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places and Wise Guy (aka Tropical Gangsters, apparently named after the Rhode Island store that provided him with his zoot suit wardrobe).

  Fresh Fruit ostensibly told the tale of the Kid sailing the seven seas in search of his elusive paramour, Mimi, who had absconded in uncertain circumstances to some tropical locale. It was a Homerian epic that, while populated with sirens and sorceresses, was concerned more with nebbishes and cads than heroes and monsters. Instead of cyclopes and lotus-eaters, the putative protagonist had to outwit fast-talking natives, cope with difficult Latin music and strange customs, and fend off predatory Swiss ski instructors. Of course, our hero probably never even leaves Manhattan, and Darnell designed the scenario so that he could explore alienation while trading barbs with Joseph Conrad on the set of The Road to Zanzibar.

  After beginning his travelogue with “Goin’ Places”—a song that echoes Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cartoon, “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” which depicts the Manhattanite’s worldview as pretty much ending at the Hudson River (“Believe me I know that when you leave New York you go nowhere”)—Darnell imagines New York as a primeval rain forest teeming with weird biomass, dense mist, restless natives banging their war drums, and spooky creepy-crawlies skittering and slithering underfoot. With its didgeridoo undertow, blocky piano chords, rain dance percussion, and monkey chants, “In the Jungle” is a dark, dank place harboring all sorts of demons both real and psychic—you half expect Mr. Kurtz suddenly to emerge from the overgrowth, clasping a knife between his teeth. “I don’t believe in integration just to achieve miscegenation,” the song’s narrator sings. “Don’t offer me remuneration / I don’t believe in acclimation … I don’t believe in propagation / Just to achieve cafe au laition / Don’t offer me emasculation / I don’t believe in deprivation.”

  The reggae feel of “Animal Crackers” follows with a riff on the Tokens’ “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” at the beginning. The lyrics continue the tone of poking fun at exoticists and square white guys with a character halfway between Fantasy Island’s Mr. Roarke and Daniel Defoe’s Friday telling our fearless hero, “You’ve got no reason to be
dangling from up here / You’ll disembark and find there’s nothing here to fear / We’ve got no history of human sacrifice / We welcome you, your children and your wives / But Frosted Flakes and coffee cakes [“painted eggs” after the second verse] customs will deny / And your bag of Animal Crackers…” When the square peg protagonist dares to set foot on foreign soil, he’s set adrift in a land full of “Latin music” that he can neither comprehend nor countenance: “I’m so confused / This Latin music’s got me so, so bemused / The accent’s worse than Cockney / I’m not amused, it’s killing me … Frazzled and floored / This Latin music’s mayhem / I won’t endure / There’s too much syncopation / Where’s the two and four?” Later, the air of displacement and preposterousness is heightened by one reggae song that’s half in German and another about a woman who runs off with a Swiss ski instructor.

  Like Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places, Wise Guy was a mock travelogue in which the band is “washed up on the shore of B’Dilli Bay—an island of sinners ruled by outcasts where crime is the only passport and RACE MUSIC the only way out!” However, unlike Fresh Fruit, dislocation and orientalism were not the main concerns of Wise Guy, and while the pan-Caribbean vibe of Fresh Fruit reappeared in the ersatz soca/salsa of “Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy,” the trade-wind lilt of “No Fish Today,” and the synthesized steel drum and timbal fills of “I’m Corrupt,” Wise Guy was mostly straight-ahead, if slightly astringent, R&B. Well, as straight-ahead as a guy who calls his backing musicians “the Pond Life Orchestra” can be. Wise Guy’s deceptively simple light funk bottom effectively streamlined the band’s sound, reining in the big-band arrangements and the pan-American references without neutering their effectiveness, and created a sharp-focus background for Darnell’s tales of quotidian inhumanity. Here, the savages weren’t the fetish objects of “race music” but the seemingly normal people you take for granted every day as you walk past them on the street.