Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

  “No Fish Today” was everything Steely Dan wanted to be but couldn’t: With the siren harps and sea-mist strings, the music evokes a tropical paradise that is undercut by one of the harshest dialogues this side of Harold Pinter, in which a fishmonger refuses to sell a woman any fish during a shortage because “the authorities agree that if anyone should eat, it should be the upper class.” Of course, the merchant was “neither right nor wrong, just another pawn” who “got to be this old because [he does] what [he’s] told.” Crueler still was the amazing “Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy.” Over the most detailed music of his career and the Coconuts singing “onomatopoeia” in the background, Darnell didn’t break it to her gently: “If I was in your blood, you wouldn’t be so ugly.” Elsewhere, there was the breakup invective of “Loving You Made a Fool Out of Me,” in which both parties get in some choice insults, and the Ellingtonian razzle-dazzle of “Stool Pigeon” (“The FBI rewarded him because they like a guy who will stab a friend”). Even the seemingly balmy Bali Hai of “The Love We Have” was the plaint of a man suffering the slings and arrows of a lover who blows hot and cold.

  Like most of the best disco music (Chic’s “Good Times,” Inner Life’s “I’m Caught Up [In a One Night Love Affair],” New York Citi Peech Boys’ “Don’t Make Me Wait”), Darnell’s records both celebrated and damned disco’s glitterball sophistry. Instead of feeling trapped by disco’s rock-and-a-hard-place position between two worlds, Darnell reveled in it. Darnell’s characters were guys desperately searching for someone real, someone who wouldn’t sell them down the river, yet in his forties street hood getup, Kid Creole was the most hyperstylized character around. He replaced the gospel salvation of the African-American tradition with the flashy resplendence of show tunes—in Darnell’s world the material trumps the promises of the future every time—but, driven by sarcasm, there was no redemption, only endless mutation.

  5

  PRISONERS OF THE NIGHT

  The Disco Craze

  There will be disco dancing at the inaugural ball for President Carter on January 20. In the first ever disco show at a presidential inauguration, the Portable Peach mobile disco outfit of Scott Woodside and Barry Chase of Atlanta will travel to Washington for the ceremonies at the invitation of the Carter fundraising committee. In addition to disco dancing, the show will also feature two disco dancers in peanut costumes dancing to the music of the Bicentennial Disco Mix released last year by Private Stock Records.

  —Billboard, January 22, 1977

  I’m not sure if it was heaven or hell. But it was wonderful.

  —Jimmy Carter’s mother, Lillian, on her visit to Studio 54

  I’ll keep you hot when the fuel runs out.

  —Executive Suite

  In the summer of 1973, the bop apocalypse occurring at the Loft, Tenth Floor, and Third World Gallery started to become big news. The lure of the discotheque was rapidly spreading from its main constituency and ensnaring everyone caught in New York’s web of despair and desolation. As an estimated one hundred thousand New Yorkers were boogying away the blues in the Big Apple’s discos every Saturday night, Vince Aletti, in an article for Rolling Stone in September, was the first to mark out disco music as its own particular genre separate from R&B and soul; two weeks later, Billboard noted the discotheques’ growing influence in creating pop hits.1 The remarkable success of the discotheques “began to suggest an entertainment formula for the secretive 70s: take people out of their own neighborhoods, let them wander around in the desolation of the warehouse district with a scribbled address they’ve gotten from a friend; give them a rush of quadrophonic input and the stimulus of satin blouses under strobes; add a taste of kinkiness; limit the membership to a chosen few—and they’ll show up in droves.”2 Cheap, functional, stark, seedy, and somewhat exclusionary, the modern discotheque was an entertainment formula that was keenly in touch with the realities of New York City.

  But as much as disco wallowed in squalor, it also soared to the heavens. It offered communion and ecstasy, fantasy and release. After all, one hundred thousand people don’t gather together every weekend to be miserable together. The stratospheric rise of the disco scene paralleled New York’s own upsurge. Under banner headlines like “City Will Turn Tide of ‘Urban Sickness’” and “Rebirth of Lower Manhattan,” architect Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center (which opened on April 4, 19733) was hailed as signaling New York’s phoenixlike ascent from the ashes of urban turmoil and fiscal mismanagement. While Yamasaki had envisioned his two 110-story towers as utopian symbols of world peace, New York’s Port Authority, which had funded the project, had rather different aims in mind. Even though New York had definitively become the global financial capital after World War II, lower Manhattan (where New York’s financial district was located) was largely a derelict, desolate place that was left behind by both the industries that had fled the city’s tax code and the commercial real estate boom that was transforming midtown.4 The Port Authority and its allies, like David and Nelson Rockefeller, tried to remedy this situation with “a massive and fully tax-exempt public intervention in the private real estate market through the development of the world’s largest office building.”5 The WTC’s ten million square feet of office space (the equivalent of seven Empire State Buildings) was meant to revitalize an area often called “Hell’s Hundred Acres” seemingly by sheer force of will. These soaring, gleaming rectangular spires rising from a sinkhole that resembled some third world outpost much more than it resembled capitalism’s capital city were meant to act as beacons signaling to the money-worshipping flock that New York had changed its ways. “If you build it they will come” was the logic—the architectural equivalent of Horatio Alger’s pick yourself up by your bootstraps philosophy.

  In the midst of the city’s crippling financial crisis, as its infrastructure was crumbling, as gasoline prices in the United States were quadrupling as the result of an embargo called by Middle Eastern members of OPEC on all crude oil shipments to Western nations that supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War, New York City had constructed potentially the largest white elephant the world had ever seen. Instead of acting responsibly and saving its pennies for the rainy days that long ago arrived, Gotham was saving up all its money for Saturday night, when it could put on its gaudiest platform shoes and step out in style—damn the consequences. Despite itself, the plan worked. Slowly, companies moved into the WTC and into lower Manhattan. Ironically, it was in reaction to the megalomania of projects like the World Trade Center that in October, New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission recognized the SoHo–Cast Iron Historic district (an area bounded by West Broadway to the west, Crosby Street to the east, Houston Street to the north, and Canal Street to the south) as an area of architectural importance and deemed its old warehouses and sweatshops worthy of preservation. Thanks to the work done by the artists, musicians, DJs, and party-goers who initially transformed these dead areas of the city under the very noses of the Port Authority, conservative preservationists, real estate agents, and stockbrokers “discovered” that the lofts of SoHo and TriBeCa, the neighborhoods immediately to the north of the World Trade Center, made ideal upscale living spaces. It wouldn’t be long before the formerly derelict buildings of lower Manhattan became the most fashionable addresses in the world. As Deep Throat told Bernstein and Woodward around this time, “Just follow the money.” Just as money transformed the sites of disco’s birth, the influx of capital into the disco industry would remake disco into something largely unrecognizable to its earliest practitioners.

  * * *

  In early 1975, Van McCoy, a longtime presence on the soul/R&B scene (having previously worked with everyone from the Shirelles and Jackie Wilson to Faith, Hope & Charity and the Stylistics), was working overtime in order to finish recording an album of instrumentals for producers Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore’s Avco label. David Todd, the DJ at Manhattan nightspot Adam’s Apple, had been pestering him for several weeks to come to the club to check o
ut a new dance that was creating a stir. McCoy was too busy to go to a nightclub, so he sent his friend and business partner, Charles Kipps Jr., in his place. What Kipps saw at Adam’s Apple excited him so much that at around midnight he left the club and brought two dancers with him back to Mediasound Studios where McCoy was working. “When he came back, he showed me this very strange dance,” McCoy told Essence magazine. “It was something completely different from the you-do-your-thing-and-I-do-mine dances; it was people dancing together again. The hustle reminded me of ballroom dancing, and I love graceful dancing.”6 McCoy wrote “The Hustle” right there on the spot, and he recorded it the next day during the one hour of studio time he had remaining for his session with the Soul City Symphony (drummers Steve Gadd and Rick Marotta, bassist Gordon Edwards, keyboardist Richard Tee, guitarist Eric Gale, a horn section, and concertmaster Gene Orloff’s strings).7 This afterthought became not only McCoy’s solitary Top 40, let alone #1, single as an artist, but also, thanks to its accompanying dance craze, the record that truly catapaulted disco from an underground phenomenon to worldwide furor.8

  At first blush, “The Hustle” is hardly the kind of record that you normally associate with a dance craze. After its great, almost mysterious intro, it devolves into the strangely rhythmless, inane, singsong, prim and prissy instrumental equivalent of Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight”—not exactly the fire and blood or blatant, unrepentant hucksterism that marks a great dance craze disc. But thanks to that infernal flute line boring into your skull with the savage ferocity that only elevator music can muster, “The Hustle” was inescapable and inevitable, the kind of record that crawls under your skin, subliminally taking root to the point where you find yourself whistling it while masturbating. It was the perfect record for the novocaine bliss of Nixon and Ford’s America: Brush years of stress and strife under an ornate carpet of strings and woodwinds, mollify the rage with a cheap come-on from a breathy bird, and placate the masses with tooth fairy promises and doe-eyed innocence.

  On the week that “The Hustle” had fallen out of the top spot in the American charts, former Nixon speechwriter and New York Times op-ed columist William Safire hailed the hustle as a return to self-discipline and decorum on the dance floor after years of “frantic self-expression” and “personal isolation.”9 “Unlike their older brothers and sisters who took pride in a pair of dungarees, free-flowing, unkempt hair and ‘hang-loose’ dances, today’s young people value sleek clothes, fancy high-heeled shoes and a more stylized, structured form of dancing,” Safire’s New York Times colleague Dena Kleiman had announced a month earlier. “It’s no longer ‘anything goes’ but what looks good … Unlike the more vigorous, inner-directed dances of the 1960s in which contact between couples was to be avoided and shaking, jumping, and turning at whim was the mode, the hustle is a dance of posture, rigor, and coordination.”10 This wasn’t an instance of conservative commentators donning flares and open-necked Kiana shirts in an effort to jump on a passing bandwagon and look like they’re with it. No, they were hailing the hustle as the return of the purity of American culture, a homecoming of innocence and safety, as the reaffirmation of “standards.” “The political fact is that the absolute-freedom days of the dance are over,” Safire trumpeted. “When you are committed to considering what your partner will do next, and must signal your own intentions so that the ‘team’ of which you are a part can stay in step, then you have embraced not only a dance partner, but responsibility.”11

  This wasn’t just rejoicing over the return of the repression and Victorian courtship rites of ballroom dancing and the reaffirmation of traditional gender roles where a man leads a woman around the dance floor, or even the triumph of “personal communication” over the ghastly and unseemly self-absorption of the freeform dancing that had been the rage since the twist and the filth and loose mores that characterized the ’60s. The hustle was the harbinger of a conservative revolution. “After a terpsichorean era of confrontation, we are entering an era of negotiation,” Safire asserted. “The geopolitician who fails to see this social phenomenon is out of touch with his time. As dancing requires instruction, genuine standards become the fashion; as eyes focus on and arms enfold a partner, responsibility and humanity come into vogue.”12 Seemingly, it wasn’t just Safire, with his conservative agenda and baggage, who was interpreting the hustle as a decisive break with the Age of Aquarius. “The ’60s was so solipsistic, so narcissistic: look at the way people dance!” a friend of journalist Andrew Kopkind exclaimed. “Disco is just as exhibitionist, but you create it with someone else, with another person on the dance floor. It’s a retreat from that scary chaos into patterns.”13

  On the surface, the hustle seemed so regressive and sterile: the familiar old box steps of ballroom dancing, the man taking the lead, the well-groomed men in suits and the women in frilly dresses—there was something frightfully Stepford Wives about it all. Yet, the hustle’s origins were anything but anodyne. The word hustle (which comes from the Dutch word for “shake”) had long had currency in the underworld, where it was used as a term for describing the work of pickpocketers, scam artists, and prostitutes. The hustle was born in the Latino sections of the Bronx, where it was a vision of romance floating gracefully out of the squalor and decay of Fort Apache. It was men and women dressed to the nines, spending whatever they could afford in order to attain that one minute of ecstasy that dancing on the rubble could provide. “The first time I saw the Hustle was probably in 1972,” says Michael “Lucky Strike” Corral, who grew up on 181st Street in the Bronx and joined the Puerto Rican gang the Savage Skulls at the age of thirteen after connecting with them through pigeon flying.16 “I used to see them [the older members of the Savage Skulls] and the Javelins [a gang allied to the Skulls] dance on the rooftops … They started bringing radios to our coops while we were flying birds, so I got more into the music. And that’s how I got down [with the Skulls].”17 In order to become a full-fledged member of the gang, he had to run “the Apache line” (walk down the middle of two lines of ten people each who were throwing punches and elbows) and, finally, survive a game of Russian roulette (“losers” were unceremoniously dumped in abandoned buildings, where they would eventually be found by the police, who took them to be suicides). This probably wasn’t the return to civility and “standards” that William Safire had in mind.

  * * *

  DISCO AND THE “ME DECADE”

  While Safire and Kopkind’s friends were praising disco for liberating society from the self-admiration of the ’60s, other commentators were bemoaning disco for its own brand of solipsism. “[T]he real thrust of disco culture,” Albert Goldman wrote, “is not toward love of another person but toward love of self—the principal object of desire in this age of closed-circuit, masturbatory vibrator sex. Outside the entrance to every discotheque should be erected a statue of the presiding deity: Narcissus.”14 As if to prove this, “the Mad Hatter [discotheque] in Tampa, Florida will offer the TV generation the ultimate audiovisual experience in the ‘I-want-to-be-in-pictures’ syndrome. It is installing video-dish systems that will record the action on the dance floor and then project it onto the walls of the disco in pictures sixteen feet wide and ten feet high. That way, the disco dancers can simultaneously watch—and star in—their own disco movie.”15 In his best seller The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, Christopher Lasch wrote that after the turmoil of the 1960s, Americans retreated into the “purely personal.” “The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious,” he wrote. “People today hunger not for personal salvation but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.”18 Disco as shallow, self-centered quasi culture or as a regressive retreat back to safety from the anarchic free-for-all of the 1960s: Either way it looked like the death of politics, meaning and the Left.

  Of course, on one hand the ’70s were all about “self-actualization,” “plugging in,” and Looking Out
for #1—it was, as Tom Wolfe dubbed it, the “Me Decade.” When they found that it was easier to raise capital on the markets than it was to raze the Capitol, most of the ’60s radicals folded up their tents and dungarees in favor of BMWs and three-piece suits. However, as both Lasch and futurist Alvin Toffler noted, the distinction that separated people coming of age in the ’70s and after from previous generations was the lack of a sense of permanence and solidity brought on by postindustrialization and a feeling of severe rootlessness. The sense of time, too, had collapsed, where the past no longer informed the present. While this led to nostalgia (for the 1950s, disco’s fetishization of the 1930s and ’40s), this was also at the very root of disco’s liberationist impulse. As a form of trance, the most ritualistic aspects of disco culture viewed time as cyclical, unshackling it from Western teleology and returning to a pre-Christian notion of “salvation as liberation from time.”19

  * * *

  According to Corral, in the early days, the biggest hustle record was Barry White’s “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe.” Van McCoy somehow must have intuited this because, with its string fanfaronade, cooing vocals, and jazzy guitar licks, “The Hustle” is almost a carbon copy of White’s arrangements for “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe” and Love Unlimited Orchestra’s “Love’s Theme.” While the hustle started in the barrio in the early ’70s, eventually worked its way through the outer borough Latin clubs until it arrived at the Manhattan discotheques in early 1975, and then exploded internationally with McCoy’s “The Hustle,” its roots can be traced back to the guaguancó, a 4/4 rhythm that was developed in the late nineteenth century when European-style marching bands attempted to play the more syncopated son and rumba rhythms native to Cuba. When these rhythms made their way to the United States with waves of immigration from Puerto Rico and Cuba, they merged with jazz to create the cha-cha and the mambo. This meeting with jazz caused the music to be further harnessed by the 4/4, and at New York clubs like the Palladium, the Cheetah, and the Corso, the mambo developed into a slot dance, a standard format of ballroom dancing in which the action of the dance, especially the woman’s, is defined by an imaginary line drawn on the dance floor. As Latin music in New York mutated into salsa (a mixture of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and American elements), the tempo increased and the dance, too, changed. “What [the Savage Skulls] were dancing was a mixture of salsa, that street salsa mixed with the hustle type of thing,” Corral remembers. “It wasn’t like your typical ballroom stuff.” To all intents and purposes, the hustle is a slightly faster version of salsa with a few more flourishes. “The hustle was more competitive,” Corral explains. “You could do aerial moves, which in the salsa they don’t really do that. We would do these incredible aerial moves. The salsa is just a little bit more conservative. It’s similar, but it’s not as well put together with strategy and acrobatic stuff. We was doing a lot of acrobatic stuff.”20