Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

  Corral was part of the Hustle Kings, an informal dance troupe whose members tried to earn money by competing in every hustle contest they could possibly attend. “We used to go to all the clubs, and I’m talking all the clubs all over New York, like three clubs a night, even the gay clubs, the Ice Palace, Crisco Disco,” Corral reveals. “I used to have to pencil in a mustache lightly so I could get in [laughs]. I was young and I had a baby face.” With his gang background, he wasn’t the kind of guy you’d expect to be hanging around Manhattan’s queer discos wearing flashy, skintight clothes. “I remember myself and little Lourdes, who was my partner, and Eddie Vega [leader of the Hustle Kings and future choreographer who taught Patrick Swayze everything he knew in Dirty Dancing], we entered Dance Fever [a televised weekly dance contest] and, well, I was one of the winners of the $1,000, which was like a national thing, and Eddie won the $25,000, which was the first place,” Corral recalls. “I should try to get the footage of all that. The way we used to dress was incredible. I was wearing an electric blue type of body suit. It was just how you dressed.”21

  By this time, the hustle had mutated into myriad different styles and substyles. There was the New York hustle, Latin hustle, L.A. hustle, Bay Area hustle, Continental hustle, West Coast hustle, tango hustle, rope hustle, American hustle, street hustle, sling hustle, etc. “The music had progressed a bit and it got a little faster,” Corral says. “Then it was Cerrone, ‘Love in “C” Minor’ type of thing.”22 The popularity of the king of disco soft porn suggests that the hustle’s return to touch dancing had absolutely nothing to do with civility and everything to do with why dancing is so central to youth culture to begin with. For white folks the ’60s were all about “turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.” Unlike the dolly birds who danced in London’s Ad-Lib club in the mid-1960s without so much as a glance from the men, discogoers danced as if they had been coated in Spanish fly. The hustle marked the return of dancing as a surrogate for, or prelude to, sex. The sexual revolution may have happened during the ’60s, when chemists unleashed the birth control pill and LSD at the same time, but disco dancing was the clarion call of sexual liberation.

  But it was more than just the sexual body that disco was concerned with. The dance floor is nothing if not communal, and this group body was a polymorphous, polyracial, polysexual mass affirming its bonds in a space beyond the reach of church, state, or family. At the discotheque, the rigid boundaries imposed by such institutions were thrown out with the careless disregard of someone tossing a spent popper bottle. In this, the experience of Michael Corral—a Savage Skull member who felt more comfortable in the miniature Sodom of Crisco Disco than in the more racially and socioeconomically homogeneous clubs of his neighborhood23—was typical. As long as you strutted your stuff on the floor, disco was essentially democratic (once you got into the club, that is). Even that bible of the ’60s dream, Rolling Stone, declared that “Because it is so democratic—on the boards, the dancer is the ultimate star—disco is probably the most compelling, artful and popular dance movement in generations.”24

  In a sense, in the discotheque the ’70s practiced what the ’60s preached: The communion offered by the dance floor was the embodiment of the vision of peace that the ’60s yearned for. The naïve utopianism may have been ditched, but the radically different attitudes to race, gender, and sexuality born in the ’60s remained and flourished most evidently on the disco dance floor. As Le Jardin DJ Steve D’Aquisto enthused to the New York Post about the club, “even Saturday night ‘is like a little Woodstock, all races and creeds becoming one.’”25 On the dance floor, the politics is one of the body, not of rhetoric—it’s an internalized politics, a politics of gesture, perhaps reminiscent of the stance of many of the hard-line Leftist groups of the early ’70s for whom even the most mundane daily activity was imbued with political significance. “Back in my hippie days, we talked about freedom and individuality, and it was all bullshit,” declares Chic’s Nile Rodgers. “The fact is, you could tell a hippie a mile away. We conformed to our nonconformity. As the celebratory phase of the struggle, disco really was about individuality. And the freakier, the better.”26

  * * *

  In June 1974, Truman Capote was a guest on the Tonight Show and was regaling the talk show’s host, Johnny Carson, with tales of his freaky adventures on the New York nightlife circuit. Capote, with his bizarre Big Easy lisp, big floppy hat and dark glasses, and nonexistent posture, looked like he had just beamed in from Mars, so Carson, who played the relaxed, affable, Middle American straightman when interviewing his guests, could only smirk and wink knowingly at the TV audience as Capote described his favorite club in New York. “[Le Jardin] has these Art Deco couches all along the room, these palm fronds drooping down everywhere,” Capote drawled, “and out on the dance floor, this terrible churning, the whole place churning like a buttermilk machine.”27

  The spume whipped up by the agitated dancing at Le Jardin was the first wave of the disco craze. While disco records had topped the charts before, the culture of disco was largely invisible to mainstream America until the mini–media frenzy that surrounded Le Jardin in 1974–75. Opened by former South African model John Addison in June 1973 as “a total gay experience. A gala affaire for monsieurs,”28 Le Jardin was a perplexing bilevel club that occupied both the basement and the penthouse of the past-its-prime Diplomat Hotel at 110 West 43rd Street. Strangely for a club whose elevator was described as having a “housing-project urine odor,”29 Le Jardin blended the belle epoque feel of the jet-set clubs like Le Club with the wild abandon of the Sanctuary. Unlike most of his predecessors, Addison was willing to spend money—not just on the banquettes, palm trees, and pretty-boy waitstaff, but, most crucially, on the lighting and sound systems. The club’s combination of hard-core gay partiers and celebrity glamour (Capote, Diana Ross, David Bowie, New York Dolls singer David Johansen, and Warhol superstar/punk pinup Cyrinda Foxe) made for an atmosphere that was pretty much unique in the history of clubbing anywhere in the world at the time. Le Jardin was the first truly mixed discotheque in New York, if not the world, and its combination of gay abandon and fashion with hip heterosexuals created disco’s myth and allure.

  Another reason it was unique was that it wasn’t purely a discotheque—the club’s upstairs ballroom was where Kiss got its start and where Patti Smith launched her legendary Horses album. However, it was the dance floor that attracted the most attention, and the man responsible was Bobby DJ Guttadaro, who had been poached from the Continental Baths. Guttadaro was one of the best mixers around, and along with the Loft’s David Mancuso, he was early disco’s prime tastemaker. Thanks to his position at the most famous club in New York, Guttadaro had the ability to turn records like Love Unlimited Orchestra’s “Love’s Theme,” Carl Douglas’s “Kung Fu Fighting,” and Disco Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes’ “Get Dancin’” into bona fide pop hits, and he got gold records in recognition of his contribution to their success.

  Inevitably, because of its image and above-ground notoriety, after two years “the people who pride themselves on being one dance ahead had moved on to the private clubs … leaving Le Jardin to the people.”30 According to Rolling Stone’s Ed McCormack, this new crowd was still pretty freaky: “At Le Jardin, the music commands a snaking daisy chain of dancers through pelvic puppet paces as the atmosphere grows heady with the adrenaline incense of Brut cologne and a thousand amyl nitrate poppers, each lending its queasy aphrodisiac crush to the whole mind-boggling, switch-hitting group grope going on out there on the floor. After all, this is the place where the gamut of dress runs from Pierre Cardin suits to silver costume clothing, from Halston originals to backless halters, through all the shades, cycles and fetishes of chic, camp and queer, until it culminates in the truly bizarre ensemble of one muscular young madman who sports a leather aviator’s cap, smoked Captain Midnight goggles and red plastic clothespins clamped onto his bare nipples, squeezing them out into two little ouch-drops of excruciating S&M ecstasy while
he goes limpidly gazonkers out on the dance floor.”31 Soon enough, though, the remaining scenesters and pansexuals left for good, and Le Jardin was almost exclusively populated by square Long Islanders and secretaries from New Jersey in Zodiac T-shirts and Jordache jeans. The club had been taken over by the dreaded bridge-and-tunnel crowd.

  Le Jardin may have been disco’s first truly mixed club, but maintaining the right social mixture is a precarious balancing act: Let in too many of the “wrong” people and the vibe is destroyed; let the “right” people dominate the club and the spirit of communion becomes nothing but an incestuous love-in. Underground dance cultures have always had a problematic relationship with the mainstream, and even though it didn’t really have any utopian dreams to protect, this was particularly true of disco because of its roots as a refuge for the pariahs of straight society. The tug-of-war between exclusivity and inclusivity reached its peak in 1977 when “The head of the New York State Liquor Authority here has again warned disco owners and operators that some of their admission policies may infringe on the constituional rights of patrons and could, as a result, lead to revocation of their license … Laurence J. Gedda’s new warning comes in the wake of reports that many New York clubs still scrutinize their patrons, and make admission difficult if not impossible. The practice, according to officials of the Authority, continues in spite of recent stepped-up action against such clubs.”32 Yet again, here was disco’s essential tension: the urge to merge versus the desire to remain separate but equal. The problem for disco was that, unlike many underground dance cultures, the music was quintessentially mainstream; it didn’t have to make any concessions to the tastes of Middle America. Its vision was nearly universally intoxicating and it was instantly apprehended by even middle-management types from Lima, Ohio.

  When the tourists started coming en masse to Le Jardin, however, Bobby DJ jumped ship to a new club being opened by Addison’s cousin, Maurice Brahms, where he would alternate with Jim Burgess. Infinity, at 653 Broadway in a former envelope factory, was a huge space (the dance floor was a block long) that featured a big pink neon penis right by the entrance. Naturally, when it opened in November 1975 it was intended to be a gay club, but Guttadaro by now had such a big reputation that he was the focus of a lot of press attention, and the unmarked door between Bleecker and Third streets was soon set upon by scene makers, mink-clad ladies and celebrities like Paul Newman, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Jack Nicholson. While there were still plenty of people like the guy in saddle shoes who “strapped a life-size female doll to his ankles and wrists and … moved lightly across the dance floor with her,”33 the “scurve” (“singles who live with roommates on the Upper East Side or in the middle-class neighborhoods of New Jersey and Long Island, people drifting around and trying to get picked up”34) had set in. “Now middle-class young men cruise the banquettes each weekend, but the tone of the place is sufficiently gay that a woman can protect herself by adopting a fierce glare to indicate dykishness, or by staring fixedly at herself in the mirror, for self-absorption is respected here.”35 In fact, Infinity was so popular that the vibration on the dance floor caused the stylus on Bobby DJ’s turntables to cut across his records, forcing him regularly to use his reel-to-reel backup tapes. Inspired by the suspension of a 1947 Packard, soundman Bob Casey solved the problem by suspending the turntables using rubber bands—a solution so successful that it became the industry standard for the next twenty years.

  But Infinity was important for more than just its ingenious DJ setup. The interior of this enormous loft space was either left industrial or painted black and featured two-story art deco mirrors running along the side of the dance floor and one of the most expensive lighting systems ever installed in a nightclub. Infinity was the bridge between the loft aesthetic of the Gallery, Tenth Floor and, naturally, the Loft and the glitzy nostalgia that would soon characterize disco design during the boom. And the boom certainly took root at Infinity, so much so that even the wealth-porn rag Forbes ran a glowing feature on the club and Brahms. The music and the vibe, though, were every bit the equals of the staggering surroundings. “I was hit by the sight of all these lasers and guys dancing with their shirts off and these huge metallic fans catching the light,” Ian Levine reminisces about his first visit to the club in 1977. “I can always remember, I walked in and they were playing Cerrone’s ‘Give Me Love,’ which was a very ‘me’ record—you know, it had the strings and stuff. The thing about ‘Give Me Love’ is that it’s a whole side of an album with three songs. Each one leads into the other one, and it stops at one point and the beat stops completely and nothing happens but just the strings, not even the hi-hat, just the strings going dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun d-d-dun-dun-dun-dun, and when that happened the place went wild and there were two thousand hands in the air and screaming. I was sort of caught—it was like a photo catching a moment in time. I can still picture it today. It was quite magically electrifying … In all the years later and all the New York discos I went to—and I went to all of them—I never saw that moment re-created in quite the same way. That one moment of magic with Jim Burgess DJing at the Infinity really was quite special.”36

  After Le Jardin and Infinity came the deluge. By the end of 1975 there were an estimated five hundred discos in New York City alone and some ten thousand nationwide.37 Part of the reason for the boom was simply that discos were extremely lucrative. As Forbes magazine explained, at Tramp’s Discotheque in Washington, D.C., the owners spent $100,000 on renovating and converting the banquet room of the Carriage House restaurant. The club averaged two hundred to five hundred customers every night of the week, making an average gross of $900,000 a year. Of that gross, 20 percent was spent an alcohol and 35 percent on payroll and upkeep, leaving a cool profit margin of 45 percent, or $400,000. The discotheque business was so profitable that Mike O’Harro, one of the owners of Tramp’s, talked about another of his ventures as becoming “the McDonald’s of disco.”38

  Of course, disco was about more than just the economics. Disco was the first genre of music that was inextricably linked to the nightclub environment, so disco became more than just music, more than just something in the background, more than just a facilitator to sexual relationships. Disco became people’s entire social lives. In Manhattan, some discotheques opened at lunchtime so that office workers chained to a nine-to-five regime could frolic for an hour in the disco environment without threatening their work performance with late nights and substance binges. La Martinique, a predominantly black disco at 57 West 57th Street, held lunchtime sessions every Friday from noon until 3 p.m., where junior executives in well-tailored polyester suits danced with women in pantsuits and six-inch platform shoes and enjoyed a buffet of cold cuts, salad, and fruit. Meanwhile, across the Hudson, “[a]t dawn in New Jersey, the disco scene is cranking into high gear. If you still want to dance after the bars close, if you need a disco booster shot to carry you into the next day, there are the disco breakfast clubs, places like the Second Half in Clifton, the Last Resort in Bloomfield and Long Branch both. These places will pound Barry White into your synapses right while you’re chowing down on your bacon and eggs.”39 In other cities the disco not only fulfilled a social role but also acted as a hub for business networking. “In a pace-setting Sun Belt city like Atlanta, the disco functions as a multimedia melting pot,” Newsweek magazine proclaimed. “At predominantly black and swinging Cisco’s disco, leading figures in the local news come in once a week to answer questions. ‘Here,’ says Jim Wright, publisher of Lovely Atlanta magazine, ‘discos have been the most viable means politicians and businessmen have found to meet the necessary people they need to make their businesses go.’”40

  The rise of the discotheque paralleled the growth of the service economy in the 1970s. With America making its shockingly rapid transition from a manufacturing to a postindustrial society (particularly in New York City with the decimation of its industrial base in the ’60s and ’70s), discotheques, many of which were situated in abandoned
factories and warehouses, were recolonizing the dead industrial space, replacing the production of goods with the production of illusions. The economy was in tatters and people wanted to do what they did during the Great Depression—dance. Just as the Depression saw the heyday of grand pleasure palaces like the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem and Midtown’s Roseland Ballroom, the postindustrial, inflationary ’70s spawned their own fantasy factories, combining nostalgia and extravagance with a devil-may-care attitude that not only perfectly summed up the times, but also foreshadowed the bleakness of what was on the horizon. Inflation had turned America from the land of prim, gray, thrifty, virtuous savers into a land of profligate thrill seekers, betting on both the past and the future with the right now.41 In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch wrote that America had become detached from a sense of time, that the past was no longer informing people’s actions or their understanding of events. “Instead,” he wrote, “we had only nostalgia, a past built of symbol and sentiment, and readily exploited as marketable commodity. Bourgeois values, on the other hand, had so eroded (an inflationary economy abetted the cultural shift) that we lived without a sense of the future as well. Indefinite hedonism thus came to dominate the modern psyche. ‘Restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire’ moved mass society on its rudderless course.”42