Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

  However, it was impossible for anyone to reconcile disco’s liberationist aspects with the fact that these disco “revolutionaries” were partying with people like Imelda Marcos, Roy Cohn, and Betty Ford. It was easier just to run a picture of Margaret Trudeau, the scandalously young wife of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who was photographed at Studio 54 sans underwear on May 22, 1979, the night before her husband lost a reelection bid. Maybe this was the conservative revolution that William Safire had predicted when he first saw the hustle in 1975. As Charles Kaiser wrote, “Everything about the ambience of Studio 54 made it the antithesis of the spirit of the sixties. There was certainly nothing democratic about it. Frank Rich remembered that ‘to be there as a peon, as I was on a few occasions, was to feel that the Continental Baths crowd had finally turned nasty toward the intruding straights and was determined to make them pay (with overpriced drinks and condescending treatment). Even as everyone was telling you that this was where the action was, you felt that the real action, not all of it appetizing, was somewhere in the dark periphery, out of view—and kept there, to make you feel left out.’”66

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  THE STORY OF “I WILL SURVIVE”

  Studio 54 will always be remembered for cocaine in the back room with Liza, Andy, and Halston, but it wasn’t merely about excess and decadence. On occasion, it was actually about the music, and none more important than the night in 1978 when Ritchie Kaczor decided to play (with a little encouragement from Polydor A&R man Rick Stevens) the B side of Gloria Gaynor’s most recent single, a cover of Clout’s “Substitute.” When he played it, nearly everyone left the dance floor, but Kaczor persisted, and within a few more spins “I Will Survive” was the biggest record at Studio. The buzz was such that soon every disco in New York was playing it, and the record company rereleased the single with “I Will Survive” as the A side. It eventually went to #1 in just about every country in the world. Its association with Studio 54 may have been why it initially became a dance floor hit, but the record had everything a great disco record is supposed to have: full-throated gospel release complemented by the surging bass line, dramatic strings, hissing hi-hats, and a hint of Broadway razzmatazz. Although Gaynor was crowned the “Queen of Disco” after dance floor favorites like “Honey Bee,” “Never Can Say Goodbye,” and “Casanova Brown,” “I Will Survive” was one of those exceedingly rare records that are more like forces of nature than pop hits. While the song has become something of a feminist anthem, Gaynor says that “When I sang ‘I Will Survive’ I was relating it to my recovery from spine surgery [after a fall while performing on stage in 1978]. And because the word was going around after my accident that the ‘Queen of Disco is dead,’ one of my main thoughts was that my career would survive! And in a funny way it was also, for me, to do with surviving the death of my mother. I know for most people the song is about abusive relationships and women asserting their independence of men and all that sort of thing and of course I have suffered in that way myself, but for some reason I was never thinking of that when I sang it.”67

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  The real action at Studio 54 was money, and it was in the dark periphery, out of view, tucked into Hefty bags hidden in the walls, in crawlspaces, and in between plumbing pipes. At 9:30 a.m. on December 14, 1978, acting on a tip from a disgruntled employee, officers of the IRS and the Organized Crime Strike Force raided Studio 54 and found the Hefty bags, which contained almost $1 million in cash. Not content with hobnobbing with the rich and famous, Rubell and Schrager were taking their money—skimming $5 million a year, 80 percent of the club’s gross by one estimate. The authorities also found evidence that Rubell and Schrager were paying off Mob loansharker Sam Jacobson, but instead of agreeing to the plea bargain deal offered to them if they turned over evidence on Jacobson, Rubell and Schrager said that they had information on narcotics use by White House chief of staff Hamilton Jordan. Ironically, the case against Jacobson collapsed, but by turning on the federal government, Rubell and Schrager doomed themselves to face the full force of the law on their income tax evasion charges. On January 18, 1980, they were each sentenced to three and a half years, fined $20,000, and received the opprobrium of the judge, who criticized their “tremendous arrogance.”68 Despite his protestations that he was “sorry,” at his farewell party in March, Rubell serenaded his well-wishers with an out-of-tune rendition of “My Way.”

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  Unwilling to be pushed aside by the outer borough interlopers, Maurice Brahms and John Addison decided to join forces on a club called New York New York. Located at 33 West 52nd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, the club was designed by Angelo Donghia, who created a space of cool white and gray elegance, with color provided by red lacquer tabletops and palm trees both real and neon. The club opened a few weeks after Studio 54 and was conceived of as its high-class rival; or, as one employee put it, the club’s “motif was clean taste.”69 Where Studio 54 merely occupied an old television studio, New York New York was “‘the primetime slickly produced television variety show special’ of discos.”70 The nightspot’s opening night on May 18, 1977, was every bit the success that Studio’s launch was, with throngs of celebrities both inside and left out in the cold. “In the middle of a number someone, somewhere, pushes a button and a cloud of smoke, scented with Fabergé perfume, rises to the waists of the assembled dancers,” Anna Quindlen wrote of her visit to the club.71 Unfortunately, this “fog” was as humid as its name implied, and it took the creases out of men’s trousers. More successful was New York New York’s light show: minnows of magenta, blue, white, and green light that darted around the club; a curtain of tiny beads of light that hung over the dance floor and reflected in the mirrors to create the club’s vaunted “infinity effect.” Like most variety show specials, however, New York New York’s magic wore off almost immediately. Perhaps it was because Brahms and Addison were already established presences in Manhattan’s nightworld and felt that they didn’t need to bend over backward for celebrities the way Rubell and Schrager did, or maybe it was that the overly conceptualized interior was too bright, too out in the open to allow the rich and famous to get up to nefarious activities the way they could in the relative darkness of Studio 54, or maybe it was that Studio really did have that je ne sais quoi that made it truly special. Whatever the reason, New York New York became the place that people who couldn’t get into Studio 54 went to instead. “A great many of the men wear sport coats with shirts open at the collar and medallions hanging in the resulting hairy V’s,” Anna Quindlen wrote. “They outnumber the women substantially.”72 As if becoming the bridge and tunnelers’ favorite nightspot wasn’t enough of an indignity, New York New York failed to get the after-party for Martin Scorsese’s film of the same name, and Liza Minnelli, one of the movie’s stars, spent the night at Studio 54 much to Brahms and Addison’s chagrin and the delight of the tabloids’ gossip pages.

  A similar fate almost befell the Times Square discotheque Xenon when it opened in June 1978. Located in the old Henry Miller Theater (the dance floor was where the stage used to be and the seats were replaced by leather banquettes) at 124 West 43rd Street, Xenon boasted a sixteen-channel sound system, the most expensive ever put in a club in New York, a spectacular light show, and a spaceship designed by Douglas Trumbull (who created the special effects in Close Encounters of the Third Kind) that was to descend from the ceiling and hover just above the dancers’ heads. Xenon’s first mission was aborted, however, when the spaceship didn’t work and the light show was something less than advertised, and owners rock promoter Howard Stein and former European disco impresario Peppo Vanini decided to lick their wounds and start over. When it reopened in the autumn, Xenon became Studio’s main rival in the celeb stakes, hosting parties for the likes of Warren Beatty, Pelé, Gregory Peck, Lauren Bacall, and Richard Avedon. Xenon even managed to lure away Disco Sally from Studio 54. Like Studio, Xenon was disco as theater. As one of the club’s doormen told journalist Vita Miezitis, “If
we have a number of celebrities or rich people inside, I will look for people who will entertain this group both in the way they are dressed and the show I think they will put on inside the club.”73 The proscenium of this disco theater was formed by two columns of light designed to look literally like pinball machines, while the stage setting was a number of garish neon frescoes surrounding the dance floor that depicted the New York skyline with a cowboy straddling the Brooklyn Bridge and King Kong beating his chest.

  With the amount of attention generated by places like Xenon and Studio 54, by 1979 discotheques were spreading like the plague throughout the United States, each hoping that some of the sparkle would rub off on it. One thousand of these nightclubs were in the New York metropolitan area, but this isn’t to say that the Big Apple had a monopoly on discotheque outrageousness. Perhaps inevitably, Tinseltown was New York’s match in terms of over-the-top design: the DJ at L.A. discotheque Dillon’s was fitted with a special harness so that he could fly over the crowd on the dance floor, while Billboard magazine described the decor of Hard Times Charlies as “an antiques collector’s delight. Costing in excess of $150,000, it includes a DJ booth converted from an early 18th Century French elevator. A colorful carnival carousel hangs suspended over the dance floor. The seating features pews from old English churches, and there’s an original marble and brass shoeshine parlor salvaged from Chicago’s colorful past.”74

  Across the pond, however, clubs were much more sedate despite the tremendous influence the United Kingdom exerted over disco music. London’s disco scene was shackled to its gentlemen’s/workingmen’s club roots thanks to the country’s restrictive licensing laws and to the DJs, who couldn’t respond to American disco culture because they were too busy fighting the musicians’ union, which aggressively targeted DJs as job killers. The Big Smoke’s most famous discotheques were the hopelessly staid aristo watering hole Annabel’s in Berkeley Square and the Embassy in Old Bond Street. Although the Embassy was owned by Jeremy Norman, who published Burke’s Peerage, it wasn’t all old colonels reminiscing about the Raj and braying, horsey Sloanes, although they were there in abundance. It was essentially a smallish ballroom with a sunken dance floor surrounded by palm trees decorated with white mannequins. Après Studio 54, the club’s busboys wore silk briefs and maybe shoes. “There are no particular dance steps in vogue,” Andy Blackford wrote of a visit there. “The Hustle and the Bump were New York inventions and there’s an implicit understanding among the London elite that New York is so far ahead in everything disco that to import its dances would be a transparent admission of failure.”75

  What the Embassy did have, though, was a DJ who could mix records. This was quite a rarity at the time—as late as 1979, there were only a few DJs in Britain who mixed, and most of those were American imports. “DJs were very primitive, you know, they would announce the records and have no concept of mixing and what disco’s about,” remembers Ian Levine, one of the only mixers in the country, who took over at Angels in Burnley when the Blackpool Mecca closed down in 1979. “The London DJs, in particular, were so entrenched in funk.”76 At places like Lacey Lady in Ilford, the Royalty in Southgate, the Goldmine in Canvey Island, Frenchie’s in Camberley, Surrey, and Crackers in the West End, the music was almost exclusively soul-boy funk and jazz funk, records like Norman Connors’s “Captain Connors,” Bob James’s “Westchester Lady,” and Side Effect’s “Always There.” To further distance themselves from the more populist British disco scene, many of the DJs on the jazz-funk scene (Chris Hill, Greg Edwards, Robbie Vincent, Bob Jones, Tom Holland, etc.) banded together as the “soul mafia.”

  Meanwhile, on the Continent, the influence of the olde worlde discotheques still reigned. Although the European aristocracy had to spend the decade dodging the Red Brigade and Baader-Meinhof gang, the European discos of the ’70s were no longer the basement hovels of old. They were pleasure palaces to compete with the most luxuriant of New York’s beau monde nightclubs. The most splendid of these dolce vita dance halls was undoubtedly Rituel on the Costa Smeralda, the section of the Sardinian coast that the Aga Khan turned into a millionaire’s playground in the ’60s. Rituel was “a glistening white cave shaped like an amphitheatre, with successive tiers etched into the rock walls and strewn with hundreds of white pillows, upon which the rich recline in splendiferous near nudity. A slowly turning light machine fills the cave with vivid colored images, and at the lowest level of the cavern, on a tiny dance floor of ebony marble, gorgeous people move ever so slightly … If, God forbid, they should perspire, there is a rustic terrace reached through a hole in the cave’s ceiling. From that lofty perch they can turn their brows toward sea breezes while they watch the moon over the calm Mediterranean.”77

  I’m hell on wheels, let’s roll.

  —Cher, “Hell on Wheels”

  Can you do it on skates?

  —Citi, “Can You Do It on Skates?”

  Disco may have been fabulously glamorous and resplendently decadent, but it was also downright silly. And no aspect of disco culture was more ludicrous than roller disco. Perhaps because it was more proletarian than the high falutin world of Studio 54, more tailored for teenagers than twentysomething sophisticates, roller disco encapsulated the worst of the fadishness and velour-shirted mindlessness (with elbow and knee pads) of the 1970s. When it hit the mainstream thanks to the new polyurethane wheels that replaced the scraping and bumpiness of the old metal ones, the legend of Rollerena, the beloved blond bimbos of Venice Beach, the bizarre popularity of roller derby and Cher’s “Hell on Wheels,” roller disco spread across the world with the unrelenting fury of the pet rock. Suddenly, everywhere from Hixon, Tennessee (site of Skateland, which had one of the country’s most expensive light shows), to Dunstable (home of the United Kingdom’s first roller disco, the California, DJed by Peter Preston), there were pockmarked teens with Goody combs sticking out of the back pockets of their Toughskins and gamine women wearing rainbow-colored boob tubes, hot pants, and matching leg warmers trying to do the roll and rock or the coffee bean without dropping their glowsticks. Celebs the world over were boogying on wheels (Jack Nicholson had black boot skates with green neon tubing, and Cher had skates whose wheels lowered like the landing gear of an airplane); games manufacturer Gottlieb made a very popular “Roller Disco” pinball machine; there were at least three movies made and rush-released to capitalize on the trend, all of them nominees for the worst films ever made—Roller Boogie (starring Linda Blair), Skatetown, U.S.A. (featuring a stellar cast including Scott Baio, Flip Wilson, Ruth Buzzi, Maureen McCormick, Ron Palillo, Billy Barty [playing Flip Wilson’s son!] and, in his first role on the silver screen, Patrick Swayze as Ace Johnson), and Xanadu (producer Alan Carr’s car-crash of a musical with Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly)—and the legendary “Roller Disco” double episode of CHiPs (with guest stars like Leif Garrett, Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, F-Troop’s Larry Storch, and M*A*S*H’s Larry Linville). The dark side of the roller-skating craze was conjured by movies like The Warriors, which featured gangs of roller-skating toughs terrorizing the Bronx, and an ad for Hostess Fruit Pies in which the Incredible Hulk rescues a town from the pillaging “Roller Disco Devils.”

  Inevitably, many of disco’s early devotees hated roller disco and everything that it represented. As the disco scene was becoming ever more commercialized, a character in Andrew Holleran’s Dancer From the Dance laments, “The music was atrocious: that roller-skating music they’re turning out now that discos are big business.”78 Very few of the roller discos had liquor licenses and so attracted a much younger, teeny-bopper crowd than the standard discos. But the truth is that, like disco itself, roller disco had a history deeper and richer than its mainstream face would indicate. Roller skating was first developed in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century as a way for the Dutch to practice their national sport, ice skating, during the summer months. Dancing on roller skates (to brass bands and pipe organs) began in the parks and promenades of Victorian Engla
nd in the 1880s, and roller rinks throughout the world employed organists (think of the music of Dave “Baby” Cortez) as a matter of course until the 1970s. In the mid- to late 1960s, Hector and Henry Abrami, owners of the Empire Rollerdrome on 200 Empire Boulevard in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, decided to hire a DJ to replace the organist as a cost-cutting measure, and the seeds of roller disco were sown. The Abrami brothers opened the Empire in the 1930s, when Crown Heights was an area almost exclusively inhabited by Eastern European immigrants. The neighborhood started to change in the 1960s with an influx of Afro-Caribbean immigrants, and the DJ started to tailor his set toward their musical tastes. The result was the most famous roller disco in the world. In the mid-1970s, a technique called the “Brooklyn Bounce”—based on varying stride patterns and frequent stops—was developed by skaters Bill Butler and Pat the Cat, and the roller disco craze was born. Soon, busloads of tourists (including JFK Jr. and Cher) would visit the thirty-thousand-square-foot rollerama decorated with brightly colored rainbow murals on Wednesday night, which became known as “white night” (at almost every other roller disco in the country Wednesday night was “black night”) to gawk at the dancers who were universally acknowledged as the best roller boogiers on the planet. It was a spectacle of speed, improvised choreography, and athleticism that no regular disco could hope to match.