Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

  To Levan, DJing wasn’t about mixing, skills, or taste. It was about feeling and, strangely enough, narrative. Levan often told stories or made comments through his song selection. “Out of all the records you have, maybe five or six of them actually make sense together,” Levan told Steven Harvey in 1983. “There is actually a message in the dance, the way you feel, the muscles you use, but only certain records have that. Say I was playing songs about music—“I Love Music” by The O’Jays, “Music” by Al Hudson—and the next record is “Weekend” [by Phreek or Class Action]. That’s about getting laid, a whole other thing. If I was dancing and truly into the words and the feeling and it came on, it might be a good record, but it makes no sense because it doesn’t have anything to do with the others. So, a slight pause, a sound effect, something else to let you know it’s a new paragraph rather than one continuous sentence.”24

  While on one hand Levan attempted to become if not the Homer of the turntables at least the O. Henry, he was also aiming for wild abandon, trying to create epiphanic bursts of energy that shattered structures like narrative. Some of his signature tics—like cutting off a record midflow or his car-crash mixes—seemed almost like the DJing equivalent of punk rock dissonance or feedback. He was after what Roland Barthes defined as “punctum”: that moment of explosive insight where everything suddenly becomes clear, the crack of the Zen master’s cane across the back of your head, the divine contact that comes after a whirling dervish ritual.

  As a teenager, Levan had frequented the Loft and the Gallery when they first opened, and got his first DJing gig at age eighteen at the Continental Baths in 1973. “I was doing lights and the DJ walked out,” he recalled to Harvey. “The manager who was like, a six foot three inches, Cuban guy, said, ‘You’re going to play records tonight!’ I told him that I didn’t have any records. ‘You’ve got five hours!’”25 Well, Levan managed to find some records and ended up playing the Baths for about a year.

  Levan left the Baths in 1974 to play at Richard Long’s after-hours loft club, SoHo Place, at 452 Broadway. While Levan’s growing following ensured that the place was packed, the club was in Long’s workshop and was essentially a showcase for Long’s recently started sound equipment business. Unfortunately, the club’s booming bass ensured that it wouldn’t stay open for very long. As soon as SoHo Place closed, Levan was asked by Michael Brody to DJ at his newly opened club at 143 Reade Street in what is now known as TriBeCa. The club was situated in an old meat locker and still had the temperature control switch, which Levan would play with along with the DJ crossover that allowed him to manipulate specific frequencies of a record. It was at Reade Street that Levan would develop the techniques as well as the sound—the deep, dark bass, the queasy, dubby emotion that he would extract from records—that would make him a legend.

  With an unsympathetic landlord and space issues, Reade Street was never going to be the right space for Levan’s rising star, so Brody closed the club in 1976 and asked Levan not to play anywhere else until he found a new place. The new place was the Paradise Garage and it was built explicitly for Levan—probably the only nightclub ever constructed for a specific DJ. The Garage unofficially opened in January 1977 with the “Construction Parties” that were held in the club’s small nine-hundred-square-foot Grey Room in order to raise money for the rest of the club’s construction. When the full club (with the second largest dance floor in New York) finally officially opened in February 1978, it was a disaster. There was a hitch with the sound system, and even though it was in the middle of a snowstorm, no one was allowed inside until it was fixed. Once they got inside, it was practically as cold as it was outside. Almost all of the A-list Flamingo crowd that Brody had invited left, vowing never to return.

  It’s debatable whether the pretty boys would have stayed at the Paradise Garage even if they had stuck around to hear Levan spin. Their environment was the Flamingo, which specialized in relentlessly chipper music; Levan played darker, more bottom-heavy records that retained their connection to the gospel continuum. As time went on and “disco” became less and less popular, Levan’s music got darker, weirder, more disjointed, particularly the remixes that he made specifically for his own dance floor. Levan was one of disco’s true dub champions, and his mix of Instant Funk’s “I Got My Mind Made Up” and his production of New York Citi Peech Boys’ “Don’t Make Me Wait” are classics of dub technique used in the service of dance floor imperatives: delaying climax while building tension and stretching the beat, and as an impressionistic canvas to depict the club life dystopia of constant, but unfulfilled, temptation and unrequited desire. His most radical remix, however, just may be his dub mix of Smokey Robinson’s minor R&B hit “And I Don’t Love You.” One of the most famous voices in the history of popular music becomes nothing but a ghost, and a devastatingly haunting one at that, only mournfully intoning the title phrase a couple of times from behind a fog of echo and distended guitar. Levan uses echo to double the prevailing beat over itself and inserts a cascade of synth-toms, subverting a rather ham-fisted ’80s funk-lite groove to create an opiated palette of dance floor colors that gives the lie to naysayers who claim that disco is capable of only one, skweaming emotional timbre.

  The Garage’s heyday was in the early ’80s, after disco had supposedly been banished into exile. “In the early ’80s no one seemed to have any direction. The [DJs] were all scattered around trying to find the new thing because disco was dead,” Paradise Garage regular Danny Krivit says about the Garage’s ability to continue to attract huge crowds. “They were really playing a lot of stuff that they didn’t feel … [Levan] was completely unaffected by this. He was playing stuff that he thought was good music. The club had a clear direction. Maybe the name disco or the trash disco was easy to throw away, but you couldn’t lump all this music together as bad music. There was a lot of good music there. The Garage got people back to that—this is just good dance music.”26

  The gospel of the Paradise Garage spread quickly, particularly to a club in New Jersey. The Zanzibar opened in Newark in August 1979 after the club’s owner, Miles Berger, inspired by a visit to the Paradise Garage, got Richard Long to design a system in his club at the Lincoln Motel. Hippie Torales was the club’s original DJ, but he was replaced in 1981 by Tony Humphries and Tee Scott. While clubs like Zanzibar and later the Shelter in New York ensured that “Garage music” would become ossified, enshrined in the mausoleum of genre, they weren’t the only culprits. Even Levan’s own crowd got protective of what it thought Garage music was. Krivit remembers that when hip-hop first came out “quickly, people were like, ‘I don’t like this, don’t push rap on me.’ Certain people were getting a little standoffish, like, ‘This is Garage music, that doesn’t belong here.’ That used to bother Larry whenever anyone said that. He was like, ‘Good music is good music, so when I hear something that’s rap and it’s good, I’m going to play it here.’”27 Nevertheless, out of Levan’s hands and outside of its original environment, Garage came to mean only soulful New York dance music, especially with a jazzy feel; gone were the weird records, the messianic intensity, the messy mistakes. Garage soon was characterized by the same rigid beat and lack of inspiration that doomed disco—albeit on a smaller scale.

  * * *

  As the Paradise Garage was reinstating the spirituality and communion of early disco after its fall from grace, another enormously influential nightclub was propelling disco into the future by remaking it as a kind of doo-wop, one not to be sung on the corner or a stoop under a streetlight, but in the arcade by the glare of a video game screen and mostly by girls. Blending the innocence of the early girl groups and doo-wop singers with disco’s fractured sense of melody and a percussion sensibility halfway between disco and hip-hop, the music that emerged from the Funhouse was called freestyle. While many of the aural hallmarks of disco were no longer in evidence, this new music was still very much a tribal rite, a declaration of often forbidden sexuality and an expression of the ambivalence about
crossing over.

  Situated in one of many of Manhattan’s warehouse districts at 526 West 26 Street, the Funhouse opened on March 30, 1979, with Jim Burgess and Bobby DJ. They were soon replaced by Jonathan Fearing, who played a sort of classicist disco at a time when traditional disco was dying and was mutating into new forms. Fearing was replaced in 1981 by young hotshot John “Jellybean” Benitez, who had his finger on the pulse of the changing dance scene in New York. Benitez drew a fanatical following of Hispanic and Italian-American teenagers from the Bronx and the outlying areas of Brooklyn and Queens like Canarsie and Ozone Park. The dancers at the club were called “buggas,” and their uniform (for both boys and girls) consisted of short, sleeveless cutoff T-shirts (often with the name of their neighborhood printed on it) that showed generous amounts of midriff, sweatpants, bandanas rolled as thin as possible and tied around the forehead, and Chinese slippers.

  The vibe was a combination of hip-hop and disco: The crowd would bark if they liked a song that Jellybean was playing and boo if they didn’t; the boys would be prowling the dance floor looking for people to battle with (both with dance moves and with fists) while the girls would be singing along to the cathartic songs of heartbreak. Jellybean, whose DJ booth was situated inside a twelve-foot-high clown face, played a combination of electro (Man Parrish’s “Hip-Hop Be-Bop”), disco (Jimmy “Bo” Horne’s “Spank”), weird disco (Martin Circus’s “Disco Circus”), Italo-disco (Harry Thumann’s “Underwater”), British New Wave (New Order’s “Confusion” and Wide Boy Awake’s “Slang Teacher”), and classic break beats (Jimmy Castor’s “It’s Just Begun”).

  The sound the club was most known for, though, was the hard electroboogie of Arthur Baker and John Robie, especially records like Jenny Burton’s “Remember What You Like,” Freez’s “I.O.U.,” Planet Patrol’s “Play at Your Own Risk,” and Slack’s “Slack.” Robie was one of the most important keyboard players since World War II, largely because of his mastery of the Emulator sampling keyboard, a more affordable version of the Fairlight without any sequencing capabilities, which was released in 1982, ushering in the era of sampladelia. While sampling is most associated with hip-hop, its first use on record was on former Main Ingredient vocalist Cuba Gooding’s 1983 version of his old group’s “Happiness Is Just Around The Bend” (a cover of the Brian Auger song). Robie concocted an entire chorus out of one syllable, Gooding singing “bop.” The sampling on “Happiness” was fairly discreet: You had to be part of the cognoscenti to notice it. However, later that year Robie made unmistakable use of the Emulator on C-Bank’s stunning disco concrète classic “One More Shot,” which used a snippet of the sound of breaking glass as a percussion device and all manner of weird synth striations and nasty scratches to give a grim edge to vocalist Jenny Burton’s tale of heartbreak and lover’s paranoia.

  Records like these were the flip side of the music popular in late gay discos like the Saint and Trocadero Transfer: Where Patrick Cowley used the new technology to imagine a brave new world of sexuality, Robie and Baker’s harsh drum machines, piercing synthesizers, and non sequitur sound effects made perfect sense to alienated kids raised on video games; where Cowley et al. were celebrating the fact that it was raining men, these records were asking that age-old question of teen love—will you still love me tomorrow? Somewhere in this mechanical matrix, New York Latinos heard ancestral echoes of salsa piano lines and montuño rhythms. In the hands of producers like the Latin Rascals, Paul Robb, Omar Santana, and Andy “Panda” Tripoli, the Pac-Man bleeps, synth stabs, and Roland TR-808 claves became a robotic Latin jam session called freestyle.

  Freestyle’s ground zero was Shannon’s 1983 single “Let the Music Play.” Although it didn’t have the hi-hat sound that would come to characterize freestyle percussion, the song’s electro-woodblock-and-cowbell percussion and kick drum/snare drum interaction sounded like a cross between Gary Numan and Tito Puente, and provided the blueprint for freestyle’s street-smart tales of innocence and experience. “Please Don’t Go,” by sixteen-year-old Nayobe and produced by Andy Panda, further Latinized the “Let the Music Play” formula by featuring keyboard patterns stolen from both Eddie Palmieri and Patrice Rushen on top of synthesized timbal beats. With these records taking off in his club, Jellybean attempted to reclaim the old break beat classic “The Mexican” for Latinos from both Ennio Morricone and British prog rock group Babe Ruth.

  However, as freestyle was starting to take off, Jellybean’s interest was elsewhere. According to legend, one night in 1983 a Funhouse regular had sneaked into the DJ booth and managed to play her demo over the club’s sound system when Jellybean wasn’t paying attention. The crowd loved what they heard, and the clubgoer persuaded Jellybean to produce a track for her. Her name, of course, was Madonna. Although she had previously sung backup for Patrick “Born to Be Alive” Hernandez, and Jellybean’s production of “Holiday” was significantly more melodic and more streamlined than most of what he played at the Funhouse, Madonna’s early style owed a huge debt to the freestyle sound.

  Jellybean quit the Funhouse in June 1984 to pursue his own recording and production career, but freestyle continued to dominate the club thanks to Jellybean’s replacement, Lil’ Louie Vega, who would later go on to fame as one half of Masters At Work. Meanwhile, former Funhouse dancer Lisa Velez was discovered by production team Full Force and, as Lisa Lisa, became freestyle’s biggest early star. With a dubby synth effect stolen from Robie’s Emulator and a Roland woodblock pattern, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam’s debut record, “I Wonder If I Take You Home,” became the first freestyle record to dent the American Top 40 in 1985.

  Records like Shannon’s “Let the Music Play” were also big on Friday “Wheels of Steel” nights at the Roxy, an enormous club at 515 West 18th Street. Freestyle was also called “Latin hip-hop,” and its drum machine beats fit in with the electro sound that was being developed at this club by DJs like D.ST and Afrika Bambaataa. While the uptown hip-hop kids were turning downtown technology to their own ends at the “Wheels of Steel” nights, there was a similar reclamation effort going on with disco the rest of the week.

  The Roxy was conceived of as a roller rink, and “initially, they wanted to be Studio 54 but with roller skates—the red ropes, celebrities, everything,” claims Danny Krivit, who was the original DJ there. “A couple years into it, the [original] owners sold it to another guy. The new owner really wanted to open the club up and fill it. Roller skating, they’d consider three, four hundred people a good night. I remember that I started doing Monday nights because that was the only night of the week he wasn’t there trying to tell me what to play. It was only about thirty or fifty people that night—he didn’t care about that night. Very quickly I got the numbers up to twelve hundred, which for roller skating is very crowded. And it dwarfed any of his other nights. It was only because I was playing what they needed to hear rather than what he thought they needed to hear—real roller-skating music.”28

  Developing from more R&B-flavored disco, like Patrick Adams’s productions, Brass Construction, and the Mizell brothers’ work on A Taste of Honey’s “Boogie Oogie Oogie,” this “real roller-skating music” was more downtempo and less strictly 4/4 than classic disco because you just can’t skate to high-tempo music. Krivit was playing records like Shalamar’s “Take That to the Bank” and “The Second Time Around,” the Whispers’ “And the Beat Goes On,” Lakeside’s “Fantastic Voyage” (all released on Los Angeles’s Solar label), Rufus’s “Do You Love What You Feel,” and Vaughan Mason’s “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll.” While maintaining much of disco’s groove, these records also marked a return of what dance music historian Brian Chin calls “an upbeat-and-downbeat, one-two feel to dance.”29

  Away from the roller rink, this “funkier” groove came to be known as “boogie” or “street music,” “to distinguish it from Hi-NRG and the styles of ’80s dance music in Europe.”30 Many of the early records in this style—the Fantastic Aleems’ “Get Down Friday Night,�
� Logg’s “I Know You Will,” Convertion’s “Let’s Do It” (all featuring LeRoy Burgess on vocals), Central Line’s “Walking Into Sunshine”—were hits at the Paradise Garage, and pop trinkets like Indeep’s “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life” had an across-the-board appeal. Soon enough, though, records like Young & Company’s “I Like What You’re Doin’ to Me,” Goldie Alexander’s “Show You My Love,” Major Harris’s “Gotta Make Up Your Mind,” Kinky Foxx’s “So Different,” and Ceela’s “I’m in Love” began to articulate a more defiantly R&B sensibility and broke away from the rainbow coalition that defined New York in the immediate postdisco era, feeding into R&B styles like the Minneapolis funk of Jam & Lewis and the New Jack Swing of Teddy Riley that severed any connection to disco or “white” music.

  “YOU MUST FEEL THE DRIVE”

  Italo-Disco

  Disco may have been tarred and feathered, drawn and quartered, and flayed in the United States, but disco never died in Europe. It was never even dragged through the mud or had its name used in vain. Instead, disco became part, if not the basis, of the continent’s pop framework. Perhaps it was because disco maintained a connection to old-fashioned Tin Pan Alley melodies or because in Europe pop is treasured for its frivolity or because Europeans saw disco as their last chance to maintain a foothold on a pop landscape that was fast mutating into the primary vehicle for American cultural imperialism. But whatever the reason, disco was perhaps even bigger in Europe after its 1979 death in America than before. Part of this was due to laws in many European countries that mandated that a certain proportion of records played on pop radio had to be homegrown, but it is also undeniable that disco flourished in the hands of European producers in the 1980s, under protectionism or not, and nowhere more so than in Italy.

  Italy had plenty of jet-set discos in the late ’60s/early ’70s, including the regular Roman haunt of the Onassises, Number One (two blocks from the Via Veneto), where a drug investigation in 1972 quickly turned to stolen art trafficking, forcing many members “to [leave] hurriedly for safaris in East Africa and for the sun in Acapulco.”31 However, typical of the fractured history of disco, the story of Italo-disco really begins in France.32 The Peppers were a poppy prog rock quintet featuring synth player Mat Camison and drummer Pierre Alain Dahan, who, inspired by the success of Chicory Tip’s cover of Giorgio Moroder’s “Son of My Father” and Hot Butter’s “Popcorn,” decided to put out their own goofy synth novelty number. With its bouncy clavinet bass line, hand claps, “bop-bop-bop-bop bop-bop-a-da-da” vocals, and whiny synth melody, “Pepper Box” was a huge hit across Europe in 1973 and was an early disco hit in the United States the following year. A few years later, Dahan was recruited to be part of a group to flesh out a TV theme song for widespread commercial release. The group was called Space, and “Magic Fly” ushered in synth disco along with Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” in 1977. But where “I Feel Love” used the Moog throb for distinctly erotic purposes, “Magic Fly” was not Spanish fly and used synth pulses and sequencer rhythms to sail topographic oceans and explore the dark side of the moon. This obsession with space and the prog rock tendencies would come to characterize Italo-disco.33