Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

  Disco music had arrived in Italy in the mid-1970s wearing more typical clothing. “From 1974 to 1976, there was this club [Baia Degli Angeli in Gabicce, near Rimini on the Adriatic coast] with two American DJs, Bob Day and Tom Sison,” says Italian DJ Daniele Baldelli. “They had beautiful records that Italian DJs never listened to before because there was no import-export in that period. We received records from America maybe six months later. So when these two boys came, it was very good to listen to this music.”34 The beautiful records that Day and Sison were playing were examples of the Philadelphia sound that would soon set Europe alight with its mixture of soaring melodies and driving rhythms.

  In 1977, Day headed back to the States and asked Baldelli, who had been DJing since 1969 in nearby Cattolica, to replace him. Baldelli agreed and, along with Claudio Rispoli, carried on playing Day and Sison’s mixture of Philly, disco, and funk. “At Baia Degli Angeli they had something very nice for the DJ,” Baldelli remembers. “I was playing in a glass elevator, so I could go up and down from the ground floor to the first floor and see all the dance floors in the club—the three inside and the two outside near the pool.”35

  Baldelli left Baia Degli Angeli in 1978, and in April 1979 he became the DJ at the Cosmic club in Lazise, a small town on Lake Garda.36 The club, which had a capacity of one thousand people, was based on famous American discotheques: The dance floor had the same multicolored lights as Odyssey 2001, where Saturday Night Fever was filmed, and the club had columns of light similar to those at Studio 54. However, the Cosmic was much more egalitarian than its models. “The people that came to Cosmic … were Italian people from eighteen to twenty-eight, all the same style,” Baldelli says. “They dressed with jeans, T-shirts, the girls were like hippies in Woodstock, many flowers and so on. At Cosmic there was no door selector.”37

  The clubbers themselves may have been down to earth, but the music that Baldelli played lived up to the club’s name. “In 1979 I was playing the same music I was at Baia Degli Angelli, then from 1980 until 1984 it started something in me,” Baldelli says. “I was looking in every kind of music … On one record I used to play, Bolero by Ravel, and on this record I played African sound of Africa Djolé [a Guinean percussion troupe], or maybe the electronic sound of Steve Reich over which I mix Malinke sound of Guinea [probably ethnographic recordings], or I mix T-Connection with Moebius and Roedelius, or maybe Cat Stevens and Lee Ritenour, or maybe Depeche Mode at thirty-three instead of forty-five, or I play Yellowman forty-five instead of thirty-three. I mix twenty African songs with one pattern of Korg electronic drum. I play one Brazilian batucada with a song of Kraftwerk. I was using synthesizer effect on the voice of Miriam Makeba, Jorge Ben, or Fela Kuti. Or I play Indian [sic] melody of Ofra Haza or Sheila Chandra with the electronic sound of German label Sky [late-period Krautrock like Cluster, Michael Rother, and Streetmark].”38

  This combination of spaced-out rock and tribal percussion became known as Cosmic music in honor of the club. Crank up the speed a bit (Baldelli says that most of the music he played was between 90 and 105 bpm) and this was the same formula as Italo-disco. While the Cosmic club is often seen as the crucible of the Italo sound, most of the ingredients were already in place prior to Baldelli’s epiphany, no matter how unique his music was. In fact, Baldelli himself dismisses most Italo-disco as too mainstream. “Claudio Simonetti, Gazebo, Mario Boncaldo—all this, for me the Italian music I didn’t like, I think it was too much commercial,” he declares. “The only songs I played in Cosmic was Koto [responsible for “Chinese Revenge”], Hipnosis [Italo band that covered both Jean-Michel Jarre and Vangelis] and Mario Boncaldo [the man behind the pinnacle of the Italo sound, Klein & MBO’s “Dirty Talk”], all the other production was really commercial. I preferred to play the electronic music that came from Germany, especially the Sky label.”39

  Claudio Simonetti, keyboardist for the Italian prog rock group Goblin, came up with a similar formula to Baldelli in 1978 after being turned on to disco at Rome’s Easy Going club by DJ Paolo Micioni. Simonetti’s early productions for Easy Going (“Baby I Love You” and “Fear”) and Vivien Vee (“Give Me a Break”) were Giorgio Moroder–style disco but seen through the refraction of Alan Parsons Project’s “I, Robot” and his experience at Cinecittà studios soundtracking countless films and absorbing ideas from film/TV composers like Nino Nardini, Piero Piccioni, Giampiero Boneschi, Mario Nascimbene, and Ennio Morricone himself. Easy Going’s “Fear,” in particular, was essentially Pink Floyd remixed by Moroder and Silver Convention.

  Another important early influence on the Italo sound was the husband-wife duo Krisma. Maurizio and Christina Arcieri lived in London in the late ’70s and combined punk antics and fashion, New Wave melodies and guitar lines with Vangelis-style electronics on records like “Chinese Restaurant” and “Many Kisses.” Soon enough, though, the Italo sound would be influencing London’s New Wave scene. Klein & MBO’s “Dirty Talk” was the perfect Italo package: a prog rock sense of exploration and portentousness, the sangfroid of British synth pop, really cheap-sounding synthesizers, a very Moroder hi-hat shuffle, and although the percussion never really gets going, the multiple oscillating bass lines give it a sort of syncopated feel. “Dirty Talk” was an enormous hit on dance floors across the world and became an acknowledged influence on New Order’s “Blue Monday.”

  “Dirty Talk” was also a big hit at the Paradise Garage and at the Warehouse in Chicago, where Levan’s friend and former DJing partner at the Continental Baths, Frankie Knuckles, DJed. Knuckles had moved to Chicago from New York in 1977 when he was recruited by the owners of the Warehouse. Knuckles initially played mostly Salsoul and Philly records and gospel-influenced message records, but by the late ’70s the crowd started to respond more and more to the weird, dubby records that Levan was spinning back in New York. In response, Knuckles started to augment his old disco records with the more rigid beats of a cheap drum machine and reedited them to make them either punchier or dubbier. Legend has it that this combination of disco with drum machines and reel-to-reel tape edits became known as House music after people kept asking record stores for “the records they played at the Warehouse.”

  Another way of expressing the formula was Salsoul + Italo = House. Records like “Dirty Talk,” with its electronic minimalism and its simultaneously warm and eerie sound, fit in perfectly at the Warehouse and at rival club the Music Box, where Ron Hardy DJed in a similar style. Italo records were huge in Chicago, largely thanks to Paul Weisburg’s Imports Etc. record shop,40 and provided much of the blueprint for House music, which would distill the excess of disco into a drum machine beat and a synthesized bass line. The influence of records like “Dirty Talk” and Gaz Nevada’s “I.C. Love Affair” on deep House auteur Larry Heard and Capricorn’s “I Need Love” on producer Farley Jackmaster Funk is obvious.

  Equally apparent is Italo-disco’s influence on the other crystallization of the disco sound to emerge from the American Midwest, techno. Techno was born in Detroit—well, actually in Belleville, a fishing village about twenty-five miles outside the city—as the sound of profound postindustrial alienation. Although often described as Parliament-Funkadelic meets Kraftwerk, the earliest techno records bear at least as big a stamp of Italo as that of George Clinton or Düsseldorf’s showroom dummies. One of the first techno-style records to emerge from Detroit was A Number of Names’ “Sharevari,” which lifted its hook directly from Kano’s early Italo record “Holly Dolly” even if its prime influence was arch British synth-pop. Alexander Robotnick’s (a pseudonym for ex–jazz musician Maurizio Dami) “Problèmes d’Amour” was another Italo record that found its way to Detroit from Canada (where the Italo sound was enormously popular) and into the hearts and sequencers of Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, and Carl Craig, the producers who would largely create techno. For its American release, “Problèmes d’Amour” was remixed by François Kevorkian, providing a further link between disco and the dance music that it melted into
.

  7

  “STAYIN’ ALIVE”

  Disco Today

  There’s something which very few people write about or understand—but it’s probably one of the most important processes of popular culture—and that is a generation recognising itself in music.

  —Colin Newman

  I was thinking that what happened in the 1970s had much more impact on modern culture than what happened in the 1960s. As far as I can tell, the way they act, the way they look … It’s not about what happened in the 1960s, it’s really about what happened in the 1970s.

  —Clem Burke

  June 29, 1999, was “’70s Night” at Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Before that night’s game between the Chicago Cubs and the Milwaukee Brewers, the Village People performed a miniconcert. Standing at home plate, the group sang their hits “Y.M.C.A.,” which had become a standard between-innings song at most of the country’s ballparks, and “In the Navy.” Nearly twenty years to the day after Chicago’s disco riot, and only a few miles up the road from Comiskey Park, the Village People, the most iconic symbol of everything that was wrong with disco in the eyes of Middle America, not only escaped a baseball stadium with their lives and no field invasion, but they were given a standing ovation.

  Almost five months later, on November 17, the United States Postal Service unveiled its disco stamp as part of the Celebrate the Century series of commemorative stamps. The stamp, which depicted a man and a woman dressed like John Travolta and Karen Lynn Gorney in Saturday Night Fever dancing under a mirror ball, garnered 365,221 votes in a nationwide ballot to choose fifteen images that best represented the 1970s from a choice of thirty. Disco was outranked by only the smiley face, Sesame Street, and Earth Day; it out-polled VCRs, the nation’s bicentennial, Monday Night Football, the Pittsburgh Steelers winning four Super Bowls, the women’s rights movement, the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, and All in the Family.

  Twenty-five years after the fact, “disco” is no longer a five-letter word that can’t be uttered in polite company; it’s no longer the guilty pleasure hidden in the closet along with your macramé wall hangings and lava lamp. Disco is now even enshrined as part of the establishment; it has the imprimatur of the federal government. A year before the stamp and the Village People’s triumphant appearance at Wrigley, disco was the subject of two feature films—54 and The Last Days of Disco—and had a costarring role in a third, Boogie Nights. While Boogie Nights did attempt to replicate the wild sexual abandon of the era (being about the porn industry, it could hardly not), the movies were all marked by the almost complete absence of gay or black characters. It was a whitewash comparable to the hosing down of the balconies at Studio 54 and the Saint: Effacing both the unrepentant, orgiastic stink that made disco so subversive in the first place and the holding out for false promises that gave it its weight and tension, these movies left behind nothing but the after-trail of revisionist kitsch. Imprisoning disco in the gloss of nostalgia—with its little inconveniences swept under the cover of a twenty-inch bell-bottom—these acts of preservation have forced disco to be seen through the rose-tinted mirror shades of irony. Reduced to nothing but stockbrokers in leisure suits and good-time girls in tube tops, the contemporary memory of disco serves only to camouflage the pain of one of the most difficult decades in American history with an afro wig and rainbow-colored stockings.

  On the other hand, disco’s cheery image is a reminder that it belongs to everyone: from drunk guys at the ballpark to members of a drag revue, from revivalist bores and “quality music” snobs to girls ready to go out on the town—all can claim disco as their own. Despite the media’s focus on the elitism of Studio 54, it was and is populist music par excellence. Its willingness to be all things to all people—born from the alienation at the core of its soul—marks it as the perfect American music despite what its detractors claimed. The only thing un-American about disco was its derision of authenticity, that crutch used to prop up the fragile ego of an upstart nation. But from a contemporary perspective, maybe even that’s not so true.

  Disco was the last gasp for integration in America, and its pluralist aesthetic has acted as a beacon for producers reacting against today’s musical apartheid. “I think in the past twenty years or so America has become a lot more stratified,” says Daniel Wang, a dance music producer whose work explicitly references disco. “In the mid- to late ’60s there was the civil rights era, and in the ’70s there was a certain remnant idealism about having cultures mix. And you hear that very explicitly in disco music. You hear it when Vince Montana talks about Salsoul: ‘Hey, we got the white jazz xylophone player, the blues guitar player…’ In Patrick Juvet’s ‘I Love America’ you literally hear for thirteen minutes, ‘Here’s the Latin New York. Here’s the rock New York. This is why I love America, because you got all of all these mixes.’ Nowadays, I think there are all these enclaves. The gay sound has a very specific sound because it wants to be separatist and gay; it’s about white men who take a lot of steroids and K and crystal meth, and they only want to be with their own kind. Black people, too, R&B: It’s a very canned drum-machine beat, but that beat becomes nothing more than the empty signifier—it signifies nothing more than the fact that this is black music. Although in itself it’s not funky anymore; it’s canned, it comes from some drum machine or some MPC and it’s the same beat. Every R&B song is exactly the same beat. The only thing that makes it black is a black voice talking on top, but of course it’s all processed. The same thing with rock music. They signify only their own ethnic or sexual enclave. That idealism has been replaced by commercial marketing to the correct socioeconomic or racial group. Maybe that’s the disappointment we hear in music nowadays.”1

  On a series of EPs released on his own Balihu label, as well as on records for likeminded labels such as Environ and Ghostly International, Wang exorcised his disillusionment by refracting the warm techno of the ’90s through the prism of the mirror ball. He seriously freaked the François Kevorkian drum sound, rubbery Shep Pettibone keyboards, and Walter Gibson percussion that ruled New York in the early ’80s. Every leftover synth and sound effect from labels like Prelude, West End, Streetwise, Cutting, Sleeping Bag, Tommy Boy, and Next Plateau made an appearance on his records. On his Silver Trophies EP, Wang harked back to Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra with a sly, electronic wink at Western stereotypes of “the Orient.”

  Wang was born in California but spent most of his formative years in Taiwan. “I used to watch this show called Dance Fever, and they would have all these hustle dancers on,” he recalls. “They’d play [Dan Hartman’s] ‘Instant Replay’ and Patrick Hernandez ‘Born to Be Alive,’ and I’d get really into it and repeat the moves in front of a mirror. In ’82 and ’83 I started to listen to Madonna, like ‘Burning Up,’ and the early Hi-NRG, Evelyn Thomas, Hazell Dean, Freez ‘IOU,’ early freestyle … I spent a small fortune on a Vidal Sassoon haircut, and the other boys in the school thought I was a total fruit, which I was.”2

  While sexuality undoubtedly played an important role in his initial identification with disco, he cites a different conversion experience. “I was DJing gay college parties at Yale in about ’89, ’90, and then about ’91, ’92, I started to hear the Strictly Rhythm records, all the early House records. Then in about ’94 I would come to the city and go to these parties at this place called House Nation at Fareta Dance Music Studios on Broadway at Bleecker … François Kevorkian was in the side room playing Seven Deadly Sins by Rinder & Lewis, Eddy Grant, but this Rinder & Lewis thing hit me like a ton of bricks and made me realize that disco was not all this loop-based whatever and that there were people who made these very complex structures and interesting arrangements … Then there was hearing Danny Krivit and Tee Scott play ‘Evolution’ by Giorgio Moroder, which is probably the most sonically evolved record ever made—it’s a virtual catalog of what one can do with synth effects with a great sort of orchestral composition on top …

  “The single sentence that sums up why we—ever
y person in this generation—keep going back to that period was that music was relatively innocent,” he continues. “It wasn’t based on genre—of course there was money it, it was a huge industry and completely commercialized—yet on the musical level the entire disco and dance music industry was trying out every timbral and orchestral possibility that could happen over a 4/4 or funk beat. In other words, everything was brought into play: Latin music, classical music, this is a cliché but it’s true. You had the best string session players who were playing at Lincoln Center on the weekdays and on weekends they were moonlighting for disco orchestras. There hasn’t been anything really like that since. The last time that was happening in pop music was in the ’30s and ’40s when you had huge orchestras—Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman—hiring that number of people. I like to think that it’s not really nostalgia, that if one listens to so-called pure music in an absolute sense, richness of composition and timbrality, the late ’70s are just the golden period.”3