Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

  38. Quoted in Zwerin, p. 150.

  39. The African-American rent parties, “buffet flats,” and after-hours joints of the 1920s and 1930s also often featured recorded music, but the music that was played was what was popular and not necessarily targeted at a very specific audience with specific tastes.

  40. Zwerin, Tristesse, p. 147.

  41. W. D. Halls, The Youth of Vichy France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 178.

  42. Ludovic Tournès, New Orleans Sur Seine: Histoire du Jazz en France (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1999).

  43. Albert Goldman, Disco (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1978). While his book was undoubtedly learned and was certainly written with some pizzazz, Goldman is a problematic figure. Most irritatingly for the writer and historian, he doesn’t list any of his sources in his book. This might not be such a problem if it wasn’t for his reputation. His tabloid character assassinations of Elvis Presley and John Lennon have an infamy in the rock community comparable only to Southern preachers warning of the dangers of “jungle music.” But more crucial for disco scholars are his comments made during a 1967 debate with Gore Vidal that featured in a documentary on homosexuality made by the American CBS television network. “We’re in the course of gradually rolling back from our former cultural values or cultural identifications to a more narcissistic, more self-indulgent, more self-centered, essentially adolescent lifestyle,” he said, predating the neoconservative attack on popular culture by some fifteen years. “The homosexual thing cannot really be separated from a lot of other parallel phenomena in our society today … We have all sorts of fun-and-game approaches to sex. We have rampant exhibitionism today in every conceivable form. We have a sort of masochistic, sadistic vogue. We have a smut industry that grinds out millions of dollars of pornography a year. We have a sort of masturbatory dance style that’s embraced as if it were something profoundly sexual, whereas actually, all those dances do is just grind away without any consciousness of other people or their partners. And homosexuality is just one of a number of such things all tending toward the subversion, toward the final erosion, of our traditional cultural values. After all, when you’re culturally bankrupt, why you fall into the hands of receivers.”

  By the time he wrote Disco, Goldman seemed to have made peace with narcissism—he even downright praises this aspect of disco culture. However, thorny sentiments still abound throughout the book, with barely disguised racism and misogyny giving an added piquancy to his homophobia. “To the ghetto-inspired pleasure grabbing, multiple drug abuse, and off-the-wall fucking of the ’60s have been added all those refinements that come with money and maturity”; “The moment you hit the room, your nostrils were distended by the stench of black sweat”; and “demonstrating unwittingly how totally unfulfilling it is to dance by yourself as opposed to how frustrating and infuriating it is to have to work out something as intimate as the way you dance with some cranky bitch” are but three examples.

  Despite poring over countless accounts of Paris during the occupation, numerous histories of jazz in France and queries to the Académie Française, and numerous scholars specializing in the history of jazz in France, I have been unable to uncover any other source that confirms the existence of La Discothèque. The record lending arm of La Bibliothèque Française, which started in the 1930s, however, was called La Phonothèque. In The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night (New York: Morrow, 1997) Anthony Haden-Guest writes that “credit for coining the word ‘discothèque’—a play on cinémathèque—has been claimed by Brigitte Bardot’s director-husband Roger Vadim.”

  44. Halls, Youth of Vichy France.

  45. Regine Zylberberg, Call Me By My First Name (London: Andre Deutsch, 1988).

  46. Ibid., p. 130.

  47. Donald Goddard, “It’s Only 640 Miles From Paris to Vienna, But They Are Atmospheres Apart,” The New York Times, June 25, 1972, Section 10, p. 1.

  48. Vanessa Grigoriadis, “Regine’s Last Stand,” New York, April 19, 1999.

  49. Goldman, Disco, p. 30.

  50. Record hops were popular during the early years of the rock-and-roll era. Local radio DJs would play the latest releases at a town’s dance hall with the occasional appearance of a performer who usually lip-synched along with his or her latest hit.

  51. Louis Calta, “Party to Mark Closing of Arthur Discotheque,” The New York Times, June 21, 1969, p. 16; Angela Taylor, “Arthur, Once a Hairdo, Is Now a Discotheque,” The New York Times, May 7, 1965, p. 44.

  52. Author’s interview with Cherry Vanilla, August 22, 2003.

  53. Jackson, Encyclopedia of New York City, pp. 315–16.

  54. John Gruen, “Cerebrum, ‘Designed to Soothe the Spirit,’” Vogue, January 1969.

  55. Goldman, Disco, p. 112.

  56. Author’s interview with Barry Lederer, October 22, 2003.

  57. For more on Stonewall and the gay rights movement, see Chapter 2.

  58. Goldman, Disco, p. 118.

  59. “State Asking for Shutdown of 43d Street Discotheque,” The New York Times, March 25, 1972, p. 34; “Discotheque Ordered Closed,” The New York Times, April 5, 1972, p. 49.

  60. Gamelan is a heavily percussive Indonesian music featuring hammered metallophones that sound like an orchestra of xylophones but considerably less twee and tinkly.

  61. Radio DJs had used slip-cueing for some time prior to Grasso’s bringing it to the club environment. Grasso himself was taught the technique by an engineer for WCBS, DJ Bob Lewis. See the Francis Grasso interview at www.djhistory.com.

  62. Whether Grasso was the first DJ to use two copies of the same record is in dispute. Pete DJ Jones, who was Grandmaster Flash’s biggest influence, claims to have started using two copies of the same record in 1969. Other uptown DJs who were formative influences on the hip-hop DJs, like Maboya and Grand Master Flowers, claimed to have originated the technique as well.

  63. Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, Grove Press, 2000, p. 130.

  64. Peter Braunstein, “Disco,” American Heritage, November 1999, p. 53.

  65. Carroll, Nothing Happened, p. 3.

  66. “The Story of the Loft,” XFM London, aired October 2000.

  67. Vince Aletti, “SoHo Vs. Disco,” The Village Voice, June 16, 1975, p. 124.

  68. “The Story of the Loft.”

  69. Robert McG. Thomas Jr., “Weekly Parties for 500 Chill Tenants,” The New York Times, May 21, 1974, p. 45.

  70. Aletti, “Sotto Vs. Disco,” p. 1.

  71. Author’s interview with Danny Krivit, March 11, 2003.

  72. Aletti, “Sotto Vs. Disco.”

  73. Ibid.

  74. Author’s interview with Danny Krivit.

  75. Aletti, “Sotto Vs. Disco.”

  76. Author’s interview with Danny Krivit.

  77. Steven Harvey, “Behind the Groove: New York City’s Disco Underground,” Collusion 5, September 1983, p. 30.

  78. Another popular Loft record with similar vibes was Ozo’s Listen to the Buddha album, particularly “Anambra River.” Ozo was a multiracial band tending toward the fourth-world fusions conjured up by Brian Eno and Jon Hassell and featuring expressly Buddhist lyrics.

  79. There are also those who say that “Soul Makossa” was discovered by DJ Alfie of the Glitter Palace (see Mark Jacobson, “Hollyw-o-o-o-d! The Return of the New York Disco,” New York, July 1, 1974), but given Mancuso’s well-documented championing of Caribbean and African music, it seems likely that he found it. Another discovery from his trawls through Nostrand Avenue’s record shops was Jamaican Boris Gardiner’s version of Booker T. & the MG’s’ “Melting Pot,” whose break featured more percussion than the original. Mancuso’s love affair with Jamaican music would continue well into the ’80s as he played records like Joe Gibbs’s dub classic “Chapter Three,” and Nicodemus’ version of the “Mad Mad” riddim, “Boneman Connection.”

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sp; 80. While this was the first record pool, it wasn’t the first attempt to organize DJs as a unified workforce. See “Disco DJs Form Union in Poland,” Billboard, January 11, 1975, p. 4.

  81. For more on “Love Is the Message,” see Chapter 4.

  82. Sheila Weller, “New Wave of Discotheques,” New York Sunday News, August 31, 1975, pp. 20–26.

  83. Author’s interview with Tom Moulton, March 12, 2003.

  84. Ibid.

  85. Ibid.

  86. Author’s interview with Barry Lederer.

  87. Author’s interview with Tom Moulton.

  88. See I. S. Horowitz, “‘Illegit’ Disco Tapes Peddled by Jockeys,” Billboard, October 12, 1974, p. 1.

  89. Linda M. George, liner notes to Disco Par-r-r-ty, Spring Records SPR 6705, 1974.

  90. Ibid.

  91. Author’s interview with Tom Moulton.

  92. Quoted in Tony Cummings, Robert Gallagher, Denise Hall, and Davitt Sigerson, “Dance and Discomania,” Black Music, January 1976, p. 12.

  93. Many DJs made their own edits of songs (usually boosting the breaks with additional percussion) and pressed them up on acetates so that they could play them at clubs and often distributed copies of their new mixes to other DJs. The most famous of these early remix “labels” was Sunshine Sound, which was the studio where most acetates were cut in New York at the time. DJs like François Kevorkian (a mind-boggling tribal remix of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”), Keith Dumpson, and John Morales contributed edits to Sunshine Sound, which also released the legendary “Hollywood” mix. DJ Rick Gianatos released his edits on his own Disco Queen label, which featured his mixes of records like Juggy Jones’s “Inside America” and MFSB’s “Love Is the Message.”

  94. Author’s interview with Danny Krivit.

  95. Haden-Guest, The Last Party, pp. xvii–xviii.

  96. George Melly, Revolt into Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 106–07.

  97. Author’s interview with Ian Levine, November 2, 2003.

  98. Ibid.

  99. Ibid.

  100. Tony Cummings, “Blue-Eyed Soul,” Black Music, September 1975, p. 17.

  101. Ibid.

  Chapter 2. “I’M JUST AN OUTLAW, MY NAME IS DESIRE”: Disco and Sexuality

    1. The Mattachine Society pressured the New York City Police Department to stop using undercover cops to entrap homosexuals (not that this seemed to affect the Continental Baths, which was raided in February and December 1969 by cops who wore handcuffs underneath their towels) and forced a change in the New York Liquor Authority law that stated that if a group of three or more homosexual men met in a bar, the bar could lose its license.

    2. In the late ’60s/early ’70s, rampant homophobia was hardly the exclusive preserve of religious zealots and bigots. It was enshrined in the dictates of “science.” The American Psychiatric Association wouldn’t strike homosexuality from its list of mental disorders until 1973.

    3. Charles Kaiser, Gay Metropolis, 1940–1996 (San Diego: Harcourt, 1999), pp. 148–49.

    4. Ibid., p. 149.

    5. Quoted in Mark Jacobson, “Live From New York,” New York, October 22, 2001, p. 42.

    6. The fame of the Continental Baths was largely thanks to Bette Midler, who sang the club’s praises on her three appearances on the Tonight Show in 1970 and 1971.

    7. Robert Amsel, “A Walk on the Wild Side of Stonewall,” The Advocate, September 15, 1987.

    8. Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993), p. 185.

    9. Lucian K. Truscott IV, “Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square,” The Village Voice, July 3, 1969, p. 1.

  10. Ibid., p. 18.

  11. Jerry Lisker, “Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad,” Daily News, July 6, 1969.

  12. Author’s interview with Barry Lederer.

  13. Ibid.

  14. See Felix Guattari, Molecular Revolution: Psychology and Politics (New York: Penguin, 1984).

  15. John Whyte, the owner of the Botel in the Pines, disputes this account and says it was the other way around: The first DJ setup in Fire Island was at his establishment. See Esther Newton, Cherry Grove, Fire Island: 60 Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), p. 244.

  16. Author’s interview with Barry Lederer.

  17. Cherry Grove and the Pines are linked by a path that cuts across the sand dunes’ shrubbery, which acquired the nickname of the Meat Rack because of the startling amount of anonymous sex that went on in those bushes.

  18. Author’s interview with Barry Lederer.

  19. Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance (New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 114.

  20. Quoted in Mel Cheren, Keep on Dancin’: My Life and the Paradise Garage (New York: 24 Hours for Life, 2000), p. 108.

  21. Author’s interview with Barry Lederer.

  22. See Cheren, Keep on Dancin’, p. 162.

  23. Andrew Kopkind, “The Dialectic of Disco: Gay Music Goes Straight,” The Village Voice, February 12, 1979, p. 13.

  24. Edmund White, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (New York: Penguin, 1991), pp. 269–70.

  25. Author’s interview with Ian Levine.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Chris Kirk, “What a Difference a Gay Makes,” Collusion, No. 4, February–April 1983, p. 18.

  29. See Danny Wang, “Tee Scott,” Underground News, No. 20, p. 15.

  30. David Diebold, Tribal Rites: San Francisco’s Dance Music Phenomenon 1978–1988 (Northridge, CA: Time Warp Publishing, 1988), p. 5.

  31. Diebold, p. 125.

  32. Fittingly, Pete Bellotte and most of the Munich Machine covered “Can Can” under the guise of Stainless Steal in 1978.

  33. Author’s interview with Ian Levine.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Ibid.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Author’s interview with Ian Levine.

  40. See Kimberley Leston, “The Story of O,” The Face, May 1987, p. 32–35.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Ibid.

  43. Kaiser, Gay Metropolis, p. 283.

  44. Rodger McFarlane quoted in David W. Dunlap, “As Disco Faces Razing, Gay Alumni Share Memories,” The New York Times, August 21, 1995, p. B3.

  Chapter 3. “LIKE CLONES AND ROBOTS THAT WE ARE”: Automating the Beat

    1. David Toop, “Throbbery With Intent,” The Wire, April 1992, p. 21.

    2. Quoted in Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash (London: Picador, 1998), p. 3.

    3. David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995), p. 204.

    4. Ibid., p. 205.

    5. George, Death of Rhythm & Blues, p. 154.

    6. Rickey Vincent, Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 209.

    7. Toop, “Throbbery,” p. 21.

    8. Walter Hughes, “In the Empire of the Beat: Discipline and Disco,” in Microphone Fiends: Youth Music & Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 151.

    9. Toop, “Throbbery,” p. 22.

  10.  Adam White and Fred Bronson, The Billboard Book of Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits (New York: Billboard Books), 1993, pp. 183–85.

  11. Abe Peck, Dancing Madness (New York: Anchor Books, 1976), p. 6.

  12. Interview with Laurin Rinder at www.discomusic.com/people-more/41_0_11_0_M/.

  13. Davitt Sigerson, “A Splice of History,” Black Music, September 1977, p. 40.

  14. Haden-Guest, The Last Party, p. xxii.

  15. Vince Aletti, “Electric Dreams,” Numéro 39, December 2002. Reprinted at www.discostepbystep.com/giorgio_moroder.htm.

  16. Angus
MacKinnon, “The Importance of Not Being Earnest,” New Musical Express, December 9, 1978, p. 30.

  Chapter 4. “ZIPPIN’ UP MY BOOTS, GOING BACK TO MY ROOTS”: Disco and the Soul Continuum

    1. Kaiser, Gay Metropolis, p. 136.

    2. In 1968, gay activist Frank Kameny coined the slogan “Gay is good” after witnessing Stokely Carmichael and fellow protesters chanting, “Black is beautiful.” At the “Gay-In” in Central Park celebrating the first anniversary of Stonewall, marchers chanted, “Say it loud, gay is proud.” See ibid., pp. 147, 216.

    3. Author’s interview with Vicki Wickham, November 2003.

    4. Ibid.

    5. Ibid.

    6. Much of this account comes from Cecil Adams’s “Straight Dope” column, April 23, 1993, reprinted at www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_031.html.

    7. See Ben Edmonds, What’s Going On?: Marvin Gaye and the Last Days of the Motown Sound (Edinburgh: Mojo Books, 2001).

    8. The report is printed at www.dol.gov/asp/programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm.

    9. Peter Kihss, “‘Benign Neglect’ on Race Is Proposed by Moynihan,” The New York Times, March 1, 1970, p. 1.

  10. Carroll, Nothing Happened, p. 41.

  11. Ibid.

  12. For a discussion of the Philadelphia Plan, see ibid., pp. 45–46.

  13. Ibid., p. 49.

  14. Frank Robertson, “Disco Tech: An All-American DJ Fights the Power,” in Peck, Dancing Madness, p. 27.

  15. Holleran, Dancer from the Dance, pp. 38–39.

  16. This account is based on White and Bronson, Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits, pp. 58–59.

  17. Ibid., p. 85.

  18. Tony Cummings, The Sound of Philadelphia (London: Methuen, 1975), p. 89.

  19. Davitt Sigerson, “Philly ’76,” Black Music, July 1976, p. 37.