Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

  20. Interview with Joe Tarsia at geosound.org/joetarsiainterview.htm.

  21. Harvard Business School, “A Study of the Soul Music Environment Prepared for Columbia Records Group,” quoted in George, Death of Rhythm and Blues, pp. 136, 137.

  22. David Sanjek, “Tell Me Something I Don’t Already Know: The Harvard Report on Soul Music Revisited,” in Norman Kelley, ed., Rhythm and Business: The Political Economy of Black Music (New York: Akashic Books, 2002), p. 66.

  23. Harvard Business School, quoted ibid., p. 63.

  24. Ibid., p. 66.

  25. Sigerson, “Philly ’76,” p. 37.

  26. Ibid.

  27. For more on Young and the ur-disco beat, see Chapter 3.

  28. Salsoul advertisement, Billboard, January 22, 1977, p. 82.

  29. Sigerson, “Philly ’76,” p. 37.

  30. For more on this record, see Chapter 1.

  31. George, Death of Rhythm & Blues, pp. 154–55.

  32. Sigerson, “Philly ’76,” p. 37.

  33. Ibid.

  34. Jacobson, “Hollyw-o-o-o-d!,” p. 48.

  35. Author’s interview with Danny Krivit.

  36. Jacobson, “Hollyw-o-o-o-d!,” p. 51.

  37. Racliffe A. Joe, The Business of Disco (New York: Billboard Books, 1980), p. 40.

  38. Peck, Dancing Madness, p. 6.

  39. William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 130.

  40. George, Death of Rhythm & Blues, p. 121.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class (New York: Harper, 1993), p. 79.

  43. Bart Landry, The New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1987, pp. 75, 195.

  44. Wilson, Declining Significance, p. 139.

  45. Joe, Business of Disco, p. 34.

  46. Ibid., p. 36.

  47. Haden-Guest, The Last Party, p. 81.

  48. Ibid.

  49. Ibid., p. 82.

  50. Ibid., pp. 82–83.

  51. Ibid., p. 83.

  52. Author’s interview with Nile Rodgers, June 18, 2003.

  53. Ibid.

  54. Ibid.

  55. Ibid.

  56. Marc Taylor, A Touch of Classic Soul 2 (Jamaica, NY: Aloiv Publishing, 2001), pp. 51–52.

  57. Author’s interview with Nile Rodgers.

  58. Ibid.

  59. Quoted in David Nathan, “The Art of Being Chic,” Blues & Soul, October 9–22, 1979, p. 7.

  60. Author’s interview with Nile Rodgers.

  61. Ibid.

  62. Ibid.

  63. Geoff Brown, “Qui Sont Ces Gens? C’est Chic,” Black Music, March 1979, p. 27.

  64. Author’s interview with Nile Rodgers.

  65. Quoted in Davitt Sigerson, “Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band,” Black Music, January 1977, p. 25.

  66. For a measure of how original the brothers Browder were, check out Charlie Calello’s own disco revival pap “Dance, Dance, Dance” (essentially a disco “Havah Nagilah”) (Ariola, 1976) and a cover of Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” (Profile, 1982).

  67. Sigerson, “Dr. Buzzard,” p. 24.

  68. Quoted in Robert Palmer, “Kid Creole: He Mixes a Heady Brew of Styles,” The New York Times, June 10, 1981, p. C23.

  Chapter 5. PRISONERS OF THE NIGHT: The Disco Craze

    1. Vince Aletti, “Discotheque Rock ’72: Paaaaarty!,” Rolling Stone, September 13, 1973, pp. 60–61; “Discotheques Break Singles,” Billboard, October 6, p. 3.

    2. Jacobson, “Hollyw-o-o-o-d!,” p. 50.

    3. Although the ribbon was cut in 1973, the building’s first tenants moved in on December 16, 1970.

    4. In 1962, a report titled “The Wastelands of New York City” called lower Manhattan a vast commercial slum, and it was earmarked for wholesale demolition by Robert Moses to make way for his Lower Manhattan Expressway project. But in the face of a campaign waged by urbanist Jane Jacobs, the expressway project was turned down and the cast iron buildings of SoHo and TriBeCa were granted a reprieve.

    5. Roger Cohen, “Casting Giant Shadows: The Politics of Building the World Trade Center,” Portfolio: A Quarterly Review of Trade and Transportation, Winter 1990/1991, reprinted at www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/World_Trade_Center_History.html.

    6. Quoted in Fred Bronson, The Billboard Book of Number One Hits (New York: Billboard Books, 1988), p. 410.

    7. This account is a composite of several conflicting stories that have appeared in ibid.; Bronson and White, Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits; Brian Chin, “In the Beat of the Night,” liner notes to The Disco Box, Rhino 75595, 1999; Wayne Jancik, The Billboard Book of One-Hit Wonders (New York: Billboard Books, 1998).

    8. One measure of how important the hustle and “The Hustle” were to disco’s mainstream success is the number of hustle records that appeared in its wake: Salsoul Orchestra’s “Salsoul Hustle,” the Kay-Gee’s’ “Hustle Wit Every Muscle” and “Tango Hustle,” Eddie Drennon’s “Let’s Do the Latin Hustle,” Joe Cuba’s “Latin Hustle,” James Brown’s “Hustle!!! (Dead on It),” Fajardo ’76’s “C’mon Baby Do the Latin Hustle,” the Fatback Band’s “Spanish Hustle,” Alcatraz Black Band’s “The Dynamic Hustle Samba,” Sweet Charles’s “Hang Out and Hustle,” Tommy Stewart’s “Bump and Hustle,” Rice & Beans Orchestra’s “Blue Danube Hustle,” Hidden Strength’s “Hustle on Up (Do the Bump),” Mastermind’s “Hustle Bus Stop,” and Hi-Tension’s “British Hustle” to name but a few.

    9. William Safire, “On the Hustle,” The New York Times, August 4, 1975, p. 19.

  10. Dena Kleiman, “The Hustle Restores Old Touch to Dancing,” The New York Times, July 12, 1975, p. 27.

  11. Safire, “On the Hustle.”

  12. Ibid.

  13. Kopkind, “The Dialectic of Disco,” p. 25.

  14. Goldman, Disco, p. 11.

  15. Maureen Orth, with Betsy Carter and Lisa Whitman, “Get Up and Boogie,” Newsweek, November 8, 1976, p. 98.

  16. For a poetic explanation of the fascination that pigeon flying has on New York street culture, see Jim Jarmusch’s film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.

  17. Author’s interview with Michael Corral, February 3, 2004.

  18. Lasch quoted in J. David Hoeveler Jr., The Postmodernist Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970s (New York: Twayne, 1996), p. 12.

  19. Author’s interview with Michael Corral, February 3, 2004.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Ibid.: “The only hip-hop parties I would go to was the Kool Herc parties … When I went to Herc parties, they was cool, but I wasn’t wanted there because I was a light-skinned child and everybody was black in there. It was like a racial thing going on, so I felt intimidated in a way, and I couldn’t wear colors in there because I would get my ass kicked. So when I went there I wasn’t feeling that vibe, I was feeling uncomfortable.”

  24. Mikal Gilmore, “Disco!,” Rolling Stone, April 19, 1979, p. 54.

  25. Jan Hoddenfield, “Cruising the Scene in the Discotheques,” New York Post, August 9, 1975, p. 39.

  26. Author’s interview with Nile Rodgers.

  27. The Tonight Show, June 5, 1974.

  28. Le Jardin flyer from 1974.

  29. Ed McCormack, “No Sober Person Dances, in Which a Suburban Prole Decadent Visits a Hot Manhattan Disco and Learns That Cicero Was Right,” in Peck, Dancing Madness, p. 11.

  30. Richard Szathmary and Lucian K. Truscott IV, “Inside the Disco Boom,” The Village Voice, July 21, 1975, p. 6.

  31. McCormack, “No Sober Person Dances,” p. 11.

  32. Robert Roth, “N.Y. Club Scrutiny Again Draws Liquor Board Fire,” Billboard, December 17, 1977, p. 68.

  33. Sally Helgesen, “Disco:
Phosphorescent Shapes Pass Through the Night, Leaving Nothing Behind,” Harper’s, October 1977, p. 20.

  34. Ibid., p. 21.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Author’s interview with Ian Levine.

  37. While this figure is pretty staggering, it is also worth noting that in 1925 there were 786 licensed dance halls in New York City, 238 of them in Manhattan, and that 14 percent of men and 10 percent of women aged seventeen to forty visited one at least once a week. See Jackson, Encyclopedia of New York City, pp. 315–16.

  38. “Discomania,” Forbes, June 1, 1976, p. 47.

  39. Szathmary and Truscott, “Inside The Disco Boom,” p. 7.

  40. Orth, “Get Up and Boogie,” Newsweek, p. 95.

  41. For a discussion of inflation and how it presaged the ’80s credit and speculation boom, see Schulman, The Seventies, pp. 131–43.

  42. Quoted in Hoeveler, The Postmodernist Turn, p. 11.

  43. John Sippel, “Ramada Tests Disco Appeal in North Dakota,” Billboard, December 14, 1974, p. 63.

  44. Quoted in Cummings, Gallagher, Hall, and Sigerson, “Dance and Discomania,” p. 12.

  45. See Tom Moulton, “Disco Action,” Billboard, November 23, 1974, and Radcliffe Joe, “The L.A. Scene: Growing, But Second to N.Y.,” Billboard, December 16, 1978, p. 53. With disco proliferating out of control and the inevitable thinning of the DJ talent pool, New York’s Sugarscoop Records came to the rescue of dancers in provincial outposts everywhere forced to listen to lousy transitions and clunky mixing. In October 1977 they started a DJ subscription remix service called Disconet that offered premixed medleys and special remixes of individual tracks by New York’s most talented DJs. The first Disconet record featured a mix by 12 West DJ Tom Savarese that included Chic’s “Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah),” Sheila & B. Devotion’s “Love Me Baby,” and the Hues Corporation’s “Telegram of Love.”

  46. See Moulton, “Disco Action.”

  47. Brian Chin, “The Disco Beatmasters: From the Studio to the Dance Floor,” liner notes to The Disco Box, Rhino 75595, 1999.

  48. Quoted in Denise Hall, “Lookin’ White/Bein’ Black/Soundin’ Brown,” Black Music, September 1976, p. 43.

  49. Davitt Sigerson, “The Great Disco Debate,” Black Music, September 1978, p. 23.

  50. Quoted in Chin, “The Disco Beatmasters.”

  51. Nik Cohn, “Another Saturday Night,” in Hanif Kureishi and Jon Savage, eds., The Faber Book of Pop (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), pp. 425, 431.

  52. Nik Cohn, “Fever Pitch,” The Guardian, September 17, 1994, Weekend Section, p. 12.

  53. Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), pp. 433–34.

  54. Carroll, Nothing Happened, p. 266.

  55. Author’s interview with Nile Rodgers.

  56. McCormack, p. 13.

  57. Aletti, “SoHo Vs. Disco,” p. 124.

  58. Anna Quindlen, “What’s New in Discotheques,” The New York Times, November 11, 1977, p. C18.

  59. Ibid.

  60. Al Corley, a sometime doorman: “You know Steve’s basic line? ‘Just make sure you don’t let in anyone like me!’ Basically what he was saying was, I would not let myself in. It was a joke, but there was some truth to that. Or Ian. I mean, you would never let Ian in. If Ian wasn’t in, he would never get in. And he knows that.” Quoted in Haden-Guest, The Last Party, pp. 52–53.

  61. Orth, “Get Up and Boogie,” p. 94.

  62. William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 449.

  63. Quindlen, “What’s New in Discotheques.”

  64. Haden-Guest, The Last Party, p. 50.

  65. Helgesen, “Disco,” p. 23.

  66. Kaiser, Gay Metropolis, p. 258.

  67. Gloria Gaynor, Soul Survivor (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1995), p. 94.

  68. Arnold H. Lubasch, “Two Studio 54 Owners Are Given 3½ Years for Evading U.S. Taxes,” The New York Times, January 19, 1980, p. 1.

  69. “Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, October 3, 1977, p. 33.

  70. Vita Miezitis, Night Dancin’ (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980), p. 118.

  71. Quindlen, “What’s New in Discotheques.”

  72. Ibid.

  73. Miezitis, Night Dancin’, p. 25.

  74. Joe, “The L.A. Scene,” p. 53.

  75. Andy Blackford, Disco Dancing Tonight (London: Octopus, 1979), p. 24.

  76. Author’s interview with Ian Levine.

  77. Jamake Hightower, “Dancing in the Seventies,” Horizon, May 1977, p. 31.

  78. Holleran, Dancer from the Dance, p. 12.

  79. “With Jamaica,” The New Yorker, February 25, 1974.

  80. The record was originally released promotionally on Brown’s P&P label.

  81. Brown started the P&P label in the early ’70s with a record of driving, primal funk by Flame & Sons of Darkness called “Solid Funk.” Flame was longtime underground soul presence Oscar Richardson of the group Flame ’N’ King, while Sons of Darkness was a teenaged group that Brown had discovered playing in the basement of his apartment building. The group featured Emmanuel Rahiem LeBlanc and Keith “Sabu” Crier, who would later become part of the Rhythm Makers (see Chapter 3) and GQ, who had a huge disco hit with “Disco Nights (Rock-Freak)” in 1979.

  82. Adams’s more commercial side was evidenced by his work with Main Ingredient’s Tony Sylvester and producer Bert DeCoteaux on soft soul records by Bloodstone (“Just Like in the Movies”) and Ace Spectrum (“Don’t Send Nobody Else”); as the house arranger at Greg Carmichael’s Red Greg Records, where he worked on records as diverse as Universal Robot Band’s “Dance and Shake Your Tambourine,” Bumble Bee Unlimited’s “Love Bug,” and Tony Sylvester and the New Ingredient’s “Pazuzu”; and his work on more than one hundred commercial jingles—most important for disco devotees was the one of Windsong Perfume: “I can’t seem to forget her, her Windsong stays on my mind.”

  83. Abe Peck, “The Cartoon That Conquered the World,” Rolling Stone, April 19, 1979, p. 12.

  84. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

  85. David Toop, “Throbbery,” p. 21.

  86. Frederic Dannen, Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business (New York: Times Books, 1990), pp. 162–63.

  87. Jesse Kornbluth, “Merchandizing Disco for the Masses,” New York Times Magazine, February 18, 1979, p. 8.

  88. I. S. Horowitz, “Symphony and Disco Join in Rochester,” Billboard, December 16, 1978, p. 47.

  89. Gilmore, “Disco!,” p. 9.

  90. Kopkind, “The Dialectic of Disco,” p. 12.

  91. Author’s interview with Danny Krivit.

  92. Tara Rogers, “Take Me ‘Out’ to the Ballgame,” www.pinknoises.com/ymca.shtml.

  93. Bill Straub, “With a Nail-Biting Playoff Season, Baseball Bounces Back,” The Washington Post, October 16, 1997.

  94. Insane Coho Lips membership card reprinted at www.outernetweb.com/focal/disco/coholips/jpgs/vicoho.jpg.

  95. Abe Peck, “Hangover at Dahl House,” Chicago Sun-Times, July 14, 1979, p. 6; Bill Gleason, “The Horror at Comiskey,” Chicago Sun-Times, July 14, 1979, p. 85; “Disco Demolition,” whitesoxinteractive.com/History&Glory/DiscoDemolition.htm.

  96. DREAD was started by DJs Jim Johnson and George Baier, who originally called their antidisco army the Disco Ducks Klan and were going to wear white sheets at a rally at a disco that had decided to turn back into a rock club.

  97. Frank Rose, “Discophobia: Rock & Roll Fights Back,” The Village Voice, November 12, 1979, p. 36.

  98. Joe Nick Patoski, “Disco Showdown in Oklahoma,” Rolling Stone, November 2, 1978, p. 33.

  99. Quoted at www.jahsonic.com/DiscoSucks.html.

&nbs
p; 100. Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life (New York: Headline, 1999), p. 249.

  101. Billy Sunday, “Dancing, Drinking, Card Playing,” reprinted at www.bibleteacher.org/bs_6.htm.

  102. Much of this account is from Rose, “Discophobia,” pp. 36–37.

  103. Ibid.

  104. Steve Hogan and Lee Hudson, Completely Queer: The Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), p. 291.

  105. Schulman, The Seventies, p. 121.

  106. Robert Worth, “Guess Who Saved the South Bronx?,” Washington Monthly, Vol. 31, No. 4, April 1999, pp. 26–32; Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Random House, 1975); Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000); “City on a Hill: The South Bronx: From Urban Planning Victim to Victor” at www.demographia.com/db-sbrx-txt.htm.

  107. Fricke and Ahearn, Yes Yes Y’All, p. viii.

  108. Worth, “Guess Who,” p. 27.

  109. Joseph P. Fried, “City’s Housing Administrator Proposes ‘Planned Shrinkage’ of Some Slums,” The New York Times, February 3, 1976, p. 35.

  110. Worth, “Guess Who,” p. 28.

  111. Fricke and Ahearn, Yes Yes Y’All, p. viii.

  112. See Freeman, Working-Class New York, p. 276, and Jonathan Mahler, “Summer of ’77,” The New York Times, June 30, 2002, Section 14, p. 1.

  113. Quoted in Freeman, Working-Class New York, p. 281.

  114. Herbert C. Gutman, “As for the ’02 Kosher-Food Rioters…,” The New York Times, July 21, 1977, p. 23.

  115. Freeman, Working-Class New York, p. 281.

  116. Fricke and Ahearn, Yes Yes Y’All, pp. 131–33.

  117. Vince Aletti, “The Dancing Machine,” in Shelton Waldrep, ed., The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000).

  118. Author’s interview with Danny Krivit.

  119. Fricke and Ahearn, Yes Yes Y’All, p. 28.

  120. For more on the rise of the South, see Kirkpatrick Sale, Power Shift (New York: Vintage, 1975) and Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

  121. Quoted in Schulman, The Seventies, p. 107.