Like the fate of so many of the label’s other signatures, the Village People’s destiny was decided by the so-called Casablanca Test, a company tradition of playing a demo at ear-bleeding volume to see how staffers would react. Sure enough, as soon as Bogart rattled the building with the Village People’s demo, an enthusiastic crowd began pouring into his meeting. Casablanca had just found its second disco-bomb, earning its place in music history as the disco label.
Just as the last great party of the baby boom was about to get under way, another important pioneer stepped into the rapidly thickening crowd on the dance floor. Nile Rodgers was a struggling funk guitarist who, having developed his “chucking” style on the chitlin’ and air force circuits, had been observing the signs from both sides of the Atlantic. During a long stay in London in the midseventies, Rodgers had his big awakening at a Roxy Music gig. Knocked out by their bizarre mix of suave pop and theatrical costumes, he began rummaging through the bins at the nearest record shop.
Seeing that Roxy’s album sleeves featured glamour models, he began noticing the meteoric rise of Kiss in America—all clues suggesting to him that pop music was becoming faceless, conceptual, glitzy. He returned to New York and formed Chic with bassist Bernard Edwards. Their addictive second single, “Everybody Dance,” was recorded in late 1976, with the powerful background vocals of Luther Vandross.
As coincidence would have it, the sound engineer on the demo, Robert Drake, was a deejay at a fashionable black discotheque, the Night Owl. Weeks after the demo had been mixed, Drake telephoned one night. “Hey, Nile, you’ve gotta come over and see this!”
When Rodgers entered the discotheque, Drake said “Check this out,” and dropped the needle. As the distinctive bass line announced “Everybody Dance,” howls reverberated through the club. “A frenzied crowd of dancers, playing air guitar and air bass on the dance floor, lasted through seven continuous plays of Robert’s two lacquers—approximately an hour of the same song,” remembered Rodgers. “I understood why deejays played a popular record repeatedly to keep the dance floor hopping, but this was ridiculous.”
Disco was erupting like a volcano. “The movement, in every sense of the word, was as open and communal as the forces driving the hippies of my youth,” Nile Rodgers believed. In fact, for downtowners like Rodgers and his friends of African, Hispanic, and Asian origin, disco was more inclusive. “It was now cool again to touch your dancing partner. A whole slew of touchy-feely dance moves were introduced into mainstream clubs—a consequence of gay sex coming out of the closet and onto the dance floor.”
Right time, right place. In early 1977, Paramount discreetly released Robert Stigwood’s latest film, Saturday Night Fever. Nobody was expecting the movie, and its soundtrack would become one of the blockbusters of the decade. Meanwhile, at Casablanca, Donna Summer was looking at one-hit-wonder status—four syrupy singles with whispery vocals failed to break into the Top 40. Then, suddenly and spectacularly, the B-side to her fifth single on Casablanca flipped. Called “I Feel Love,” it had been composed and produced by Giorgio Moroder, who had been experimenting in late 1976 with pulsating and modulating electronic sounds—no acoustic instrumentation whatsoever.
The vinyl equivalent of a flying saucer had landed. The first authority in the business to apprehend its importance was Brian Eno, the cross-dressing, avant-garde producer from Roxy Music. Interrupting a David Bowie recording session in Berlin, Eno stormed in with a copy of “I Feel Love” in his hand. “I have heard the sound of the future!” he declared, beaming. “This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years!”
23. SOURCES
It was as if New York and London were dotted with water wells that tapped into a giant network of underground rivers. The oncoming New Wave wouldn’t just ooze from lofts and basements; its multidimensional sound owes much to the specialist record stores that were supplying deejays, musicians, and vinyl addicts with weird and wonderful rarities. Far below the towers of the major corporations, a new generation simply began mixing up the diverse sonic and ethnic ingredients that were already being stocked and played, back to back, in happening stores.
In London, one interesting maverick was a bespectacled and bearded Irishman named Ted Carroll, who ran record stalls in the Golborne Road and Soho markets with his partner, Roger Armstrong. In 1975, they opened a shop called Rock On around the corner from the Camden Town subway station. Understanding how easy it was to press and sell records, Carroll began his Chiswick label, including “Keys to Your Heart” by the 101ers, featuring Joe Strummer in his pre-Clash days.
Stringing a thread between the progressive rock, punk, and postpunk eras was a far more spectacular example—Virgin, which had opened several alternative shops in the early seventies, then took off in 1973 as an Island-affiliated indie. Although the label was synonymous with its more famous entrepreneur founder, Virgin’s record man was in fact Simon Draper, Richard Branson’s distant cousin from South Africa.
Born into an academic family, Simon Draper had spent his childhood in the beautiful KwaZulu-Natal highlands of South Africa, later studying in Cape Town and Durban. He kept himself up to date by reading American and English publications like Down Beat, Beat International, NME, and Melody Maker. Mail-ordering records and books from a number of specialist import stores in Johannesburg, he soaked up a wide variety of influences: Soft Machine, Frank Zappa, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso. Although it took about a month for his orders to arrive, he became so good at sourcing music that, for example, when his American pressing of Soft Machine’s debut album arrived on his doorstep in Durban, it hadn’t yet been released in the U.K.
Deejaying his own weekly show to the Durban region in the late sixties, the nineteen-year-old came to fully apprehend South African censorship. The national broadcasters’ music library, “had quite a lot of interesting records but they were all banned,” he recalled. “You’d see a Bob Dylan album, but all the tracks were scratched out with chalk. The same with the Doors’ first album; most of the tracks you weren’t allowed to play. So I began ordering records from SABC Johannesburg, where there was a bigger library, but that just seemed to ring alarm bells because I was always asking for the wrong records.” Draper was the first deejay in South Africa to play Jimi Hendrix.
At the time, he was studying politics under an inspirational Hegelian-Marxist lecturer who was later murdered by the secret police for living with an Indian woman. “My parents were very anti-Apartheid,” he says. “My mother was a member of the Black Sash, a woman’s movement which organized public demonstrations against the government. But I wasn’t as brave as one or two of the people I went to university with. I just wanted to get out. I felt deprived of cultural stuff. It wasn’t just records that were banned, so were the books I wanted to read. Norman Mailer was banned. The library would have, let’s say, William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner and then someone would complain. They would actually burn the book.”
Throughout his youth, Draper heard his mother discussing the latest news from relatives in England. One of them was Eve Branson, who, while her husband went back to college to study law, had set up her own business selling trays depicting scenes of country life. Their unique and dyslexic son, Richard, had struggled through school but set up a successful magazine called Student. Simon Draper’s ears pricked up when he realized that his distant cousin had just set up a mail-order business selling cut-price records.
Accompanied by his younger brother, Simon Draper arrived in London in December 1970 with £100 in his back pocket. Once they’d set themselves up with an apartment, he tracked down Richard Branson and introduced himself as a long-lost relative who ate records for breakfast. Surprised but flattered, Branson took Draper out to lunch and explained his plans to set up a shop, a label, a recording studio, and a publishing company.
The very next day, Draper was put in charge of Virgin’s mail-order service and began buying stock for Virgin�
��s first shop on Oxford Street, just opening that very week. “I found that I knew more about records and music than any of the people who were already there,” said Draper. “Far more. I told them, ‘We’ve got to have records that nobody else has. We’ve got to have imports. We’ve gotta have rare records. We’ve got to have bootlegs.’”
Religiously listening to John Peel’s radio shows and reading letters from customers, Draper sourced rare cutouts in America and began importing experimental music from Germany and France. “When I started looking for artists to sign,” said Draper of Richard Branson’s decision in 1973 to start Virgin’s own label, “I knew the label would have to make an impact. Obviously we wanted sales, but you looked at other labels who were significant, particularly Island, and you saw that Chris Blackwell had great judgment. He signed originals. Same with Charisma, Chrysalis, Elektra, Vanguard—always one man’s taste. I wanted to be sure that our label was distinctive.”
From the very outset, Richard Branson was an ambitious young businessman. He negotiated a lucrative distribution deal with Island—far better terms than what Chrysalis had started out on. Despite Virgin’s promising start, “by around 1975, we realized we were overly dependent on Mike Oldfield and Tangerine Dream,” explained Draper. “We were boxing ourselves into a corner.” Too small to secure deals with the likes of 10cc, whom they’d chased for months, “we were still trying to find acts starting from scratch, when luckily for us, punk came along.”
At the very heart of the punk explosion, a small but buzzing record shop called Rough Trade opened its doors for business in that milestone summer of 1976. Its young founder was Geoff Travis, another vinyl addict with an important destiny in the record business. As was true for so many other great talent spotters of the New Wave, markets, libraries, universities, and cultural melting pots had provided a rich background to his childhood. His Russian grandparents, fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms in the thirties, had settled in the London suburb of Dalston, where young Geoff Travis spent many a Saturday hanging around their shoe shop—soaking up the sights and smells of the local market.
Geoff attended school in the multicultural neighborhood of Islington, where “my very first experiences buying records was in an electrical shop in North London,” he explained. “It was in an arcade; you went past washing machines and toasters and in the back there’d be a record counter.” As a teenager in the late sixties, he then discovered London’s specialist record shops, often jumping on the subway during his lunch break to go hear a new release in town. His favorite was Musicland, where one of the faces behind the counter was none other than Elton John.
After studying English literature at Cambridge, Travis got his life-changing brainwave at the end of a road trip across America. In San Francisco, he walked into City Lights and melted into the friendly, nonelitist atmosphere. “City Lights had always been a romantic thing in my mind,” he explained. “I liked the Beats to a degree, but I have reservations about a lot of the writing. I prefer the Black Mountain Poets.” Wondering what to do with his growing collection of vinyl, Travis began imagining a humanized record store where people could hang out, play records, and chat with the staff—without ever feeling pressured to buy something or get out.
As well as Musicland, Travis acknowledged, “the Virgin shops were definitely an influence, especially the one in Oxford Street when you went upstairs and you sat on the cushions on the floor. They also had listening booths. It made me realize that going to a record shop could be more than just going to purchase something. It could be more of a community place.” What made Rough Trade unique was its location in Ladbrook Grove, London’s Caribbean neighborhood, which was also home to plenty of struggling musicians. To foster a community atmosphere, Travis looked no further than the immediate neighborhood. Reggae, punk, and avant-garde rock intermingled, as did its core customers—black, white, male, female.
The proliferation of all these alternative record shops made it possible for cutting-edge independents to reach customers. Like the disco scene in New York, the punk explosion was about to create alternative networks. London’s coolest stores were all stocking punky singles from America thanks to a mail-order company—Skydog, based in Paddington. Of the new English imprints sprouting up, one mail-order indie stood out: Stiff Records, also set up in the summer of 1976 by Dave Robinson and Dr. Feelgood manager Jake Riviera. For pub rockers like Robinson and Riviera, the step into punk wasn’t any kind of quantum leap. Although the punks were younger, they shared the same irreverent ethos and preference for raw sound.
In late 1976 and early 1977, the Sex Pistols were like a hilarious window display attracting customers through the door. Because they were so slow to deliver actual product, others benefited from the hype—notably Stiff, whose “New Rose” by the Damned was the first English punk record. Operating the mail-order business out of a one-room office where Dave Robinson often slept on the floor, Stiff then released “Blank Generation” by New York proto-punk Richard Hell, a former member of Television.
When “Anarchy in the U.K.” by the Sex Pistols was released by EMI in late November 1976, it was a minor hit, charting at No. 38. Then came the famous incident live on British TV in December 1976, when Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones called the host a “dirty bastard” and “a fucking rotter.” The ensuing outrage, as popularized by the Daily Mirror headline THE FILTH AND THE FURY, prompted EMI to fire the Sex Pistols just ninety days after they’d signed their contract.
In urgent need of a new label, Malcolm McLaren talked his way through two secretaries to obtain a meeting with A&M’s London boss. “I clearly recall Malcolm coming into my office wearing a leather outfit with his knees chained together,” laughed Derek Green, who also took note of the smarmy grin and intentionally wonky haircut. “I was a hippie but a rebel at heart. As is my way, I paid little attention to the story he was telling me about EMI. I just played the tape and was blown away! I couldn’t stop playing it—I had to sign the Sex Pistols.”
Closing the deal turned into a nightmare. “Those close to me pleaded with me not to sign them,” admitted Green, “but the more they reacted, the more determined I became to shake A&M out of its lethargy and elitism. It was showing me just how safe and almost middle-aged we had become. I even had my hair cut and removed the beard!”
The other problem was that because Green and McLaren were intent on the Sex Pistols conquering America, the negotiations dragged on while Green flew out to California to petition his A&M colleagues. Calling McLaren long distance to progress the negotiation, Green would dial the clothes shop’s number. “Hello, I’m the MD of A&M Records. Can I speak to Malcolm, please?”
“Fuck off” was all Vivienne Westwood would say before the line went dead.
As Green remembered it, “I was busy explaining to Jerry Moss how important this signing was but also how difficult they were to deal with. Jerry was amazing. He just didn’t get it for the U.K. punk scene, but he supported me totally to concede more points than I usually would.” Green then brought McLaren out to Los Angeles to meet the Americans. “He arrived on a perfect day at the A&M lot—the home of hippie values, sweltering in his black leather one-piece with his knees chained together. Can you imagine how he was being laughed at?”
McLaren explained the ideological thinking behind punk to A&M’s general manager, Gil Friesen, who politely engaged the manager. “Bullshit aside, the recordings were in my view ready to release without any further production,” said Green, commending the raw, hi-fi sound producer Chris Thomas had captured. With the album ready and the contractual points finally ironed out, the parties agreed to meet in London for the official signing. “Unfortunately, in all the drama, I had not yet met any of the Pistols,” explained Green. As a precautionary measure, he set up a meeting in the offices of an affiliate publisher, Rondor Music—away from his skeptical staff.
As Green entered the room, his guests were playing an obscure A&M album called Magma—one of Herb Alpert’s weirdest pet projects. Wit
hout any handshakes or hellos, Johnny Rotten glared at Green and said, “This is the only A&M record I would ever listen to!” Green then noticed a new and menacing face. “To my utter amazement bassist Glen Matlock was not with them, but instead someone with the unlikely name of Sid Vicious. I was devastated, as I understood Matlock was the main writer.” Taking McLaren aside, Green asked, “Is Sid proficient?” “Sid can’t play at all,” confirmed McLaren proudly.
Green concealed his first sinking feeling as McLaren planned probably his best-ever publicity stunt: the bogus signing outside Buckingham Palace, which provided news networks with a powerful image of the Sex Pistols falling out of a car in front of the imposing gates. For the written press, A&M had booked a conference room at the Regent Palace Hotel, where Green first noticed McLaren’s manipulative talents as the manager whispered into Lydon’s ear to tell him to plug the tour dates. “I tried to hide at the back,” said Green, “until a journalist from German TV asked me if the contract gave me any control over the group’s behavior. Before I could say anything, Sid Vicious farted.”
As the day unraveled into a drunken rampage, the band’s next appointment was their first encounter with A&M’s staff. “The first I knew of them misbehaving,” said Green, “was when my head of sales came in saying Sid was swearing drunkenly and cleaning his bleeding foot in a toilet.” Green kept reminding his staff that preorders for “God Save the Queen” suggested they had a surefire No. 1.
That Sunday, a particularly angry voice telephoned Green at home. The previous night at the Speakeasy Club, Sid Vicious had attacked a key BBC figure—Bob Harris, both an Old Grey Whistle Test presenter and Radio 1 deejay. Knowing he’d be sucked into the latest Sex Pistols scandal, Harris was lying low in the North of England, utterly enraged.
Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry Page 30