Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (38 page)

During that summer of 1976, just as punk was rising up in London, Stigwood read a
New York Magazine
story called “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” written by British music critic Nik Cohn. Presented as real-life reporting, it described the urban struggles of a working-class Brooklyn youngster who, every weekend, went wild on the dance floor of the Bay Ridge discotheque 2001 Odyssey. Stigwood bought the screen rights for $90,000, signed a three-picture deal with John Travolta for $1 million, and began filming
Saturday Night Fever,
whose soundtrack was in large part supplied by his Bee Gees.

Probably the most iconic disco label of them all was an independent based in Los Angeles: Casablanca, whose comical, New York–bred founder, Neil Bogart, was one of the most spectacular boom-to-bust record men the business has ever seen. He may have been straight, but like Robert Stigwood’s, his career began theatrically; he attended the School of Performing Arts, which inspired the 1980 film
Fame.
From there, he ran the inexplicably misspelled Buddah Records, whose core market was
bubblegum
—low-nutrition pop rock aimed at youngsters musically disenfranchised by counterculture.

Throughout the late sixties, Neil Bogart was happily going against the hippie-rock traffic, honing his promotional techniques for the likes of Curtis Mayfield, Bill Withers, and Gladys Knight. His favorite mantra, religiously repeated to staffers with a cheeky grin, was “Whatever it takes!” If a radio deejay or program director wouldn’t accept gifts or lunch invitations, Bogart and his gang would do
anything
to get their records aired on the right stations.

According to one Bogart legend, in his formative years the hardest, most incorruptible program director was Rick Sklar from the influential WABC. Inventing a brand-new trick, Bogart got his brother-in-law Buck Reingold to hide in a stall in the station’s men’s room. Looking through a crack in the door, with his battery-operated record player placed on the toilet seat, he waited for Sklar to enter. When he eventually did, Reingold waited until his prey was comfortable, then played his new record from the neighboring cubicle.

With hilarious stories spreading through the record industry, Neil Bogart caught the attention of the humorous Joe Smith, who believed the job of record company management was simply “to keep people pumped up all of the time.” To set up the inspirational Neil Bogart with his own Warner-affiliated label, Smith talked Mo Ostin into an agreement whereby if Bogart wasn’t making a profit after $1 million of funding, Warner would take over.

The label was named after the classic movie
Casablanca
, and its first signature was Kiss, whose makeup and ear-splitting performances appealed to Bogart’s taste for theater and excess. For Kiss’s first show in the Midwest, Bogart booked an established headliner, Rory Gallagher, to ensure the showcase would be packed to the gills. With the help of an independent promoter, they lured an influential deejay to the show and handcuffed him to his seat.

Kiss strutted out. Peter Criss’s levitating drum riser went up too high for the low ceiling and knocked him briefly unconscious. Gene Simmons set his hair on fire. Guitarist Ace kept falling over in his giant space boots. As expected, when the denim-clad Rory Gallagher eventually stepped into the smoking ruins, he died a slow death. Bogart repeated the trick on the unsuspecting Aerosmith. Every time Kiss opened a show, their explosive performance left a trail of handcuffed deejays laughing with disbelief.

Larry Harris, Bogart’s cousin and radio promotions man toured stations building special relationships with radio deejays. Sitting quietly in the studio during broadcasts, he nonchalantly carved out lines of cocaine on a Kiss album sleeve. It was a convincing argument, though “I don’t think I pioneered the practice,” stipulated Harris. Still, “the black background of that album was perfect to do coke on.”

The 100,000 Kiss records sold thus far were insufficient to cover Casablanca’s heavy expenditures—the office included a pool house where rock chicks treated visitors to unmentionable surprises. But because the overstretched Warner was struggling to press and distribute orders, Mo Ostin kindly wrote off the $750,000 thus spent and allowed Bogart to battle on as an independent. It was right then, teetering on bankruptcy, in November 1974, that Bogart stumbled on his ticket to disco paradise.

He was visited by Trudy Meisel, wife of German impresario Peter Meisel, who was representing an Italian-born producer by the name of Giorgio Moroder, then enjoying some success in Germany with
mood music
. Broke, but liking the demos, Bogart secured a label deal whereby Casablanca would promote and distribute Moroder’s
Oasis
catalog throughout North America. Late one night, the Casablanca gang was listening to one of Moroder’s latest creations, “Love to Love You Baby,” featuring an American soul singer, Donna Summer. When somebody accidentally bumped the needle back to the start, the revelers continued rolling their drugged-up heads to the song’s sensual repetition. Feeling a strange magic in the air, Bogart telephoned Germany and asked Moroder to mix an extended version.

Although it wasn’t exactly danceable, the seventeen-minute version
,
released by Casablanca in August 1975 as a full side, started making noise in discotheques, first in Florida, then the Northeast. It was even noticed by a few late-night radio deejays who specialized in progressive rock. As a buzz gathered momentum, Bogart began planning Donna Summer’s future.

When she eventually arrived at JFK Airport in 1975 for a six-week promotional campaign, Bogart had choreographed the dream homecoming. After seven long years in Germany, she stepped into a waiting limousine and sank into her seat as “Love to Love You Baby” came on the radio. When she walked into her hotel suite overlooking Central Park, nearly two dozen floral displays had been carefully arranged. When she visited her hometown of Boston, Buck Reingold had personally escorted all the way from Los Angeles, a life-sized cake impression of the singer, requiring ambulances and two first-class seats on the plane. Considering she’d spent several months of the previous year bedridden with myocarditis, Bogart ensured that before America fell in love with Donna Summer, she was first happily married to Casablanca.

The bankroller for Casablanca’s first disco experiments was, of course Kiss, who in November 1975 shot into orbit. Their fourth album,
Alive!,
entered the Top 10 album charts—Casablanca’s first platinum album. The following spring, a studio album,
Destroyer,
went platinum, as did another studio album,
Rock & Roll Over
. In a period in which most rock bands released an album a year, Kiss was engaging in a campaign of mass assault. In just thirty months, they released six albums and toured constantly, louder, campier, and more excessive than anyone else on the market.

As cash began pouring in, Bogart paid off his $750,000 debt to Warner, bought a Moroccan casbah in Hollywood, hired new staff, and moved the company into a bigger building on Sunset Strip. Both the lobby and Bogart’s office were given a Rick’s Café theme, complete with stuffed camels, plastic palm trees, Moroccan furniture, and draping textiles suggesting Bedouin tents. Believing that envy would get him the best staff in the business, Bogart gave his people impressive titles, Mercedes sedans, and expense accounts and encouraged everyone to fly first class. Everyone’s birthday, even the box packers’, was celebrated with a champagne party. It was the same strategy for trade fairs. At one, Casablanca constructed a Moroccan casbah whose interiors were filled with various gambling games. Veiled belly dancers moved through the aisles giving away Casablanca gambling chips—lucky visitors could actually win prizes.

Making hits was beginning to feel easy at Casablanca, and for a glorious moment, life never felt so good. The company was happy—musically, professionally, and chemically. Larry Harris, the company number two, smoked joints openly in the office, but as the sun went down, stronger drugs were taken out of drawers. In the early days, Casablanca’s drug of preference was a type of legal pill called
quaaludes,
otherwise referred to as
ludes
.

Seeing the success Kiss was enjoying thanks to their extravagant shows, Casablanca’s funk signature George Clinton began demanding tour support in “meetings” that were grass and cocaine sessions. His brainwave, described through a cloud of smoke, was the
Mothership
—a model flying saucer would swoop in from the back of the hall over the heads of the crowd, then, with the lights turned off for two seconds, a bigger version would appear on the stage. Emerging from the dry ice, suggesting cosmic energy, George Clinton would commence his “pimp walk.” Fortunately, thanks to his sense of humor and brilliant rhythm section, George Clinton’s self-indulgence was an instant success with audiences. The accompanying album,
Mothership Connection,
released in December 1975, went platinum.

Such lavish experiments weren’t always so profitable. Casablanca was also trying to break a progressive rock group called Angel, whose attempts at so-called high-art illusions inspired several sketches in the film satire
This Is Spinal Tap.
With the hall lights dimmed, the golden face of Angel Gabriel appeared over the drum riser as a celestial voice boomed out across the audience, “And it came to pass one day in Heaven that Gabriel summoned his flock of angels…” A system of lights, dry ice, and mirrors illuminated a set of pyramids. Five glass cubicles rose up from under the stage and released the band into the earthly realm. Unfortunately, musicians got occasionally trapped in their pods.

Clearly there had to be cheaper ways of promoting records. Even the heavy-gambling Neil Bogart sensed that dance-floor hit singles were the solution in a rock world that had literally grown out of all serious proportion. In Europe, Peter Meisel’s Hansa label had been the first to score disco hits, in particular “Daddy Cool” by Boney M. It was the Bee Gees, in early 1976, who proved the point in America. Shortly after, Bogart got another fortuitous visit from Henri Belolo and Jacques Morali—the French producers who had dreamed up the Village People, a sort of gay-club fancy-dress concept depicting symbols of American life: an Indian, a construction worker, a cop, a cowboy, a sailor, a biker.

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!”