Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (16 page)

Probably the funkiest drummer to ever zing a Zildjian, the Meters’ Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste brought both the New Orleans tradition and the JB beat to hitherto unimagined levels of dexterity. He may sound like an octopus behind the kit, but the reason he’s such a bad-ass is that he keeps time like a Swiss quartz—it’s not for nothing the band’s called the Meters. Ziggy played on LaBelle’s
Nightbirds
album, the record that truly subsumed funk into disco. On the album’s two best tracks, “What Can I Do For You?” and “Lady Marmalade,” Ziggy’s drums are distinctly flat and angular, the N’orlins swing is only implied. Given funk and soul’s marching-band roots, this kind of severe regimentation was inevitable.

The hit factory at Motown got close to assembly-line interchangeability, particularly in its rhythm sections, and this was brought to the fore with what are often considered the first disco records. Eddie Kendricks’s 1972 single “Girl You Need a Change of Mind” was disco’s prototype even though its main beat, which was a snare rather than a kick, was a bit too human (the drummer is noticeably late a couple of times during the track). The following year, with the Temptations’ “Law of the Land,” producer Norman Whitfield made his apocalyptic funk even more dystopic with a strict 4/4 drumbeat that embodied the inevitability of human nature described in the song. The skipping hi-hats, the subtle but crucial conga fills, the hand claps, the dubby effects Whitfield puts on the horns, the hooky string lines, the deracinated gospel keyboards—this was almost the entirety of disco in five-minute microcosm. It was the rigid main beat, however, that really marked “Law of the Land” as a break from the soul continuum. Picking up on cues from Sly Stone and James Brown, Whitfield had broken from the Motown mold in the ’60s by inserting spaces in between the beats; the relentless, clockwork beat of “Law of the Land,” however, was perhaps his most Motown-like beat, albeit updated for a world quickly getting used to the certainties of the machine.

Motown’s greatest rhythm mechanic, however, never even recorded for them. Hamilton Bohannon used to drum in the Motown touring band, and when the label left Detroit for Los Angeles in 1971, Bohannon stayed behind in the Midwest. No one has taken “groove” as literally as Bohannon—there are no peaks, no builds, no intensity anywhere in the records he made for Brunswick from 1974 to 1976. Perhaps because of his time at Motown, Bohannon made dance music like an assembly-line worker—his hypnotrance rhythms were so monotonous you could get repetitive strain injury listening to them. Willie Henderson was a producer and arranger at the Chicago offices of Brunswick from 1968 to 1974 before he decided to start his own Now Sound label. There must have been something in the water in the Windy City during that time, because Henderson’s “Dance Master”—a favorite at the Loft—had the same machinic inevitablity as Bohannon, the same drone of the downtrodden funk worker. Rahiem LeBlanc, the guitarist of New York’s Rhythm Makers (note the workmanlike name), had the same sound as Bohannon and Henderson—what Bo Diddley would sound like given a wah-wah pedal and a flanger—but Herb Lane’s keyboards were far too engaging to make their disco classic, “Zone,” quite as hypnotic. What “Zone” did have, though, was the most metronomic cowbell ever—you can almost hear drummer Kenny Banks counting off to himself every quarter-note hit. Without the Eno-esque ignorability factor, this numbing regularity was taken up by “the human metronome,” Chic’s Tony Thompson.

Ironically, though, for all the talk of the disco robots removing humanity from black music,
the
disco beat is probably the least mechanistic of any of the rhythms mentioned so far. The battery for almost all of the classic Philadelphia International records, drummer Earl Young and bassist Ronnie Baker, were two of the most influential rhythm players of the ’70s. With the help of engineer Joe Tarsia, they experimented with all sorts of techniques in order to achieve the marvelously rich and full sound that characterized Philly soul. Baker would wrap a rubber band around his bass strings at the bridge in order to get a thumpy sound that not only anchored but propelled the music forward. Young, meanwhile, placed a wallet on his snare drum to give it a certain dynamic. Tarsia was obsessive about microphone placement, drum tuning, and which bass drum beater was the right one for a particular sound. All of these peculiar elements came together on Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “The Love I Lost.” The song originally began life as a ballad, but the session wasn’t working until producer Kenny Gamble told the musicians to let rip and crank up the tempo. Young unleashed a war dance on the kick drum with a shuffle on the snare, but instead of echoing this pattern on the cymbals, Young used a trick he had first used a few months earlier on an obscure record by the Fantastic Johnny C, “Waitin’ for the Rain.” Picking up a thing or two from jazz drummer Max Roach, Young accented the off-beats using an open hi-hat. The result was the hissing hi-hat sound that has dominated dance music ever since this record was first released in September 1973. The first drummer to pick up on this hi-hat pattern was New York session drummer Allan Schwartzberg. His beat on Gloria Gaynor’s version of “Never Can Say Goodbye” (and his later work on records like the Joneses’ “Sugar Pie Guy,” Disco Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes’ “Get Dancin’,” and the Wing and a Prayer Fife and Drum Corps’s “Baby Face”) ensured that the sibilant cymbal would become one of the hallmarks of disco.

“LES FRONTIÈRES SONT OUVERTES”

Eurodisco

With such a strong presence of automated beats and mechanical rhythms throughout the history of African-American music, the disco naysayers were on unsteady ideological turf when they criticized its repetitiveness and machinelike qualities. After all, they couldn’t very well denigrate their own beloved funk. So they found a scapegoat. It came from Europe like a marauding Ostrogoth in clodhoppers and a three-piece polyester leisure suit, and its name was Eurodisco. Journalist Nelson George described Eurodisco as “music with a metronomelike beat—perfect for folks with no sense of rhythm—almost inflectionless vocals, and metallic sexuality that matched the high-tech, high-sex, and low-passion atmosphere of the glamorous discos that appeared in every major American city.”
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Funk historian Rickey Vincent further characterized the dreaded Eurodisco parasites as “producer-made tunes [that] generally lacked any sense of sequence—beginning, buildup, catharsis, release—yet they were simple and catchy enough to bring rhythmless suburbanites and other neophytes flocking to plush dance clubs at strip malls from coast to coast.”
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Just as Native Americans thought that if you photographed them, they would lose part of their soul, the defenders of funk thought that if you made drumbeats with machines, music would lose its soul. Eurodisco was tainting the pure gene pool of black music with its goose-stepping stomp beats and beer-hall sing-alongs, and taming James Brown the way Pat Boone had wrapped Little Richard in a woolly grandpa cardigan. While there was no doubting that Eurodisco was seemingly made for the Stepford Wives and air-headed California girls aspiring to be Farrah Fawcett, it was equally true that many Eurodisco hits were practically note-for-note remakes of earlier records by Barry White, MFSB, and the Temptations.

The history of Eurodisco is inseparable from the history of the drum machine and the click track (the metronome beat that now plays in the headphones of all studio musicians while they’re laying down a track). The first electronic drum machine, the Wurlitzer Side Man, was released in 1959. The Side Man was designed as an accompaniment for solo organ players, and even significant advances like the Kent K-100 and the Keio Donca-Matic remained the preserve of albums like
Ken Demko Live at the Lamplighter Inn
until the early ’70s, when Sly Stone made the drum machine as expressive as a guitar or piano. Stone was an organist, and when he locked himself in the studio to record that masterpiece of pessimism and defeat,
There’s a Riot Goin’ On,
he took one of these primitive rhythm boxes to keep him company. But it wasn’t just for practical reasons: The machine’s stammering, staggered, punch-drunk quality was the perfect foil for lyrics like “Feels so good inside myself, don’t want to move.”

The most famous early drum machine hit, though, was born of purely pragmatic concerns. Timmy Thomas was a lounge musician who played at the club he owned in Miami, where he used a Lowrey organ and one of these beat boxes. His 1972 “Why Can’t We Live Together?” was essentially the same version that you would have heard any night at his club—just Thomas sobbing about racial injustice, almost funky organ playing not dissimilar from a jaunty cinema keyboard player, and a spooky bossa nova–ish preset beat. The instrumental flip side, “Funky Me,” tackled the rhythm box on its own terms and featured a beat eerily reminiscent of Suicide’s earliest records. Incidentally, a carbon copy of the rhythm box beat from “Why Can’t We Live Together?” would reappear, chained to a slowed-down Bo Diddley rhythm, on one of disco’s founding moments, George McCrae’s 1974 smash hit, “Rock Your Baby,” which was produced by Thomas’s former booking agent, Harry Wayne Casey (aka KC from KC and the Sunshine Band). Sylvia and the Moments (“Sho Nuff Boogie”) and Shuggie Otis (“Island Letter”) soon followed with their own “sophisticated” and trippy-tropical takes on the primitive drum machine groove. Strangely, though, the drum machine was used on these records precisely because it didn’t reproduce the uniform sound of a conveyor belt (heck, you could get Ringo Starr to do that). Instead, it sounded exotic, otherworldly, inebriated.

It wouldn’t be until the dawn of Eurodisco in the mid-1970s that the drum machine would live up to its name. Thanks to the Common Market, broadly similar social democratic governments, and the onslaught of the American pop culture machine, the distinct national identities of Europe began to dissolve after World War II. The lingua franca of this new pan-European identity became a combination of the deracinated Motown stomp beat first developed in the north of England, the sunny cod-Latino holiday music first developed by Titanic and Barrabas, and the bubblegum music started in the United States by Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz as an antidote to the “serious” rock music of hippiedom. Europop was relentlessly chipper, hyperstylized music that reflected the boundless optimism of a European union that would end all continental wars, the homogenized blandness of a culture run by bureaucrats, and the retreat into safety of a continent that was reeling from terrorist organizations like the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Brigade. It was lowest-common-denominator music, and its message could be understood by anyone, even if you had to wade through swamps of bad diction and even worse syntax to get there. It was a kind of musical Esperanto—designed for everyone yet seemingly loved by no one (at least in public). Europoppers hardly needed the drum machine to make their rhythms more metronomic (check the Equals’ early Europop classics “Baby, Come Back” and “Viva Bobby Joe” for proof), but when Eurodisco producers discovered the drum machine, the nightmare vision of a unified Europe was realized: The Germans were the drummers, the Belgians were the bassists, the Swedes were the singers, the French and the Italians were the producers, and everyone but the British wrote the English-language lyrics.

When the rhythm box fell into the hands of producers in Munich and Düsseldorf, it became the stern taskmaster it was always designed to be—“a regulator to tighten the pulse,”
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as journalist David Toop called it, and any derivation from a strictly regimented 4/4 was absolutely forbidden. Academic Walter Hughes has called disco “a form of discipline” in which, along with body building and safe sex, gay men turned the practices of regulation into acts imbued with eroticism. Hughes writes that disco “takes the regular tattoo of the military march and puts it to the sensual purposes of dance music.”
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Of course, as we have seen, this had happened in popular music all along, but with its own self-awareness, insistence on the 4/4 beat, and the development of the synthesizer and the drum machine, disco explicitly played on this aspect, perhaps never more obviously than on Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.”

Little more than Donna Summer simulating an orgasm or twenty over a background of blaxploitation cymbals, wah-wah guitars, a funky-butt clavinet riff, some synth chimes, and what could be the most lifeless drums ever recorded (courtesy of a Wurlitzer Side Man), “Love to Love You Baby” was the aural parallel of the newly respectable porn industry. Even without Summer’s moans and heavy breathing, this would have been the case. Thanks to a thousand terrible love scenes in blaxploitation flicks, that wink-wink-nudge-nudge guitar riff had become permanently associated with a couple getting down in a wood-paneled room with leopard-skin throws and astrological bric-a-brac, while the piercing synth fills represented the more “spiritual” side of fornication. But it was that bloodless jackhammer beat that really screamed
Debbie Does Dallas.
Rock critic Dave Marsh once compared rock and roll’s backbeat with the rhythm of onanism, but this was the sound of a professional grimly, resolutely performing his task until it was time for relief, particularly in the song’s seventeen-minute marathon version.

The original three-and-a-half-minute version of “Love to Love You Baby” was extended into a minisymphony at the behest of Casablanca Records chief Neil Bogart. “He liked the song so much he wanted to have a long version of it,” producer Giorgio Moroder told David Toop with some amusement in 1992. “And that’s when I did the 17-minute one. The official story is that he was playing it at a party and people wanted to hear it over and over. I think the real one was more like the bad story. He was doing something other than dancing.”
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Instead of just padding out the track, Moroder elongated it by using a new bass line as a tidal bridge between segments, creating waves that surged, climaxed, and crashed every four minutes or so. Moroder had applied the motorik autobahn aesthetic to the human body, and the resulting cyborg permanently changed the character of music.