Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (32 page)

By November 1974, discotheques like Le Jardin, the Gallery, and Hollywood (located on the site of the old Peppermint Lounge) were such a force that they were influencing not only what was being played on radio but also how the records were being played. In response to the growing popularity of the nightclubs, New York FM station WPIX started the world’s first disco radio program that month. Disco 102 was hosted by Steve Andrews every Saturday night from 8 p.m. to midnight and aired songs that were being played in the city’s discos. While Andrews didn’t blend or mix like the club DJs, he didn’t play any jingles and his between-song patter was kept to a minimum to better replicate a club atmosphere. This format was soon exported to Boston and then rapidly throughout the country, with varying degrees of success.

Although the disco bug was spreading across the country at an alarming rate, with hotel chains like Ramada trying out discotheques in far-flung locales like Fargo, North Dakota (with three phones to the DJ booth placed througout the lounge so that people could make requests), in an effort to boost revenue,
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New York (and even then only a small fraction of the Big Apple’s vast clubbing scene) was still calling all the shots. “In New York, the gay discos still influence the sound,” Tom Moulton reported in
Billboard.
“You’ll find the gay discos are much more into things they’re not familiar with, whereas in the straight discos, people still feel they have to hear something they’re familiar with.”
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Even in major music cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston (with the exception of DJs John Luongo and Jimmy Stuard), the clubs’ music programming was nowhere near as sophisticated or up-to-the-minute as New York and was largely dependent on the audiences’ familiarity with the music to generate any dance floor atmosphere.
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The one major exception was Miami. Part of the problem for DJs outside of the Big Apple was the difficulty in obtaining promotional copies of new records in order to keep right up-to-date. DJs in Miami, though, were very well served by the city’s dominant independent distributor and label complex, Henry Stone’s T.K. Records empire.
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Henry Stone was born in 1921 in the Bronx, and when his father died in 1929 he was sent to an orphanage. As a kid he fell in love with the sound of Louis Armstrong and started playing the trumpet. While in basic training in New Jersey, he played trumpet in the army’s first integrated band. When he was discharged after World War II, he became a traveling salesman for the L.A.-based Modern Records. Settling in south Florida, he set up his own Rockin’ and Glory labels in the early 1950s and started producing records as well, including early sessions with Ray Charles and the vocal group the Charms. After setting up Tone Distribution at the end of the decade, he started the Dade and Glades labels and recruited Steve Alaimo and Brad Shapiro to work as producers/A&R men for his various labels. Like Stone, Alaimo and Shapiro were both white fans of black music, and the integrated studio followed the pattern set by other Southern soul studios like Stax and Fame in Memphis and Muscle Shoals in Alabama.

In the late ’60s, a singer called Terry Kane built an eight-track studio above the Tone Distribution offices in the run-down Miami suburb of Hialeah, and Stone would let some of the young employees who worked in his warehouse use the studio at night during downtime. Two of these kids were Richard Finch and Harry Wayne Casey. Casey had heard the Bahamian Carnival music, junkanoo (similar to the music made by New Orleans’s Mardi Gras Indians with its cowbell percussion, whistles, and goat-skin goombay drums), and had the idea to integrate it with more straightforward R&B rhythms. Calling themselves KC and the Sunshine Junkanoo Band, in 1973 Casey (KC), Finch, and members of the multiracial studio band recorded what would become the first release on Stone’s new T.K. label. “Blow Your Whistle” was a slightly strange mixture of an out-of-date soul bass line and drums with jingling percussion roiling underneath until the dams burst during the whistle-blowing breaks. Despite its awkwardness, the record’s Carnival vibes worked perfectly in a disco context, and thanks to this exposure the record reached #15 on the R&B chart. Its similarly styled but funkier follow-ups (released as KC and the Sunshine Band), “Sound Your Funky Horn” and “Queen of Clubs,” were also big hits in the United Kingdom.

While their band was boosting R&B with heavily syncopated Caribbean percussion, Casey and Finch went the other direction with a song they wrote in 1974 called “Rock Your Baby.” Gone was the party vibe of the KC and the Sunshine Band records and in its place was the proto–drum machine beat familiar from Timmy Thomas’s “Why Can’t We Live Together?” The song was originally intended for KC and the Sunshine Band, but it was in too high a pitch for KC to sing, so they offered it to Betty Wright and Gwen McCrae, two female singers with T.K.-associated labels, but they both turned it down. McCrae’s husband, George, was then offered the song. While its simplicity was the diametric opposite of the lush records from Philadelphia and Barry White, “Rock Your Baby” wasn’t exactly straightahead soul/R&B either. McCrae sang it as if in a reverie, his dreamy vocals playing off perfectly against the cotton-ball keyboards. This strangely novel articulation of ecstasy and its faint trade-wind lilt made “Rock Your Baby” a huge hit not only among disco tastemakers always on the lookout for visions of pleasure outside of the straight and narrow but also among the general public, who made it the third American pop number one in less than a year (after Love Unlimited Orchestra’s “Love’s Theme” and the Hues Corporation’s “Rock the Boat”) whose success was directly attributable to the discotheques.

McCrae’s chart success paved the way for the mainstream breakthrough of KC and the Sunshine Band. And what a breakthrough it was. Until
Saturday Night Fever
made the Bee Gees superstars, KC and the Sunshine Band were the undisputed kings of disco. “Get Down Tonight,” “That’s the Way (I Like It),” “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty,” and “I’m Your Boogie Man” were all pop #1s between 1975 and 1977, and “Keep It Comin’ Love” reached #2. KC and the Sunshine Band’s bouncy, bubble-headed enthusiasm and slightly square approach (those horns!) to black slang were two things that gave disco its bad name. While KC’s background in the Pentecostal church perhaps had something to do with the band’s singles bar straightness, it also gave him some honest-to-goodness vocal chops, and it was clear that the members were not some Johnny-come-latelies capitalizing on a trend. They loved the music, and their enthusiasm, however ungainly, was infectious.

T.K. had more dance floor success with the Caribbean vibe started by KC and the Sunshine Band in the form of records like Ralph McDonald’s “Calypso Breakdown,” but the label had all disco bases covered with funky disco from Jimmy “Bo” Horne (also produced by Casey) and T-Connection, straight-ahead disco from Celi Bee & the Buzzy Bunch, Peter Brown, Foxy, Anita Ward, and Joe Thomas, and Eurodisco from Kebekelektrik, USA-European Connection, and Voyage. While T.K. was one of the disco era’s biggest success stories, it was also one of the most spectacular failures. When the antidisco backlash reached critical mass in 1979, T.K. sank seemingly without a trace and declared bankruptcy in 1981.

With Stone’s forty-year presence on the R&B scene, T.K. maintained connections with the soul world, recording James Brown and providing homes for the side projects of MFSB/Salsoul Orchestra players Ron Kersey (Wild Honey) and Bobby Eli (Eli’s Second Coming). However, this was a rarity among primarily disco-oriented organizations. In the spring of 1973, MFSB’s Norman Harris produced a single for a new singer named Gloria Gaynor for Columbia Records. “Honeybee” was a strange mix of trademark Philly soul and a buzzing fuzz guitar, imitating the title’s insect, that sounded like it was played by a ’60s garage band. It was an uncomfortable meeting and the record tanked. After the disc’s failure, the rights reverted to Gaynor’s manager, Jay Ellis, who had discovered Gaynor earlier that year while she was working at the Wagon Wheel Club on Forty-fifth Street in Manhattan. Ellis had recently set up DCA (Disco Corporation of America) with former Tommy James and the Shondells producer Meco Monardo and Motown engineer Tony Bongiovi, and the production team had hit immediately with Don Downing’s “Lonely Nights, Lonely Days.” DCA decided to tinker with “Honeybee” and kept the buzzing guitar (but placed way down in the mix), the strings, and Earl Young’s drums, but changed the bass line, added new instruments, and generally smoothed out the record. The record was rereleased (as “Honey Bee”) in April 1974 on MGM, and it became a modest R&B hit and an enormous disco hit. While the sound of Philadelphia was revered among the early disco pioneers, the newcomers felt they knew better and brought in Broadway arrangers to give dance music a classic pop makeover. The result was the ersatz showbiz of variety shows and Eurovision telecasts with Earl Young’s Philly drums reduced to nothing but that hissing hi-hat sound and Norman Harris’s jazzy guitar licks remade as “single muffled note” riffs that Monardo called “bubble” guitar.
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While this formula paid dividends on the pop charts and on more mainstream dance floors with records like Gaynor’s “Never Can Say Goodbye,” Carol Douglas’s “Doctor’s Orders,” and Don Downing’s “Dreamworld,” a bunch of white guys weaned on classical music and making their living churning out bubblegum pop hits scribbling over one of the sacrosanct soul forms alienated both the R&B community and the more hard-core disco scene.

From the time disco entered the mainstream, such racial tension became commonplace. The ruptures of disco’s racial politics were personified by Vicki Sue Robinson. Robinson was born in Philadelphia in 1955 to a folk singer mother who was a Russian Jew of French-Canadian descent and an actor father who was black with Scots blood. When she was ten, the family moved to Harlem, where she studied acting and dancing at the radical theater school, the Neighborhood Playhouse, while occasionally singing alongside such folk legends as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. She soon appeared in the original Broadway productions of
Hair
and
Jesus Christ Superstar,
and went to Japan to model but found herself singing with Japanese Prog rockers Sadistic Mika Band instead. On her return to New York she was discovered by journeyman producer Warren Schatz, and they hit immediately with the peerless “Turn the Beat Around.” The record was the culmination of everything that had been coalescing as “disco” since it went above ground in 1973: the quasi-Latin percussion runs (courtesy of Carlos Martin), the soaring strings, the hi-hat sound created by Earl Young, the thumping bass, the pop arrangement colliding with soul imperatives, the mixture of Broadway phrasing with churchy inflections, the showbiz razzmatazz somehow adding something to the “authentic” melisma. How could something so obviously informed by Andrew Lloyd Webber be so damn funky, so uplifting? “I’ve had some weird happenings behind that color thing, people not knowing how to deal with it, thinking it’s a white girl trying to sing black,” Robinson told journalist Denise Hall in 1976. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m just doing what I’m doing.”
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What she was doing was laying out in the plainest terms possible disco’s poetics and intimating that, even during a period of intense corporatization, where the bean counters who run the music biz held sway, disco could transcend even the hollowest of motives amd the thorniest of contradictions as long as the drummer hit that
rat-tat-tat-tat
on the drum.

“WHOOP! WHOOP!”

As the Beastie Boys said, ‘“Whoop! Whoop!’ is the disco call.” While an exaggerated “paarrtaayy” was early disco’s most recognizable sonic hallmark, the high-pitched “Whoop! Whoop!” was undoubtedly the disco craze’s signature sound. Ironically, the sound (albeit at a lower pitch than what would become the norm) was first used by the jazz-funk band the Blackbyrds on “Party Land” from their 1976 album
Unfinished Business
and was something that they probably picked up from the crowd at one of their gigs. Mastermind’s “Hustle Bus Stop” from 1977 was the next record to use the sound, but, as Davitt Sigerson notes, “The fad only really got going in the spring of 1978 with two pop/disco hits: ‘The Groove Line’ by Heatwave, and ‘Let’s All Chant’ by the Michael Zager Band.”
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After these two records managed to connote dance floor revelry with this simple sonic phrase, copycat records flooded the market: Foxy’s “Get Off,” Teddy Pendergrass’s “Get Up, Get Down, Get Funky, Get Loose,” Kleer’s “Keep Your Body Workin’,” Sun’s “Sun Is Here,” and Rick James’s “Be My Lady,” to name a few. The “Whoop! Whoop!” led directly to that other late disco hallmark, the high-pitched “Boo!” of the synth toms used on records like Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell,” Flakes’ “Sugar Frosted Lover,” Debbie Jacobs’s “Hot Hot (Give It All You Got),” Kelly Marie’s “Feels Like I’m in Love,” Love Deluxe’s “Here Comes That Sound Again,” and Arpeggio’s “Love and Desire.”

Records like “The Hustle,” “Turn the Beat Around,” “Get Down Tonight,” Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” Diana Ross’s “Love Hangover,” Johnnie Taylor’s “Disco Lady,” and the Miracles’ “Love Machine” staked disco’s claim on the pop charts, and by 1976 it was a big enough genre to have recognized subgenres: East Coast funk (Brass Construction, Mass Production, T-Connection, Slave, Brainstorm), which fused disco’s galloping drums and thumping bass lines with the vocal chants, horn blares, and off-beat rhythm guitar and keyboard riffs of funk; East Coast disco (Gloria Gaynor), described by Tom Moulton as, “It’s like traffic, fast with sudden jerks, and the lights changing quickly. You could walk down the street to those records in New York. But anywhere else, you’d have to
run
”
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; sophisto soul (Love Unlimited, Gene Page, Van McCoy); the Miami sound (KC and the Sunshine Band); and West Coast disco (the Originals), which combined Philly touches with more traditional R&B-styled horn charts and arrangements. However, it wouldn’t be until 1977 that disco would make the full-on transformation into discomania.