Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (35 page)

A similar fate almost befell the Times Square discotheque Xenon when it opened in June 1978. Located in the old Henry Miller Theater (the dance floor was where the stage used to be and the seats were replaced by leather banquettes) at 124 West 43rd Street, Xenon boasted a sixteen-channel sound system, the most expensive ever put in a club in New York, a spectacular light show, and a spaceship designed by Douglas Trumbull (who created the special effects in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
) that was to descend from the ceiling and hover just above the dancers’ heads. Xenon’s first mission was aborted, however, when the spaceship didn’t work and the light show was something less than advertised, and owners rock promoter Howard Stein and former European disco impresario Peppo Vanini decided to lick their wounds and start over. When it reopened in the autumn, Xenon became Studio’s main rival in the celeb stakes, hosting parties for the likes of Warren Beatty, Pelé, Gregory Peck, Lauren Bacall, and Richard Avedon. Xenon even managed to lure away Disco Sally from Studio 54. Like Studio, Xenon was disco as theater. As one of the club’s doormen told journalist Vita Miezitis, “If we have a number of celebrities or rich people inside, I will look for people who will entertain this group both in the way they are dressed and the show I think they will put on inside the club.”
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The proscenium of this disco theater was formed by two columns of light designed to look literally like pinball machines, while the stage setting was a number of garish neon frescoes surrounding the dance floor that depicted the New York skyline with a cowboy straddling the Brooklyn Bridge and King Kong beating his chest.

With the amount of attention generated by places like Xenon and Studio 54, by 1979 discotheques were spreading like the plague throughout the United States, each hoping that some of the sparkle would rub off on it. One thousand of these nightclubs were in the New York metropolitan area, but this isn’t to say that the Big Apple had a monopoly on discotheque outrageousness. Perhaps inevitably, Tinseltown was New York’s match in terms of over-the-top design: the DJ at L.A. discotheque Dillon’s was fitted with a special harness so that he could fly over the crowd on the dance floor, while
Billboard
magazine described the decor of Hard Times Charlies as “an antiques collector’s delight. Costing in excess of $150,000, it includes a DJ booth converted from an early 18th Century French elevator. A colorful carnival carousel hangs suspended over the dance floor. The seating features pews from old English churches, and there’s an original marble and brass shoeshine parlor salvaged from Chicago’s colorful past.”
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Across the pond, however, clubs were much more sedate despite the tremendous influence the United Kingdom exerted over disco music. London’s disco scene was shackled to its gentlemen’s/workingmen’s club roots thanks to the country’s restrictive licensing laws and to the DJs, who couldn’t respond to American disco culture because they were too busy fighting the musicians’ union, which aggressively targeted DJs as job killers. The Big Smoke’s most famous discotheques were the hopelessly staid aristo watering hole Annabel’s in Berkeley Square and the Embassy in Old Bond Street. Although the Embassy was owned by Jeremy Norman, who published
Burke’s Peerage,
it wasn’t all old colonels reminiscing about the Raj and braying, horsey Sloanes, although they were there in abundance. It was essentially a smallish ballroom with a sunken dance floor surrounded by palm trees decorated with white mannequins. Après Studio 54, the club’s busboys wore silk briefs and maybe shoes. “There are no particular dance steps in vogue,” Andy Blackford wrote of a visit there. “The Hustle and the Bump were New York inventions and there’s an implicit understanding among the London elite that New York is so far ahead in everything disco that to import its dances would be a transparent admission of failure.”
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What the Embassy did have, though, was a DJ who could mix records. This was quite a rarity at the time—as late as 1979, there were only a few DJs in Britain who mixed, and most of those were American imports. “DJs were very primitive, you know, they would announce the records and have no concept of mixing and what disco’s about,” remembers Ian Levine, one of the only mixers in the country, who took over at Angels in Burnley when the Blackpool Mecca closed down in 1979. “The London DJs, in particular, were so entrenched in funk.”
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At places like Lacey Lady in Ilford, the Royalty in Southgate, the Goldmine in Canvey Island, Frenchie’s in Camberley, Surrey, and Crackers in the West End, the music was almost exclusively soul-boy funk and jazz funk, records like Norman Connors’s “Captain Connors,” Bob James’s “Westchester Lady,” and Side Effect’s “Always There.” To further distance themselves from the more populist British disco scene, many of the DJs on the jazz-funk scene (Chris Hill, Greg Edwards, Robbie Vincent, Bob Jones, Tom Holland, etc.) banded together as the “soul mafia.”

Meanwhile, on the Continent, the influence of the olde worlde discotheques still reigned. Although the European aristocracy had to spend the decade dodging the Red Brigade and Baader-Meinhof gang, the European discos of the ’70s were no longer the basement hovels of old. They were pleasure palaces to compete with the most luxuriant of New York’s beau monde nightclubs. The most splendid of these dolce vita dance halls was undoubtedly Rituel on the Costa Smeralda, the section of the Sardinian coast that the Aga Khan turned into a millionaire’s playground in the ’60s. Rituel was “a glistening white cave shaped like an amphitheatre, with successive tiers etched into the rock walls and strewn with hundreds of white pillows, upon which the rich recline in splendiferous near nudity. A slowly turning light machine fills the cave with vivid colored images, and at the lowest level of the cavern, on a tiny dance floor of ebony marble, gorgeous people move ever so slightly … If, God forbid, they should perspire, there is a rustic terrace reached through a hole in the cave’s ceiling. From that lofty perch they can turn their brows toward sea breezes while they watch the moon over the calm Mediterranean.”
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I’m hell on wheels, let’s roll.

—Cher, “Hell on Wheels”

Can you do it on skates?

—Citi, “Can You Do It on Skates?”

Disco may have been fabulously glamorous and resplendently decadent, but it was also downright silly. And no aspect of disco culture was more ludicrous than roller disco. Perhaps because it was more proletarian than the high falutin world of Studio 54, more tailored for teenagers than twentysomething sophisticates, roller disco encapsulated the worst of the fadishness and velour-shirted mindlessness (with elbow and knee pads) of the 1970s. When it hit the mainstream thanks to the new polyurethane wheels that replaced the scraping and bumpiness of the old metal ones, the legend of Rollerena, the beloved blond bimbos of Venice Beach, the bizarre popularity of roller derby and Cher’s “Hell on Wheels,” roller disco spread across the world with the unrelenting fury of the pet rock. Suddenly, everywhere from Hixon, Tennessee (site of Skateland, which had one of the country’s most expensive light shows), to Dunstable (home of the United Kingdom’s first roller disco, the California, DJed by Peter Preston), there were pockmarked teens with Goody combs sticking out of the back pockets of their Toughskins and gamine women wearing rainbow-colored boob tubes, hot pants, and matching leg warmers trying to do the roll and rock or the coffee bean without dropping their glowsticks. Celebs the world over were boogying on wheels (Jack Nicholson had black boot skates with green neon tubing, and Cher had skates whose wheels lowered like the landing gear of an airplane); games manufacturer Gottlieb made a very popular “Roller Disco” pinball machine; there were at least three movies made and rush-released to capitalize on the trend, all of them nominees for the worst films ever made—
Roller Boogie
(starring Linda Blair),
Skatetown, U.S.A.
(featuring a stellar cast including Scott Baio, Flip Wilson, Ruth Buzzi, Maureen McCormick, Ron Palillo, Billy Barty [playing Flip Wilson’s son!] and, in his first role on the silver screen, Patrick Swayze as Ace Johnson), and
Xanadu
(producer Alan Carr’s car-crash of a musical with Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly)—and the legendary “Roller Disco” double episode of
CHiPs
(with guest stars like Leif Garrett, Jim Brown, Fred Williamson,
F-Troop
’s Larry Storch, and
M*A*S*H
’s Larry Linville). The dark side of the roller-skating craze was conjured by movies like
The Warriors,
which featured gangs of roller-skating toughs terrorizing the Bronx, and an ad for Hostess Fruit Pies in which the Incredible Hulk rescues a town from the pillaging “Roller Disco Devils.”

Inevitably, many of disco’s early devotees hated roller disco and everything that it represented. As the disco scene was becoming ever more commercialized, a character in Andrew Holleran’s
Dancer From the Dance
laments, “The music was atrocious: that roller-skating music they’re turning out now that discos are big business.”
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Very few of the roller discos had liquor licenses and so attracted a much younger, teeny-bopper crowd than the standard discos. But the truth is that, like disco itself, roller disco had a history deeper and richer than its mainstream face would indicate. Roller skating was first developed in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century as a way for the Dutch to practice their national sport, ice skating, during the summer months. Dancing on roller skates (to brass bands and pipe organs) began in the parks and promenades of Victorian England in the 1880s, and roller rinks throughout the world employed organists (think of the music of Dave “Baby” Cortez) as a matter of course until the 1970s. In the mid- to late 1960s, Hector and Henry Abrami, owners of the Empire Rollerdrome on 200 Empire Boulevard in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, decided to hire a DJ to replace the organist as a cost-cutting measure, and the seeds of roller disco were sown. The Abrami brothers opened the Empire in the 1930s, when Crown Heights was an area almost exclusively inhabited by Eastern European immigrants. The neighborhood started to change in the 1960s with an influx of Afro-Caribbean immigrants, and the DJ started to tailor his set toward their musical tastes. The result was the most famous roller disco in the world. In the mid-1970s, a technique called the “Brooklyn Bounce”—based on varying stride patterns and frequent stops—was developed by skaters Bill Butler and Pat the Cat, and the roller disco craze was born. Soon, busloads of tourists (including JFK Jr. and Cher) would visit the thirty-thousand-square-foot rollerama decorated with brightly colored rainbow murals on Wednesday night, which became known as “white night” (at almost every other roller disco in the country Wednesday night was “black night”) to gawk at the dancers who were universally acknowledged as the best roller boogiers on the planet. It was a spectacle of speed, improvised choreography, and athleticism that no regular disco could hope to match.

Despite its Crown Heights location (which could have been in Mississippi as far as most Manhattanites were concerned), the Empire was one of the true crucibles of disco in New York—legendary DJ Larry Levan (see Chapter 6) even worked there as a skate guard (in the early ’80s, Mike Tyson had his job). The Empire’s preeminence was in no small part due to its DJ in the mid-1970s, Peter Brown. He played a combination of disco classics (Eddie Kendricks’s “Girl You Need a Change of Mind”), funk standards (the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money” and Kool & the Gang’s “Hollywood Swinging”), and obscure club favorites like Cymande’s “Bra.”
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Brown was also involved in record promotion, and in 1975 he helped get a record by the vocal group Four Below Zero, “My Baby’s Got E.S.P.,” signed to Morris Levy’s Roulette label.
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The producer of “My Baby’s Got E.S.P.” was Patrick Adams, the former head of A&R at the Perception / Today labels and producer and arranger for the cult vocal group Black Ivory, and he and Brown quickly formed a partnership. The two used Brown’s old P&P label
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as a vehicle for Brown’s own productions and for Adams’s more experimental records.
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The label’s first twelve-inch release was Adams’s own DIY project, “Atmosphere Strutt,” made under the name of Johnny Copeland (Cloud One) Orchestra in 1976. The record set out the label’s house style, which would be duplicated on the pair’s other labels (Heavenly Star, Queen Constance, Land of Hits, Golden Flamingo, and Sound of New York, USA): a deep, spacey bass sound, syncopated rhythms that felt like anything but 4/4, askew vocals, strangely tinkly keyboard melodies, and wild Minimoog flourishes. It sounded nothing like the cookie-cutter synth gallop that was starting to dominate disco, and “Atmosphere Strutt” quickly became an underground disco classic, as did other releases like Clyde Alexander’s “Got to Have Your Love,” Licky’s “African Rock,” the Ahzz’s “New York Moving,” and Cloud One’s “Disco Juice.”

THE OTHER PETER BROWN

The name “Peter Brown” is the source of much confusion in disco lore. The Peter Brown who worked with Patrick Adams is
not
the Peter Brown who had a megahit with “Do Ya Wanna Get Funky With Me” in 1977. That Peter Brown was from the Chicago suburbs and recorded the single on a four-track recorder in his bedroom and played all of the instruments. He secured a release on the T.K. subsidiary Drive, and it became the first twelve-inch single to sell a million copies. Its B side, “Burning Love Breakdown,” essentially a dubbier, instrumental remake, is a certified underground disco classic and one of the precursors of House music. Brown went to record an even more successful follow-up, “Dance With Me” (featuring Betty Wright on vocals), and eventually cowrote “Material Girl” for Madonna. There is also plenty of confusion surrounding Brown and Adams’s Sound of New York, USA label. This is
not
the Sound of New York label that was a subsidiary of Beckett and released late disco classics like Indeep’s “Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life,” Kinky Foxx’s “So Different,” or Stone’s “Crazy.”