Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (37 page)

In his book
Noise: The Political Economy of Music,
Jacques Attali, the onetime head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, wrote that music heralds changes in society more quickly than other art forms or social organizations.
84
Mainstream disco’s abandoning of its original constituency and its values, its unseemly greed, its whitewashing of race and, to a certain degree, gender, its legions of two-bit hacks hoping that some of the musical wealth of the genre’s true geniuses would trickle down to them by merely imitating their opulence made it the perfect bridge from the liberalism that largely dominated the ’50s and ’60s to the neoconservatism that has shaped the Anglo-American axis since the 1980s. Journalist David Toop wrote that Casablanca, the quintessential label of the disco craze, “anticipated the junk bond scandals of the 80s with a boom-to-bust trajectory driven by hot air, hype and invisible, ultimately non-existent money.”
85
Casablanca head Neil Bogart was the man who almost single-handedly invented the disco bubble. One of his chief business tactics was shipping records platinum, even those by unknown artists, and counting the shipped records as sales. With such a high-risk business strategy, Casablanca required a hype machine that operated in a similar overdrive. Puffing up no-talent acts with a load of hot air became the norm for the record industry during the disco boom, and it was during this time that companies started to pass the burden of the cost of promotion on to the artists themselves, saddling them with huge recoupable expenses that ensured that a record would have to go gold before the artist would start earning any money. Bogart’s most Ivan Boesky–like moment, though, occurred when launching Donna Summer’s career in the United States. For her American debut, Bogart “had Hansen’s of Los Angeles sculpt a life-size cake in her image. The cake was flown to New York in two first-class airline seats, met by a freezer ambulance, and taken to the Penta discotheque for Summer’s performance there.”
86

“More, More, More” was how former porn star Andrea True presciently described disco’s insatiable appetite in 1975, and in 1979 it ultimately gorged itself to death. At the beginning of the year there was a critical mass of twenty thousand discos operating in the United States. “Boogie Fever” was a virus, and it never met a host it didn’t like: There were disco versions of everything from “Beer Barrel Polka” to “Jingle Bells”; advertising jingles, Broadway musicals (Jerry Brandt’s
Got Tu Go Disco,
a retelling of
Cinderella
set in a Manhattan nightspot starring Studio 54’s doorman, Marc Benecke), wedding ceremonies (a club in Dubuque, Iowa, offered a “disco wedding” package complete with lighting effects and a smoke machine), pinball machines, even the Jewish liturgical tradition (Sol Zim, “the disco cantor”) were all colonized by the disco bug. Not even children were safe: The beloved TV show
Sesame Street
released not one but two disco albums (
Sesame Street Fever
and
Sesame Disco!
); cereals like Count Chocula, Frankenberry, and Boo Berry, which were aimed at kids, gave away the truly monstrous “Monsters Go Disco” record with every box; there were Winnie the Pooh “disco players,” “Disco Mickey Mouse” watches and pillowcases, and rhinestone “disco suits” for toddlers. Addled by the potent combination of Hai Karate fumes and disorienting strobe lighting, disco denizens appeared to be George Romero zombies boogying ever-onward, but toward what no one was very sure. They were just hypnotized and swept along by the relentless surge of disco’s 4/4 death march (“Even in Jonestown, children wrote the names of recent disco hits in their notebooks,” noted reporter Jesse Kornbluth
87
). The existential crisis wrought by disco was perhaps best exemplified by a club at Eleventh Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street in Manhattan. It was named Les Mouches after Jean-Paul Sartre’s play that critiqued the notion of religious guilt. And, even more perfectly, it was Imelda Marcos’s favorite New York haunt.

Rock bad boys like Kiss, the Rolling Stones, and Rod Stewart also succumbed to the disease. While it was perhaps inevitable for Kiss (which was signed to Casablanca) and the Rolling Stones (because of the group’s abiding love for black music and refusal to be seen as the keepers of last year’s blues) to go disco, Rod the Mod’s “interpolation” of Jorge Ben’s “Taj Mahal,” “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?,” was about as sexy as a eunuch in a posing pouch and was a particular disgrace to the rock community (even worse was former Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” but luckily almost no one heard it). Old showbiz stalwarts like Frank Sinatra, Ethel Merman, Andy Williams, and Burt Bacharach went disco in a vain effort to shift product. Aside from the truly shocking music most of these recordings featured, the problem with these attempts to go disco was the superstar billing. The disco scene may have had its hyperarrogant DJs and gossip-column fodder celebrities, but disco music was never about superstars. It was about behind-the-scenes producers and anonymous session musicians, vocalists who were plucked from obscurity and then went right back there—think, for example, of Evelyn “Champagne” King, discovered singing in the bathroom of Philly’s Sigma Sound Studios, whose enduring “Shame” is one of disco’s greatest moments, or of Cheryl “Got to Be Real” Lynn, discovered on
The Gong Show.
Disco dancers had little use for the gargantuan ego of Mick Jagger or Frank Sinatra—the records should be about the groove and the exorcism of the demons of lost love, not the persona of the performer. For a culture born of the manumission from the shackles of repression and surveillance and pathologizing, the anonymity of disco is one of its most subversive and liberating aspects. While disco began with Francis Grasso blending Led Zeppelin and Chicago Transit Authority, disco had no use for rock and roll when it abandoned its connections to dancing and celebration in favor of offshore tax shelters and corporate sponsorship. Of course, this perfectly suited the bankers who ran the major labels, and so the dancing public was bombarded with thousands of beat-by-numbers records in the hope that one or two of them might catch on.

Even the centuries-old establishment of “high culture” was defenseless against the marauding leisure suit barbarians. Alec R. Costandinos remade Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
and Victor Hugo’s
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
as soft-porn schmaltz epics positively dripping with sickly string swoops and crass horn fanfares. Already reeling from the blasphemy of Walter Murphy & the Big Apple Band’s “A Fifth of Beethoven,” classical music suffered a further humiliation when, in a desperate bid to increase the shrinking attendance at its concerts, on January 6, 1979, the Rochester Philharmonic shared the stage at the Dome Arena in Henrietta, New York, with a DJ from the local discotheque, Club 747.
88
Perhaps disco’s greatest indignity to the edifice of Western culture, though, was Costandinos’s Sphinx project, an overripe dance floor passion play that made
Ben-Hur
look cheap and restrained. When
Rolling Stone
’s Mikal Gilmore expressed his doubts about the project to the label’s publicist, she remarked, “It’s the first time in Christian history that we can dance to the Stations of the Cross. Some people might find that blasphemous or pagan, but when you’re out there on that floor with a lot of other people, sharing the grief of the Lord’s betrayal, I dunno, it seems sort of …
uplifting.
”
89

Of course, America’s biggest religion is money, and on that front disco was certainly not committing heresy. In February 1979, journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote, “Today, the disco industry is a mammoth $4 billion enterprise—bigger than television, movies, or professional sports in America.”
90
From the time Chic’s “Le Freak” replaced Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond’s “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” at the top of the American pop charts in December 1978, every American #1 single (with the possible exception of the Doobie Brothers’ one-week reign with “What a Fool Believes”) was a disco record until the Knack’s “My Sharona” replaced Chic’s “Good Times” on August 25, 1979. Then, as DJ Danny Krivit jokes, “Disco died in a week. One week.”
91
He was barely exaggerating. After the Knack reintroduced rock to the American charts, there were only a handful of disco records that topped the charts—Herb Alpert’s “Rise,” Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer’s “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough),” and Diana Ross’s “Upside Down”—and these were all by well-established artists, not by musicians who made their names during the disco craze. Seemingly as suddenly as it emerged, disco vanished from the landscape of American popular culture. Kopkind had unwittingly provided a clue as to why.

As a country heavily invested in myths of masculinity, achievement, and its own uniqueness, America reserves a special place in its psyche for professional sport. No sport is more crucial to American fable than baseball, where every pitch is invested with cosmic significance and every home run is chronicled as if it were a labor of Hercules. Baseball is as much about American wholesomeness as
Father Knows Best
or
The Waltons,
as much about American masculinity as John Wayne or Gary Cooper, so it was inevitable that the camp disco beast would be slaughtered on the national pastime’s fields of dreams. No other sport in the world, not even cricket, is so mired in a golden-age nostalgia of the past, so obsessed with making its past greats into mythic heroes. Despite the fact that there are nine players on a team, baseball is all about the individual—a gallant twentieth-century version of Davy Crockett who no longer kills bears with a switch but swats balls into orbit with a thirty-six-ounce bat. At times it feels like the entire bulwark of American exceptionalism would crumble without baseball.

Disco, then, with its problematic relationship with masculinity, and baseball, where “heterosexual performance off the field is naturalized as an extension of athletic prowess,”
92
always had an ambivalent relationship in the arena of popular culture. As
The Washington Post
’s Bill Straub writes, “Of course, baseball in the mid-1970s was the only thing worth believing in. At a time when the nation was embroiled in Watergate and the after-effects of the Vietnam War, civil strife and the … disco scare, baseball represented at the time all things Americans are supposed to hold dear. It was pure, everyone started out on an even basis, excellence was rewarded and, in an increasingly cynical age, it was always there for you.”
93

The most obvious harbinger of disco’s doom came from Chicago’s Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979, in between games of a scheduled twi-night doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers. It was already scheduled to be “Teen Night,” where kids under the age of twenty got a gift for attending the game, but with the White Sox having a lousy season and attendance dwindling, the team’s promotions manager, Michael Veeck, thought that something else was needed to lure fans to the ballpark. Veeck was no stranger to outlandish promotional schemes: He was the son of the team’s owner, the legendary Bill Veeck, the man who dreamed up the concept of the promotional giveaway (including live pigs and cases of beer), not to mention exploding scoreboards, weddings at home plate, and sending in a midget to pinch-hit during a game. The younger Veeck came up with the idea of staging a “Disco Demolition Derby” during the between-game intermission, and any fan showing up with a disco record to be demolished got into the stadium for 98 cents.

Veeck’s coconspirator was a twenty-four-year-old morning drive-time disc jockey for radio station WLUP named Steve Dahl. In March of that year, Dahl had been fired from his job at station WDAI, which had switched from a rock format to an all-disco one, and he began his antidisco campaign when he retook the airwaves later that month. Following in the footsteps of “shock jock” Don Imus, Dahl attracted a sizable audience for antics, like forcibly taking over a teen disco, destroying a copy of Van McCoy’s “The Hustle” on the day McCoy died of a heart attack, and offering free tickets to a Village People concert if the winners would pelt the group with marshmallows emblazoned in Magic Marker with “Disco Sucks.” He also released a parody record set to the tune of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” called “Do You Think I’m Disco” that featured such lyrics as “I like to dance with girls in sleazy dresses / Lipstick, nail charms and make-up in excesses / Buy them a drink and try and get their number / Usually they’re as cold as a cucumber / Do ya think I’m disco / Am I superficial / Looking hip’s my only goal” sung in a voice somewhere between Sean Penn’s in
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
and “Weird Al” Yankovic’s. Dahl even recruited his own “Disco Army,” the Insane Coho Lips (named after the coho salmon, a species introduced into the Great Lakes in order to eliminate the lamprey eel, a parasite that had almost wiped out the lakes’ fish population), which was “dedicated to the eradication and elimination of the dreaded musical disease known as DISCO.”
94

Dahl heavily promoted the “Disco Demolition Derby” for weeks on his radio show, and by the time July 12 rolled around, Dahl’s audience of Middle American burnouts was worked up into a frenzy. The game was a sell-out, with an attendance of fifty thousand. There were another estimated fifteen thousand people without tickets or disco records hanging around outside (many of whom paid the turnstile attendants to let them in or simply scampered up the drainage pipes to get inside) and an unknown number stuck in a traffic jam on the Dan Ryan Expressway. If you didn’t have a car, the main means of transportation to the stadium was the Archer bus, which was filled with teenagers drinking beer, passing around bottles of peppermint schnapps and joints, chanting “Disco sucks! Disco sucks!”

The atmosphere inside Comiskey was equally crazy. Fireworks were being set off and being thrown indiscriminately into the crowd. Inevitably, many fans had brought more than the one record to be sacrificed on Dahl’s pyre, and records were being tossed like Frisbees at Tigers center fielder Ron LeFlore during the first game. Beer vendors were selling around three times their average amount. By the end of the first game, most of the crowd was totally loaded and braying for blood like Romans at the Colosseum awaiting the Christians and the lions.