Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (42 page)

Manchester’s A Certain Ratio was a mixed-race band that idolized Parliament-Funkadelic and saw itself as part of the United Kingdom’s rare groove scene. The problem was that on early records like
The Graveyard and the Ballroom,
the group’s brand of funk was as dour and desolate as its northern surroundings. However, its sprightly 1981 cover of Banbarra’s “Shack Up” was a hit in many New York clubs, and the group went to the United States to soak up the influence of the clubs and to record (with Martin Hannett, who also recorded ESG) its first studio album.

A Certain Ratio’s labelmates Section 25 were largely a Xerox copy of miserablists Joy Division, but they had one moment of dance floor transcendence. “Looking From a Hilltop (Megamix),” mixed by New Order’s Bernard Sumner and A Certain Ratio’s Donald Johnson, was a big club hit in New York, Chicago, and Detroit—the three titans of America’s Rust Belt who, amid the great population and cultural shift to the Sun Belt, were looking for solace in the United Kingdom’s abandoned industrial heartland. But “Hilltop” was no pumping piston, Kling Klang, metal-on-metal behemoth; despite all the electronics, it was almost pastoral with little-girl-lost vocalist Jenny Ross giving it a kind of wind-sweeping-across-the-moors mystery.

It was probably New Order, though, that made the biggest impression on disco dance floors. The group formed from what was left of Joy Division after lead singer Ian Curtis committed suicide in 1980. They decided to pursue a synthesizer-based direction, and although they initially were as bleak as their previous incarnation, they soon took on board the influence of Giorgio Moroder, particularly the chill of tracks like “E =MC
2
,” and Kraftwerk’s
Radio-Activity
album. The real turning point in their career, though, was when they heard Afrika Bambaataa & the Soul Sonic Force’s “Planet Rock.” The electro hip-hop remake of Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express” and “Numbers” was largely crafted by producer Arthur Baker. New Order were so enamored with the record that they sent him a tape of their first album. He was particularly impressed with one track, “5 8 6,” a brief downtempo, largely beatless synthscape, and told them that they should expand it into a full-fledged song. The result was “Blue Monday”—a combination of the melody from “5 8 6,” the disembodied chorus sound from Kraftwerk’s “Uranium,” and synth lines from the Moroder and Patrick Cowley songbooks—which became the biggest-selling twelve-inch single in history. The record was so popular in the clubs that Bobby Orlando paid New Order the ultimate tribute: He ripped them off hook, line, and sinker on his production of Divine’s “Love Reaction.”

*   *   *

With disco as a specific musical genre (rather than a state of mind) in sharp decline in the United States by late 1979, the only clubs that kept afloat in New York were ones that encouraged quirkiness and experimentation. A Certain Ratio’s first gig in New York said pretty much everything you needed to know about the bizarre combinations that were being concocted in the Big Apple in the early ’80s. In December 1982, a certain Madonna opened up for A Certain Ratio’s performance at the ultimate breeding ground among the disco, punk, and art scenes, Danceteria. The Danceteria was started by Jim Fouratt and his partner, Rudolf Pieper, in March 1980 at 252 West 37th Street. The club was short-lived but eventually reopened in 1982 at 30 West 21st Street. In its new incarnation, Danceteria was a three-floor space with a performance area and dance floor downstairs, another dance floor on the second floor, and a video lounge and restaurant on the third floor. Fouratt and Pieper had a staggeringly open-minded booking policy—everyone from salsa artists like Tito Puente and Típica ’73 to Sun Ra to Eric Bogosian perfomed there.

DJs like Bill Bahlman, Johnny Dynell, Anita Sarko, and Mark Kamins connected the dots among postpunk, disco, hip-hop, salsa, and New Wave. Fouratt, meanwhile, explored the commonalities between disco’s tawdry fleshpot and the rarefied world of modern composition—i.e., that nothing can violate the supremacy of the rhythm or pulse and a fixation on repetition—with a series of ambitious programs that brought composers like Philip Glass and Glenn Branca into the nightclub environment. “It’s all about mixing up these different kinds of people,” Fouratt told
The New York Times.
“We deliberately try to present serious music in a ‘vulgar’ format, to use the original connotation of the word. At places like The Kitchen [a high-brow experimental art venue], this work is perceived in a serious, reverential way. At Danceteria, if they like something, they cheer; if they don’t, they just move on to another floor.”
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If there was one artist, though, who truly characterized this peripatetic genre bending by spanning both the Kitchen and Studio 54 in a single bound, it was an avant-garde cello player by the name of Arthur Russell. Charles Arthur Russell Jr. was born and raised in landlocked Oskaloosa, Iowa, where, as the son of a former naval officer, he became obsessed with the ocean. In 1968, Russell moved to San Francisco to join a Buddhist commune. He was forbidden to play his cello, so he played in his closet. Russell then studied Indian music with Ali Akbar Khan and played cello on several Allen Ginsberg recordings. In 1973, he moved to New York and played drums with Laurie Anderson and worked with Talking Heads, Peter Gordon, and David Van Tiegham before going on to curate the music program at the Kitchen. Sometime in the mid-1970s, Russell went to the Gallery to see Nicky Siano spin. After his disco baptism, Russell immediately connected the dots between Hamilton Bohannon and the minimalism of Steve Reich, between a marathon DJ set and the sustained, subtly shifting harmonic clusters of Phill Niblock.

Working together as Dinosaur, Russell and Siano released “Kiss Me Again” in 1978. Talking Heads’ David Byrne played one of the most clipped guitar phrases in history, while Russell’s background cello was partially responsible for the record’s perplexing bass sound. “Kiss Me Again” was recognizable as disco, but it was also bafflingly weird: the muffled bass line that never resolved itself, the guitar solo during the break not unlike the skronk being played by Arto Lindsay in the No Wave group DNA, and the electronic sounds that acted as a shield during the chorus, preventing any sense of release from developing, creating the sense of longing and unfulfilled desire that marked many of the best disco records.

As bizarre as it was, “Kiss Me Again” worked within established disco parameters and became a fairly substantial club hit. Russell, however, would largely abandon dance music’s recognizable shapes in favor of a vision of disco as drift, as floating through and across waves and dimensions of sound. “He loved out-there stuff,” says engineer Bob Blank, who was a frequent collaborator with Russell. “He was a real artiste, and we seemed to work well together—he believed in first takes, and I was a fast engineer. We had similar musical sensibilities … Arthur walked in one day to make music, right after ‘Kiss Me Again’ came out, and we hit it off right away. He was always coming in saying that he had gotten three hundred dollars as a grant and could we do an LP—pretty wild. He once traded a 1951 Chevy that was his dad’s old car for some studio time!”
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In 1980, Russell hooked up with another early DJ, Steve D’Aquisto, and went to Blank’s studio to work on an album for West End Records, originally under the name the Little All-Stars, but they soon changed their name to Loose Joints. With an array of studio musicians and three vocalists they recruited from the dance floor of the Loft, the duo recorded countless hours of tape, but only three releases ever resulted. “Is It All Over My Face?” was originally released with a male vocal, but it didn’t do much, so label head Mel Cheren asked Larry Levan to do a remix. Levan got a friend to let him into a studio when the boss wasn’t around to work on the remix, but he was only three hours into it when the boss returned and Levan had to stop working. The unfinished quality of the remix perfectly suited both the track’s mantralike aspects and the spacey instrumentation. “Pop Your Funk” and “Tell You Today” were both even weirder than “Is It All Over My Face?” and didn’t have a Larry Levan mix to bring them back to earth—they were just left to float off on their own.

Russell’s greatest dance floor achievement, however, is probably Dinosaur L’s “Go Bang! #5,” released on the label he founded with Will Socolov, Sleeping Bag. “Go Bang!” originally appeared on the 1981 album
24-24 Music
as “#5 (Go Bang).” The music was recorded in June 1979 with a lineup including Peter Gordon, Peter Zummo, Julius Eastman, the Ingrams, and Wilbur Bascomb, and existed in some bizarre nether region between Herbie Hancock, the Love of Life Orchestra, and D. C. LaRue. For the single release, the track was remixed by François Kevorkian, who, while restraining John Ingram’s hyper and sibilant drumming into a manageable shape for the dance floor, made it even weirder by stretching the space and focusing on Eastman and Jimmy Ingram’s
Phantom of the Opera
keyboards.

Indian Ocean’s “School Bell / Tree House” was Russell with Zummo and Walter Gibbons, and, if anything, is more dislocated and more disjointed than “Go Bang!” The track is largely Russell mumbling ethereally (if that’s possible) over some percussion loops (one conga loop and a nagging hi-hat) and a whisper of his cello in the background. As
The New York Times
’s Robert Palmer wrote about one of his performances, it conjures the image of “Russell alone on a sailboat, singing into the wind.”
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More conventionally club-friendly was Lola’s “Wax the Van,” a record Russell made with Bob Blank, his wife, former James Brown associate Lola, and their six-year-old son, Kenny. The enormous bass sound, water drop percussion, and windswept vocals continued Russell’s fascination with oceanic sounds. Both “Schoolbell/Tree House” and “Wax the Van” can be heard, even more buffeted by wind and salt, on Russell’s startlingly stark solo album of processed cello, vocals, and percussion,
World of Echo.

Russell was a true original, but he was by no means disco’s only explorer of psychedelic caverns of low-end flux. François Kevorkian was a DJ from France (where he played Yes, King Crimson, and Mahavishnu Orchestra to hippies), who moved to New York in 1975 to study with jazz drummer Tony Williams after he was booted out of university in Lyon for starting a general strike. In February 1976, Kevorkian was hired by Galaxy 21 to play drums and percussion alongside DJ Walter Gibbons. Kevorkian had little knowledge of the music being played at New York’s after-hours clubs when he was hired, but being thrown in at the deep end forced him quickly to gain an intimate knowledge of disco structure. When Galaxy 21 closed, Kevorkian worked as a kitchen porter and toilet cleaner at Experiment Four, where John “Jellybean” Benitez spun before he made his name at the Funhouse. Jellybean gave Kevorkian access to his home studio, where he would experiment with tape edits, initially imitating the homemade edits that Gibbons used. After he got a feel for the equipment and the format, Kevorkian started to add effects to his edits—something that no one else in New York was doing at the time—an idea that he got from reggae. “The psychedelic multidimensional planetary Reggae that the people like Black Uhuru was doing with that one album ‘Black Uhuru in Dub’ [a dub of the
Love Crisis
album] really changed my whole way of thinking,” Kevorkian told writer Jonathan Fleming. “After I heard that album, it was like my life had changed. I saw landscapes that I had never knew existed before as far as the way to use effects in the studio or the way to use effects as music.”
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Kevorkian soon landed a gig at Sesame Street, a black gay after-hours club that used the Flamingo’s space while it was closed during the summer, and then at Studio 54 challenger New York New York. While playing at New York New York, Kevorkian was approached by former Scepter/Wand A&R man Marvin Schlachter, who had just started a disco label called Prelude, and asked if he would do remixes for the new label. Kevorkian agreed, and his first mix for the label was Musique’s “In the Bush,” which he did in conjunction with engineer Bob Blank. “François came in and was given three hours by Prelude to remix ‘Bush,’” Blank remembers. “I basically did my thing and he directed. He later was a very hands-on producer, but at the time he had never done a remix and actually did not know what to call the 4/4 beat that the bass drum provided—he kept saying, ‘Give me more
poom poom poom.
’ The sounds, dynamic, etc., was all me, but François created the intro progression from bass drum up.”
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Kevorkian did dozens of mixes for Prelude and was a constant presence in Blank’s Blank Tapes Studios. “I was passionate about the fact that we were working in a new medium,” Blank says of his time working with Kevorkian on remixes. “Previous to that, records were very dense, with three minutes of tightly integrated music. We were changing that by dropping out parts, adding loops of rhythm, making it sound more like we heard it.”
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Despite Kevorkian’s early edits, his love of Jamaican dub, and the example of Walter Gibbons’s mix of Bettye Lavette’s “Doin’ the Best That I Can,” most of his Prelude mixes were extensions and boosts rather than full-on restructuring work. It wasn’t until a British obscurity, the dub mix of “Love Money” by TW Funkmasters, became a huge club hit in New York that he fully realized the power that dub effects had over a dance floor.
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“Love Money” propelled Kevorkian to explore the farthest reaches of outer space on his remixes of Jimmy Cliff’s “Treat the Youths Right” and “D” Train’s “Keep On.” Kevorkian’s ultimate dub excursion, though, was a journey he took with former PiL bassist Jah Wobble, Can’s keyboardist and tape manipulator Holger Czukay, and U2 guitarist The Edge. “Snake Charmer” was egghead disco at its very best, a merger of Kraftwerk-style drum programming (from Kevorkian himself), dub bass lines, and tape collages reminiscent of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,
also an early ’80s club favorite.