Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (13 page)

While he certainly wasn’t the first musician to openly address his homosexuality, Sylvester wasn’t just a sideshow act tolerated because he was amusing, nor did he sing facile, feel-good anthems. Merging the mechanical, piston-pumping beats that started in clubs like the Flamingo with the gospel / R&B tradition that gay white disco often seemed to try to break free from, Sylvester united the two main strains of disco. But in doing so, he went way beyond either. Sylvester propelled his falsetto far above his natural range into the ether and rode machine rhythms that raced toward escape velocity, creating a new sonic lexicon powerful, camp, and otherworldly enough to articulate the exquisite bliss of disco’s dance floor utopia, but also sensitive enough to recognize that the dance floor could just as often be hell.

Sylvester James was born in Los Angeles in 1947 to a middle-class family. Like most singers of his generation, he learned his craft in church, and at age eight he toured the South, performing on the gospel circuit. His grandmother was Julia Morgan, a blues singer in the ’30s, and by his teens, the music of her contemporaries Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday had supplanted gospel as his first love. Morgan also instilled a love of the theater in her grandson. In his late teens, Sylvester left home, changed his name to Ruby Blue, and lived as a woman for a few years on the Sunset Strip.

He moved to San Francisco in 1969 and joined the cross-dressing hippie revue troupe the Cockettes, which debuted on December 31, 1969, at the Palace Theater in North Beach. While many of the members (who were neither all gay nor all male) of the Cockettes had beards and dressed like women—but with motorcycle jackets and boots—or like bizarre combinations of Carmen Miranda and Robinson Crusoe, Sylvester’s performances were more carefully observed impersonations of people like Josephine Baker than the acid-fueled,
épater le bourgeois
shenanigans of the rest of the troupe. Thanks to the group’s notoriety, Sylvester quickly became an underground star. When the Cockettes split up in the summer of 1972, Sylvester starred in a cabaret show called “Women of the Blues” at the Rickshaw Lounge in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where he performed piano blues and jazz standards from Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Josephine Baker, and Ethel Waters.

At the Rickshaw Lounge he was discovered by
Rolling Stone
publisher Jann Wenner, singer Boz Scaggs, and jazz musician Ben Sidran, which led to a recording deal with Blue Thumb records. His two records for Blue Thumb—
Sylvester and the Hot Band
(with the Pointer Sisters singing backup), aka
Scratch My Flower
because it had a scratch-and-sniff sticker on the cover that smelled of gardenias, and
Bazaar
—featured fairly typical rock instrumentation with Sylvester doing his helium gospel bit on top while he covered Neil Young, James Taylor, and Gram Parsons. Sylvester’s cottony falsetto was an uncomfortable match with guitars, however, and both albums had an unpleasantly astringent quality and, unsurprisingly, bombed. More interestingly, at around the same time, Sylvester sang backup for the extraordinarily feisty Betty Davis (Miles Davis’s ex-wife) on two tracks from her self-titled debut album.

Even though he idolized singers like Cissy and Thelma Houston, Sylvester hated disco music until a trip to Europe in 1975 changed his mind. Sylvester stopped performing in a cabaret or rock style and, with singer Martha Wash, he began to sing straightforward gospel-soul. While performing at a nightclub called Palms on Polk Street, Sylvester was “rediscovered” by Harvey Fuqua (a former member of the vocal group the Moonglows and a producer for Marvin Gaye), who had come to see backup singer Wash. Fuqua signed Sylvester to his Honey label, which was distributed by Fantasy, and produced
Sylvester
in 1977. “Down, Down, Down” was pretty formulaic first-wave disco—surging strings, galloping bass line, awkward horns—and the workmanlike arrangement made Sylvester’s voice sound weak, but it did have energy and pace, and the song became a modest club hit in New York. It was a version of Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson’s “Over and Over,” though, and it propelled Sylvester toward disco superstardom. Rather than the dance floor heat with which he would become associated, “Over and Over” was a guitar-and-bass slow burn whose intensity came from impassioned vocals by Sylvester and his great backup singers, Wash and Izora Rhodes. The track’s warmth and its gospel-styled peaks and message (“You can’t be somebody’s lover until you’re somebody’s friend”) made it a staple at the Loft.

1978’s
Step II
brought Sylvester temporarily into the mainstream. The album’s first single, “Dance (Disco Heat),” was a fairly mindless but irresistible disco bounce-along that featured Rhodes and Wash (now known as Two Tons o’ Fun) and reached the American Top 20 at the peak of disco fever. Although the follow-up, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” barely creeped into the Top 40, it is Sylvester’s greatest record. “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” was originally recorded as a midtempo, piano-driven gospel tune. According to legend, Sylvester was scheduled to do a performance at San Francisco’s celebrated City disco (on the corner of Montgomery and Broadway in North Beach) and was rehearsing “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” in the club’s basement when lighting engineer Patrick Cowley, who was getting a little bit of fame on the city’s disco scene for his astonishing sixteen-minute bootleg remix of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” asked if he could do a similar treatment to Sylvester’s song. Sylvester agreed, and the result was an epochal record in disco history. With its synth licks, mechanized, galloping bass line, computerized hand claps, and uptempo drumbeats, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” is the genesis of the disco subgenre known as Hi-NRG and the cornerstone of gay disco.

Where much gay disco, though, had the insistent perkiness of a high school pep rally and often conjured nothing so much as the image of two particularly buff bobble-head dolls doing the bump with one another, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” interrogated the African-American musical tradition and asked what “realness” is supposed to mean to gay black men who, alienated from almost all of society, were forced to hide their true identities for most of their lives. The chicken shack of R&B and gospel’s storefront church got renovated by Cowley’s synthesizers, while at the same time Sylvester ruffled the detached exterior of synth-pop with an intense expression of rapture. The way Sylvester sang “I know you love me like you should,” moving up to a register so high that it can be completed only by a synth whoosh, might be disco’s ultimate diva moment.

After “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” Cowley began to play a bigger role in Sylvester’s music. Cowley was the driving force behind the disco concept album
Stars.
Unlike the sprawling double and triple albums of the progressive rock era,
Stars
had only four tracks—“Stars (Everybody Is One),” “Body Strong,” “I (Who Have Nothing),” and “I Need Somebody to Love Tonight”—but they pretty much summed up the entire disco experience. While Cowley is associated with a relentlessly uptempo sound, he proved his genius on “I Need Somebody to Love Tonight,” a slow and moody sci-fi–reggae track that, along with the Peech Boys’s “Don’t Make Me Wait,” is one of disco’s greatest expressions of longing.

“I Need Somebody to Love Tonight” was an aberration for Cowley, however. As San Francisco mixer/producer Casey Jones told producer/singer David Diebold, “Patrick Cowley came along and basically created a sound in music that became known around the world as a San Francisco identity sound. It was a druggy sound. It was an ‘up’ sound. The whole scene in San Francisco at the time pretty much revolved around ‘up’ drugs. The entire gay disco scene has in fact, since the mid- to late ’70s, been influenced by music which would complement their drug highs. The drug of choice in high energy markets has always been speed of one sort or another. Patrick created a synthesized sound that would enhance a drug induced high and the song which really launched that sound was ‘Menergy.’”
30

“Menergy” was originally released in 1981, and although it was an aural fantasy of a futuristic club populated entirely by cybernetic Tom of Finland studs, the record was remarkable not for its passion or stink, but for its hygiene. The song talked about the “boys in the back room lovin’ it up, shooting off energy,” but the production—synth vapor trails, hand claps like a cracking bullwhip, melodies that recall “They don’t wear pants on the other side of France,” mechanically processed vocals, background clave rhythms sped up so fast that any sense of swing or Latin flair was banished—was so clinical that a back room was the last thing it conjured. While it flew along at 120-something bpm, you couldn’t imagine breaking a sweat to it, it was so clean. It was camper than Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy singing the “Indian Love Call” to each other, but it was also somehow incredibly composed, unwitty, and nonswishy. This bordering-on-sterile style continued on other Cowley productions for his Megatone label: Sylvester’s “Do Ya Wanna Funk,” Paul Parker’s “Right on Target” (with a cover of the Seeds’ “Pushin’ Too Hard” on the B side!), and his own “Megatron Man” and “Sea Hunt.”

That Cowley’s production style was so antiseptic is not surprising given that he moved to San Francisco from Rochester, New York, in 1971 in order to study electronic music at the City College of San Francisco. The lab-coated atmosphere of the academic music world rubbed off on him, and Cowley would continue to treat synthesizer music as a scientific experiment until his career was cut short when he died of AIDS in November 1982. Diebold, however, suggests another reason for the dirtless and often bloodless vibe of Cowley’s recordings. In San Francisco “there has always been the distinction between the dance club and a public sex utility,” he writes. “There are no correlations between The Sanctuary in New York with its black mass murals and orgiastic congregation and the pristine, clean (and even conservative) Dreamland. The balconies at The Saint in New York (which entertain every sort of sexual union) are nothing at all like the balconies at Trocadero [Transfer] (which are generally used for sitting and viewing the dance floor).”
31
The San Francisco disco scene was very button-down even if nearly everyone on the dance floor had his shirt off. And although the city’s biggest star was African American, San Francisco’s discotheques were overwhelmingly white.

The Bay Area’s ultimate disco was the Trocadero Transfer at 520 Fourth Street. The club was huge—like Studio 54 it was housed in an old television studio—with a four-thousand-square-foot dance floor, above which dangled a cluster of a dozen or so mirror balls. The club’s original DJ was Gary Tighe, but the DJ who took it to prominence was Long Island native Bobby Viteritti, who spun there from 1977 to 1981. Like fellow Long Island DJs Wayne Scott, Howard Merritt, and Roy Thode, Viteritti played in the high-energy, thoroughly professional style developed at the Flamingo. Like many of the great New York DJs, Viteritti made his own reel-to-reel edits of popular tracks, but he emphasized the midrange rather than the bass, making for a cleaner, more consistently upful sound. This was enhanced at the Trocadero by another Graebar sound system whose four coffin speakers, despite their name, propelled the music away from the dark depths. Viteritti was also famous for playing an hour or so of downtempo records—torch songs, jazzy R&B ballads like Marlena Shaw’s cover of Diana Ross’s “Touch Me in the Morning,” and almost always Cerrone’s “Call Me Tonight”—to bring the crowd down after several hours of dancing at a cardiac-inducing pace. During this part of the set, the lights were turned down, submerging the club in blackness, creating a seamy, sexually charged atmosphere. The “sleaze music” set would soon become a hallmark of many gay after-hours clubs.

Despite the early morning popularity of sleaze music, high-energy dance music was the bread and butter of Frisco disco. Aside from Megatone, which was run by Patrick Cowley and Marty Blecman, San Francisco’s main gay disco label was Moby Dick. Founded by DJ Bill Motley and Victor Swedosh, the owner of the Moby Dick bar in the Castro, Moby Dick records were in a more “classic” disco style—horn charts, swelling strings, surging (real, not synthesized) bass lines—only with the jackhammer tempo de rigueur at the city’s clubs. The label is best known for Motley’s Boys Town Gang records, perhaps the campest (or kitschest, depending on your worldview) records ever perpetrated on humanity. The group’s first release, “Cruisin’ the Streets,” was one of the first records not by Rudy Ray Moore to feature a warning label (“May contain material not suitable for children or the prudish”). It was easy to see why: “You can find anything you’re looking for / You might find a big ol’ boy, nine inches or more / It’s all true I promise you, it might make you sore.” The music and the vocal performance by local cabaret singer Cynthia Manley were as cartoonish and ridiculous as the Village People, but the heavy-breathing interlude and the lyrics meant that it would never cross over to middle America.

The flip side of “Cruisin’ the Streets” was a medley of “Remember Me” and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” two Motown standards written by Ashford and Simpson. Previously, Motley, along with DJ Trip Ringwald, had included Martha & the Vandellas’ “Come and Get These Memories” as part of their vapid sing-along “Bitchin’ 50s Medley” on Disconet, even though the track was recorded in 1963. On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be much connection between the glories of Motown and Boys Town Gang’s trashy disco potboilers. But Motown not only provided the archetype for gay disco’s teenage-crush heartbeat momentum, it also laid the foundation for its hot flashes and heroic heartbreak. The connection was made explicit when Hi-NRG came to be defined as its own genre.

“PRIMITIVE DESIRE”

Hi-NRG

Conjuring both the racing heart and the swelling rush of blood, the rhythm of the gallop had been used to connote sexuality since at least 1866, when Jacques Offenbach used the beat to connote gay Paris in his operetta
Gaîté Parisienne
(aka the can-can).
32
However, when jazz and blues started to reshape popular music, the gallop was largely replaced by the concept of swing. It wasn’t until Motown merged R&B arrangements with gospel’s Holy Roller stomp on records like the Supremes’ “Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart” that the giddyap came back to pop music.