Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (15 page)

Part of the reason the club had to close was what was originally called “Saint’s disease,” named “in honor of the downtown discotheque favored by the most beautiful and sought-after men of all—because so many of the best-looking were among the first to die.”
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Despite the ritual of going to the Baths afterward on Sunday morning/afternoon and the notorious balcony that brought the Anvil’s basement up to the penthouse, the Saint was more than just an enclosed Central Park Ramble with music. “We didn’t know we were dancing to the edge of our graves,” Rodger McFarlane, the executive director of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, told
The New York Times
about his days as a Saint devotee. “It was the headiest experience I’ve ever had in my entire life. And it is unrivaled still. It was liberating, spiritually uplifting.”
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“LIKE CLONES AND ROBOTS THAT WE ARE”

Automating the Beat

The adaptation to machine music necessarily implies a renunciation of one’s own human feelings.

—Theodor Adorno, 1941

We have grown used to connecting machines and funkiness.

—Andrew Goodwin, 1988

On their 1979 album
Uncle Jam Wants You,
George Clinton’s groove collective Funkadelic conceived of themselves as a funk militia, a phalanx protecting Afro-America from an outside invasion. This invading force was disco, and Uncle Jam and company were “the army with the mission to rescue dance music from the blahs.” Disco, they argued, was boring, it didn’t go anywhere, it just stayed on the same 4/4 beat forever. A funk fan, however, was “a dancing interpretation of the meaning of syncopation / She’s a big freak, got to be freak of the week / Don’t give her that one move groovalistic / That disco sadistic / That one beat up and down it just won’t do / Don’t give her that forever and ever foreplay / She’s not looking for the short way / She’s got to reach the point where she gets off.” Disco, in other words, was a cocktease that offered no climax. For Clinton, disco was the “Placebo Syndrome,” a pale imitation of funk whose machine rhythms were a fake substitute for the pleasure principle. Its sexless grooves were denuding black music of its funk and, by extension, black people of their humanity. As we have seen, though, disco’s endless throb turned plenty of people on and got most of them off. Disco may have been attempting to articulate a new kind of sexuality, but its insistence on machinic rhythms was hardly unprecedented. In fact, the standardized meter and mechanical beats of disco can be traced back to the very birth of African-American popular music, and even the growth of Clinton’s beloved funk music can’t escape this history.

The rhythms of modern popular music were born in the late nineteenth century in New Orleans’s Congo Square, where brass bands composed of freed slaves and immigrants from Haiti and Cuba would congregate on Sundays. Not as well trained as the mixed-race Creole bands that enjoyed white patronage, the black bands developed a style of playing that was hotter (more rhythmically charged) than the European brass-band style played by the Creoles. These gatherings were the first battles of the bands, and the group that played the hottest would take the second line with it as it marched in victory. The second line were the people who marched behind the band and clapped, stomped, and shouted along with the music. The second line soon became an established rhythmic pattern. A combination of John Philip Sousa with Latin American clave patterns, this syncopation became one of the primary sources not only of jazz, but just about every form of African-American music.

With its emphasis on regimentation and rigidity in order to foster the discipline necessary to create the perfect killing machine, marching band music is at the root of dance music’s proximity to mechanization. Even in the hands of the funkiest cats the Big Easy had to offer, the second line pattern couldn’t escape its roots in regimentation. With his conversion of the marching band style to the drum kit, New Orleans beatsmith Earl Palmer is the father of funk, yet rigidity and bounce were never very far away from one another when he played. Although it wasn’t issued until 1991, his drumming on Dave Bartholomew’s “Messy Bessy,” which was recorded in 1949, sounds like the font of modern rhythm. Palmer’s controlled torrent of triplets and snare rolls anticipated not only rock and roll and the funk of James Brown and the Meters, but surf music and the Burundi beat fad as well—and all this from a sound that probably wasn’t all that different from a fife and drum band leading the Minutemen against the Redcoats at the Battle of Concord in 1775. Even more martial was Palmer’s angular version of the Mardi Gras beat on Eddy Lang’s 1956 single “I’m Begging With Tears,” but the ground zero of the militarism metaphor was Jesse Jaymes’s “Red Hot Rockin’ Blues” from 1958. Palmer’s percussive volleys were so punishing on this and Eddie Cochran’s “Somethin’ Else” from the following year that Palmer was recruited by Phil Spector to join his wrecking crew and help create the wall of sound. The drill-sergeant precision of Palmer’s drumming was primarily responsible for the creation of rock and roll’s monolithic backbeat—check his jackhammer pounding behind Fats Domino and Little Richard.

Palmer’s backbeat may be the archetype of rock and roll, but the ultimate rock rhythm wore a tartan tux and was played on a homemade square guitar and maracas. A mathematical formula for the Bo Diddley beat might read something like: (John Lee Hooker + 1/2 Gene Krupa) × (hambone + clave). Within this equation is basically the entirety of American popular music, and the Bo Diddley beat has been at the heart of everything from the British Invasion to disco (check Shirley and Company’s “Shame, Shame, Shame” or Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley’s dance floor crossover “New York Groove”). While Louisiana has its own version of this souped-up “shave and a haircut, two bits” rhythm, the Slim Harpo beat, the roots of the Bo Diddley beat proper are also in New Orleans. Long before Miami and New York had Hispanic populations to speak of, Latin rhythms took hold in New Orleans’s cosmopolitan melting pot. With the city’s significant numbers of Caribbean immigrants, the practices of voodoo and Santeria were widespread throughout New Orleans and so were the cross rhythms that were used to summon the loas and orishas. Eventually, the clave, the basic 3/2 pattern that was the backbone of this music, spread outside the shrines and was integrated into the brass bands.

Part of the reason the marching band sound was so popular in New Orleans was that a large number of decommissioned soldiers ended up there after the Civil and Spanish-American wars, making brass instruments readily available. Elsewhere, though, people couldn’t afford tubas or drums, so they created bass lines by blowing into empty moonshine jugs and made beats by thrashing cheap guitars. The rhythm of life in most of America was created by the railroad, and prewar blues and country records were often little more than imitations of the locomotive using jugs and guitars: the Memphis Jug Band’s “K.C. Moan” from 1929, Lead Belly’s “Rock Island Line” and “Midnight Special” from 1940, Darby & Tarlton’s “Freight Train Ramble” from 1929, and Bill Monroe’s “Orange Blossom Special” from 1941. As the funkafied marching-band sound advanced up the Mississippi from New Orleans, it was smelted with these piston-pumping train rhythms, and the Bo Diddley beat was born. With its chugging momentum, Diddley’s first single, “Bo Diddley” in 1955, established his trademark rhythm. Everything, including the guitar that imitated both wheels on a track and a steam engine going through a tunnel, was at the service of the beat. “Bo Diddley” may have sounded a bit like
The Little Engine That Could,
but by 1956’s “Who Do You Love?” and 1957’s “Hey Bo Diddley,” the Bo Diddley beat had all the forward motion of a newfangled diesel locomotive.

Like Bo Diddley, the German group Kraftwerk created the end of the century’s most enduring rhythms by mimicking a train. Where Diddley’s guitar was a steam engine moving off in the distance, the synth lick on Kraftwerk’s 1977 “Trans-Europe Express” was the Doppler effect trail left by a Japanese bullet train. Strangely, though, the beat huffed and puffed just like the maracas of Diddley’s sidekick, Jerome Green. The reasons for this were twofold. First, by boarding the “Trans-Europe Express,” Kraftwerk wasn’t trying to escape this mortal coil like the prisoner in Lead Belly’s “Midnight Special”; it was celebrating industry’s ability to bring people together, its power to efface boundaries. Second, it was a demonstration of just how much the German power plant intuited the very essence of the machine. As Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hutter told journalist David Toop, “Sit on the rails and ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. Just keep going. Fade in and fade out rather than trying to be dramatic or trying to implant into the music a logical order which I think is ridiculous. In our society everything is in motion. Music is a flowing artform.”
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Kraftwerk wasn’t approximating only the machine pulse, but its very logic (if such a thing is possible)—the ultimate trance of perfect repetition. This is perhaps most apparent in the full twenty-plus-minute version of 1975’s “Autobahn.” That characteristic swingless rhythm of much Krautrock, especially the drumming of Neu!’s Klaus Dinger (a former member of Kraftwerk), was called “motorik,” and this was writ large on “Autobahn,” where the pulse just flowed and surged constantly on cruise control. Both “Autobahn” and “Trans-Europe Express” were underground disco hits and were, perhaps more surprisingly, very popular in the black ghettos of New York, Detroit, and Miami. Detroit Techno artist Carl Craig said that Kraftwerk “were so stiff, they were funky,”
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while the Great Peso from early hip-hop crew the Fearless Four called Kraftwerk “our soul group.”
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That Kraftwerk was so important to many African-American musicians speaks not only of the profound dislocation that postindustrialization and the fetishization of communication technologies wrought on the black community but also of the fact that, despite all appearances to the contrary, Kraftwerk touched on something deep in the roots of all music. The trance ritual is as ancient as humans themselves, and the eternal rhythm loop that could transport you across its waves of sound was the goal of the very first person to beat two rocks together. For Kraftwerk, these rocks were now machines. As Hutter told Toop, “We came from little train sets and
Elektrobaukasten
—the post-war generation with these little electric toy boxes. You immediately become child-like in your approach.”
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As with most of disco’s practitioners and celebrants, Kraftwerk was discovering the wonder, the elemental in the all-night flow motion of the machine. The ultimate aim of disco’s own trance ritual wasn’t the zombielike catalepsy that the naysayers claimed, but the most exquisite ecstasy. Despite its own machine roots, rock was man’s attempt to master his sonic surroundings—“to implant into music a logical order”—disco was a ravishing surrender to the clockwork throb.

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Another reason disco attracted so much scorn was that it was the combination of the seemingly utterly inhuman sound of Kraftwerk and the genre that is alleged to be the most organic—funk. According to its definition, funk is supposed to be greasy, dirty, stinky, redolent of sex—the epitome of earthiness. However, although funk is perceived of as being loose and free-flowing, the truth is that it’s as rigid as any time-regulated servomotor. Yet again, with his metronomic precision, Earl Palmer laid down the ground rules for funk. The finest exponent of the New Orleans swing that would eventually mutate into funk, though, was Charles “Hungry” Williams. As the drummer behind Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns on records like “High Blood Pressure,” “Little Liza Jane,” “Everybody’s Whalin,’” and “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu,” Hungry took the marching-band gumbo flavor into more polyrhythmic directions. Hungry swung like crazy, but however far out he went, he never forgot “the one.” “Everything on the one” is funk’s only commandment, and people who break it have their own circle in hell—a dentist’s waiting room where they’ll sit for all eternity listening to Perry Como.

Hungry taught Clayton Fillyau, drummer on James Brown’s
Live at the Apollo,
the New Orleans mandate, and in his hands the James Brown beat was born. On Brown’s 1962 single “I’ve Got Money”—perhaps the most intense and electric record of his entire career—Fillyau’s lightning-speed syncopated chatter notes behind the main beat are the foundation of funk drumming. Fillyau, and every drummer who followed him, hit “the one” with digital accuracy—if he didn’t, he’d get fined. From the impeccably shined shoes to the precision-tooled beats, every one of Brown’s bands was a well-oiled machine. With Brown policing funk’s cardinal rule like Draco and the hard-and-fast strictures governing the rhythm, you didn’t really need postpunk groups like Gang of Four to make obvious the connection between funk and control.

Funk really started to take shape on 1964’s “Out of Sight” with drummer Melvin Parker’s rim clicks and the rest of the band basically sitting on the vamp. However, it was Brown’s next single, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” that truly changed the face of music. For all of the naturalism that racists and Cartesians like to ascribe to Brown, the bone-rattling effect of “Papa” was largely due to the fact that the master tape was sped up, thus giving the record a claustrophobic feel that made the blaring horns, piercing guitar, and ricocheting rhythm section that much more intense. At the same time as “Papa” is all about glare and flamboyance (the horns, Brown reducing the gospel vocal tradition to nothing but the falsetto shrieks and guttural roars, the “chank” of the guitar, which is probably the genesis of reggae), it also posits the once anonymous bottom end (the bass and drums) as the be-all and end-all of music. The first rule of this new Brownian motion was that nothing—not even melody, harmony, structure, or texture—can usurp the primacy of the pulse. Brown’s new music was, in effect, Kraftwerk before the fact, just without the conceptual baggage. Disco’s never-ending beat would be unthinkable without “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.”