Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (19 page)

Summer quickly grew tired of playing the sex machine, however, as her born-again Christian values increasingly conflicted with her status as disco’s queen. She retreated into standard pop fare like “Love’s Unkind,” “I Love You” (though both of these had a certain German overlord quality about their rhythms), “Last Dance,” and, gasp, “MacArthur Park.” As Moroder told journalist Vince Aletti, “She wouldn’t sing about this, she wouldn’t sing about that. Having her biggest hit with a sexy song, she was suddenly saying that she wouldn’t sing that type of song any more, and then she insisted on having a song about Jesus on her album.”
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As an Italian from Val Gardena in the Dolomites, whose culture has more in common with Germany than the red-sauce-and-pasta stereotype of Italy, and as a musician whose first big hit was a German-language bubblegum-style cover of Sir Douglas Quintet’s roots-rock standard “Mendocino,” Giorgio Moroder had his own history of ambivalence and culture clash. Being stranded between cultures meant that Moroder was not only an excellent mimic, but that electronic music’s quality of erasing “roots” and classification held a particular allure for him, and when Summer decided to play it safe, Moroder kept the electronics for himself.

Of course, Moroder had a history with the synthesizer well before he met Summer. His 1972 album,
Giorgio,
featured a song called “Son of My Father” that would be covered a few months later by slumming English glam rockers Chicory Tip and become the first pop #1 to feature a Moog. Intriguingly, the album also had a song called “Automation,” but he reserved the true robot schtick for his 1975 album,
Einzelganger,
which was composed almost entirely of hopelessly corny vocodered vocals. During this time he also worked with Agnetha Fältskog and Bonnie Tyler, and musing on what might have happened had he not met Donna Summer is just too awful to bear. You might get an idea from his extraordinary 1976 solo album,
Knights in White Satin.
His version of the Moody Blues song (part of a fourteen-minute suite that takes up side one) does feature some of the most preposterous, unbearably kitschy, just god-awful vocals this side of Richard Harris, but the music was definitive Munich sound—clockwork cowbell kick drum from Keith Forsey, bouncy bass doubled by the Moog, blocky piano chords, and utterly transporting strings—and became a hit on the campest dance floors. The album also included the single entendre of “I Wanna Funk With You Tonite”—easy listening as Hi-NRG, and possibly the most Motown of all of his bass lines.

More letter-perfect Munich sound came in the form of two albums released, with tongue firmly in cheek, under the name Munich Machine. The real machine music, though, came with his 1977 album,
From Here to Eternity,
whose back cover boasted, “Only electronic keyboards were used on this recording.” On the title track he combined the bass pulse of “I Feel Love” with Kraftwerk’s synth vapor trails, while on the suite of “Faster Than the Speed of Love” / “Lost Angeles” / “Utopia—Me Giorgio” he again reinvented synthesized rhythm by volleying the solid drum machine pattern with what sounded like pins and needles ricocheting around a cake tin, presaging both the android descarga (a salsa jam session) called Latin freestyle and techno’s drum machine calculus. Unlike “I Feel Love,” though, there was no tension at all, not even a hint of ambivalence.
From Here to Eternity
was a headlong rush into computer hyperspace,
Tron
without the dystopian urge, shiny, happy music for the shiny, happy people of the health-and-efficiency-crazed 1980s. Of course, there was something a bit
Stepford Wives
about it all, but like a cat or a baby you couldn’t help but be transfixed by the sheer radiance of the synth effects.

As journalist Angus MacKinnon ponted out in a 1978 profile, “This affable and amiable man is not, I surmise, a conceptual metaphysician. He is a producer and, above all, a businessman.”
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Perhaps this is why he was so eminently qualified to define the sound and gloss of ’80s pop with
From Here to Eternity
and 1979’s
E=MC
2
.
Moroder’s last great record was “Chase” from his soundtrack to Alan Parker’s film
Midnight Express.
“Chase” used the same materials and virtually the same sounds as “I Feel Love” to conjure the adrenaline rush of terror and loss of control as the film’s protagonist was arrested by Turkish police for drug smuggling. Strangely, it was a big disco hit, and Moroder created the template for that peculiar strain of dance music based on the dark side of nightlife, on fear, on bad drugs, on worse sex. Away from the dance floor, Moroder’s music becomes like Tangerine Dream’s score for
Risky Business
—there’s a hint of alienation, but it’s the alienation of privilege and not giving a fuck. It’s the alienation of the salesman. Of course, there’s something vital about electrobubblegum music giving the finger to the pretense and portent of rock, something liberating about its utter detachment from meaning and the discrimination of “value.” But without the community of the dance floor, it all rings rather hollow. The machine needs social interaction just as much as humans do.

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“ZIPPIN’ UP MY BOOTS, GOING BACK TO MY ROOTS”

Disco and the Soul Continuum

If history tells us anything about the black experience it is that the different expressions of black protest tend often to be a by-product of economic class position.

—William Julius Wilson

One night in mid-1974 at the Gallery, Nicky Siano mixed LaBelle’s feverish, desperate, ultrapercussive, shockingly direct plea for justice and unity, “What Can I Do for You?,” into MFSB’s lush, but no less rousing or straight-ahead, jazzy flower-child mantra, “Love Is the Message,” and the crowd went berserk. Perhaps no other single moment in the history of disco sums up the tumultuous changes that the new aesthetics of the dance floor and the post–civil rights generation would have on the soul continuum. Here was a gay Italian man mixing together two African-American records that each in its own way severed black music’s historical connection to the gospel tradition for a crowd that couldn’t have had less use for the church’s message of doin’ right by Jesus if they were there to hear one of the satanic black masses of DJ Anton LaVey.

“The triumphs of the black civil rights movement in the first half of the decade—especially the March on Washington in 1963 and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964—provided the blueprints for a much broader national liberation, first for women, then for gays and eventually for practically every other oppressed group in America,” Charles Kaiser wrote.
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With the civil rights and Black Power movements providing not only the inspiration and impetus for the gay liberation movement but also its basic structure, sloganeering,
2
and models for collective struggle, it should come as no surprise that the black music of the period would become the soundtrack to gay liberation. And, with the often less than savory views on homosexuality in the Black Power movement in particular, there should be no further surprise that subtle changes would be made to the formula.

Although it didn’t feature either a shudderingly deep bass sound or diva vocals, “Love Is the Message” was in many ways the perfect Siano record thanks to its play of light and dark, the constant shift between groove and goofiness, and the tension between fluidity and unrepentant cheesiness. MFSB was the house band of Philadelphia International Records, the single most important influence on the sound of disco, and “Love Is the Message” first appeared on their 1974 album,
TSOP.
The track is almost completely devoid of blue notes—the slurry sax is so schlocky that it’s somewhere between a Vegas lounge act and the yuppie cabaret of Sade, Spandau Ballet, and George Michael’s “Careless Whisper”; the vocalists are so anodyne they could be from Munich; the churchy organ (which sounds awfully close to the roller-rink eighty-eights of Dave “Baby” Cortez) gets only a couple of look-ins and is completely swamped by the sweetening—and so syrupy that if you discovered that Lawrence Welk orchestrated it you wouldn’t be all that surprised. Yet it’s a record that is as epochal as “Mystery Train” or “Johnny B. Goode” or
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,
a record that delineates a cultural and musical shift as surely as any acknowledged rock masterpiece. Almost the entirety of the next thirty years of dance music comes from this single record: the cheery bonhomie, the cloying fantasy of the good life, the doe-eyed spirituality, the cushiony, enveloping bass sound, the string stabs, the adoration of jazzy chords and jazz as a sound rather than process, the keyboards like pools of liquid mercury, the mantra as lyric. While the musicians were aiming for St. Peter’s harps, for music that soared like angels, it was certainly an earthly paradise that they were envisioning. This was no primeval Garden of Eden or the pristine “milky white way” of heaven; it was more like a luxury high-rise penthouse—a rather different kind of triumphant march to the skies, a different kind of crossing over.

LaBelle’s “What Can I Do for You?,” meanwhile, is gospel as theater—the production values and brassy, over-the-top singing scream supper-club revue. While gospel has always had its fair share of showmanship, LaBelle’s campy, overwrought virtuosity (particularly when combined with the Starchild outfits) is far closer to Vegas than it is to vespers. While the song retained traditional soul’s view of love as salvation, “What Can I Do for You?” seemed primarily concerned not with dignity and basic humanity but with quality of life. Gospel’s ideal of noble struggle was replaced by an assertiveness, a stridency, a squawky friction (by the end all you hear is “What can you do for me?”) that was alien to the solemnity and the turning of the other cheek of the gospel-inspired civil rights movement. Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash sang “What Can I Do for You?” far more like Mick Jagger demanding satisfaction than Mahalia Jackson stoically moving on up a little higher.

“What Can I Do for You?” was on the album
Nightbirds,
which also featured their breakthrough record, “Lady Marmalade.” The forcefulness and sexual forthrightness of the album stood in sharp relief to the prissiness and cutesiness of so many girl groups. Of course, LaBelle started life as the Blue-Belles, one of those typical girl groups wearing ludicrously frilly dresses and singing songs like “Down the Aisle (Wedding Song)” and, um, “Danny Boy,” but when they came under the stewardship of Vicki Wickham, a British woman who had previously produced the classic television show
Ready Steady Go
and managed Dusty Springfield, they metamorphosed into a feminist rewrite of the girl group blueprint. “It was my concept,” Wickham says. “I did know that the sixties girl groups were over—this was 69 going into 70—and they were having a hard time. The Ronettes, the Supremes, the Shirelles, and on and on, nobody was really doing anything—it was a whole new day. I also, though I absolutely loved that type of music, didn’t know that world particularly well. What I did know was a rock world, and so to combine the two seemed very natural to me. They had the greatest voices, they could perform on stage. If we took some of the more familiar rock type of attitudes, that would be a good combination.”
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Instead of the usual girl group fodder like “Down the Aisle (Wedding Song),” Wickham had the group singing rock songs like the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,” the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and Cat Stevens’s “Moonshadow.” And with this rock approach came the rock uniform. “The thing that I really did wrong was at the beginning to put them into jeans and T-shirts because I thought we can’t do the same old dresses and wigs and all of this,” Wickham admits. “It really was dismal. I mean they looked pretty bad and it was horrible of me. Thank god for someone called Larry LeGaspi, who came to a show and said, ‘You are doing it all wrong. I make costumes.’ I said, ‘We’ve got no money.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry. I’d be delighted. I have friends, I can do it. If you let me dress them, you don’t have to pay at the beginning.’ And he came up with this whole concept—the silver, the feathers, everything—and it was wonderful. And that was what was missing … He was right, that these three women were larger than life. When you put the three of them together, the moment they opened their mouths everyone would just go, ‘Oh, my God.’ It was just enormous, their presence on stage … He saw this much more than I did: If we put them in wonderful clothes, they can carry it and that’s what’s needed. And indeed it was. I was trying to attract attention to them with the lyrics and the concept. Of course, what I was missing was the visuals.”
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With the visuals in place, LaBelle started to attract a following among New York’s disco denizens. “Even when they were playing the Village Gate or the Bitter End, folky sort of places, the gay audience started to come,” Wickham remembers. “And, of course, with the costumes, that endorsed them as a potentially interesting diva group.” LaBelle’s gay following eventually led them to play regularly at the Continental Baths. “The Baths came about because there was a woman who used to come around to the recording sessions who was dating the drummer and she would sit in the corner,” Wickham explains. “One day she said, ‘I’m going out to L.A. to do the Johnny Carson show.’ We really didn’t know who she was and we said, ‘Oh, my God, why are you on the Johnny Carson show?’ ‘Well, I perform and I sing.’ And it was Bette Midler. Bette went into the Baths before us, and one day she said to me, ‘The girls really should play the Baths, they’d love it.’”
5

While the space age glitz of LaBelle’s image went down a storm with the gay community, it didn’t always jibe with the sentiment of their lyrics. “People want truth or nothing at all,” they sang on “What Can I Do for You?” “People want sincerity and nothing more.” Here in a nutshell was the conflict of African-American popular music in the 1970s: selling out versus tuning out, fantasy versus “reality,” movin’ on up versus movin’ on out. With the basic battle for civil rights and integration seemingly won, African-American music moved away from the influence of the church to an emphasis on the here and now. It was time for America to deliver on its promises; it was time for something solid and tangible and real. However, when the assurances came due, they were revealed as nothing more than lip service. With this shift from hope to disillusionment, black music began to eschew the integrationist aesthetic and practice of Southern soul and started to question the illusions of American society, to search beneath the veneer of the American dream and its myths and promises, to catalog the betrayals. Representing both the last gasp of the integrationist drive and the first breath of cultural nationalism, postsoul disco favorites like LaBelle were caught in this crossfire.