Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (24 page)

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This is why when disco really started to hit the big time in 1975, Philadelphia International couldn’t keep up with the genre that it had played such a large role in creating. It was still a huge presence on the R&B chart, but the label had fewer and fewer crossover hits and almost disappeared from the discotheques after the O’Jays’ “I Love Music” toward the end of 1975. Gamble had become more concerned with writing message songs, and many of the bandwagon jumpers weren’t interested in early disco’s connections to positivity and didn’t like being preached to. Gamble had also become preoccupied with maintaining his company’s market share, and in 1976 he was fined $25,000 for his role in the payola scandal that had emerged the previous year. Most important, though, many of the key players in MFSB, who were toiling away largely anonymously for standard union day rates, gradually shifted their allegiance to an independent label based in New York.

The Salsoul label was part of the Caytronics group, which was run by three Sephardic Jewish Syrian-American brothers, Joe, Ken, and Stan Cayre. Originally a manufacturer of ladies’ lingerie, Caytronics started to import Mexican records in 1966 but soon started importing records from across Latin America. With the demand for imported Latin records, New York’s homegrown salsa boom propelled by the Fania label and the fact that by 1970 there were 1.4 million Puerto Ricans in the United States, 811,843 of them in New York City, Caytronics started its own label, Mericana, in 1972. One of the label’s first releases was an album by Joe Bataan, an Afro-Filipino pianist and vocalist who made his name during the bugalú boom of the late ’60s, called
Salsoul
in 1973. The streamlined combination of salsa and soul on album cuts like “Latin Strut” and “Aftershower Funk” made it a favorite with the influential WBLS disc jockey Frankie Crocker, who played almost the entire album on his nightly show, helping to sell twenty thousand copies of the record in New York alone. “Latin Strut” and “Aftershower Funk” became such favorites on New York dance floors that Mericana was soon renamed in honor of its biggest record.

The following year, Salsoul released Bataan’s follow-up album,
Afro-Filipino,
which included “La Botella,” a version of Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Bottle.” Further refining the combination of Latin music and soul, “La Botella” had percolating
montuño
-derived rhythms and piano passages underneath a distinctly midtown sax solo courtesy of David Sanborn and became an enormous dance floor hit and another important signpost for the direction disco was about to take. The record perfectly united both sides of the disco drive: the percussive spirituality and tribalism of its early days and the upward mobility demanded by its entrance into the mainstream. Like the syncretic blends of salsa (literally meaning “sauce,” salsa mixed together the Cuban
son montuño
with Puerto Rican bombas and plenas, and jazz and rock instrumentation) and bugalú (the combination of Cuban mambo and soul) in which Bataan had previously worked, disco was essentially cross-cultural and learned its cues from these two patchwork genres.

The final piece of disco’s “gorgeous mosaic” was put in place in 1975 with the first record by Salsoul Orchestra, “Salsoul Hustle.” According to the label’s own PR department, “The concept of blending the
Latino
sound with R&B rhythms and underscoring it all with rich Philadelphia strings was based on an idea of Joe Cayre’s brother, Ken Cayre, vice president of Salsoul Records.”
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Amazingly, this seemed to jibe perfectly with a concept that Vince Montana had been harboring for a while. “I had this idea, I’d had it for years, which was the Latin feeling, the heavy soul rhythm, the lush strings, stomping brass. But I never had the money to get in and do it.”
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The two met, and Montana agreed to produce a record that fused the lush Philly soul he had been making for the past several years with the Latin funk bottom that Salsoul had made its name with. Working with MFSB’s conga player Larry Washington, the great
neoyorquiño
percussionist Manny Oquendo and trumpet player Jerry Gonzalez, both from Conjunto Libre, and a bunch of New York studio musicians, Montana achieved disco perfection with his opulent, string-heavy production that floated along the waves of congas and timbals that crested with insistent wah-wah guitar.

The Latin element was distinctly played down on Salsoul Orchestra’s next single, but it was sacrificed for the rhythm engine that drove that best of the Philly productions—Young, Baker, Harris—as well as a large portion of the rest of MFSB, including Bobby Eli, keyboardist Ron Kersey, string section leader Don Renaldo, and vocalists Barbara Ingram, Evette Benton, and Carla Benson. “Tangerine” was a disco reworking of the old Johnny Mercer number that was a hit for Jimmy Dorsey and featured Young reprising the beat made famous on “The Love I Lost” along with guitar comping from Harris that was somehow reminiscent of a roller-rink organ. With the mass defection of MFSB, this upstart New York label was suddenly in possession of the most sought-after studio musicians in the world and very quickly became the most important disco label on the New York scene with Double Exposure’s “Ten Percent” (the first commercially available twelve-inch single),
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Silvetti’s “Spring Rain,” Ripple’s “The Beat Goes On and On,” Anthony White’s “Block Party,” First Choice’s “Let No Man Put Asunder,” and “Dr. Love,” Gary Criss’s “Rio De Janeiro,” Judy Cheeks’s “Mellow Lovin’,” and Salsoul Orchestra’s “You’re Just the Right Size,” “Nice ’n’ Naasty,” and “Magic Bird of Fire” in its first couple of years.

Montana’s arrangements for Salsoul Orchestra were, well, more orchestral than most of the MFSB records. Perhaps because he had anticipated the arrangements that would characterize disco—particularly the string stabs and the way the strings, wah-wah guitar, and vibes all interacted—in 1969 when he arranged a bubblegum funk record called
Keem-O-Sabe
made by a group of Philadelphia studio stalwarts (including Eli, Len Barry, Jon Madara, and a certain Daryl Hall) under the name the Electric Indian, strings were given a more prominent role in Salsoul Orchestra. It was hardly as if the records were drowning in saccharine orchestration (certainly less than almost all of the Thom Bell productions), but the records attracted scorn from people accusing them of denuding black music of its thrust and vigor. “The same players who performed with such fire on ‘Bad Luck’ and the anthemic ‘I Love Music’ made, recording as the Ritchie Family and Salsoul Orchestra, a series of incredibly insipid records, eventually helping drown the Philly sound in clichés,” wrote R&B historian Nelson George. “The sales of … the fake Philly sound of Salsoul Records—with a stamp of approval by prominent deejays [who, notes George, are mostly gay, and he castigates them for championing female vocalists over male singers]—made the majors believe that these musical technologies would accelerate the black crossover process. So the new dance music inspired by the inventions of Gamble and Huff, came to celebrate a hedonism and androgyny that contradicted their patriarchal philosophy.”
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Yes, Salsoul Orchestra used female voices to utter single entendres that wouldn’t be out of place in a
Carry On
movie, but to say that a few tongue-in-cheek references to sexuality defiled Gamble and Huff’s vision of racial uplift, particularly since the MFSB recordings were primarily instrumental, is preposterous. Furthermore, the soft soul sound of Gamble and Huff associate Thom Bell was certainly as androgynous and antipatriarchal (or at least apatriarchal) as anything released on Salsoul, or any other pure disco label, for that matter. What George really seems to miss, though, is that Salsoul Orchestra records are quite simply hotter than the MFSB records. Perhaps George thinks that the fiercer rhythm section of Salsoul Orchestra is somehow more hedonistic than the penthouse jazz of MFSB. Sure, Salsoul Orchestra recorded medleys of Christmas songs and backed Charo, but regardless of the chintz it had to work with, Montana shined the spotlight on Young and Baker. “Basically, I’m a percussionist, and I like to hear my drums,” Montana said. “They’re what people dance to … I know what my vibes sound like one foot from my ear, and that’s what I expect it to sound like coming out of the speaker. And I think that’s what the people want too, the real sound. They’re buying
sounds
today.”
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Using a grain-brain, an electronic gate that cuts out certain frequencies, on each different percussion sound, Montana was able to achieve even more instrumental definition than Gamble and Huff, particularly on the bottom end. As journalist Davitt Sigerson said at the time, “Unlike the masters Gamble & Huff, whose MFSB productions are often frankly vapid, drowned in slick and unimaginative strings and horns, Salsoul keeps the rhythm tracks as hot as Wick Fowler’s Three-Alarm Texas Chili, and brings up Earl Young’s fine and usually undermixed snare drum … Wah wah guitar, clavinet, bongo and conga cook with exceptional clarity.”
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“DON’T LET ME CROSS OVER”

Disco, the Black Middle Class, and the Politics of Crossover

Philadelphia International’s inability or refusal to wholeheartedly embrace disco caused the label to fade from the mainstream after 1976. While the label continued to have R&B hits with the O’Jays, the Jones Girls, and Teddy Pendergrass, its last significant pop hit was perhaps unsurprisingly the record that most unequivocally espoused the disco aesthetic—McFadden & Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” in 1979. Written and performed by the pair behind the O’Jays’ “Back Stabbers,” who claimed that the song was simply a celebration of the fact that Gamble and Huff had finally let the pair into the studio as performers in their own right, “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” was one of those all-purpose cheerleading disco anthems like Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” (which followed it at the top of the R&B charts) that seemed to fit any circumstance and any cause. Less plush, less preachy, less bluesy than most Philadelphia International records, “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” ditched the ambivalence of old in favor of firmly buying in. The music was positively triumphant—more like Bill Conti’s version of the Philly sound on the
Rocky
soundtrack than Gamble and Huff—while John Whitehead dispensed NAACP platitudes like a hip guidance counselor: “There’s been so many things that’s held us down / But now it looks like things are finally comin’ around / I know we’ve got a long way to go / And where we’ll end up I don’t know / But we won’t let nothing hold us back / We’re puttin’ ourselves together / We’re polishin’ up our act / And if you’ve ever been held down before / I know you refuse to be held down anymore.”

This vision of upward mobility disguised as an assertive statement of black pride fit in perfectly not only in the discotheque but on black radio as well. By 1979, black radio in the United States had changed its complexion from a more grassroots, community-oriented medium to one that more closely resembled the mainstream American dream. The instigator of this trend was one of the most iconic DJs in the history of American radio, Frankie Crocker. In the mid-1970s Crocker was the afternoon/evening drive-time DJ and, more important, the program director at New York’s biggest black-owned radio station, WBLS. Instead of waiting for the promotion men to come to him to pitch records, Crocker went out on the disco circuit—frequenting places like the aspirational black disco Leviticus at 45 West 33rd Street, Studio 54 and, most famously, the Paradise Garage—to discover his own, and the playlist changed accordingly. Crocker’s mix of music was elegant, suave, sophisticated and, most important, color-blind. Crocker played off-the-wall (for black radio) stuff like Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” and long album cuts as well as singles. Under his stewardship, WBLS changed from “the total black experience in sound” to “the world’s best looking sound.” When he went on air, Crocker locked the studio door, turned off the studio lights, and lit a candle in order to create the right mood for his chic style. At the time Crocker called himself “Hollywood,” and he envisioned a post–civil rights world of cocktail parties full of urbane chatter around swimming pools and debonair brothers in earth-tone suits making business connections. “Hollyw-o-o-o-d!… is not in California; it’s the main thought stream of the new disco scene, a seductive freeway straight to the heart of all hard partyers,” was how journalist Mark Jacobson described Crocker’s world. “It’s got nothing to do with drugs, although one might bring some along for the ride. Hollyw-o-o-o-d! is a suspension of reality, not an escape from it. It’s modulated blues and browns, not flashy pimp oranges. It’s Walt Frazier dribbling through all hostile hands, playing ah-fense and dee-fense so smoothly you can’t tell which team has the ball. It’s Superfly and Shaft, not Martin Luther King and Malcolm X … Frankie [Crocker] says, ‘Hollyw-o-o-o-d! is just something good, very good … it’s just another dream … we all need to dream.’”
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Just like Philadelphia International’s, Crocker’s fantasy of the good life was fueled by technology as well as the music itself. “None of the FM radio stations were really utilizing stereo back then; WBLS were the first to really bring that home,” remembers Danny Krivit, a budding disco DJ at the time. “Even with their announcements, they would go [mimics stereo panning] ‘W-B-L-S’ and really make you understand it. They were starting to play records that other stations weren’t; radio was still a 3:45 maximum-length medium, very formatted. BLS was breaking out of that, playing album cuts, the album versions of hit records. ‘Love Is the Message’—a long album-only instrumental that’s also kind of disco, basically it just isn’t radio—became kind of popular, and BLS jumped all over it to show how different they were.”
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WBLS’s plush stereo sound demanded a new kind of music. Of course, the sumptuous arrangements of Philadelphia International and the lavish orchestrations of Barry White fit the bill perfectly, but even relatively straightforward R&B that didn’t have symphonic pretensions started to become more “refined,” more “Hollywood.” “The result has been a new genre of black rhythm-and-blues music that is totally different from the driving, maximum pentration of ‘danceable’ 60s R&B,” Jacobson wrote. “The new songs are like big barroom fans that sweep the air around you as you dance. They make you want to roller-skate. They’re softer, more playful, almost approaching mirth. The lyrics have little to do with the blues … The singing, in the Smokey Robinson tradition, is lilting, spacey, filled with otherworldly falsettos. Very few tunes have bedrock, gravelly blues voices. Horn parts aren’t low-life and King Curtis–Jr. Walker things; they’re brassy and up.”
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