Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (29 page)

By using these archetypes, dance music, comic scenarios, and the language of Broadway and Hollywood, Darnell attempted to universalize the plight of the mulatto misfit. Darnell’s two great themes—being out of place and everyday human cruelty—essentially made all of his characters into half-castes, all of them wrestling with the cost of selling out, all of them resigned to the fact they’re doomed to be fish out of water no matter what path they choose. Darnell explored these themes most effectively on his two masterpieces,
Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places
and
Wise Guy
(aka
Tropical Gangsters,
apparently named after the Rhode Island store that provided him with his zoot suit wardrobe).

Fresh Fruit
ostensibly told the tale of the Kid sailing the seven seas in search of his elusive paramour, Mimi, who had absconded in uncertain circumstances to some tropical locale. It was a Homerian epic that, while populated with sirens and sorceresses, was concerned more with nebbishes and cads than heroes and monsters. Instead of cyclopes and lotus-eaters, the putative protagonist had to outwit fast-talking natives, cope with difficult Latin music and strange customs, and fend off predatory Swiss ski instructors. Of course, our hero probably never even leaves Manhattan, and Darnell designed the scenario so that he could explore alienation while trading barbs with Joseph Conrad on the set of
The Road to Zanzibar.

After beginning his travelogue with “Goin’ Places”—a song that echoes Saul Steinberg’s famous
New Yorker
cartoon, “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” which depicts the Manhattanite’s worldview as pretty much ending at the Hudson River (“Believe me I know that when you leave New York you go nowhere”)—Darnell imagines New York as a primeval rain forest teeming with weird biomass, dense mist, restless natives banging their war drums, and spooky creepy-crawlies skittering and slithering underfoot. With its didgeridoo undertow, blocky piano chords, rain dance percussion, and monkey chants, “In the Jungle” is a dark, dank place harboring all sorts of demons both real and psychic—you half expect Mr. Kurtz suddenly to emerge from the overgrowth, clasping a knife between his teeth. “I don’t believe in integration just to achieve miscegenation,” the song’s narrator sings. “Don’t offer me remuneration / I don’t believe in acclimation … I don’t believe in propagation / Just to achieve cafe au laition / Don’t offer me emasculation / I don’t believe in deprivation.”

The reggae feel of “Animal Crackers” follows with a riff on the Tokens’ “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” at the beginning. The lyrics continue the tone of poking fun at exoticists and square white guys with a character halfway between
Fantasy Island
’s Mr. Roarke and Daniel Defoe’s Friday telling our fearless hero, “You’ve got no reason to be dangling from up here / You’ll disembark and find there’s nothing here to fear / We’ve got no history of human sacrifice / We welcome you, your children and your wives / But Frosted Flakes and coffee cakes [“painted eggs” after the second verse] customs will deny / And your bag of Animal Crackers…” When the square peg protagonist dares to set foot on foreign soil, he’s set adrift in a land full of “Latin music” that he can neither comprehend nor countenance: “I’m so confused / This Latin music’s got me so, so bemused / The accent’s worse than Cockney / I’m not amused, it’s killing me … Frazzled and floored / This Latin music’s mayhem / I won’t endure / There’s too much syncopation / Where’s the two and four?” Later, the air of displacement and preposterousness is heightened by one reggae song that’s half in German and another about a woman who runs off with a Swiss ski instructor.

Like
Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places, Wise Guy
was a mock travelogue in which the band is “washed up on the shore of B’Dilli Bay—an island of sinners ruled by outcasts where crime is the only passport and RACE MUSIC the only way out!” However, unlike
Fresh Fruit,
dislocation and orientalism were not the main concerns of
Wise Guy,
and while the pan-Caribbean vibe of
Fresh Fruit
reappeared in the ersatz soca/salsa of “Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy,” the trade-wind lilt of “No Fish Today,” and the synthesized steel drum and timbal fills of “I’m Corrupt,”
Wise Guy
was mostly straight-ahead, if slightly astringent, R&B. Well, as straight-ahead as a guy who calls his backing musicians “the Pond Life Orchestra” can be.
Wise Guy
’s deceptively simple light funk bottom effectively streamlined the band’s sound, reining in the big-band arrangements and the pan-American references without neutering their effectiveness, and created a sharp-focus background for Darnell’s tales of quotidian inhumanity. Here, the savages weren’t the fetish objects of “race music” but the seemingly normal people you take for granted every day as you walk past them on the street.

“No Fish Today” was everything Steely Dan wanted to be but couldn’t: With the siren harps and sea-mist strings, the music evokes a tropical paradise that is undercut by one of the harshest dialogues this side of Harold Pinter, in which a fishmonger refuses to sell a woman any fish during a shortage because “the authorities agree that if anyone should eat, it should be the upper class.” Of course, the merchant was “neither right nor wrong, just another pawn” who “got to be this old because [he does] what [he’s] told.” Crueler still was the amazing “Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy.” Over the most detailed music of his career and the Coconuts singing “onomatopoeia” in the background, Darnell didn’t break it to her gently: “If I was in your blood, you wouldn’t be so ugly.” Elsewhere, there was the breakup invective of “Loving You Made a Fool Out of Me,” in which both parties get in some choice insults, and the Ellingtonian razzle-dazzle of “Stool Pigeon” (“The FBI rewarded him because they like a guy who will stab a friend”). Even the seemingly balmy Bali Hai of “The Love We Have” was the plaint of a man suffering the slings and arrows of a lover who blows hot and cold.

Like most of the best disco music (Chic’s “Good Times,” Inner Life’s “I’m Caught Up [In a One Night Love Affair],” New York Citi Peech Boys’ “Don’t Make Me Wait”), Darnell’s records both celebrated and damned disco’s glitterball sophistry. Instead of feeling trapped by disco’s rock-and-a-hard-place position between two worlds, Darnell reveled in it. Darnell’s characters were guys desperately searching for someone real, someone who wouldn’t sell them down the river, yet in his forties street hood getup, Kid Creole was the most hyperstylized character around. He replaced the gospel salvation of the African-American tradition with the flashy resplendence of show tunes—in Darnell’s world the material trumps the promises of the future every time—but, driven by sarcasm, there was no redemption, only endless mutation.

5

PRISONERS OF THE NIGHT

The Disco Craze

There will be disco dancing at the inaugural ball for President Carter on January 20. In the first ever disco show at a presidential inauguration, the Portable Peach mobile disco outfit of Scott Woodside and Barry Chase of Atlanta will travel to Washington for the ceremonies at the invitation of the Carter fundraising committee. In addition to disco dancing, the show will also feature two disco dancers in peanut costumes dancing to the music of the
Bicentennial Disco Mix
released last year by Private Stock Records.

—
Billboard,
January 22, 1977

I’m not sure if it was heaven or hell. But it was wonderful.

—Jimmy Carter’s mother, Lillian, on her visit to Studio 54

I’ll keep you hot when the fuel runs out.

—Executive Suite

In the summer of 1973, the bop apocalypse occurring at the Loft, Tenth Floor, and Third World Gallery started to become big news. The lure of the discotheque was rapidly spreading from its main constituency and ensnaring everyone caught in New York’s web of despair and desolation. As an estimated one hundred thousand New Yorkers were boogying away the blues in the Big Apple’s discos every Saturday night, Vince Aletti, in an article for
Rolling Stone
in September, was the first to mark out disco music as its own particular genre separate from R&B and soul; two weeks later,
Billboard
noted the discotheques’ growing influence in creating pop hits.
1
The remarkable success of the discotheques “began to suggest an entertainment formula for the secretive 70s: take people out of their own neighborhoods, let them wander around in the desolation of the warehouse district with a scribbled address they’ve gotten from a friend; give them a rush of quadrophonic input and the stimulus of satin blouses under strobes; add a taste of kinkiness; limit the membership to a chosen few—and they’ll show up in droves.”
2
Cheap, functional, stark, seedy, and somewhat exclusionary, the modern discotheque was an entertainment formula that was keenly in touch with the realities of New York City.

But as much as disco wallowed in squalor, it also soared to the heavens. It offered communion and ecstasy, fantasy and release. After all, one hundred thousand people don’t gather together every weekend to be miserable together. The stratospheric rise of the disco scene paralleled New York’s own upsurge. Under banner headlines like “City Will Turn Tide of ‘Urban Sickness’” and “Rebirth of Lower Manhattan,” architect Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center (which opened on April 4, 1973
3
) was hailed as signaling New York’s phoenixlike ascent from the ashes of urban turmoil and fiscal mismanagement. While Yamasaki had envisioned his two 110-story towers as utopian symbols of world peace, New York’s Port Authority, which had funded the project, had rather different aims in mind. Even though New York had definitively become the global financial capital after World War II, lower Manhattan (where New York’s financial district was located) was largely a derelict, desolate place that was left behind by both the industries that had fled the city’s tax code and the commercial real estate boom that was transforming midtown.
4
The Port Authority and its allies, like David and Nelson Rockefeller, tried to remedy this situation with “a massive and fully tax-exempt public intervention in the private real estate market through the development of the world’s largest office building.”
5
The WTC’s ten million square feet of office space (the equivalent of seven Empire State Buildings) was meant to revitalize an area often called “Hell’s Hundred Acres” seemingly by sheer force of will. These soaring, gleaming rectangular spires rising from a sinkhole that resembled some third world outpost much more than it resembled capitalism’s capital city were meant to act as beacons signaling to the money-worshipping flock that New York had changed its ways. “If you build it they will come” was the logic—the architectural equivalent of Horatio Alger’s pick yourself up by your bootstraps philosophy.

In the midst of the city’s crippling financial crisis, as its infrastructure was crumbling, as gasoline prices in the United States were quadrupling as the result of an embargo called by Middle Eastern members of OPEC on all crude oil shipments to Western nations that supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War, New York City had constructed potentially the largest white elephant the world had ever seen. Instead of acting responsibly and saving its pennies for the rainy days that long ago arrived, Gotham was saving up all its money for Saturday night, when it could put on its gaudiest platform shoes and step out in style—damn the consequences. Despite itself, the plan worked. Slowly, companies moved into the WTC and into lower Manhattan. Ironically, it was in reaction to the megalomania of projects like the World Trade Center that in October, New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission recognized the SoHo–Cast Iron Historic district (an area bounded by West Broadway to the west, Crosby Street to the east, Houston Street to the north, and Canal Street to the south) as an area of architectural importance and deemed its old warehouses and sweatshops worthy of preservation. Thanks to the work done by the artists, musicians, DJs, and party-goers who initially transformed these dead areas of the city under the very noses of the Port Authority, conservative preservationists, real estate agents, and stockbrokers “discovered” that the lofts of SoHo and TriBeCa, the neighborhoods immediately to the north of the World Trade Center, made ideal upscale living spaces. It wouldn’t be long before the formerly derelict buildings of lower Manhattan became the most fashionable addresses in the world. As Deep Throat told Bernstein and Woodward around this time, “Just follow the money.” Just as money transformed the sites of disco’s birth, the influx of capital into the disco industry would remake disco into something largely unrecognizable to its earliest practitioners.

*   *   *

In early 1975, Van McCoy, a longtime presence on the soul/R&B scene (having previously worked with everyone from the Shirelles and Jackie Wilson to Faith, Hope & Charity and the Stylistics), was working overtime in order to finish recording an album of instrumentals for producers Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore’s Avco label. David Todd, the DJ at Manhattan nightspot Adam’s Apple, had been pestering him for several weeks to come to the club to check out a new dance that was creating a stir. McCoy was too busy to go to a nightclub, so he sent his friend and business partner, Charles Kipps Jr., in his place. What Kipps saw at Adam’s Apple excited him so much that at around midnight he left the club and brought two dancers with him back to Mediasound Studios where McCoy was working. “When he came back, he showed me this very strange dance,” McCoy told
Essence
magazine. “It was something completely different from the you-do-your-thing-and-I-do-mine dances; it was people dancing together again. The hustle reminded me of ballroom dancing, and I love graceful dancing.”
6
McCoy wrote “The Hustle” right there on the spot, and he recorded it the next day during the one hour of studio time he had remaining for his session with the Soul City Symphony (drummers Steve Gadd and Rick Marotta, bassist Gordon Edwards, keyboardist Richard Tee, guitarist Eric Gale, a horn section, and concertmaster Gene Orloff’s strings).
7
This afterthought became not only McCoy’s solitary Top 40, let alone #1, single as an artist, but also, thanks to its accompanying dance craze, the record that truly catapaulted disco from an underground phenomenon to worldwide furor.
8