Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (3 page)

“GO WHERE THE ACTION IS, THAT’S WHERE THE IN-CROWD LIVES”

A Prehistory of Disco
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The disco may very well be “where the happy people go,” as the Trammps insisted in 1976, but in reality the discotheque and discontent go together like glitterballs and rhinestones. Not just in the sense of dancing one’s blues away (which, of course, is part of it), but also in the fact that disco—that music now most redolent of cheery knees-ups and good-time girls dancing around their handbags—could have emerged only from the dark underground of a society teetering on the brink of collapse. Indeed, the disco scene of the 1970s—with its wanton cocaine and casual sex gluttony, its devotion to baroque indulgence in the face of staggering inflation, its aging celebrity has-beens desperately trying not to waste away (or at least do so elegantly), its sense of partying hell for leather tonight because you’re not going to know where you stand tomorrow—often conjured nothing so much as the degeneration of Weimar Germany. It’s ironic, then, that the ancestral roots of disco culture and the very notion of the discotheque (the combination of two French words,
disque,
meaning “record,” and
bibliothèque,
meaning “library”) can be traced back to Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II.
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On March 25, 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a law that made it compulsory for all boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen to join the Hitlerjugend, or Hitler Youth, and all girls of the same age to join the Bund Deutscher Mädel (German Girls’ Federation). Around the same time, an alternative youth movement started in Hamburg and quickly spread across Germany. The Swing Jugend (Swing Kids) were one of a number of loosely organized youth groups or movements that, in their own small ways, opposed the relentless and draconian homogenization that Hitler enforced in order to foster youth that would serve Germany forever. The Swing Kids were mostly middle- and upper-class (and, it must be stressed, largely apolitical) youths who wore long whips of hair (in direct contravention of the order that men must wear military-length hair) and “long, often checked English sports jackets, shoes with thick light crepe soles, showy scarves, homburg hats”;
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some even carried umbrellas in imitation of the British foreign secretary at the time, Anthony Eden. The female Swing Kids, meanwhile, wore long, flowing hair and penciled eyebrows, lipstick and nail polish. Naturally, the Nazis were scandalized by such wanton displays of Hollywood-influenced degeneracy, as true German women had a “pure” beauty and kept their hair in Heidi braids.

Even more of an affront to Nazi sensibilities, though, was the Swing Kids’ taste in music: degenerate “Americano nigger kike jungle music”
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created by African Americans and disseminated by the Jewish-dominated media industries. The Swing Kids would dance in an outrageous fashion (linking arms, jumping up and down, jitterbugging to the point of physical exhaustion, one woman often dancing with two men at the same time) to the “hot” sounds of Louis Armstrong and Nat Gonella. However, it wasn’t easy for the Swing Kids to dance: Not only did the organization of professional musicians under the Nazis, the Reichs Music Chamber, travel around the bars in search of swing music and then alert the Gestapo, but the leader of the SS and the chief of police, Heinrich Himmler, issued a police order preventing adolescents from loitering after dark or attending dances after 9 p.m. Gatherings of Swing Kids were therefore largely clandestine affairs hastily organized around a vacant spot and the availability of a portable gramophone and a connoisseur’s collection of swing records.

These swing parties may not have had any ultrasuede jackets, dry-ice-covered dance floors or party whistles, but they are the source point of the disco aesthetic. While people had been dancing to recorded music for years at American bars and roadhouses that had jukeboxes or, even earlier, piano rolls, both jukeboxes and piano rolls were serviced by distribution companies that chose the music themselves. The gatherings of the Swing Kids mark the first instance that a disc jockey played music of his own choosing and not necessarily what was in the hit parade, tailored to a specific crowd of dancers in a nondomestic setting.
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Add to this the frightening cultural climate, the almost-outlawed subculture, vivid dress sense, a politics of pleasure, uninhibited sexuality, and complex relations to class, and if they only had a primitive mixer and a drum machine, the Swing Kids might have invented disco thirty years early.

There were also pockets of Swing Kids in Vienna and, especially, in Paris, with its long connection to American jazz musicians and “le jazz hot,” where they were known as Les Zazous. Taking their name from nonsense syllables scatted by Cab Calloway, the Zazous, like their German counterparts, often came from the upper middle class, smoked Lucky Strikes, and greeted each other with the phrase,
“Ça swing!”
According to jazz historian Mike Zwerin, “Zazou boys wore pegged pants with baggy knees, high rolled English collars covered by their hair, which was carefully combed into a two-wave pompadour over their foreheads, long checked jackets several sizes too large, dangling key chains, gloves, stick-pins in wide neckties with tiny knots; dark glasses and Django Reinhardt moustaches were the rage. The girls wore short skirts, baggy sweaters, pointed painted fingernails, hair curled to their shoulders, necklaces around their waists, bright red lipstick.”
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On Sundays, even during the Nazi occupation, they took portable record players to small restaurants and cafés in outlying areas of Paris, played their favorite swing records, and danced.

With their loud music and refusal to take anything seriously, the Zazous had become such a headache to the authorities that on June 14, 1942, the head of the collaborationist Jeunesses Populaires Françaises sent squads of thugs on “search-and-destroy” missions in the Quartier Latin, the Champs-Élysées, and the suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Their objective was to cut the hair of any Zazous they could lay their hands on.
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Later that year, when the Nazis started to force Jews to wear the yellow Star of David, some of the Zazous wore yellow stars with “Zazou” or “Swing” scrawled across them as a rather unfortunate celebration of what they interpreted as Nazi kitsch.
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This gesture certainly didn’t help matters any when, in late 1942 and 1943, the Nazis arrested several hundred Swing Kids and Zazous in both Germany and Paris and sent them to work camps.

While such cherished Parisian institutions as the Moulin Rouge, One Two Two, and Maxim’s continued to operate during the Occupation largely to serve Nazi officers, and Hitler encouraged Paris’s famous nightlife to remain vital because he thought such wanton decadence would hasten French defeat, the Zazous, members of the Resistance, and intellectuals had to dodge the gestapo, informants, and road blocks to assemble and discuss strategy at more (often literally) underground spots. One such meeting place was La Discothèque, a tiny basement club on rue de la Huchette, one block south of the Seine in the Fifth Arrondissement (the Quartier Latin), which, according to Albert Goldman, opened during the Occupation.
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While the soldiers of the Wehrmacht got their jollies at the nightclubs of the Pigalle, and the Nazi propaganda machine targeted “educated” Parisians by bringing the very best of Berlin’s renowned classical music community to Paris, here, on a street where the revolutionary tyrants Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Marat had met to discuss the founding of the Committee of Public Safety that intimidated the country during the French Revolution with its campaigns of surveillance and violence, patrons would exorcise the demons of another reign of terror through the sacrament of alcohol and the testifying spirit of American jazz records. According to Goldman, patrons could order a record at the same time as they ordered a drink.

As the war raged on, however, with resources diverted elsewhere, the bans on dancing and public assembly were gradually enforced less and less and
“les bals clandestins”
flourished in private homes and in bars in the Quartier Latin and in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe near the place d’Étoile.
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Many of these bars copied La Discothèque’s format: Some brave soul would get his hands on a primitive PA system and a gramophone, lay some cables in a vacant basement, and set up a makeshift club. Entry to these clubs was often speakeasy style: A hatch in the door allowed the proprietor to check out the prospective client and ask him for the day’s password or membership credentials. Once inside, the patron could listen or dance to jazz records until the early hours of the morning.

Even after the Occupation ended, though, the basement hovel remained so popular that it became the template for a uniquely European form of nightlife. Given the rationing of the postwar years and the fact that the public service model of broadcasting became firmly entrenched in Europe (as opposed to the capitalist free-for-all it was in the United States), the discotheque became the only venue in which adventurous listeners could hear music that was outside a prescribed “national culture.” Furthermore, where their American comrades could simply take the A train over to Fifty-second Street and on any given night hear Erroll Garner or Charlie Parker at the Three Deuces, Art Tatum at Club Downbeat, and Count Basie at Club Troubadour, European jazz fans’ distance from their heroes led them to sanctifying the record as an almost holy artifact, as opposed to the live performance itself.

Perhaps the most important of the postwar nightclubs was Paul Pacine’s Whisky à Go-Go. He opened the club sometime around 1947–48 on the site of the old Plancher des Vaches, where, according to future club impresario Regine Zylberberg, the nightclub custom of marking a bottle of whiskey with the customer’s name was started.
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The club on the rue de Beaujolais, right behind the Palais Royale in the First Arrondissement, was set in a tiny cellar that had three levels, and when there were thirty or forty people inside it felt like the black hole of Calcutta. The club was decked out in Scottish kitsch—all tartan and whiskey cases, inspired by the Ealing comedy
Whisky Galore,
called
Whisky à Go Go
in French—but, interestingly, what truly set the club apart was that it was the first place in France to have a jukebox. Even in the land that invented the discotheque, this was a major draw and the club was soon the most celebrated in Paris.

In 1953, Pacine moved the club to a new location on rue Robert Estienne, near the Champs-Élysées. Regine Zylberberg, a Belgian Jew who had escaped the Nazis by hiding in a convent for two years and who then worked as a coat-check girl at the club, convinced Pacine to let her take over the old location, which was lying dormant. According to her autobiography, she was a one-woman show there: “I could lay my hands on a barmaid, disc jockey, cloak room attendant and bouncer straight away, no problem; I did it all myself … I had a dozen hands, six legs and four eyes. I was a Jack-of-all-trades; I welcomed people in, gave them a drink, put the records on, and chucked out undesirables. My domain? A cellar on three levels. As you came in there was the bar, where ten people could get a drink, provided they stepped on each other’s toes. Down five steps to the second level where there were four tables and a banquette. Five steps further down was the dance-floor, which also served as the bottle-store. With more than 40 people in the place you got asphyxiated … By the end of the first month, I had 30 or so regulars, and by the end of the second the place was busting at the seams … After three months, we extended into the cellar next door … We had a contrasting mixture at the club, but it was effective. We danced the cha-cha, the meringue [
sic
] and of course rock ’n’ roll. I’d bought some rock records before it became fashionable, and when people started talking about it I got them out and everyone went wild.”
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No longer the haunt of Resistance fighters and fugitive intellectuals, the discotheque was now a celebrity hangout. Among the flashy guests that Zylberberg boasts of were Zsa-Zsa Gabor, Sacha Distel, Darryl Zanuck, Louis Malle, Françoise Sagan, and Claude Terrail, the proprietor of the legendary Parisian restaurant Le Tour d’Argent. Yes, this was the birth of the new socially promiscuous Eurotrash. But with the first nonstop, transatlantic flights beginning in the late 1950s, they had a kinder term back then for Europe’s roaming elite, the jet set (or, in French,
les locomotifs
). The jet set also had dozens of clubs that followed in the Whisky’s wake, tailored especially for them: Chez Castel, New Jimmy’s, Le Privé. These were the kind of places where the host would cheerfully natter away in English with Omar Sharif but pretend he didn’t speak a word of English as soon as an uncouth American businessman arrived at the door trying to get in.
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The most important of these clubs was Regine Zylberberg’s Chez Regine, which opened in 1958 and was a far more fabulous affair than the Whisky. The club was funded by the Rothschilds and counted Brigitte Bardot, Salvador Dalí, Rudolf Nureyev, and Georges Pompidou among its regular visitors. It was here that Zylberberg introduced the theme party to nightlife with the Jean Harlow night, which required women to wear white satin dresses to gain entry—some even had their Rolls-Royces painted white for the occasion. The discotheque had indeed come a very long way from its origins. During the 1968 student uprisings, the students pushed through barricades to confront the police just outside of Chez Regine on the boulevard du Montparnasse in the Sixth Arrondissement. Zylberberg led frightened guests like Dior designer Marc Bohan, shipping heir and future virulent right-wing commentator Taki Theodoracopoulos, and Françoise Sagan through the clouds of tear gas and up the back stairs to her apartment above the club. As Zylberberg recollected to
New York
magazine, “Taki complained, ‘I want to go outside! I want to see the war in France!’ Two minutes later, he was back, and banging down the door—‘Let me in, Regine!’ Idiot! While the sirens blared outside, the whole group whiled away the night, dancing and drinking champagne.”
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