Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (36 page)

While the P&P releases expressed Adams’s more experimental instincts, he was also one of the greatest of the commercial disco producers. Not that he ever achieved sales commensurate with his skills, just that his productions were some of the most nuanced, well-crafted, and that worst of all musical phrases, “soulful” of the disco era. Although his previous work with the Universal Robot Band, Bumble Bee Unlimited, and Black Ivory gained him notoriety among the cognoscenti, Adams really came to widespread attention in 1978 with Musique, a studio project based around vocalists Jocelyn Brown, Christine Wiltshire, Mary Seymour, and Gina Tharps. On Musique’s two big hits, “In the Bush” and “Keep on Jumpin’,” Adams replaced the oblique vocal mumblings and synth weirdness of his P&P releases with great-big diva vocals, chirpy horn charts, and scything strings—the big-budget production values didn’t hurt either. He also ratcheted the pace up several notches to ensure spins at peak times when the dance floors were packed. Along with Adams’s two great underground records from the same year, Sine’s “Just Let Me Do My Thing” and Phreek’s “Weekend,” “In the Bush” and “Keep on Jumpin’” were unabashedly “disco”—reveling in its garish textures and tempos—but they also pointed a way out of the lamé morass of clodhopping bass lines, unctuous orchestration, and cocaine decadence that characterized mainstream disco. Their bounciness and rapprochement with funk’s “boom-slap” laid the groundwork for the R&B-flavored “street music” and “boogie” that replaced disco at the turn of the ’80s, the similarly styled roller-skating music popular at clubs like the Roxy at the same time (Vaughan Mason’s “Bounce, Skate, Rock, Roll,” Rose Royce’s “Pop Your Fingers”), and the Garage sound that would soon emerge from New York’s Paradise Garage and New Jersey’s Zanzibar.

However, Adams kept on making straight-ahead disco records in the form of his two biggest chart successes—Herbie Mann’s “Superman” and Narada Michael Walden’s “I Don’t Want Nobody Else (To Dance With You)”—and his two masterpieces, both made with Jocelyn Brown. Brown’s cover of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (especially Larry Levan’s remix) and Inner Life’s “I’m Caught Up (In a One Night Love Affair)” are absolute disco perfection: that unique combination of catharsis and seduction, the bittersweetness of lost love summed up in one larger-than-life wail set against pillow-soft strings and surging, upful bass and guitar figures, while the chorus sassily urges you to wash that man right out of your hair.

With the changes that Adams inadvertently wrought on disco, though, his form of dance music gradually fell out of favor, and after Wish featuring Fonda Rae’s great “Touch Me (All Night Long)” in 1984 and Skipworth & Turner’s equally marvelous “Thinking About Your Love” in 1985, Adams largely vanished from the production scene. However, Adams’s studio chops meant that he wouldn’t disappear altogether. During what is almost universally acknowledged as hip-hop’s “golden age” (1987–91), Adams was one of the most sought-after engineers in New York. As well as engineering records for Salt-N-Pepa and Teddy Riley, Adams worked on Eric B. & Rakim’s first three albums and developed the technique of using a bass drum microphone to record Rakim’s voice, helping him become one of hip-hop’s most lauded rappers. This was hardly an isolated instance of the merger of disco and hip-hop, but such coupling was rare given the animosity and mistrust that the two genres’ principal constituencies shared for each other.

Funky music is music with so much to share

I love America.

—Patrick Juvet, “I Love America”

The fashions, the mores, the dance steps made roller disco pretty goofy and laughable, but if disco had a nadir it was unquestionably the Village People. The Village People represented everything uncool about disco: the stale beats seemingly phoned in by studio hacks, the dunderheaded English-as-a-foreign-language lyrics, the complete lack of subtlety, all delivered by guys wearing a Native American headdress and a loincloth, a construction worker’s clothes, a police uniform, and leather biker gear. Then, there was the group’s cinematic fiasco
Can’t Stop the Music,
a movie so resplendently awful (even if it is Steve Guttenberg’s finest moment) that it’s been turned into a drinking game. To top it all off, they were the product of the imaginations of the French.

Henri Belolo grew up in Morocco and was turned on to music by American soldiers stationed there after World War II. He eventually worked for Barclay and Polydor, and discovered disco and the Philadelphia International sound on a trip to the United States in 1973. Two years later he met Jacques Morali, a budding producer who wanted to make a disco version of the old standard “Brazil (Aquarela do Brasil).” Belolo thought it was a fantastic idea, and the two went to Philadelphia to work on the project with members of MFSB, including drummer Earl Young. They recruited three singers—Cheryl Jacks, Cassandra Wooten, and Gwendolyn Oliver—to become the voices and faces of the group that was called the Ritchie Family after the arranger, Ritchie Rome. Although it was a pretty pale imitation of the Philly sound, “Brazil” reached #11 on the American charts and was followed by other overorchestrated and ever more ridiculous travelogues like “Peanut Vendor,” “African Queens,” “In a Persian Market,” “Quiet Village,” and the medley “The Best Disco in Town.” Jacks, Wooten, and Oliver laid the schtick on thick with their theatrical overenunciation, Morali’s lyrics were the cheapest fantasies imaginable (“I am fire / I am sex / I am brown and I’m beautiful / A gyrating, vibrating, heartbreaking sister”), and Rome arranged as if he was scoring a Busby Berkeley movie, but the absurdist nature of the project was highlighted by their album covers, which were even kitschier than the lyrics and featured the group decked out as Egyptian royalty and football players.

Morali and Belolo went from the high camp of the Ritchie Family to what may be the most subversive group in the history of popular music. Of course it wasn’t intentional—just the deliciously bad taste of men raised on Johnny Hallyday and Charles Aznavour—but to explode Kenneth Anger camp into hypertrophic cartoon characters so absurd that only children and grannies from Arkansas could possibly like them was probably the most effective weapon in the battle of assimilating gay culture into mainstream America this side of the pill and
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
But everything Belolo and Morali did—from their imagery, which was so flagrant it was positively rococo, to the feigned innocence of their interviews—made it seem like this was the greatest in-joke, the greatest media prank ever perpetrated on the American public.

It all started innocently enough, with Belolo and Morali walking through New York’s West Village when they spotted someone sporting a full Native American costume and were entranced by his presence and his foot bells. They followed him into a bar, where he worked as a tabletop dancer. A customer wearing a cowboy hat was watching him intently, and the concept for the Village People was born right there in the Anvil. Morali’s concept was to portray the “gorgeous mosaic” that was the American male, and since they were in Greenwich Village with all its fabulous characters, the group became the Village People. With this macho drag notion in mind, Belolo and Morali held open auditions for the group and secured the services of songwriters Phil Hurtt (who had previously written for the O’Jays, Joe Simon, and the Spinners) and Peter Whitehead, who helped the Francophone Belolo write some thematically appropriate songs. With Morali’s befeathered muse, Felipe Rose, already recruited, Broadway extra Victor Willis became the policeman; former backup singer for Bobbi Humphrey, Alex Briley, became the soldier; Randy Jones, a member of Agnes de Mille’s dance company, became the cowboy; out-of-work Broadway actor David Hodo “joined the group because he needed a week’s work to qualify for unemployment”
83
and became the construction worker; and former toll collector in the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, Glenn Hughes, transformed himself into the leather biker.

The first, self-titled album (largely recorded with just Willis and the backup band Gypsy Lane) extended the Village People concept with the gay travelogue of “Fire Island” (featuring such kitsch-as-can-be lyrics as “Don’t go in the bushes / Something might grab ya!”), “San Francisco (You’ve Got Me),” and “In Hollywood (Everybody Is a Star)”—they left off “Key West” and “Sodom and Gomorrah” until the second album. The cartoonish subversion, though, didn’t really start until 1978’s “Macho Man,” an undeniably catchy tongue-in-cheek ode to the Muscle Marys who were beginning to dominate the gay disco scene. The locker-room muskiness of “Macho Man” may have been utterly ridiculous, but its camp esprit de corps was somehow universal enough for the record to reach #25 on the American pop charts. This hypermasculinity quickly became the Village People’s stock-in-trade: the mustachioed lumberjack chorale of “Go West,” the homoerotic military fetish of “In the Navy,” the towel-snapping bathhouse bonhomie of “Y.M.C.A.” While such unabashed celebrations of masculinity would normally be the preserve of Tom of Finland fans, the irony was that the Village People were practically persona non grata in the gay clubs. Instead, the Village People got most of their play at aerobics classes for senior citizens who could form the letters
Y, M, C,
and
A
with their arms without taxing their bodies too much, at barbecues by car mechanics who thought “Y.M.C.A.” was about playing basketball, at straitlaced high school proms in Kansas, and at children’s playgroups. It was Middle America that took the Village People close to its bosom, so much so that “In the Navy” was
this
close to becoming the recruiting song for the United States Navy until someone thought better of it. Whether they realized it or not, Belolo and Morali had achieved what George Clinton had with his Parliafunkadelicment Thang—forcing an unprepared, unknowing audience to groove to a message that they would ordinarily find singularly unpalatable through sheer force of the stupidity (or stoopidity, as Clinton would put it) of their music.

After churning out four albums in less than two years, and releasing
Can’t Stop the Music,
the Village People had largely run their course. However, Belolo and Morali had only just started their mission to take Middle America for all it was worth. After parting company with erstwhile collaborator Jean-Michel Jarre, Patrick Juvet, a Swiss singer with flowing blond locks and unfeasible cheekbones, hooked up with Belolo and Morali for a series of records that redefined disco risibility. Juvet sang with a falsetto so fey that it was the diametric opposite of the Village People’s he-man oratorio, so when paired with Belolo and Morali’s insipid production the effect was like an abstract watercolor. Juvet’s biggest hit was 1978’s “I Love America,” an unintentionally comic fourteen-minute love letter to American music with such bons mots as, “When I first learned how to Latin / I had so much fun / The salsa sound was so different / Than any sound around / The demanding music / From the people of Puerto Rico / I love to watch them play / Their music is so great.” Belolo and Morali’s Can’t Stop Productions continued to crank out disco product in the form of such ill-advised records as Phylicia Allen’s (Victor Willis’s wife and the future Mrs. Huxtable on
The Cosby Show
) Josephine Baker concept album,
Josephine Superstar;
Dennis Parker’s (aka porn star Wade Nichols) rather shocking “New York by Night” and “Fly Like an Eagle”—he sang about as well as adult film stars act; Gloria Gaynor’s gay-lib-by-numbers version of “I Am What I Am” (from
La Cage aux Folles
); and Eartha Kitt’s monotonal “Where Is My Man.”

None of this is to say, however, that the mainstream disco experience was pure, unadulterated crap, or that art and commerce didn’t exist side by side during the disco era. Only the most sourpussed curmudgeon or hard-core disco aesthete could deny the goofy pleasure of the Village People, the sing-along catharsis of “I Will Survive,” KC and the Sunshine Band’s whistle-stomp booty quake, or the precision-tooled craftsmanship of the
Saturday Night Fever
soundtrack. Studio 54 is still one of the nightclubs that all others are measured against and was undoubtedly a pretty special place even if you did have to suffer Rubell and his band of cretins. Even when it was purveyed by chancers and formulaic followers of fashion, disco was a remarkable moment in American cultural history, a time when female voices (even if they were singing the words of mostly male songwriters and producers) temporarily drowned out the beefy bluster that usually characterizes American discourse. Not since Noël Coward’s reinvention of Tin Pan Alley had articulations of gay pleasure and style been so acceptable and so popular. It wouldn’t be long, though, before it all became a bit too much and even the grannies from Kansas started to get the joke. The camping of America had got out of hand.

“WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT?”

Disco is like a great porno film. If the characters and filming techniques are interesting, it’s great for five minutes.

—Herbie Mann

Disco is as identifiable a commodity as
Smile
buttons and just as vital.

—Lester Bangs

Death to Disco Shit! Long Live The Rock! Kill yourself. Jump off a fuckin’ cliff. Drive nails into your head. Become a robot and join the staff at Disneyland. OD. Anything. Just don’t listen to disco shit. I’ve seen that canned crap take real live people and turn them into dogs! And vice versa. The epitome of all that’s wrong with civilization is disco. Eddjicate yourself.

—John Holmstrom,
Punk

For all the glamor of Studio 54, the taboo shattering of New York’s urban demimonde, the radical production techniques of the remixers and synth whizzes, and the derring-do of the DJs, the quintessential mainstream disco experience was more prosaic. Disco wasn’t getting swept off your feet by John Travolta or Donna Summer having twenty-three orgasms in one session; it was hearing “Y.M.C.A.” six times in one night at the Rainbow Room of the Holiday Inn in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, while doing line dances with a bunch of traveling salesmen. Outside of its original contexts, disco was anything but what it promised, and it was this stupefying mundanity that finally punctured disco’s veneer of splendor and dazzle.