Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (4 page)

While offering minor royalty and pampered society types refuge from the marauding hoi polloi, Chez Regine also introduced the world outside of North America to the twist, and in so doing became the first true discotheque to be associated with a dance craze. According to legend, on an autumn night in 1961, the cast of the traveling production of
West Side Story
visited Chez Regine. Apparently one cast member had with him a few twist records, including Chubby Checker’s version of Hank Ballard’s “The Twist” and Joey Dee and the Starliters’ “Peppermint Twist,” and played them that night at the club. Soon all of fashionable Europe was swiveling its hips.

The twist is important not only because of its relationship to the discotheques, but also because it fomented a revolution in the style of dancing, one that would be crucial to the culture of disco. Even half a decade after Elvis first thrust his pelvis and Chuck Berry did his first duck walk on American television, much of the world was still fox-trotting around ballrooms and cocktail lounges. As Albert Goldman says, “The Twist smashed forever the old dance molds and established an entirely new style for social dancing; a solo rather than a partner dance; a stationary rather than a traveling step; a simple motion, like toweling yourself, that anyone from a three-year-old to your grandmother could learn to do.”
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Goldman, though, overstates the case. Ever since the plantation dance known as the cakewalk—which originated with slaves in Florida and featured couples parodying the pompous manner of white society with exaggerated high steps and arched backs—became popular among whites, American social dancing has been markedly different from its European counterpart, which retained its connections with courtly dancing for much longer. By the time ragtime, and accompanying dance steps like the turkey trot, the grizzly bear, and the bunny hug, burst out of Chicago’s saloons and bordellos at the turn of the century, white Americans had long been used to adopting the more exuberant dance styles of African Americans. The big apple, a group participation dance that originated in South Carolina in the 1930s, featured solo dancers surrounded by a circle of eight to ten people. Teenage rock-and-roll fans had been performing semipartner line dances like the stroll, the walk, and the madison, and largely solo steps like the shake, the shimmy, and the shag at “record hops” for a few years before the twist took off.
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However, unlike most of these short-lived dance crazes, the twist really was a cultural moment rather than a fleeting fad, so much so that even President John F. Kennedy was hosting twist parties at the White House.

While for most American teenagers the twist began with Chubby Checker’s first appearance on
American Bandstand,
for mainstream Americans of an older generation, the twist started at a Times Square dive owned by Shirley Cohen called the Peppermint Lounge at 128 West 45th Street. In 1961, the New York press started to report that celebrities like Judy Garland, Tallulah Bankhead, Noël Coward, and Marilyn Monroe had been spotted doing the twist at this seedy sailor bar and gay pickup joint attached to the Knickerbocker Hotel. The music was provided by the house band, Joey Dee & the Starliters, and the media frenzy was such that by December, the group’s “Peppermint Twist” was #1 in the
Billboard
chart.

Inevitably, the stars and the in crowd got bored of slumming it, and several more upscale discotheques were soon set up to cater to their every whim. There was Olivier Coquelin’s swishy Le Club on Fifty-fifth Street and Sutton Place, which was designed to look like the alpine ski lodges he used to run in Europe; Bradley Pierce’s Ondine at 308 East 59th Street; Shepheard’s in the Drake Hotel at Park Avenue and Fifth-sixth Street; L’Interdit and Le Directoire in the Gotham Hotel at Fifty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue; and on Fifty-fourth Street and Second Avenue was the famous El Morocco, which had transformed itself from a nightclub featuring live entertainment into a discotheque and was so fabulous that it was chosen as the site to hold perhaps the most bizarre fund-raiser in the history of American politics, the Discotheque for LBJ in 1964, in which the terminally old-school Texan President Lyndon Johnson attempted to acquire some of the hip cachet of his former boss, JFK.

But even with the most powerful man in the world among your clientele, nothing is guaranteed in clubland, and El Morocco’s decline forced it to move to a different location. After Richard Burton ditched her in favor of Elizabeth Taylor, Sybil Burton opened Arthur in May 1965 on the site of the old El Morocco with an investment of $88,000 provided by eighty-eight backers (including Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Leonard Bernstein, Mike Nichols, and Lee Remick) who each contributed $1,000.
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Named after George Harrison’s quip to a reporter who asked him, “What do you call your hairstyle?” in
A Hard Day’s Night,
Arthur brought to New York a taste of swinging London and, more important, it foreshadowed the caste-destroying social aesthetic that could have become one of disco’s biggest gifts to world culture. Although the prospective clubgoer still needed something that could only be inherited (i.e., beauty) in order to catch the eye of doorman Mickey Deans and gain access to the world beyond the club’s fabled velvet ropes, Arthur was the first step in the undoing of the jet set—it was no longer good enough just to have a name or money. However, in a glaring example of the truism that subcultures always end up reproducing the culture they try to escape, by granting admission based on the sexual proclivites of the doorman, Arthur set the precedent for the disco culture born from the resistance to the Nazis to enshrine its own peculiar form of body fascism. Sybil Burton and Deans also dabbled in a bit of social genetic engineering; they were after the right mix: a handful of celebrities like Judy Garland, Leonard Bernstein, Liza Minnelli, and Diana Vreeland; a pinch of pretty young things in miniskirts, bell-bottoms, and Nehru jackets; a soupçon of outrageous night people; and the merest hint of prostitutes and hustlers. This was the beginning of that all-important night world concept that would be elevated to an art form a decade later by Studio 54’s Steve Rubell.

The concept of the mix was taken one step further by Arthur’s disc jockey, Terry Noel. Noel had been one of the house dancers at the Peppermint Lounge during its heyday, and he understood both the highs and lows of the three-minute pop single. While the immediacy of the traditional single got people onto the dance floor in a hurry, its abrupt ending got them off just as quickly. With Arthur’s fairly sophisticated sound system and two turntables at his disposal, Noel became the first DJ to mix records, to blend, say, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, the Mamas and the Papas, Otis Redding, and the Rolling Stones as part of one continuous flow. Now there was no abrupt ending, no jarring halt to your favorite song, no excuse, other than physical exhaustion, to stop dancing. This may have been the dawn of the psychedelic era and the beginning of “head music,” but no musical innovation had so catered to the body since the advent of the drum.

Arthur struck a singular pose in New York nighlife. Unlike the Olde Worlde vibe of most of New York’s nightspots, Arthur was a brash Pop Art laboratory filled with bold blocks of primary colors, Plexiglas, and smoked mirrors; the drinks were served in goblets. This was not your granddad’s wood-paneled gentlemen’s club, a lavish dance palace of the 1920s and ’30s, or the exotic fantasia where you took the missus or the mistress to get a bit of the other. It was something thoroughly modern and totally new, and New York’s nightspots quickly followed suit. In response, Coquelin and Borden Stevenson (the son of onetime Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson) opened the Cheetah at Broadway and Fifty-third Street. It didn’t get more over the top than the Cheetah: an eight-thousand-square-foot dance floor surrounded by garish lighting, a movie theater, a TV room (with one color television), a reading room (complete with library) for any bookworms who had somehow stumbled in, a clothes shop, and vendors making their way through the crowd hawking Nathan’s hot dogs at 50 cents a pop.

Offering a slightly more sophisticated menu (although the onion soup and Sole Kathleen were cooked at home by owner Nilo DePaul and brought in frozen to be reheated on the premises), Aux Puces was a French restaurant on Fifty-fifth Street between Park and Madison avenues that provided a bridge between Old World elegance and the brash new Pop Art decor. From the outside, it looked like your run-of-the-mill faux Parisian bistro. “You had to
know
there was more behind it,” says Kathy Dorritie, one of the club’s DJs who would later gain fame under the name Cherry Vanilla as a member of the cast of Andy Warhol’s shocking stage show
Pork,
as David Bowie’s publicist, and as a punk icon in her own right. “Many people had no idea. You knocked on a big wooden door and David Smith either let you in or told you there was a private party going on back there and turned you away. Getting in depended on your being known, beautiful, sexy, famous, a drug dealer, a madam, whatever David decided was going to make the night divine.”
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Once inside, Aux Puces was a reflection of the anointed ones’ glitter and dazzle: It was filled with mirrored coffee tables painted with astrological signs surrounded by velvet banquettes and a mirrored fireplace. There were a few chandeliers and birdcages dangling from the already low ceiling and fake palm trees dotted around the floor to add a hint of natural color. “The dance floor was quite small,” says Dorritie, “but that was the fun of it. Everyone was jammed in together, bodies touching bodies, padding joints, snorts of coke, poppers. That’s what everyone liked about it.” The music played by Dorritie and fellow DJ Jay Martin was a hipper, less uptight selection than that spun by Terry Noel at Arthur: a mix of soul (Motown, Aretha Franklin, Lee Dorsey, Lorraine Ellison), rock (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”), and oddities like “word-jazz” maestro Ken Nordine and French yé-yé girls like Françoise Hardy and Sylvie Vartan.

Although the distaff discaire would soon become a rarity in New York nightlife, Dorritie had an almost equally hip counterpart in British expatriate Ann Henry, who spun at downtown’s only society discotheque, Salvation! on Sheridan Square. Like Arthur and Aux Puces, the scene inside Salvation! was largely the creation of doorman Mike Quashie, a limbo instructor from Trinidad, who let in plenty of Greenwich Village freaks to provide entertainment for the magnates, fashion designers, and their admirers who frequented the place. As the crowd of suits and women sporting Native American chic (headbands and deerskin miniskirts) attempted to do the booglaoo to the Doors on the tiny dance floor, Henry would also control the lights, projecting parameciumlike fractals onto the club’s white walls.

The wild fantasyscapes of Arthur, Cheetah, Salvation!, and Aux Puces paralleled the development of the multimedia aesthetic that began during the early to mid-1960s. With technology encroaching on art, and vice versa, the old divide between high and low culture started to crumble. Art movements like Fluxus (neo-Dadaists attempting to challenge the notion that works of art are fixed objects through mixed-media works like found poems, mail art, “aktions,” performance art, etc.), Jonas Mekas’s Expanded Cinema (in which film’s relationship with the screen and the theater was called into question with the use of slideshows, music, and lights), and Allan Kaprow’s “happenings” (improvised theatrical events that emphasized the experiences and sensations of the audience) not only questioned the nature of “art” but also the role of the spectator. The previously passive audience of art and cinema was now being asked to become part of the process, part of the work of art. This, in turn, paralleled the rise of the hippie counterculture and its championing of “mind-expanding” drugs that allegedly heightened sensitivity and fostered feelings of connectedness. Andy Warhol’s jarring discotheque environment Exploding Plastic Inevitable (with music provided by the Velvet Underground and film projections, strobe light show, and patterned slides designed by Warhol and assistant Dan Williams) and the hippie “be-ins” (“gatherings of the tribes” featuring poetry, lectures, rock bands, impromptu bongo jam sessions, child care provided by the Hell’s Angels, Timothy Leary playing patty-cake with little girls, and so on) combined the multimedia aesthetic with the sensory overload of psychedelic indulgence.

Of course, in the sphere of dance music the dancers had always been part of the spectacle. Predominantly black clubs like the Territorial Club on 125th Street in Harlem, the COCP social club on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, the Dom (below the Electric Circus on St. Mark’s Place), Nell Gwynn’s Taverne across the street from Grand Central Station, and Gary Catus’s Third World Gallery at 144 Fifth Avenue combined aspects of the house/rent parties of the 1920s and ’30s with the African-American tradition of the “jook” (a kind of communitarian party that emerged in the postemancipation South where new dance steps were taught and exchanged between people from different regions) to create atmospheres that were halfway between a bar and someone’s house. The focus at the gatherings was firmly on the dance floor, with the dancers essentially the star performers. As Sly Stone sang in 1970, “Everybody is a star,” and as Sybil Burton’s notion of the “mix” indicates, this idea of the audience being the true star of the show would become one of the most subversive aspects of disco culture.

The notions of the “happening” and the “be-in” were quickly assimilated into the club culture of the time and embodied most outrageously at the opening gala for the Electric Circus, housed in the old Polish National Hall at 23 St. Mark’s Place, on June 27, 1967 (as well as trapeze performers and performance artists, the club featured a blinding light show and a sound system so powerful that New York City’s electric supplier Con Edison had to lay a special cable underneath the street just to power it).
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But these ideas were expressed perhaps most perfectly, most bizarrely at a club at 429 Broome Street in SoHo, which at the time was still largely a no-go area full of abandoned warehouses and bad street lighting. Opened in 1968, Cerebrum was effectively the world’s first chill-out club. John Gruen in
Vogue
described an evening there: “At the door, a young man dressed in outer-space silver greets you with enormous gentleness and asks you to remove all your clothes … Now, as you and your date stand in pristine nakedness, a lovely young girl helps you into a voluminous, shimmery garment—a kind of silken flowing toga with hood that is cool and delectable to the touch—and leads you through a dark, carpeted corridor into a large softly lit room. Continuous music varies from Indian contemplative to hard-rock soul; on the walls, multicolored projections.