Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (41 page)

The trickle became a stampede as the Thatcher and Reagan era and AIDS reared their ugly heads and freedoms of all kinds were being curtailed. In such a climate, talking positively about sex and pleasure was as radical and provocative a gesture as declaring yourself the antichrist was in 1977. Since the body became the prime political battleground (not only over AIDS but also, in the United States at least, over abortion rights in the face of an escalating conservative and evangelical backlash) in the early ’80s, disco had lots to offer punk. Punk was largely an abnegation of sex and the body—consider Johnny Rotten’s famous comment about love being “two minutes and 52 seconds of squelching noises,” or that punk’s dance was not a rite of courtship and touching but either pogoing (i.e., jumping up and down) or hurling yourself violently around the room and bashing into your fellow “dancers”—but disco was often nothing but sex and one long body high, and the blending of punk’s more expressly political ambitions with disco’s pleasure principle was more than just a marriage of convenience.

Of course, punk had plenty to teach disco too. While disco certainly had more than its fair share of divas, women were largely absent from the production and decision-making processes. There were very few female DJs of note during the disco era: Kathy Dorritie, Ann Henry, and Bert Lockett from the early days; Sharon White of lesbian disco Sahara and the Saint, and Lizzz Kritzer at La Folie during its heyday; and Susan Moribito, Wendy Hunt, and Jenny Costa during the later stages. Punk opened up space for people whose voices were too shrill or too deep for the pop status quo or were just plain unruly and weird, and its DIY spirit allowed women to take greater roles, to form bands, to become more than just eye candy. Since women generally have fewer aesthetic hangups than more tribal young men, the merger of grate and groove, of feedback and fatback was often done in their hands.

That said, the first proof of punk and disco’s empathy
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was made by a mixed gender group, New York’s James White & the Blacks. James White (né Siegfried) also went by the name James Chance, and with his group the Contortions he made jazz and funk snarl with the same intensity as punk rock. As James White, he did the same thing to disco. “I’ve always been interested in disco,” he told the
SoHo News.
“I mean, disco is
disgusting,
but there’s something in it that’s always interested me—
monotony.
It’s sort of jungle music, but whitened and perverted. On this album I’m trying to restore it to what it
could
be. Really primitive.”
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“Contort Yourself” was released in late 1978 and it was really primitive. Robert Quine’s main guitar riff was a twitchier take on the archetypal Nile Rodgers riff, and it was less sympathetic to the rhythm. The secondary guitar riff had more than a slight similarity to Cymande’s great Brit funk one-off, “Bra.” White’s skronky sax bleats were similarly abrasive, while the hand claps and cod-Latin percussion fills could have been lifted off a Gloria Gaynor record.

While groups like Blondie followed James White & the Blacks by making ironic disco records (“Heart of Glass”), others remade disco in their own image. Public Image Limited’s “Death Disco,” which reached #20 on the British pop charts in July 1979, was perhaps the most uncompromising record ever to make a Top 20 chart. While only a thoroughly miserable bastard like John Lydon would come up with a title like “Death Disco” or even conceive of writing a disco song about his mother dying, “Death Disco” revealed the darker truth about disco: It was a culture that was just as much on the brink as punk; its participants were equally trapped; it attempted to suggest answers to questions posed by a society in the process of abandoning a universalist communitarian model for a vision based on cutthroat individualism; disco’s glitter queens and escapist working-class teens were kicking against the pricks the only way they knew how. Part Kaddish, part Lydon throwing himself on his mother’s funeral pyre, part fiddling while Rome burns, the seething funk guitar inferno arabesque of “Death Disco” remains postpunk’s finest, most defiant, most radical moment. Nevertheless, even though guitarist Keith Levene largely based the music on a rather different form of dance music (Tchaikovsky’s
Swan Lake
), the only part of the record that prevented “Death Disco” from being played at New York’s more adventurous discotheques like Paradise Garage or the Loft was Lydon’s infernal wailing.

“Death Disco” was, however, played at many of the new breed of nightclubs that were opening up in New York, not as Studio 54’s less glamorous stepsisters but as Studio’s bitter and twisted evil twins. These clubs were certainly reacting against what they perceived to be disco’s snobbishness (even though they often replicated it, just with a different dress code), but they were also borrowing from disco and reaching back to the early ’70s when disco and punk developed side by side, reacting against the same things.

The connection between punk and disco goes back to Aux Puce DJ Kathy Dorritie, who would transform into Warhol superstar, David Bowie publicist, and punk singer Cherry Vanilla in the early ’70s. One of her regular haunts was the legendary Max’s Kansas City, a bar at 213 Park Avenue South that was opened in 1965 by Mickey Ruskin. Max’s crowd was a who’s who of American bohemia: in the front room macho artists like Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg, Brice Marden, and Frosty Myers cavorted with fashion photographers like John Ford, Richard Davis, and Izzy Valaris, who brought along models like Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy; while in the backroom, Andy Warhol held court with his Warhol Superstars, receiving supplicants like Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, and even Terry Noel. They were served by Debbie Harry, who was a waitress at Max’s in the very early ’70s. The crowd of regulars may have been glittering, but most of them went to Max’s because if you came during cocktail hour and bought one drink you could eat yourself sick on the famous chickpeas.

In 1969, Ruskin opened a disco upstairs from the bar with Criss Cross as the DJ and slide shows by Tiger Morse. As the disco started to attract regular visitors like Rauschenberg and New York Knicks great Walt Frazier, Cross was replaced by Paul Eden (who was particularly fond of playing “Monkey Man” by the Rolling Stones) and Claude Pervis, and then by Wayne (later Jayne) County, who would wear a Dusty Springfield wig and wield a dildo while spinning. The last record of the night was always the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” The disco also hosted live shows, including a famous performance by Elephant’s Memory (of “Mongoose” fame), who got the gig because they were friends with Jerry Rubin. It was more famous, however, for being one of the crucibles of punk thanks to performances by the Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, Iggy & the Stooges, the Ramones, Suicide, and Patti Smith.
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Based on the traditional rock band format with a raison d’être of pure confrontation, punk was pretty much exclusively a performance-based genre. However, punk’s nihilism and its reliance on the tools of the enemy meant that it was an aesthetic dead end doomed to burn out almost as quickly as it began. Punk survived by adapting disco groove and reggae skank (largely thanks to Don Letts, who noticed the millennial fervor of both genres and spun reggae during intermissions between punk bands at the Roxy in London, and to Lydon himself, who played reggae alongside Krautrock and Van Der Graf Generator on his radio show on London’s Capital Radio) to its own ends and, as it did so, the punk discotheque started to take shape. Hurrah, at 36 West 62nd Street, was opened by New York nightlife mainstay Arthur Weinstein as a pre–Studio 54 celeb joint. It lasted for a little while, but when Studio stole its fire, it turned more bizarre in order to carve out its own niche rather than struggle on as a place that people went to if they couldn’t get into Studio. In the summer of 1978, Jim Fouratt was made the manager, and he brought in a British DJ who played synth-punk records by the Normal (“Warm Leatherette”) and Cabaret Voltaire (“Nag Nag Nag”). Soon, Hurrah started to call itself “The Rock Disco,” and it quickly became the preeminent postpunk club in New York, stealing the thunder of CBGB by becoming one of the first clubs to show videos and by following the clues in the music and combining DJing with live performances from groups like Liquid Liquid and ESG.

These two New York groups represented the most experimental end of the punk-disco fusion. ESG was a quartet of sisters (with a little help from their friend Tito Libran) from the South Bronx projects who named themselves after emerald, sapphire, and gold, and expressed an admiration for Barry Manilow and Christopher Cross, but somehow still managed to open up for both the Clash and PiL. From their creation myth (Rene, Marie, Valerie, and Deborah Scroggins’s mother bought them their first instruments to keep them off the streets), which says everything you need to know about the redemptive power of music to the universes contained within the stark lines of their masterpiece—their self-titled EP containing “Moody,” “UFO,” and “You’re No Good,” which was recorded at Hurrah—ESG perfectly summed up the times. As Rene told journalist Steven Harvey, “I don’t feel like a disco group, I don’t feel like a punk group. I feel like a funk group, maybe like Rick James says, punk-funk. I feel we’re right here, in between, we’ve got something for everybody.”
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Liquid Liquid (bassist Richard McGuire, drummer Scott Hartley, vocalist Salvatore Principato, and percussionist Dennis Young), meanwhile, started off life as a punk band from New Jersey called Liquid Idiot. After getting turned on by Can, Fela Kuti, and dub reggae, the renamed Liquid Liquid became rock deconstructionists with a ferocious but minimal groove. Its 1983 track “Cavern” was huge in discos throughout the Big Apple, got airplay on WBLS (New York’s main black radio station), and even reached the mid ’50s on
Billboard
’s disco chart. As a further example of the rare synergy that existed between not only punk and disco, but also hip-hop at the time, “Cavern” was used as the basis for Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel’s “White Lines (Don’t Do It).” Unfortunately, Liquid Liquid was never credited, and the ensuing lawsuit bankrupted its label, 99 Records, and split the band apart.

Not too long after Fouratt took over Hurrah, Steve Maas, who used to work with maverick filmmaker Jack Smith, opened the Mudd Club at 77 White Street on October 31, 1978, with the B-52’s playing. Instead of the hundreds of thousands lavished on Studio 54, Xenon, and their ilk, the interior of the Mudd Club cost a grand total of $15,000—sound system included—with much of the decor coming from the surplus stores around the corner on Canal Street. While the Mudd Club presented itself as the alternative to Studio 54, it was still exclusive—it just had a steel chain instead of a velvet rope. David Bowie, Mariel Hemingway, Diane von Furstenberg, and Dan Aykroyd were regular visitors.
People
magazine even reported that “Andy Warhol is happy to have found a place, he says, ‘where people will go to bed with anyone—man, woman or child.’”
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While the club remains a legend in New York nightlife for its blaxploitation parties, its erotic Twister nights, and its Mother’s Day party in 1979 where half the people came dressed as Joan Crawford and the other half “wore pinafores and Band-Aids as Mommie’s battered dearests,”
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the club’s music policy was often less festive. Although DJ Glenn O’Brien would typically play Lipps, Inc.’s “Funkytown” and the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno” with an ironic wink, the Mudd Club was known for a more arty blend of disco camp and punk sneer. Painter Jean-Michel Basquiat frequently played there with his band Gray (Michael Holman, Nicholas Taylor, and Justin Thyme). Unlike the bold colors and information overload of Basquiat’s canvases, Gray’s music was minimalist disco noir. Another Mudd Club regular was Stuart Argabright, whose group Ike Yard specialized in industrial desolation, but as Dominatrix he created the perfect blend of punk and disco sexuality with “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight.”

*   *   *

While groups like Spandau Ballet, Haircut 100, and Duran Duran (whose stated ambition was to combine Chic with the Sex Pistols) and clubs like Blitz and Club for Heroes were the public faces of the punk-disco merger in Britain, plenty of other groups followed PiL’s twisted route toward a more “serious” music that belied both disco’s tacky surface and punk’s pleasure-denying sneer, and provided some of the most satisfying resolutions of popular music’s eternal mind-body problem.

London may be the United Kingdom’s metropole, but much of the best multicultural genre bending was occurring in provincial cities like Manchester and Bristol. Most of Bristol’s mutant disco action centered on Dick O’Dell and his Y label. O’Dell was a recovering hippie who had previously worked the lights and sound for Pink Floyd and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. In 1978 he started managing the Pop Group, a Bristol band that blended punk dissonance, disco grooves, dub bass, and dislocation, and lyrics that read like headlines from
Socialist Worker.
Y began in 1980 with releases from the Pop Group and the Slits (an all-female band working in the same territory) but had its biggest hit with Pigbag’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Pigbag.” Great dance music and Cheltenham somehow don’t go together, but then again the early ’80s were all about strange combinations. Streamlining the Pop Group’s aural anarcho-syndicalism (and with former Pop Group bassist Simon Underwood on board), Roger Freeman, Chris Hamlyn, Chris Lee, and James Johnstone came up with punk disco’s biggest hit with their cowabunga rendering of the old
Tarzan
theme. And, more important, they were the only disco interlopers to understand the power of the party whistle and the synth chirp. While O’Dell would release very undisco records from Diamanda Galás and Sun Ra, Y would continue to twist the dance floor into new shapes with records from New York’s Pulsallama (an all-female group that sounded like Pigbag combined with Julie Brown), Leeds’s Shriekback (who formed from the ashes of Gang of Four) and Bristol’s Glaxo Babies and Maximum Joy, whose “Stretch” was the perfect blend of funk intensity and claw-your-eyes-out skronk even though the rap was so bad that it paled next to George Michael blessing the mike on “Wham! Rap.”