Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (44 page)

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As the Paradise Garage was reinstating the spirituality and communion of early disco after its fall from grace, another enormously influential nightclub was propelling disco into the future by remaking it as a kind of doo-wop, one not to be sung on the corner or a stoop under a streetlight, but in the arcade by the glare of a video game screen and mostly by girls. Blending the innocence of the early girl groups and doo-wop singers with disco’s fractured sense of melody and a percussion sensibility halfway between disco and hip-hop, the music that emerged from the Funhouse was called freestyle. While many of the aural hallmarks of disco were no longer in evidence, this new music was still very much a tribal rite, a declaration of often forbidden sexuality and an expression of the ambivalence about crossing over.

Situated in one of many of Manhattan’s warehouse districts at 526 West 26 Street, the Funhouse opened on March 30, 1979, with Jim Burgess and Bobby DJ. They were soon replaced by Jonathan Fearing, who played a sort of classicist disco at a time when traditional disco was dying and was mutating into new forms. Fearing was replaced in 1981 by young hotshot John “Jellybean” Benitez, who had his finger on the pulse of the changing dance scene in New York. Benitez drew a fanatical following of Hispanic and Italian-American teenagers from the Bronx and the outlying areas of Brooklyn and Queens like Canarsie and Ozone Park. The dancers at the club were called “buggas,” and their uniform (for both boys and girls) consisted of short, sleeveless cutoff T-shirts (often with the name of their neighborhood printed on it) that showed generous amounts of midriff, sweatpants, bandanas rolled as thin as possible and tied around the forehead, and Chinese slippers.

The vibe was a combination of hip-hop and disco: The crowd would bark if they liked a song that Jellybean was playing and boo if they didn’t; the boys would be prowling the dance floor looking for people to battle with (both with dance moves and with fists) while the girls would be singing along to the cathartic songs of heartbreak. Jellybean, whose DJ booth was situated inside a twelve-foot-high clown face, played a combination of electro (Man Parrish’s “Hip-Hop Be-Bop”), disco (Jimmy “Bo” Horne’s “Spank”), weird disco (Martin Circus’s “Disco Circus”), Italo-disco (Harry Thumann’s “Underwater”), British New Wave (New Order’s “Confusion” and Wide Boy Awake’s “Slang Teacher”), and classic break beats (Jimmy Castor’s “It’s Just Begun”).

The sound the club was most known for, though, was the hard electroboogie of Arthur Baker and John Robie, especially records like Jenny Burton’s “Remember What You Like,” Freez’s “I.O.U.,” Planet Patrol’s “Play at Your Own Risk,” and Slack’s “Slack.” Robie was one of the most important keyboard players since World War II, largely because of his mastery of the Emulator sampling keyboard, a more affordable version of the Fairlight without any sequencing capabilities, which was released in 1982, ushering in the era of sampladelia. While sampling is most associated with hip-hop, its first use on record was on former Main Ingredient vocalist Cuba Gooding’s 1983 version of his old group’s “Happiness Is Just Around The Bend” (a cover of the Brian Auger song). Robie concocted an entire chorus out of one syllable, Gooding singing “bop.” The sampling on “Happiness” was fairly discreet: You had to be part of the cognoscenti to notice it. However, later that year Robie made unmistakable use of the Emulator on C-Bank’s stunning disco
concrète
classic “One More Shot,” which used a snippet of the sound of breaking glass as a percussion device and all manner of weird synth striations and nasty scratches to give a grim edge to vocalist Jenny Burton’s tale of heartbreak and lover’s paranoia.

Records like these were the flip side of the music popular in late gay discos like the Saint and Trocadero Transfer: Where Patrick Cowley used the new technology to imagine a brave new world of sexuality, Robie and Baker’s harsh drum machines, piercing synthesizers, and non sequitur sound effects made perfect sense to alienated kids raised on video games; where Cowley et al. were celebrating the fact that it was raining men, these records were asking that age-old question of teen love—will you still love me tomorrow? Somewhere in this mechanical matrix, New York Latinos heard ancestral echoes of salsa piano lines and
montuño
rhythms. In the hands of producers like the Latin Rascals, Paul Robb, Omar Santana, and Andy “Panda” Tripoli, the Pac-Man bleeps, synth stabs, and Roland TR-808 claves became a robotic Latin jam session called freestyle.

Freestyle’s ground zero was Shannon’s 1983 single “Let the Music Play.” Although it didn’t have the hi-hat sound that would come to characterize freestyle percussion, the song’s electro-woodblock-and-cowbell percussion and kick drum/snare drum interaction sounded like a cross between Gary Numan and Tito Puente, and provided the blueprint for freestyle’s street-smart tales of innocence and experience. “Please Don’t Go,” by sixteen-year-old Nayobe and produced by Andy Panda, further Latinized the “Let the Music Play” formula by featuring keyboard patterns stolen from both Eddie Palmieri and Patrice Rushen on top of synthesized timbal beats. With these records taking off in his club, Jellybean attempted to reclaim the old break beat classic “The Mexican” for Latinos from both Ennio Morricone and British prog rock group Babe Ruth.

However, as freestyle was starting to take off, Jellybean’s interest was elsewhere. According to legend, one night in 1983 a Funhouse regular had sneaked into the DJ booth and managed to play her demo over the club’s sound system when Jellybean wasn’t paying attention. The crowd loved what they heard, and the clubgoer persuaded Jellybean to produce a track for her. Her name, of course, was Madonna. Although she had previously sung backup for Patrick “Born to Be Alive” Hernandez, and Jellybean’s production of “Holiday” was significantly more melodic and more streamlined than most of what he played at the Funhouse, Madonna’s early style owed a huge debt to the freestyle sound.

Jellybean quit the Funhouse in June 1984 to pursue his own recording and production career, but freestyle continued to dominate the club thanks to Jellybean’s replacement, Lil’ Louie Vega, who would later go on to fame as one half of Masters At Work. Meanwhile, former Funhouse dancer Lisa Velez was discovered by production team Full Force and, as Lisa Lisa, became freestyle’s biggest early star. With a dubby synth effect stolen from Robie’s Emulator and a Roland woodblock pattern, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam’s debut record, “I Wonder If I Take You Home,” became the first freestyle record to dent the American Top 40 in 1985.

Records like Shannon’s “Let the Music Play” were also big on Friday “Wheels of Steel” nights at the Roxy, an enormous club at 515 West 18th Street. Freestyle was also called “Latin hip-hop,” and its drum machine beats fit in with the electro sound that was being developed at this club by DJs like D.ST and Afrika Bambaataa. While the uptown hip-hop kids were turning downtown technology to their own ends at the “Wheels of Steel” nights, there was a similar reclamation effort going on with disco the rest of the week.

The Roxy was conceived of as a roller rink, and “initially, they wanted to be Studio 54 but with roller skates—the red ropes, celebrities, everything,” claims Danny Krivit, who was the original DJ there. “A couple years into it, the [original] owners sold it to another guy. The new owner really wanted to open the club up and fill it. Roller skating, they’d consider three, four hundred people a good night. I remember that I started doing Monday nights because that was the only night of the week he wasn’t there trying to tell me what to play. It was only about thirty or fifty people that night—he didn’t care about that night. Very quickly I got the numbers up to twelve hundred, which for roller skating is very crowded. And it dwarfed any of his other nights. It was only because I was playing what they needed to hear rather than what he thought they needed to hear—real roller-skating music.”
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Developing from more R&B-flavored disco, like Patrick Adams’s productions, Brass Construction, and the Mizell brothers’ work on A Taste of Honey’s “Boogie Oogie Oogie,” this “real roller-skating music” was more downtempo and less strictly 4/4 than classic disco because you just can’t skate to high-tempo music. Krivit was playing records like Shalamar’s “Take That to the Bank” and “The Second Time Around,” the Whispers’ “And the Beat Goes On,” Lakeside’s “Fantastic Voyage” (all released on Los Angeles’s Solar label), Rufus’s “Do You Love What You Feel,” and Vaughan Mason’s “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll.” While maintaining much of disco’s groove, these records also marked a return of what dance music historian Brian Chin calls “an upbeat-and-downbeat, one-two feel to dance.”
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Away from the roller rink, this “funkier” groove came to be known as “boogie” or “street music,” “to distinguish it from Hi-NRG and the styles of ’80s dance music in Europe.”
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Many of the early records in this style—the Fantastic Aleems’ “Get Down Friday Night,” Logg’s “I Know You Will,” Convertion’s “Let’s Do It” (all featuring LeRoy Burgess on vocals), Central Line’s “Walking Into Sunshine”—were hits at the Paradise Garage, and pop trinkets like Indeep’s “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life” had an across-the-board appeal. Soon enough, though, records like Young & Company’s “I Like What You’re Doin’ to Me,” Goldie Alexander’s “Show You My Love,” Major Harris’s “Gotta Make Up Your Mind,” Kinky Foxx’s “So Different,” and Ceela’s “I’m in Love” began to articulate a more defiantly R&B sensibility and broke away from the rainbow coalition that defined New York in the immediate postdisco era, feeding into R&B styles like the Minneapolis funk of Jam & Lewis and the New Jack Swing of Teddy Riley that severed any connection to disco or “white” music.

“YOU MUST FEEL THE DRIVE”

Italo-Disco

Disco may have been tarred and feathered, drawn and quartered, and flayed in the United States, but disco never died in Europe. It was never even dragged through the mud or had its name used in vain. Instead, disco became part, if not the basis, of the continent’s pop framework. Perhaps it was because disco maintained a connection to old-fashioned Tin Pan Alley melodies or because in Europe pop is treasured for its frivolity or because Europeans saw disco as their last chance to maintain a foothold on a pop landscape that was fast mutating into the primary vehicle for American cultural imperialism. But whatever the reason, disco was perhaps even bigger in Europe after its 1979 death in America than before. Part of this was due to laws in many European countries that mandated that a certain proportion of records played on pop radio had to be homegrown, but it is also undeniable that disco flourished in the hands of European producers in the 1980s, under protectionism or not, and nowhere more so than in Italy.

Italy had plenty of jet-set discos in the late ’60s/early ’70s, including the regular Roman haunt of the Onassises, Number One (two blocks from the Via Veneto), where a drug investigation in 1972 quickly turned to stolen art trafficking, forcing many members “to [leave] hurriedly for safaris in East Africa and for the sun in Acapulco.”
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However, typical of the fractured history of disco, the story of Italo-disco really begins in France.
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The Peppers were a poppy prog rock quintet featuring synth player Mat Camison and drummer Pierre Alain Dahan, who, inspired by the success of Chicory Tip’s cover of Giorgio Moroder’s “Son of My Father” and Hot Butter’s “Popcorn,” decided to put out their own goofy synth novelty number. With its bouncy clavinet bass line, hand claps, “bop-bop-bop-bop bop-bop-a-da-da” vocals, and whiny synth melody, “Pepper Box” was a huge hit across Europe in 1973 and was an early disco hit in the United States the following year. A few years later, Dahan was recruited to be part of a group to flesh out a TV theme song for widespread commercial release. The group was called Space, and “Magic Fly” ushered in synth disco along with Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” in 1977. But where “I Feel Love” used the Moog throb for distinctly erotic purposes, “Magic Fly” was not Spanish fly and used synth pulses and sequencer rhythms to sail topographic oceans and explore the dark side of the moon. This obsession with space and the prog rock tendencies would come to characterize Italo-disco.
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Disco music had arrived in Italy in the mid-1970s wearing more typical clothing. “From 1974 to 1976, there was this club [Baia Degli Angeli in Gabicce, near Rimini on the Adriatic coast] with two American DJs, Bob Day and Tom Sison,” says Italian DJ Daniele Baldelli. “They had beautiful records that Italian DJs never listened to before because there was no import-export in that period. We received records from America maybe six months later. So when these two boys came, it was very good to listen to this music.”
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The beautiful records that Day and Sison were playing were examples of the Philadelphia sound that would soon set Europe alight with its mixture of soaring melodies and driving rhythms.

In 1977, Day headed back to the States and asked Baldelli, who had been DJing since 1969 in nearby Cattolica, to replace him. Baldelli agreed and, along with Claudio Rispoli, carried on playing Day and Sison’s mixture of Philly, disco, and funk. “At Baia Degli Angeli they had something very nice for the DJ,” Baldelli remembers. “I was playing in a glass elevator, so I could go up and down from the ground floor to the first floor and see all the dance floors in the club—the three inside and the two outside near the pool.”
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Baldelli left Baia Degli Angeli in 1978, and in April 1979 he became the DJ at the Cosmic club in Lazise, a small town on Lake Garda.
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The club, which had a capacity of one thousand people, was based on famous American discotheques: The dance floor had the same multicolored lights as Odyssey 2001, where
Saturday Night Fever
was filmed, and the club had columns of light similar to those at Studio 54. However, the Cosmic was much more egalitarian than its models. “The people that came to Cosmic … were Italian people from eighteen to twenty-eight, all the same style,” Baldelli says. “They dressed with jeans, T-shirts, the girls were like hippies in Woodstock, many flowers and so on. At Cosmic there was no door selector.”
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