Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (51 page)

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Authors: Peter Shapiro

Tags: #70's, #History, #Music, #Nonfiction

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34
. Studio We (193 Eldridge Street) was the first of the lofts and was owned by James DuBois and Juma Sultan; Studio Rivbea (24 Bond Street) and Ali’s Alley (77 Greene Street) were probably the two most important lofts and were owned, respectively, by Sam Rivers and his wife Bea and Rashied Ali. Other important loft spaces included Environ at 476 Broadway, Axis at 463 West Broadway, Ladies Fort/Cafe NoHo at 2 Bond Street, Brook on West Seventeenth Street, and Jazzmania at 14 East 23rd Street. For more on the jazz loft scene, see Stanley Crouch, “Jazz Lofts: A Walk Through the Wild Sounds,”
The New York Times Magazine,
April 17, 1977, pp. 40–42, and Tom Roe, “Generation Ecstasy: New York’s Free Jazz Continuum,” in Rob Young, ed.,
Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music,
Continuum, 2002, pp. 241–62. The best available audio document of the loft jazz scene is the
Wildflower
series released on Douglas/Casablanca in 1978.

36
. The association of desperation and the discotheque can also be seen in the
salsotecas
of Cali, Colombia, during the ’70s and ’80s. Here, at clubs called Congo Bongo and Impacto Afro-Latino, men who couldn’t afford to take dates to the dance halls where live bands played would gather to listen to records both old and new and drown their sorrows in the local firewater. In the mid- to late ’80s, when the Cali drug cartel overtook the notorious Medellín cartel as Colombia’s top supplier of cocaine, the town’s sudden wealth, and the cartel’s sponsorship of many local groups, meant that the
salsotecas
were no longer needed. For more, see Lise A. Waxer,
The City of Musical Memory: Salsa, Record Grooves and Popular Culture in Cali, Colombia
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).

43
. Albert Goldman,
Disco
(New York: Hawthorn Books, 1978). While his book was undoubtedly learned and was certainly written with some pizzazz, Goldman is a problematic figure. Most irritatingly for the writer and historian, he doesn’t list any of his sources in his book. This might not be such a problem if it wasn’t for his reputation. His tabloid character assassinations of Elvis Presley and John Lennon have an infamy in the rock community comparable only to Southern preachers warning of the dangers of “jungle music.” But more crucial for disco scholars are his comments made during a 1967 debate with Gore Vidal that featured in a documentary on homosexuality made by the American CBS television network. “We’re in the course of gradually rolling back from our former cultural values or cultural identifications to a more narcissistic, more self-indulgent, more self-centered, essentially adolescent lifestyle,” he said, predating the neoconservative attack on popular culture by some fifteen years. “The homosexual thing cannot really be separated from a lot of other parallel phenomena in our society today … We have all sorts of fun-and-game approaches to sex. We have rampant exhibitionism today in every conceivable form. We have a sort of masochistic, sadistic vogue. We have a smut industry that grinds out millions of dollars of pornography a year. We have a sort of masturbatory dance style that’s embraced as if it were something profoundly sexual, whereas actually, all those dances do is just grind away without any consciousness of other people or their partners. And homosexuality is just one of a number of such things all tending toward the subversion, toward the final erosion, of our traditional cultural values. After all, when you’re culturally bankrupt, why you fall into the hands of receivers.”
By the time he wrote
Disco,
Goldman seemed to have made peace with narcissism—he even downright praises this aspect of disco culture. However, thorny sentiments still abound throughout the book, with barely disguised racism and misogyny giving an added piquancy to his homophobia. “To the ghetto-inspired pleasure grabbing, multiple drug abuse, and off-the-wall fucking of the ’60s have been added all those refinements that come with money and maturity”; “The moment you hit the room, your nostrils were distended by the stench of black sweat”; and “demonstrating unwittingly how totally unfulfilling it is to dance by yourself as opposed to how frustrating and infuriating it is to have to work out something as intimate as the way you dance with some cranky bitch” are but three examples.
Despite poring over countless accounts of Paris during the occupation, numerous histories of jazz in France and queries to the Académie Française, and numerous scholars specializing in the history of jazz in France, I have been unable to uncover any other source that confirms the existence of La Discothèque. The record lending arm of La Bibliothèque Française, which started in the 1930s, however, was called La Phonothèque. In
The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night
(New York: Morrow, 1997) Anthony Haden-Guest writes that “credit for coining the word ‘discothèque’—a play on cinémathèque—has been claimed by Brigitte Bardot’s director-husband Roger Vadim.”

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