Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (8 page)

Perhaps because of such atrocities, Moulton’s tapes were garnering him attention from some of the record companies attuned to New York’s club life. “Because I used to be in the record business, I would go to different companies and ask them for instrumentals of certain records to see if I could do a little stretcharoo here and there because I’ve got to make these tapes longer,” Moulton says. “So I did it to a song called ‘Dream World’ [by journeyman Oklahoma soul singer Don Downing]. And the label [Scepter] said, ‘Do you think you could do that in the studio?’ I went, ‘I really don’t know. I’ve only been in a studio a couple of times and that was back in the sixties at RCA.’ So I did it, and I noticed that the song is so short. I said, ‘How am I going to make it longer? Oh, I’ll just do this and blah blah blah. But I can’t do that because it modulates. How am I going to get around that?’ … I’m listening and listening and listening. I said, ‘What if I take out the strings, take out this, take out this. God, I gotta take out everything.’ Finally, I said, ‘Wait a minute, all that’s left is the percussion. Maybe I can raise the congas a little bit, then just kind of groove, and then all of a sudden come in with the bass line.’ I wanted to build it back up so that it sounded like it modulated again. Of course, it didn’t. Everyone to this day says it modulates twice. Oh, no, it don’t, only once.” The label liked what Moulton did and asked him to perform a similar trick with B. T. Express’s “Do It (’Til You’re Satisfied).” “The group hated what I did to that record, they absolutely hated it,” he declares. “I saw them on
Soul Train
when it was the number one song. [Imitates Don Cornelius] ‘We’re talking to B. T. Express. Their record is 5:35 and the radio stations are playing it.’ ‘Yeah, that’s the way we recorded it.’ Oh, I wanted to kill them. They kept saying, ‘Oh, you put the organ in the middle.’ Man, I wanted to kill them I was so mad.”
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Moulton wasn’t just elongating records to meet the demands of the dance floor. Holing himself up in his living room, Moulton was toying and playing with these records, using his equalizer to boost the bottom end and adding breaks to create disco extravaganzas out of three-minute pop songs. The first side of Gloria Gaynor’s 1975 album,
Never Can Say Goodbye,
was an eighteen-minute mix of her first hit, “Honey Bee,” the Clifton Davis–penned title track, and a cover of the Four Tops’ “Reach Out, I’ll Be There.” “I speeded [‘Honey Bee’] up a bit, but what that does is it puts things up in a higher range and makes the drums a little brighter,” Moulton told
Black Music
magazine. “It makes the voice a little higher, and if you roll off the bottom and put more highs on the voice, you can almost make like she’s really screaming, like she’s really into the record. I’ve done that with a lot of records, where it sounds like they’re singing their ass off, but they’re not ’cause it’s done technically.”
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Whatever studio alchemy Moulton was up to, the industry wasn’t interested. Instead, it was obsessed with the effect the longer records might have on radio play and its well-established promotional machines. The success of records like “Do It (’Til You’re Satisfied)” led the December 14, 1974, edition of
Billboard
to trumpet, “Discos Demand Five-Minute Singles” on its front page. A survey found DJs and club owners bemoaning the industry’s slow response time to the increasing importance of the discotheque as a medium for breaking records and its seeming lack of interest in satisfying the clubs’ needs for longer records with breaks and builds. While independent labels like Scepter and Roulette believed they garnered extra sales by releasing versions of Don Downing’s “Dream World” and Moment of Truth’s “Your Love” (also a Moulton “stretcharoo”) with a “radio mix” on one side and a longer, club-friendly mix on the flip, the majority of the industry was happy with the status quo. As is always the case in the music biz, though, an accident would force the record companies’ hand.

Sometime in early 1975, after doing an edit of Al Downing’s “I’ll Be Holding On,” Moulton took the mix to New York’s Media Sound to be mastered onto a seven-inch metal blank as a reference disc. However, they were out of them and had only twelve-inch blanks left, so Moulton and engineer José Rodriguez used one of those instead. “Oh, my God, boy was that so hot,” Moulton enthuses, remembering the sound when they first played the twelve-inch. “It just made the regular forty-fives sound like such shit. The levels were so much … the dynamics, the bass, the everything, the volume was like … playing something that was fifth generation and all of a sudden you’re playing the master tape.” For Moulton’s next edit, “So Much for Love” by Moment of Truth for the Roulette label, he went one step further and gave some test pressings to DJs like Richie Kaczor and David Rodriguez. Although not released commercially until 1976 (by Salsoul), this was the very first twelve-inch single. Several promotional twelve-inches followed in quick succession: Scepter released Bobby Moore’s “(Call Me Your) Anything Man” in June 1975; Warners issued a special promotional one-sided twelve-inch version of Calhoon’s “(Do You Wanna) Dance Dance Dance” in July; Atlantic countered with Barrabas’s “Mellow Blow” and Ace Spectrum’s “Keep Holding On” in August; also in August was Moulton’s mix of
Good Times
star Ralph Carter’s “When You’re Young and in Love” on Mercury.

Of course, the twelve-inch single not only allowed for a more defined bass sound and greater volume, but the format’s much less constraining temporal restrictions allowed for seemingly infinite possibilities of restructuring songs. However, none of the mixers of the original twelve-inches seemed to grasp this—most were pretty formulaic, prefab extensions. It wasn’t until one of disco’s maverick geniuses got his first remix commission that this would change, and that the new format would get a work worthy of releasing to the general public. Released a week before Salsoul’s pressing of “So Much for Love” in May 1976, Walter Gibbons’s radical restructuring of the veteran Philadelphia vocal group Double Exposure’s “Ten Percent” was the first commercially available twelve-inch. While primeness has been thrust upon it simply for being first, “Ten Percent” would deserve accolades even if it were the 137th twelve-inch single. Gibbons, the resident DJ at Galaxy 21 at 256 West 23rd Street, was almost universally revered on the disco scene for his heavily percussive DJing style that was nearly as reliant on sliced-and-diced breaks as the hip-hop DJs in the Bronx. People called Gibbons’s style “jungle music.” The consumately professional (and commercial) Moulton’s reedits were often merely reconstructive plastic surgery, a simple matter of extension and reduction. Gibbons’s mixes, on the other hand, were as much about deconstruction as reconstruction. The first minute and forty seconds of “Ten Percent” is as intoxicating an experience as recorded music has to offer: all champagne bubbles and gooey chocolate cake. Beginning with the ur-disco beat (a few seconds of hissing hi-hats and galloping kicks enveloped by serpentine congas) punctuated by the sharpest string edit you will ever hear, the track is then transmuted into ambrosia when Gibbons isolates TG Conway’s unctuous keyboard. Gibbons not only extends the track from three minutes to more than nine, but turns it into a Philly fantasia (the record was produced by the mainstays of the Philadelphia International house band MFSB, Earl Young, Ron Baker, and Norman Harris) of orchestral swoops, pinpoint details and intense but almost soothing breaks.

His 1977 remix of Loleatta Holloway’s “Hit and Run” was equally remarkable. This wasn’t a cut-and-paste job like “Ten Percent,” though. Here, he had access to the multitrack tapes, enabling him to rebuild the song from scratch, which he did. Excising large portions of the record, including several minutes of Holloway’s vocals, Gibbons shifted the focus of the track from hokey love song to burning stormer with Holloway, one of disco’s most charismatic and individual vocalists, reduced to nothing but vamps and exhortations. Other early Gibbons landmark mixes include the percussion frenzy of Anthony White’s “Block Party” and the Salsoul Orchestra’s “Nice ’n’ Naasty.”

Gibbons was very different from the other drama queen DJs. A shy, introverted guy from Queens, he came alive on the turntables and was perhaps the most technically gifted of all the disco spinners. Picking up from where Siano left off, Gibbons looped his favorite percussion breaks (Freddie Perren’s “Two Pigs and a Hog” from the
Cooley High
soundtrack, Jermaine Jackson’s “Erucu” from the
Mahogany
soundtrack, Rare Earth’s “Happy Song”) seemingly endlessly and cut back and forth between records like a hip-hop DJ. He was also perhaps the first to make his own reel-to-reel edits of his favorite records.
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But even as he sliced and diced records on the turntables, Gibbons never lost sight of the message. “Walter was completely message oriented,” remembers Danny Krivit. “You didn’t hear mixed messages, you didn’t hear a record say one thing and then another say something completely different and chop the message off. He went with the flow with that … He also had a sound system that he was really working and at that time not a lot of people were proficient at that. He kind of customized the songs as he went on, like he was writing tracks.”
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But Gibbons was also a deeply troubled soul, and the same demons that drove him to become a born-again Christian in 1979 probably led him to explore the darkest recesses of inner space in the studio via the shape of dub effects and techniques. Like dub’s high priest, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Gibbons seemed to believe that the mixing board was imbued with mystical properties and was a pathway to some cosmic netherworld. Gibbons’s astonishing 1978 remix of Bettye LaVette’s “Doin’ the Best That I Can” is the pinnacle of his (and probably all of disco’s) dub experimentation. Slowing the track to an absolute crawl and stripping it like an abandoned car with the remains scattered across eleven minutes, Gibbons somehow made the record funkier and more danceable. Sort of like the most cloying Motown B side in dub, “Doin’ the Best That I Can” is almost antidisco in the way that Gibbons palpably heaps scorn on producer Eric Matthews’s worst instincts by constantly undercutting the saccharine strings, judiciously using dropout and echo, importing his own rhythms, and essentially reversing the entire arrangement. This isn’t to say that Gibbons isn’t capable of going over the top, though. In disco’s long and glorious history of excess only the completely irrelevant use of slap bass about two-thirds of the way through A Taste of Honey’s “Boogie Oogie Oogie” can top the totally gratuitous half-second proto-House percussion fill Gibbons throws in at around the two-minute mark.

“Doin’ the Best That I Can,” however, would be one of Gibbons’s last contributions to disco for some time. His spiritual rebirth in Seattle in 1979 led him to stop playing records that were not uplifting. While disco contained many trace elements of gospel and, thanks largely to David Mancuso, preached positivity and loving your brother, during its heyday in 1978–79 it was focused almost exclusively on sex, and Gibbons wanted nothing to do with that. As a result, Gibbons disappeared from the scene for several years, playing gospel records and mixes of Philadelphia instrumentals with his own Christian-message vocals over the top at his own house parties. But when he did reappear in the mid-1980s, it would be with records whose effects are still reverberating today.

“COME AND GET THESE MEMORIES”

The Parallel Universe of Northern Soul

It’s well past midnight on a Saturday night/Sunday morning in a relatively unkempt, unlicensed venue in a ghostly part of town. In a tiny, claustrophobic, dimly lit room, a sweaty, heavily drugged, overwhelmingly male crowd is executing athletic spins and leaps in time to Brenda Holloway’s Motown stomper, “Just Look What You’ve Done.” The crowd seems hell-bent on partying, trying to escape their skin with a fanatical fervor. They’re equally devoted to the records the DJ is playing, a series of Motown-style soul songs with a pounding 4/4 beat and a surging heartbreak melody, but with brittle instrumentation that often sounds like someone stifling tears.

It’s a scene straight out of any number of New York’s underground discotheques of the early 1970s. Yet this dance floor exorcism was taking place thousands of miles away and several years earlier. The site was the Twisted Wheel club at 6 Whitfield Street in central Manchester, England, on any weekend in the mid- to late 1960s. This was the birth of a strange phenomenon that would come to be called “Northern Soul,” in which young men from the industrial wastelands of the north of England worshipped American soul records—the rarer and more obscure the better—with a zeal and piety that would shame anyone but the most devout religious followers. Over the next several years, the culture of Northern Soul would not only parallel the nascent disco scene in New York but profoundly influence it as well.

Even more than being a nation of shopkeepers, Britain has always been a nation of collectors. Ever since New Orleans and Dixieland jazz were superseded by swing in the early 1930s, the United Kingdom has seen numerous small collector cultures dedicated to preserving and obsessively documenting African-American musical styles that have fallen out of favor with black Americans. The original “keepers of yesterday’s blues” (as Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones called them in
Blues People
) were dubbed the “moldy figs,” but successive cultural guardians got progressively less stuffy and hipper. The coolest of them all were the Northern Soul devotees.

The United Kingdom’s soul scene was an outgrowth of London’s jazz scene and started developing in the very early ’60s at clubs like the Flamingo (a former Jewish social club beneath the Whisky à Go-Go on Wardour Street that held all-nighters on weekends that were popular with recently arrived West Indian immigrants and American GIs stationed in Britain) and the Scene in Ham Yard in Soho where DJ Guy Stevens would play a combination of urban blues like B. B. King, the lounge blues of Mose Allison, and the Hammond organ jazz of Jimmy Smith. It was this strange and explosive combination of fanatic DJs/collectors/curators, immigrants from the African diaspora, and American armed forces personnel that would define not only Northern Soul but also the next forty years or so of European popular music.