In Defense of The Disco Files

"The best discotheque DJs are underground stars, discovering previously ignored albums, foreign imports, album cuts and obscure singles with the power to make the crowd scream and playing them overlapped, nonstop so you dance until you drop," Vince Aletti

The Disco Files 1973-1978: New York's Underground, Week by Week
by Vince Aletti (1998/2009/2018) 

This book existed more by legend than anything else for me for many years. The “Dean of American Rock Critics,” Robert Christgau, would mention something about it in his Village Voice columns and essays. The author, Vince Aletti, was a neighbor, and lived in the same building in the East Village of NYC. But the actual book was hard to get my hands on. For a long-time it was too expensive; or never available for what I felt like I could afford anyway. Quickly gone out of print and revered by dance music enthusiasts, presumably. I eventually got a look at a library copy, in a big coffee table book format, but discovered it was for the most part record lists that no way could I adequately process in the amount of time I could check it out from the library. 

The heart of The Disco Files are weekly columns Aletti compiled and wrote for Record World from 1973 to 1978. Along with Billboard and Cash Box, Record World was one of the big music industry trade magazines publishing at the time. It was a fat period in the music industry, a production boom still catching up with the youth culture explosion of the 1960s. The form of TDFs column evolves some but always features Aletti highlighting what records are hot in the local NYC dance club scene he frequents, personal favorites, industry gossip, plugs for DJs and coming attractions. It's an insider's tip sheet. And Aletti is an enthusiastic crate diving records guy working at a music industry trade publication. Then as the popularity of dance clubs and dance music grows-- or explodes, more like it-- he gets caught up in this excitement, adds DJ top ten lists first from NYC and LA but eventually spreading out to include DJs in Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, etc. By early 1975 the column is capped off by a Disco File Top 20 and there are thousands of working dance music DJs across the land. In short, TDFs book, weekly columns compiled over five years, chronicles the first boom incarnation of the dance music DJ and is made up mostly of hundreds of underground disco DJ top ten lists from that time.  (1)

 Finally, in 2009 a new edition came out, adding interesting interviews and other disco-related Aletti write-ups that appeared in Rolling Stone and elsewhere. In a more reader-friendly format and price, I eventually snagged a copy of that edition. And that began my more careful reading (or 'careful listening' to the records) of The Disco Files. I started adding to a TDFs playlist (standing at 549 streaming songs or albums or disco mixes) and I’ve been lost in the music ever since, so to speak. Feeling my way towards some kind of geezer understanding of my life long special affection for dance music and the original form in which I encountered it: 1970s Disco.  

First off, this book has to be the most detailed first-person primary document account of the popular records of the first DJ dance club music boom. Aletti's columns span five years, 1973-‘78. Aletti and a DJ/music writer pal agree 1972 is the starting point for Disco in a interview included in the volume. You could also reasonably argue that the disco era began with DJ David Mancuso's inaugural dance party at The Loft on Valentine's Day, February 14, 1970. I’d also probably stretch the classic era to ’79, 1972-1979, for reasons I'll hopefully get to later. Nonetheless, Aletti's weekly columns', '73-'78, document disco DJs favorite records through the beating heart of the disco era. If Saturday Night Fever ('77) was disco's obvious imperial commercial peak, The Disco Files are the secret archives. 

So what were the disco records that led up to Saturday Night Fever? Basically, they were the records that gay DJs played in underground dance clubs in NYC in the early 1970s.  “Disco” was essentially a commercial dance music bubble triggered by the Stonewall Uprising in 1969, gay protests that opened-up gay club and dance party opportunities or at least reduced dramatically the harassment they had operated under up to that point in NYC. Between 1970 and 1975 gay dance clubs went from a handful to thousands. Classic era 1970s disco marks the cultural origins of gay and/or LGBTQ+ friendly urban dance club music scenes that eventually spread to many cities around the world, expanding, downsizing, recombining, by the 1990s proliferating dance music sub-genres with a mad glee, transmigrating disco music into Eurodisco, House, Techno, and a gazillion dance pop permutations of EDM, of which I know and appreciate many but only superficially or glancingly.

Important to remember, foremost, none of the original so-called disco DJ’s called the music they played disco or even clubs where they played it discos. Discotheques as a kind of private dance club was a French import and had arrived in NYC in a place called Le Club in the 1960s but the early gay discos in NYC went by names like The Loft, 12 West, Infinity, and the Flamingo. Playboy magazine called LA dance clubs 'discos' in the '60s but really no one was talking about "disco" as a music genre before Aletti. Disco, the genre label, was music industry hype that Aletti obviously aided and abetted, if he didn’t in fact invent. But not because he anticipated and desired the kitsch abomination of "Disco Duck" but because he wanted to promote the great records he heard his favorite DJs play to turn on dancers in dance clubs in NYC. He hung out around the DJs and for him "disco" records were records DJs played to get a big response on dance floors and that was a cool thing. The animating idea is really that simple: Let's make hit records out of records that were hits first in the dance clubs, where people went to dance to their DJ's favorite records. We'll call these 'disco' records!  (2)

In the beginning disco DJs were predominantly gay Italians and their mixed-race, Black and Latino friends, states Aletti upfront and matter of factly. The music industry, including Aletti, sees this growth in DJ music at the time, 1972-1973, as possibly a new and hot source for making hit records. The first disco record—i.e., a Top 40 chart hit record that was first a hit in a NYC gay dance club-- is Manu Dibango’s massive Afro-funk single in 1973, “Soul Makossa,” a big hit at Mancuso's Loft parties in '72. The song had been released and left for dead by radio before being revived and re-released to international success after hitting it big in NYC’s underground gay discos. Also, noteworthy that the first actual disco Top 40 hit isn't in the popular souped-up '60s Neo-soul or Euro-techno sounds but what Aletti calls "left field" disco, instrumental centered world beat and/or global funk. Another example The Chakachas "Jungle Fever," reached number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972, a quintessential one hit wonder, and also leads off Aletti's 1978 Disco's Greatest Hits double album, Steppin' Out, which isn't the greatest by any stretch but does try to encapsulate proto-disco's diverse palette of sounds. "Jungle Fever" leads off the comp, like "Soul Makossa" does disco, as a kind of global music multicult Exotica for the 1970s. Some Danish session musicians team up with Kari Kenton, the wife of Latin mambo jazz bandleader Tito Puente, panting and moaning through a sultry jungle funk trifle made in a modern recording studio in Europe. (3) 

Aletti (left) writes the first accounts of the music emanating from these gay underground dance clubs in New York. DJs become underground legends for throwing the best dance parties: Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Richie Kaczor, David Rodriguez, Richie Rivera, etc. The DJ burnout rate was terrible, as it always is in party scenes, but in those first peak years, with a couple turntables and a big soundsystem, maybe some flashing lights and/or balloons, DJs choreographed epic dancefloor workouts. The best DJs knew how to weave these rich sonic tapestries, always groovy, hot, sweaty, screaming and shouting buildups alternated with cool them out mood-elevating interludes and musical fanfares (the latter rooted in an ambience of psychedelic bliss, and replicated in chillout rooms at Raves in the '90s). Hippie dance music, basically. The best original disco DJs were inveterate crate diggers, discovering otherwise ignored album cuts and foreign cutouts that they parted out and stretched into extended dancefloor workouts, medleys, suites of dance music with dramatic sweep, build-ups and cool-downs and, above all, foremost, mesmerizingly syncopated dance grooves. By 1975 they were making pop hits out of songs DJ’s played to ecstatic responses on dancefloors in a great pop music convergence: The Temptations "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone" ('72), O'Jays "Love Train" ('73), Barry White's "Love's Theme" ('73), "TSOP" ('74), etc. The first most practical and material music industry achievement of the classic disco era was the establishment of a record pool distribution system that gave DJs greater access to new dance music records. Aletti was instrumental to this effort.  

The emerging disco sound, 1972-1975, says Aletti, was Afro-Latin, Black, although not always American, heavy on the drums, minimal lyrics, chant-like choruses, foreign languages fine, and long instrumental passages with tricky breaks. These were disco formula conventions by 1975. 

Philly International was to this first wave of Disco what the Ramones were to the same era of Punk Rock. An ideal model, not without the conservative tendencies of all such models. In the actual underground gay dance clubs Aletti was reporting on what jumps out at you is the crazy variety. There was “Soul Makossa” and other international stuff,  the “left field” disco records. There were oodles of gutbucket funk, campy Broadway cabaret Drag Show affectations, good grooved jazz fusion, souped-up '60s soul styles galore, nostalgia for previous eras of dance music, Swing, Rock & Roll, even Hot Jazz. Really, if whatever music style could be set to an uptempo beat it was disco ready. 

Consider Mancuso’s Loft playlists, again (Aletti more or less upfront concedes that The Loft was his  Disco dance music Platonic ideal), drum heavy rock music (Babe Ruth, Steve Miller Band, J. Geils) was played next to drum-circle Afrobeat world music was played next to good grooved jazz fusion fantasias next to palette cleansing psychedelic chill-out numbers (War’s “City Country City,” EW&F’s “That’s The Way of the World”). Still, for all that variety, Mancuso often centers long-form Philly International/souped up Neo-soul music as if it were the consensus Disco blueprint like all the other DJs: again, specifically, bigger intros and outros, more beats, more strings, more sex, and more extended instrumental breaks. In 1970 Mancuso's invitations to his first dance party at The Loft read "Love Saves The Day"; and in 1973 Philly International's house band, MFSB (Mother Father Sister Brother), put out the number one disco pop hit that year, "Love Is The Message." Classic era disco was born somewhere between those two dates. 

"Sultana," Titanic (1971): Proto-rock disco from Europe in the Santana style. Guy with tambourine and shaker looks like inspiration for Will Farrell's SNL cowbell sketch. Also, member of Titanic ends up in legendary French space disco group Space.  

In fact, Aletti muses about the first “disco” records with a friend and fellow DJ/music writer, agreeing about the primacy of Eddie Kendricks (former Temptations falsetto), “Girl, You Need a Change of Mind” (1972), and the Temps long version of “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” same year. Souped-up Motown, ready to let the funk out. And Philly International ran with this longform funky disco structure further than any other record company: The O’Jays, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, The Traamps, The Three Degrees, The Intruders, People's Choice, etc. They were The Sound of Philadelphia and also the iconically OG sound of classic era gay disco, or proto-disco, whatever mixed feelings Gamble & Huff may have about the latter status. 

So the popular center of disco in its first phase, 1972-1975, was gay DJ adoration for Philly International Records (PIR) and souped-up '60s soul sounds. The formal keys, again, were long-form Neo-soul, if you like, songs or often more like extended dancefloor workouts, over 5-6 minutes, please, long instrumental intros and outros, more drums and beats, with the soul on top, more chanting, more sex, less actual words, more lost in the music dancing, the words even more incidental than with other standard pop fare. And another practical material achievement of '70s disco was the development of the 12-inch dance single. The ideal disco dance club DJ dance music form in the days of vinyl records at least. Record producer Tom Moulton, often credited with inventing the 12-inch single idea, lovingly elaborated on the instrumental breaks in the prototype Philly International sound. Harold Melvin & The Blue Note’s “The Love I Lost” (1972), proto-disco top ten classic for me, goes from 6 minutes to 12 minutes in Moulton’s epic remix.

 

"The Love I Lost," Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes (1972): Disco producer Tom Moulton remixes The Sound of Philadelphia. Songs so long always threaten monotony of course but many of Moulton's best, this one, Patti Jo's "Make Me Believe in You," The Intruder's "I'll Always Love My Mama," "Backstabbers," "Do It Any Way You Wanna," all immensely satisfying studio production pop homages to the Philly International sound.  

To say I love this stuff feels like insufficient understatement. Can it be campy, excessively glitzy, overloaded by overwrought orchestrations, yes, but the best disco records are mesmerizingly and gloriously groovy dance music. Diana Ross's "Love Hangover," a massive number one hit in 1976, is another imperial peak of the Disco era for me. It's the first wave neo-soul sound fully discofied: combining the extended DJ overture, lush fanfare, building anticipation, twirling like a slow disco ball before dropping into the reckless abandon of a funky dance floor inferno. At its apex Ross crying ecstatically, indecently, "I don't need no cure/I don't need no cure." To disco dancers Donna Summer's "Love To Love You Baby" clocking nearly 17 minutes in 1975 was never too long. It was a dance music revelation. "Love Hangover," Ross's response to "Love To Love You Baby," was maybe the only song to get all that disco dancefloor energy and style in a Top 40 number one smash, March 1976. 

"Love Hangover," Diana Ross (1976): Epic and copied, disco's sincerest form of flattery.   

At any rate, no sooner was Disco branded by the music industry than rock critics in Rolling Stone were trashing it as a commercial abomination. One of Aletti’s best pro-Disco essays, appearing in the Village Voice in 1976, was his mockingly deadpan demolition of a Rolling Stone attack on Archie Bell and The Drells (another Philly International act) for going, with sneering Dave Marsh-ian disdain, “Disco.” Aletti shoots holes in Marsh's "disco sucks" hostility, concluding such sentiments were always there, before disco (long before they were burning disco records in Chicago in ’79, btw), and the scorn may have been vaguely rooted in some homophobia or racism (which seems more blatantly obvious in retrospect), but came back mostly to an uptight priggish rockist attitude about dance music that was dominant at Rolling Stone and in the rock press. Rockist rock snob nonsense about how dance music was not serious enough, escapist, repetitive; silly, too campy, etc. Classic era Disco was all those things, as larded with schmaltzy crap as any other big pop music genre, but its was also at its best, as silly and campy as, say, Taste of Honey's "Boogie Oogie Oogie" ('78), "don't be thinkin' you're too good to boogie," great 20th c popular dance music, up there for me with any 1920s Hot Jazz or 1950s Rock & Roll, two other 20th century dance music favorites. (4)

At any rate, Aletti was no mere industry flak for Disco. He loves the souped-up ‘60s soul revival, the Neo-soul sound and the genre-bending “left field” global diversity played at The Loft. The guy is listening to a lot of dance music records in those five years and genuinely appears to be turned on by the gay friendly multicultural dance music scenes emerging out of the new DJ curated dance clubs. But he is already bemoaning the deluge of copycat records and lame covers in the disco scene by 1975; everyone trying to be the next Gloria Gaynor or make the next “Rock Your Baby” (1974). This is part of every pop culture boom, really. Producers try to replicate proven hit formulas until they stop scoring hits. Aletti’s spirits are revived by the commercial breakthrough of Eurodisco, Giorgio Moroder/Donna Summer's electronics based disco productions, the imperial pop phase of the classic era, or at least for a time anyway. 

 Just Moroder/Summer’s pop breakthroughs alone, decidedly disco songs, silly and campy to the hilt, were epic turning points in pop music history. There are sparks of electronic dance music pre-history in "Popcorn" ('69) and "Fly Robin Fly" ('75) and others but it is "I Feel Love" in '77 that really goes supernova for popular electronic dance music, EDM, inspiring in subsequent decades countless electronic dance music scenes over and way beyond what I know. But includes many post-disco dance music sub-genre favorites like Italo Disco, House, Hi-NRG, Latin Freestyle, Techno, Ambient, and truly on and on. Machine music that hits the groove spot with relentless power, like James Brown's original sex machine, only with new drum machines and various keyboard synthesizers. It all really takes off with the pop transcendence of "I Feel Love" and Moroder's experiments with a Moog synthesizer. 

But for all its disco smasharoo success, "I Feel Love" lights up the discos in TDFs, overall EDM remains an exotic outlier on DJs lists or up to '78 anyway, the period Aletti chronicles. DJ lists are mostly dominated by instrumentally souped-up and stretched out '60s Neo-soul and after 1976 industry-knockoff bubblegum disco takes. I mean, there's also still lots of jazz fusion and latin funk and funky world beat and what not but electronic dance music is semi-rare on DJ set lists throughout the TDFs period. There are other pre-'79 electronic disco landmarks, to be sure, Patrick Crowley/Sylvester, "Bionic Boogie," Synth-Pop pioneers, YMO, Gary Numan, but barely so, most relevant songs coming out in '78-'79, and EDM remains rare in the states throughout the '70s. It likely takes off first in Europe, Moroder, Space, Eurodisco or Italo Disco, and then relaunches in Chicago in the early '80s, generating House and Acid and Techno and what all, again, I don't know exhaustively by any stretch but I like a lot of what I do know. (Sample.) (Also, another big EDM playlist; 228 tracks and counting.) My point, EDM is a classic disco era breakthrough but remains a minor dish for most the disco DJs sharing lists with Aletti for TDFs. 

"I Feel Love," Donna Summer (1977) live on Midnight Special. 

My sense going through the DJ lists is that 1975-ish is something of a turning point for Aletti in that his original dream of getting more DJ dance club hits onto the charts was giving way to a creeping sense that “Disco” was producing untold numbers of mediocre DJs who would just as soon play the safe disco hits distributed by the new disco departments of the record industry. Creative DJs digging through the record bins for dancefloor gold was looking more like a romantic memory of yesteryear, even if that yesteryear was only two or three years back! And maybe he was noticing the high-end DJs seemed increasingly locked into these decadent record production wars, turning out grandiose and drecky disco, Alec R. Costandinos’ 30-minute long disco version of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" ('78) serving as a kind of apotheosis, although I gather Aletti was even into this stuff longer than most. True blue disco record guy to the very end, or until he got out of it anyway. At any rate, my take is by 1975 it was dawning on Aletti that DJ's discovering crate diving gems and making hits out of them playing them for dancers, the source of his original enthusiasm for the music, was more or less lost and over. 

What is the evidence for a theory that the classic disco era was actually over before the commercial Disco boom years, 1976 to '79 even got started? Aletti complains about it but also Andrew Holleran, another key primary source about '70s disco, author of the 1978 gay disco novel, Dancer from The Dance, insists disco was over by '75 or '76, latest. As I've said, Aletti bemoans the assembly-line "Disco" copycat records taking over by 1975. Holleran says, additionally, there was something dark and desperate and beautiful about disco that gets lots in the commercial glare of Disco in 1976 and thereafter. As disco got more popular it is striking how everyone wanted to try their hand at a disco track: Barbara Streisand, Richie Havens, Rod Stewart, Lonnie Liston Smith, Rolling Stones, Andy Williams, B.B. King, Little Feat, for heaven's sake, Chicago blues guy Johnnie Taylor scores four weeks at number one with "Disco Lady" in 1976. 

By '75 the chart-seeking disco sound had settled into a formula, grew oversaturated and kitschy, as almost all pop chart sounds eventually do. And this Van McCoy/Gloria Gaynor/Donna Summer mass produced disco sound drowns out the variety of styles of dance music being played in the discos by the best DJs. There is something to this argument. Certainly between '72 and '75 disco records were what DJs played for dancers, a lot of Philly International, soul, funk, Latin, proto-world beat stuff; whatever records worked. The DJs were often reviving old records. But by '75 disco records are predominantly for a lot of the new DJs what the disco departments of the record industry are putting out labeled "Disco," and naturally that's going to include a lot of terrible musical dreck and a tendency to standardize the style into a marketable brand. I'm not unsympathetic to this argument, I probably prize most the proto-disco period myself, but I'll suggest some of this question may come back to where you stand on Saturday Night Fever ('77). If your first reflex is sneerish disdain then I'm betting you'll like this disco was over by '75 or '76 theory. If more disposed to the charms of SNF, like I am, than you're likely to note some of the limits of the disco-is-dead by '75-'76 doomsayers. (5) 

From my distant historical perspective, what stands out about the disco DJ's favorite records lists, '73-'78, are indeed how much they stray from the now dominant Philly International or electronic Eurodisco commercial models of the classic disco era. For example, and crucial to the foundations of classic era disco, funk, and its many variations, Sly Stone funk, James Brown funk, P-Funk, jazz-funk, and what Aletti calls the “left field” stuff, global Afro-beat, Latin-funk, very little of which fits neatly into the aforementioned Disco sound buckets, or the Saturday Night Fever master mix, are staples of underground gay disco set lists from their outset and all the way through 1978. Pointer Sister's "Yes We Can Can," southern blues funksters, Richard 'Popcorn' Wylie, Oliver Sain, Bohannon, Miami disco, George McCrae, KC & The Sunshine Band, Caribbean disco, Boney M, Brazilian disco, Deodato, SF's Patrick Cowley, etc. You get the picture. Disco was a hugely popular "Love Train" brand by '76 but what got played in the best discos was often something else, or at least a lot more of something else. 

So basic dance tracks overloaded by overwrought orchestrations do arguably get worse as the decade of the '70s advances. And lots of classic era commercial Disco does sound now like clutzy and over-produced music revivals of past music fads or random Disco Duck pop themes packaged for the dance floor. It's as if the music industry found this dance music formula, longform Philly International (and even lavishly longer Tom Moulton 12" mixes), lots of uptempo bass and percussion chasing the elusive dance floor beat you can't lose, in Chuck Berry parlance, bathed in strings and sophisticated tempos, and now they were going to prove you could make hit records out of anything attached to this solid chassis of the golden era disco sound. Some of this pop culture scavenging the past gets over as these grandly elaborate disco fanfares, say, "The Fifth of Beethoven" or Meca's "Star Wars," but the ratio or number of examples of excessive disco dreck does increase as the end of the '70s nears. 

I won't dispute any of this but my slightly contrary case to Aletti (and Holleran) is based mostly on my own first exposure to Disco via Top 40, not the underground gay disco stuff played in the early '70s. The first records marketed as Disco that turned me on, were in fact assembly line product of the industry glut period, '77-'79 and later: above all "I Feel Love" but also the Bee Gees, Village People, Chic, Sister Sledge, Sylvester; songs like Dan Hartman’s “Instant Replay,” Aimee Stewart’s “Knock On Wood,” Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell,” Chic’s “Good Times,” etc. Even in disco’s most bloated imperial phase, the bubblegum designs of a lot of the industry disco product schlockingly obvious, many of these Top 40 disco hits were as exciting to me as Little Richard or Bo Diddley singles. At this point, Boney M’s 1979 disco hit “Rasputin,” another longtime favorite, appears to be as universally popular as Toto’s “Africa.” The music industry may have pulled the plug on Disco in 1979 but great disco dance club music, bubblegum or underground, hardly noticed. These are few reasons I resist claims peak disco was over by '75 or '76 and would instead extend the classic disco era to at least 1979; proto-disco period '72-'75, imperial Disco period, '76 to 1979. Everything after that is post-disco or, with all the dance music stuff anyway, from then on disco by another name. (6) 

"Instant Replay," Dan Hartman (Tom Mouton Mix/1978)

"Rasputin," Boney M (1979/Disco Purrfection Version)

I didn’t know the underground stuff partly because it was a little before my time but mostly because I was a hick teenager from the sticks of Oregon. Another thing hundreds of lists of records in TDFs reveals is how a lot of the stuff that was a hit in the actually really-existing ‘70s NYC gay discos or dance clubs never made it to Top 40, especially the gay stuff that came before the Village People breakout. My earliest disco experiences, beyond Top 40 radio, a dance club called Fat City in Medford, OR, circa 1978-1979, a college town disco, leaned heavily on Top 40 disco, or that's the only stuff I recognized in my illiterate condition at the time. I listened to the radio and knew a little bit of the charts and heard a little of the Eurodisco, proto-electro disco, Moroder/Village People/Sylvester second wave popular disco stuff, and very very much liked it, but I really had no idea about all this underground gay disco that figures so prominently in TDFs DJ lists.  

There's a lot of gay disco variations on the Philly International sound in particular, South Shore Commission’s “Free Man,” Double Exposure’s “My Love is Free,” and Carl Bean’s “I Was Born This Way,” for three obvious gay disco canon examples. Bean's "I Was Born This Way" ('77) is particularly interesting, marking the Philly International to Eurodisco transition, Bean's version propelled by an big electro disco pump only two years after Valentino's now deflated sounding soul review original in '75. It's longform Neo-soul dance turned up to an extended 12" dancefloor disco pump max, 7-8 minute or longer songs now standard or even minimal. Anyway, triumphantly anthemic gay disco, so probably precisely the stuff Holleran was already going sour on. But I beg to differ. This is transcendent disco. The long instrumental bridge that crescendos Double Exposure's "My Love is Free," for another exhilarating example, is an extended spiritual frenzy of hard funktastic soul music. 

Also, there's probably a great disco book in how the underground gay disco of the 1970s turns straight, or heterosexually oriented anyway, songs into gay anthems: that brilliant Intruder's song, "I'll Always Love My Mama," "Papa was a Rolling Stone," Eddie Kendricks' "Girl You Need a Change of Mind" or "He's A Friend," "I Will Survive," etc.  But Rhino’s 80-song, 4-CD, The Disco Box (1999), couldn't fit the biggest gay disco anthem of them all, "I Was Born This Way," really!? (A wrong finally avenged by Lady Gaga in 2011 but still?) Or no Patti Jo's "Make Me Believe in You" ('73/'75), no Santa Esmeralda's "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" ('77), no Tantra's "Hills of Katmandu" ('79)? Let’s just say if you are something of a record hound yourself the palette of disco music in The Disco Files goes many places you would never know from Rhino’s Disco Box, or beyond the liner notes anyway. (7)  

"My Love is Free," Double Exposure (Tom Moulton 12" Mix/1976)

A common theme in Aletti’s retrospective interviews is that money destroyed the classic era disco ideal of multicultural inclusivity and even musical diversity; “The more money involved the less people get along.” Actually, there are cracks and divisions in the small DJ recordpool group Aletti was a part of almost from the start. But certainly the bigger the dancing crowd the harder to sustain the peace-loving inclusivity vibe. This is evident in the transition between Mancuso’s Loft, in a private party community, that Mancuso bragged had never suffered an incident of violence, true or not, and its bigger spiritual heir Larry Levon’s Paradise Garage, where hundreds or over a thousand dancers sometimes moved to one beat.  In the land of a thousand dancers there was some core safe space center to Levon’s dance music scene, something that kept the dancers returning to the Garage, sustaining the "Love Will Save the Day" vibe at least for a time, but inevitably the bigger the crowd gathered the more drugs, crime, and violence gathered around the edges. Besides, this conflict, LGBTQ+ safe space dancing inclusivity versus burnout dance scene drug cultures that invite crime and violence, continued to be a feature of club cultures and the EDM explosion in the '90s and dance music subcultures into the 21st century, from what I've gathered.  I'm more inclined to an observation that while too much money hustle often contributes to the demise of dance club scenes the original LGBTQ+ friendly inclusivity ideal established however ephemerally in '70s disco keeps getting reborn again somewhere new. You can't keep that kind of thing down (nor should you want to but...). 

"Rude Movements," Sun Palace (1981)

It's a tension always there, pop music forms have grown out of the demimonde of bars and clubs since the 19th century. Bars, drinking, and associated commerce has subsidized popular music scenes since the saloon and brothel business got big in cities in the late 19th century. I’m not trying to suggest there was not plenty of coke-snorting excess and drug casualties to the classic disco era. As I've already mentioned the burnout rate with DJs was extremely high. But Aletti, reportedly, doesn’t go beyond weed and the occasional psychedelics. And I’m not so sure, despite the popular caricature, there was much more deadly drug abuse amongst dance club DJs and dancers than there was amongst rock musicians and their fans in the 1970s? Were there more drug casualties in disco than in the Grateful Dead and its fanbase? (8)

Aletti stops writing his column in ’78. He didn’t want to hang around until “Disco Duck” had made it to the senior rec centers, which is did shortly thereafter. Who could blame him? Disco departments in the music industry were slashed after 1979. My memory is music writer Nelson George argues in his book The Death of Rhythm and Blues that the rise of commercial Disco had hurt Black employment in the music industry. Presumably he was talking about record producers and promoters, as most Disco performers were Black throughout the disco era. At any rate, according to Aletti, a significant number of those gay record producers and promoters that had possibly pushed out the old guard of Black record promotors in the music industry got their comeuppance and also lost their jobs in the music industry by the early 1980s. Including Aletti who turns to writing about photography in the NY-er, and is ultimately maybe more famous now as a photography writer than as a music writer? I'm not familiar with his other work but I will insist that TDFs have to be the definitive source on the records of the '70s disco era, or '73-'78, anyway. 

Really, The Disco Files needs no defense, certainly not mine. If you're interested in the records played by DJs in the classic disco era TDFs is an absolutely essential resource. What you'll find if you dig into those classic disco era DJ lists is some Disco stereotypes, some very good ones, but also a much wider, earthier, even more wildly multicultural, goofy and kitschy variety of dance music than the classic disco models might suggest. In summary, having reviewed so many DJ lists, I'd say funky disco in all its funky, city/country, Euro and Afro-Latin global variety wins, even dominates. So I'm defending the actual really-existing disco records against the "disco sucks" attitudes again, which remain pervasive in my experience. Admittedly, it doesn't help the cause that oldie disco anthems today are all over beer commercials and political rallies, and often for the wrong side! Dance music is silly in the way that dancing is silly. Silly fun! It's not for "serious" contemplation, although you just  might find sometimes it to be the perfect antidote or relief or escape from all the seriousness of the world. My basic case as a music fan, a music listener, is that disco and antecedent and subsequent dance music genres are truer to the Chuck Berry school of rock & roll music--"it's got a back beat, you can't lose it"-- than a lot of the stuff recognized by rock snobs and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame voters. And dance music is really its own reward. It convinces you with its infectious rhythms. Words and/or fancy musicianship are secondary features, so it is often mocked by serious-minded people and many music critic types. 

Dance music is made to make you move or thrill to how it moves. It's made for people who enjoy and thrive off the syncopated drive and forward propulsive charge of uptempo beat-centered music. If you are one of those people there is no better place to explore the wondrous variety of '70s dance music and the actual "Disco" records played in the 1970s discos than Vince Aletti's The Disco Files. (9)

Notes: 

1. You might call this book a records book. One obvious observation in ramping up my music book reading in my retirement leisure time would be that there are two kinds of music books for me, narrative music books (histories, biographies, etc) on the one hand and record books on the other. Of course, the two overlap and exist on a spectrum but I've found that I have to approach these two kinds of music books quite differently. The former I read like any novel or history, more or less straight through; or, you know, with regular pauses for other life stuff but not for any kind of extensive research. Look up something on Wikipedia maybe but that's about it. I'm listening to mentioned artists and records while reading but they're few enough that my typically slow reading pace works fine. But what I'm calling record books, even if I do read them more or less cover to cover, I have to go slower and pause more frequently to listen to the records because the records are the subject of the narrative and if I don't slow down and frequently pause to listen to records these books just end up a bunch of name-dropping lists and I don't get much out of them. TDF is a record book like that, and why I at first didn't get much out of it checking it out from the library. As far as I know, TDF is the definitive records book about the original disco era. There are hundreds of DJ lists of disco records in the book. 

2. I lived through '70s disco but really was a little too young and a hick teen from the outer western suburbs of Portland, OR to get all of it. I knew only the "disco" that reached me via the radio, Top 40, or maybe a little TV and never knew it as disco or heard anybody call it disco before probably 1975 or 1976 earliest.  I didn't read much about pop music, or beyond occasionally flipping through a fan mag at the newsstand before 1977 or really 1979 when I began reading everything I could about pop music. Before then the music played in the gay discos in TDFs I knew as soul or funk, if that. For instance, I loved the popping bass at the beginning of the O'Jays' "For the Love of Money" ('73) from the very first time I heard it, a lick about as funky as you can get. I used to pick up the needle and try to loop it, playing just the extra tight bass intro over and over, the build up of tension was thrilling to me, but I'm fuzzy about what I called it, definitely not "disco." At any rate, I'd heard lots of Philly International before I really knew anything about the record label. I heard this stuff thanks to Top 40 and the Columbia Records Club or maybe saw them on Soul Train or Midnight Special. It was part of my fumbling pre-literate audio discovery of dance music that went by "soul" or  maybe "funk" music, although at that point I was exposed only to its most commercial Top 40 forms: O'Jays, Ohio Players, EW&F, etc. My favorite hit music. In retrospect, at least half of the Rhino series Soul Hits of the 1970s: Didn't It Blow Your Mind, certainly all the uptempo tracks, were cherished staples of my early '70s Top 40 radio listening, "Jungle Fever," Kool & the Gang, "Rock The Boat," Average White Band's "Pick Up the Pieces," etc. And as it turns out this stuff was all over the early gay discos as well, but it wasn't being marketed as "Disco" to me or not enough to register with me as such until the late '70s. I've learned since that Hot Chocolate's "Disco Queen" came out in '74 but the first single by them I recall hearing was "You Sexy Thing" in '75. Anyway, I don't think I was recognizing any of this stuff as disco before '77 and really never encountered a lot of "disco sucks" reactions before '79, when they burned those records at a White Sox game and then you'd get some yahoo responses to that story, "yeah, Disco Sucks!" but I was still mostly oblivious to any "disco sucks" hostility until I began hanging out with other record collecting people in the early '80s.   

3. But for guys like Aletti, and Holleran, another key primary source about '70s disco, disco was over by '75 or '76 latest; note almost precisely when the music industry began marketing music as "Disco." Aletti's first "disco" records are longish, 5-7 minutes, funky disco dance jams by the Temptations and Eddie Kendricks in '72-'73. People love digging into this first disco song question or proto-disco precursors. I'm no different. James Brown, the Isley Brothers, and The Supremes are often mentioned but if I were to try to identify a record I heard before '72-'73, a record that anticipated the formula disco sound I think I'd actually probably go straight to Archie Bell and the Drell's "Tighten' Up" from 1968. Loved that song. Largely instrumental music. Bell's rap vocal is little more than some endearing hype about how tight his Drells are. The vocals are incidental or the cherry on top at most. The disco sound was hitting a groove and keeping it going for as long as you can, taking out instruments and adding them back one at a time, taking down and building up the groove for big sweaty feverish dance workouts. (And then add on the lavish fanfare interludes, sexual innuendo, etc; I know but...) But the basic structural form of disco, the chassis, extending the instrumental grooves and breaks on extended 12" records, goes back to what Archie Bell and Sly Stone were doing in the late '60s and what James Brown and the Temptations/Eddie Kendricks and Philly International turned into disco music production templates by 1972-'73. 

4. Marsh's head must have exploded when he was introduced to this abomination: The Yellow Magic Orchestra, the most popular band in Japan at the time, play a new wave disco version of Archie Bell's "Tighten' Up" on Soul Train in 1980. How YMO win over Don Cornelius and the dancers is actually sweet and inspiring. "You need to tighten up, even Elvis Presley did that," they enthuse with spastic robotic charm. Afrika Bambaataa loved Kraftwerk. And I actually liked several of Marsh's books but he needed to lighten' up now and then, as I recall. I actually can't say I like any of The Drells' disco songs as much as "Tightin' Up" but The Melting Pot band behind Bell during the commercial peak disco years, '75-'79, were an exceptionally tight funky dance groove band all the way up to '79's "Strategy." Words, verbal hooks, was not their strength. But they were always a tight disco band. 

5. As I hope I've made clear, I like both the proto-disco period, '72-'75, maybe even prefer it, but I like a lot of the commercial peak pop "Disco" years of 1976 to '79 as well. Also maybe a good reminder that in disco's peak years on the charts, say, '74-'79, disco never makes up more than half the number one singles, peaking in '79. People picking on dance records instead of, say, Bobby Sherman or Captain & Tennille records is just uptight and perverse. Still, I wouldn't dismiss entirely the take of two key primary sources like Aletti and Holleran. I think on balance I probably prefer their disco era but I like more of the imperial bubblegum disco era than they do. 

BTW, in the Dancer from The Dance, Holleran's novel, the tragicomic contrast between the gay liberation of the disco and the pervasive sense of doom, living as a pariah, an outcast in a straight world is very gripping and hilariously melodramatic. Gothic doom everywhere, let out of the closet only on the dance floor in dark twisted flamboyant desperation. A speed freak socialite and drag queen holds court through much of the story and is comically obsessed with penis size, suggests every gay man is obsessed the same and constantly mocks his own as the smallest in NYC. His basic social role appears to be leveraging beautiful young gay men (presumably with big penises) to the rich gay men who may or may not have a large penis but can afford one. They rendezvous for this semi-rough trade at the discos. The novel is very dark and funny at the same time. 

So I enjoyed the gay '70s disco novel. It's funny and poignant. But I was initially disappointed with it because there wasn't more actual disco music in the story, why I read the book in the first place after all. But the one classic era disco song Holleran does give special attention to, mentioned multiple times, is about as perfect a slice of what early gay disco was about as you're going to find. Patti Jo’s tough love “Make Me Believe In You” (1973), written and produced by Curtis Mayfield in his hard urban country soul style, or Tom Moulton’s 1975 extended play remix, both burning hot classic era disco tracks. It's this queer-eye for a hard Neo-soul sound and the identifying hard with the tough love position of Patti Jo. But, again, not in the Rhino Disco Box, or beyond the liner notes!? That’s just weird. 

"Make Me Believe In You," Patti Jo (1973/1975) (Original Curtis Mayfield production/Tom Moulton Remix) 

6. So I'm defending the quality of disco music in the imperial glut period '77 to '79. I've said elsewhere that "I Feel Love" and EDM are obviously the most lasting legacy of the classic '70s disco era. But I also want to point out that the influence of '70s disco on latter day dance music styles goes beyond electronics. Pumping out electro disco, hi-NRG, and danceable schlager throughout the 1980s, German record label ZYX's Italo Disco Collections, last I checked up to 35 in the series, although I've heard only a handful, are predominantly rooted in Giorgio Moroder's '70s Eurodisco, and echo Abba and beerhall polkas and singsong group-singing dance styles popular in Europe. French disco outfit Space launches the space disco sub-genre in 1977, splitting the difference between art rockers Kraftwerk and the schmaltzy side of Moroder. And now space disco thrives as a retro-futurist DJ niche sound into this century. It's not a big stretch to suggest Chicago's House music was essentially an adaptation of the souped-up '60s disco sound of the proto-disco period to EDM (think Philly International or Salsoul Records). Nearly all the House stuff in the '80s is produced with newly available cheap synthesizers and Roland drum machines. Detroit techno sounds like something new, also '80s, a mixture of Kraftwerk's dark wave melodicism with some latter-day Detroit techno-nerdy "discaires," as Holleran calls them.  It's a strikingly original sound, rarely any vocals, fast tempos, catchy beat details, minor-key dark wave "tuneage" (dating myself again) and a tremendous influence on the EDM explosion in the UK and Europe in the 1990s. From Disco to Detroit Techno to Aphex Twin is not a stretch. Daft Punk make the schmaltzy side of classic era space disco a big EDM hit in the late 1990s and 2000s. And Chic's late classic era funky disco guitar sound is still turning out hits in the 2010s. Dua Lipa and The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess and Jesse Ware and Roisin Murphy are all disco's children. Again, all this stuff prefigured to a degree and/or was inspired by the '70s disco era.My point, EDM is the  classic '70s disco era's greatest legacy but there's way more '70s 'disco than EDM in our post-disco world.

"Remake (Duo)," Paperclip People (1994/Produced by Carl Craig)

7. Humble thyself: Rhino's The Disco Box, 4-CDs, 80s songs, is an essential document of '70s disco music, for the super interesting and informative liner notes alone. But it has its flaws. Up front, the expertise of the writers that contribute to TDB goes way beyond my amateur dabbling. I don't know Brian Chin, the Executive Producer, but he's the disco columnist who followed Alettti at Record World.  And as I've written about before, I got so much out of Tim Lawence's Love Saves the Day. He contributes to TDB too. Even Aletti adds a note, appearing to endorse the project. 

When TDB came out in 1999 I was stoked. Culminating a decade of lavish retrospective music box sets precipitated by the advent of the CD, annoying on one level, everyone with vinyl collections felt like now they had to replace their vinyl collections with CDs, but on another level this radically upgraded access to popular music's past. It felt like that Bob Dylan quip about how he likes new music just fine, but it's just that there's also so much more great old music out there to listen to! The '90s, for me, was an explosion of awesome retrospective pop music box sets and especially retrospective collection series. Some of that might have been my age, entering my thirties. I still think the wheelhouse for new youth music is your teens and twenties. But the '90s were a boom decade for Rhino Records series collections and box sets, so I had great hopes for The Disco Box. 

But what do you make of a collection that includes three or four KC and the Sunshine Band songs, a band very deserving mind you, but no Boney M? Trying to compress disco into 80 songs I wouldn't repeat any artists but they, apparently, faced copyright restrictions, so no "Night Fever" either. I know, 'so now you're telling me they created a Disco Box without "I Was Born This Way" without "Rasputin" and without "Night Fever"?!' But they include "I Feel Love" and "Love Hangover" and Disco Tex and "I Should Have Loved Ya" and "Young Hearts Run Free" and and nearly all my late disco favorites. And I can appreciate why they start with "Love's Theme" in '74, the first year a radio station playing a disco music format appears in NYC, you have to draw the line somewhere. Again, classic era '70s disco in only 80s songs?! Impossible task. 

But the biggest flaw in TDB is the jukebox length and random segues feel of each disk. Essential to disco music's connection to dancing and dancers was the 12" vinyl dance single, the big instrumental interludes, extended funky breaks, and the seamless transitions, a continuous dance workout energy that is really hard to achieve in less than five minutes. Some great disco gets there in less time, "Love's Theme" or "The Hustle," for examples, probably partially because they're almost all instrumental records. But keeping everything under five minutes gives TDB's disco an abridged K-Tel feel, sacrificing the epic sweep of the best extended 12" classic era disco. Tom Moulton's Philadelphia International Classics collection and other 12" extended disco mix collections began appearing by 2000s and 2010s, remedying the situation, but too late for TDB.  

The other problem of the disjointed mix feeling might get to my bigger problem with the disco album in general. Perhaps my biggest problem with the disco album is that there were a dozen or so Michael Jackson and the Jackson's family albums and Stevie Wonder albums and EW&F and Sister Sledge albums, at the very least, that were absolute dance floor staples in the discos but rarely get counted as disco albums. All of Chic's albums or up through '79's Risque are disco albums, how could they possibly not be?! 

But beyond albums with several hits in the discos, extended 12" disco song productions or mixes weren't made for albums, so the approach to the epic dance song rarely translates very well to the album format. Also, rarely did disco albums even try to reproduce the way disco music was played in the dance clubs. The DJ seamlessly segues the mix of music, mixing one song into another, one artist with another, into extended sets of dance music that can last without pause for 15-20 minutes or much longer. This disco DJ mix energy is rarely attempted in the album format, probably principally because the most common album format presents only one artist at a time and disco DJs weren't spending much time making albums yet. 

There are exceptions. Disco Tex's live like mix and disco segues. Cloud One's Atmosphere Strut ('76), with crowd noise and that live mix flow feel. That Sylvester album, Step II ('78), makes an effort, certainly side one. I think Boney M's Nightflight to Venus is the best bubblegum disco album of all time but maybe its bubblegumminess is disqualifying as DJ music? At any rate, it's put together like seamless set of disco music. I recently read Alex Jeffrey's 33 1/3 book about Donna Summer's Once Upon a Time (2021), making the case her 1977 cinderella disco fantasy double album is the best disco album of all time. I was drawn to his argument because I used to play side one of OUAT obsessively way back when. An absolute favorite disco album or side of an album capturing that seamless DJ mix energy. Anyway, fun read. Lots of curious lyrical explication I totally missed. But reminded me that actually my two favorite songs on the album, "Working the Midnight Shift" and "Rumour Has It" (which Jeffrey's doesn't like at all), weren't even on the side one I played all the time. When I played those songs I almost always played just those songs and ignored the rest of those sides. But I always played side one start to finish, like one epic DJ set. And I played that side one obsessively.  

So I guess I had a taste for that disco DJ mix energy and continuous sweep of DJ dance music, even if faked by the producer, but I rarely found it in the disco album format. TDB's liner notes includes a list of 50 Essential Disco Albums, many personal favorites, but I still think the individual extended mix 12" dance song is disco and dance music's ideal format. There weren't a lot of great disco albums in the classic disco era because there weren't a lot of music producers or disco DJs making albums the way they made dancefloor mixes. 

You might say Madonna, The Pet Shop Boys, M.I.A., Daft Punk,  and Lady Gaga eventually solve this dance music albums riddle but that comes later.       

8. Admittedly, what I know, is almost entirely second hand. I read. I don't go to dance clubs anymore. And I need to read more about the intersection of dance club cultures and drugs and crime. Tim Lawrence's Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983 sits in my reading stack. I'll get to it. I'm slow. For now, I'll only remark additionally, following an entirely different music thread, I recently read Dale Cockrell's Everybody's Doin' It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York (2019), which argues that all popular music produced between 1840 and 1917, the root years of American popular music, was essentially supported and nurtured by bars and brothels, by the trade in alcohol and sex. Of course those connections still exist around dance club scenes. Are they a bigger problem than they are around any other music scenes for young people? I don't know. 

9. At this point it's a little silly bemoaning sneering attitudes about dance music. There is a veritable library of good books written about disco and dance music since the '70s. Some of my favorites for further reading (and some actual background expertise): Love Saves the Day, Tim Lawrence ('03),  Hot Stuff, Alice Echols ('10), Turn the Beat Around, Peter Shapiro ('05), Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster ('99), and The Underground is Massive, by Michaelangelo Matos ('15). But, as I've said, my taste for dance music predates my introduction to rock criticism or reading a lot about pop music and I've found in my personal life few friends who share my affection for disco and dance music. It's like this old commercial where all the guys pretend to like dance music because they know it helps them get with the ladies when they're in their twenties but after that strategy gives way some Neil Young and Springsteen or U2 and Radiohead are always the preference in the mancave. But, and sometimes embarrassingly so, I actually always liked the dance music stuff, which grew varyingly awkward with most my music friends, who were either mocking or disdainful or wryly tolerant. But once I did start reading the pop music press, 1979-ish, I still encountered plenty of the "Disco Sucks" attitudes but they were never universal by any stretch. There was always a fair amount of hostility for electronic music and electronic pop as well, I might add. A lot of traditional musicians have hostile attitudes about electronic music. This has lessened some over the years perhaps but it's still a thing I encounter often. At any rate, my point is that there were a few important rock critics, music writers, who I followed for a while, pretty closely from 1979 to the mid-'90s or so, that gave me permission to indulge my affection for disco and dance music and electronic music and I'm grateful for their validations. Xgau, the Dean of American Rock Critics, was always stumping for Black music in a milieu that often marginalized it. And Frank Kogan and Chuck Eddy were championing disco and dance music long before the disco revival in books got going in the 2000s. 

"Love Island," Deodato (1978): End of another long night of dancing. Sweaty hugs and kisses. A gentle, sweetly sad, jazz fusion balm, mixing the downtempo vibe of the EW&F's "That's The Way of the World" and the theme song to Welcome Back, Kotter.