Can Do Collective Krautrock: No Fuhrers

Chapter 2: No Fuhrers, 

from Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany by David Stubbs

    My music listening life can be split into three phases that probably resemble roughly the experience of many. My earliest phase when I heard whatever records my parents happened to play and I eventually discovered Top 40 and the radio. My second phase, which I’m going to call my rock snob phase, takes off somewhere between 1977 and 1979, when I discover a music press, go to college, move into the city, and begin to fancy myself a learned student of rock and pop music and its history. This phase lasted until the early ‘90s for me when I got married and started school teaching, launching a phase when music became, again, primarily a background listening experience. I remember a student once commenting that all their social studies teachers had a thing for African music, like me. I balked at the stereotype then but think now it does get at something essential about the liberal internationalist character of the last Dad Rock phase in my music listening. Retiring might mark another new phase in my music listening but I don’t have enough perspective yet to tell for sure.  

    At any rate, Chapter 2 in David Stubbs’ Future Days profiles Krautrock flag bearers Can. Can was a German experimental rock band formed in Cologne in 1968. They improvise a blend of psychedelia, progressive jazz-rock, funk, studio electronics and tape editing into these long and drawn-out and slightly robotic proto-worldmusic grooves. I don’t keep up with the rock snob press very well anymore but I gather Can’s stock has risen considerably in the 21st century and they also happen to fit perfectly several of my ‘dad rock’ music listening inclinations. Making this a great time to linger over some Can records again.  

    As I mentioned in my blurb about Chapter 1, Stubbs frames Krautrock as born out of 1968 student protest movements. But Can, like Amon Duul, weren’t hanging out with the Red Army Faction. They were a more a middle-class cultural response to the spirit of ’68, maybe akin to the drop out hippie movement in the states. Can originally setup their recording studio in a retreat-like castle outside Cologne, like Faust in an old and abandoned schoolhouse in a rural setting or Cluster in their converted German farmhouse. Amon Duul, both versions, grew out of a hippie commune. 

    Foremost, though, the US model for Can were Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground. Their name is a play on Warhol’s 1962 painting exhibition of 32 Campbell Soup Can flavors. Irmin Schmidt, co-founding member, visited NYC in the mid-‘60s, hanging out around La Monte Young’s Dream Syndicate, which included the Velvet’s John Cale and others. And the group’s first band name, and name for all their subsequent recording studios (in another nod to their affiliation with hippie psychedelia), was Inner Space. The two sides of Can from the start are Pop art pretensions and classic hippie era, 1968-1972, psychedelia. 

    What the original German musical acts we’re calling krautrockers (this is contested too, of course, and probably something I’ll take up at some point) called their own music was “Kosmische Musik,” or ‘cosmic music’ or, in other words, psychedelic music.  

    Stubbs celebrates Can’s remarkable collective achievement and then their mushrooming influence since their heyday (1968 to 1973, or 1975, or 1979, YMMV). 

    In the beginning the four or five principles get together, hang out in their Inner Space studio for long hours, days on end, jamming and improvising with studio electronics and tape editing effects. No one came to the studio with finished songs; they improvised their songs together in the studio. Schmidt brags that everyone in Can got credit for song compositions and attributes the decline of Can recordings in the mid-‘70s to this collective bond in the band cracking and beginning to break down. 

When "Mother Sky" is all you need. Can, 1970. 

    And then understandably Stubbs marvels even more at the mushrooming influence and legacy of Can since the 1970s, spreading from Joy Division/New Order to the Eurhythmics to The Orb to Radiohead to Stereolab to LCD Soundsystem to Pavement and Tame Impala and on and on. Can have evolved into a pioneering prototype of a post-punk musical intersection combining DIY rock band collaboration with electronics and ambient music and an infatuation with global beats. Again, a rock snob and dad rock marriage made in heaven, or in my mind anyway.   

    Seems relevant to note from the outset three of four of the Fab Four band members in Can were pushing or already 30 in 1968. 

    Schmidt, keyboards, and founding musical direction guy in the band, with no shortage of strong opinions, was already doing successful musical production soundtrack work for TV and movies when Can formed. His professional experience is also why Can’s first two albums are titled Monster Movies and Soundtracks (1969). A lot of their earliest recordings were originally produced for TV and movie soundtracks. For this reason, some discographies won’t include Soundtracks with Can’s other proper albums. One of Can’s earliest mission statements, articulated by Schmidt, is a sneering disdain and opposition to schlager music, with which I am no expert but understand is sentimental and sweet pop hits widely popular in Germany and Scandinavian countries at the time. I imagine Abba as an uber-ultra model of schlager music but I’m not really sure? I’ve never followed the Eurovision song contest and only know the Will Ferrell comedy. Anyway, Schmidt avowedly formed Can in opposition to schlager-ish commercial pop music, whatever exactly that was in 1968 Germany. And he also had a thing about not wanting Can associated with the British progressive groups, repeatedly emphasizing Can’s more important affinities with minimalism and James Brown and the Velvets and Andy Warhol. 

    It’s not clear how much Schmidt’s vision for Can reflects that of the other guys in the band but it brings out the art rock foundations of Can’s formation. Schmidt and co-founder, bassist and master sound experimentation and tape editor, Holger Czukay, both studied together with electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen in the early 1960s. Stockhausen means musically, in short: musique concrete or taped found sounds or already existing passages of music chopped up, looped, and manipulated electronically. Miles Davis and an astonishing number of prog rockers cite Stockhausen’s influence on their music in the early ‘70s. Maybe above all others, a Stockhausen recording put out in 1959 called “Gesang Der Junglinge” or “Song of the Youths” was very influential. 

Significally, Schmidt insists that Can has nothing to do with British prog rock but Can shares Stockhausen’s and prog rock’s penchant for drones and minimalist repetition and soundtrack ambience and an epic and/or hypnotically indulging, shall we say, approach to song length. Again, like the Velvets, Can’s “Yoo Doo Right,” on their '69 debut, Monster Movies, lasts over 20 minutes, surpassing “Sister Ray” at 17 and a half minutes in 1968, although both will soon enough be crushed by prog rock monster track monoliths like Jethro Tull’s 43-44 minute long “Thick as a Brick” or Michael Oldfield’s 60 minutes long “Amorak.” Apparently, Stockhausen has a piece of music that lasts for almost 29 hours. Anyway, by the late ‘70s Brit prog rockers are playing on Can’s last albums, guys who formerly played with Brit prog rockers Traffic. 

    The guitarist, Michael Karoli, the youngster in the core quartet, and the only member of the quartet that fits the rock star model, reportedly introduced Czukay to the Beatles’ “I am the Walrus,” which opened Czukay up to the avant-garde collage and studio manipulation possibilities in pop music. Eventually, Karoli travels in North Africa, especially Morocco, sharpening Can’s interest in non-Western rhythms, hypnotic trance and modal repetition. His guitar style, echoed later by post-punkers like PIL's Keith Levine or Amerindie groups like the Feelies and Vampire Weekend, shares an affinity with the bright, trilling, trebly guitar sounds of North/West Africa. 

    Finally, driving the core quartet of Can musicians, is drummer Jaki Liebezeit. I’m fully behind Stubbs and Schmidt’s arguments that the key to Can’s musical achievements were the collaborative and improvisatory group setup. Can is a sum greater than its parts, this is born out in how none of the band members solo work I’ve heard compares with Can’s classics or even their post-Mooney-Suzuki records. Like the Beatles, like the Velvet Underground, like many of the greatest bands, the sum was greater than its individual parts with Can. But if I had to identify only one musician in that core Can quartet of musicians as MVP, the guy who raised their sound above just another early ‘70s jazz rock fusion band, of which there were many in that day mind you, it’s Jaki Liebezeit’s drumming. 

    His beats are always center, simple, metronomic but tricky and funky. Leading the way, Liebezeit pushes the tempo in Can music and creates the center of the band's sound around which the other guy’s riff and improv. He manages to simultaneously evoke traditional drumbeats and global rhythms with a signature clipped machine-like precision and relentlessness. Although that doesn't quite tell the whole story either. 

Liebezeit is frequently credited, along with Kraftwerk and Neu’s drummer Klaus Dinger, and I’d throw in there as well Faust’s drummer Werner “Zappi” Diermaier, with inspiring the trademark motorik sound: a relentless, machine-like drumming style associated with the emergence of Krautrock. But Liebezeit is more than the motorik sound. The popular model of the motorik sound, Kraftwerk’s 1974 track, “Autobahn,” is literally an electronic transcription of Dinger’s exuberant drumming style, according to co-founder Ralf Hutter. Liebezeit’s signature drum sound is really a combo of that relentless tribal trance-inducing trademark machine-like motorik sound, that he shares with Dinger and Zappi and probably others, combined in Liebezeit with a big bag of global funky-jazz drummer chops. 

    Indeed, Liebezeit began on the drums as a jazzer, subbed once for Art Blakey when his Jazz Messengers played in Cologne in the early 1960s. He modeled his simple drum set after jazz great Kenny Clarke and admired the drumming of Elvin Jones. But he has some falling out with the free jazz mindset before he joins Can; “there were too many rules in free jazz,” he concludes. Foremost, it appears he burnt out on free jazz’s aversion to repetition and groove. He expresses a preference for the syncopated sounds of flamenco and afro-Cuban jazz music. This reminds me of some remarks in Miles Davis’s autobiography. In the middle of the free jazz craze Miles boasts that he tries to never repeat himself but then admits elsewhere to preferring drummers who keep a strong steady time he can play off. Liebezeit wanted to be Mile’s steady drummer but insisted that his relentless tempos or grooves would lead the way; forcing the tempo, connecting his drumming style to punk and post-punk. Liebezeit’s drumming drives Can’s sound. Like in funk and groove music styles, his drumming is almost always the center of the group’s sound. 

        I’m no expert on any musicianship, I caution the reader. The most formal music education I got was actually playing drums in my 5th and 6th grade band but quit with a buddy who played the snare drum next to me because our band instructor was, ironically in a story about Krautrock, a complete Nazi figure to us, actually German with a thick accent, and very strict and impatient, which very well could have been because we weren’t very good. Anyway, I’ve never played a drum set and cannot read a musical score. So, like I said, I’m no expert on great drumming. But I’ve always loved beats and rhythms and funky syncopating grooves and it’s hard for me to think of a more original and signature drumming style than Can’s Jaki Liebezeit. He shares the krautrock trademark motorik drum sound with Dinger and Zappi but he brings to it a virtuosic global funky groove traditionalism that is all his own. There are times when he sounds like a machine sample of Clyde Stubblefield 10 or 15 years before this sound would become a staple of hiphop music. Lots of tricky funky beats relentlessly and hypnotically stretched into marathon monster jams. His 23-minute long tour de force in "Chain Reaction" (opening the live set below) displays Liebezeit's classic rock era godhead chops. He was a brilliant drummer. His bandmates were known to describe his drum sound as “half man, half machine.” 

The impression I'm left with now is that I've only touched the surface with live Can stuff but, wow, there is some good stuff out there. This is from 1975, so late by most evaluations of Can, but it absolutely cooks with this minimalist banging energy. Not to be missed.  

    For Liebezeit alone I find nearly all Can’s albums listenable. No doubt they lose some of their signature weirdness when Czukay leaves the band in 1977. And there is definitely an dramatic edge to their sound that is lost without vocalists Malcolm Mooney or Damo Suzuki. All their best albums, solid 'A' albums in my book, Monster Movie (’69), Soundtracks (’70), Tago Mago (’71), Ege Bamyasi (’72), and Future Days (’73), feature one or both of them. But for me the four principles, the Fab Four, jamming together are always a superlative jazz-funk rock instrumental outfit. German psychedelia’s Booker T & The MGs, only in Can's case led by the drummer. Soon Over Babaluma (’74),  still arguably an 'A' album, and Landed (’75), Flow Motion (’76), Saw Delight (’77), Out of Reach (’78), and Can (’79), all arguably 'B+' albums, with each including some strong band Can moments. No doubt the vocals pale in comparison with the Mooney and Suzuki albums. And there's more schlager in the later stuff. After Soon Over Babaluma they do sound at times like they are trying hard to sell out but the band always remains tight and good together. Or perhaps up until their 1989 comeback album, Rite Time, when it does sound like they’re all just phoning it in. The collaborative energy in Can all gone. 

   But it is the Mooney and Suzuki stories that do really take the Can thing to another level in vanguard rock music lore. Neither was a very good singer. They both appeared with Can as though hired hands, although the core quartet talks about the collaborative energy between Mooney and Liebezeit and, as I've alluded, Mooney-Suzuki are a feature of nearly all Can’s best songs: “Yoo Doo Right,” “Mother Sky,” “She Brings the Rain,” “Halleluwah,” “Paperhouse,” “Vitamin C,” “Spoon,” etc. It was as if Can were the Velvets led by John Cale. None of the core quartet were lead singer types, so to fulfill that role they bring in these outsider art guys off the street. 

    Mooney was artist and graduate student, an American, and a globetrotting counterculture hippie. If ever there was the case for John Ford’s quip about “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend” here it was. Mooney’s vocal style was garage rock gruff. He’d obsessively repeat phrases, “Waiting for the Streetcar,” “Yoo Doo Right,” “Outside My Door,” interspersed with yelps and whoops, as sharp rhythmic counterpoints to Liebezeit. The effect was catchy but also edgy and obsessive. In band lore Mooney finally suffers some sort of nervous collapse after performing “The Empress and the Ukraine King” one night, repeating the phrase “Upstairs, downstairs” for hours, long after the rest of the band and crowd had given up and gone home. Shortly thereafter he is counseled to leave Can for his health and he moves back to the states where he went on to become a visual artist and college professor. After those remarkably productive three years with Can, 1968 to 1970, he never plays with the band again until ‘89’s Rite Time. Mooney later says the “Upstairs/downstairs” story was made up but still remarkable how fitting it was to the obsessive repetition in Mooney’s best songs with Can. Mooney was an add on but essential to giving early Can songs a dramatic rock punch that grabbed the listener's attention. 

    Damo Suzuki was an immigrant from Japan who, after Mooney had left the band, they ran into actually performing on the street, busking, in Munich in 1970. So, again, the lead singer is a hired hand, an immigrant, and sings in English, not German, even though Suzuki was Japanese. In early live performances of the band you can find on youtube it appears as though audience members have no idea what to make of Suzuki. His vocal performances appear to be intense exorcisms, like Mooney, based on a lot of repetition and rhythmic tension and build-up, but are often totally indecipherable beyond the occasional hook phrase chanted repeatedly. 

    For the longest time I heard the lyrics to “Vitamin C” as “Hey you,” a classic song opening lyric (Swamp Dogg, Pink Floyd, etc), “you’re losing your,” all consistent with a lyric sheet, but then I heard maybe ‘privacy,’ or ‘your sanity,’ anything but “Vitamin C”?! I still can’t hear “Vitamin C”? Or for another example, his crucial "da da das" or “yeah, yeah, yeahs” at the end of “Halleluwah,” where he is according to lyric sheets really singing “Halleluwah”?! No way I hear that but whatever he’s saying the way he says it is indeed exhilaratingly “Halleluwah” stuff. Suzuki’s incantatory chanting make the words, beyond a hook phrase like “Mother Sky” feel less important than the trance-like force of the repetition and Suzuki’s speaking in tongue-like cathartic gesticulations. 

    The story of Suzuki’s breakup with the band in ’73, after recording Future Days, is almost as strange as the Mooney story. Supposedly he left the band to get married and join the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Then the story goes he got very sick, broke up with his wife, and became a successful middle level management guy in some industry. Then he later returned to music by creating Damo Suzuki’s Network, where he’d tour without a band and do collaborative one-off concerts with local musicians around the world. In later interviews he suggests he never felt like a fully integrated member of Can in the ordinary “band family” sense. But he sure did collaborate with them to make a few great Can albums between 1970 and 1973. 

Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki pictured together in the late 1990s or 2000s. 

    

    The core band family of Can musicians are Schmidt, Czukay, Karoli, and Liebezeit, but they never sound better than they do when they play with Mooney and/or Suzuki. They’re always predominantly an instrumental proposition, with minimalist lyrics, but their playing and songs are never as intense or dramatically rock as when they play with Mooney and Suzuki. 

Two excellent retrospective Can compilations, under Schmidt’s impressive curation, came out in the 2010s, and I’m assuming have a lot to do with Can's growing rock snob legacy. 

A 3 hour/3-CD collection of outtakes and live performances known as The Lost Tapes came out in 2012.  Foremost, it’s notable, for such a studio-centric band by reputation, how many great live recordings of early Can exist. In their takeoff as a band, 1968 to 1973, Liebezeit seemingly always charging ahead, the band are scorching hot together, goading Mooney and Suzuki on. The recordings on TLT are a little crude and rough but remarkably effective for outtakes and make the case for what monsters of experimental rock and psychedelia Can were in those first five years of their existence. 

And then there is The Singles a 2017 album compiling 23 Can singles and B-sides originally released between 1969 and 1979, and then the set adds on a 1989 remix of “Hoolah Hoolah.” This is the case for Can as a pop band. It feels a little far-fetched of a claim, Can as a pop band, but still remarkable how many of Can’s singles on this compilation hold up as pop songs. “Spoon” reaches number 6 on the pop charts in Germany in 1972 (and then a semi-popular Amerindie band from Texas name their band after the song in the 1990s). Can even tried disco like everybody else at the time and produced their only chart hit, “I Want More,” in the UK, peaking at 26 in 1976. They’re so into it they then spin that song into a couple more extended play disco funk jams. Ultimately, this audacious collection proves two things: 1) Can were not above the occasional schlager music (“Silent Night," "Cascade Waltz," etc), contrary to Schmidt's original convictions, and 2) Can were remarkably deft at making pop or semi-pop songs (“Turtles Have Short Legs,” “She Brings the Rain,”  “I’m So Green,” “Mushroom,” “Moonshake,” etc) for such an anti-schlager experimental rock band. The model might be Abbey Road era Beatles studio experimentation but it’s all Can's take: an improvising German jam band, immigrant Mooney or Suzuki doing their performance art vocal things, and Liebezeit’s proto-worldmusic Motorik funk.

    Anyway, Can are now on a very short list of my favorite experimental rock bands of all time. Up there with the Velvets, various Eno collaborations, Captain Beefheart, and Sonic Youth. I think in the same way some critic might dismiss Hawkwind as a grandiose rehash of Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” some critic might dismiss Can as a German jazz-funk rehash of the Velvet’s “Sister Ray" or "I Heard Her Call My Name." I recognize the associations, both band's cop to them outright, but I think both Hawkwind and Can transcend those formulations with their records. Anyway, don’t sleep on Can, seminal krautrockers, if you like any of the above experimental rock greats. What I’ve learned most getting into some Can again is that their appeal goes beyond their classic albums. They were a great live band, with way more outtakes of great long experimental stuff out there than I knew. And with more remarkably catchy would-be wannabe pop hits than I realized. It's still true Can peaked when they featured Mooney and Suzuki but they were always a great band and reward greater attention to their expansive catalog of recordings. 

    Back in the day Xgau compares Can unfavorably with electric Miles Davis. What strikes me today about that comparison is not how much more I like Miles electric albums but what an apt comparison-- long groove heavy jams with rock and funk moves-- and then why the either/or? Instead, I imagine what a great double-bill live show would Can and Miles have made circa 1972-1973. Or why not a monster triple bill of Hawkwind opening, Can, and Miles headlining, of course. Three signature variations on classic psychedelic era deep grooves. 

Can goes disco on Top of the Pops, 1976. 

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. 

Hot Tub Time Machine: Soul Hits of the '70s

 "Love Rollercoaster," Ohio Players (1975): "Say what?" Number 1 in 1976 and a monster at school dances and probably the discos, I hadn't been to one quite yet. Dr. Funkenstein, George Clinton, doesn't like the disco blahs but discos sure do like the funk. Bohannon, Eddie Kendricks, Archie Bell, Earth, Wind, & Fire, Isley Brothers, Kool & The Gang, Jimmy Castor, War, Chic, and the Ohio Players could all be funky as it gets and were big hitmakers in the discos. 

"Shake, Shake, Shake (Shake Your Booty)," KC & Sunshine Band (1976): As a pretentious pimply adolescent I resisted KC's lyrics, which all more or less encourage you to shake your booty. Not that I was opposed to shaking my booty, properly lubricated, but couldn't they be not so freakin' obvious about it?! Now I think the dancing dogma accentuates KC's singular focus on making irresistibly catchy Latin funk pop. This or "Get Down Tonight" my Sunshine Band peaks. They emphasize the fun in funky.  

"You're Everything I Need," Major Lance (1975): By the '70s and the disco era Major Lance is a throwback, raw early '60s soul, like early Motown but still a little rougher around edges, more mistakes and sometimes more enthusiasm and that all-join-together churchy musical energy that made soul music sizzling hot in 1963 and still a dance music breakdown-sound, which Sly took to glorious pop heights, favorite in the '70s discos. Especially big in the discos of northern England and dubbed Northern soul. 

"The World," Sweet Inspirations (1970): A lot of early gay disco was taking Philadelphia International, Motown, or Atlantic soul music like this, as DJ's naturally started with a special appreciation for the longer stuff, more time between record transitions, Eddie Kendrick's "Girl You Need A Change of Mind" or The Temptations "Papa Was A Rollin Stone," both going way past five minutes, for early disco examples, and then stretching these proto-disco models even longer, lovingly adding symphonic intros and outros, elaborately funky bridges, endless buildups and exquisite climaxes. Producer Tom Moulton made a whole career out of this. This Atlantic single is more country than Moulton's mixes, the Sweet Inspirations bring more churchy old school fervor into the disco, but the mix conveys Moulton's kind of disco love for original soul music sources. Some of the love behind the Sweet Inspirations should also be credited to Jerry Wexler as well, the guy who coined the phrase rhythm & blues. The SI's were backup singers for Aretha, Elvis, Dusty, and a bunch of other Wexler production credits, and put out eight albums of their own between 1967 and 1979. 

"Fight the Power," The Isley Brothers (1975)

 I love how they're fighting the power with a Soul Train line dance. Like they're showing off their  ultimate crossover dance moves and, stunned, the authorities have no idea what to do?! Ronald Isley, lead singer, is very frustrated because they tell him he plays his music too loud, like he's a teenager angry because his parents are trying to shut his music down. And, plus, he's pissed about "all the other bullshit going round." It's not the agitprop of the Public Enemy version but it's hotter, funkier, more undeniable as pure musical force. And it reached number 4 on the Hot 100 and was very big, naturally, in the discos. Thank God It's Disco Friday. 

"Train in Vain," The Clash, London Calling (1979)

 

The London Calling cover draws connections between The Who and The Clash, 1960s and 1970s, '60s Mods and '70s Punk Rock, pop art and uptempo (but not metal) guitar rock. It's The Clash's big statement, staking their claim to rock history. "Train in Vain" just wants to be the best bad break-up song ever. 

"Protex Blue" & "Garageland," The Clash (1977)

Johnny Green's favorite Clash song. Probably not least of all because Joe calls him out in the coda, "Johnny, Johnny!" Perhaps honoring Johnny's dedication to condoms. Green, all-around chauffeur, stage-hand, personal assistant, drug & alcohol supplier, and horny groupie hound dog; basically, one-half the production team that kept The Clash running in their Death & Glory years ("like being on a commando raid with the Bash Street Kids," said photographer Pennie Smith of those times), and co-author of A Riot of Our Own (1999). "Protex Blue" is, arguably, as influential a Punk Rock prototype in form, in style, as anything on the first album. There's Chuck Berry guitar and it covers a lot of early X territory, for instance.  

They'd soon enough grow more interested in what the rich were doing but "Garageland" is my lumpen Clash sentimental fave. Paul's sexually explicit bass. Topper in peak rat-a-tat-tat attack form. Joe's gruff bark and Mick's "Ahh-ahh-ahhs" chorus. A mic-drop classic punk rock instrumental coda. The whole shebang a drunken rampage of gleeful intensity and laddish pride.