Susumu Yokota (1960–2015) was a Japanese electronic musician, DJ, and composer whose work moved between club music and more contemplative ambient sounds. On the club side, he emerged in the early 1990s with acid house and techno bangers like this monster 17-minute EP. Sometimes under aliases such as Frankfurt Tokyo Connection, Ebi, and Stevia, or here as Tenshin with his friend Makoto. Behind the big slugging beats and frantic Noirish stabs of cheap synths you can already hear the shifting, building, cascading, looping, Musique concrete of Yokota's more mature ambient music. Hypnotic big beat acid house right there when raves and EDM were blowing up for the first time. Not that I was there but I can hear the energy; experimental dance music energy. Rocking out, getting down, etc, universal musical languages.
Disco-- Everybody's doin' it: Richie Havens "Back to My Roots" (1980)
A funny part of getting into the deep cuts of the disco era, as I've mentioned before, is how eventually everybody's doing it, everybody seems to get around to making their disco track. B.B. King. Little Feat. Camel. Barbara Streisand. The Beach Boys. Even the opening act at Woodstock!
"Going Back to My Roots," Lamont Dozier (1977): For Dozier, the great songwriter who co-wrote and produced 14 Billboard number one hits with Motown, living in LA at the time the song was about going back to his Black roots in Detroit. An intimate psychological (if epic) journey; the original clocks in at over 9 minutes long. But Hugh Masekela, South African trumpeter, producer, anti-apartheid artist, contributes to production and takes the song back to Africa. The final section moves explicitly into Afrobeat territory, chanting in Yoruba and carrying on with the collaborative energy of sizzling global funk music; so LA to Detroit to Soweto. It's a great track, if maybe a little disjointed by its Dozier and Masekela sides. But Havens' voice and the way his discofied version fully transforms the song into this multicultural global dance anthem really takes it to another level for me. Makes it a post-disco global disco classic.
country blues-jazz-soul-funk proto-disco
Despite the upscale disco-w-strings velvet rope fantasy stereotype, Barry White, "The Hustle," Deodato*, what struck me reviewing '70s disco DJ playlists in The Disco Files was how much gutbucket country blues-jazz-soul-funk gets played in the underground gay discos. The first two tracks following are in that spirit and the other three I'm pretty sure I found in TDFs.
*- Brazilian pianist, composer, and jazzy disco record producer Eumir Deodato has a daughter married to actor Stephen Baldwin and a granddaughter married to Justin Bieber. Keeping up the legacy of the '70s disco era's decadence, they're apparently still getting into trouble at nightclubs in the 2020s.
In Defense of The Disco Files
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)
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.
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)
Carnival, Saturnalia, Bacchinalia for Russian Siberian Prison Inmates, circa 1850
Prisoners in Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead, in a prison camp in Siberia work arduously to squirrel away whatever money they can scrounge up, work release, trade in contraband, vodka, they strive and connive to save up some money so that they can blow it all on one big night out, get drunk, feast, strut around the prison yard, party, pick fights, risking nearly everything, rape and murder, crazy debauches. Why? Why can't they turn their saving industry to more productive ends go the scornful reproaches of prison authorities. Here is an explanation of this prisoner behavior ending with a funny deadpan cautionary note characteristic of Dostoevsky but offered by one Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, nobleman and teacher sentenced to prison for murdering his wife,
Finally, they run some risk when they give themselves up to this boasting; in which
again they find a semblance of life and liberty—the only thing they care for. Would not a
millionaire with a rope round his neck give all his millions for one breath of air? A
prisoner has lived quietly for several years in succession, his conduct has been so
exemplary that he has been rewarded by special exemptions. Suddenly, to the great
astonishment of his chiefs, this man becomes mutinous, plays the very devil, and does
not recoil from a capital crime such as assassination, violation, etc. Every one is
astounded at the cause of this unexpected explosion on the part of a man thought
incapable of such a thing. It is the convulsive manifestation of his personality, an
instinctive melancholia, an uncontrollable desire for self-assertion, all of which obscures
his reason. It is a sort of epileptic attack, a spasm. A man buried alive who suddenly
wakes up must strike in a similar manner against the lid of his coffin. He tries to rise up,
to push it from him, although his reason must convince him of the uselessness of his
efforts.
Reason, however, has nothing to do with this convulsion. It must not be forgotten
that almost every voluntary manifestation on the part of a convict is looked upon as a
crime. Accordingly, it is a perfect matter of indifference to them whether this
manifestation be important or insignificant, debauch for debauch, danger for danger. It is
just as well to go to the end, even as far as a murder. The only difficulty is the first step.
Little by little the man becomes excited, intoxicated, and can no longer contain himself.
For that reason it would be better not to drive him to extremities. Everybody would be
much better for it.
But how can this be managed?
Alta Arlene Thompson, Daughter, Sister, Wife, and Loving Mother, Dies at 87
Obituary-
Mrs. Thompson grew up and went to school in small town Banks, nestled up against the Coast Range on the western fringe of the Tualatin Valley in Washington County. Alta and her husband Jack Thompson were married in the Banks’ First Methodist Church in 1958. Alta and Jack square-danced for many years with the Hillsboro Hoedowners and Alta worked for many years for the Washington County Health Department in the county seat, Hillsboro.
Alta and Jack stopped working full-time in the late 1990s and enjoyed a long retirement, snow birding between various locations in the sunny Southwest and Bend in Central Oregon, and then back home again in Washington County. They spent their long retirement riding ATVs with friends in western deserts and mountains, and vacationing with family. Alta and Jack were married for 67 years.
Alta was born in 1938. Her mother’s family lived near Banks going back to the late 19th century. Alta was named after her grandmother, Alta Carstens, matriarch of some family property on the north end of Banks. The Carstens had migrated from England and established a homestead near Banks in the 1880s. Alta’s father’s family, Winters, formerly Van Winters, were of English and Dutch ancestry. Her dad, Louis, worked in sawmills, from Alaska to Northern California before settling in the Banks area and Washington County.
Alta graduated from Banks High School in 1956, a graduating class of 29 students. She married Jack C. Thompson, graduate of nearby Hillsboro High School, at a small church in Banks. Alta and Jack raised two children, Jack II and Deborah, living for a time in Banks, Hillsboro, Beaverton, and the longest stint on a small piece of property in Mountaindale, a narrow valley in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range. All in Washington County.
Alta worked for the Washington County Health Department for 23 years as a secretary and administrative clerk. She took great pride in her work and the government services to which she contributed. Jack and Alta joined the Hillsboro Hoedowners, a square-dancing club, in the late 1960s and were active members until the mid 1990s. Their social lives were filled with family and square-dancing events, and frequent vacation trips to the Oregon coast and bigger summer camping adventures to surrounding states and national parks.
Alta contributed to a family tradition of quilt making, read romance mysteries by the box full, and was a big Portland Trail Blazers fan. Surviving are Alta’s husband, Jack, a son, Jack II, and granddaughter, Salome.
Endings are always hard (a personal reflection),
Maybe for however much you want to imagine yourself to be a unique individual, hanging out with your mother, or your parents anyway, is always going to remind you that to a perhaps uncomfortable degree the apple never falls far from the tree. We’re a mixture of our mothers and fathers, or the people who raised us anyway, the folks who wiped our noses and taught us how to tie our shoes and ride a bike.
In my mom’s retirement years, she became a big Portland Trail Blazer fan. She’d always been a fan but in her golden years she tried not to miss a game on TV and became fiercely partisan about the Blazers. She always rooted for them and never picked on the them when they were struggling; as I, by contrast, once I’d moved away from home, was often quick to. She loved it when Blazer players chose to live in the Portland area permanently and would refer to a player appearing in the news with tender affection, like family. But truth be told I never saw a game with her in those years, 2000s and 2010s, when she would not swear the refs and sometimes even the NBA had it in for the Blazers. She’d even grumble about the refs when they were winning, even if that complaining was quickly forgotten in the victory celebration. It could get so bad when things weren’t going well for the Blazers, and there was no shortage of losing Blazer games in those years, fit to be tied, my mom would insist on turning the game off, and then have to check back to see if there was any change in the score every 15 minutes until the game was over. She was fiercely loyal and partisan about the Blazers and took all their ups and downs very personally.
My mom was fiercely emotional and loyal like that in all her loving attachments, my dad, us kids, family, friends, her work, Banks, Oregon, Washington County, the Blazers, everything. Her love was fiercely loyal and tender like that. She beamed when you visited her and cried when you had to leave. She defended loved ones, right or wrong. But be that as it may, you most definitely did not want to get crosswise with my mom over any of the other things she loved. She was like one of those scrappy NBA players who you love when they’re on your team, on your side, in your corner, but find hard to take when part of the opposition.
Which was a particular worry for me when Trump rose to power in 2015. I feared my mom and dad might go for the guy. They were from the same demographic as his voting base. Both came from rural backgrounds, no college educations. They shared many of the grievances of his constituencies. A lot of the nativist myths Trump rose to power on-- foreigners are all ripping us off and our tax dollars pay for DEI minorities living off gov’t handouts, for two prime examples-- were popular coin in working class circles in the Oregon I grew up in.
But I’d underestimated my mom on this one. She never hesitated, “Trump is a bad man” was her succinct conclusion the first time his candidacy came up; this was before he’d even been elected. And I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. She was already a Hillary Clinton fan, had read a couple of her books. But she was also a Republican John McCain fan, so I couldn’t be certain? Plus, by that time they were living again on the property of my dad’s niece, who in the Obama years expressed fears the government was going to try to take away their guns. So I had my concerns.
Although, must say, my parents never really pushed any partisan politics on us as kids. If the subject ever came up, my mom would say her dad was a Democrat, presumably because he was a working man, and her mom was Republican, presumably because she was the daughter of a relatively large landholder in a small community. And, for that matter, I don’t remember a lot of partisan politics from either my mom’s or dad’s sides of the family while growing up. A loud bigot uncle here, the occasional ethnic slur there, but very little indication of the bitter grievances that have come out in the Trump Era.
What grievances, or from what I heard of them? Gun control, too many immigrants, liberals are bad and, most unexpected, a near hysterical hostility towards Portland-- and cities in general, I gathered-- where I have lived for the last 40 plus years! At any rate, I never needed to add my two cents or brace myself too much visiting my parents but, unfortunately, much of Trump’s first term was filled with my mom's stories about the shocking support for him she encountered in various other extended family members, whom she was seeing more of again now that they were settled back in Washington County.
Mostly, I found in my parent’s hostility to Trump some relief or even humor. One of her brothers, a former cop, was outraged by her hostility to Trump. She’d relate every encounter with puzzled and funny indignation. Curiously, another relative, on my dad’s side, also justified her Trump support as owing to the fact she also had police friends. Supporting Trump, apparently, was Backing the Blue. That Trump, a convicted felon, serial sex abuser, the most criminally litigated POTUS in history, did not raise any alarms or concerns about police or police union support for him because the police were family and friends.
The stories could be funny if outrageous from my safe distance but a few particularly upsetting incidents, when I was not present, were unfortunately deeply alienating experiences for my mom. She never openly quarreled with anyone, in her tellings anyway, but would replay a couple of the most trying episodes incessantly when I visited. Basically, some relative would grouse that Trump would do great things if only the damn democrats would stop trying to get in his way. His so-called crimes were overblown by liberals, etc. And my mom would feel shut down, disrespected, and ostracized, and replay the bad encounter over every time I visited.
I was sympathetic with her position, of course, but it was sad to watch it strain family relationships. And, really, my sympathies were no help in bridging the growing distance. I’d always thought Trump was a crazy fascist who promoted violence against his enemies. Enemies he slandered and scapegoated on TV no less! Poor immigrants, people of color, Trans, street protesters, liberals, Democrats, etc. (Again, as a person living in a Blue city, Me!) My mom was right, he was a bad man, and he was dangerous. I viewed his supporters first with puzzled alarm and whenever possible wary distance. I still think there is something extremely broken in popular support for him and anybody that supports him cannot be entirely trusted, sorry to say.
That said, my Aunt Bert, on my mom’s side, and my dad’s niece, Patty, stayed in contact with my mom until the end, and my mom was always grateful for their support; if also always humorously mystified by their Trump support. They don’t like chauvinist men, or at least she didn’t think they did, why would they go for a sexist creep like Trump, she’d ask me? I had my hunches but was about as baffled as she was, to be honest.
This is backdrop to this last five year run for my parents and my efforts to support them through this difficult period. It wasn’t easy for anybody concerned.
I first started getting more involved during Covid, April 2020, when they were living again on my dad’s niece’s place. This was the second time during their retirement when my parent’s wanted to go home, move back to Washington County for a spell and Patty had generously offered them a spot on her place.
I protested their second stay as soon as I heard about it. Patty lived 20 miles from town and health care. I really didn’t know yet exactly how bad it had gotten for them, but I knew their RV was breaking down and their health appeared to be weakening fast enough that they needed to be settling closer to health care than Dixie Mountain! But my dad’s curt response to my protests anticipated the hard times ahead, “The only way you’ll get me off this Hill now is in a pine box,” he exclaimed.
This was a wildly impractical position to take, and I said so, but I also understood where they were coming from. The Hill where Patty lives, way up in the West Hills outside Portland, was literally the same area where my dad had grown up and was deeply rural and what my parents had always called home: Not having to live in town but living on some property outside town was their idea of the American dream. Like their sweet place in Mountaindale, the place they cashed-in to embark on their 20-year-plus big retirement. I got all that. Patty’s place was like going home for them or the closest available facsimile, but it was too far away from health care when their health care needs were obviously only going to increase.
I’d always visited them a handful of times a year, holidays, weekends, vacations, although fewer visits in their hardcore snow birding years, as Bend and Arizona were much further away from Seattle than Portland. But during Covid I began driving down once a week to keep them in groceries and ferry them to and from the doctor. Once I was seeing them more regularly again, I recognized quickly that they were losing their ability to live independently and the living situation for them at Patty’s was totally unsustainable.
When I arrived on the scene they were already struggling to prepare their own meals. Dad could no longer drive safely but was in fierce denial about this. This was funny at first but soon enough grew scary and dangerous. Patty helped out however she could but mom was increasingly needing help going to the restroom or even getting out of a chair, was often on the edge of tears for fear of falling when taking any stairs, even one or two steps, and finally fell one time in the RV where my dad and Patty could not lift her off the floor and an ambulance had to be called from town, again, 20 miles away.
After a very difficult year, I got them vaccinated as soon as I could and into a senior living facility in Hillsboro in the summer of 2021.
My parents were always great sweethearts. I’m not saying they were not old fashion about some things in a way modern couples might object to. Mom ran the house, dad took care of the outside chores, etc. And I cannot count the number of times I would ask my mom her opinion or preference about something, anything, and this got worse the longer they were together, when she wouldn’t invariably respond first with her account of dad’s opinion or preference, even though you hadn’t asked for his opinion but hers. The funny part of this was my mom had actually always been full of opinions about many things, especially her fierce loving attachments, and liked talking about pretty much whatever, much more than my dad, and undoubtably where I got these tendencies from, but increasingly the longer my parents were together to access my mom’s opinions on anything-- to get beyond, ‘Well, your dad thinks this or that’-- you had to patiently crack the hardshell united front of their relationship and that could take some time.
This closeness, the loving tenderness between them, was obviously a source of great strength for them. More than anything else, this is what comes through for me sorting through their boxes of old photos. They were married 67 years, went through their share of ups and downs, were never rich but always rich in love for each other and their family. Or for as long as their own health and physical strength held up, at any rate. Which like everything else, admittedly, got very difficult for them at the end.
Their last four or five years, the last year and half up at Patty’s, and then three years living in an assisted living facility in Hillsboro, my dad’s ability to physically support my mom was breaking down. And, unfortunately, my mom could never quite adjust to this new fact, nor could he to her growing immobility and aches and pains associated with Parkinson’s disease. She was always tormented by the threat of injuring him but couldn’t stop calling out to him for help. And when she would call out, he’d always try to help her, but then they’d get into arguments about how he should go about helping her, and it would go on like this day-in-day-out until he got injured again. He thankfully retained his sense of humor and showed remarkable resilience in the face of her pained wrath but as his dementia got worse matters got worse between them. Everything became hard for them.
Still, when they finally first moved my dad into memory care, separating him from her for the first time in 65 years, memory care staff told me for the first few days they found him wondering the hallways, trying all the locked doors, and when they’d ask him what he was doing he’d say, “I’m trying to get back to my wife!”
My mom, by contrast, knew his name and who he was to the bitter end, was tormented by any separation from him, and would rage with jealously at what she perceived in his growing dementia as the loss of his affections and then in calmer, more reflective moments, would muse about him, “He’s funny. I love him so,” and then she’d cry again, this time smiling through her tears.
Even great sweethearts struggle as declining health and ultimately death separates and isolates them. This was wrenchingly sad to watch up close but looking back it appears to me now as kind of heroic. They struggled the best they could to stay together until death did part them.
My mother was always a fiercely loving person and I am tremendously grateful to have had her in my corner. It was terrible to watch her suffer as she did in her last years but, finally at rest, I hope I have done justice to her loving memory. I love you, Mom. R.I.P.
Photo memorial: I put together a photo memorial to her memory at: www.flickr.com/photos/swellsvillefamilyalbums/albums.