Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  The fruit of endless labour and individual imagination, Boston came to epitomise a style of American music-making as basic as its unmistakable brand names: Kansas, Journey, Styx, Foreigner, Starz, Heart. This was the dawn of arena rock, of AOR, although the genre was more specific than that abbreviation suggested. It denoted music that was loud but slick; built around hard-rock riffs and pop melodies; and sealed with rabble-rousing choruses that virtually defied their audience not to punch the air with delight. The AOR bands demanded no commitment from their fans beyond enjoyment: no political agenda, no qualifications in music theory or poetic structure. If the previous generation of rock musicians had sought to represent or even lead the (counter-)culture, AOR offered itself in place of a culture, its ideal audience a generation united in its instinctive, lightning responses to brazen emotional triggers. In time, AOR would widen its palette of feelings to encompass the power ballad, a form of muscular sentimentality filled with gargantuan theatrical anguish.

  In retrospect, signposts towards this new American mainstream were scattered through the early 1970s: from the Eagles’ ‘Witchy Woman’ (swamp rock from the California beaches) and the Doobie Brothers’ ‘Long Train Running’ (rock meets funk in a sedative cloud of smoke) to Grand Funk Railroad’s ‘We’re an American Band’ (1960s frat rock for kids too young to remember the 1960s). Kiss disguised their own melodicism behind their garish make-up and daredevil posing, although no band whose most enduring hit was a ballad as grandiose as ‘Beth’ could ever pose a credible threat to society. Even Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Southern-rock anthem, ‘Free Bird’, could be purloined for the new tradition, for its ability to unify a crowd in arm-swaying, lighter-holding Pavlovian response. But the band who did most to establish the boundaries for AOR were Styx, whose massed choruses and fist-pumping riffs were designed for the expanse of a sports arena.

  Those fists were permanently clenched for the next decade, as the American rock mainstream recycled the same set of attitudes: defiance, triumph, resolution, commitment, passion. Disco came and went; hip hop was born; punk exploded and turned into cliché; but in the American heartland, AOR and its hard-rock cousin continued almost undisturbed, accumulating outside influences so slowly that its audience barely noticed the change between Starz’ 1977 hit ‘Cherry Baby’, with its roots in mid-1960s British beat, and Van Halen’s 1984 venture into synth-led disco rock, ‘Jump’. By then, AOR had become so permanent an institution that it could jettison virtually all of its trademarks and still trigger its arena crowds with music that they would once have despised. At its most formulaic, it produced anonymity – names such as Balance, Point Blank, Silver Condor, Spider and the Dillman Band; or it could reduce rock legends, such as Jefferson Starship, to the same state. But while it could deliver an anthem as uncomplicated and chest-beating as Journey’s 1981 single ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’, it would never die – as long as there were people who needed to be told that they could make it through the storm, keep the faith, and a hundred other clichés which would soon fuel a boom in self-help books. AOR sold its audience the most seductive of emotional diets: a sense of belonging, and endless exhilaration.

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  fn1 Within two years, NME had reinvented itself as the hippest of all the British rock papers, filling its pages with refugees from the ailing underground press and clichés borrowed from its American equivalents.

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  EXHILARATION: TO SPIN the body, fall back to the floor, leap up as if propelled by a trampoline, turn, coil, unwind, all in perfect time with the vintage four-to-the-bar metronome of musicians from 4,000 miles away. The venue was the Twisted Wheel or Tiffany’s; the Golden Torch or the Night Owl; the Burlesque or the Dungeon; the Casino or the Highland Room; basement or ballroom, cellar or club room. All for the sake of pleasure, liberation, the power of volume and the perfect beat – the union of bodies carving the air in simultaneous, solitary joy.

  The stimulus for this ecstasy was soul; Northern soul, named not for its North American origins (its spiritual home was Detroit) but the location of its disciples, in Manchester, Wigan, Blackpool or the Potteries. Every weekend they would be drawn together by train or by coach, for a pilgrimage into the utterly reliable territory of music which immersed you in its transcendent energy (with some pills, perhaps, to keep you on your feet till dawn).

  The Twisted Wheel in Manchester was where it all began: relocated in 1965 to a coffee shop in an old warehouse, above a cellar complex which played host over the next six years to visiting American soul stars and the cream of Britain’s own R&B talent, black and white. It was a haven for mods, at first, until the gospel of soul music spread and another elite was formed: one without prejudice of gender or race, linked only by its obsession with the rhythms of black America. Northern soul enjoyed an occult existence until pundits began to query why the British singles chart was filled, between 1969 and 1972, with apparently random revivals of soul sounds from the past. Some of these came from Motown’s biggest stars, others from acts whose records had barely been distributed in Britain before. For this was a scene that revolved around records which weren’t popular; which, in the most extreme example, of Frank Wilson’s hyper-charged ‘Do I Love You’, had never been given a commercial release. DJs and venues competed to uncover the hottest obscurities from America’s 1960s soul scene, and then cover them up in plain sight – blasting their two and a half minutes of rhythmic ecstasy to a room of pulsating dancers, while keeping the identity of their find a secret from their rivals. Their goal was to locate records as thrilling as the best-loved Motown classics, but unknown to the masses, their obscurity sealing the deal.

  Each different venue and town had its own philosophy. Some wouldn’t venture beyond the 1960s, while others kept pace with the ever-changing rhythms coming out of America. Most famous of all was the Wigan Casino, which ran from 1973 to 1981, pulled in punters from across Britain, founded its own Casino Classics label, made stars of its DJs, and was ultimately exploited by such hits as ‘Footsee’ by Wigan’s Chosen Few, and ‘Skiing in the Snow’ by Wigan’s Ovation. Its playlists ranged from vintage Detroit backing tracks (‘Double Cookin’’, ‘I Have Faith in You’), through blue-eyed soul by the Four Seasons and Paul Anka, to the perennial Three Before Eight (o’clock) – the weekly spins of Jimmy Radcliffe’s ‘Long After Tonight is All Over’, Tobi Legend’s ‘Time Will Pass You By’ and Dean Parrish’s ‘I’m On My Way’ which brought the all-nighter to a close.

  Beyond Wigan, there were all-dayers and all-nighters across the North and the Midlands, and even in London, although the capital preferred to follow the contemporary pulse of America. The scene prompted a series of drug busts around 1969–70, although it was the least violent and disruptive of milieux. This stigma was so pervasive that even five years later, venues would display signs proclaiming ‘We do not play soul music’.

  Not that soul music was easily compressed into a sound or a style. Besides the uptown soul beloved of the Northern loyalists, and the muscular R&B sound of the American South, African-American music had been changing as dramatically as the society from which it came. Even Motown was experimenting with ‘psychedelic soul’, as groups such as the Temptations reflected the turbulence of urban poverty and violence, ‘Cloud Nine’ and ‘Ball of Confusion’ evoking ghettos caught between militant black activism and the lure of heroin. Sly & the Family Stone, multiracial and polyrhythmic, became one of the biggest bands in America by providing near-manic dance anthems alongside bulletins from a generation haunted by disillusion and despair.

  The mainstream exploded in bizarrely different ways – the lengthy lover-man raps of Isaac Hayes’s ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ and ‘Walk On By’; the teasing sensuality of Al Green’s ‘Tired of Being Alone’; the combustible eroticism of James Brown’s ‘Sex Machine’, Curtis Mayfield’s eerie contrast of ‘Hell Below’ with the almost forlornly optimistic ‘Move On Up’; and a spate of remarkable records which reeked of paranoia, from War’s �
��Slipping into Darkness’ and the O’Jays’ ‘Back Stabbers’ to the Undisputed Truth’s ‘Smiling Faces Sometimes’, in which a handshake concealed a snake and your brother might turn out to be your most profound enemy. For the first time, black artists were freed to make albums as rich and experimental as their white peers, a liberation they channelled into work as idealistic as Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and as desolate as Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly.

  This was defiantly black territory, as the producer of the TV show Soul! insisted: ‘R&B music, especially3 with many of its new lyrics, forms the flow for black pride. It is totally ours, and cannot be purchased or properly imitated by anyone else.’ But the beats of black music were constantly changing; there was nothing beyond attitude to link Isaac Hayes’s expansive, languorous landscapes with the naked, taut funk of the Isley Brothers, or, indeed, with the Latin-soul pulse of the Dramatics’ ‘Whatcha See is Whatcha Get’. The prevailing sounds were as harsh as life in the ghetto, and as silky smooth as bourgeois existence in the suburbs – African-American, both of them, but reflecting experiences as different as those of Bing Crosby and Elvis Presley in the 1950s. Soul was either a musical incitement for riot, or (as Ronnie White of the Miracles claimed) women’s music, an invitation to fall in love with a sweet-voiced tenor like Smokey Robinson.

  There was another dichotomy: funk as a vehicle for cinematic tension, epitomised by Isaac Hayes’s theme for the ‘blaxploitation’ movie Shaft or the Temptations’ ‘Papa Was a Rolling Stone’, and funk as an invitation to party. Often it was hard to tell the two approaches apart, as wah-wah guitar crackled like fire over skeletal arrangements. Funk could signal fear or elation; but by the mid-1970s, as the black liberation movement collapsed into internal warfare, and hard drugs swamped America’s ghettos, there was no appetite left for music which charted the desolation of daily life. Curtis Mayfield’s music illuminated the bleak path ahead: within six years, he slipped from an almost saintly optimism about the fate of black America into an era of grim realism, and then the depressingly featureless vista of his 1975 album, There’s No Place Like America Today. This music was brutally honest, and almost unbearably drained of hope: too empty to be angry anymore. Given a choice between despair and escapism, African-American people chose to party as if all they lived for was the dance.

  Moving to music, and the sensation4 of needing to, are vital to any understanding of what black music is about … So much of the American black’s musical content has to be understood through the body rather than the mind.

  Equally clear is the link between dancing and sex. Basically, to dance is to transmit sexual messages; it is to simulate the coital tempo … it remains an activity of man the animal rather than man the thinker.

  Robert Gallagher, Black Music, January 1976

  I find it mind-bending5. It’s a contributory factor to epilepsy. It’s the biggest destructor in history to education. It’s a jungle cult. It’s what the Watusis do to whip up a war. What I’ve seen in the discos, with people jogging away, is what people do in the bush.

  Chief of the Rhodesian Broadcasting Company, explaining its ban on disco music, 1979

  In its eternal search for a scapegoat to blame for Britain’s economic and social woes, the fascist National Front party focused its hatred on the country’s non-white community. Its manifesto at the October 1974 general election repeated its customary call for ‘a complete repatriation6 of all coloured immigrants and their descendants living here’. Cleansing the British population was not enough, however. The NF also demanded that the BBC should be barred from broadcasting ‘imported negro rhythms’. As the decade progressed, the party’s membership embarked on a systematic campaign of intimidation aimed at British radio stations. The switchboards were inundated with anonymous callers demanding: ‘Stop playing that wog music’, as NF leader Martin Webster declared that reggae was music only fit for ‘monkeys and degenerates’.

  Even the most insightful fascist – oxymoron – would have struggled to identify precisely what constituted music with ‘imported negro rhythms’. Was it soul music, played by the Average White Band or David Bowie? Or the Rolling Stones, expressing their passion for R&B or reggae? Paul McCartney recording with R&B arranger Allen Toussaint in New Orleans? Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball, reviving the fifty-year-old jazz of the Crescent City? The challenge was to find the British popular music (let alone the American or Jamaican) that didn’t lean to some extent on a ‘negro’ rhythm, imported or otherwise.

  Those infectious beats had inspired almost every new dance craze since the birth of ragtime, but blackness and dance music were not synonyms. The Chakachas’ ‘Jungle Fever’ from 1972 added Latino spice to the fatback grooves of James Brown’s band, overlaid with orgasmic exclamations: sex and race, red rags to the blackshirt bull. Except that the Chakachas hailed not from Spanish Harlem or Watts, but from Belgium.

  Even more disconcertingly, there were now dance rhythms which emanated not from the slippery fingers and syncopated soul of musicians, black and white, but from machines. Exhibit one: ‘Son of My Father’, a hit for Giorgio (Moroder) in the US, Chicory Tip in Britain – a bubblegum tune powered by synthetic handclaps and percussion, and spiralling lines from a Moog synthesiser: robotic, and ominously circular, suggesting that it might, like the cockroaches, survive the nuclear holocaust. Exhibit two: ‘Popcorn’ by Gershon Kingsley, commercialised by the American band Hot Pepper: the catchiest of electronic earworms, caught in a blizzard of interlocking synthesiser parts, and set to an unrelentingly frenetic computerised drumbeat. Here was a future that might have appealed to the most authoritarian of fascisti: the soundtrack of a Metropolis where all humanity was in thrall to the emotionless rattle and burble of electronic devices which they could no longer control. Except that neither exhibit was emotionless: in their constant repetition was the stuff of joy.

  ‘Here in New York7,’ said record mixer Tom Moulton in 1975, ‘a lot of people go to the discos to get away from the world … and be totally free, dancing.’ No community in that city required that carefree joy, and the safety on which it depended, more than the gay crowd that flocked to clubs such as the aptly named Sanctuary. There, as early as 1971, a disc jockey named Francis Grasso was pioneering the art of creating music from machinery – a pair of record decks. ‘His tour de force8’, wrote disco chronicler Albert Goldman, ‘was playing two records simultaneously for as long as two minutes at a stretch. He would super[impose] the drum break of Chicago’s “I’m a Man” over the orgasmic moans of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” to make a powerfully erotic mix.’ The sexuality extended beyond Robert Plant’s groans. Grasso manipulated his turntables with a teasing sensuality which would arouse his audience into an ecstatic frenzy, as he built the music to the verge of a crescendo, let it subside for a second, built it again, until the dancers were shrieking and roaring with an explosive, almost animal energy. Grasso’s sets weren’t just a parade of the funkiest music of a funky age: he homed in on the drum-breaks and riff repetitions which would ignite the crowd’s erogenous zones, reducing records to their core moments of audience response, and elongating them by slipping between decks to keep the dance in motion.

  Everything was geared towards extending the moment – music that was artificially prolonged, poppers (amyl nitrite) to heighten and draw out the sexual rush, the frantic coupling of the gay clubs which existed in a place beyond time and outside society’s prohibitions. There was nothing inherently ‘gay’ about disco music: the music was merely the conduit to exhilaration, a thrilling demolition of barriers and restraints which was only available in the dance club (or the bathhouse). Tom Moulton may have conveyed more than he intended when he explained that ‘I love to see people turn on9 like that with music’.

  Moulton was the populariser of disco, who codified the innovations of others. Witnessing for himself the impact of the cross-turntable ‘instant mix’, he realised that there would be commercial potential in supplying ready-made extensions of hot dance
cuts for those without the skill or the equipment to mimic Grasso’s dexterity. Increasing numbers of dance singles now coupled vocal and instrumental versions of the same song. Using his home studio, Moulton would literally splice together elements of the two on tape, and then supply these to other DJs. By 1975, he had taken to pressing his ‘disco mixes’ on twelve-inch records, rightly assuming that the humble seven-inch single wouldn’t be capable of encompassing such epics. As they were only available by subscription from Moulton, and weren’t on sale to the public, he did not have to worry about obtaining the approval of artists or producers. In any case, his twelve-inch mixes were so popular with dancers that they undoubtedly stimulated sales of the original records. The logical step was to give the dancing public what it wanted, and sell his mixes commercially. BT Express’s 1974 hit ‘Do It (Till You’re Satisfied)’ was one of the first – seven-inch only, still, but with the heightened bass and extended percussive breaks that fuelled his club mixes. Only two years later did another DJ, Walter Gibbons, provide what was subtly described as ‘Disco blending’ on a twelve-inch, nine-minute mix of Double Exposure’s ‘Ten Per Cent’, the first LP-sized single ever to reach the shops. By then, Moulton had already provided DJs with the ultimate disco experience: an entire LP side by Gloria Gaynor (Never Can Say Goodbye, in 1975), arranged and mixed to provide eighteen minutes of dancing in exactly the same tempo.fn1

  Grasso, Moulton, Gibbons: these were professional manipulators of sound, demonstrating their craft to the predominantly white clientele of dance clubs in Manhattan. A few miles away, in the cash-starved, brutally ‘regenerated’ streets and high-rises of the Bronx, the nightclub was an abandoned space or the basement of an apartment building, and the entertainment was a young black or Latino male with a sound system and a bundle of records. Sometimes the equipment would have been lifted from a community hall. Sometimes the DJ would divert the city’s electricity into his own jerry-built amplification. Like rival sound systems in Jamaica, two aspiring sound-meisters would spar across a crowded dance floor, each trying to outdo the other with volume and bass vibrations, covering up their latest discoveries like the DJs of ska and Northern soul legend.