Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  As Steve Rubell’s nightclub on 54th Street attracted celebrities and their awestruck stalkers, those who could not even dream of admission could lose themselves in the fantasy of Saturday Night Fever. Released at the end of 1977, this film – soundtracked by the Bee Gees, and produced by their manager – completed disco’s commercial victory and hastened its downfall.fn2 The disco had been a place of mass hedonism; the crowd was both thrillingly involving and pleasingly anonymous. Now it attracted those who would be John Travolta, as men donned white suits in his image, and risked their fellow patrons’ safety by attempting to echo his most flamboyant moves. As evidence of Travolta’s instant personification of the disco experience, Alice Echols points out that ‘Brazilians began to use neologistic34 verbs and nouns from the root “Travolta” – travoltar (to travolt), travoltice (travoltage) – to describe the condition of disco fever.’

  Rock critic Stephen Holden predicted early in 1979 that this would be the year when ‘disco became the biggest thing in pop35 since Beatlemania, and possibly since the birth of rock and roll’. The charts bore him witness; likewise the annual Grammy Awards. The disco phenomenon spread beyond North America and Western Europe to reach Japan, Africa and even Russia, where Bee Gees singles became as hot an underground currency as Beatles records had been in the 1960s. Disc jockeys now required an acute statistical and psychological grasp of what would make people dance; specialists were employed to detail the ‘beats per minute’ of each disco track, to ensure that the atmosphere would not be broken by something unexpectedly fast or slow.fn3 The winter of 1978–9 was also the season when Village People – a male troupe of singer-dancers adopting blatantly stereotypical gay images – were accepted by millions who got the joke, and many millions more who preferred to believe that they were just a cop, a cowboy, a construction worker, a sailor, a biker and a Native American, who happened to enjoy dancing together. It’s so ridiculous that it should be apochryphal, but the US Navy really did consider using Village People’s ‘In the Navy’ as a recruiting anthem until the semiotics of the group’s costumes were explained to its senior officers.

  If John Travolta was disco’s role model, the Bee Gees its pop ambassadors and Village People its tongue-in-cheek clowns, then the genre’s auteurs – intelligent, brilliant, slick, pin-point accurate – were Chic. ‘Every song had to have Deep38 Hidden Meaning’, recalled the group’s creative fulcrum, Nile Rodgers. ‘We went out to conquer the world – one dance-floor at a time.’ As he explained it, the Chic ethos was simple and devastatingly effective: ‘Back then, most R&B acts39 wore flamboyant clothes, but we created believable alter egos: two men in impressively labelled but subtle designer business suits, which effectively gave us the anonymity of Kiss. We put sexy girls on our album cover, which was suave like Roxy Music, and we tooled a new form of Euro-influenced R&B … Then we put together a corporation that would manage and develop this entity and its future enterprises, the Chic Organization Ltd.’ Unbeknownst to Chic, this would be the template for success at the end of the century: military planning, backed by corporate might; expansive ambition, packaged in the form of spontaneity and fun.

  Those qualities seemed, in early 1979, to be obtainable only from disco. Billboard magazine declared that ‘veteran acts’ need not chase the youth market, as ‘Audiences no longer leave40 the music scene to the kids on turning 30 … Ten years ago, there was a tendency to consider pop artists over the hill as they hit 30. Now the prevailing attitude seems to be that artists aren’t getting older, they’re getting better.’ But the ‘veterans’ were still afraid of being considered old, and many of those who felt that their commercial standing had slipped chose this moment to make a decisive grab for the disco market. Many critically acclaimed jazz-funk artists crossed the boundary into dance music, although in most cases the shift only involved using a more persistent backbeat and simpler chord changes. Stephen Stills, best known as a confessional songwriter and blues-rock guitarist, concocted some highly professional imitations of the Bee Gees on his 1978 album Thoroughfare Gap, to the disgust of his existing fan base. Even more extreme was the reaction to the Beach Boys’ epic disco revamp of their twelve-year-old song ‘Here Comes the Night’, which was extended from two minutes to eleven, as a playful pop song became a disco symphony. Their vocal blend was magnificent, but they were booed whenever they attempted to perform the piece in public, and quickly abandoned the experiment.

  A month after the Beach Boys’ disco record was released, a trade magazine ran an alarmist story: ‘Disco Rules, But Where41 Are the Big Sales?’ The dance craze had persuaded some LP-only dealers to resume stocking singles, but disco was not proving itself a major factor in the album market, Saturday Night Fever and the Bee Gees aside. ‘Imagine how bad business42 would be if we didn’t have disco’, quipped Atlantic Records’ producer Jerry Wexler, but even he was forced to admit: ‘It could be that disco has become our new Muzak’ – ubiquitous background music that nobody would dream of buying.

  ‘People turn to dance43 for an electronic shot, an energy level that rock wasn’t giving them’, said media analyst John Perikhal. But there was a substantial audience – male, young, white, non-metropolitan, instinctively conservative – for whom disco represented everything that they despised: dancing, of course, but also rich people, black people, liberated women and, most of all, anyone who seemed even remotely gay. Shock jocks on American radio stations, whose playlists were 100% rock, launched a guerrilla campaign in 1978–9 against disco. They would smash records on air, spin them at 78 rpm to ridicule the artists, play machine-gun effects while a dance disc was being broadcast – even, in the case of Steve Dahl from WLUP in Chicago, pronounce ‘disco’ with a lisp to denote how ‘gay’ the whole culture was. And it was Dahl who provided the climactic moment of this campaign, when he staged a Disco Demolition Night between ball games at a double-header in Comiskey Park. Seventy thousand people attended in collective loathing of everything that disco stood for. Tens of thousands of dance records were piled into a crate which was set in centrefield – and then exploded. This proved so incendiary a catharsis that there was a riot, during which the stadium was severely damaged, and the ball game had to be abandoned.

  Thereafter rock fans proudly wore lapel badges stating ‘Disco Sucks’, while still congratulating themselves on their rebel status. The record industry began to back away from the tainted term, opting to push ‘dance music’ as a less pejorative substitute. While disco was still spreading to other parts of the globe – Turkey reported a sudden bout of ‘Travolta fever’, even though Saturday Night Fever had not been released there – its American homeland was turning its back on the monster it had created. By autumn 1979, even the Chic Organization was signalling a move away from dance tunes to ‘heavier ballads, rock and R&B44’, while Village People had their eye on movies and Las Vegas.

  Some dance clubs refashioned themselves for roller-skating, the assumption being that the music needn’t change. Some record companies emphasised that they were abandoning ‘pure’ disco in favour of disco rock, disco pop and even disco reggae. There was talk of introducing melody to disco, or rock guitars, or a country twang – anything that might stick.

  Then, out of the blue, a novelty arrived, from below the radar of the music business. In summer 1978, Billboard magazine had printed a puzzled news story about a New York record retailer who was being inundated with requests for long-out-of-catalogue disco and soul records. These came ‘from young black DJs45 from the Bronx, who are buying the records just to play the 30 seconds or so rhythm breaks that each disk contains’. These breaks were known as B-beats, the piece explained helpfully. The impetus for this buying spree was a ‘mobile DJ who is known in the Bronx as Cool [sic] Herc’ who ‘rose to popularity by playing long sets of assorted rhythm breaks strung together’. Herc told the magazine that if necessary he would speed up the breaks for better effect. ‘On most records, people have to wait through a lot of strings and singing to get to the good part of the re
cord,’ he explained. ‘But I give it to them all up front.’

  A year later, another report focused on ‘Jive Talking New York DJs46 Rapping Away in Black Discos’, as ‘a jivey rap commands as much attention these days as the hottest new disk’. No connection was made to Kool Herc: the leading figures of this scene were apparently Eddie Cheeba, DJ Hollywood, DJ Starski and Kurtis Blow. Cheeba was said to tour the city with seven female dancers and a DJ. ‘People go to discos every week and they need more than music to motivate them’, he explained. ‘I not only play records, but I rap, and they answer me.’ Fans of these ‘rapping DJs’ made their own recordings of their favourites in action: ‘Tapes of [DJ] Hollywood’s raps are considered valuable commodities by young blacks here.’

  Former doo-wop entrepreneur Paul Winley learned about the B-beat phenomenon from his daughters, who were experiencing it first-hand. In 1979, he prepared a series of unauthorised compilation albums containing vintage tracks which were ripe for B-beat DJs to plunder, under the wonderfully erratic title Super Disco Brake’s. At the same time, the disco group Fatback issued ‘King Tim III (Personality Jock)’, which opened like a conventional party record, whistles and computerised drums to the fore. But the vocal, by disc jockey Tim Washington from Harlem, was something new: delivered in a sing-song narrative style, almost like a nursery rhyme, cadenced to the syncopated rhythm. Its content was nothing more radical than a call to inhabit the dance floor (‘to the break, everybody’), but revolutions have to begin somewhere – for this was, unmistakably, the birth of rap as a mainstream commercial genre.

  Fatback’s single attracted the attention of Sugar Hill Records impresario Sylvia Robinson (herself a veteran, as one half of 1950s R&B duo Mickey & Sylvia; and a pioneer of disco, as the singer of the erotic No. 1 hit from 1973, ‘Pillow Talk’). She asked her son to search out some rappers. He returned with a trio of novices, and a bundle of borrowed rhymes. Robinson steered her studio band through an instrumental version of Chic’s ‘Good Times’, and let her amateur talent loose. She named them, obviously enough, the Sugar Hill Gang, and their record ‘Rapper’s Delight’. The first voice at the microphone carefully explained that what they were doing was called ‘rapping’, before the Gang embarked on some primitive self-congratulation – a style that never seems to grow old. Some radio stations who specialised in soul music complained that the single was ‘too black’ – a coded reference to its supposed ghetto origins. Not that there was a gangster aesthetic at work here: Sugar Hill rapper Wonder Mike said of his ‘speech music’, ‘Our raps may be about cars47, girls, food or dancing’, which was the stuff of Chuck Berry’s rock ’n’ roll canon. He also sabotaged the genre’s notion of spontaneity at its birth: ‘Don’t think we make it up as we go along. It’s all written, memorised and rehearsed before we go on stage.’ But none of that undercut the freshness of the record, which was a huge hit on the Soul charts, entered the US Pop Top 40, and enjoyed its greatest success in Britain, where it reached No. 3. BBC disc jockey Anne Nightingale predicted that this ‘new-found form of black dance music48’ would ‘give the flagging disco sound the shot in its pick-up arm it so desperately needs’. And that, for the moment, was the pinnacle of rap’s ambition; after all, a novelty only lasts for a season.

  * * *

  fn1 Disco historian Alice Echols notes: ‘singers found that their vocals10 were no longer the defining feature of a song, but rather just one element. “I don’t sing much”, was Gaynor’s wounded response upon hearing Moulton’s final mix of her LP. Dismayed, Gaynor asked, “What am I supposed to do when we perform the song?” To which Moulton replied, “You learn to dance.”’

  fn2 It also inspired a sequel, Urban Cowboy, set in the Texas honky-tonks, which briefly made country the hippest music in America. The ensuing boom-and-bust narrative was enacted so quickly that there was barely time for Nashville’s record companies to capitalise on the phenomenon.

  fn3 Record Mirror’s James Hamilton was the master of this art, to wit: ‘Atmospheric bumpy36 106-104-105-104-103-102 bpm 12 in. jazz jogger’, or ‘Excellent remix of the lazily37 swaying hypnotic old 117 bpm side-to-side kicker with added jazz sax ’n’ smack.’

  1, 2

  IN 1972, THE US satirical magazine National Lampoon devoted an entire issue to boredom. ‘We want to tell you that what is around3 you EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME is boredom, lots of it,’ its editorial pronounced, ‘and we think it’s about time you began to face it.’

  Ennui and disillusionment were central to the culture of the 1970s. It had been, said American writer Chet Flippo in 1979, a ‘decade of dullness4’. A set of economic and political crises were dumped like refuse sacks across the path to the future: the oil crisis, tensions in the Middle and Far East, Western financial decline, urban terrorism, stalemate in the Cold War. For anyone who had bought into the optimism of the mid-1960s, and the rhetoric of a counter-culture, these grim realities were made more deadening by a profound sense of loss and anticlimax. It had seemed in the late 1960s that youth might be able to accelerate history and seize the reins of Western civilisation. By the early 1970s, it was as if the greyness of the 1950s had continued unchecked, imposing its moral repression and artistic conservatism on anyone who had the nerve to dream of liberation.

  Dressing up, dancing or preferably the combination of the two provided a refuge. Kids could watch David Bowie on Top of the Pops and imagine themselves transported to an alien world of gaudy beauty and sexual ambiguity. The dance floor and the disco offered hedonism as an alternative to depression, even if one only danced to keep from crying. But for many, this was not catharsis enough.

  Even rock stars imagined that their culture could only be changed with symbolic acts of violence. In their final months as a band, the Beatles fantasised that they might explode their career with a worldwide televised concert, during which they would say something so shocking – ‘Fuck the Queen’ was one suggestion – that all the constraints of their fame would be shattered at a stroke. Kit Lambert, the manager of the Who, imagined that (as Pete Townshend recalled) his group would perform at London’s Royal Opera House, ‘shit all over the stage5, and storm out’. Children of the 1950s, they remembered the culture-shaking impact of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, and mourned their inability to rival their youthful iconoclasm.

  For anyone raised on tales of 1950s and 60s rock mayhem, there were ample reasons to be disappointed by the 1970s. Glam rock or heavy metal might divert adolescents for a while, but was diversion enough? As pop culture slumbered towards the midpoint of the new decade, Britain was awash with bland boy bands masquerading as 1950s Teddy boys, while in America the new mainstream was soft pop, soft rock, soft country: James Taylor erasing his heritage of mental illness and heroin addiction, perhaps, or Loggins & Messina reviving 1950s rock tunes as aural tranquillisers. As cynical songwriter Randy Newman complained after a road trip across his radio-soaked nation, ‘The big stations only play6 soft rock. It’s all mellow. Now that’s a hell of an ambition, to be mellow. It’s like wanting to be senile.’

  British writer Nick Kent offered a solution in 1974: ‘The only way this whole rock ’n’ roll7 mess can be salvaged and ultimately transformed into a feasible form again is if, as will happen, the whole schism blows itself up like some toad inhaling cigarette fumes, and sometime after the ashes have settled, a whole new breed of teenage bands will sprout up slowly who will write songs about being self-conscious and suffering from acne and having nocturnal emissions and premature ejaculations and all the hideous things young teenage kids really have to go through. And consequently rock music will start to have some true relevance again, beyond existing as some exotic musical broadsheet for other people’s bloated fantasies.’

  Yet Kent, for all his prophetic idealism, was equally in thrall to his fantasies. Like many rock journalists in an era when the music press was arguably at its most influential, he yearned for a music that would be raw, aggressive and fast. Writing about the American glam band the New York Dol
ls, he praised their ability to capture the quintessence of rock: ‘total lack of self-consciousness8 and a commitment to full-tilt energy workouts, no matter what level of proficiency you’re working at’. His NME colleague Charles Shaar Murray wrote about falling ‘in love with rock and roll9 for the right reasons’ (my emphasis): ‘I mean, if you started digging rock because it provided a vital insight into the mood of the times, or because so many rock musicians today are … genuinely creative (you know, like Rick Wakeman or Mike Oldfield), then forget it’, he insisted.

  Lyricist and critic Clive James declared in 1975 that he loved rock because ‘within it, you can encompass10 thousands of styles. It’s a journalistic restriction to consider that rock ’n’ roll is confined to certain ways and means.’ But week after week, year after year, a critical consensus was sold to the adolescent and student readers of magazines such as the NME and Creem, until it was accepted like a catechism: the only credible form of music was (in the words of Lester Bangs) ‘simple, primitive, direct, honest11’. The sounds of the future had to be modelled on the most exciting sounds of the past, although most of the heroes of the 1950s and 60s had sullied their heritage by growing old and irrelevant. In place of Elvis and the Stones, then, a new galaxy of stars was installed, whose names were voiced so often by journalists and young musicians alike that they came to seem like the dominant forces of their era (1966–73).