In 1942, leader of the SS and German police chief Heinrich Himmler sent a memo regarding the Swing Kids to his underling, Reinhardt Heydrich—the feared organizer of the Final Solution—that read, in part: “My judgment is that the whole evil must be radically exterminated now. All ringleaders . . . into a concentration camp to be re-educated . . . It is only through the utmost brutality that we will be able to avert the dangerous spread of Anglophile tendencies.”{286} After that, anyone caught swinging, or looking like they did, ended up in death camps.
From its earliest days, then, dancing to records in clubs involved an underground culture, a forward fashion sense, secrecy and danger.
French citizens blasted American “Negro music” at top volume in below-street-level clubs and restaurants during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Playing the records as loud as possible meant that Germans outside the clubs couldn’t hear anything anyone inside was saying. Devout Nazis were repulsed by the music and wouldn’t come near it, and the less devout didn’t dare. Loud jazz provided perfect security.
At the end of World War II, urban Europeans were vested in a culture of records—rather than dance bands—playing in clubs. The first commercial disco, Paris’s Le Whisky à Go-Go—not to be confused with the LA rock club of a similar name—opened in 1947. The walls were made from whiskey crates decorated with labels of various scotches, stacked floor to ceiling. A whiskey bar was an anomaly, and an instant hit, in a wine-drinking nation. Remarkably, there were two turntables, playing 78 rpm records.
Régine Zylberberg worked there, became manager, and in the late 1950s opened her Chez Régine in the Latin Quarter of Paris. It became a legendary place for dancing to records and introducing new jazz cuts at the height of the era of the American expatriate jazz musician in Paris. Régine’s featured a professional DJ.
Discotheque invaded New York City via the Peppermint Lounge, a seedy gay bar and sailor hangout on Forty-fifth Street and Eighth Avenue, pretty much the epicenter of seedy New York nowhere at the time. The rise of the dance the Twist in 1960–61 helped make the Peppermint Lounge a success. The Twist was a worldwide phenomenon in its day, like Saturday Night Fever. Hank Ballard did the first version, then Chubby Checker broke it nationwide twisting on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. The celebrities of the day would go slumming at the Peppermint Lounge to twist the night away. The DJs played mostly early sixties pop soul records, the various twisting hits like the Isley Brothers “Twist and Shout” and selections from easy-listening compilations sold at supermarkets, like Enoch Light’s 1964 Discotheque Dance . . . Dance . . . Dance.
The next significant discotheque was Arthur, created by actor Richard Burton’s ex-wife Sybil. Opening in 1965, Arthur epitomized the jet-set disco. The initial investment came from Sybil Burton’s alimony. Eighty-eight celebrities—including conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein, composer Stephen Sondheim, director Mike Nichols and actors Lee Remick, Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison, among others—ponied up $1,000 each to provide the rest of the funding. The club was named for a moment in the Beatle’s first film, A Hard Day’s Night. A square from Squaresville asks George Harrison: “What would you call that hairstyle?” George replies: “Arthur.” Arthur broke new ground with its linked turntables run through a mixer connected to the amplification system. The renowned sound and lighting designer Chip Monck—who gained a different sort of fame as the voice of Woodstock—set up the Arthur sound system in stereo.
Arthur served as a model for Studio 54. For the first time, patrons had to pass an overt inspection at the door, and risk being rejected on the sidewalk. Mickey Deans, who would go on to be Judy Garland’s fifth and final husband, was the night manager and believed in “body fascism,” that is, the natural social supremacy of the smoking hot. His door policy sought to create a precise mix of titled Europeans, beautiful young things, celebrities, New York bluebloods and outrageous night people. Arthur showcased New York’s mixed after-midnight universe, where stars mingled with gay culture and really good-looking “normal” New Yorkers. DJ Terry Noell had two turntables and played mostly soul music—with Motown dominant—and the sounds of Swinging London and Carnaby Street British Invasion.
The disco-defining game-changer was the Church, in Hell’s Kitchen, later known as the Sanctuary. In 1969, Francis Grasso—a kid from the outer boroughs like SNF’s Tony Manero—became the precursor of all modern DJs when he created the first extended mixes by switching between two copies of the same record on two turntables. Because he could best run the switch during drum solos, his sets were all about the break. Grasso played African music like Babatunde Olatunji’s “The Drums of Passion,” and conga-heavy Latin music. Another crowd favorite was the long version of the Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today,” with its tick-tocking cowbell—which made switching between turntables easy to time—and extended psychedelic drum break. Grasso could make the song last as long as his crowd wanted to dance. The Sanctuary is supposedly the birthplace of the dance the Bump. Around this time in 1969, the first song appeared featuring the distinctive chugging disco bass-line, unchanging shuffle beat and soaring strings, the Four Tops’ “Don’t Bring Back Memories.” Another proto-disco cut was written and produced by Sly Stone: Little Sister’s “You’re the One.” Larry Graham, Sly’s bass player, created what would become a widely copied, thumb-popping, disco-style bass line on several cuts on Sly’s 1973 album, Fresh.
The next important scene was the Loft, conceived and run by David Mancuso, on Broadway in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood. In 1970, Soho after dark was a deserted wasteland, a desolate, garbage-strewn backwater. Because the Loft had no liquor license, it was spared the vice squad entrapment seductions and harassing police presence suffered by most gay bars. The Loft served no food or drinks; the crowd was young and liked LSD. The psychedelic mind-set didn’t sit well with songs that ran only two minutes fifty-nine seconds. The Loft DJs sought out and showcased longer tracks, like Eddie Kendricks’s groundbreaking, eight-minute “Girl You Need a Change of Mind,” and his equally epic “Keep on Truckin’.” The most legendary and influential proto-disco track was “Soul Makosa” by African saxophonist Manu Dibango. After the Loft’s DJ David Mancuso put it into heavy rotation, “Soul Makosa” became an underground smash and widely imitated.
Studio 54 opened in an old CBS radio and TV Studio on West Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan in 1977. Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager had a specific, but wide-open concept: to bring the energy and glamour of the underground gay clubs out in the open and to meld that with show business, international society, fashion and New York money. The atmosphere was glitzy and decadent, the decorations lavish and the bartenders and waitresses all famously beautiful. Author Truman Capote said of the staff: “You can’t have a candy store without candy.” The door policy was—by design—capricious, ruthless and humiliating. Steve Rubell said, “We turned away the president of Cyprus because he looked boring.”{287} According to cultural commentator Sara Stosic: “Schrager/
Rubell . . . were famed for a selective screening policy on who was allowed into their venue, building on the idea of ‘inclusive exclusivity’. . . where access was granted on an economic factor, looks, or social standing. Schrager/Rubell pioneered the ‘velvet rope’—in their opinion a ‘democratic process to exercise the same discretion people exercise when inviting people into their home.’”{288}
“The criteria for entrance are unwritten and, at best, whimsical,” wrote rock critic Dave Marsh. “Prestige is at stake, so fame counts, but conformity to certain sartorial standards also plays a part. Sometimes the owner himself is perched at the door to make these key decisions, guarding the Studio gate like St. Peter on Quaaludes.”{289} Model and Vogue Italia editor Bethann Hardison said: “Studio 54 changed the world. That’s why you could go to Bosnia or some small, obscure place and there’ll be some fool standing outside with a red velvet rope.”{290}
“I’ve been to a lot of night clubs,” Truman Capote said, “and this is the nightclub
of the future. It’s very democratic. Boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else—all one big mix!”{291}
“By going to this venue at midnight,” Stosic wrote, “one knew that everybody they wanted to see would be right there, and that seems to have been the beauty of it. One didn’t have to go to five restaurants and three clubs and six parties. It was midnight and everybody was at Studio. Everybody perceived [Studio 54] to be immune to the law and whatever one did would not enter into the rest of their lives. There seemed to be no concept of punishment and morality. In the words of Studio 54 co-owner Steve Rubell (who was paraphrasing William Blake): ‘The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’”{292}
That freedom extended only so far, it turned out. One of the owners bragged during a TV interview of out-earning the Mafia and said: “What the IRS don’t know won’t kill it.” Unsurprisingly, the IRS subsequently raided the club and convicted the owners of tax evasion. Each served thirteen months in prison.{293}
Studio 54 lured folks from every borough of New York, hence the lines around the block. For the working-class aspirants in those lines, 54 was the big-time, Manhattan version of the infinitely less glamorous discos and dance clubs that operated in neighborhoods around the city. Saturday Night Fever had its genesis in one of these clubs even before 54 opened. Or, more accurately, SNF’s genesis came from a great fraud spun around one of those clubs, a bold lie that could never be perpetrated today, an article about a real dance club and a scene that never existed.
On June 7, 1976, New York magazine published the article “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” by English pop culture observer Nik Cohn. Cohn wrote one of the first books of rock criticism, 1969’s Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, featuring capsule biographies of James Brown, Bob Dylan, the Who and other founding figures. Cohn’s friendship with the Who and willingness to shoot his mouth off led him to be credited by Pete Townshend as the inspiration for—or at least the suggester of—“Pinball Wizard.” He worked with Dutch artist Guy Peellaert on the seminal, licentious illustrated volume of imagined rock-star fantasies Rock Dreams, wrote collections of essays and, later, an in-depth, loving exploration of New Orleans rap and hip-hop. “Tribal Rites” was Cohn’s first piece for New York. In the introduction he writes: “Everything described in this article is factual and was either witnessed by me or told to me directly by the people involved.” Nothing, however, in the piece turned out to be factual; Cohn made it all up.
Stigwood, never shy about taking credit for anything that ever happened anywhere, claims to have been contacted by Cohn some months before the article appeared. Cohn wanted to write a movie for Stigwood but had no firm ideas. Stigwood told him to keep in touch and send him whatever he wrote. Stigwood frames the story to present himself as having his finger on the pulse not of what was happening, but what was going to happen. And, as usual, Stigwood actually did.
Cohn posits a young working-class Italian, Vincent, from the insular Brooklyn Italian neighborhood of Bay Ridge. Vincent works in a hardware store by day, stocking paint. By night he’s the best dancer at the Bay Ridge disco 2001 Odyssey. Cohn writes that Vincent is known as a “Face” and his dancing gang of buddies as “Faces.”
Cohn copped to “Tribal Rites” being fiction in 1996. “My story was a fraud,” he said. “I’d recently arrived in New York. Far from being steeped in Brooklyn street life, I hardly knew the place. As for Vincent, he was largely inspired by a Shepherd’s Bush Mod whom I’d known in the Sixties, a one-time king of Goldhawk Road. All I’d intended was a study of teenage style. Even its fakery had been based on the belief that all dance fevers were interchangeable.”{294}
A “Face,” as anyone who’s seen the movie adapted from the Who album Quadrophenia knows, was a cool Mod—natty, tailored, speed-taking, customized Italian motor scooter–riding urban English “youth” dandies from the early sixties who made the pages of Life magazine engaging in fistfight riots on Brighton Beach with the Mod’s archenemies, the leather-jacketed Rockers. The “Ace Face,” as portrayed in the film by Sting, had sharp, raw silk suits, a buff Vespa and to-the-minute razor-cut hair. Cohn so transposed his Mod from Shepherd’s Bush that he had the Bay Ridge kids slinging Mod slang.
Cohn’s gang of Faces are dead-end guys who spend their menial-job pay on plumage for the club. What makes them different, what allows them to believe that they are different, is that they really can dance and they dress with what passes for style in Bay Ridge. As Cohn puts it: “To qualify as an Odyssey (the name of the club where the Faces dance) [one] needed to be Italian, between 18 and 25, with a minimum stock of six floral shirts, four pairs of tight trousers, two pairs of Gucci loafers, two pairs of platforms . . . and he must know how to dance.”{295}
The dance floor was sacred. Anyone who came in wearing the wrong clothes or pulling dated moves wrecked the vibe and was quickly made unwelcome. That atmosphere was straight out of Mod culture, whose in-club competition to be styling in the proper manner was ferocious. Cohn describes a Darwinian hierarchy in which the threat of public humiliation maintains the club’s standards of cool, dress, dance and decorum. Vincent led every dance, calling out moves, counting the beat, directing traffic. Off the dance floor, the girls chase Vincent, but he keeps his remove. When he worries, he worries about his nonexistent future. That one day he’ll be too old to dance or somebody will dance better and he’ll be left with nothing but the hardware store. The article ends with Vincent and the Faces heading off into the night, deeply dissatisfied with themselves, looking for somebody—anybody—to beat up.
It’s a good story, a classic tale of a doomed gunslinger. He became the fastest gun in his little town, but outside his little town, his skills not only mean nothing, but come with an expiration date. The movie’s plot expands on Vincent and his terror of a dead-end life, of being unable to love and of yearning for a shot at a future, possibly as a dancer, in the real world, namely, Manhattan. In the screenplay by Norman Wexler, who won an Oscar for the screenplay for Serpico, Vincent gets renamed Tony Manero.
“[Robert] called me and told me to pick up New York magazine with an article in it by Nik Cohn called ‘Tribal Rites of Saturday Night,’” Al Coury said. “I went down to the lobby to get it and [Stigwood] called me back and said: ‘I’m going to take that story and make a movie and you are going to have the biggest soundtrack ever.’”{296} Stigwood bought the screen rights to the story less than twenty-four hours after it appeared in print. Cohn got $90,000—pretty big potatoes in 1976—and wrote the first draft of the screenplay. Some versions of the history have Stigwood so intent on securing Cohn’s article that he gave Cohn a big fee and a percentage of the soundtrack royalties. If true, Cohn certainly never had to work again. The rationale for this version is that Stigwood didn’t think soundtracks sold that well and so had little to lose. But that doesn’t sound like Stigwood: he never gave away percentages, he kept his partnerships to a minimum and he was adamant from the start that the movie and the record would be enormous.
“Disco was happening,” said Freddie Gershon. “But it was not yet the worldwide craze. It was the smart set and the gay set. Which was sometimes the same set. It hadn’t spilled over. But Robert saw what was happening in Brazil. We went on the maiden voyage of the Concorde from Paris to Rio. Rio was rough, and exotic and the music never stopped. Stigwood saw it in England, France, Germany. [Disco] was going down the social strata. Five years earlier it would have been effete for men to even be on the dance floor. Now men were becoming peacocks. It was Robert’s instinct that a Tony Manero existed in every community in the world.”{297}
Legendary music producer Sam Phillips always said that if he could find a white man who sang like a black man, he would make a million dollars. Then one day Elvis Presley walked into Sam Phillips’s Sun studio . . . Stigwood’s vision paralleled Phillips’s. If only he could create a straight dancing idol and a credible world in which straight g
uys vied to be the best dancer, he would make a lot more than Phillips’s puny million. Tony Manero—as portrayed by John Travolta—was that guy.
The Bee Gees flew to France in January or February of 1977.{298} They did not go there to record Saturday Night Fever. At the time, they knew nothing about it. What they knew was that they needed to write and record tracks for a new, as yet unnamed, studio album, their follow-up to Children of the World. They also had to mix a double live album from their recent LA Forum show. A combination of factors landed them outside Paris, at the Château d’Hérouville.
“For tax purposes,” Karl Richardson said, “they needed to make records outside the United States or the UK.” Dick Ashby booked them a month in Hérouville.{299} The eighteenth-century château was a live-in work environment featuring the sixteen-track Strawberry Studios, built by film-score composer Michel Magne in 1970. Elton John recorded there in 1972. After his LP came out, the place became forever known as Honky Château. It’s an idyllic spot. Van Gogh painted in the meadow below the château, and composer Frédéric Chopin and author George Sand (real name: Amantine Dupin) used the château for their secret trysts. Sweet, Cat Stevens, T-Rex, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd all recorded at the Honky Château.
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