Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution, part 2: "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now" (BBC, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, June 25) I put on KPBS for a couple of intriguing programs: “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now,” the second of three episodes in a mini-series with the God-awful title Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution; and a bizarrely poetic quasi-documentary by filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon called King Coal, about growing up in West Virginia and the mythic importance of coal to the Appalachian region in general and West Virginia in particular. “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” was irksome to me for the sheer amount of what I call “first-itis,” the tendency of biographers and historians to claim that the person or people they’re writing about were the first in the world to do something even though plenty of other people were doing it before them. The basic thesis of this show was that disco was a force for social change particularly in the Black and Queer communities, and that before it Black women who wanted to “cross over” to the white audience had to sell themselves as sex kittens. The most blatant examples of first-itis in the program came from an art historian named Dr. Lisa Farrington, who argued that by changing their name from Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles to just Labelle in 1974, Patti LaBelle and her group (which actually broke up two years after the name change) established a fierce independence that no Black woman artist in pop music had ever achieved before. C’mon, Lisa, do the names “Billie Holiday,” “Abbey Lincoln” and “Nina Simone” mean anything to you? Under the new name, they recorded a song called “Lady Marmalade” in 1974 that became a number one hit for one week on the Billboard Hot 100.

It was a song about a prostitute that didn’t portray her as either a seductress or a victim, but simply as a young girl trying to make a living as best she could. Of course, that had been done before in New York in 1927 by Mae West in her play Sex – a word considered so risqué then that the New York Times didn’t consider it fit to print (the Times ads promoted “Mae West in that certain play”) – in which she played a prostitute. West was actually arrested for obscenity and sentenced to ten days in city jail (though she only served eight, and by special dispensation with the judge she was allowed to wear her normal silk underwear in jail instead of having to don the standard-issue stuff). In later years West noted the irony that she was in jail for playing a prostitute and most of the other women there were in jail for being prostitutes. Dr. Farrington made one good point about the image change – she showed videos of the group both in their Bluebelles incarnation (identically dressed in costumes obviously copied from The Supremes) and in their Labelle guise, dressed differently from each other in skin-tight sequined costumes that projected their sexuality. “Lady Marmalade”’s catch line was, “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?,” which means, “Do you want to go to bed with me tonight?” – but Patti LaBelle herself said, “I didn’t know what it was about. I don’t know French and nobody, I swear this is God's truth, nobody at all told me what I'd just sung a song about.” (And “Lady Marmalade” was actually written by two white guys, one of whom was Bob Crewe, who co-wrote most of the Four Seasons’ biggest hits with fellow Four Season Bob Gaudio.) Labelle member Nona Hendryx seemed more aware of what “Lady Marmalade” was about when she said in an interview for this program, “It’s like a playwright, you know, someone describing something as opposed to judging it and in a way that – not celebratory, but in a way that was not downtrodden and horrible and that this is just yet another aspect of life.”

The attempt to make disco seem like a celebration of the revolutionary spirit runs headlong into the fact that the music itself was never (or almost never) anything more than a celebration of sheer hedonism – if you wanted to hear socially conscious pop music in the late 1970’s you listened to punk rock instead – though Dr. Farrington argues that this was a big part of its appeal. “Black women became stars with huge LGBTQ followings,” Dr. Farrington said. “The Black disco diva was a breakthrough persona, and this means everything to Black women because the minute you see yourself in a raised position, you know, as a world-class artist that people would pay a fortune to buy a ticket, you could fill up Madison Square Garden, this kind of thing, it opens possibilities.” As if no Black women before disco had become major stars, including major stars with major Queer followings? John Hammond, who discovered Billie Holiday (and many others, including Aretha Franklin, who achieved the kind of mega-success with white audiences Dr. Farrington is attributing to the disco queens and did it at least a decade before disco), said in his autobiography that he was aware of the following Billie Holiday had among Gay men – not as big as the following for Judy Garland, but still a major part of her audience.

“Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” tells the horrific story of Candi Staton, a Black woman singer who was opening for Ray Charles in Las Vegas. One night, after her set, she decided she wanted to sit in the audience and watch Ray Charles work – and her then-husband literally went berserk when he couldn’t find her. “My suite was way up on the 20th-something floor, and he pushed me,” she recalled. “He was pushing me all the way through the lobby to the elevator, and then we get to the floor. He said, ‘I'm gonna kill you tonight. I tell you what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna throw you off the balcony." 20-something floors. He picked me up, and [was] holding me over the banister like this, and I'm like, ‘This man is gonna kill me tonight. How in the world am I gonna get out of this one?’ I said, "You know you're in this hotel, and it's owned by the Mafia. This is Las Vegas. … How are you gonna feel with my body splattered at the bottom and my name is on the marquee? You won't make it out of Vegas.’ He brought me back in, and he said, ‘I’ll tell you what I'm gonna do. I'm just gonna shoot you.’ I was so tired, I just laid down on the bed. I said, ‘O.K. Shoot me.’ I went to sleep. He had the gun like this. I said, ‘Just shoot me. I won't know it. I just – forget it.’” Staton said her near-experience with death at the hands of a psychotic husband was the inspiration for her star-making disco hit, “Young Hearts Run Free.”

Disco created a new generation of Black women singing stars, including Thelma Houston (who credited her star-making hit, “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” to Suzanne DePasse, who’d become head of artists and repertoire for Motown Records and thought that song, a hit for Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, could be even more popular sung by a woman) and Gloria Gaynor (whose masterpiece, “I Will Survive,” was originally relegated to the “B”-side of her single “Substitute” until she took control of her own promotion, had test pressings of “I Will Survive” made up and gave them to DJ’s at discos until the play in discos made the song a hit). Then there was the all-time disco queen, Donna Summer, a fascinating singer whose breakthrough story isn’t told here. She was living in Munich, Germany studying to be an opera singer when she got a call from producer Giorgio Moroder, who wanted an opera-quality voice for a song he had in mind called “Love to Love You Baby.” The “song” consisted of a long series of orgasmic moans – the title was also the entirety of the lyric – and Summer took the gig because she didn’t take it seriously. She was so convinced the basic concept was stupid she made the record, got paid, and thought nobody would ever hear it and she could make a little money to pay her voice teachers. Instead the U.S. rights were picked up by Neil Bogart for his label, Casablanca Records (a name he chose because the Casablanca film had starred his namesake, Humphrey Bogart, though Neil’s birth name was actually “Bogatz”). His wife, Joyce Bogart-Trabulus, became Donna Summer’s manager and had “Love to Love You Baby” re-edited so it was 17 minutes long. Neil Bogart bought half-hour blocks of time on various radio stations and used them to play the full-length version of “Love to Love You Baby,” with the result that the radio stations who’d played it only because Bogart was forcing them to had to deal with listeners demanding that they keep playing the song even after Bogart’s time slots ended.

The other major talent profiled here was Sylvester, whom I remember vividly. He was actually a drag queen who got his start in the late 1960’s with a troupe called the Cockettes – I remember seeing them once, though by then he had already left – and I did see him as opening act for David Bowie during the Ziggy Stardust tour (or at least the San Francisco performance at Winterland on October 28, 1972). Between his Cockettes days and his emergence as a disco diva in the late 1970’s Sylvester’s act was basically Ike and Tina Turner – he even had three hot-pantsed drag queens as his Ikettes – and I remember attending that show in the company of several friends of mine, one of whom was visibly nervous about seeing a supposedly Gay rock star like David Bowie. I remember asking him midway through Sylvester’s third song how he liked it, and he said, “She’s O.K.” I said, “You realize that’s a guy up there?” – and his jaw dropped. The producers of this show, Grace Chapman and Louise Lockwood, were so determined to make their disco = revolution point no matter what that they showed a photo of Sylvester, in full drag, with San Francisco’s legendary Gay political leader, Harvey Milk. In fact, Milk’s favorite form of music was opera – in his early days as a super-closeted New York stockbroker before he moved to San Francisco, he and his then-partner Scott Smith had been season ticket holders at the Met – and Randy Shilts’s biography describes how many of Milk’s younger volunteers were nonplussed when he’d bring opera cassettes into his office and play them into the wee hours. Of course the show couldn’t help but mention the rise of Studio 54, the infamous New York disco built on drugs (there was an animated neon drawing of a coke spoon on the wall), quick on-premises sex and an ultra-exclusive policy in which the co-owner, Steve Rubell, decided on the spur of the moment whether or not you qualified for admittance. The show ended with the popularity of Saturday Night Fever and how both the movie and the successful soundtrack LP mainstreamed disco but also took it away from its Black and Queer roots by making the white, (presumably) straight John Travolta the icon of disco and its culture.