Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution, part 3: "Stayin' Alive" (BBC, PBS, 2024)

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

After A Capitol Fourth I logged on to the PBS.org Web page to “stream” episode three of the TV miniseries Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution. It was called “Stayin’ Alive” and its basic thesis was that disco didn’t really die; some of the major D.J.’s and producers relocated from New York to Chicago and started a new genre called “house music.” I remember trying to figure out what “house music” was when I started hearing about it in the mid-1980’s and, based on the few records I heard, it seemed to mean splicing a Bud Powell-style jazz piano solo into the middle of a disco record. I have vivid memories of the disco era – at least once the monster success of Saturday Night Fever, both the movie and the soundtrack album, made it inescapable – mainly because I was in the middle of my five-year relationship with a woman and both of us couldn’t stand the stuff. We embraced Bob Seger’s specifically anti-disco record “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll” as our theme song and, when we read an interview in a music magazine with a disco D.J. who’d said he’d tried to do disco sets with rock songs but couldn’t create a mood because “rock songs are too short and they sound too different from each other,” we both thundered, “They admit it! They admit all disco sounds the same!” The makers of “Stayin’ Alive,” Grace Chapman and Shianne Brown, tried to make the case that racism and homophobia fueled the anti-disco backlash, but though there may have been elements of that (much the way the Abstract Expressionists hated the Pop Artists largely because the Abstract Expressionists were aggressively heterosexual and the leading Pop Artists, including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, were Gay), what killed disco was just a lot of bad music and commercial crap.

The show takes an oddly hard line against the Village People, calling them a novelty act (which was true) and the creation of their producer, Jacques Morali. Once again this show indulged in “first-itis” (the tendency among biographers to claim the person they’re writing about was the first to do something even though others were doing it before). In the early 1960’s producers like Phil Spector at Philles Records and Berry Gordy at Motown consciously shaped their labels’ acts to create a house “sound” that would be readily identifiable as Spector or Motown no matter who the people actually singing were. The rebel in me loves the idea that the Village People and Morali were able to trick the U.S. Navy into loaning them a destroyer to shoot the video for the song “In the Navy” in exchange for allowing the Navy to use the song in recruitment commercials. This was at a time when there was a flat ban against Queers serving in the military and a number of high-profile Queer ex-servicemembers were taking it on in court. At the same time I joked that the Village People’s songs sounded so similar that they could just save us time by blending their three biggest hits into one: “It’s Fun for a Macho Man to Stay at the Y.M.C.A. and Then Join the Navy.” Just as rock ‘n’ roll had been corrupted by American capitalism at the end of the 1950’s and righteous performers – both Black, like Chuck Berry and Little Richard; and white, like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Buddy Holly – had been replaced by toneless wimps like Frankie Avalon and Fabian, so the capitalist exploitation machine took over disco in a big way and led to atrocities like Rick Dees’ “Disco Duck.” (A clip of its video is shown here, with a guy in a Big Bird-sized duck suit cavorting on a dance floor, and it’s just as terrible as you probably remember it.)

The most aggressive anti-disco campaigns came from rock radio stations staging stunts to kill off disco and knock their all-disco competitors. The show profiles a rock station in Oregon which drove vans with their logo painted on through the streets of Portland and played messages denouncing disco. The most famous (or infamous) anti-disco publicity stunt was the “Disco Demolition” staged by Steve Dahl, a D.J. on a popular morning radio show in Chicago, who got the Chicago White Sox to slash tickets to 98 cents for their double-header with the Detroit Tigers on July 12, 1979. To get the discount, you had to bring in a disco record, and Dahl was going to collect them and literally blow them up in the intermission between the games. According to the Wikipedia page on the event, “White Sox officials had hoped for a crowd of 20,000, about 5,000 more than usual. Instead, at least 50,000 — including tens of thousands of Dahl's listeners — packed the stadium, and thousands more continued to sneak in after capacity was reached and gates were closed. Many of the records were not collected by staff and were thrown like flying discs from the stands. After Dahl blew up the collected records, thousands of fans stormed the field and remained there until dispersed by riot police.” The immediate result was that, after a two-hour attempt to clean up the field for the second game, American League President Les McPhail ordered that the White Sox forfeit the game to the Tigers. Until I saw footage of the “Disco Demolition Night,” I had remembered Steve Dahl for a brilliantly funny anti-disco parody record, “Do Ya Think I’m Disco?,” based on Rod Stewart’s song “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” (another attempt, like the Rolling Stones’ “Miss You,” by an old-style rock act to keep up with the times by doing disco). Among its best lines were, “My shirt is open, I never use the buttons/Though I look hip, I work for E. F. Hutton,” and, “Do ya think I’m disco/’Cause I spend so much time/Blow-drying out my hair?/Do ya think I’m disco/’Cause I know the dance steps/Learned them all at Fred Astaire’s.” Rod Stewart’s manager heard it and tried to get Stewart to sue the way Led Zeppelin successfully suppressed Little Roger and the Goosebumps’ “Gilligan’s Island Stairway” (a brilliant record in which they sang the lyrics to the Gilligan’s Island theme song to the melody of “Stairway to Heaven”) – only Stewart himself, to his credit, told his manager, “Let it alone! I think it’s hilarious!”

There’s more than a bit of Nazism behind “Disco Demolition Night,” and the event reflected the insanity of thinking you can suppress something people want by physical violence against it, but ultimately disco died of its own weight and then went into hibernation and re-emerged as today’s “electronic dance music,” or “EDM” for short. Ironically, most of the EDM today makes classic-era disco sound pretty damned good by comparison; the Black women singers who emerged from the disco scene – Donna Summer, Candi Staton, Gloria Gaynor, Anita Ward (who’s interviewed here) – all had quite good Black soul voices and could have become music stars in any era. I remember hearing Summer’s records like “Last Dance” (which became the obligatory closer at all discos and dance parties) and her cover of Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” and loving the slow introductions to the songs. There Summer could phrase and sing musically and effectively before the drum machines turned on and strait-jacketed her into the thumping disco rhythms. Anita Ward’s interviews were among the most fascinating parts of this program: when disco hit she had just graduated from college with a degree in psychology, intending to be a counselor. Then she got talked into recording a disco song, “Ring My Bell” (which turns out to have been one of the better records of the era), which turned her into a one-hit wonder. She said she would have liked to record a wider variety of material, including standards and R&B (much the way Lady Gaga, who unlike most EDM artists at least knows how to write a song with a beginning, middle and end instead of just barking out a few lyrics over a dance groove, showed off her chops as a standards singer in her two albums with Tony Bennett), but it’s too bad she didn’t get the chance.

“Stayin’ Alive” also inevitably mentions disco’s influence on rap (or “hip-hop,” to use the euphemism favored by people who like it). Many of rap’s rhythm patterns were either “sampled” from actual disco records or in a similar style, and even more than disco (which was never about much more than going to clubs and having fun), rap had politically progressive roots in records like Grandmaster Flash’s single “The Message” and Public Enemy’s album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Even more than disco, though, rap quickly got subsumed into commercial garbage and a kind of mindless braggadocio about how many men the singer has killed, how many women he’s fucked and impregnated (without even offering to help support the kids), how many Queers he’s bashed and how much atrocious jewelry (“bling”) and fancy homes and cars he’s accumulated. The show also depicts the AIDS epidemic, which kicked in in 1981 (just as the disco craze was petering out) and brought the party in the Gay male community to a screeching halt. I didn’t come out as a Gay man myself until late 1982 and I sometimes had the sense that I was arriving at a party just as everyone else was starting to head home. One thing the show does a good job depicting was the terror that gripped the Gay male community as hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of people started getting deathly ill seemingly for no reason. Among its most prominent early casualties were Studio 54 owner Steve Rubell (who was notorious for his exclusionary admission policies; there’s a clip of him on this show barring entry to any men with chin or cheek stubble) and Paradise Garage owner Michael Brody. Paradise Garage was a legendary New York disco which opened in a former auto garage (hence the name) and was known for a looser, more egalitarian vibe than Studio 54.

Much of the Gay male community seemed, consciously or unconsciously, to internalize the idea that the AIDS epidemic literally meant “the wages of sin are death,” and the whole culture of casual sex on which many of the early discos had been built seemingly collapsed overnight. (In fact, Gay men still being men, it continued sub rosa but emphasized the fear factor and was no longer bragged about or celebrated.) AIDS was an extraordinarily dark cloud for the Gay male community, but it had a weird sort of silver lining; as more and more stories circulated about Gay men trying to visit their partners in hospitals and being turned away because they weren’t considered “family,” at least some Americans started seeing Gay men as complex human beings that formed genuinely loving relationships with each other just the way straight people do. This paved the way for the grudging acceptance of same-sex marriage in the 2010’s. I still think the series title Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution is ludicrous – if disco celebrated anything, it was narcissism and hedonism, hardly the stuff of which serious political movements are made, and as I noted in my previous comments on earlier episodes, if you wanted to hear socially conscious pop music in the late 1970’s you listened to punk rock instead – but the sheer durability of those thumping rhythms and their transformation into today’s music says much about humans’ primal desires for joy and celebration.