Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution, part 1: "Rock the Boat" (BBC, PBS, 2023)

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

Last night (Tuesday, June 18) KPBS showed a couple of TV specials dealing with cultural themes even though the first one was about a phenomenon that I really didn’t like when it was actually happening. It was the first episode in a three-part mini-series called Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution. I didn’t like disco music when it was at its peak of popularity in the late 1970’s, and mostly I still don’t, though it actually sounds pretty good especially by comparison with the so-called “electronic dance music” (EDM) style of today that derived from it. I remember I spent a term of my time at San Francisco State University living in a dorm (more just to have the experience than anything else), and during those months in the first half of 1978 the Saturday Night Fever album was literally inescapable. Just about everybody in that dorm seemed to own a copy of it, and I liked the Bee Gees’ songs from the film and The Trammps’ “Disco Inferno” (a great song with a real sense of drama) but hated or at least was unimpressed by everything else on the album. (I had just come off a year of listening to almost nothing but classical music, and not surprisingly the track on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack that most irritated me was “A Fifth of Beethoven,” Walter Murphy’s disco-ized rewrite of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.) The show, directed by Grace Chapman, basically presented disco as a form of social rebellion by previously marginalized people, particularly African-Americans and Gay men. It presents a potted history of the origins of the Queer rights movement and the social and cultural ferment of the 1960’s that gave rise to it, including the seemingly endless Viet Nam War and the big peace protests that drew heavy-duty reactions from the police.

This first episode, “Rock the Boat” (after one of the early disco hits by a group called the Hues Corporation), depicted disco as an inherently revolutionary music and culture (since the club scene it generated was as much a part of the social phenomenon as the music itself; the word “discothéque” had been coined in the 1960’s and it simply meant a dance venue in which the music was supplied by records instead of a live band) and hinted at the way disco’s adherents would defend it against its detractors later in the 1970’s. If you didn’t like disco, you were told, it was because you were racist and/or homophobic. At the time there were plenty of laws discriminating against Queer people; not only was sex between two partners of the same sex illegal in virtually all the U.S. (the first state to get rid of the anti-sodomy laws was Illinois in 1961, and they did it by mistake; they were doing a revision of the state’s criminal code and they simply inadvertently left out the anti-Gay law), it was illegal for two people of the same sex to dance together in public. It was also illegal to cross-dress in public; the law in New York City was you have to have at least three items of gender-appropriate clothing on at all times, and one woman who was doing shows as a male impersonator was forced by police to strip because they demanded to see she was wearing women’s underwear under her male suit. The person who figured out how to get around all this was a man named David Mancuso, who opened a private club called The Loft in 1972. Since it was a privately owned space (his own home, in fact) and you had to have an invitation to enter, the police couldn’t enter without Mancuso’s permission and therefore men were allowed to dance with and touch other men, and women allowed to dance with and touch other women.

At the same time Black rhythm-and-blues and soul music were evolving in ways that emphasized strong, danceable beats – in fact, initially the devotées of disco didn’t call the music disco, they called it “danceable R&B” – and the key figures in that evolution were the production team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, who formed a record label called Philadelphia International (after the city where they were based) and combined strong rhythms with soaring string orchestras. One instrumental (pardon the pun) figure in creating their sound was their session drummer, Earl Young, who worked out a rhythm pattern consisting of a nearly metronomic four-beats-to-the-bar pounding on the bass drum and an equally insistent matching figure on the hi-hat cymbals. Young is still alive and he demonstrated that rhythm on his drum set for the program. Oddly, not all the music heard here is disco; the first song we hear is actually “Aquarius” from the musical Hair, used to depict the political and social ferment of the late 1960’s, and we get bits of great pre-disco soul classics like Marvin Gaye’s acknowledged masterpiece “What’s Goin’ On” and Lynn White’s woefully unacknowledged “Part-Time Love.” (Lynn White was one of the great might-have-beens of soul music; she was a protégée of Willie Mitchell, who discovered and produced Al Green, and while “female Al Green” would serve as a capsule description, her hauntingly smoky soul voice literally sounds like no one else’s. Alas, she quit the music business in the early 1990’s and disappeared after that.)

One of the key turning points in the evolution of disco from soul came from an obscure African singer-saxophonist named Manu Dibango, who in 1972 made a record called “Soul Makossa” for a tiny label in his native Cameroon. A New York record store imported a stock of copies of “Soul Makossa,” and before long word of mouth spread about this great new song and they sold out. Atlantic Records picked up the U.S. rights and released it (they put it out so fast that my copy had the labels reversed so the B-side, “Lily,” was labeled “Soul Makossa” and vice versa). Dibango’s catchy little jam became a major hit and its beginning – Dibango chanting “Ma-ma-ko, ma-ma-sa, ma-ko-ma-ko-sa” – was an iconic sound in early disco and was “sampled” by Michael Jackson for “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” the opening track of his mega-hit album Thriller a decade later. Other key records in establishing disco as a separate genre were “Girl, You Need a Change of Mind” by former Temptations co-lead singer Eddie Kendricks (a favorite at David Mancuso’s Loft parties) and “Rock Your Baby” by George McCrae, who was interviewed for the program and recalled getting a call from James Brown personally inviting him to be Brown’s opening act. This program ends just as the disco craze is getting underway and well before I became aware of it (though I did buy the “Soul Makossa” single in 1973 and quite enjoyed its fusion of African and African-American music styles), and it’s going to be followed by two more episodes, “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” (billed with the slogan, “As disco conquers the mainstream, it turns Black women and Gay men into icons”) and “Stayin’ Alive” (billed as, “By the end of the 1970’s, disco seemed untouchable. But it was about to face a violent backlash that almost destroyed it.”)

Some of the anti-disco backlash really did get silly, and other parts of it did indeed have racist and homophobic components, but you didn’t have to hate Black or Queer people to hate disco: Gay journalist John Lauritsen called it “soulless noise.” Incidentally, one of the most fascinating people interviewed for this show was music critic Vince Aletti, who wrote the first article in Rolling Stone about the nascent disco scene. I remember Aletti as being by far the most sensitive and intellectually interesting critic at the short-lived magazine Creem, an attempt at an edgier competitor to Rolling Stone, and I particularly remember two pieces he did for Creem. One was a review of the Rolling Stones’ album Exile on Main Street that summed up my own feelings about that sprawling record (it was a double album and I thought it would have been much better with sides one and three coupled as a single LP), and the other was his own coming-out story as a Gay man. As ubiquitous as coming-out stories later became, that was the first one I ever read!