September 15, 2020 • 52 mins
Disco declines and is brought back, big time, by the big screen. Join Steve as he traces the impact of a danceable Hollywood blockbuster on radio and discotheques as the 70s reach a fevered pitch.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Speed of Sound is a production of I Heart Radio.
When the disco craze peaked in nine, the disco audience
was like America itself at the time, predominantly white, heterosexual,
and suburban. But disco didn't start out that way. At
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its beginning. It was an underground scene dominated by gay men, Hispanics,
and African Americans. But then in late nineteen seventy seven,
a film called Saturday Night Fever was released, and that
film had the effect of turning what was a subculture
into a mainstream fad, one which then completely dominated American
(00:43):
popular culture. I'm Steve Greenberg welcomed the Speed of Sound local.
In June seventy six, at the height of the first
wave of the disco boom, New York Magazine published a
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cover story with the title Tribal Rites of the New
Saturday Night. The piece was written by Nick Cone, a
British journalist who up until that point had achieved his
greatest notoriety due to his love of playing pinball. You see,
Nick Cone was the inspiration for the song Pinball Wizard
in the Who's Rock opera Tommy Shore. But nick Cone's
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greater contribution to the culture was as the author of
a nineteen sixty nine book alternately known as Pop from
the Beginning or a Wap Bob a Blue bab alp
Bam Boom. This book was one of the very first
histories of rock and roll ever published, and incidentally, it's
my personal favorite book about the subject. In Pop from
the Beginning, nick Cone professed his great love for what
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he termed super pop, which to him was simple, fast,
flashy music filled with sexual energy, music that had the
ability to catch teen obsessions and freeze them in images.
Think Chuck Berry or those early Who records. So it
was no surprise that in ninety six Nick Cone became
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fascinated by disco, a flashy, sexy phenomenon. When Nick Cone
became aware of disco, it was just bubbling up to
the surface from New York's black and gay undergrounds, and
it was starting to become massively popular in, among other places,
the Italian American neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York. The New
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York Magazine article by Nick Cone dealt with the life
of a nineteen year old Brooklyn resident named Vincent, who
worked in a dead end job selling paint at a
local hardware store. Vincent's only means of release was getting
dressed up on Saturday night and dancing at his local disco,
which was called two thousand and one Odyssey. That disco
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opened in nineteen seventy in Vincent's neighborhood of Bay Ridge,
which was a blue collar, mostly Italian neighborhood. At two
thousand and one Odyssey, Vincent was the king. He was
great looking, and he was the best dancer. Everyone's eyes
were fixated on him when he danced. Vincent's whole existence
revolved around those Saturday nights at two thousand and one Odyssey,
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where he danced, did drugs, and occasionally had sex in
the backseat of a car in the parking lot. Now
nick Cone offered very detailed descriptions of the scene at
two thousand and one based on having followed Vincent and
his crew on their disco adventures for a few months,
and for most readers of New York Magazine, this was
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their first insider glimpse of the disco nightlife. However, what
no one knew at the time was that it was
all made up. Nick Cone hadn't spent weeks watching Vincent
at two thousand and one Odyssey because there was no Vincent.
He was a figment of Nick Cone's imagination, but that
was a secret known only to Nick Cone until he
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finally fessed up over twenty years later. It turns out
Nick Cone actually had traveled to Bay Ridge to check
out the scene at two thousand and one Odyssey, but
when he pulled up to the club in a taxi,
there was a drunken brawl taking place outside on the sidewalk.
As Cone recalled it, just as I opened my side door,
one of the brawlers emerged from the pack, reeled over
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towards the gutter, and threw up with fine precision, all
over the side of the cab and my trouser legs.
I took it as a sign, quickly slamming the door,
I ordered us back to Manhattan. But while pulling away
in the cab, nick Cone noticed one clubgoer standing in
the doorway at two thousand and one and calmly observing
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the brawl as it took place. Con was is really
intrigued by this young fellow, who, to him seemed to
possess a certain star quality. So Cone returned to two
thousand and won the very next week, hoping to speak
with him, but he never found him. Nick Cone did
make it inside the club on his second visit, but
didn't learn much. The noise level was deafening, the crush
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of sweaty bodies suffocating, and none of my attempts at
striking up conversation got past the first few sentences. Plus
I made a lousy interview. I knew nothing about this world,
and it showed quite literally. I didn't speak the language,
so I made it up. Nick Cone may not have
known anything about disco, but what he did know a
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lot about was the mod scene that was popular in
the mid sixties among certain British youth, and so he
wrote his article about a figment of his imagination who
was a composite of the guy standing in the doorway
at two thousand and one and a mod that he
knew when he was a teenager in London. Cone sense
that there were a lot of similarities between the disco
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crowd and the nineteen sixties British mods. They both had
that obsession with fashion and music, and they had aspirations
to present as being better off than they really were.
That desire of a blue collar worker to not be
defined by his job, but rather by who he is
when he goes out that intense focus on Saturday Night
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by a nobody who once a week gets to be
as somebody. It's no coincidence that Vincent's crowd and the
Nick Cone article were known as the Faces, which happens
to be exactly what stylish mods were known as in
England during the Swinging sixties. By the way, if you're
interested in getting a sense of what the mods scene
in London was like, definitely check out the movie Quadraphenia
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featuring music by who else but the Who? Well, I
thought want of it a sim as everybody else. That's
Walman Madsy. I mean, there's gotta be somebody, ain't you. Well,
you might as well jump into scenes ran Anyway, that
New York Magazine art about the two thousand and one
Odyssey Disco wound up in the hands of a man
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named Robert Stigwood, who was an Australian born music mogul.
Earlier in the seventies, stigwould expanded his empire into film.
He produced the movie adaptations of Jesus Christ Superstar and
The Who's Tommy. Robert Stigwood read the New York Magazine
story and decided that a movie about the disco scene
just might be a hit, So he picked up the
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film rights to Cohn's article, and then he brought in
as the star of the movie, John Travolta, who was
at that point the hottest teen idol in America. He's
starting a top rated television comedy called Welcome Back Cotter,
where he played a tough but lovable Italian American high
school student in Brooklyn named Vinny Barberino. Uel Knows. The
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film that Stigwood's company made, Saturday Night Fever, really fleshed
out the lead character, who now went by the name
Tony Manero. It especially fleshed out he's home life. In
the movie, Tony lived at home in Bay Ridge with
his parents. His father was an unemployed construction worker, his
mother was a housewife, and even though his family had
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trouble making ends meet, his father forbade his mother from
working outside the home. It was the man who was
supposed to put bread on the table. This depiction really
resonated in the America of nineteen seventy seven, which had
been hit really hard by an economic recession and where
opportunity seemed extremely limited. Now, just like in Nikkole's original article,
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the two thousand and one, disco was the place where
Tony Manero ruled as the greatest dancer. Incidentally, in this
movie version of the club, the DJ was played by
none other than Sir Monty Rock, the third of Disco
Text and the sex so Lette Spain. They were the
group whose early disco hit Get Dance, and we discussed
in the previous episode of Speed of Sounds, what are
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you talking about, Baby Chip Dancing Man. She's proven the
hottest stars on the roster of Robert Stigwood's record label
RSO Records. The initials stood for Robert Stigwood Organization, where
the Australian brothers the Bigs, who had already had a
couple of number one records with disco songs, but Stigwood,
oddly enough, didn't initially consider them to write the music
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for the film. Robert Stigwood's original choice for the song
that would be playing along with the film's iconic opening
scene of John Travolta strutting down the street was Boss
Gags hit from the year before, low Down Better to
Chip Around. However, Boss Gags label Columbia Records, turned down
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the opportunity to have that song in Saturday night Fever,
holding it back for their own soundtrack to a film
which dealt with New York nightlife looking for Mr Goodbar.
So Stig Would turned to the BGS and they worked
up a song. Now. Originally, the chorus of the song
the b GS wrote had them singing Saturday Night, Saturday Night,
as a nod to the title of the film, but
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eventually they changed it to Staying Alive, which better captured
the grittiness of the movie. The lyrics of staying alive,
I've been kicked around since I was born. You may
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look the other way really summed up that late seventies
cents of powerlessness and apathy that a lot of American
young people were feeling, and that sense of hopelessness was
especially acute among New York teenagers. In seven it was
a moment when the city cream from one convulsion to another.
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New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy, and
that meant that garbage went uncollected. The schools were underfunded,
they were very minimal, municipal sir verses, and high crime
and burnt out neighborhoods. Not to mention Son of Sam,
a serial killer who terrorized the city for the first
half of the year, and a citywide blackout that summer
which resulted in mass looting in a general sense of chaos. Now,
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with this horrendous state of affairs, New York City produced
two distinct musical responses. There was the punk scene, which
was incubating in downtown clubs like CBGB's, and there was disco.
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Punk was nehalistic, it was resigned to this idea of
no future. Disco, on the other hand, was escapist, glamorous,
and aspirational. Punk rock was actually with the music industry
was betting on at that time to become the next
big thing, and the major labels were falling over each
other to sign punk's most notorious act, the Sex Pistols.
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How Yes, But then along came Saturday Night Fever. The
movie premiered in theaters just before Christmas seven. As we've
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discussed previously, seventy seven saw disco begin to recede as
a force on American pop radio. In fact, the week
Saturday Night Fever was released, the biggest disco hit on
the Billboard Top forty was all the way down at
number thirty four. In disco's place, a lot of sappy
adult pop by artists like Barry Manilow and Debbie Boom
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were filling the top forty airwaves. New York's pioneering disco station,
w p i x FM actually abandoned the disco format
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in the summer of ninety seven and switched to album rock,
which of course would prove to be incredibly bad timing.
At the same time, though going out to dance at
discos on the weekend was still a really popular activity
all across the country. It was a relatively cheap form
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of entertainment, and that made it especially appealing in the
middle of a recession, and so record producers and remixers
kept on making records for all those clubgoers to dance too,
even if they were unlikely to become pop hits. At
this moment, disco music stood at across roads. The originators
of disco were disillusioned by the dilution of the sound,
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which was becoming more lowest common denominator, and the purest
hated the phoniness that was really starting to creep in
Studio fifty four was grabbing lots of headlines, but that
was the celebrity scene, very far removed from that original
communal spirit of disco. Legendary DJ. David Mancuso's New York
Record Pool, which was a nonprofit organization that made possible
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the distribution of disco records to club DJ's, actually closed
down the same week Saturday Night Fever opened because David Mancuso,
the original disco DJ who pioneered the scene at his
club The Loft, became fed up by all the cynicism
that was taking over the scene. Disco really did start
to feel like it might be over coming up. America
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catches the fever, but it takes a ballad to get
things going. Prior to the release of Saturday Night Fever,
RSO Records was actually scared that they were coming out
with their movie too late and that they had already
missed the disco fat that they were trying to cash
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in on in the first place. RSO Records was very
aware of pop radio's move away from the disco sound,
and so to hedge their bets, they decided to release
a ballad as the first single from the movie soundtrack
instead of one of the disco songs. The big song,
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How Deep Is Your Love was released in September nine,
three months before the film came out, and it was
approaching number one on the charts when Saturday Night Fever
premiered on December sixteen. Now, the combination of John Travolta's
charisma he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, the
big songs, and a surprisingly good script made Saturday Night
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Fever a phenomenon, which in turn made disco much bigger
than it had ever been. It's actually entirely possible that
without Saturday Night Fever, disco might have petered out in
the broader culture and resumed being a niche subculture. But instead,
the movie's runaway success caused the whole disco scene to
become turbo charged, and it also changed disco in pretty
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significant ways. For instance, the original script for Saturday Night
fevercalled for all the dances in the film to be
partner dances and line dances like the Hustle and the
Bus Stop, which were the kind of dances people actually
did it discoes like two thousand and one Odyssey. You
could check those dances out on YouTube if you're curious
what they looked like. But John Travolta felt that he
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needed to do a solo dance in order to really
develop his character, and so he insisted that they changed
the script so he could be featured doing a freestyle dance.
According to Travolta, I had to enforce that scene. They
were basing this movie on him being the best dancer,
and he didn't have a solo I had to prove
to the audience that he was the best. And so
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in the middle of the film, John Travolta breaks free
from his dance partner and does a solo dance to
the song you Should Be Dancing, a BGS hit from
the previous year that was inserted into the movie for
just this purpose. Little did anybody know at the time
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that this little added scene would completely change the dynamic
of disco dancing, because disco goers now felt they were
given license to do their own thing on the dance
floor rather than try to learn a couple's dance. This
was actually convenient, considering that in the wake of the
film's success, the number of discos increased exponentially. Over forty
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thousand new discos sprouted up across the US in the
first year after Saturday Night Fever came out, and we
can safely assume that a lot of those new disco
denizens weren't very accomplished dancers. Now. While our collective cultural
memory of Saturday Night Fever centers around the music and
the dancing, it was actually a very smart movie. It
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was a story about a young person whose life is
going nowhere until he finds in dance the strength to
break free from its surroundings. Truth is at its heart.
Saturday Night Fever was a dark, even brutal depiction of
sexual aggression and depression among working class Italian kids stuck
in nineteen seventy seven Brooklyn. Crucially, Saturday Night Fever gave
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Middle America a visual sense of disco culture. The scenes
inside two thousand and one Odyssey were directly inspired by
a series of paintings by an artist named James McMullen,
whose work appeared alongside Nick Cone's original New York Magazine article,
and these scenes offered a picture of a secret world
full of glamor, full of passion, where sure there were
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exceptional dancers, but there were also dancers no better than
the average joe, and even those dancers could feel they
could be someone for a night. Two thousand and one
Odyssey was an approximation of Studio fifty four's glamour, but
it was accessible to anybody. And notably, while the first
wave of disco was overwhelmingly a black and gay scene,
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Saturday Night Fever made it all about white heterosexual people.
It was that aspect of the movie that really helped
sell disco's appeal to Middle America and make it feel safe. Now.
I'll tell you, John Travolta's portrayal of Tony Manarrow in
that movie really struck a chord with people I knew
in high school in New York City. Back then, Tony
was just like a lot of guys that are high
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school guys from blue collar families, Guys about to graduate
school with not much in the way of a future
to look forward to, guys who consequently decided to just
live for today. I remember this being our favorite line
from the film. Fu No, Tony, you can't fuck your future.
The future fucks you. It catches up with you, and
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it fucks you if you ain't planned for it. And
so Saturday Night Fever simultaneously glamorized life on the dance
floor under the mirrored ball at the two thousand and
one Odyssey and made clear that the pleasures being experienced
by Tony Manero at the club were extremely fleeting. Now
propelled by the music of the BGS, the Saturday Night
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Fever soundtrack became the biggest selling album of all time
In its day. It moved twenty five million units worldwide,
and it wasn't surpassed until Michael Jackson's Thriller. In addition
to the number one ballad How Deep Is Your Love,
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the movie spawned three other number one songs, all written
by the Brothers GiB There was the aforementioned Staying Alive,
plus another BGS recording that actually did manage to work
in the title of the film, Night Fever. The final
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number one song from Saturday Night Fever was a BGS
composition called If I Can't Have You, which Robert Stigwood
decided to give to a singer on his label named
Yvonne Leman. She was one of the stars of stigwood
film version of Jesus Christ Superstar, and she'd also had
some success on the charts in ninety six with her
cover of a very Gift song called love Me My
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Love When we really had it on you were Always
It and make Me smile, Help Me Win in a Phone.
I can't believe vone. Ellman was originally supposed to sing
how Deep Is Your Love in the movie, but Robert
Stigwood felt that the song was just too good for
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the bgs to give away, and so he let her
record If I Can't Have You as a sort of
consolation prize, and it ended up being a number one
record him I Don't. Saturday Night Fever's popularity leads to
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belated success for yet another song that was closely associated
with the film, but which was not a brother's GiB song.
Disco Inferno, recorded by the fathers of disco, the Tramps,
was originally released in early nineteen seventy seven, and while
the song was a massive hit in the clubs and
went to number one for six weeks on Billboard's Disco chart,
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which measured club play, it failed to even reach the
top forty on the Billboard Hot one hundred, this being
the period when interest in disco music had really begun
to wane on pop radio, Disco Inferno was a throwback
in its own way to the early days of disco,
when soul music had a much more direct influence on
the disco sound. Being featured in Saturday Night Fever brought
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disco Inferno back and made it way bigger. In fact,
it became one of the defining songs of the whole
disco era story. The Saturday Night Fever album went to
number one during the third week of January seventy eight,
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and it stayed at number one for six months, and
the film experienced the same kind of longevity in movie theaters.
I remember seeing Saturday Night Fever when it came out
in December of nineteen seventy seven, and I remember seeing
it again at the very same movie theater during Memorial
Day weekend in night. Now. As far as Saturday Night
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Fever's impact on the music world, initially, its success just
led to a boom in popularity of songs specifically from
the movie and also anything associated with the Bigs, regardless
of whether or not it was even disco. The BJS
owned the spring of nineteen seventy eight on pop radio.
Songs written by the Bigs at one point held down
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the top five positions on the Billboard Hot one hundred,
which is something even the Beatles never accomplished because when
the Beatles had the top five records on the chart
back in April of nineteen sixty four, they had only
written four of the five songs since one of those
five was a cover version of Twist and Show, But
nineteen seven D eight was total Bigs mania. In the
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nine months following Saturday Night Fever's release, songs written by
the Brothers Gibs spent an astonishing twenty seven weeks at
number one on the pop chart, with four of those
songs being from the movie, plus two by the Bigs
Little Brother Andy GiB Sweet, I Can't Play. And finally
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there was the Barry GiB Penn theme from another Robert
Stigwood film, Greece, sung by Frankie Valley. In the early
months of record labels responded to the crazy popularity of
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Saturday Night Fever by signing a slew of new disco acts,
which set the stage for the massive disco explosion of
nineteen seventy nine. Notably, the major labels resolved to get
in on the action, and this meant doing things in
a very major label way, developing stars, which was really
kind of counter to the whole disco aesthetic, where producers
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and DJs had always been the real stars, and the
major labels were out to sell albums, which were of
course more profitable than singles, Even though disco had always
very much been a singles based genre. At CBS Records,
which was at that time the dominant company in the
music industry, there's been a rebellion of sorts in the
ranks of the salesforce who were complaining that CBS couldn't
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compete unless they placed a much heavier bet on disco.
In response to this, CBS worked up a report with
the imposing title Research Report on Artist Development as it
pertains to disco oriented product of May. The report recommended,
among other things, that CBS signed more disco artists and
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put more emphasis on promoting those artists in clubs using
extended twelve inch mixes. To achieve that last goal, CBS,
along with the other major labels, higher dedicated disco promotion
staffs whose jobs were to go out to the discos
and convince the DJs to play their records. Bobby Shaw,
who was a promo man from Warner Brothers Records during
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that period, remembers the job I was promoting just to
the club DJs, And you know, in those days it
was a little different because you know, there was no
downloading and you literally had to hand deliver a piece
of music to somebody or put it in the mail
or send it by messenger. You know, there was no
pressing a button and here it is. It made for
a lot better relationships, and you know, in this day
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and age, relationships seemed to be going down the tubes.
While CBS adopted the report's recommendations, the president of the
company made sure to emphasize in the music press that
the labels focused in signing disco acts was going to
be toward developing complete artists and not the creation of
what he turned a fabricated disco sound using non artists.
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And anticipating that there'd be a massive demand for disco albums,
CBS decided to invest in brand new manufacturing facilities to
produce more vinyl LPs. This business decision would, as we
shall see, proved to be quite costly. So by the
summer of seventy eight, the club DJs and the pop
radio stations were playing all these new major label disco
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acts like our c as Evelyn Champagne King, whose mother
was an office cleaner at Gamble and Huff's Philadelphia International Records,
and who was discovered there by a producer named Theodore Life.
He actually heard Evelyn King's singing in the washroom while
she was helping her mom at work. Now, if it
had been a couple of years earlier, Theodore Life would
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certainly have brought Evelyn King to Gamble and Huff, whose
washroom she was cleaning, But with the major labels offering
big money contracts for disco product, he took her to
our Cia Records, where she had a smash hit first
I'm Out with Shane Keep. Meanwhile, Capitol Records got behind
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A Taste of Honey, a Los Angeles group brought to
that label by a veteran producer named Fonse Mazelle who
years earlier was part of the corporation that was the
production team over Written Motown, who were behind the Jackson
Five's early hits. A Taste of Honey's first song, Boogieogieoogie,
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went all the way to number one in the fall
of eight and then it wound up earning the group
of Grammy a few months later in the Best New
Artist category. Also jumping on the immediate post Saturday Night
Fever Bandwagon that summer was the biggest rock and roll
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band in the world, The Rolling Stones. Their pivoted disco
was fueled by Mick Jaggers residency in New York City,
where he was regularly seen partying at Studio fifty four.
While some rock die hearts condemned The Stones as sellouts
for going disco, their defenders reminded everybody that the band
had always had their ears tuned to the latest developments
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in black music, and this really was just the latest
manifestation of the Stones interest in R and B. For
the disco scene, having The Stones joined the party gave
the music a new respectability, and for the Stones, going
disco gave them their first number one record in five years,
Miss You. But the Rolling Stones weren't the only superstar
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act to go disco. In the summer of seventy way,
at the other end of the musical spectrum, cheese pop
maestro Barry Mandelow entered the disco sweep stay with his
big hit song Copa Cabana, which was inspired by the
legendary New York nightclub of the same name that had
recently reopened as a disco They were from A four
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They Were, and in July of nineteen seventy eight, New
York City got a brand new Ald disco station when
w k t u f M, which was previously this
barely listened to adult music station adopted the disco format.
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W k T You filled the vacuum left behind by
w p i X FM's ill time move to album
rock the year before. Just two months after they switched
to disco, w k T You passed the perennial number
one Top forty station w A b C as the
most listened to station in New York and therefore as
the most listened to station in the whole country. By
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the end of nineteen seventy eight, w k T use
Evening DJ Paco had the highest ratings ever record by
any radio DJ in New York City. If you're into disco,
you have to be into because I haven't stopped dancing yet.
While it was the disco boom that enabled w k
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to UFM to jump past Top forty station w A
b C a M, there was also another force at
work here. W k t use rise marked the first
time that a radio station on the FM spectrum passed
an AM station to be a market leader. AM radio
had been around a lot longer than FM, but music
sounded much better on the FM dial, and more and
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more people were migrating to it, especially since cars were
beginning to be sold with FM radios installed as standard equipment.
While w ABC had been number one in the ratings
for every period since nineteen sixty two, it never recovered
its place as New York's leading music station after it
was jumped by w k t U soon. In fact,
it was also leap frog by w b l S,
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which was an FM R and B station that was
now emphasizing disco really heavily at the expense of other
styles of R and B. Nine saw w BLS and
w k t YOU dominate New York radio, going one
two in the ratings month after month, with w ABC
and pop music on AM radio quickly becoming an afterthought.
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W k t u f M success convinced the radio
industry that disco was a major musical force and that
the disco audience was being underserved. One by one, nearly
every market in America saw an FM radio station switched
to the all disco format, and in response to that,
every market saw the local AM top forty station load
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up its playlist with disco records in a last ditch
attempt to try and slow the exodus to FM. Those
traditional AM top forty stations were hoping that going all
in on disco could keep them competitive, but for the
A M Top forties it was too late. The listeners
who had fled A M music radio for FM weren't
coming back. In fact, by midnight teen seventy nine, FM
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radio for the first time ever past AM radio in
total listenership nationally, and by the early eighties, most of
the old AM Top forty stations, including New York's w ABC,
abandoned music entirely, switching to all talk formats. So as
much as anything else, it was the rise of the
all disco radio format that really enabled disco to completely
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dominate the music landscape as eight turned to nineteen seventy nine,
and which led to the inevitable glood of disco music
on the radio. But jumping on the disco bandwagon wasn't
limited to the music industry. Up next Saturday Night Fever
isn't the only disco movie to compete for screen time
or the top of the charts. In the summer of
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seventy eight, a film called Thank God It's Friday hit
movie theaters than Thank God It's Friday was set in
the fictional l a club called the Zoo, and it
brought to the big screen a West Coast version of
the goings on at the local disco. The zoo, like
Brooklyn's two thousand and one Odyssey, was a place where
(34:12):
ordinary people could experience some approximation of the glamour that
was inaccessible to that great, massive people who would never
get to set foot inside Studio fifty four. Of course,
Studio fifty four and its stars studied clientele kept up
a steady presence in the gossip columns and the celebrity magazines,
but the local disco would have to do for most
(34:33):
of America, and so by the original Brooklyn two thousand
and one Odyssey, disco started to open franchises across the country,
becoming sort of the McDonald's of dance clubs. Now. I
remember the local disco across the street from my high
school in Queens, New York, and it was a far
cry from the fantasy of Studio fifty four. It was
(34:54):
called Jerry's Disco, and it was owned by this guy,
Jerry Rosenberg, who was famous in New York at that
time for starring in TV ads for Cut Rate applying
stores dressed as a construction worker with the tagline what's
the story? Jerry? And he brought this exact same sensibility
to Jerry's disco. Hey, Jerry, what's the story. If you
(35:15):
want a party, you want to dance, you want a
great night out, come on dot Jerry. But Jerry, what's
the story. Unbelievable life, unbelievable show, giant danced, flare, really
big drinks on the night, talk about atmosphere, not a waife.
See for yourself. The party starts every night at night,
and I'll be here waiting for you. That's the story anyway.
(35:39):
The movie Thank God It's Friday's biggest contribution to the
culture by far was launching one of its featured performers,
Donna Summer, into superstardom. Ever since her first hit love
(36:01):
to Love You Baby back in, Donna Summer maintained a
pretty steady stream of club hits, and occasionally one of
those songs would cross over to pop radio, like her
groundbreaking single I Feel Love in nineteen seventy seven, which
we discussed on our previous episode. In Thank God It's Friday,
Donna Summer appeared on camera singing a song called Last Dance,
(36:23):
and it was her performance of that song in that
movie which really said her on the course to become
the biggest artist in the whole music business. For the
rest of the seventies, Donna Summer was signed to an
(36:46):
l A based record label called Casablanca Records. Now, according
to a memoir written by the label's co founder Larry Harris,
Casablanca Records it was not a product of the nineteen seventies.
It was no person or company in that era of
narcissism and Druggi glutton. It was more emblematic of the
times than Casablanca Records and its magnetic founder Neil Bogar.
(37:10):
Besides the steady stream of disco music, the thing that
fueled Casablanca Records was cocaine. As Larry Harris recalled, there
was blow everywhere. It was like some sort of condiment
that had to be brushed away by the wait staff
before the next party was seated. Cocaine dusted everything it
was on fingertips, tabletops, upper lips, and the floor. Just
(37:31):
like Henry Stone's t K label down in Miami, Casablanca
Records was more than happy to share its cocaine with
radio and club DJ's in exchange for airplay, making it
the most successful label of the disco era. But Let's
be clear, Casablanca's promotion methods should in no way diminish
the fact that Donna Summer was a uniquely talented artist
(37:53):
who released one classic single after another in the final
years of the seventies. Donna Summer actually had three number
one albums in the twelve month period from late nineteen
s to late nineteen seventy nine, and all three of
them were double albums. By now, an entire ecosystem had
(38:22):
sprung up around disco, and disco culture had its own
dress code to go along with the sounds on the
dance floor. For men, there were shiny, really colorfully patterned,
wide collared polyester kiana shirts which usually were worn open
at the chest. Or perhaps a man would go all
(38:43):
out with a three piece polyester leisure suit with wide
lapels and bell bottom pants preferably white or powder blue,
and of course platform shoes. Now a woman might show
up at the disco and perhaps a knee length dress
with a cinched waist, which was known as the jersey
rap dress. But tube tops are also quite popular, along
(39:05):
with halterneck shirts, spandex shorts, catsuits and dresses with long
thigh slits, and women's footwear well that tended towards shoes
with chunky heels or maybe even knee boots. And of course,
beyond having its own dress code, disco also had its
own drug culture, and that culture centered around cocaine. According
(39:26):
to the writer Paul Guttenberg, the relationship of cocaine to
nineteen seventies disco culture cannot be stressed enough. Superficiality, success
and money. We're back in, and cocaine intensified and highlighted
all their sensations and delusions. Of course, coke used by
celebrities and jet setters, made cocaine seem glamorous and Unlike heroin,
(39:49):
which was looked at as a street drug used by junkies,
cocaine was seen as a soft drug. To be sure,
without the stimulating effect of cocaine, those all night parties
places like Studio fifty four would have definitely run out
of steam a lot earlier in the evening. Additionally, all
that drug use contributed to yet another aspect of disco culture,
(40:10):
public sex. Sex in the club's bathroom, stalls, stairways, balconies,
basement wherever, and it was generally unprotected sex since the
AIDS epidemic hadn't yet struck. This was all consistent with
the broader seventies trend towards much freer sexual expression. Disco
music reinforced that idea with songs like in the Bush
(40:32):
by music which left very little to the imagination. Nile
Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were two musicians who had been
on the scene for a while, backing up bands in
New York City, experimenting with jazz and art rock and
even punk before finally settling on disco. Now, Rogers remembers
(40:55):
those early days this way. We envisioned ourselves more like
Earth Wind and Fire type of group, because we looked
at Earth Wind and Fire as a group of jazz musicians,
you know, sort of like cooling the Gang. Like we
were jazz musicians that learned to play R and B
and learned how to write R and B. So our
first allegiance would be mainly to jazz. At least that's
(41:19):
how I saw it. Bernard was very proud to say, no,
I'm a boogaloon musician. But then Rogers and Edwards began
to get gigs as live touring musicians for some acts
associated with the Philadelphia Sound, and they came to embrace disco,
forming a band called she Sheik's first hit record, Dance
(41:51):
Dance Dance Yaw Yaw Yasa, was pretty avant garde for
its day. It borrowed sonically from British art rockers roxy
music as much as it did from disco, and it
had this sinister edge. There was a voice that came
in at various points throughout the record, shouting yells, yells,
(42:13):
yawso was something the band had heard shouted by this
evil nineteen thirties dance marathon m C in a movie
from nineteen sixty nine called They Shoot Horses, Don't They
Welcome to the Dancer. In that movie, desperate people in
depression era America were literally dropping dead on the dance
(42:36):
floor while competing in a marathon for a cash prize.
The idea of tragedy beneath the surface it entertainment and
capitalism was a strong undercurrent in Sheik's music. In fact,
the band found the whole spectacle of going to discos
in order to escape reality to be at its core
kind of tragic. Even the group's name Chic and the
(42:57):
high fashion clothes they wore were actually intended as a
commentary on American class struggle and the lead vocals and
dance dance. Dance sounded kind of disembodied, drained of enthusiasm,
conveying the futility of hedonism and disregard for meaning. But
Sheik's audience didn't necessarily get the songs darker connotations. They
(43:18):
just enjoyed the groove and the record launch's career. Now
Rogers remembers, basically, we were going through the worst economic
period since the Great Depression, if you remember in those times,
but if you came to a disco, it was so
hedonistic and so amazing, you would have thought that we
were the welcomed people in the world. But it was
quite the contrary. We were probably the poorest, but we
(43:40):
didn't live like that. We lived like every day with
our last But the best was yet to come for Sheik,
As now Rogers fondly recalls, Grace Stones was really enamored
with us because of Earth's budget dance, and of course
you had heard dance, but it was everybody dance that
was the chill learn m So she wanted us to
(44:11):
understand who she was artistically because she was thinking about
having us produced what would have then been her next record.
But she told us that the only way that we
could truly understand her artistically is to see her live performance,
and we were like, okay, cool. Now, this was the
very first time we ever heard her speaking voice. It
(44:32):
sounded to us like a cross between Marlene Dietrich and
sort of Bella Legosi and an Ice and sort of
like Bob Marley. It was like the weirdest thing we
had ever heard. But we thought that she was just
putting that on. And so she says, so, all you
got to do, Darling, is go through the backdoor and
tapping your personal frames, miss Grace Jones. So we thought
(44:52):
we had to put on that accent. I mean, I
cannot believe we were so dumb, but really, this was
early in our career that we didn't know we gating.
We knocked on the back door and we were kicking
for a long time. They finally opened the door because
you know, the music and tide was blasting. Uh. So
we did that and I slammed the door in our faces.
But before he slammed the door, or while he was
(45:14):
slamming the door, he told us to He said, ah,
funk off. He thought it was the silliest thing he
had ever heard and we were trying to convince him
that it was the truth. So we were kicking on
the door yet again, and we were really insistent, and
finally opened the door again and said, did not tell
you guys to hook off. But she used that rejection
as the inspiration for their biggest hit. Now Rogers remembers
(45:39):
on the way back to my apartment, we had to
pass the liquor store. We picked up two bottles of
champagne what we called rock and roll mouth wassh, which
was toomparion in those days. And now we downed him
very quickly, and we got roozy, and we started singing
what had come to our minds, which was all funk off.
(46:00):
So we just started jamming and going, ah, fuck off,
don't cot didda, don't, don't box duty of this before
fuck off, dunda dun't don't. And we were into it,
and we thought of every possible situation where the only
appropriate answer would be f off, and we just kept
going f off. If a cab drive to cut you off,
that's off, don't dita, dodo don't, don't don't. And then
(46:22):
we wrote the cool Bridge Deep and we were loving it.
We were having so much fun. And then finally Bernard
pulls his glasses down over the bridge of his nose,
which is when he always was getting serious with me,
and he says, my man, you know, this ship is
happening and this is like a couple of years before
hip hop. And I'm like, dude, you know we can't
(46:44):
get this on the radio. I went like total hippie
on him. And then oh man, you know, like like
when you have a bad acid trip man, and you're
like freaking out man, you know like and Bernard was
so not a hippie and he looked at me like
I was from out of space. And then finally I
got my black card back together and I said, well,
you know me to find chicken. You know, you're freaking
(47:04):
out on the dance floor. And then Bernard a light
bulb went off and he said, oh, yeah, it's like
that new dance. My kids are doing the freak. And
I was like, but neither Rogers nor Edwards had ever
seen anyone actually do the freak, as Nile Rodgers recalls,
and uh so we ran out. We got a copy
of Chubby Checker, Come on baby, let's do the Twist,
(47:26):
and we got a copy of the Peppermint Twist, and
we came back home when we listened to it over
and over again, and neither song told you how to
do the dance. So we came home when we wrote
a song about a dance we did not know how
to do. We pretended like we knew how to do it,
and we knew that everybody in studio before now got
to do it, or at least we surmised they did.
(47:47):
So that's what we did. We said, come on down
the fifty before, find your spot out on the floor.
I freak out. In retrospect, the massive success of Sheiks
(48:08):
La Frek really served as the starting gun for the
final relentless onslaught that saw disco completely swallow American popular
culture in the first half of nineteen seventy nine. Follow
Me Here. When it was released, La Freak very quickly
went to number one in December of night it bumped
You Don't Bring Me Flowers, this schlocky ballad by Barber
(48:30):
Streisand and Neil Diamond out of the number one spot,
but after one week, Streisand and Diamond retook the top slot.
You don't sing you love song? Yeah, let's talk to
(48:54):
me anymore? When I Come through the Door at the
end of day. One week later, Lafrek bounced back to
number one, and this time it held onto the top
spot for two weeks. Then it was dethroned at number
(49:15):
one by a bigs ballad called too Much Heaven, which
stayed at number one for the next two weeks. Much
But then Lafrek did something remarkable. It bounced back into
the number one position for an unprecedented third stint at
(49:39):
the top, and this time it stayed at the summit
for three weeks in early nine. For charred observers, this
whole back and forth made it seem as though disco
itself was battling the rest of pop music for supremacy,
and when Lafrek finally vacated the top spot for good
(49:59):
in February nine, seventy nine, disco was essentially proclaimed the
champion because Lafrek was replaced at the number one position
by another disco record, and then another, and another and another.
In fact, disco related songs held onto the number one
spot every week from that point until the end of August.
It was a total disco takeover of the pop scene,
(50:21):
with La Frec leading the charge. Lafrec really took disco
to another level. It was by far the biggest radio
hit disco had ever experienced, and it offered tangible proof
to pop radio programmers that demand for disco music had
become insatiable, had done and that day, on the next
(51:19):
episode of Speed of Sound, Disco rules the world and
spawns an army of haters who finally confront disco culture
head on in a baseball stadium in Chicago. Chu. If
you want to take a deeper dive into the artists
(51:40):
and songs you just heard, check out our curated playlist
at the Speed of Sound page on the I Heart app.
Until next time. You can find me on Twitter at
Stevie g Pro. Speed of Sound is executive produced by
Lauren Bright Pacheco, Noel Brown and me. Taylor shakogn is
(52:04):
our supervising producer, editor and sound designer. Additional sound designed
by Tristan McNeil. Until next time, keep your feet on
the dance floor and always keep reaching for that mirrored ball.
Speed of Sound is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, check out the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(52:27):
to your favorite shows.
Speed of Sound is a production of I Heart Radio.
When the disco craze peaked in nine, the disco audience
was like America itself at the time, predominantly white, heterosexual,
and suburban. But disco didn't start out that way. At
(00:22):
its beginning. It was an underground scene dominated by gay men, Hispanics,
and African Americans. But then in late nineteen seventy seven,
a film called Saturday Night Fever was released, and that
film had the effect of turning what was a subculture
into a mainstream fad, one which then completely dominated American
(00:43):
popular culture. I'm Steve Greenberg welcomed the Speed of Sound local.
In June seventy six, at the height of the first
wave of the disco boom, New York Magazine published a
(01:06):
cover story with the title Tribal Rites of the New
Saturday Night. The piece was written by Nick Cone, a
British journalist who up until that point had achieved his
greatest notoriety due to his love of playing pinball. You see,
Nick Cone was the inspiration for the song Pinball Wizard
in the Who's Rock opera Tommy Shore. But nick Cone's
(01:42):
greater contribution to the culture was as the author of
a nineteen sixty nine book alternately known as Pop from
the Beginning or a Wap Bob a Blue bab alp
Bam Boom. This book was one of the very first
histories of rock and roll ever published, and incidentally, it's
my personal favorite book about the subject. In Pop from
the Beginning, nick Cone professed his great love for what
(02:05):
he termed super pop, which to him was simple, fast,
flashy music filled with sexual energy, music that had the
ability to catch teen obsessions and freeze them in images.
Think Chuck Berry or those early Who records. So it
was no surprise that in ninety six Nick Cone became
(02:25):
fascinated by disco, a flashy, sexy phenomenon. When Nick Cone
became aware of disco, it was just bubbling up to
the surface from New York's black and gay undergrounds, and
it was starting to become massively popular in, among other places,
the Italian American neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York. The New
(02:50):
York Magazine article by Nick Cone dealt with the life
of a nineteen year old Brooklyn resident named Vincent, who
worked in a dead end job selling paint at a
local hardware store. Vincent's only means of release was getting
dressed up on Saturday night and dancing at his local disco,
which was called two thousand and one Odyssey. That disco
(03:10):
opened in nineteen seventy in Vincent's neighborhood of Bay Ridge,
which was a blue collar, mostly Italian neighborhood. At two
thousand and one Odyssey, Vincent was the king. He was
great looking, and he was the best dancer. Everyone's eyes
were fixated on him when he danced. Vincent's whole existence
revolved around those Saturday nights at two thousand and one Odyssey,
(03:32):
where he danced, did drugs, and occasionally had sex in
the backseat of a car in the parking lot. Now
nick Cone offered very detailed descriptions of the scene at
two thousand and one based on having followed Vincent and
his crew on their disco adventures for a few months,
and for most readers of New York Magazine, this was
(03:52):
their first insider glimpse of the disco nightlife. However, what
no one knew at the time was that it was
all made up. Nick Cone hadn't spent weeks watching Vincent
at two thousand and one Odyssey because there was no Vincent.
He was a figment of Nick Cone's imagination, but that
was a secret known only to Nick Cone until he
(04:13):
finally fessed up over twenty years later. It turns out
Nick Cone actually had traveled to Bay Ridge to check
out the scene at two thousand and one Odyssey, but
when he pulled up to the club in a taxi,
there was a drunken brawl taking place outside on the sidewalk.
As Cone recalled it, just as I opened my side door,
one of the brawlers emerged from the pack, reeled over
(04:35):
towards the gutter, and threw up with fine precision, all
over the side of the cab and my trouser legs.
I took it as a sign, quickly slamming the door,
I ordered us back to Manhattan. But while pulling away
in the cab, nick Cone noticed one clubgoer standing in
the doorway at two thousand and one and calmly observing
(04:57):
the brawl as it took place. Con was is really
intrigued by this young fellow, who, to him seemed to
possess a certain star quality. So Cone returned to two
thousand and won the very next week, hoping to speak
with him, but he never found him. Nick Cone did
make it inside the club on his second visit, but
didn't learn much. The noise level was deafening, the crush
(05:21):
of sweaty bodies suffocating, and none of my attempts at
striking up conversation got past the first few sentences. Plus
I made a lousy interview. I knew nothing about this world,
and it showed quite literally. I didn't speak the language,
so I made it up. Nick Cone may not have
known anything about disco, but what he did know a
(05:42):
lot about was the mod scene that was popular in
the mid sixties among certain British youth, and so he
wrote his article about a figment of his imagination who
was a composite of the guy standing in the doorway
at two thousand and one and a mod that he
knew when he was a teenager in London. Cone sense
that there were a lot of similarities between the disco
(06:02):
crowd and the nineteen sixties British mods. They both had
that obsession with fashion and music, and they had aspirations
to present as being better off than they really were.
That desire of a blue collar worker to not be
defined by his job, but rather by who he is
when he goes out that intense focus on Saturday Night
(06:22):
by a nobody who once a week gets to be
as somebody. It's no coincidence that Vincent's crowd and the
Nick Cone article were known as the Faces, which happens
to be exactly what stylish mods were known as in
England during the Swinging sixties. By the way, if you're
interested in getting a sense of what the mods scene
in London was like, definitely check out the movie Quadraphenia
(06:43):
featuring music by who else but the Who? Well, I
thought want of it a sim as everybody else. That's
Walman Madsy. I mean, there's gotta be somebody, ain't you. Well,
you might as well jump into scenes ran Anyway, that
New York Magazine art about the two thousand and one
Odyssey Disco wound up in the hands of a man
(07:04):
named Robert Stigwood, who was an Australian born music mogul.
Earlier in the seventies, stigwould expanded his empire into film.
He produced the movie adaptations of Jesus Christ Superstar and
The Who's Tommy. Robert Stigwood read the New York Magazine
story and decided that a movie about the disco scene
just might be a hit, So he picked up the
(07:25):
film rights to Cohn's article, and then he brought in
as the star of the movie, John Travolta, who was
at that point the hottest teen idol in America. He's
starting a top rated television comedy called Welcome Back Cotter,
where he played a tough but lovable Italian American high
school student in Brooklyn named Vinny Barberino. Uel Knows. The
(07:50):
film that Stigwood's company made, Saturday Night Fever, really fleshed
out the lead character, who now went by the name
Tony Manero. It especially fleshed out he's home life. In
the movie, Tony lived at home in Bay Ridge with
his parents. His father was an unemployed construction worker, his
mother was a housewife, and even though his family had
(08:10):
trouble making ends meet, his father forbade his mother from
working outside the home. It was the man who was
supposed to put bread on the table. This depiction really
resonated in the America of nineteen seventy seven, which had
been hit really hard by an economic recession and where
opportunity seemed extremely limited. Now, just like in Nikkole's original article,
(08:32):
the two thousand and one, disco was the place where
Tony Manero ruled as the greatest dancer. Incidentally, in this
movie version of the club, the DJ was played by
none other than Sir Monty Rock, the third of Disco
Text and the sex so Lette Spain. They were the
group whose early disco hit Get Dance, and we discussed
in the previous episode of Speed of Sounds, what are
(08:55):
you talking about, Baby Chip Dancing Man. She's proven the
hottest stars on the roster of Robert Stigwood's record label
RSO Records. The initials stood for Robert Stigwood Organization, where
the Australian brothers the Bigs, who had already had a
couple of number one records with disco songs, but Stigwood,
oddly enough, didn't initially consider them to write the music
(09:18):
for the film. Robert Stigwood's original choice for the song
that would be playing along with the film's iconic opening
scene of John Travolta strutting down the street was Boss
Gags hit from the year before, low Down Better to
Chip Around. However, Boss Gags label Columbia Records, turned down
(09:45):
the opportunity to have that song in Saturday night Fever,
holding it back for their own soundtrack to a film
which dealt with New York nightlife looking for Mr Goodbar.
So Stig Would turned to the BGS and they worked
up a song. Now. Originally, the chorus of the song
the b GS wrote had them singing Saturday Night, Saturday Night,
as a nod to the title of the film, but
(10:07):
eventually they changed it to Staying Alive, which better captured
the grittiness of the movie. The lyrics of staying alive,
I've been kicked around since I was born. You may
(10:31):
look the other way really summed up that late seventies
cents of powerlessness and apathy that a lot of American
young people were feeling, and that sense of hopelessness was
especially acute among New York teenagers. In seven it was
a moment when the city cream from one convulsion to another.
(10:52):
New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy, and
that meant that garbage went uncollected. The schools were underfunded,
they were very minimal, municipal sir verses, and high crime
and burnt out neighborhoods. Not to mention Son of Sam,
a serial killer who terrorized the city for the first
half of the year, and a citywide blackout that summer
which resulted in mass looting in a general sense of chaos. Now,
(11:16):
with this horrendous state of affairs, New York City produced
two distinct musical responses. There was the punk scene, which
was incubating in downtown clubs like CBGB's, and there was disco.
(11:37):
Punk was nehalistic, it was resigned to this idea of
no future. Disco, on the other hand, was escapist, glamorous,
and aspirational. Punk rock was actually with the music industry
was betting on at that time to become the next
big thing, and the major labels were falling over each
other to sign punk's most notorious act, the Sex Pistols.
(11:59):
How Yes, But then along came Saturday Night Fever. The
movie premiered in theaters just before Christmas seven. As we've
(12:19):
discussed previously, seventy seven saw disco begin to recede as
a force on American pop radio. In fact, the week
Saturday Night Fever was released, the biggest disco hit on
the Billboard Top forty was all the way down at
number thirty four. In disco's place, a lot of sappy
adult pop by artists like Barry Manilow and Debbie Boom
(12:41):
were filling the top forty airwaves. New York's pioneering disco station,
w p i x FM actually abandoned the disco format
(13:03):
in the summer of ninety seven and switched to album rock,
which of course would prove to be incredibly bad timing.
At the same time, though going out to dance at
discos on the weekend was still a really popular activity
all across the country. It was a relatively cheap form
(13:26):
of entertainment, and that made it especially appealing in the
middle of a recession, and so record producers and remixers
kept on making records for all those clubgoers to dance too,
even if they were unlikely to become pop hits. At
this moment, disco music stood at across roads. The originators
of disco were disillusioned by the dilution of the sound,
(13:46):
which was becoming more lowest common denominator, and the purest
hated the phoniness that was really starting to creep in
Studio fifty four was grabbing lots of headlines, but that
was the celebrity scene, very far removed from that original
communal spirit of disco. Legendary DJ. David Mancuso's New York
Record Pool, which was a nonprofit organization that made possible
(14:10):
the distribution of disco records to club DJ's, actually closed
down the same week Saturday Night Fever opened because David Mancuso,
the original disco DJ who pioneered the scene at his
club The Loft, became fed up by all the cynicism
that was taking over the scene. Disco really did start
to feel like it might be over coming up. America
(14:33):
catches the fever, but it takes a ballad to get
things going. Prior to the release of Saturday Night Fever,
RSO Records was actually scared that they were coming out
with their movie too late and that they had already
missed the disco fat that they were trying to cash
(14:54):
in on in the first place. RSO Records was very
aware of pop radio's move away from the disco sound,
and so to hedge their bets, they decided to release
a ballad as the first single from the movie soundtrack
instead of one of the disco songs. The big song,
(15:18):
How Deep Is Your Love was released in September nine,
three months before the film came out, and it was
approaching number one on the charts when Saturday Night Fever
premiered on December sixteen. Now, the combination of John Travolta's
charisma he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, the
big songs, and a surprisingly good script made Saturday Night
(15:40):
Fever a phenomenon, which in turn made disco much bigger
than it had ever been. It's actually entirely possible that
without Saturday Night Fever, disco might have petered out in
the broader culture and resumed being a niche subculture. But instead,
the movie's runaway success caused the whole disco scene to
become turbo charged, and it also changed disco in pretty
(16:03):
significant ways. For instance, the original script for Saturday Night
fevercalled for all the dances in the film to be
partner dances and line dances like the Hustle and the
Bus Stop, which were the kind of dances people actually
did it discoes like two thousand and one Odyssey. You
could check those dances out on YouTube if you're curious
what they looked like. But John Travolta felt that he
(16:24):
needed to do a solo dance in order to really
develop his character, and so he insisted that they changed
the script so he could be featured doing a freestyle dance.
According to Travolta, I had to enforce that scene. They
were basing this movie on him being the best dancer,
and he didn't have a solo I had to prove
to the audience that he was the best. And so
(16:45):
in the middle of the film, John Travolta breaks free
from his dance partner and does a solo dance to
the song you Should Be Dancing, a BGS hit from
the previous year that was inserted into the movie for
just this purpose. Little did anybody know at the time
(17:11):
that this little added scene would completely change the dynamic
of disco dancing, because disco goers now felt they were
given license to do their own thing on the dance
floor rather than try to learn a couple's dance. This
was actually convenient, considering that in the wake of the
film's success, the number of discos increased exponentially. Over forty
(17:33):
thousand new discos sprouted up across the US in the
first year after Saturday Night Fever came out, and we
can safely assume that a lot of those new disco
denizens weren't very accomplished dancers. Now. While our collective cultural
memory of Saturday Night Fever centers around the music and
the dancing, it was actually a very smart movie. It
(17:53):
was a story about a young person whose life is
going nowhere until he finds in dance the strength to
break free from its surroundings. Truth is at its heart.
Saturday Night Fever was a dark, even brutal depiction of
sexual aggression and depression among working class Italian kids stuck
in nineteen seventy seven Brooklyn. Crucially, Saturday Night Fever gave
(18:16):
Middle America a visual sense of disco culture. The scenes
inside two thousand and one Odyssey were directly inspired by
a series of paintings by an artist named James McMullen,
whose work appeared alongside Nick Cone's original New York Magazine article,
and these scenes offered a picture of a secret world
full of glamor, full of passion, where sure there were
(18:37):
exceptional dancers, but there were also dancers no better than
the average joe, and even those dancers could feel they
could be someone for a night. Two thousand and one
Odyssey was an approximation of Studio fifty four's glamour, but
it was accessible to anybody. And notably, while the first
wave of disco was overwhelmingly a black and gay scene,
(18:59):
Saturday Night Fever made it all about white heterosexual people.
It was that aspect of the movie that really helped
sell disco's appeal to Middle America and make it feel safe. Now.
I'll tell you, John Travolta's portrayal of Tony Manarrow in
that movie really struck a chord with people I knew
in high school in New York City. Back then, Tony
was just like a lot of guys that are high
(19:20):
school guys from blue collar families, Guys about to graduate
school with not much in the way of a future
to look forward to, guys who consequently decided to just
live for today. I remember this being our favorite line
from the film. Fu No, Tony, you can't fuck your future.
The future fucks you. It catches up with you, and
(19:42):
it fucks you if you ain't planned for it. And
so Saturday Night Fever simultaneously glamorized life on the dance
floor under the mirrored ball at the two thousand and
one Odyssey and made clear that the pleasures being experienced
by Tony Manero at the club were extremely fleeting. Now
propelled by the music of the BGS, the Saturday Night
(20:02):
Fever soundtrack became the biggest selling album of all time
In its day. It moved twenty five million units worldwide,
and it wasn't surpassed until Michael Jackson's Thriller. In addition
to the number one ballad How Deep Is Your Love,
(20:23):
the movie spawned three other number one songs, all written
by the Brothers GiB There was the aforementioned Staying Alive,
plus another BGS recording that actually did manage to work
in the title of the film, Night Fever. The final
(20:47):
number one song from Saturday Night Fever was a BGS
composition called If I Can't Have You, which Robert Stigwood
decided to give to a singer on his label named
Yvonne Leman. She was one of the stars of stigwood
film version of Jesus Christ Superstar, and she'd also had
some success on the charts in ninety six with her
cover of a very Gift song called love Me My
(21:12):
Love When we really had it on you were Always
It and make Me smile, Help Me Win in a Phone.
I can't believe vone. Ellman was originally supposed to sing
how Deep Is Your Love in the movie, but Robert
Stigwood felt that the song was just too good for
(21:33):
the bgs to give away, and so he let her
record If I Can't Have You as a sort of
consolation prize, and it ended up being a number one
record him I Don't. Saturday Night Fever's popularity leads to
(21:56):
belated success for yet another song that was closely associated
with the film, but which was not a brother's GiB song.
Disco Inferno, recorded by the fathers of disco, the Tramps,
was originally released in early nineteen seventy seven, and while
the song was a massive hit in the clubs and
went to number one for six weeks on Billboard's Disco chart,
(22:17):
which measured club play, it failed to even reach the
top forty on the Billboard Hot one hundred, this being
the period when interest in disco music had really begun
to wane on pop radio, Disco Inferno was a throwback
in its own way to the early days of disco,
when soul music had a much more direct influence on
the disco sound. Being featured in Saturday Night Fever brought
(22:38):
disco Inferno back and made it way bigger. In fact,
it became one of the defining songs of the whole
disco era story. The Saturday Night Fever album went to
number one during the third week of January seventy eight,
(23:00):
and it stayed at number one for six months, and
the film experienced the same kind of longevity in movie theaters.
I remember seeing Saturday Night Fever when it came out
in December of nineteen seventy seven, and I remember seeing
it again at the very same movie theater during Memorial
Day weekend in night. Now. As far as Saturday Night
(23:21):
Fever's impact on the music world, initially, its success just
led to a boom in popularity of songs specifically from
the movie and also anything associated with the Bigs, regardless
of whether or not it was even disco. The BJS
owned the spring of nineteen seventy eight on pop radio.
Songs written by the Bigs at one point held down
(23:41):
the top five positions on the Billboard Hot one hundred,
which is something even the Beatles never accomplished because when
the Beatles had the top five records on the chart
back in April of nineteen sixty four, they had only
written four of the five songs since one of those
five was a cover version of Twist and Show, But
nineteen seven D eight was total Bigs mania. In the
(24:02):
nine months following Saturday Night Fever's release, songs written by
the Brothers Gibs spent an astonishing twenty seven weeks at
number one on the pop chart, with four of those
songs being from the movie, plus two by the Bigs
Little Brother Andy GiB Sweet, I Can't Play. And finally
(24:32):
there was the Barry GiB Penn theme from another Robert
Stigwood film, Greece, sung by Frankie Valley. In the early
months of record labels responded to the crazy popularity of
(24:55):
Saturday Night Fever by signing a slew of new disco acts,
which set the stage for the massive disco explosion of
nineteen seventy nine. Notably, the major labels resolved to get
in on the action, and this meant doing things in
a very major label way, developing stars, which was really
kind of counter to the whole disco aesthetic, where producers
(25:17):
and DJs had always been the real stars, and the
major labels were out to sell albums, which were of
course more profitable than singles, Even though disco had always
very much been a singles based genre. At CBS Records,
which was at that time the dominant company in the
music industry, there's been a rebellion of sorts in the
ranks of the salesforce who were complaining that CBS couldn't
(25:39):
compete unless they placed a much heavier bet on disco.
In response to this, CBS worked up a report with
the imposing title Research Report on Artist Development as it
pertains to disco oriented product of May. The report recommended,
among other things, that CBS signed more disco artists and
(26:00):
put more emphasis on promoting those artists in clubs using
extended twelve inch mixes. To achieve that last goal, CBS,
along with the other major labels, higher dedicated disco promotion
staffs whose jobs were to go out to the discos
and convince the DJs to play their records. Bobby Shaw,
who was a promo man from Warner Brothers Records during
(26:20):
that period, remembers the job I was promoting just to
the club DJs, And you know, in those days it
was a little different because you know, there was no
downloading and you literally had to hand deliver a piece
of music to somebody or put it in the mail
or send it by messenger. You know, there was no
pressing a button and here it is. It made for
a lot better relationships, and you know, in this day
(26:42):
and age, relationships seemed to be going down the tubes.
While CBS adopted the report's recommendations, the president of the
company made sure to emphasize in the music press that
the labels focused in signing disco acts was going to
be toward developing complete artists and not the creation of
what he turned a fabricated disco sound using non artists.
(27:04):
And anticipating that there'd be a massive demand for disco albums,
CBS decided to invest in brand new manufacturing facilities to
produce more vinyl LPs. This business decision would, as we
shall see, proved to be quite costly. So by the
summer of seventy eight, the club DJs and the pop
radio stations were playing all these new major label disco
(27:27):
acts like our c as Evelyn Champagne King, whose mother
was an office cleaner at Gamble and Huff's Philadelphia International Records,
and who was discovered there by a producer named Theodore Life.
He actually heard Evelyn King's singing in the washroom while
she was helping her mom at work. Now, if it
had been a couple of years earlier, Theodore Life would
(27:47):
certainly have brought Evelyn King to Gamble and Huff, whose
washroom she was cleaning, But with the major labels offering
big money contracts for disco product, he took her to
our Cia Records, where she had a smash hit first
I'm Out with Shane Keep. Meanwhile, Capitol Records got behind
(28:15):
A Taste of Honey, a Los Angeles group brought to
that label by a veteran producer named Fonse Mazelle who
years earlier was part of the corporation that was the
production team over Written Motown, who were behind the Jackson
Five's early hits. A Taste of Honey's first song, Boogieogieoogie,
(28:37):
went all the way to number one in the fall
of eight and then it wound up earning the group
of Grammy a few months later in the Best New
Artist category. Also jumping on the immediate post Saturday Night
Fever Bandwagon that summer was the biggest rock and roll
(29:00):
band in the world, The Rolling Stones. Their pivoted disco
was fueled by Mick Jaggers residency in New York City,
where he was regularly seen partying at Studio fifty four.
While some rock die hearts condemned The Stones as sellouts
for going disco, their defenders reminded everybody that the band
had always had their ears tuned to the latest developments
(29:21):
in black music, and this really was just the latest
manifestation of the Stones interest in R and B. For
the disco scene, having The Stones joined the party gave
the music a new respectability, and for the Stones, going
disco gave them their first number one record in five years,
Miss You. But the Rolling Stones weren't the only superstar
(29:50):
act to go disco. In the summer of seventy way,
at the other end of the musical spectrum, cheese pop
maestro Barry Mandelow entered the disco sweep stay with his
big hit song Copa Cabana, which was inspired by the
legendary New York nightclub of the same name that had
recently reopened as a disco They were from A four
(30:11):
They Were, and in July of nineteen seventy eight, New
York City got a brand new Ald disco station when
w k t u f M, which was previously this
barely listened to adult music station adopted the disco format.
(30:32):
W k T You filled the vacuum left behind by
w p i X FM's ill time move to album
rock the year before. Just two months after they switched
to disco, w k T You passed the perennial number
one Top forty station w A b C as the
most listened to station in New York and therefore as
the most listened to station in the whole country. By
(30:52):
the end of nineteen seventy eight, w k T use
Evening DJ Paco had the highest ratings ever record by
any radio DJ in New York City. If you're into disco,
you have to be into because I haven't stopped dancing yet.
While it was the disco boom that enabled w k
(31:13):
to UFM to jump past Top forty station w A
b C a M, there was also another force at
work here. W k t use rise marked the first
time that a radio station on the FM spectrum passed
an AM station to be a market leader. AM radio
had been around a lot longer than FM, but music
sounded much better on the FM dial, and more and
(31:34):
more people were migrating to it, especially since cars were
beginning to be sold with FM radios installed as standard equipment.
While w ABC had been number one in the ratings
for every period since nineteen sixty two, it never recovered
its place as New York's leading music station after it
was jumped by w k t U soon. In fact,
it was also leap frog by w b l S,
(31:56):
which was an FM R and B station that was
now emphasizing disco really heavily at the expense of other
styles of R and B. Nine saw w BLS and
w k t YOU dominate New York radio, going one
two in the ratings month after month, with w ABC
and pop music on AM radio quickly becoming an afterthought.
(32:18):
W k t u f M success convinced the radio
industry that disco was a major musical force and that
the disco audience was being underserved. One by one, nearly
every market in America saw an FM radio station switched
to the all disco format, and in response to that,
every market saw the local AM top forty station load
(32:39):
up its playlist with disco records in a last ditch
attempt to try and slow the exodus to FM. Those
traditional AM top forty stations were hoping that going all
in on disco could keep them competitive, but for the
A M Top forties it was too late. The listeners
who had fled A M music radio for FM weren't
coming back. In fact, by midnight teen seventy nine, FM
(33:01):
radio for the first time ever past AM radio in
total listenership nationally, and by the early eighties, most of
the old AM Top forty stations, including New York's w ABC,
abandoned music entirely, switching to all talk formats. So as
much as anything else, it was the rise of the
all disco radio format that really enabled disco to completely
(33:24):
dominate the music landscape as eight turned to nineteen seventy nine,
and which led to the inevitable glood of disco music
on the radio. But jumping on the disco bandwagon wasn't
limited to the music industry. Up next Saturday Night Fever
isn't the only disco movie to compete for screen time
or the top of the charts. In the summer of
(33:51):
seventy eight, a film called Thank God It's Friday hit
movie theaters than Thank God It's Friday was set in
the fictional l a club called the Zoo, and it
brought to the big screen a West Coast version of
the goings on at the local disco. The zoo, like
Brooklyn's two thousand and one Odyssey, was a place where
(34:12):
ordinary people could experience some approximation of the glamour that
was inaccessible to that great, massive people who would never
get to set foot inside Studio fifty four. Of course,
Studio fifty four and its stars studied clientele kept up
a steady presence in the gossip columns and the celebrity magazines,
but the local disco would have to do for most
(34:33):
of America, and so by the original Brooklyn two thousand
and one Odyssey, disco started to open franchises across the country,
becoming sort of the McDonald's of dance clubs. Now. I
remember the local disco across the street from my high
school in Queens, New York, and it was a far
cry from the fantasy of Studio fifty four. It was
(34:54):
called Jerry's Disco, and it was owned by this guy,
Jerry Rosenberg, who was famous in New York at that
time for starring in TV ads for Cut Rate applying
stores dressed as a construction worker with the tagline what's
the story? Jerry? And he brought this exact same sensibility
to Jerry's disco. Hey, Jerry, what's the story. If you
(35:15):
want a party, you want to dance, you want a
great night out, come on dot Jerry. But Jerry, what's
the story. Unbelievable life, unbelievable show, giant danced, flare, really
big drinks on the night, talk about atmosphere, not a waife.
See for yourself. The party starts every night at night,
and I'll be here waiting for you. That's the story anyway.
(35:39):
The movie Thank God It's Friday's biggest contribution to the
culture by far was launching one of its featured performers,
Donna Summer, into superstardom. Ever since her first hit love
(36:01):
to Love You Baby back in, Donna Summer maintained a
pretty steady stream of club hits, and occasionally one of
those songs would cross over to pop radio, like her
groundbreaking single I Feel Love in nineteen seventy seven, which
we discussed on our previous episode. In Thank God It's Friday,
Donna Summer appeared on camera singing a song called Last Dance,
(36:23):
and it was her performance of that song in that
movie which really said her on the course to become
the biggest artist in the whole music business. For the
rest of the seventies, Donna Summer was signed to an
(36:46):
l A based record label called Casablanca Records. Now, according
to a memoir written by the label's co founder Larry Harris,
Casablanca Records it was not a product of the nineteen seventies.
It was no person or company in that era of
narcissism and Druggi glutton. It was more emblematic of the
times than Casablanca Records and its magnetic founder Neil Bogar.
(37:10):
Besides the steady stream of disco music, the thing that
fueled Casablanca Records was cocaine. As Larry Harris recalled, there
was blow everywhere. It was like some sort of condiment
that had to be brushed away by the wait staff
before the next party was seated. Cocaine dusted everything it
was on fingertips, tabletops, upper lips, and the floor. Just
(37:31):
like Henry Stone's t K label down in Miami, Casablanca
Records was more than happy to share its cocaine with
radio and club DJ's in exchange for airplay, making it
the most successful label of the disco era. But Let's
be clear, Casablanca's promotion methods should in no way diminish
the fact that Donna Summer was a uniquely talented artist
(37:53):
who released one classic single after another in the final
years of the seventies. Donna Summer actually had three number
one albums in the twelve month period from late nineteen
s to late nineteen seventy nine, and all three of
them were double albums. By now, an entire ecosystem had
(38:22):
sprung up around disco, and disco culture had its own
dress code to go along with the sounds on the
dance floor. For men, there were shiny, really colorfully patterned,
wide collared polyester kiana shirts which usually were worn open
at the chest. Or perhaps a man would go all
(38:43):
out with a three piece polyester leisure suit with wide
lapels and bell bottom pants preferably white or powder blue,
and of course platform shoes. Now a woman might show
up at the disco and perhaps a knee length dress
with a cinched waist, which was known as the jersey
rap dress. But tube tops are also quite popular, along
(39:05):
with halterneck shirts, spandex shorts, catsuits and dresses with long
thigh slits, and women's footwear well that tended towards shoes
with chunky heels or maybe even knee boots. And of course,
beyond having its own dress code, disco also had its
own drug culture, and that culture centered around cocaine. According
(39:26):
to the writer Paul Guttenberg, the relationship of cocaine to
nineteen seventies disco culture cannot be stressed enough. Superficiality, success
and money. We're back in, and cocaine intensified and highlighted
all their sensations and delusions. Of course, coke used by
celebrities and jet setters, made cocaine seem glamorous and Unlike heroin,
(39:49):
which was looked at as a street drug used by junkies,
cocaine was seen as a soft drug. To be sure,
without the stimulating effect of cocaine, those all night parties
places like Studio fifty four would have definitely run out
of steam a lot earlier in the evening. Additionally, all
that drug use contributed to yet another aspect of disco culture,
(40:10):
public sex. Sex in the club's bathroom, stalls, stairways, balconies,
basement wherever, and it was generally unprotected sex since the
AIDS epidemic hadn't yet struck. This was all consistent with
the broader seventies trend towards much freer sexual expression. Disco
music reinforced that idea with songs like in the Bush
(40:32):
by music which left very little to the imagination. Nile
Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were two musicians who had been
on the scene for a while, backing up bands in
New York City, experimenting with jazz and art rock and
even punk before finally settling on disco. Now, Rogers remembers
(40:55):
those early days this way. We envisioned ourselves more like
Earth Wind and Fire type of group, because we looked
at Earth Wind and Fire as a group of jazz musicians,
you know, sort of like cooling the Gang. Like we
were jazz musicians that learned to play R and B
and learned how to write R and B. So our
first allegiance would be mainly to jazz. At least that's
(41:19):
how I saw it. Bernard was very proud to say, no,
I'm a boogaloon musician. But then Rogers and Edwards began
to get gigs as live touring musicians for some acts
associated with the Philadelphia Sound, and they came to embrace disco,
forming a band called she Sheik's first hit record, Dance
(41:51):
Dance Dance Yaw Yaw Yasa, was pretty avant garde for
its day. It borrowed sonically from British art rockers roxy
music as much as it did from disco, and it
had this sinister edge. There was a voice that came
in at various points throughout the record, shouting yells, yells,
(42:13):
yawso was something the band had heard shouted by this
evil nineteen thirties dance marathon m C in a movie
from nineteen sixty nine called They Shoot Horses, Don't They
Welcome to the Dancer. In that movie, desperate people in
depression era America were literally dropping dead on the dance
(42:36):
floor while competing in a marathon for a cash prize.
The idea of tragedy beneath the surface it entertainment and
capitalism was a strong undercurrent in Sheik's music. In fact,
the band found the whole spectacle of going to discos
in order to escape reality to be at its core
kind of tragic. Even the group's name Chic and the
(42:57):
high fashion clothes they wore were actually intended as a
commentary on American class struggle and the lead vocals and
dance dance. Dance sounded kind of disembodied, drained of enthusiasm,
conveying the futility of hedonism and disregard for meaning. But
Sheik's audience didn't necessarily get the songs darker connotations. They
(43:18):
just enjoyed the groove and the record launch's career. Now
Rogers remembers, basically, we were going through the worst economic
period since the Great Depression, if you remember in those times,
but if you came to a disco, it was so
hedonistic and so amazing, you would have thought that we
were the welcomed people in the world. But it was
quite the contrary. We were probably the poorest, but we
(43:40):
didn't live like that. We lived like every day with
our last But the best was yet to come for Sheik,
As now Rogers fondly recalls, Grace Stones was really enamored
with us because of Earth's budget dance, and of course
you had heard dance, but it was everybody dance that
was the chill learn m So she wanted us to
(44:11):
understand who she was artistically because she was thinking about
having us produced what would have then been her next record.
But she told us that the only way that we
could truly understand her artistically is to see her live performance,
and we were like, okay, cool. Now, this was the
very first time we ever heard her speaking voice. It
(44:32):
sounded to us like a cross between Marlene Dietrich and
sort of Bella Legosi and an Ice and sort of
like Bob Marley. It was like the weirdest thing we
had ever heard. But we thought that she was just
putting that on. And so she says, so, all you
got to do, Darling, is go through the backdoor and
tapping your personal frames, miss Grace Jones. So we thought
(44:52):
we had to put on that accent. I mean, I
cannot believe we were so dumb, but really, this was
early in our career that we didn't know we gating.
We knocked on the back door and we were kicking
for a long time. They finally opened the door because
you know, the music and tide was blasting. Uh. So
we did that and I slammed the door in our faces.
But before he slammed the door, or while he was
(45:14):
slamming the door, he told us to He said, ah,
funk off. He thought it was the silliest thing he
had ever heard and we were trying to convince him
that it was the truth. So we were kicking on
the door yet again, and we were really insistent, and
finally opened the door again and said, did not tell
you guys to hook off. But she used that rejection
as the inspiration for their biggest hit. Now Rogers remembers
(45:39):
on the way back to my apartment, we had to
pass the liquor store. We picked up two bottles of
champagne what we called rock and roll mouth wassh, which
was toomparion in those days. And now we downed him
very quickly, and we got roozy, and we started singing
what had come to our minds, which was all funk off.
(46:00):
So we just started jamming and going, ah, fuck off,
don't cot didda, don't, don't box duty of this before
fuck off, dunda dun't don't. And we were into it,
and we thought of every possible situation where the only
appropriate answer would be f off, and we just kept
going f off. If a cab drive to cut you off,
that's off, don't dita, dodo don't, don't don't. And then
(46:22):
we wrote the cool Bridge Deep and we were loving it.
We were having so much fun. And then finally Bernard
pulls his glasses down over the bridge of his nose,
which is when he always was getting serious with me,
and he says, my man, you know, this ship is
happening and this is like a couple of years before
hip hop. And I'm like, dude, you know we can't
(46:44):
get this on the radio. I went like total hippie
on him. And then oh man, you know, like like
when you have a bad acid trip man, and you're
like freaking out man, you know like and Bernard was
so not a hippie and he looked at me like
I was from out of space. And then finally I
got my black card back together and I said, well,
you know me to find chicken. You know, you're freaking
(47:04):
out on the dance floor. And then Bernard a light
bulb went off and he said, oh, yeah, it's like
that new dance. My kids are doing the freak. And
I was like, but neither Rogers nor Edwards had ever
seen anyone actually do the freak, as Nile Rodgers recalls,
and uh so we ran out. We got a copy
of Chubby Checker, Come on baby, let's do the Twist,
(47:26):
and we got a copy of the Peppermint Twist, and
we came back home when we listened to it over
and over again, and neither song told you how to
do the dance. So we came home when we wrote
a song about a dance we did not know how
to do. We pretended like we knew how to do it,
and we knew that everybody in studio before now got
to do it, or at least we surmised they did.
(47:47):
So that's what we did. We said, come on down
the fifty before, find your spot out on the floor.
I freak out. In retrospect, the massive success of Sheiks
(48:08):
La Frek really served as the starting gun for the
final relentless onslaught that saw disco completely swallow American popular
culture in the first half of nineteen seventy nine. Follow
Me Here. When it was released, La Freak very quickly
went to number one in December of night it bumped
You Don't Bring Me Flowers, this schlocky ballad by Barber
(48:30):
Streisand and Neil Diamond out of the number one spot,
but after one week, Streisand and Diamond retook the top slot.
You don't sing you love song? Yeah, let's talk to
(48:54):
me anymore? When I Come through the Door at the
end of day. One week later, Lafrek bounced back to
number one, and this time it held onto the top
spot for two weeks. Then it was dethroned at number
(49:15):
one by a bigs ballad called too Much Heaven, which
stayed at number one for the next two weeks. Much
But then Lafrek did something remarkable. It bounced back into
the number one position for an unprecedented third stint at
(49:39):
the top, and this time it stayed at the summit
for three weeks in early nine. For charred observers, this
whole back and forth made it seem as though disco
itself was battling the rest of pop music for supremacy,
and when Lafrek finally vacated the top spot for good
(49:59):
in February nine, seventy nine, disco was essentially proclaimed the
champion because Lafrek was replaced at the number one position
by another disco record, and then another, and another and another.
In fact, disco related songs held onto the number one
spot every week from that point until the end of August.
It was a total disco takeover of the pop scene,
(50:21):
with La Frec leading the charge. Lafrec really took disco
to another level. It was by far the biggest radio
hit disco had ever experienced, and it offered tangible proof
to pop radio programmers that demand for disco music had
become insatiable, had done and that day, on the next
(51:19):
episode of Speed of Sound, Disco rules the world and
spawns an army of haters who finally confront disco culture
head on in a baseball stadium in Chicago. Chu. If
you want to take a deeper dive into the artists
(51:40):
and songs you just heard, check out our curated playlist
at the Speed of Sound page on the I Heart app.
Until next time. You can find me on Twitter at
Stevie g Pro. Speed of Sound is executive produced by
Lauren Bright Pacheco, Noel Brown and me. Taylor shakogn is
(52:04):
our supervising producer, editor and sound designer. Additional sound designed
by Tristan McNeil. Until next time, keep your feet on
the dance floor and always keep reaching for that mirrored ball.
Speed of Sound is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, check out the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(52:27):
to your favorite shows.
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