Let's Do the Hustle at Studio 54: The Rise and Fall of 70’s Disco Part 2

Steve continues to trace the trajectory of Disco's dominance of the airwaves and the hottest clubs, including New York City's notorious home for the famous and decadent; Studio 54.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Speed of Sound is a production of I Heart Radio.
Welcome back to our multi part series on the rise
and fall of seventies disco. On this episode, we're continuing
to track the dazzling, danceable rise of disco from the
underground urban clubs all the way to disco's dominance of
Top forty radio. I'm Steve Greenberg again. This is Speed

(00:22):
of Sound. Okay, So it's the summer of nine four
and rock the Boat and Rocky Baby have just jumped
started the disco era by becoming back to back number
one records. The gold rush was on, and the first
artist out of the gate was Barry White, who went

(00:44):
all in on disco after his big success with Love
Unlimited Orchestra, whose song Loves Theme was actually the first
number one pop hit to get its start in the
New York discos earlier that year. Now, while Love's Theme

(01:06):
wasn't made with the discos in mind and became a
disco hit by accident, pretty much everything Barry White did
for the rest of the decade most certainly was and
he became the king of discos early years, beginning with
Can't Get Enough of Your Love Babe, which shot to
number one just two months after, rock Can't Get Enough

(01:37):
ended up as the number one song of the year
on the Billboard Soul Chart, and the soul radio stations,
which had a primarily African American listenership, were very quickly
becoming the place on the radio dial where the club
hits were appearing first, although they were starting to cross
over to pop radio with greater and greater frequency. One
of the first record labels to pick up on the

(01:59):
pop radio ventil for disco was a label in New
York City called Scepter Records, headed by a legendary music
executive named Florence Greenberg no relation, who was one of
the first women to own and run a record label.
Florence Greenberg was a pretty remarkable woman. She was a
suburban housewife and passaic New Jersey who in her mid

(02:20):
forties decided she'd had enough of that life and got
into the music business just like that, kind of like
the music business equivalent of the marvelous Mrs Mazel And
throughout the nineteen sixties, Scepter Records had tremendous success with
acts like The Cherrell's and Dion Warwick. You might also
remember Florence Greenberg as the record executive who gave fellow

(02:40):
Passaic native Joey d his big break. Well. In the
summer of nineteen seventy four, Scepter Records released a record
called do It Till You're Satisfied by a Brooklyn group
called BT Express. That record was an instant smash in
the discos and it was starting to climb the soul chart,
but Florence green felt that the song really belonged on

(03:02):
pop radio too. However, she met with a lot of
resistance from New York's powerhouse top forty radio station w ABC.
So Florence Greenberg invited the entire w ABC programming staff
out to a night at a local disco so they
could see the reaction to the BT Express song on

(03:24):
the dance floor for themselves. Well, w ABC immediately added
do It Till You're Satisfied to its playlist. It should
be noted that the version of do It Till You're
Satisfied that was getting the airplay was not the version

(03:47):
as originally recorded by the group BT Express. It was
a remix of the song done by a man named
Tom Moulton, who's gone down in history as the father
of the remix. Earlier in nineteen seventy four, Tom Moulton
again making mix tapes for a disco called The Sand Piper,
which was located on New York's Fire Island. His mix
tapes didn't just keep the music going NonStop. Tom Molton

(04:10):
also cut up the songs themselves, emphasizing the parts of
the records that he thought would really drive the dance
floor crowd into a frenzy. Sceptor Records asked Tom Molton
if he'd have a go at remixing due un Till
You're Satisfied for the discos, and the result was a
record with much louder drums and bass and more instrumental breaks. Now,

(04:31):
the members of BT Express were none too happy with
the result. Recording artists in general aren't so fond of
other people messing with their work. But do un Till
You're Satisfied, as remixed by Tom Molton, turned out to
be a number two record on the National Pop chart,
and it went all the way to number one on
the Soul chart. So now with the possibility of massive
pop success extremely real producers started making disco records with

(04:55):
the specific intent of crossing them over from the clubs
to the radio, and that meant they needed pop songs.
Eddie o laughlin was a music publisher in New York
at the time who had never been to a disco,
but he was told that a song he published called
Makomba by a rock band called Titanic was being played
at a club called Le Jardin, so he decided to

(05:17):
go down there and check it out. Eddie O'Laughlin was
surprised to find out that the DJ le Jardin wasn't
playing his song with Kumba in its entirety, but rather
he was just playing the instrumental break from the song
again and again, mixing back and forth between two turntables.

(05:44):
Eddie O'Laughlin realized that while there were a lot of
great grooves being played at places like le Jardin, there
weren't a lot of songs that could become hits on
the radio. Here he is recalling that Eureka moment walk
into the club and after an how, I'm realizing that
it's all beats, a lot of rhythm, a lot of percussion.
Played a record by Titanic, which was a Swedish or

(06:08):
French band I'm not sure, called m Kumba Blah blah
blah blah blah blah blum. Anyway, I said after I left,
it feels like this could be a good market to
create music for. I was just um a music publisher,
so I said, maybe used the substance of the foundation
the tracks, but maybe we could find a great song.
So Eddio Laughlin combed through his publishing catalog and he

(06:31):
found a song called Doctor's Orders that was a hit
in England the previous year by a group called Sonny.
Then he signed a local New York singer named Carol

(06:52):
Douglas to his brand new record label, Midland Records, and
in October of nineteen seventy four, he took her into
the studio with the pretty auction team of Tony bon Jovi,
the cousin of eighties rocker John bon Jovi, and Miko Minardo,
who later in the seventies had a big number one
record with his disco version of the music from Star Wars,
and they cut a disco version of Doctor's Orders. Eddie

(07:14):
O Laughlin remembers, I took a taxi home that night.
That's like a big deal for me. I take trains
at that point in my life. I'm always taking a train.
Train was like cents. I think I'm taking a taxi
because I think this is going to be a very
big hit record on my our little label called Midland Records.
It was just such a confident feeling I get it.
Within days of its release, Doctor's Orders was one of

(07:37):
the biggest records in New York. It was like an
instant hit because the market was underserved. I guess, as
if sophisticated word he has went on. We had orders

(07:57):
for a hundred thousand singles like in days, six days,
so it was definitely, oh, there's something really new happening.
Nearly simultaneously, Tony bon Jovi and Miko went into the
studio with another newcomer named Gloria Gainer, and they produced
a disco version of a song called Never Can Say Goodbye,
which had already been a big hit twice in the

(08:19):
previous three years, first by The Jackson Five Never Can,
and then by Isaac Hayes American Bonn. Even though the

(08:46):
well Lauria Gainer's disco version of never Can Say Goodbye
was met with the same overwhelming responses Doctor's Orders, both
in the clubs and on the radio, I never Can.
By this point there were so many Disco records, making

(09:07):
an impression that Billboard initiated a Top Disco Songs chart
in October of nineteen seventy four, which ranked the most
popular songs in the clubs, and the first number one
on that chart was Gloria Gaynors Never Can Say Goodbye.
By November of nineteen seventy four, disco was becoming so
hot that a New York radio station, w p I

(09:28):
x FM introduced a program called Disco one oh two.
One oh two was their frequency on the radio dial,
and Disco one oh two was four hours of non
stop disco music every Saturday night. Neil McIntyre, who was
the program director at w p I x FM, figured
that people getting ready to go out and party at
discos would like to listen to some disco music to

(09:50):
get them in the mood. Well, the show became pretty popular,
and by the next year, Disco one o two was
on the air seven nights a week, and by nineteen
seventy six, the nation was playing a hundred percent disco
Disco one o two Now. In January five, when Gloria

(10:12):
Gaynor's album came out, it caused a huge sensation in
the disco world because The entire first side of the
album was an extended disco mix of three songs, including
Never Ken Say Goodbye, that played continuously for eighteen minutes.
This was the idea of mixer Tom Moulton, as he
recounted in a two thousand and nineteen interview at the

(10:33):
Red Bull Music Academy. DJ's are always complaining they have
no time to like to go out and go to
the bathroom or have a sandwich. Is no time. I thought,
you know, I'm gonna do something nice for the DJ's.
I'm gonna put it. I'm gonna make a medley and
put it together like it's one song. It's eighteen minutes.
So if you can't eat a sandwich in eighteen minutes,

(10:54):
give up, you know. During the first few years of disco,
Tom Moulton did remixes of just about every notable club hit,
always extending the brakes and boosting the rhythm. Sometimes he'd
add additional drums on top of the drums that were
already there, or even a horn part. He was a
real artist, and he did it all with audio tape

(11:14):
and a razor blade, making the cuts by hand. Sometimes
listeners could even hear the splices without a doubt, Tom
Moulton invented the remix as we know it today, and
every DJ who has come since os him a real
dead of things. The song we're hearing right now is

(11:44):
Tom Malton's remix of al Downings I'll Be Holding On,
which was yet another number one song on the disco chart.
It's also the song that led to the accidental invention
of the twelve inch single. Here's the story. In late
ninety four, Tom Moulton went to the studio to make
a test pressing of his remix of I'll Be Holding On,
and he was told by the engineer that the studio

(12:07):
was all out of blank seven inch discs to press
it on, so they pressed it on a twelve inch
disc instead, and that allowed the grooves on the disc
to be wider well. This caused the base on the
record to be deeper, and overall it gave the mixed
greater dynamics. It also enabled the record to be played
at louder volumes without distorting. Plus, a twelve inch disc

(12:28):
solved the problem of fitting really long songs on one
side of a disc. No more switching from one turntable
to another to play part one in Part two of
a record. Pretty soon, record labels were sending promotional twelve
inch singles to the DJs and the clubs in order
to have their songs sound as awesome as possible on
the dance floor, starting with Warner Brothers Records twelve inch

(12:50):
promo disc of Dance Dance Dance by the group Calhoun.
Calhom was this local disco band from New York. I
think they must have been from a Long Island because
on Disc oh one or two they always used to
have ads for clubs out on Long Island, like rum
Bottoms in all these places, and they always said coming
this Saturday night, Calhoun. I have no idea what Calhoun

(13:10):
looked like. I have no idea if they had any
other songs besides Dance Dance Dance, But I just remember
them as the guys and the commercials for rum Bottoms.
By the end of nineteen seventy four, disco music was

(13:31):
turning into a national sensation and people were becoming more
and more intrigued by the whole disco scene. The spirit
of that early moment was captured on record sort of
by a veteran record producer named Bob Crew, who in
the sixties produced the Big Frankie Valley in the Four
Seasons hits in Envy four Bob Crew, who formed a

(14:00):
group called Disco Text and the Sex Solettes fronted by
a former hairdresser known as Sir Monty Rock the Third
now Monty Rock the Third, was already a gay icon
in the culture. By this point, he'd made over a
hundred appearances on TV talk shows like The Johnny Carson
Show or The MERV Griffin Show, although it was really
unclear what his actual talent was. Apparently he was just

(14:23):
a fun guest to have on a talk show. I
said again, I had long hair, and I might wear
a little makeup, but I'm like any ordinary cat anyway. Listen,
Get Dancing by Disco Text and the Sex Solettes recreated
the vibe of being in a disco, with Monty Rock
playing the role the DJ addressing the crowd. Get Dancing

(14:57):
was a smash, and it gave America a very camp
be first glimpse of what it might have been like
in a New York disco. Incidentally, at about the same time,
Bob Crew went into the studio with the exact same
backing singers and musicians as he used on the disco
text and the sex Olex record, and he recorded the
original version of a song he'd written with another member

(15:19):
of the Sex so Letts, Kenny Nolan. That song, Lady Marmalade,
was almost instantly covered by LaBelle, and of course it
went on to become a classic. Here's a little bit
of the Eleven Hours original version of Lady Marmalade and

(15:45):
here's Labelle's cover version. Meanwhile, disco was starting to go worldwide,
with American disco hits becoming massive in Europe and European
record producers starting to emulate that disco sound. The first

(16:09):
big disco hit to emerge from England was Carl Douglas's
Kung Fu Fighting in November of nineteen seventy four. It was,
like so many hit records, originally recorded as a throwaway
B side, but the DJs flipped the record over and
played Kung Fu Fighting instead of whatever the intended A
side was. As it happened, America was in the middle
of a kung Fu craze at that very moment, with

(16:31):
Bruce Lee movies and a TV show called Kung Fu
achieving huge popularity. When you can take the pebble from
my hand, it will be time for you to leave.
Given how big the kung fu craze was at the time,
I can't imagine how Kung Fu Fighting wasn't chosen as
the A side in the first place, But in any event,

(16:52):
it went on to become the fifth disco record to
make it to number one on the pop chart in
that incredible breakthrough year of nineteen seventy four. It's notable,

(17:14):
by the way that when Kung Fu Fighting made its
way to the US, it first broke out of the
discos on the West Coast, which was a sure sign
that the disco movement was spreading far beyond New York. Meanwhile,
back in Philadelphia, Super R and B producers Gamble and
Huff were acutely aware that the ground was shifting. Gamble
and Huff had produced some of those unintentional disco hits

(17:36):
of the previous couple of years, but it was their
proteges Harris Baker and Young who led the way by
pioneering the four on the Floor disco beaten, who were
really having a lot of disco success by making records
with the clubs in mind. Harris Baker and Young were
still part of m FSB, the band that played on
all of Gamble and Huff's productions, and so Gamble and
Huff had no trouble and jump beyond the disco train.

(17:59):
Working with Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, featuring the
incredible lead vocals of Teddy Pendergrass, they released a song
called bad Luck, which featured lyrics that addressed all kinds
of political issues, ranging from inflation to the resignation of
President Nixon the previous summer. Bad Luck was by far
the biggest disco hit to date. It's spent eleven weeks

(18:20):
at number one on the Billboard Disco Chart, and in fact,
Billboard to this day still lists bad Luck as the
number one song of all time on the Disco chart.
Bad Luck was an amazing record and incidentally one of
my personal favorites of the whole period. Bad Luck may

(18:50):
have been a socially conscious record, like a lot of
the soul music of the early seventies, but times were
changing and music audiences were becoming a lot more interested
in partying than in changing the world, and so even
Gamble and Huff's biggest act, the O J's, moved away
from making gritty social commentary records like for the love
of Money, and they got with the zeitgeist, recording big

(19:11):
disco party hits like Living for the Weekend and of
course the classic I Love Music. With the major label
still not really in the disco game and the very

(19:33):
top pop recording stars not yet ready to go disco,
a whole slew of older musical acts, most of whom
hadn't had a hit in years, jumped into the fray
and made comebacks by getting on the bandwagon. Fresh from
his success with Disco Text and the Sex Solettes, producer
Bob Crue went into the studio with his old friend
Frankie Valley and they came up with a song called

(19:55):
Swearing the God, a massive hit in and the song
that early set Frankie Valley up for his incredible string
of disco influence seventies hits ranging from December nineteen sixty
three to the Theme from Greece. Some but Frankie Valley

(20:23):
was a kid compared to Herbie Man, a forty five
year old jazz flutist who had had a hit back
in nineteen sixty eight called Memphis Underground. He made a
big comeback in that first disco wave by covering a
record by d j. David Mancuso's favorite Spanish band Barabbas,
that people from his record label we're hearing in the clubs.

(20:43):
The song was called Hijack, and even though Herbie Man
was quoted as saying disco boards the ship out of me,
he managed to beat out Barabbas and have the big
radio hit with his version of the song. Probably most

(21:05):
amazing was the comeback of a woman named Shirley Goodman
who had had one loan hit back in the nineteen
fifties as half of the duo Shirley and Lee. Their
record was called Let the Good Times Roll Come. In

(21:26):
late nineteen seventy four, Shirley went into the studio with
record producer and label owner Sylvia Robinson. Now we discussed
Sylvia Robinson at length in our episode on sugar Hill Records,
and we learned that Sylvia was someone who never let
a new fad go by without jumping on the bandwagon.
She always got in early well. In late nineteen seventy four,

(21:47):
with Disco in the Air, she recorded Shirley Goodman on
a song that married the disco beat to the nineteen fifties.
Bo did lead guitar riff. The record was called shame, Shame, Shame,
and it came out credited to shirleyan Company. Now it

(22:14):
turned out that the bow did lea guitar lick, went
together really well with the disco beat, and there was
this mini boomlet of songs that featured it. One of
them was from England by a woman named Tina Charles

(22:35):
was just But more interestingly, there was a record called
Disco Stomp by an artist named Hamilton's Bohannon. Now, the
people listening to this podcast may recognize the name Bohannon
primarily because he's one of the artists name checked in
the Tom Tom Club's great song Genius of Love. But

(23:05):
Bohannon was a real rhythmic pioneer and he made some
of the fiercest, hardest disco records of the seventies, none
of which ever hit the American pop charts, although they
were massive club hits. Disco Stomp was probably the best
of the bunch. It was a top ten hit in
England and in fact it's actually the inspiration for Genius
of Rock. Incidentally, Disco Stomp was also the inspiration for

(23:37):
a song called New York Groove by a UK group
named Hello, which was later hit in the US for
Kiss member Ace Freely up next, the mastermind behind Cheek

(24:06):
refuses to let the Queen of soul go disco. The
disco boom led to the floodgates really starting to open
for veterans soul singers to have their first hits and years,
including Benny King, who hadn't had a big pop hits

(24:26):
since stand By Me all the way back in but
there he was, back in the top ten in five
with Supernatural Things. And there was Johnny Taylor, who emerged

(24:48):
from the bankruptcy of Memphis Stax Records to have a
number one record that was the biggest hit of his career,
just Going, and Esther Phillips, who hadn't had a hit
since nineteen sixty two but came back with a disco

(25:08):
remake of an old Dinah Washington song, And of course
Lou Rawls, whose career was so cold that he was
appearing on Dean Martin's celebrity roasts on television at this

(25:30):
point before he teamed up with Gamble and Huff and
the Philadelphia Musicians to record his biggest hit ever, find
as Long as Someone Who Loves You Tinder. But for

(25:51):
every star who used disco as a comeback vehicle. There
were great artists who couldn't or wouldn't jump on the
disco bandwagon and consequently saw the hits dry up. Most notably,
of course, is the Queen of Soul herself, Aretha Franklin,
who was already a legend at this point, having had
thirteen top ten pop hits since nineteen sixty seven. The

(26:12):
last one of those hits came out in the spring
of nineteen seventy four, just before Rock the Boat went
to number one, But it would be another eleven years
before Aretha Franklin returned to the upper reaches of the
pop charts, buried as she was by the disco avalanche.
In fact, that's why the rock band Steely Dan were
able to sing this lyric in seventy eight. That's Franklin,

(26:42):
she don't please full souls. Nile Rodgers of the great
disco group Chic recalls with some sadness, actually being asked
to produce a Aretha during the disco years. I flew

(27:03):
out to Encino to Aretha Franklin's house and she and
I was just so excited. Oh my god, I'm gonna
work with a Reta Franca is amazing because up until
that point I had never worked with anyone famous. It
was all just you know, Chic or Sister Sledge or Normantine.
Was all home grown stuff. And and she sat down

(27:25):
on the piano with that magical voice, and then she sang,
I'm gonna be the only start tonight down at the disco.
And I looked at her and I was like, what
Aretha Franca queen? And so you don't have to do it?
And so I wouldn't do that song. And she fired me,
which was perfectly fine because I didn't want to go

(27:46):
down in history of the guy who did a Rego
Franklin disco record. Another of those veteran record makers who
saw a big opportunity in disco was a producer named
Van McCoy, who had worked with the Sharrall's, Barbara Lewis
and a lot of other artists going back to their
early sixties. Now, in the spring of seventy five, he
heard about this dance that was being danced by Puerto

(28:08):
Rican teenagers in the South Bronx. The dance was called
the Hustle, and what was interesting about it was it
was a touch dance. That is, it was danced by
a couple, unlike every single popular dance that had come
out since The Twist, which was the first dance he
danced alone. Van McCoy had never actually seen the Hustle done,
but he knew the records that kids were hustling too,

(28:28):
and so he made a record called Simply the Hustle
and released it under the name Van McCoy and the
Soul City Symphony. The Hustle hit the clubs in February
of nine and had shot to number one nationally in July. Well.

(28:55):
The Hustle changed the culture on the dance floor. It
brought on a return to a more treat sdational style
of dancing, danced by couples who were touching with steps
that had to be learned. It was the first new
touch dance to become popular in the decade and a
half since the Twist. Now pop culture tends to run
in cycles and do your own thing ethos of the
sixties was now giving way to something more formalized and

(29:18):
more seemingly sophisticated. The Hustle sent the disco boom into
an even higher gear. Dance studios, which had fallen on
pretty hard times since the advent of all those free
form dances in the mid sixties saw a rush of
people who wanted to take hustle lessons so they wouldn't
miss out on the fun, and a boatload of hustle
songs quickly appeared in the market, exhorting dancers to do

(29:41):
some form or another of the hustle, like the Latin
Hustle by Eddie Drenna or the Fat Back Band's Spanish Hustle.
It was at this point that the national media began

(30:13):
to take notice. Time Magazine in Newsweek both ran huge
stories on the disco fad, and in The New York Times,
conservative political columnist William Sapfire celebrated the hustle, noting this
new dance is as revolutionary as the twist and as
politically portentous. A standard is set. One must study, practice

(30:35):
and work to achieve success in doing the hustle. The
absolute freedom days of the dance over disco was becoming
very big, and inevitably the major record label started to
get in on the action in a major way, inundating
radio with disco records. But in order to get on
the radio, a disco record first had to become a

(30:55):
hit in the discos. Now By the end of n
there were in thousand discos in the US, and getting
the newest records had always been a pretty tricky process
for the disco DJs. It required personal relationships with people
at the labels whould give them free promo copies, or
else they'd have to go out and buy the records
themselves with their own money. In the spring of nineteen

(31:17):
seventy five, David Mancuso held a meeting at his club,
The Loft, which was also his home, with some of
his fellow DJs, and they came up with a solution
to the problem of how to get records. It was
called the New York Record Pool. The idea was simple.
Bona fide DJs would sign up for the record Pool,
and the labels would send copies of all the new
releases directly to the record Pool, which would then distribute

(31:39):
the records to its members. Corey Robbins, a longtime music executive,
was a young DJ at the time and he remembers
what it was like belonging to the New York Record Pool.
It was street uh. David Mancuso started it with I
think Steve the Aquisto, and you paid I think a
small amount of money every month to be a member.
It was very very low. And then you go there

(32:00):
every week, you know, like on a Friday, and you'd
pick up you know, they had I don't know how
many members at that point, maybe seventy five members, and
record companies would send seventy five copies of each new
release and they would put it in your little bin.
And every Friday I would go there and I pick
up a box of between twenty five and fifty records.
In return for the free records, the DJs filled out

(32:21):
feedback forms which gave the labels a sense of which
records were working on the dance floors and which were steps.
And it was all nonprofit. Jens Jens. We've already discussed
how veteran artists used the disco boom to make comebacks,

(32:45):
but the biggest comeback of them all by far was
the return of the Bgs. In case you don't know,
the Bgs were Australian brothers whose family relocated to England
and they had had a run of huge beatlesque hits
in the late sixties. Then they broke up, but they

(33:12):
got back together and had a couple of more hits
in the early seventies. By two the hits had completely
dried up and they needed to try a new approach.
Their friend Eric Clapton, who had just recorded an album
at Criteria Studios in Miami, suggested to the BIGS that
they picked themselves up and moved to Miami record their
next record there. Well. Once they got there, the BGS

(33:33):
became extremely influenced by the disco scene in Miami, and
they were pushed further in the direction of disco by
their producer, a veteran soul hit maker named Arief Martin,
who had just produced a number one disco record with
a Scottish group called The Average White Band Pick Up
the Pieces. The BGS took Ari Martin's advice and came

(33:59):
up with a disc a song called Jive Talking. It
was a number one hit and it's set their career
on a whole new trajectory. On their next album the
following year, they embraced disco even more and went to
number one yet again, with a song called You Should
Be Dancing. Of course, fate would have even bigger things

(34:29):
in store for that record and for the BGS. But
I'm getting ahead of myself now. The BGS weren't the
only ones having disco success out of Miami. In t
K Records, one of a number of record labels owned
by the legendary Miami record man Henry Stone, was becoming
a disco powerhouse. Henry Stone was one of those colorful

(34:50):
characters who dotted the record business back in those days,
very comfortable in the back room with mobsters, but also
at home in the studio with musicians. Over a course
of several decades, Henry Stone had a hand in launching
the careers of everyone from James Brown, who he signed
to his friend Sid Nathan's King Records label, to Sam
and Dave, who he signed to his friend Morris Levy's

(35:12):
Roulette Records. And by the way, years later, Henry Stone
was actually the man who put up the initial seed
money for sugar Hill Records until Morris Levy brought out
his interest. But when disco broke big, that was when
Henry Stone really hit his peak. His label t K
Records was for a time the biggest independent label in
the business. Henry Stone accomplished that through a combination of

(35:35):
great records and payola. As he recounted in his autobiography,
which was called Payola. People like booze, drugs, hookers, expensive
meals and nights on the town, especially d j's, and
most of them will take bribes to play certain music.
In the seventies, I'd give a DJ ten thousand dollars

(35:56):
at a time just to play certain records. I was
the king of that, the King of Paola. But even
Paola can't make a bad record into a true hit.
Fortunately for Henry Stone, t k's roster was loaded with
talent during the disco years. George McCrae, who hit number
one with rock Your Baby, plus George's wife Gwen McCrae,
the group Foxy Bobby Calledwell t Connection, and the multi

(36:20):
talented Betty Wright, who dueted with Peter Brown on Dance
with Me and You in nineteen seventy five, became the
first woman ever to win a Grammy in the Best
R and B Song category for her amazing record Where

(36:41):
Is Below. But the biggest of all of Henry Stone's
acts was Casey in the Sunshine Band. Remember in our
previous episode we talked about Casey and the sun Shine Junk,
a new band whose leader Harry Wayne Casey produced George

(37:04):
mccraize Rocky Baby. Well, they dropped the junk in from
their name, and as Casey and the Sunshine Band began
an incredible string of hits that took the bohemian junk
and who groove and blended it with a stomping disco beat.
Starting in through a combination of that irresistible beat and
Henry Stone's Paola, they had four number one records in

(37:26):
eighteen months. Of course, you could argue that their number
ones all sounded like the same record, but it was
a really good record. Now, the b GS, the Average

(38:11):
White Band and Casey in the Sunshine Band represented the
emergence of a type of disco played by white artists
and aimed straight at the heart of Middle America. So
disco music, which at the beginning was really an offshoot
of African American soul music, started to have offshoots of
his own that had very little or even nothing at
all to do with the soul music tradition, and a

(38:33):
lot of this music was coming out of Europe. In
ve euro disco started to emerge as a big force
in the US. At first, the disco music made in
Europe sounded a lot like American disco. A French producer
named Jacques Morale even went to Philadelphia to record with
the great musicians there and under the name of the
Ritchie family. He had a big hit with Brazil, which

(38:55):
was a cover of a nineteen thirties song that evoked
exotic locales and swath sophistication. But it wasn't long before

(39:17):
distinctly European sounds started to emerge, and that new sound
originated in Germany, influenced by the German electronic group Craftwork.
The first German disco group to score big in the

(39:40):
US was Silver Convention, who were based in Munich. Their
first hit, Fly Robin Fly, sounded nothing at all like
soul music, but it's very unique production and it's throbbing
disco beat propelled it not only the number one on
the US Pop chart, but it also hit number one
on the R and B chart, which was the first
i'm a European artists had ever done that. The kids

(40:02):
were dancing to Fly Robin Fly on Soul Train just
as much as they were on American band stand. At
roughly the same time, an even more important talent emerged

(40:24):
from the Munich music scene. Three talents actually, two of
them being songwriting producers and one a singer, and none
of them were German. Georgio Moroder was an Italian producer.
Pete Ballada was British and together with Georgio, he'd written
a big worldwide hit in two, a song called Son
of My Father, which was credited to Georgio. Incidentally, Son

(40:46):
of My Father was one of the very first pop
hits to use a Moog synthesizer. The singer Georgio and
Pete teamed up with in Munich was an American who
had relocated to Europe at the end of the sixties

(41:07):
to take a part in the German production of the
musical Hair. Her name was Donna Summer. Donna Summer kicked
around for a while on the German music scene in
the early seventies, and once disco music made its way
across the Atlantic in nine four, she got together with
Pete and Georgio and had a couple of hits in Holland.
By the way, according to Eddio Laughlin, she also sang

(41:29):
on at least one of the early Silver Convention tracks,
which appeared on his Midland International label. About six months later,
after we discovered that the record was becoming very successful,
we got a request from the company we licensed the
record from saying that one of the girls wants to
go solo and could we give her release? Oh fine,

(41:50):
who is that? Her name is Donna Summer. Oh no problem,
We get the release. Her name was on the contract
and that was fine and she did great in Nive.
Donna Summer suggested to Georgio that he should write a
song with the title love to Love You Baby, a
line that had been bouncing around in her head for

(42:11):
a while. But when Georgio came back to her with
the finished lyrics for love to Love You Baby, she
felt it was way too sexually explicit, and also Georgio
had put in this part for erotic moans and groans.
Donna Summer agreed to sing the song, but only as
a demo recording. That then they pitched to a different
singer to actually record. But once Donna Summer completed her vocal,

(42:36):
Georgio convinced her that she had a really big hit
on her hands and please don't give this song away.
So the record with Donna Summer singing on it was
released and it became another hit for her in Holland.
At this point, a copy of the record was sent
to a man named Neil Bogart, who owned Casablanca Records
in Los Angeles. Neil Bogart was by this point already

(42:58):
a very successful record executive. He was a radio promo
man at Cameo Parkway Records in Philadelphia during that label's
final days, and then he moved over to Buddha Records,
where he helped invent sixties bubblegum music. In nineteen seventy three,

(43:22):
Neil Bogart started Casablanca Records, having success almost immediately with
the band Kiss. After Neil Bogart got that copy of
Love to Love You Baby, he decided to play at
a party he was throwing at his house in l
a Well. It was met with an overwhelmingly positive reaction,
especially that part with the orgasmic moaning and groaning. Neil

(43:43):
Bogart called Georgio Moroder and he said, hey, can you
make the record much longer, specifically the part where she's
having an orgasm. Georgio obliged, and he came back with
a sixteen minute version of the song, which, according to
the BBC can pained the sound of no less than
twenty three orgasms. Love to Love You Baby took up

(44:21):
one entire side of Donna Summer's debut album. When the
single of love to Love You Baby hit the radio
in the US in a shortened version, it caused a
bit of a scandal, since there's never been anything so
overtly sexual on pop radio before. But the record was
a smash, making pretty apparent the fact that American pop
culture and disco culture in particular, was ready to embrace

(44:44):
and even celebrate explicit sexuality right out in the open.
Of course, we'd hear a lot more from Georgio Moroder,
Pete Ballata, and Donna Summer as the seventies wore on
Like Fly Robin Fly. Their sound was kraft Work influenced
euro disco, and it's simplified beat was extremely appealing to
Middle America. It made disco even more inviting for people

(45:07):
who weren't very good dancers. At this point, the first
disco deluge began. Look at the Billboard charts from any
week in ninety six and you'll find at least a
few disco records in the top ten. And it wasn't
just newcomers and has been making a comeback anymore. The
biggest stars in the music business were jumping on the bandwagon,

(45:27):
especially the stars over at Motown who had thus far
sat things out. The Miracles were the first Motown act
with a big disco hit, going to number one with
Love Machine. Then Marvin Gaye jumped aboard with I Want You.

(45:59):
But the biggest hit of them all was by the
biggest star in the Motown universe. Coming up, a new
queen of disco is crowned and reigned supreme. Diana Ross

(46:29):
was already a superstar in and she was coming off
of a number one hit with the theme song from
a movie in which she starred Mahogany, and she had
no interest at all in going disco. In fact, she
insisted that the label release a different song as her
next single instead of Love Hangover, which she saw as
merely an album track. But then the group The Fifth

(46:51):
Dimension released their own version of Love Hangover and started
to get on the radio with see very Gordiant. Motown
sat down with Diana Ross and convinced her to change singles,

(47:13):
and Love Hangover was rush released. Now, Love Hangover was
heavily influenced by Love to Love You Baby. Diana Ross
is using her extra sexy voice, including some heavy breathing,
although no orgasmic moans. And groans, and the music track
and the background vocals all sound much more Munich than Motown.
Love Hangover hit number one right around the time of

(47:35):
the US By Centennial, and of course became one of
the defining hits of Diana Ross's career. Meanwhile, the dominance

(47:55):
of the Philadelphia sounding disco was coming to an end.
The musicians who form the core of the Philadelphia house
band MFSB, including vibes player and arranger Vince Montana, defected
from Gamble and Hubs Philly International label over financial disagreements.
They wanted to earn a bigger piece of the hits
they were playing on, so they signed with a New

(48:16):
York based label called sal Seoul Records, where they formed
the sal Seoul Orchestra, which featured some of the most
legendary musicians in Philadelphia, including incidentally, Buddy's Sabbath, the saxophonist
who gave the twist by Chubby Checker It's defining sound,
plus our friends Harris Baker and Young took their services
over to Salthoul. Now the Saleoul Orchestra really hit it

(48:40):
big with a song called Tangerine, which, like the Ritchie
Families Brazil, was another glossy cover of a song from
an old Hollywood movie, this one from One But the

(49:03):
next record to come out on Southhold was the Real
Game Changer, produced by Harris Baker and Young ten Percent
by the group Double Exposure, was remixed by Walter Gibbons,

(49:23):
who was the DJ at New York's Galaxy one Disco.
His remix of the song received such a positive reaction
that Southhold Records decided to commercially release the twelve inch
single of the remix that originally had just been sent
to club DJ's. Now this was the first time anyone
had ever put out a commercial twelve inch vinyl single,
and no one knew if there was even a market

(49:45):
for such a product. But ten Percent sold like hotcakes,
and thus a new commercial format was born, and one
that could be sold at a much higher price than
a seven inch single. On the ten Percent remix, Walter
Gibbons was taking the art of the remixer to the
next level, radically reconstructing the record from the ground up,
stripping away almost all the original production and even most

(50:07):
of the lyrics to turn the record into something completely
new and entirely designed for the dance floor. By now
Disco hits were coming from everywhere. Some were silly, like

(50:29):
winging a prayer fife and drum corps version of the
song baby Face. Some were awe inspiring, like Mighty High
by the veteran gospel group Mighty Clouds of Joy featuring
the Great Earl Young on drums. There was Donna Summer

(51:03):
inspired sexiness from porn actress Andrea True. A failed rock
band called Wild Cherry gave into the times and went
disco to have their only hit with Play That Funky Music.

(51:36):
There was even a disco version of the theme from
the nineteen fifties TV show I Love Lucy, And of
course there was the disco version of Beethoven's Fifth by

(51:58):
Walter Murphy and his Big Apple Band, which went all
the way to number one. Disco was everywhere. There were
a discos for kids, for roller skaters, discos for grandma

(52:19):
and grandpa discos and converted supermarkets and in shopping malls
and in holiday inns, and the Fredis Stair dance studios
kept doing great business, teaching everybody to do the hustle. Now.
When something gets that big, things start to get silly.
Rick D's was a top forty DJ in Memphis, and
he heard a disco song that he personally thought was

(52:40):
really stupid called Gimme Some by Jimmy Bohorn. That prompted
him to write a song to parody of the whole
disco scene, which he thought had gotten out of control.
Living as he did in Memphis, the home of the

(53:02):
recently bankrupt Stax Records, it was only natural that he'd
make his way to a new label called Free Tone,
owned by Stax Records co founder A Stelle acton She's
the Ax and Stacks. He went into the studio with
producer Bobby Manuel, a former Stax guitarist, and they put
together a musical track that was essentially a disco version

(53:23):
of Rufus Thomas nineteen sixty nine Stax hit Do the
Funky Chicken, st Start Get Do and for lyrics, Well
the Funky Chicken became a disco duck, and Rick D's

(53:44):
wound up with a number one novelty record again the
Clok look At And right around this time the anti
disco backlash started. No one knows who first coined it,

(54:06):
but already by the end of nineteen seventies, six haters
of disco music, we're using the phrase disco sucks, which
people were singing to the tune of the chorus of
disco duck, and well, some of it did start to suck.

(54:29):
When disco started, the hit records were coming out of
really cool New York City discos where dj is known
for their great taste in music, were discovering and championing
new gems one after another. But by seventy seven there
were disco records that the cool kids wouldn't touch. So
the record labels, major labels mainly, who were investing heavily

(54:49):
in disco by this point, we're promoting them to the
discos in the malls and the holiday inns. From there,
the biggest of them made their way to the radio.
They were disco sounding records, but they weren't accepted by
the people who pioneered the scene. Leo Sayer was a
really talented singer songwriter from England. I actually like his
early seventies albums a lot, but when his career stalled

(55:11):
mid decade, well, Leo went disco and he had a
number one hit with You Make Me Feel Like Dancing,
probably the poster child for a song that the public
thought was disco, but the taste making DJ's thought was direct.

(55:36):
It was clear that there was a glut of bad
disco out there. You'll remember from our Twist episode of
Speed of Sound that back in the early sixties when
Chubby Checker first hit with the Twist. The record initially
found its audience among listeners of Top forty radio, mostly teenagers.
Then over the next year or so, it began to
be discovered by society folk adults who congregated at places

(55:57):
like New York's Peppermint Lounge, and it got so big
among the jet set crowd that the record was re
released and hit number one all over again. Well, the
same thing happened with the whole genre of disco, just
his interest in disco was beginning to wane a little
bit on pop radio. A disco opened in New York
City that catered to high society. On April seven, Steve

(56:21):
Rubel and Ian Schreeger, who had previously owned a disco
in Queens called The Enchanted Garden, opened Studio fifty four.
Like a certain real estate developer from Queens who was
there on that opening night, Rebell and Schreeger had ditched
the outer boroughs for the glamour and celebrity that they
felt could only be attained in Manhattan. The club was
an immediate success. During his first week, the fashion designer

(56:44):
Halston through a thirtieth birthday party for Bianca Jagger, attended
by a hundred and fifty A list celebrities. The highlight
of that party, the moment that really made Studio fifty four,
occurred at midnight, as DJ Nikki Siano played b Anka's
Hubbies song Sympathy for the Devil, A naked man covered
in silver glitter led a white horse into the club.

(57:08):
When Bianca Jagger mounted the horse and rode across the
dance floor, the image was captured by dozens of cameras
and appeared in every newspaper in the country. Studio fifty
four instantly attained legendary status. The mastermind behind that party
and nearly everything else that brought fame to Studio fifty
four was a Peruvian born public relations woman named Carmen Dolio,

(57:31):
who was already a fixture on the New York disco scene.
She'd been a regular at the Loft from the beginning.
At Studio fifty four, Carmen Dolsio conceived of everything about
the club other than the music. She envisioned the elaborate
design of the space, which was a converted theater, bringing
in Broadway lighting specialists and set designers to imbute the

(57:52):
club with the sense of glamour associated with the fashion world,
where she'd gotten her start in public relations. While Steve
Rebell and Ian shrey You are in the names history
associates with running Studio fifty four, Carmen Deelesio was responsible
for its character and from masterminding all of its most
outlandish parties. Over the years, Studio fifty four has become

(58:13):
a central focus of our collective historical memory of disco.
But it wasn't as though most people could get in.
The club was meant for a celebrity crowd. Andy Warhole,
Michael Jackson, Liza Minnelli, Margaret Trudeau, the wife of Canada's
Prime minister. She was a regular, and it was known
for the vast quantities of drugs taken there. Cocaine and

(58:34):
queludes had replaced the poppers that were being taken in
the early discos, and for the outrageous sex engaged in
its bathrooms, basement and balcony. The drugs in fact fueled
the sex, which was quite often anonymous and generally unprotected
in that pre AIDS era. Studio fifty four is famous
for the shirtless bus boys, the flamboyant drag queens, but

(58:55):
perhaps it's best remembered for the arbitrary brutality of its
door policy. The club was famous for allowing a woman
in but not her date, or turning away celebrities. The
actor Michael Douglas was somebody who got turned away even
though he was already a really major star, or saying
to a group, you and you and you, but not you.
Most people simply couldn't get in at all, but that

(59:17):
didn't keep them from standing on the street, hoping against hope.
Andy Warhol once said that was the key to Studio
fifty four success. It was a dictatorship at the door
and democracy on the dance floor. And the fact that
the door was controlled by Mark Bennish, a gay man,
was symbolic of the fact that in this place it
was gay culture that was the arbiter of what was

(59:39):
cool and what was not. Now Rogers still remembers his
Studio fifty four days quite fondly. The studio change the
entire game because it was a place where it felt
like the safest place in the world. It really felt
like a speakeasy, even though all of the earlier discos
had that same kind of I too, but Studio fifty

(01:00:01):
four was big. It was like enormous, and you felt
enormous being in there. If you were one of the
people who were special enough to be in Sperior fifty four,
it felt like you were in a magical place. And
if they played your music, wow, you really felt like
a king. And the scene was no doubt bacchanalian. As

(01:00:23):
Nile Rogers recalls, the sex was fantastic and with the
girls were amazing. Uh. I think you may have heard
the story about how my office was the Studio fifty
four girls bathroom and no woman ever asked me to
leave the stall or anything. And it was that cool.
And the thing is that that disco mentality and culture

(01:00:45):
sort of spread all around the world. Studio fifty four
remains to this day a lightning rod for our interest
in disco because it really plays to our collective infatuation
with wealth and with celebrity. It's a classic example of
a wide elite picking up on a minority culture and
then claiming it as its own. As Stephen Gaines wrote,
in his biography of the designer Halston, Studio fifty four

(01:01:08):
was the embodiment of the most decadent social period of
any city in modern history. The idealism and equality of
the early discos like the Loft had then utterly trampled
on and left behind by the worship of wealth and celebrity.
The sixties ethos that the celebrities who spent time at
Studio fifty four had once experienced was now nothing but
a distant memory. As journalist Andrew Copkin wrote at the time,

(01:01:32):
the sixties were braw less, lumpy. Heavy. Disco is stylish, chic, sleek.
Light Disco emphasizes surfaces over substance, mood over meeting. The
sixties were a mine trip marijuana LSD. Disco is a
body trip, queludes cocaine. The sixties were cheap. Disco is expensive.

(01:01:53):
On a sixties trip, you saw God. On a disco trip,
you see Jackie Oh at Studio fifty four. Studio fifty
four also became the place from which a lot of
hit records began to break. They employed great DJs, Nikki

(01:02:17):
Siano from the Gallery and Richie Kaysor. Primarily Donna Summer
had one of the first records to break from Studio
fifty four's dance floor, a record that went down as
one of the pioneering achievements of electronic music. I Feel Love.
I Feel Love was once again deeply influenced by the
German electronic music innovator's craft work, specifically their newest record

(01:02:39):
trans Europe Express. Producer Georgio Moroder put the craft work
idea on steroids, combining electronics with a thumping mechanical beat
and of course Donna Summer's trademark centual his vocals. The

(01:03:01):
record was a revelation. No one had ever heard anything
like it. I Feel Love pointed in the direction that
dance music and pop in general would take for the
next decade. But overall, disco was in trouble out in

(01:03:26):
the wider culture. While Studio fifty four grabbed headlines in
the gossip columns on the pop charts, it seemed as
though disco was beginning to peter out. In the spring
of nineteen seventy seven, even Casey Casum noted on American
Top forty the decline in the number of disco songs
on the chart, and he speculated that the disco fad
might be running out of steam. We mentioned that in

(01:03:48):
nineteen seventies six, there were as many as six disco
records in the top ten on any given week, but
by late nineteen seventy seven, there weren't any at all
in the entire top thirty. There's still really big hits
in the clubs themselves, of course, but there was less
and less overlap between what was being played in the
discos and what was hitting big on pop radio. For

(01:04:08):
thirty four weeks in nine seventy seven, the songs that
were number one on the disco chart, which measured club play,
never even hit the top forty on the pop chart.
Disco kind of felt over. W p i x FM,
the first all disco station in the country, gave up
on disco and changed their format to album rock in
the summer of ninety seven. Now, that would prove to

(01:04:30):
be a miscalculation of historic proportions, because while disco was
on the ropes, it was far from dead. It just
needed a little outside help. Well. The White Knight that
saved disco just in the nick of time came from Hollywood,
and I used the term white night on purpose because
the night was wearing a white three piece suit well.

(01:05:19):
On the next episode of Speed of Sound, we'll find
out how John Travolta and the BGS took disco to
undreamt of heights and in the process struck gold with
a blockbuster movie and the biggest album of all time.
If you want to take a deeper dive into the
artists and the songs you just heard, check out our
curated playlist at the speeded Sound page on the I

(01:05:41):
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

(01:06:01):
shakogn is 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 mirrod Va. Speed of Sound is a production of

(01:06:23):
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio,
check out the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.