The Death of the Disco Era: The Rise and Fall of 70’s Disco Part 4

The disco fad goes into overdrive, and is met with opposition from haters who vow to bring it crumbling down, leading to an anti-disco riot on a baseball diamond in Chicago. Join Steve for the final chapter on the rise- and fall - of 70s Disco.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Speed of Sound is a production of I Heart Radio.
Throughout the winter and spring of nine nine, the disco
hits just kept on coming, but at the same time,
the backlash against disco kept growing, and no one was
prepared for the violent way it would all crash and burn,
or that baseball would be involved. I'm Steve Greenberg and

(00:26):
this is Speed of Sound. Right from the start, the
disco scene had always been dominated by female vocalists, the
so called disco divas, and at the very dawn of
the disco era, there was no disco diva bigger than

(00:46):
Gloria Gainer. In she had one of the earliest disco
hits with her cover version of Never Can Say Goodbye,
and pretty soon after that she was officially crowned Queen

(01:08):
of the Discos by the National Association of Disco Tech DJs.
But by nineteen seventy six it hits drive up for
Gloria Gainer and then in early nine seventy eight, she
suffered a bad fall while performing on stage at the
Beacon Theater in New York City. The morning after that fall,
she woke up to find herself paralyzed from the waist down.

(01:30):
She needed surgery to remove a rupture disc and diffused
two of the vertebrae in her spine. She regained her
ability to walk, but she was in a lot of pain.
Gloria Gainer was hell bent, though, on not letting that
accident end your career, and so in the summer of
ninety eight, she went back into the recording studio wearing
a back brace to record a new single. The song

(01:52):
that Gloria Gainer's record company intended as her single was
called Substitute. Now that song had been a hit in
Europe the year before War by a South African girl
group called Cloud. Gloria Gainer wasn't thrilled about recording Substitute,

(02:14):
but between her lack of recent hits and her accident,
she knew she was in a precarious position with the
record label. There were rumors she was about to be dropped,
and she'd actually heard about staffers at the label joking
in the halls that the Queen is dead. So she
gave Substitute her best shot and put a disco spin
on the song. When it was time to record a

(02:43):
B side to the single, Gloria Gainer's producers handed her
a brown paper bag that had lyrics scribbled on it.
The lyrics were mostly written by co producer Dino Facrus,
and they were inspired by his having been fired from
his job as a staff writer from Motown Records a
couple of years earlier. The song was called I Will Survive.
As soon as Gloria Gainor read the lyrics I will

(03:04):
Survive on that brown paper bag before she ever even
heard the melody, she was convinced her record label was
making a huge mistake, as she recalled years later, and
great the lyrics, and I'm like, what are you nuts?
You're gonna put this on the B side. This should
be this should be the A side. When we recorded it,
I took it to record company. They wouldn't even listen

(03:26):
to it. The President chose the other song. Nobody wanted
to book the President's Baby. Well, the record label released
Substitute in September, and it peaked at number one oh
seven on the chart. So Gloria Gainer on her own,
took I Will Survive to Richie kays Or, the DJ
at New York's top disco studio fifty four. Richie Kayser

(03:49):
immediately fell in love with the record and he started
playing it. But every time you put it on at
Studio fifty four. The song cleared the dance floor. Now,
Richie kays Or was one of those rate DJs who
really believed it was the DJ's job to educate the
dancers in the club, and so he just kept on
playing I Will Survive. He even gave copies of it

(04:10):
to his DJ friends at other clubs. Eventually, it started
to get exactly the reaction Richie Cazor knew it would,
and at that point New York radio stations began to
get phone calls from people who'd heard it in the
clubs and wanted it played on the radio. Well. I
Will Survive was a smash hit as soon as it
got on the air, hit number one nationally in March
of nineteen seventy nine, and of course it's gone down

(04:32):
as a classic, one of the most iconic songs of
the entire disco era and a timeless anthem of empowerment.
I Will Survive was co written and produced by a
man named Freddie Perrin, who really should have been a

(04:54):
lot more famous than he ever was, being that he
was one of the most successful hitmakers in the nineteen seventies.
Readie Perrin was yet another member of that Motown producing
collective known as the Corporation, who wrote and produced all
the early Jackson five hits, big number one smashes like
I Want You Back, ABC and the Love You Say. Then,

(05:14):
when disco came along, Freddie Perren jumped on the bandwagon
early and had a number one hit in nineteen seventy
six with The Miracles Love Machine Machine I'm Just Machine Now.
This was a particularly impressive achievement being that the member

(05:36):
most identified with the Miracle sound, lead singer and songwriter
Smokey Robinson, had actually left the group a couple of
years earlier. Freddie Perren's success with Love Machine was a
great example of how disco truly was a producer's medium,
where stars were welcome but not necessary. Perren then left Motown,
and just a few months later he produced another number

(05:57):
one record, Boogee Fever by the family group the Silver
st After producing some disco hits by another family act
to Varus, movie producer Robert Stig would ask him to
produce a Tavares version of the Brothers GiB song More

(06:17):
Than a Woman for the film Saturday Night Fever. Robert
Stig would and Barry Gibb like Freddie Perren's production to
that song so much that they asked him to produce
another song for the movie, Yvonne Ellman's recording of the

(06:40):
Gibbs composition if I Can't Have You, and this gave
Freddie Perren yet another number one record. Then, hot on
the heels of producing I Will Survive, Freddie Perrin co
wrote and produced a pair of smash hits for Peaches

(07:03):
and Herb. Now, Peaches and Herb were this R and
B duo who had been on the scene since the
mid sixties, but who hadn't had a hit in over
ten years. After going into the studio with Freddie Perrin, though,
Peaches and Herb found themselves in the spring of nineteen
seventy nine at the top of the charts with two
hits simultaneously. First there was the party anthems Shake Your

(07:25):
Group Name, soon to be joined by the number one
hit Reunited, the ultimate disco era slow Dance. As Casey
Cason explained on American Top forty, you know even the

(07:48):
hottest disco text don't keep the beat potting all night
long without a break. We survey dozens of disco record
distributors and disco DJs across the country, and we found
out that most discos like program one slow number every
forty five minutes to an hour. Let's hear the top
disco ballot of ball Peaches and Herbs Reunited. Me Reunited,

(08:20):
was incredibly the only ballot to hit number one in
the midst of the disco on slot that dominated pop
music for the first date months of nineteen seventy nine.
Journalist Dave Marsh wrote at the time of being overwhelmed
at discovering Peaches and Herbs Reunited on the radio one
Sunday morning and stopping the car breathless that soul music

(08:40):
still lived. While Gloria Gayner was riding the disco wave
to new heights, a slew of other disco divas were
having big hits as well. The all male production teams
at the heart of disco just love to work with
female singers as the vehicles for their productions, and so
the first half of nineteen seventy nine saw the greatest
preponderance of female voices at the top of the pop

(09:03):
charts of any period in history. Up to that point,
the parade of disco divas was seemingly endless. There was
Amy Stewart who hit number one with a cover of
the old Stax hit Knock on Wood, showing once again
that you didn't even need a new song to have
a disco hit. A disco version of any great song
might just do the trick. Then there was a Need Award,

(09:31):
a school teacher from Memphis who shot to the top
of the chart with her only hit, a sexually suggestive
record called Ring My Bell. There was Linda Clifford. There

(10:04):
was Alicia Bridges. Please Don't talk about Love to Night,
Please don't talk about, Please don't talk about. There was
Cheryl Lynn, who was discovered on a TV talent contest
called The Gong Show, which led to a hit with
the song Got to Be Real. And unexpectedly, there was

(10:38):
newcomer Debbie Harry, front woman of the group Blondie, who,
despite coming up through the ranks of punk clubs like
cb GBS, went disco for her very first American hit,
the number one record Part of Glass. And in addition

(11:09):
to their own female fronted band, Chic Nile Rodgers and
Bernard Edwards were also this Fengalis behind the success of
another female act, Sister Sledge. Nile Rodgers recalls that before

(11:31):
Agreen to work with Sister Sledge. Jerry Greenberg, the president
of Sheik's label, Atlantic Records, offered Rogers and Edwards the
chance to produce The Rolling Stones. Now, Bernard and now
we're smart enough to know that Keith Richards basically the
guitar player, and I'm not gonna play Keith Richards parts.
So we only wanted to do artists that we could

(11:54):
be the band because we knew that we could control
the outcome, so to speak. We didn't know how to
write other people's music. We had to write our own
music and they would sing it. So Jerry Greenberg talked
to us about this group called Sister Sledge and how
they were like family to the label and blah blah blah.

(12:15):
And when we got home we looked at all of
his notes and basically Jerry Greenberg uh laid out the
blueprint for the lyrics that we Are Family. I mean,
it really was almost identical. We looked at his pitch
to us and we just started moving one line to
hear and moving another line to the Andy would write
a rhyming scheme to go along with that line, and

(12:38):
we had we are Family basically. At that point, we
backed him and said short We'll do Sister Sledge. Sister
Sledges hits He's the Greatest Dancer and we Are Family
really captured that communal spirit of the clubs, where dancers
felt like a real family, at least for that night.
Rogers and Edwards hits with Sister Sledge were more poppy,
less dark and washed out the the songs they released

(13:01):
as Chic Sister Sledge were, in fact disco at its
most joyous. We Are Family was even adopted as the
theme song of the nineteen seventy nine Pittsburgh Pirates, who
won the World Series that year. Just Man Do Get Ship. Now,

(13:28):
amidst the crowded field of female disco divas, one male
singer did manage to attain legendary status. Sylvester James Jr.
Known professionally simply as Sylvester, emerged out of San Francisco's
gay club scene, and he was a true original. As
a member of the avant garde drag troupe the Cockettes,

(13:48):
Sylvester had finally honed his campy cross dressing character, and
he was already a local legend in the early seventies
when he was discovered by the singer Boz Scaggs and
Rolling Stone magazine publisher Jan Wenner, who got him a
record deal which led to a couple of unsuccessful rock albums.
Sylvester turned to disco in presenting himself as unabashedly gay,

(14:11):
which made him pretty unique in America, where homophobia was
still the norm and where most gay artists projected a
persona that was a most sexually ambiguous. Musically, Sylvester was
a real pioneer. Along with his producer Patrick Cowley, he
essentially invented the sub genre known as high energy with
his hit record You Make Me Feel Mighty Real. This

(14:34):
record was a pioneering song of gay affirmation, and it
became a most unlikely pop hit in the winter of
seventy nine. The song combined Sylvester's incredible falsetto vocals with
mechanized drums and synthesized keyboard lines, creating this frantic record
that music critic Robert Christgau referred to as Sylvester remained

(15:08):
one of the biggest artists in dance music, as well
as a gay icon for the rest of his life,
tremendously influencing all of electronic dance music until he died
of aids in. Incidentally, in two thousand and nineteen, You
Make Me Feel Mighty Real joined I Will Survive, La Freak,
Donna Summers I Feel Love and the Saturday Night Fever

(15:29):
soundtrack as the only disco records designated for preservation in
the Library of Congress's Registry of Culturally Significant Recordings. Pretty
cool now. Towards the end of his life, Sylvester began
to be known as the Queen of the discos, but
of course, the biggest disco diva of them all was
Donna Summer. After her breakout moment in the movie Thank

(15:50):
God It's Friday, Donna Summer went on an unbroken streak
of massive hits, all produced by Georgio Moroder and Pete Bolada.
She followed up Got It's Friday's Last Dance with a
disco version of the old Jimmy Web song MacArthur Park,
and that gave her the first of four number one
songs that you'd have over the next twelve months. But

(16:22):
it was the release of her masterpiece, the double album
Bad Girls, in the spring of seventy nine, that shot
Donna Summer to the very pinnacle of pop stardom. Welcome

(16:47):
Bad Girls was one of the few truly great albums
to emerge from disco, which was very much a singles
dominated genre, and it was the v soundtrack to the
Summer of Nine with its two number one singles title
song and the incredible hot Stuff. Hot Stuff was really

(17:11):
innovative for a disco song and that it incorporated rock
guitars courtesy of Steely Dan's Jeff skunk Back Star. As such,
a paved the way for the great R and B
and rock fusion records of the eighties like Michael Jackson's
Beat It. But outside of Donna, Summer and Sylvester, disco

(17:33):
really produced very few homegrown stars. The producers, the DJs,
and even the people on the dance floor remained bigger
than the singers. Ray Caviano of Warner Brothers Records Disco
Department remarked at the time of all disco acts are
figment of some producers imagination. While a lot of what
was being released in this period, no doubt did sound synthetic,

(17:55):
a couple of authentic old school soul influenced records still
managed to sneak through, and unsurprisingly they both came from Philadelphia,
Gamble and Hubbs Philadelphia International Records have been more or
less left behind after so many of their musicians defected
to Sal Seoul Records a couple of years earlier, but
they managed to release one last great disco hit during

(18:18):
the onslaught of seventy nine, Ain't No Stopping Us Now
rivaled I will survive as the great empowerment anthem of
the disco years. It was recorded by the duo McFadden
and Whitehead, who had written some of the great earlier
Philly hits by the o JS and Harold Melbourne. In
the Blue Notes. They wrote Ain't No Stop in Us

(18:45):
Now to protest gambling huffs constant discouragement of their desire
to be the singers on their own songs, and the
song represented the aspirational aspect of disco at its apex. Meanwhile,
Philly International's arch rival Sal Soul Records went at them

(19:08):
toe to toe with the year's other great disco soul record,
Instant Funks, Got My Mind Made Up? Come On, Come On.
That record was produced by Philly veteran Bunny Sigler, but

(19:30):
it only became a disco smash after it was remixed
by Larry Levan, the DJ at the New York disco
Paradise Garage. Bunny Sigler hated the remix, but then he
got dragged down to the Paradise Garage and he saw
firsthand that Larry Levan really did no best about what
worked on the dance floor. While Studio fifty four was
grabbing the headlines due to its celebrity clientele, the Paradise

(19:53):
Garage was by nine the place to be for the
serious dancers. The garage was sometimes referred to as the
Studio fifty four for blacks and Latinos, with a crowd
of up to two thousand dancers being whipped into a
state of ecstasy by Larry Levan's djaying and the club's
overwhelming sound system. Warner Brothers promo man Bobby Shaw recalled

(20:15):
his many nights at the garage. It was in an
old garage building. He walked up a ramp. You could
hear them the base and the music while you're walking
up the ramp. The room held a couple of thousand people.
Larry Levan towered over the room. There was free food. Uh,
there was a roof that was music was piped into
the roof. You could hang out there if you'd like,

(20:37):
but it was all about Larry and the music bottom line,
and the club was amazing. The space was amazing, but
it was all about the vibe. Everybody was there to dance.
There weren't people there just to go and hang out.
People went to dance. Larry Levan became known as the
DJ who could turn a record into a hit just
by playing it at the garage. This was due in

(20:59):
large part to his friendship with Frankie Crocker, the program
director at New York's R and B radio station w
b LS. Frankie Crocker, in turn, used his relationship with
Larry Levan to bring his station to number one in
the ratings by being the first on a whole slew
of the hottest records. The Levan Crocker Nexus made Larry
Levan the club DJ that record company men most wanted

(21:21):
to get to know. Bobby Shaw remembers Frankie Crocker was
the main d J w b LS. He had a
show Monday to Friday for to eight highest rated show
in New York City, and he sold a lot of records.
You got on, you got on Frankie Crocers show, You
sold records. Now. He would come and listen to Larry

(21:42):
and would literally take the records from Larry that he
liked and they would be on the show Monday morning.
In theory, Larry was almost like the programmer for Frankie
crockerd station. By early nine nine, disco essentially ruled American
pop culture. There were twenty thousand discos in the US,
and by the middle of the year there were more

(22:02):
than two hundred all disco radio stations. By the summer
of nine more than half the records in the top
ten on any given week were disco records. People started
to refer to the disco era as though it was
now the successor to the rock era. The airwaves were
saturated and over a million people were going out disco

(22:23):
dancing every week across America. Between clubs and records, disco
was an eight billion dollar industry. Coming up next Some
of the biggest and most surprising recording artists cash in
on the disco craze. The disco business was booming, and so,

(22:45):
in a bid to stay relevant, seemingly every recording artist
in the business was going disco. Glam Rockers Kiss went disco,

(23:06):
Share went Disco, want To, Barbara Streisan went disco. You're

(23:28):
You must be. Even former Beatle Paul McCartney felt the
need to go disco, and this got him a top
ten hit called good Night Tonight, Don't Say, Don't Say.

(23:53):
Rod Stewart went disco with his massive number one hit
Do You Think I'm Sexy? However, that song's authorship was complicated.
In response to a lawsuit, Rod Stewart admitted to unconsciously

(24:14):
plagiarizing the record taj Mahal by Brazilian artist Georgie Benn.
But do you Think I'm Sexy had more problems than
just that. You see the songs signature instrumental line, it

(24:42):
turns out to have been lifted from a Bobby Womack
record called put Something Down on It to Anyone, That's
why I Love It. In response to another lawsuit, Rod
Stewart admitted to consciously played darizing that one anyway. For

(25:02):
more than seven months straight, every number one song in
America was a disco hit if you include What a
Fool Believes by the Doobie Brothers, and you must the
Doobie Brothers label, Warner Brothers Records knew they could never
get What a Fool Beliefs to number one. In the
middle of the disco deluge without aiming straight for the
club crowd. So they had the record remix by a

(25:24):
really big New York City DJ named Jim Burgess, who
extended the Doobie Brothers original three and a half minute
single to nearly six minutes and added extended instrumental breaks
in a more pronounced four in the floor rhythm track.
The strategy worked. Jim Burgess's disco mix got what a
full believe lots of club play, which landed it on

(25:45):
the disco chart, and then Frankie Crocker started playing it
on w BLS having heard Larry Levan play the remix
at the Paradise Garage. This helped the remix make it
onto the R and B chart, and all this action
together gave the record the final push it needed to
become the biggest record in the country. Now. The reason

(26:17):
fads become massive is that there's a shared feeling that
you need to participate in order to be cool and current.
But when your middle aged uncle puts on his disco
shirt and jumps on board, it becomes pretty clear that
participating means you're involved in something that's already going out
of fashion. The discos in strip malls across America had

(26:37):
very little in common with the communal, multicultural clubs that
gave disco as start clubs that had cutting edge DJ's
discovering the coolest tracks. No, these discos were more like
pick up bars, with DJ's playing the biggest hits from
the radio ad nauseam. The more mainstream disco became, the
less it seemed cool. And that's when the backlash began

(26:59):
in Eternett. Now there'd been disco haters almost as long
as there'd been disco, way back in November of nine,
and editorial in the very first issue of Punk magazine
declared death to disco shit, Long live the rock, Kill yourself,
jump off a fucking cliff, become a robot and joined
the staff at Disneyland. O d anything. Just don't listen

(27:21):
to disco ship and the phrase disco sucks itself had
been around since late nineteen seventy six, but by nine
seventy nine things got taken to a whole other level.
You see, rock fans had this nagging fear that rock
music was going to die out, especially after disco dominated
that year's Grammy Awards, which were held in February. The

(27:42):
disco group A Taste of Honey, won the Grammy for
Best New Artists, defeating, among others, future Rock and Roll
Hall of famers Elvis Costello and The Cars. Saturday Night
Fever won the Grammy for Best Album All In all,
eight of the fourteen televised awards went to Disco Records.
The Grammy's sweep led the press to publish an avalanche

(28:02):
of articles about the disco juggernaut. Donna Summer appeared on
the cover of Newsweek above a headline that read Disco
Takes Over, and Time Magazine ran a piece condemning disco's
diabolical thump and shriek. That spring, the backlash began to
increase in intensity, and it had as its focal point
a manufactured group from New York City. In ninety seven,

(28:26):
French producers Jacques Morale and Henry Belolo We're looking for
their next big act, having already had a taste of
success early in the disco era with the Ritchie Family.
One evening, Jacques Moraley saw a man in New York's
most well known gay enclave, the West Village, walking down
the street dressed as a Native American chief. Morale followed

(28:46):
this man into a club where it turned out he
worked as a dancer. Morale then noticed a club patron
in a cowboy hat eyeing the chief as he danced,
and suddenly he had a brainstorm. He'd form a disco
group filled with iconic masculine characters in full costume. In
addition to the cowboy in the chief, Morally and Belolow

(29:07):
added a police officer, a construction worker, and a biker.
But those characters weren't needed to actually sing on the record.
They'd just be played by models for the photo on
the album cover. Morally and Belolo already had the only
singer they need to sing all the parts on the album,
a man named Victor Willis, who was in the original
Broadway cast of The Whiz and who possessed a really

(29:29):
strong R and B voice. The resulting album, credited to
the fictional group Village People, was a musical road trip
through the centers of gay life in America. The songs
were about San Francisco, Hollywood, Grettage Village. There was even
a song about the New York summer getaway Fire Island,
known for its gay clubs, which had helped incubate the

(29:49):
early disco sound. At the start of the seventies. Now,
The Village People album appeared in the summer of nine seven,
that pre Saturday Night Fever period when Top forty radio
wasn't giving many disco acts as shot. So while tracks
from the album spent seven weeks on top of the
Billboard Disco chart, the album's biggest single, San Francisco, peaked

(30:10):
at number a hundred and two on the pop chart boone.
But then the Village People Project got a lucky break
their label, Casablanca Records, the same label Donna Summer recorded for,
booked an appearance for the group on Dick Clark's American

(30:32):
Advanced and TV show. The only problem was there were
no actual Village People. There was just Victor Willis. Jacques
morally quickly took an ad out in a theatrical trade
paper which read types wanted, must dance and have a mustache.
And that's how the members of the Village People were recruited,
with Victor Willis being assigned the role of the policeman. Well,

(30:54):
the cover of the group's next album, Macho Man, featured
the actual group members who've been cast instead be anonymous models. Yeah,

(31:14):
it's title track actually made it into the top thirty,
but that was just a prelude to what was coming.
The group's third album, Cruising, kicked off with a song
called y m c A. On its surface, the song
extolled the virtues of visiting the local y m c A,
where inexpensive short term lodging was available to men who
needed a place to stay. However, in u S gay

(31:36):
culture at that time, when most gay men were still closeted,
the y m c A was known as a spot
for cruising and hooking up. Upon its release, y m
c A became a massive worldwide hit, and when the
group performed it on American Bandstand, it was the kids
in the audience who came up with the now classic
y m c A dance, still done at every baseball

(31:57):
game in bar Mitzvah. With y m c A ging
such massive exposure across the media, Victor Willis, who was straight,
went to great lengths to avoid admitting the song's gay subtext.
He claimed that the song was celebrating the y m
c A as a place where urban youth could play sports.
It helped that the song's lyrics were ambiguous enough to

(32:18):
allow for plausible deniability. Should sing your short on your door.

(32:44):
At first, most of straight America truly didn't understand that
the Village People's songs were odes to gay lifestyle. People
in the Heartland, especially older people and children, had no
idea that the y m c A or Fire Island
were bastions of American culture. These were just fun tunes
to dance to. The tough guys in my high school

(33:05):
all pumped iron in the school's weight room while blasting
Macho Man at top volume. Now, the subject of the
Village People's next single was the U. S. Navy. Like
the y m c A, the Navy had a reputation
in gay culture as being a place where recruits could
discreetly pursue same sex relationships. But this concept was also
unfamiliar to most of straight America, and so when it

(33:27):
was released in the spring of nineteen seventy nine, In
the Navy sounded to a lot of listeners, almost like
a recruiting jingle for the U. S. Navy. The Navy
actually reached out to Henry Belolo and asked if they
could use the song in their TV recruiting commercials. Belolo
struck a deal to grant them the rights for free
in exchange for the Navy letting the Village People shoot

(33:48):
their music video for the song aboard one of its battleships,
the USS reasoning well after the release of the in

(34:09):
the Navy video, it was brought to the attention of
the U. S. Navy brass that the song wasn't really
about what it seemed, and the Navy immediately canceled the
plan to use the song and its recruiting commercial. Moreover,
there was a resentment starting to build in some quarters
over the belief that the Village People had somehow fooled
the US military into giving its official endorsement to the

(34:30):
gay lifestyle. Conservative activists Anita Bryant took to television to
warn that homosexuals are producing records with double meaning and
having straight children by them, and a lot of those
tough guys from my high school were angry and wanted
to lash out, not just at the Village People, but
at all of disco. It didn't help discos caused that

(34:51):
a lot of the records flooding the airwaves that spring
weren't very good. Because radio airplay could sell more albums
than playing clubs could. The major label it started to
bypass the clubs with their poppyist disco releases, aiming their
promotion efforts straight at disco radio stations. You see, club
success wasn't enough for the major labels. They wanted bigger,

(35:12):
They wanted crossover an album sales. As a result, radio
regained control over the label's attention. Quality suffered. For every
good club record, there was a putrid hit on the radio,
like David Norton's Making It a Record Entirely Devoid of Soul,
which was created as the theme song of a very
short lived TV sitcom about a disco crazy young guy

(35:36):
in New Jersey who worked at an ice cream parlor.
The disco gold rush incentivized record labels to take too
many records into the market in order to cash in.

(35:57):
Pioneering disco label owner Eddie o Lachlin room members it
this way. The majors were coming in and you can
tell nobody was listening to music. They were like, okay,
give us twenty records, some people would say ten thirty
whatever from the very various producers and just throwing the
records out, and it just was starting to become very
very difficult and very tiring actually, and not even feeling

(36:20):
creative was very much business driven. At that point. Robbed
of that crucial filter of a DJ with good taste
playing music for a discerning audience of dancers, lots of
bad records began to get exposure. The beat became dumbed
down to accommodate the increasingly unsophisticated audience frequenting the discos.
A publication emerged called the Disco Bible, which catalog beats

(36:44):
per minute for every new release to help all those
shopping mall DJs create a seamless flow. But seamless also
meant sameness, and an increasing uniformity began to creep in.
Even Norman Harris, from the pioneering disco production team of Aris,
Baker and Young, complained the Billboard that I get tired
of hearing the same thing for too long. A local

(37:06):
New York newspaper condemned radio station w b LS as
without the Blues, and journalist Andrew Holleran lamented that the
disco music of nineteen seventy nine was light years away
from the old dark disco, which did not know it
was disco, which was simply a song played in a
room where we gathered to dance. Long time music executive

(37:27):
Corey Robbins remembers the disco glood of that period. A
lot of these other labels, Butterfly Records and even t K,
they started putting out these mechanical, seventeen minute aside records
that were so similar and and they didn't have any
soul to them. And uh, eventually, you know, I mean,
you go to the record pool and you get seventy
five records a week, all of a sudden, and most
of them were garbage. So there were gems in there.

(37:50):
But yes, the once the money really got big in disco,
everybody was jumping in. Indeed, just about everyone who ever
had a record deal got into the act. Same Street
did a disco album called Sesame Street Fever, which included
an appearance by b G. Robin Gibbons. Much set the
Sun so Ill Trash, and so did Arthur Feeler in

(38:23):
the Boston Pops, whose disco album bore the cringe worthy
title Saturday Night Feedler. Coming up next, Disco Backlash goes

(38:46):
into overdrive, fueled by a gas shortage and some very
vocal DJs, during the fourth of July weekend nine h
seventy nine, at the absolute height of disco over saturation,
Casey Cason's American Top forty broadcasts a special countdown of

(39:09):
the forty biggest hits of the disco era. During the
course of the broadcast, Casey took time to fill us
in on disco economics. Want to know the power of
disco and dollars and cents? These days, the American recording
industry sells about four billion dollars worth of records and
tapes every year. Disco music accounts for about a billion
of that, but that's nothing compared to the other dollars.

(39:31):
Disco is moving like the eight billion bucks we the
people spent last year for admissions, food, and drink in
America's twenty thousand disco texs. And that doesn't even include
all the money spent on disco hair, dues, clothes, dance lessons,
and roller skates. He also issued a warning about the
physical dangers of too much disco dancing. You know, disco

(39:53):
dancing has led to a new medical specially called disco genics,
which deals with back injuries caused by getting down to
strand you late. As the countdown reached its conclusion, Casey
Cason revealed La Freak as the number one song of
the disco era. But Casey couldn't possibly have known that

(40:16):
the end of the disco era was mere weeks away. Now,
there were lots of warning signs that are reckoning was coming.
Disco sucks, T shirts and bumper stickers could be seen
everywhere that summer, and disco music began to find itself
the butt of jokes. The popular comic strip Dunesbury did
a whole week of daily installments making fun of the

(40:36):
disco scene. One of those strips featured a rock radio
DJ who, under pressure from his program director, plays y
M c A and Bad Girls, but introduces them contemptuously
as exciting testaments to the social sensibilities of disco. One
of them is about meeting adolescent homosexuals in a public gymnasium,
and the other is a celebration of prostitution. Then a

(41:00):
record literally demonizing disco became a national hit. The Charlie
Daniels Band were Southern rockers who until nineteen seventy nine
were best known for a novelty single six years earlier
called Uneasy Rider. He let out a yell that curl
your hair, But before you can move, I grabbed me
a chair and said, watching folks the purly dangerous man.

(41:23):
For you may not know it, but this man's a spy.
He's ver. On their summer seventy nine top ten hit
The Devil Went Down to Georgia, they told the tale
of a country fiddler named Johnny who accepts a challenge
from Satan to see who's the better fiddle player. Johns
up your poet, play your fiddle hard. Gus hailes proclusive

(41:45):
Georgia and the Devil music cards and the song plays
out over a country rock bey, and except for the
part when it's the Devil's turn to play. Then suddenly
it becomes a disco record. A band of demons join,
and it has sounded something like this. Well predictably, the

(42:12):
disco devil is vanquished by the hillbilly rocker, while at
the same time, in the real world, rock fans were
organizing to do the same against disco music at large.
In Seattle, hundreds of anti disco protesters attacked a mobile
dance floor, The dancers dispersed and the dance was canceled.
In Portland, Oregon, a disc jockey named Bob an Chetta

(42:34):
destroyed a stack of disco records with a chainsaw in
front of a cheering live audience. There was an absolute
epidemic of anti disco activity on the part of rock
DJ's that summer. Daryl Wayne of k r o Q
and l A held a disco funeral where he buried
disco records in the sand at the beach in San Jose,

(42:55):
DJ Dennis Erectus hosted a regular feature called Erectus Rex
or Record, where he sped up disco records, then dragged
the needle across the record to the sound of people
throwing up. And we had another episode of wreck our record.

(43:22):
This time it was Casey and the Sunshine band was
shake your booty, but we fixed, didn't we? A slew
of rock stations sponsored anti disco clubs WWWW. Detroit's version
was called the Disco Sucks Clan, a name that was
particularly offensive, and it all came to a head the

(43:44):
second week of July nine, just a week after that
Casey Caseum Disco Era countdown. This was the same week
that President Jimmy Carter gave his famous Malay's Speech, where
he went on television to complain about a crisis of
the spirit that he failed at the Americans to forsake
God and family. Right. Indeed, America was experiencing something of

(44:31):
a malaise that summer. The economy was failing, crime was
on the rise. These two factors contributed to increasing tension
between African Americans and whites in the major American cities.
On top of that, in the wake of the Iranian Revolution,
there was another gas shortage. People began panic buying and
long lines appeared at gas stations for disco. The more

(44:55):
notable event of that second week of July was Disco
Demolition Night, a rally held at Comiskey Park in Chicago
between games of a White Sox doubleheader. The event was
organized by a local rock DJ named Steve doll who
was fired by radio station w d a I when
it went all Disco at the end of nine, only

(45:16):
to be hired by rock station w l u P
the next march. On his news station, Steve Dohal continually
ranted against the evils of disco, and his audience loved it.
He'd mocked his former stations and Disco d ai slogan
as Disco d i E. He formed a club called

(45:40):
the Anti Disco Armys, dedicated to the eradication of disco
district tion in our Lifetime. The Army was named after
the co host, Salmon, a fish that had recently been
introduced into Lake Michigan in order to eradicate an infestation
of a parasite known as the lamprey eel, which was

(46:00):
threatening to wipe out the lake's population of edible fish.
Get it, Steve Doll was really hateful. When Van McCoy,
the creator of the hit disco song The Hustle, suddenly
died in early July, Doll celebrated by playing a few
seconds of The Hustle before destroying the record on the air.
Even before Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park, Doll had

(46:22):
hosted at least two anti disco events that required intervention
by the Chicago Police. At those events, Dal told homophobic
anti village people jokes and then led the crowd in
chance of Disco Sucks. Doll also released his own anti
disco song parody called do you Think I'm Disco, in
which the narrator realizes the banality of his disco life

(46:45):
and terms to rock and roll for salvation. I always
stuffer socking. It always makes the ladies start to talk. Now,
Steve Dal, remember that the White Sox had held a
Disco Night promotion at Comiskey Park a couple of years earlier,
and he managed to convince the White Sox organization to

(47:08):
let him now hold Disco Demolition Night. Anyone who brought
a disco album to the stadium that night would be
admitted for cents. Doll announced he'd blow up all the
disco albums on the field between games of the doubleheader. Now,
a typical White Sox doubleheader that season drew twenty fans,
but on this night, more than fifty thousand people showed up.

(47:31):
Even after the game was declared sold out. Thousands of
fans jumped the turnstiles to get into the stadium, all
for the chance to see Steve Doll blow up the
records and the chant disco sucks and mass. It was

(47:55):
an almost entirely white crowd. A lot of people in
the crowd didn't actually hand in the disco albums to
be blown up. Instead, they threw them around the stadium
like frisbees. Baseball player Rusty stab of the visiting Detroit
Tigers urged his teammates to wear their batting helmets while
in the field during the first game of the doubleheader
because of the flying albums, Plus, there were firecrackers and

(48:17):
bottles being thrown on the field, and the stage was
really set for trouble when, in an attempt to stop
that endless stream of turnstile jumpers, most of the stadium
security staff left the field area to stand watch over
the gates. As promised, Steve Doll, dressed in an army
uniform complete with a combat helmet, blew up the collected

(48:39):
records in center field as the crowd shouted does go
Sucks and death to Disco Shu Shu shuck. Racial and
homophobic epithets were also thrown into the mix. With almost
no security staff inside the stadium, thousands of attendees stormed

(49:03):
the field, firecrackers and debris were being thrown. The crowd
then lost control and trashed the stadium, ripping up the field,
stealing the bases, and setting the remaining disco records on
fire across the outfield. Bill Veck, who owned the White Sox,
stood on the field with a microphone pleading with the
fans to cease the mayhem. But it was in vain

(49:25):
well the Santas sites I've ever seen in a ballpark
in my life. This garbage of demolishing a record Hassco.
The rioting only stopped when Chicago police arrived in full
riot gear, clearing the field and arresting thirty nine people.
With the field destroyed, the White Sox forfeited the second
game of the doubleheader. Now you have to ask yourself

(49:47):
what was behind the riot? What were they reacting against?
It wasn't disco's hedonism. There's no indication that the anti
disco people were any more moral than the disco crowd.
Rock fans claimed that disco represented everything that was synthetic
and aristocratic, while rock was populist and real. But the
truth was a lot more complex. I mean, the stadium

(50:10):
rock of that period demanded a relationship between performers and fans,
in which the fans were just passive spectators. But this
dynamic was actually reversed inside the discos, where the musical
performers were nearly anonymous and the dancers in the audience
were the real stars. So what was it? In the
final analysis, the makeup of the crowd and its tone

(50:31):
made it clear that what was really going on was
a public lynching in absentia of the perceived growing influence
of black culture and gay culture. In America, disco music
had ignored straight white men in favor of African American
divas and gay mail dancers. Rockers felt the need to
destroy disco and the altered sexual hierarchy has stood for

(50:54):
In a depressed industrial city like Chicago, white men needed
to demonstrate that they still had their masculinity. In the
words of rock rider Dave Marsh, white males eighteen to
thirty four, the most likely to see disco is the
product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins, and therefore that the
most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such
threats to their security. It goes almost without saying that

(51:17):
such appeals are racist and sexist. Sikes Nile Rogers compared
the riot to a Nazi era book burning, and so,
just as the bloody Altamont concert a decade earlier was
an epitaph for the sixties counterculture, so the Comiskey Park
riot became shorthand for the end of the disco era.
It was though, the rock fans staged a violent coup

(51:37):
against disco, and incredibly it succeeded. The disco bubble burst
pretty quickly. After Comiskey Park, disco label owner Eddie O'Laughlin
remembers just how quickly, remarkably the next day disco was dead.
It was like talk about fast, that was unbelievably fast.
So people that knew me through all the seven ease

(52:00):
I didn't want to know me so much after that,
hard to get people on the phone. I was so
associated with the disco movement, and it was a very
hurtful time to discover that, uh oh, you're part of
something that's over and this is all a nonforgiving business.
It's a harsh business. It's um tough in that way,

(52:22):
and you really have to be producing, and it was
a very difficult time to fight back for myself, and
it took me about three or four years coloring my
way back and producing local hits. The same week is

(52:43):
Disco Demolition Night, the latest chic single, good Times, debuted
in the top ten. No one knew it at the time,
but good Times would become the last hit of the
disco error and a fitting clothes. It was against an
unforgettable baseline kes female vocalists saying in an emotionally drained

(53:07):
tone that suggested that well those times are actually about
to end. Podcast When good Times entered the top ten.

(53:31):
On July one, the top six records in the country
were all disco records, but by the time it fell
out of the top ten on September, there were no
disco records in the top ten at all. The bubble
had completely burst. Disco was declared dead White kids, the

(53:51):
media reported in relieved even celebratory tones were dancing to
rock and roll again, and a rock record called My
Sharona by a new wave group called The Knack replaced
Good Times at number one and stayed there until October.

(54:19):
Even now, Rogers was shocked and how quickly disco had
become uncool. Well, the thing is that we didn't know that,
like Komiskey Park thing was going on. It happened while
we were out of the country. We read about it.
That's why I had two reactions. One was reading about
it and saying, uh, that's interesting, and then to coming
home and seeing how almost the entire record industry it

(54:41):
sort of ostracized us. Were like, wait a minute, we
were happening. We had to number one pop records in
the same years. It was strange that now all of
a sudden, nobody's calling us a party that summer celebrating
Sheik's success led the group's leaders to quickly decide to
move on from disco and from Sheik itself. Now Rogers

(55:01):
recalls and had a room that had the letters T I,
S C O over the dance for a partet. So
were split. Happened to a restaurant and half into a disco,
and it was, you know, dinner in one room, and
after dinner, we're supposed to go into the other room
and dance, but now it discu no one wanted to
go in the other room and dance, and so Bernard

(55:21):
and I sat in that other room, in the nice
air condition room, all by ourselves, and to look at
those guys. So those are the guys who used to
be our hero. They're afraid to come in here just
because it's a disco. And that was the end of
Chic And we wrote the album Real People as a
result of that. We were so upset and we said,
real People. I just want to be with some real people.

(55:44):
Good Times fell out of the top forty in October
of nineteen seventy nine, coinciding with the release of the
very first rap record, Rappers Delight, which used Sheik's baseline
as its musical basis, the glossy fantasy world of disco
was being replaced by a harsher street cousin cope, you

(56:05):
don't stop to walk into the bay man say, by
the way rappers Delight was the subject of a previous
episode of Speed of Sound, in case you want to
check that out anyway. Within a month, Ronald Reagan announced
his candidacy for the presidency and that led the way
to a more conservative America, and that same month, fifty

(56:26):
two Americans were taken hostage. Genn I Ron the eighties
had jumped started a little bit early. Xenophobia was in
the air, a popular backlash against sexual license became part
of the conservative Reagan Wave, and as a final exclamation point,
a new mysterious gay cancer appeared that would soon be
known as AIDS. Bobby Shaw remembers the impact of AIDS

(56:49):
on the club scene. I think back in those days,
the gay scene was so much more prevalent and more
breaking records, and then when the AIDS epidemic happened, it
wasn't quote as much fun anymore. People were dying, and
you know, it kind of took the energy out of
the nightlife for some people. For a lot of people,

(57:10):
people disappeared. Together. These developments ended what Nile Rodgers once
called the most liberated era in the history of the world.
And then in November, Studio fifty four is owners pled
guilty to tax evasion and embezzlement. I r S agents
raided the club and found hundreds of thousands of dollars
in cash hidden in trash bags inside the ceiling. Steve

(57:34):
rebellin Ian Schrager went to jail. As nine drew to
an end, a few superstars managed to have big hits
with disco songs that they had concocted before they realized
that the whole balloon was about to burst. Michael Jackson
hit with Don't Stop Till You Get Enough, and the

(58:00):
superstar duo of Donna Summer and Barber Streisand topped the
charts with Enough Is Enough. But in spite of these hits,
Middle America was definitely saying enough is enough to disco itself.
In fact, the hit movie Airplane, which was filmed in

(58:22):
the summer of seventy nine, poked fun at the death
of disco by having the film's jet airliners smashed through
the control tower of a disco radio station in Chicago.
Of course, Chicago, where Just Go lives forever. The disco
implosion brought to an end the hit making days of

(58:44):
most of the genre's biggest acts. Chic would never have
another pop hit, although Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards went
on to become one of the most successful producing teams
in the world, working with everybody from Madonna to David
Bowie to Duran Duran and there would be no more hits.
Her sister Sledge, Peaches and herb Gloria Gayner or the
producer Freddie Perrin and the Village People faced the harsh

(59:07):
reality of the post disco world when they released their
feature film Can't Stop the Music. In It's extravaganza that
launches the eighties. It's Ellen Cars Can't Stop the Music.
That film was met with complete derision. As for Casey
and the Sunshine Band, They'd managed to have one more

(59:28):
number one record the next year before the hits dried up,
but notably, it was with a ballad, the fittingly titled
Please Don't Go. And it would be ten long years
before the BGS would have another top ten record. They

(59:49):
were just too identified with disco and its excesses. But
Barry Gibb didn't spend the eighties moping in exile. He
wrote and produced a string of monster hits with a
long list of superstars from Barbara Streisand to Kenny Rogers

(01:00:13):
and Dolly Parton. Alone among the stars of disco, it
was Donna Summer who managed to reposition herself after the
genres demise. In nineteen eighty, she won a Grammy in

(01:00:37):
the Best Female Rock Vocal category for Hot Stuff, which
voted well for her ability to shed the disco label,
and then she went on to make some really big
pop records in the eighties, like threes She Works Hard
for the Money, another record which MIxS rock, guitars and
dance pets. Speaking of the nineteen eighty Grammys as an

(01:01:11):
epilogue of sorts to the disco era, Gloria Gainers I
Will Survive won the one and only Grammy ever awarded
in the Best Disco Song category. The dominance of disco
at the nineteen seventy nine awards had caused the creation
of the category, and then the disco implosion later that
year caused the category to be quickly eliminated. By the

(01:01:32):
beginning of nineteen eighty, most of America's all disco radio
stations abandoned the format, and in two Billboard changed the
name of the Disco chart to the Dance Chart. Corey
Robbins remembers the transition, the word disco is out. You
couldn't use it. You couldn't say I'm making a disco
record anymore. I think that was seventy nine or eighty.
But there were still there were still disco records. They

(01:01:54):
were called dance records. Then they just stopped calling disco records,
and also radio stopped playing them for a while, but
the clubs didn't stop playing them. In the hangover from
the major labels disco binge, the music industry suffered some
real financial hardship. CBS had invested in all those new
facilities to manufacture more vinyl LPs, anticipating the demand for

(01:02:15):
disco records that never materialized, and because unsold records were
completely returnable by the stores, the music industry was getting
more and more returns. Coupled with the worsening recession, which
also affected record sales, the record business found itself in
a very dire situation for several years until it was
rescued by Michael Jackson's thriller and the invention of the

(01:02:37):
compact disc. Now, disco may have been over as an era,
but it influenced everything that came after. Paradise Garage. DJ
Larry Levan didn't miss a beat as the eighties dawned,
and he became one of the pioneers of house music,
that era's dominant dance sound You Don't Have the World Baby.

(01:03:05):
While the number of discos decreased dramatically, with a lot
of those shopping wall discos closing after the bubble burst,
the club scene continued to thrive, with sub genres ranging
from house to high energy to Latin freestyle, proving very
worthy successors to the disco and the synth Pop that

(01:03:33):
made it to America a couple of years into the
eighties was directly influenced by disco, with British groups like Duran, Duran, Heaven, Seventeen,
New Order, The Human League and Public Image Limited combining
disco influenced grooves with punk attitude. Incidentally, it's worth noting

(01:04:04):
that in the rest of the world, disco never experienced
that backlash or the sudden demise, and that meant that
it was safe for alumni of the British punk scene
that incorporate disco sounds, thus creating what would become eighties pop.
Of course, hip hop, which incubated in the discos of
the South Bronx in the late seventies and which burst
onto the national scene by lifting the musical track from

(01:04:26):
Good Times, would ultimately become the most popular music genre
in the world, with seventies disco samples a staple of
hip hop sonic arsenal to this day, as Sheik's keyboardist
Raymond Jones once deserved. If disco really sucked in such
a major way, hip hop wouldn't have stepped in and
appropriated it. Finally, despite Steve Doll in the insane Coho

(01:04:47):
Lips Army's best attempt to paint disco is the mortal
enemy of rock and roll, in two thousand and thirteen,
Donna Summer was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame. The war was over and disco may not
have won, but it's survived. And that wraps up this

(01:05:26):
episode of Speed of Sound. Next time, we'll tackle of
the perfect intersection of pop music and pop culture with
just the right dash of horror and a splash of comedy.
As we share the frighteningly fascinating story behind the Monster Match.

(01:05:46):
If you want to take a deeper dive into the
artists 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

(01:06:08):
produced by Lauren Bright, Pacheco, Noel Brown and me. Taylor
shacogn 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 mirrored ball. Speed of Sound is a production of

(01:06:31):
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.