The Early Days (And Nights) of Disco: The Rise and Fall of 70’s Disco Part 1

Tune in as Steve delves into the colorful history and influences that drove the decadent decade of Disco- from a clandestine club in Nazi occupied Paris to the underground urban clubs that heralded the beginning of the gay pride movement all the way to disco's dominance of Top 40 Radio.  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Speed of Sound is a production of I Heart Radio, Hi,
and Welcome to Speed of Sound, the show that breaks
down the stories behind the pop songs and sounds that
topped the charts and shape the soundtrack of generations. I'm
Steve Greenberg. From the time I was a kid, I
listened to a lot of records. I take my favorite

(00:23):
songs off the radio onto cassettes, and then I'd catalog
everything into a loosely finder, which eventually had a couple
of thousand songs in it. Fast forward a few years
and I found myself DJing for my college radio station
sixty one w A M. You Welcome to another Thrill
Pact edition of Stevie G's Beach Party, and later on
being a club DJ, writing about music, teaching a college

(00:46):
course about pop music history, running record labels, and even
producing a few hits over several decades, like The Dogs Out. Yeah,
I'm digging on Dude, Nonny, I'm good. I could have

(01:08):
another better Problemly should not? I got somebody at home.
Mostly though, I'm still listening to a lot of records,
and I'm happy to be here to tell the stories
behind some of the most important moments in music history.
The ones that really changed everything. Today, we're tackling the

(01:30):
pulse setting genre of subculture and dance music that defined
the nineteen seventies as we recall the rise and fall
of disco. In its day, disco proved to be one
of the most provocative genres of pop music. It was sexy,

(01:54):
it was flashy, it was indulgent. But even back then,
few really understood where it came from and what it
was rooted in. People tended to either love it or
loathe it. So given how polarizing disco proved to be,
it's only fitting that the story of the disco era
began with a riot and also ended with a riot,
and the two riots occurred almost precisely ten years apart.

(02:18):
The first one was the June nine uprising at the
Stone Wall in in New York's Greenwich Village. Now, as
unbelievable as it may seem, in nineteen sixty nine, it
was illegal in New York for people of the same
sex to dance together. In fact, to ensure that all
male dancing sessions didn't occur, there was a New York
law on the books stipulating that there needed to be

(02:40):
at least one woman for each three men in a discotheque,
so it wasn't a male only dance. Think how insane
that sounds today, But back then it meant the gay nightlife,
by necessity took place in seedy bars which were willing
to break the law, and of course that meant the
constant thread of raids by the lease who would arrest

(03:01):
patrons for numerous supposed infractions, including same sex dancing. Gay
men back then regularly went out on the weekends with
enough cash in their pocket to post bail in case
they got arrested. Now. One of those bars, the stone
wall In, was rated in the summer of nineteen sixty nine.
It was the night after Judy Garland's New York funeral,

(03:21):
and well, Judy Garland was a major gay icon. Emotions
ran high, and instead of allowing themselves to be pushed
around and arrested as in the past, the patrons of
the stone wall In fought back, which came as a
big surprise to the police, who had never experienced resistance
from the gay community before a violent riot ensued. The

(03:45):
Stonewall riot is of course, remembered as the beginning of
the gay rights movement in the United States. The first
time really that the gay community said, we're not going
to allow ourselves to be pushed to the corner. At
one point that gets lost these days when we tell
the story of the uprising that night is that the
stone Wall in was, above everything else, a dance bar

(04:05):
where people dance to the tunes played on the jukebox.
It was a place where gay men, lesbians, and drag
queens could all dance with each other with impunity. In fact,
patrons remember it is perhaps the only bar in New
York where gay men could even slow dance with each other,
sharing that kind of affection in public. So the violence

(04:28):
that erupted in reaction to the police raid that night
was motivated in the immediate moment, at least partly by
the crowd feeling that their freedom to just go out
and dance was being threatened. And in the aftermath of
Stone Wall, one of the first accomplishments of that movement
in New York City was that they got the laws
banning same sex dancing repealed. Almost immediately after that, underground

(04:52):
gay discos began to spring up, open to only those
in the know. Okay, so before we get into the
disco scene in the early ninety seventies in New York.
It's worth taking a little detour to explore the history
of discothex themselves, starting with the origin of the word
discotheque itself. It's a French word which translates as a

(05:12):
library of phonograph records and law. Discotheque was actually the
name of the first disco that ever opened. It was
a clandestine dance club in Paris during the World War
two Nazi occupation. At La Discotheque, they played jazz records,
jazz having been outlawed by the Nazis because it was
music created by African Americans and Jews. Consequently, jazz became

(05:34):
a real signifier of descent in the French Resistance, and
a lot of illicit clubs sprang up where records were
played in secret. In the postwar years, the same underground
exclusive sensibility arrived in New York City when a man
named Olivier Cokeland, who was a French expatriate, opened the
club which actually was America's first discotheque, on New Year's

(05:55):
Even nineteen sixty. The club was pretty successful, but Discote
became a lot more popular with the advent of the twist,
which was danced by jet setters at a club called
the Peppermint Lounge in Midtown Manhattan. As we covered in
our Twist episode of Speed of Sound. The thing about

(06:18):
the twist was that it was the first dance you
danced alone without touching your partner, making it both scandalous
and a huge sensation. Celebrities from Marilyn Monroe to the
Beatles were seen in the gossip pages dancing the twist
at the Peppermint Lounge. After the Twist craze died down,
the beautiful people moved on to a new club called Arthur,

(06:40):
opened by a woman named Sybil Burton, who was the
wife Richard Burton left in order to marry Elizabeth Taylor.
Sybil Burton gave her club the name Arthur after a
scene from the Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night when
a reporter asked George Harrison, and George Harrison said, are

(07:00):
there was the very first club to employ a velvet
rope to keep people out, which of course just made
more people want to get in, because getting into Arthur
meant you were special, at least for one night. Meanwhile,
inside the club, the DJ Terry Nol was a real innovator.
He popularized the idea of mixing records using to turn
tables to keep the music going without a gap, and

(07:27):
of course, this is something DJs do until this day.
As the sixties war on, disco tex became absorbed into
the hippie season and they featured psychedelic light shows and
such to accompany the high provided by LSD and other drugs.
But by the end of the sixties, in the spirit

(07:47):
of do your own thing, freeform body swaying had really
taken the place of actual dances, and so disco tex
fell out of favor. And that brings us back up
to where the gay clubs that opened after of the
Stonewall Riot reinvented the discotheque experience yet again. As the
seventies dawned, there were a lot of clubs operating in

(08:09):
New York, but a few really stand out for the
contributions made by their DJs. One of the first to
hit the scene was The Loft, which David Mancuso opened
in his downtown loft on Valentine's Day nineteen seventy by
throwing a party which he called Love Saves the Day
that has gone down as legend. The name Love Saves

(08:30):
the Day itself was a play on L. S. D
and Mancuso, a mere six months after Woodstock was bringing
that hippie vibe into the seventies by mixing it with
dance floor groups. The loft literally was in the loft
where David Mancuso lived. Attending a party there felt like
being in someone's living room, because that's what it was.

(08:52):
Bobby Shaw, who later in the seventies became a disco
promotions man for Warner Brothers Records, recalls the scene. It
was the living room that became a party room. You know,
balloons all over the place. There was food that you know.
The dancelow was big enough to accommodate enough people to
make a party. I mean it was a party. And uh,

(09:13):
David not necessarily mixed records, would let things in and
just start something up. His selection was just amazing. The
only way David Mancuso was able to get away with
hosting a disco in his loft was he claimed all
of his parties were rent parties. Rent parties were a
type of party that were legal in New York City
back then, where you could charge money for people to

(09:36):
come to your house for a party, as long as
the money was to help pay your rent, and that's
what David Mancuso did with most of the money he
brought in at the Loft parties. Now, the Loft is
considered by a lot of people to be the birthplace
of disco. Mancuso had an awesome sound system and terrific
taste in music. Plus he was constantly scouring stores for

(09:58):
unknown sounds that he can adduced to the crowd, like
the song We're hearing right now dub by the British
funk group see Mandate. The Loft parties became a weekly
event and they were invite only. The party would get
going around midnight on Saturday night and could stretch on
all the way to the middle of Sunday afternoon. Bobby
Shaw remembers, obviously people were doing drugs. I mean, how

(10:21):
could you be up at that hour not be doing drugs?
You know it was peaceful, do you you know? There
was never violence. I never saw a problem ever at
the Loft. How late did the party to go to
three for on the afternoon. David Mancuso only wanted people
at the Loft who were willing to share in a
very communal vibe. All the music he played suggested hope, redemption, pride. Remember,

(10:44):
back then there was no music known as disco music.
The DJs just played whatever they thought would lead to
a great night, a great party. Future music executive Corey Robbins,
who attended many parties at the Loft, remembers one of
the most unusual things about David and Cuso style of dj.
He didn't use a mixer. He used to turntables, but
he didn't use a mixer. He would just he would

(11:05):
let a record end and then played the next record.
There was definitely a trace of hippie idealism at the Loft,
and a lot of the music was hippie influenced. For instance,
Mancuso would played the English psychedelic group Traffic or the

(11:29):
jazz funk of War. If the Loft had a theme song,
well then appropriately enough it was House Party by Fred Wesley. Meanwhile,

(11:52):
over on West forty three Street, a club opened in
an old Baptist church and was christened, appropriately enough the Church.
Inside there were murals of the devil and of angels
with exposed genitalia. This was way too controversial in the
city closed the church down pretty quickly. It opened shortly thereafter.

(12:15):
They're renamed the Sanctuary, and the angels now had clusters
of grapes painted over their private parts. Corey Robbins, who
was a local DJ at the time, remembers the scene. Yeah. Well,
I was never a drug user, so I did. I
did drink, but I would never use drugs. And you
didn't really see in the gay clubs. And I went
to gay clubs too. A lot of the best DJs

(12:36):
working gay clubs, and a lot of the records broke
out of gay clubs, loads of them. Uh. Probably the
most important clubs were the gay clubs in the in
the mid seventies, um and those where you wanted to
get your records played. I would see poppers, you know,
like they would have these little vials of whatever that
is amal nitrate I think, and then they put it

(12:56):
on their shirt and sniffed their shirt while they were dancing.
The Sanctuaries. DJ Francis Grosso had been on the scene
for a while. He got his first gig in nineteen
sixty eight when Terry Nol didn't show up one night
for work at another club because he was reportedly too
stoned out of his mind to leave the house. When
he started spinning at the Sanctuary, Francis Grosso decided that

(13:18):
DJ set should be a journey and not just a
string of unrelated records. While David Mancuso preferred lush, inspirational tunes,
Francis Grosso focused on hard rhythm. He played the more
rhythmic rock records plus African records like Ola Tunji's Drums
of Passion. Drums of Passion pretty much became Francis Grasso's

(13:46):
signature tune, and he liked Latino grooves, so he played
a lot of Santana were Francis Grosso is the DJ
who really began the idea that it was the DJ
who was the star to disco, not the records. He

(14:09):
was a musician and the turntables and mixer they were
his instruments. At the same time, at a club on
twenty two Street called the Gallery, Nikki Siano was hard
at work perfecting the art of mixing records as we
know it today. The Gallery had the most sophisticated sound
system of any club around, with pitch variation on the
turntables so he could adjust the speed, allowing for really

(14:32):
seamless cross fades, and on top of that, he used
three turntables to play his favorite parts of records over
and over in rapid repetition, extending the break into infinity.
If you think about it, Nikki Siana was really your
precursor to early hip hop DJ. There were discos springing

(14:56):
up all over New York back then, and just about
every clubgoer from that period had their own favorite. For instance,
Nile Rodgers, who went on to form Chic with Bernard Edwards,
has this memory. The other club that was downtown that
was super important that I don't see people talk about
much anymore was a Persian club called Darfish. Now, the

(15:19):
Persian scene and how influential they were on disco was
super important, and I don't know why they're not in
the history books because Darvish was one of the most
important discos in all of New York City. It had
the very, very sort of hip Persian crowd. That's where

(15:40):
I met go Goose. That's where I met the group
that wounded up becoming Dr Buzzard, Savannahban, August Darnell and
people like that, and Cody Mundy. They were all involved
in that early disco scene. And in the summer, the
disco scene migrated with the gay community to Fire Island
and they Asian spot outside of New York City where

(16:02):
a different club scene emerged. Bobby Shaw remembers that world well.
It had the Pavilion, which was an amazing scene. It
was a club that stayed open until like ten eleven
in the morning. There was no air conditioning, which was amazing.
Somebody was sweating, and it created a very sexual atmosphere.
Music journalist Peter Brownstein wrote, bona fide revolutions, whether political, cultural,

(16:26):
or spiritual, occur infrequently in history, and it's possible to
pass an entire lifetime without experiencing one. What then, do
transcendence seekers or would be revolutionaries do in the meantime?
One option is nightlife, one of society's few sanctioned antidotes
to the monotony of the day. Today, nightlife is in

(16:46):
the sense revolution during the off season. That pretty much
sums up the feeling at the beginning of the seventies,
all those protest marches in the sixties, the civil rights movement,
the anti war movement, had all climax come to an end.
They achieved some things, but not everything that everybody wanted.

(17:08):
And now how do you continue that revolutionary spirit, especially
while holding down a job and living a normal life.
You do it at night when we come back. How
disco morphed into a social movement, lifestyle and its own genre.

(17:31):
In the first years of the seventies, there was a
major disillusionment in America, especially among youth. There was this
realization that the counterculture wasn't going to bring on a
hippie utopia after all, that maybe youth really couldn't change
the world. It was that feeling of shared disappointment that
the who captured so perfectly and won't get fooled again.

(17:59):
Same but so many of the behaviors associated with the counterculture,
the sexual revolution, the drug culture, they all continued into
the seventies got even bigger, but they became completely delinked
from ideology. So basically the idealism was tossed aside. The

(18:19):
hedonism stayed. The protest marches were in the past. Now
it was time to look for a job, save some money,
and on Saturday night let off some steam. And this
was an ideal youth culture in which disco could incubate
until four Disco was whatever. DJs at the New York

(18:42):
clubs said, it was like that record we just heard
a little Bit of Life and Death in g and
A by the Avoco Dream. It was a real melting pot.
Jazz fusion rock album Cuts the Mexican by the obscure
British rock band Babe Ruth was a favorite around town. Yeah,

(19:07):
there were danceable soul singles, obscure European imports, anything really
that would create the right mood on the dance floor.
David Mancuso found a record by a Spanish group called
Barabbus while he was on vacation in Amsterdam, and he

(19:28):
turned several of the songs on their album into club favorites,
including a track called Woman. But one thing was for sure,

(19:50):
the DJ's pretty much side step the hits. If it
was on the radio, it was already over in the clubs.
The DJ's preferred album Cuts b side it's singles that
were never hits. And from all this seemingly unrelated music,
the DJ would locate the interlocking parts and stitch them
all together in a way that really caused dancers to

(20:11):
experience music in an entirely new way. Now, the early
productions that hit upon the formula that the DJs were
looking for, we're disco hits only unintentionally, since no one
was making records with the aim of having them played
in New York clubs. Everyone's goal was still let's get
a record on the radio. Now. As it happened, a

(20:32):
few records really hit the bullseye on the dance floor
and began to set the template for what would come next,
and most of these proto disco records were coming out
of Philadelphia. Philadelphia had a long history as one of
America's music capitals. It was the home of Dick Clark's

(20:54):
American Bandstand, which, as we discussed on our episode on
the Twist, was broadcast national five days a week, and
which had the power to really turn a song into
a hit. Not surprisingly, a lot of the featured songs
were on a local Philadelphia label called Cameo Parkway Records,
the label the Chubby Checkers Twist was released on in fact,

(21:20):
but by the mid sixties, Dick Clark had moved band
Stand Los Angeles and Cameo Parkway they had gone bankrupt,
leaving some of the best session musicians in the whole
country to try and figure out what to do next.
Now by a core group of these players emerged and
began to have hits under a whole slew of different names,

(21:41):
recording as Cliff Nobles and Company. They had a top
ten smash in with a song called The Horse. The

(22:01):
next year they had another hit, this time under the
name Electric Indian, with a song called Chemo Sabe. Eventually
the group named itself m FSB. They told the press
that it stood for mother, father, sister brother. In reality,

(22:25):
m FSB stood for something a lot dirtier. I'm sure
you can figure it out. At the center of this
group of musicians was the rhythm section of Norman Harris
on guitar, Ronnie Baker on bass, and perhaps most importantly,
Earl Young on drums. These were really the first musicians
who figured out that there was an appetite for a

(22:45):
certain kind of record in the discos and started making
music tailored exactly to that sound. At first, they were
just making soul records for the radio under the supervision
of the biggest producers in Philadelphia, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff.
But Earl Young was developing a drum style that wasn't
really like anything else out there, in contrast to say,

(23:06):
the classic motown dance records, which featured a backbeat complimented
by handclaps on the two and four. Earl Young instead
was playing four on the floor. That is, he was
hitting the kick drum with every beat of a four
four beat. Earl Young's use of this beat first showed

(23:30):
up very prominently in a N two record by The
Intruders called Win Place or Showed Now. The use of

(23:50):
that beat was clearly intended to suggest the galloping of
a horse, inspired by the horse racing analogies found in
the lyrics to Win Place or Show. So it was
kind of a novelty, but Earl Young knew he'd hit
upon something pretty cool, and by the Intruder's next released
I'll Always Loved My Mama in three, he augmented that

(24:10):
same beat with a high hat playing eighth notes, and
then you throw in some syncopated percussion and you have
the disco beat in all its glory. The club DJs
really loved those records, and they're among the first ones
that really sound identifiably like what we would call disco.

(24:31):
But as I said, they weren't made with the discos
in mind. Nor was a record that many critics contend
is the first true disco record, a record called Girl
You Need a Change of Mind by Eddie Kendricks, who
was formerly from the Temptations. Go Ye. Now, this record

(24:58):
had all the ingredients you could ever want seventies disco.
It had the beat, the peaks and valleys that would
drive a dance floor crowd into a frenzy, and several
long instrumental breaks, and on top of all that, it
was seven and a half minutes long. DJ's always love
long records which keep the groove going longer, and which
additionally provide them the opportunity for a bathroom break. Girl

(25:24):
You Need a Change of Mind truly was the perfect
disco record, but it was also an accidental disco record.
Frank Wilson, who produced it, has said he wasn't even
aware the disco scene existed when he made the record.
He says he was just trying to make a hit
for the radio. And the extended instrumental break, well, that
was actually no different than what his fellow Motown producer

(25:45):
Norman Woodfield was doing at the time with the Temptations.
So I'm sticking with my contention that the first people
who realized they were making disco records while they were
making them where our friends Harris Baker and Young. There
was a reason for this. Harris Baker and Young weren't
only producers, but they were also recording artists in their
own right as part of the group The Tramps. Now

(26:07):
in two the Tramps recorded a moderate hit called Zing
Went the Strings of My Heart, which was enthusiastically embraced
by the New York club DJs. While this is yet

(26:33):
another example of an unintentional disco record, the Tramps made
numerous live appearances and clubs in the Northeast as a
result of the song's success, and they noticed that there
was a particular sound which was really going over with
the crowds on the club dance floors. The Tramps returned
to the studio armed with this information, and they started
producing one disco song after another, all of which were

(26:57):
far bigger in the discos than on the radio, starting
with Love Epidemic. Now on that record we really got
to hear Earl young signature open high hat sound, which

(27:19):
became such an important part of disco As the years
went by, Harris Baker and Young also began to apply
their formula to records for other artists they produced, like
Smarty Pants by the girl group First Choice, God, and

(27:46):
in reaction to the gasoline shortage which was caused by
the Arab oil embargo, Baker, Harris and Young brought us
the incredible when the fuel runs out by the executive
suite yourself, just sis, where money keep you Now? One

(28:15):
record did find its way from the New York clubs
to become a massive radio hit, and it came from
the most unlikely of places. My law Michael Michel Michel, Yes,
that's the same I'm a saying Mama saw Mako saw
chant that Michael Jackson used many years later on want

(28:37):
to be starting something and Rihanna used and don't stop
the music. The original song, Sulmakosa, was recorded in V
one by saxophonist Manud Banu, who lived in the African

(28:59):
nation a Maroon, where he was a youth star. In
nineteen seventy two, David man Queso found a copy of
Sulmakosa in a Brooklyn, West Indian record store and he
started playing it at the loft. People loved this record
and they rushed to buy every available copy in New York. Luckily,

(29:19):
one of those copies made its way to Frankie Crocker,
the program director of New York R and B station
w b LS. It's called and at the time, the
most influential programmer in US Black radio. Good afternoon, ladies
and gentlemen, and welcome to the Frankie Crocker's Show. In

(29:39):
my career, I have been known to say that this
is the show that's found to put more of DIPSI
you small cut in your struck, more blood in your stride.
If you don't dig it, you know you've got a
hold in your soul. And you don't eat chicken on sideway.
Once Frankie Crocker started to play Sulmakosa, Atlantic Records rushed
to acquire the to get it in the store. It

(30:05):
got to number thirty five nationally, making it the first
record to migrate from the New York discos on to
top forty radio. But because the record was so different
it wasn't in English, it was from Cameroon. The music
industry took its success as a fluke and completely failed
to realize that a new path to the charts was
being created by the way. Many many years later, Mono

(30:28):
Dubango successfully sued Michael Jackson for lifting that mamasem Amasama
Maco sawline and I should note that the great Mono
Dubango died in the spring of two thousand and twenty,
a victim of COVID nineteen. The next record to bubble
up from the discos to the radio was even Digger.
By seventy three, Barry White had already had a couple

(30:49):
of major hits featuring his sexy bass voice and sultry streams.
He had this side project, a girl group called Love Unlimited,
and they've had a couple of hits too. On Love

(31:16):
Unlimited latest album, Barry White added an instrumental prelude to
the group's song Under the Influence of Love. He called
it Love's Theme, and again he didn't realize he was
making a disco record together. Love's Theme and Under the

(31:47):
Influence of Love ran for an uninterrupted eight minutes and
seventeen seconds. As with the Eddie Kendricks record, the length
only added extra appeal for the disco DJs, and the
song became a major club record. After about six months
of club play, Barry White decided, hey, let's put the
instrumental out as a single, and he credited it to

(32:09):
the entirely fictional Love and Limited Orchestra. The record went
all the way to number one, But once again a
lot of music industry observers thought the record's path to
success was a fluke. It was an instrumental, after all.
As n seventy three turned to nineteen seventy four, records
were migrating from the discos to radio more and more,

(32:30):
with Gamble and Huff getting the Earl Young disco beat
on a big hit record with Harold Melvin and the
Blue Notes, The Love I Lost Part One. That's right,
I said, The Love I Lost Part one. If a
DJ wanted to play both part one and Part two,
he'd have to turn over the seven inch single and

(32:52):
play the B side. This was becoming an increasing problem
as longer songs were becoming the norm now that producer
as were aware of the potential for success in the clubs,
and longer songs just wouldn't fit onto one side of
a seven inch record. A solution of that problem was
still a year away, and in the spring of Earl

(33:13):
Young's drumming showed up yet again on a classic record.
This time it was an instrumental recorded by MFSB called
Love Is the Message, and it went down as maybe
the greatest disco anthem of all time. It was a
six minute instrumental, not the least bit funky, just the
sound of a sophisticated fantasy nightlife caught on record while

(33:35):
every DJ played this one, and it became arguably the
theme song of the whole disco era. There are those
who always think of it as the signature song of
Nikki Siano during his days at the Gallery, and history
credits him with turning this one into a massive hit.
With the possibility of pop radio success and the money

(33:57):
that went along with it. Now it's extremely real. Record
producers began to consciously apply themselves to making the new
style of dance music that the disco text wanted so badly,
and so began the process of codifying disco as a
style of music being produced, rather than just whatever the
DJs were playing. When we Come Back, disco breaks out

(34:22):
of the underground clubs into mainstream America and onto radio
stations across the country. At the start of the nineteen seventies,
disco culture was still pretty much kept a secret from
most of straight America. Word began to get out a

(34:43):
little when journalist Vinceletti published the first national press piece
on the disco scene in September nine for Rolling Stone
entitled Disco Rock Powarty and Yes, that's parties spelled with
five a's. But what ultimately mainstream disco culture was the
nineteen seventy four recession brought on by the oil embargo.

(35:06):
It was definitely cheaper to pay a DJ fifty dollars
than to hire live entertainers, and the cover charge for
entrance to a disco was way less expensive than a
ticket to a rock concert. Thus, disco started to spring
up throughout the country, especially in lower income areas. So
what we had in nineteen seventy four was a generation

(35:27):
of lower middle class kids who were living out hippie
hedonism without any hint of idealism, unsure about the future,
disillusioned about the state of the country. President Nixon was
in the process of resigning in scandal and deciding to
live for today. If it feels good, do it. Disco
was the perfect soundtrack. And while these were very often

(35:50):
young white people enjoying music which sprang from black and
gay culture, in fact, they weren't any less homophobic or
bigoted than most of America was at the time. In
some big cities like New York, straight whites gay men,
Hispanics and blacks may have all shared the same dance floor,
but for the most part it was pretty segregated. There
were black discos, Hispanic discos, straight gay et cetera, and

(36:15):
it was still very much an underground scene. But then
all at once a magical record appeared that made it
all bubble to the surface. And when this song hit
there couldn't be any more doubt that disco was going
to be a major force in pop music. In three

(36:41):
in l a group called The Hughes Corporation released their
debut album, was entitled Freedom for the Stallion. The album
was produced by a man named John Flores, who had
had some success a couple of years earlier producing a
group called the Friends of Distinction. The Huge Corporation project

(37:04):
had nothing at all to do with disco, and there
was this one song on the album that Flores couldn't
even figure out how to produce. It wasn't considered a
very important song, so Flores farmed it out to an
arranger named Tom Sellers. The song was called rock the Boat. Now.
Tom Sellers was a kind of journeyman arranger, originally out
of Philadelphia, and as it happened, he'd worked in the

(37:27):
past with the mfs B Crew. In fact, he's the
one who did the arrangement on that electric Indian record
that we heard earlier. Sellers had recently come back from
vacation in the Caribbean, and inspired by that, he arranged
a track with a four on the floor beat that
had a little upbeat at the end of each measure,

(37:49):
and then he augmented the beat with some syncopated bongos
and a kind of light reggae baseline. It was a
very cool beat, almost like a backwards version of a
funk beat, and it definitely was unique. But once they
recorded it, everybody involved quickly forgot about it. It wasn't
even the single when the Hughes Corporation album came out,

(38:12):
but somehow the song was discovered by New York's club DJs,
who started playing it in late nineteen It was a sensation.
DJ's were putting a copy of the record on each
turn table and then cutting back and forth to extend
the song. Everybody loved it. The Hughes Corporation's label, r
c A started getting tons of requests from stores all

(38:35):
around New York for this record, and they decided to
make it a single. The producers of the song were surprised.
It was this random song that they had completely forgotten about.
They lived in l a and they didn't know anything
about the disco scene in New York. But they were
thrilled to learn that this throwaway track was huge and
gay New York discos, and so they decided to double

(38:56):
down on it. They did something that was possibly unprecedented,
but certainly it was very, very smart. What they did
is they took the tapes of Rock the Boat back
into the studio and they remixed the song to make
the bass drum, electric bass guitar, and the other rhythmic
instruments much louder and much brighter. Pop records back then

(39:16):
generally didn't have the drums that loud in the mix.
And when the new version of Rock the Boat was released,
it really sounded distinctive. In the spring of seventy four,
it got on the radio in New York City and
it immediately shot to number one in its second week
on the radio. It was crazy. I was a kid
listening to New York radio back then, and I can
tell you that Rock the Boat definitely didn't sound like

(39:39):
anything else When it went national It was an immediate sensation,
jumping in a few weeks to number one nationwide. Even
Casey Cayson professed amazement when he played the record on
American Top forty as it was racing up the chart. Well.
This next record got practically no airplay at all when
it was released in New York City in February this year,

(40:00):
and consequently no seals. But a few of the big
discotheqs in New York had copies of the record and
they started playing it along with the other established hits.
And the response to this unknown record was overwhelming. Dancers
kept requesting it and talking about it, and pretty soon
people were going into record stores and asking for it.
And this week it moves up eleven, not just to
number twelve. Here is the Hughes Corporation with the record

(40:24):
that dancers love Rock the Boat, so I like to do.
When Rock the Boat went to number one on July
four four, there was finally no doubt that the disco

(40:46):
sound was ready to take over pop radio. In fact,
the onslaught began immediately. The very next week, Rock the
Boat was replaced at number one nationally by another disco record,
this one from Miami. Miami was the other American city

(41:07):
besides New York where club DJ's were always quickly serviced
with the latest records. This was due to it being
the home of one of America's biggest record distributors, a
man named Henry Stone, who also owned the Austin Record Label. Now,
Miami is very close to the islands of the Bahamas,
and in Austin Records had a big hit with a

(41:29):
record called Funky Nassa by a Bahamian group called the
Beginning of the End. You might remember we mentioned that
track on our first episode of Speed of Sound when
we discussed the evolution of Bahamian music. Beginning of the

(41:52):
Ends album contains several songs that showcase this really distinctive
Bahamian junk anoo beat which featured cow bell and goat
skin drums, all offset against funky horns baby. Hearing that

(42:18):
music influenced a young engineer at the Austin label named
Harry Wayne Casey to form his own junk a new
group in Miami which he called Casey and the Sunshine
junk Au Band. Their early records were a blend of junk,
anoo and funk, and due to their really powerful rhythm,
they began to find an audience a club. Meanwhile, an

(42:52):
artist on the same label named Timmy Thomas released a
massive hit called why Can't We Live Together? That just
featured Timmy singing and playing a Hammond organ with the
drums provided by the organs built in drumbeat. Yes, that's

(43:16):
the record Drake sampled in Hotline Blame Blame. I can
know only me one day, but I digress. When Rock
the Boat took off in the clubs, case wrote a
song called Rock Your Baby, with which he intended to
tap into that very same Caribbean dance vibe that they
used Corporation We're having such success with. Casey used the

(43:40):
same organ, drum machine rumba beat as the Timmy Thomas record,
except he changed the speed and he added a four
on the floor kick drop. Casey was going to record
the song himself with the Sunshine Junkanu Band, but it
turned out he couldn't hit the high notes, so he
got another singer on the label, George McCrae, to record
it well. Rock Your Baby replaced Rock the Boat at

(44:03):
number one and went on to become one of the
biggest worldwide hits of the entire decade. For disco. It
was game on the Summer of four was the moment

(44:27):
when the culture of disco finally began to become visible
to mainstream America. Almost five years to the day after
the Stonewall riots. This was the true start of the
disco era. It would take another five years, almost to
the day for disco to go up in flames as
the result of another riot, this one on a baseball

(44:47):
field in Illinois. But we'll say that for later. And
that wraps up this episode of Speed of Down. Next week,
Disco Reign Supreme as America learns to do the hustle
while celebrities embraced the sex and drug filled scene at

(45:09):
Studio fifty. You can find a curated playlist of songs
from today's episode on our page at iHeart dot com.
I'm Steve Greenberg and until next time, you can find
me on Twitter at stevie g Pro. Speed of Sound

(45:32):
is executive produced by Lauren Bright Pacheco, Noel Brown and me.
Taylor 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 mirrored ball. Speed of Sound is a production

(45:58):
of i heart Radio. For more pot cast from my
heart Radio, check out the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.