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Sparkle: Ever wonder what a $2500 disco album sounds like?
02.07.2020
04:41 pm
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Every week Forced Exposure send out their email blast of new releases. If you are not receiving their newsletter, I suggest getting on it stat if you want the best resource to available new music that you are likely to find anywhere. The curation is valuable to me.I find out about a lot of new stuff there and try to support the effort by buying from them and not Amazon.

Anyway, it was through the Forced Exposure’s newsletter that I was made aware of a long lost disco album titled Sparkle that’s just been reissued. From the cover it appeared to be the music of an Amii Stewart-ish trio. The description, I think you’ll agree is tantalizing:

“In a genre that has classically been driven primarily by hot twelve-inches, it can sometimes be hard to find a disco album that delivers the goods from end to end—let alone a disco LP that could be described as ‘perfect.’ Does such an animal even exist? We’re pretty sure it has to, and we can probably think of a few candidates ourselves. Cultures of Soul Records presents Sparkle’s self-titled album which many disco aficionados would put into this category. Sparkle was a female vocal trio from Connecticut, assembled by the producer Harold Sargent, erstwhile drummer of the sterling funk band Wood, Brass & Steel, and creator of manifold drum breaks that would go on to be sampled for decades. Originally released in 1979, the album and the group are fittingly titled as the music is a scintillating, radiant collection of shimmering disco and dazzling funk, performed by Too Much Too Soon—the multiracial R&B band that featured Evan Rogers and Carl Sturken, the writing/production team that would discover Rihanna and power her career to global dominance fifteen years later. Also on hand is musical prodigy Rahni Harris, whose Sargent-assisted club classic ‘Six Million Steps’ is also included on the album. The result is an album that by far exceeds the sum of its parts, delivering a truly transcendent disco experience.” 

That promises an awful lot doesn’t it? To find out more, I searched for Sparkle on Discogs and saw that there was but a single copy of the original pressing for sale in the entire world. ONE single copy. A single copy that was priced at $2500! 

What does a $2500 album sound like, I wondered? Well, I didn’t have to wonder for too long as I reached out to the reissue label, Cultures of Soul Records in Boston and requested a review copy which they generously sent along. Does Sparkle live up to the advance hype? Absolutely! Seven slices of made-for-Studio 54 coulda been/shoulda been dancefloor classics that… you’ve never heard before by a group that you’ve never heard of either. The only thing I would say—and this is in no way meant to be negative—is that calling it an “album” is a bit of a stretch, the same as calling Sparkle a “group” is. More like a project, or even just a recording session or two, involving an absolutely crack studio band and some quite good vocalists. There’s no continuity with the vocals—the first track is an instrumental and two of the remaining six numbers are sung by men, not the pretty ladies on the cover. So it’s not really an album so much as it’s seven songs that, if you found them separately on 12-inches whilst crate digging, you would be thrilled about discovering them. Finding all seven spread across the sides of a single LP would be… mind boggling.

Buy Sparkle at Forced Exposure or from Cultures of Soul.
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.07.2020
04:41 pm
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‘Automatic Lover’: The incredible story of outer space Euro-disco diva Dee D. Jackson
02.08.2018
09:54 pm
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A singer, writer, and producer since the mid ‘70s, Deirdre Cozier can claim an enviable résumé that begins with a stint as the Euro-disco diva who, affecting an outer-space persona and the pseudonym “Dee D. Jackson,” gave the world Cosmic Curves, which spawned the internationally successful singles “Automatic Lover” and “Meteor Man” (if the “meatier man” pun was intentional, bravo!), all before she’d even escaped her early ‘20s.

And like all amazing journeys, this one started when someone left home.

The British-born Cozier was only 19 in 1976 when she married a musician who absconded with all of their belongings after only three weeks. Justifiably livid at such an outrageous betrayal, Cozier set off to find her husband and retrieve her stuff by following the only lead she had—his association with Abi Ofarim, an Israeli musician living in Munich. Cozier graciously shared her story with Dangerous Minds:

I borrowed a little cash from a mutual friend and took off to Germany on a train and boat. I remember getting off the train in Munich with nothing but a little brown beaten up suitcase very empty purse because he took everything else. I walked into a record shop at the train station and asking them if they knew where Abi Ofarim lived—and they did! What are the chances of that, but he told me that I would probably find him working in Union Studios, which was a taxi ride out of Munich, so I spent more than half of what I had in my purse on the ride to Union Studios, and from there on my life totally changed.

When I walked into the studios the musicians and technicians were on a break and most of them were British expats—Keith Forsey, Harold Faltermyer, engineer Zeke Lund, and the bassist Gary Unwin. I kinda walked in sat down and all eyes were on me (I was also rather cute) I introduced myself, all shyness disappearing with the bat of my eyelashes, and they were all so curious as I told them my tales of woe, then next came the question of well what do you do for a living? Telling them I was a singer and song writer seemed like the right thing to say, I had written a few songs in my life and I had sung with a few bands, and I actually did play guitar and a little piano so it wasn’t exactly a huge fib, but definitely not what I thought to be my vocation in life.

Not a “huge fib,” perhaps, but blurting out that she was a singer was hugely transformative. She soon began to sing with a Turkish/German jazz band in strip clubs, and started writing music with Unwin, with whom she contrived the Dee D. Jackson alter-ego, mining that era’s vivid imaginings of futuristic fashion and sci-fi’s preoccupation with artificial/mechanical life. The collaborators landed a recording contract with Jupiter records, leading to a hit in Austria and Switzerland with the single “Man of a Man,” and so in 1978 Cosmic Curves was born, along with a persona that made for a WONDERFUL series of sexy sci-fi camp record sleeves.
 
Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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02.08.2018
09:54 pm
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Results: When the Pet Shop Boys met Liza Minnelli
09.27.2017
03:53 pm
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The ‘Results’ cover by David LaChapelle

Whenever I have posted on this blog in the past about her mother Judy Garland, some of our less culturally-enlightened (troglodyte) readers accuse me of having “the musical tastes of a middle-aged drag queen”—so what if I do?—but that’s not going to stop me from recommending a somewhat obscure (in the US at least) 1989 collaboration between Liza Minnelli and the Pet Shop Boys.

Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant had already teamed up with Dusty Springfield, providing England’s greatest blue-eyed soul singer with a featured role in their “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” worldwide smash, her first hit single after two decades away from the pop charts, so the Pet Shop Boys producing Liza Minnelli’s comeback album must have seemed like a natural fit. Minnelli, who had not been in the recording studio since 1977, was already a fan of theirs, they of her, so it was apparently a bit of a love affair from the very start, Liza having a demonstrated knack (like her mother before her) for falling for gay men…

The results of the pairing of the chart-topping duo, then at the height of their hit-making powers and the showbiz royalty (who was working around her London concerts with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. during the sessions) were so stellar they opted to call the album Results, in keeping with the one word nomenclature customary for PSB releases. The material, cannily selected with Minnelli’s own tabloid-documented experiences—and age, at the time she was 43—in mind came together to sound exactly like what you’d think it would sound like with Minnelli’s iconic powerful/tender/vulnerable/triumphant voice placed atop typical (but by no means second rate) Pet Shop Boys symphonic electronic disco beats. Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti and Anne Dudley from the Art of Noise did the orchestral arrangements.
 

 
Originally released in September of 1989, Results went gold in the UK and Spain, with the “Losing My Mind” single hitting number #6 in the British singles chart. In America however, Results didn’t even make the top 100 and it was easy to find the CD for cheap in the cut-out bins not so long after it came out. It remains an undiscovered gem. Results spawned four singles: “Losing My Mind”; “Don’t Drop Bombs”; “So Sorry, I Said” and “Love Pains.” There was also a VHS video EP release titled Visible Results. The by now 28-year-old album has just been given a make-over in the form of a remastered and expanded edition three CD and one DVD box set by Cherry Red Records and hopefully it will (deservedly) pick up some new admirers with this latest iteration.

If you are even slightly curious if the Pet Shop Boys and Liza Minnelli are indeed two great tastes that taste great together, then I am pretty sure that you will love this album. But the beauty of writing about pop culture these days is that you don’t have to take my word for it, you can simply hit play on this clip of Minnelli lip-syncing “Love Pains” and make up your own mind:
 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.27.2017
03:53 pm
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‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie!’: The fantastic 70s K-Pop disco funk of Bunny Girls
03.27.2017
09:40 am
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The cover of the 1978 album by South Korean duo Bunny Girls.
 
The obscure South Korean girl group that went by both Bunny Girl and Bunny Girls were around for over a decade, and the music they put out under both monikers is full of funky disco-synth goodness.

If my research is correct, Bunny Girls put out their first album Yes Sir, I Can Boogie in 1978 at the height of the disco craze in the U.S. and continued to release a few albums and singles throughout the end of the 1980s. So obscure are the adorable duo that despite my efforts to dig up much more on them In English, I came up pretty empty handed—except for the four tracks posted below—one which includes South Korean psych-guitar god, Shin Joong Hyun. Though one of the songs as well as the title of their debut album share the exact same title as the disco smash by Spanish duo Baccara, it doesn’t appear to be a cover of Baccara’s 1977 single, “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie.” Flash forward to 1989 and we hear Bunny Girls sound as if they went back to 1985 for inspiration by way Oingo Boingo’s bouncy hit, “Dead Man’s Party.”

If any or all of this sounds good to you then you’re in for a treat because the music of the mysterious Bunny Girls is addictive ear candy that will leave you wanting to hear more. Which will sadly prove to be a difficult task though I’m sure some of our more intrepid disco fans will give it a shot. It’s also probably worth noting that Bunny Girls’ obscurity in the 70s was likely a result of the repressively dark political environment in South Korea thanks to the president and military general Park Chung-hee who lived to prevent musicians from making music during his time in office. In fact, after Bunny Girls’ fuzzy collaborator Shin Joong Hyun flatly refused to write a song for the strongman in 1972, he was blacklisted from the music industry in his homeland and his music was banned. A few years later Hyun got popped for marijuana possession and spent several years traveling between psychiatric hospitals as well as prison, where he was tortured. Which all proves at least one thing pretty clearly—if you were making pop music in South Korea in the 1970s, you were a goddam hero.

But enough of that—let’s get down to the sounds of the Bunny Girls, shall we? Yes, sir we can boogie, after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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03.27.2017
09:40 am
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Watch the infamous ‘Disco Demolition Night’ fiasco of 1979 in its entirety
09.22.2016
10:52 am
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A bounty from the Internet! Some outstanding personage has uploaded the entire broadcast of the WSNS Channel 44 Chicago broadcast of the July 12, 1979, double-header between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers, better known to you as “Disco Demolition Night,” a promotion spearheaded by DJ Steve Dahl at Chicago rock station WLUP. The event notoriously became a single-header after the second game had to be canceled because of the mayhem brought upon by the antics of the mostly white audience of rowdy rock music lovers.

On that day, disco-haters were enticed by inexpensive admission (98 cents and a disco record to add to the pile) to come out in droves. The gimmick was that between the two games, a large box containing hundreds of disco records would be blown up. Some time earlier, Dahl had lost his job after WDAI switched to a disco format, which inordinately pissed him off, and he turned that ire into a big part of his schtick at WLUP, and eventually the idea for “Disco Demolition Night” was born. In the event, the large crowd was full of rowdy stoners who didn’t give a hoot about baseball and just wanted to heap scorn on disco music. The detonation of the disco records had the double effect of rendering the field unusable and causing the throngs to descend into truly lawless chaos. 

The uploaded video is nearly three and a half hours long. It shows the entire first (and, it turned out, only) game of the twin bill, in which the visiting Tigers defeated the hometown White Sox 4-1. By the way, Harry Caray, who later became a national icon for his work with the crosstown Cubs, was a White Sox employee at this time, and he is one of the announcers calling the action. (In fact, Caray’s true mark on baseball history came decades earlier, during his quarter-century of radio broadcasting for the St. Louis Cardinals.)
 

Moments after hundreds of disco records were exploded in center field
 
As Slate’s Matthew Dessem astutely points out, the tone of the day’s action was set early on, during the National Anthem, during which a fan’s cry of “Faggot!” can clearly be heard (it’s at the 6:44 mark).

In retrospect, the spasm of hatred directed towards a pleasure-oriented music genre that was inclusive in terms of African-Americans, Latinos, and homosexuals seems positively Trumpist in spirit. The United States is the only country that has had a strong “anti-disco” movement. I like the Allman Brothers and Black Sabbath as much as the next music lover, but you know, enough’s enough!

More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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09.22.2016
10:52 am
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Blonde on Blonde: That time two topless models released a disco cover version of ‘Whole Lotta Love’

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“Page Three” might not mean much to readers outside of the UK. It was a term used to describe the photographs of topless (sometimes naked) glamor models published on the third page of tabloid newspaper the Sun. It was first introduced by (who else?) Rupert Murdoch as a way to increase sales of his newly acquired but failing newspaper. The Sun was in decline having gone from the popular Daily Herald to a less successful rebrand as the Sun in 1964 before Murdoch bought it in 1968. Old Rupert thought sexy glamor models would bring more male readers to his paper. It did but Page Three wasn’t truly successful until editor Larry Lamb made them topless models. The Sun then started to sell by the millions. Lamb launched the first Page Three in November 1970. “I don’t think it’s immoral or indecent or anything,” said Rupert Murdoch later said of Page Three.

But show it to me in any other newspaper I own. Never in America, never in Australia. Never. Never. Never. It just would not be accepted.

Though it did increase sales and made several of the Page Three models rich and famous it was never quite fully accepted by everyone in the UK. Page Three was a source of great controversy and considerable feminist anger—leading to one famous campaign to have Page Three banned. Eventually the Sun agreed it was no longer suitable and the Page Three girls stopped appearing in the paper in 2015.
 
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Glamor model and former Page Three girl Jilly Johnson on the cover of ‘Hot Hits Volume 19.’
 
Being a Page Three girl was like being a Playboy Bunny—it was a means to achieving a better career. Among those many women who became famous from appearing topless in the Sun were Samantha Fox (who went onto become a pop star and actress and infamously co-hosted the Brit Awards with Mick Fleetwood), Debee Ashby (who had a fling with Tony Curtis—“He wanted company. It wasn’t just my boobs…”), Geri Halliwell (aka Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls), Penny Irving (who became an actress in Are You Being Served? and House of Whipcord), Melinda Messenger (now a TV host and celebrity), Jayne Middlemiss (TV host) and Jordan (aka Katie Price who’s now a multimillionaire TV star, celebrity and author).
 
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Glamor model and former Page Three girl Nina Carter on the cover of ‘Top of the Pops Volume 44.’
 
Nina Carter and Jilly Johnson were two of the early Page Three girls. Both were highly successful glamor models in their own right and were famous from their work on fashion shoots, magazines and album covers. Nina and Jilly were two of the best known glamor models working in Britain during the 1970s—both earning the nickname “The Body” long before Elle Macpherson—though they probably weren’t the first.

But wait—we’re not here to talk about Nina and Jilly’s long and successful modeling careers but rather about the time they formed a band in the late 1970s called Blonde on Blonde.
 
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Blonde on Blonde ‘Whole Lotta Love.’
 
Blonde on Blonde was a short-lived pop band that made little headway in the UK but was a big hit in Japan. “We have Japanese men coming up to is and begging us to let them be our slaves!” Nina told the Evening Times in 1978. Nina and Jilly were serious about their pop career but as Nina explained at the time:

Unfortunately we are having difficulty persuading the music business in this country to do the same. People tend to dismiss us a gimmick.

More from Blonde on Blonde after the jump….

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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07.07.2016
12:20 pm
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The Beach Boys’ eleven-minute disco atrocity from 1979 will take you straight to Hell
06.16.2016
08:24 am
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While Brian Wilson and Al Jardine are touring the world in celebration of Pet Sounds’ 50th anniversary, it might be instructive to compare the Beach Boys’ masterpiece, not with their contemporaries’ achievements, but with the band’s own creative nadir.

Of course I’m talking about 1979’s interminable disco odyssey “Here Comes the Night.” If only an actual sunset lasted so long. Not to be confused with Bert Berns’ “Here Comes the Night,” made famous by Them and covered on Bowie’s Pin Ups, the Beach Boys’ “Here Comes the Night” first appeared on 1967’s “white soul” album Wild Honey. The three-minute original remains a lovely, if minor, Brian Wilson composition, its chords marked by the uncanny stink of divinity.

For their 1979 debut on Caribou Records, the Beach Boys took a page out of their former collaborator Charles Manson’s book, dismembering the song, painting the walls with its blood and sticking a fork in its belly. If you think I’m exaggerating, go ahead and push “play” at the bottom of the post. Sure you’re tough enough? It’s real witchy.

(This shocking atrocity proves that, of all the songs in the catalog, only “Never Learn Not to Love” should have been considered for the disco treatment. The merciless beat would have lent itself to Manson’s pro-orgy, anti-person message. And imagine if the ‘X’ on the forehead had become part of the “disco lifestyle”!)
 

At the Reagan White House, 1983
 
It seemed that Brian Wilson had come back into full possession of his gifts on 1977’s The Beach Boys Love You, but he, or they, had gone fishin’ when the time came to work on L.A. (Light Album). Deprived of Brian’s genius, the Boys and producer Bob Esty had only their cruelty to guide them in the studio, and the result is the most punishing eleven minutes in the history of recorded music. Not that anyone noticed, if the book The Beach Boys FAQ is to be believed:

CBS and the Beach Boys ate dirt when the disco single not only failed to make the Top Forty, but the album failed to make the Top Ninety-Nine!

Hitmaker Esty was responsible for Andy Williams’ disco remake of “Love Story,” also released in ‘79, and he let it be known that he would only disco-fy songs by artists of real class. He sharply criticized Lawrence Welk accordionist Myron Floren’s Disco Polka in Billboard later that year, explaining that not just anyone could have a crossover hit. What I’m saying is, he really put Lawrence Welk accordionist Myron Floren in his place.

Duty compels me to suggest that you read up on the buddy system and safewords before listening to this recording. This is the exactly the kind of thing Tipper Gore and the PMRC should have been looking into—except the PMRC was funded by Beach Boy Mike Love (who I’ve heard is a super nice guy and whose own band knew a couple fuckwords). Could he have been paying them not to look into his past?

Listen to this four-on-the-floor Beach Boys atrocity after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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06.16.2016
08:24 am
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‘Dragon Power,’ the disco tribute to Bruce Lee
01.08.2016
09:11 am
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Given that people like to make money, I suppose it was inevitable that Bruce Lee mania and disco fever would intersect—but when, and where? In 1978, history chose as its instrument England’s JKD (as in Jeet Kune Do) Band. On the Dragon Power (A Tribute to Bruce Lee) 12-inch, JKD Band provided an inoffensive party-record backing to screeches and bits of dialogue lifted from Enter the Dragon, and the result is delightful. Disco would sound a lot better if all the songs were ginned up with war cries, bones cracking, and other combat sounds, don’t you think? Enterprising young people: let’s make 2016 the year of war disco.
 

 
According to Discogs, the arranger of this disc, John Altman, played sax on Van Morrison and Graham Parker records, and he’s collaborated with Neil Innes of Rutles, Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and Monty Python fame on several occasions.

If this rings your bell, Amazon has the JKD Band’s full Dragon Power album, though I should warn you that I didn’t hear any shrieking, pulverizing or Eastern philosophizing on “Hooked on the Boogie” or “Let Your Body Do the Talking.”

Posted by Oliver Hall
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01.08.2016
09:11 am
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‘Saturday Night Fiedler’: This IS your father’s Disco-sploitation
09.10.2015
11:05 am
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Over 35 years after his death, conductor Arthur Fiedler is still known to people who can’t name a single living conductor of any major orchestra. During his five decade tenure as maestro of the Boston Pops Orchestra, that institution practically became the unofficial national orchestra of the US, thanks to bestselling recordings, frequent appearances on TV (particularly PBS), and Fiedler’s commitment to proving that classical music had life in it, and needn’t exist solely as a posh trifle for the uppercrust. He took some guff for pandering to the masses, and while I’m usually all for a nice bit of snobbery, leveling such a criticism at a pops orchestra seems to miss the point by miles. His work as a popularizer introduced generations to orchestral music.

So it seems entirely fitting that his final work before his 1979 death was a disco album. From the conductor’s own liner notes:

One thing I have always believed in is music as a universal language, and my years with the Boston Pops reflect the range and scope of this interest as we work our way through a vast repertoire from Country to Classics.

Young people are always a key to the success of the Pops season, and keeping up with the forward motion of their tastes and preferences is both a challenge and a great privilege for me to pursue.

From the moment I conducted the “Saturday Night Fiedler” suite on Television this May, I knew that the youngsters had done it again: disco—a marvelous, insistently rhythmic dance form to which all manner of music can be adapted from Bach to the Bee-Gees. And this span of musical poles truly accents the universality of music.

 

 
Saturday Night Fiedler was of a type with plenty of disco cash-ins of the late ‘70s; Fiedler’s own eventual Boston Pops successor John Williams already saw a disco-fied version of his Star Wars theme music threaten to eclipse the sales of his original, and everyone who could sing and plenty of people who couldn’t rushed to release disco albums during the few years that the fad utterly dominated popular music. The Boston Pops’ album contained only two side-length tracks. The B side was “Bachmania,” which, as you surely guessed, is a Bach medley tarted up with bass and beats.The A side was an 18-and-a-half minute medley of songs from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, with two Bee Gees songs segueing into two pieces of David Shire’s instrumental music, the rather durable “Manhattan Skyline,” and “Night on Disco Mountain,” which was surely familiar to Fiedler, as it was itself a lift from Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain.” The suite closes out with the Trammps’ classic “Disco Inferno.”

Weirdly, the mandatory oon-tss oon-tss disco beats seem to drift in and out of sync with the music rather a lot, leading me to wonder if they weren’t added in after the fact by the producer, John Davis, of John Davis and the Monster Orchestra semi-fame. Here it is, see what you think:
 

 
And of course, here’s “Bachmania.” I suspect the works disco’d up here will be perfectly familiar even to those of you who don’t know classical music—“Toccata And Fugue in D Minor” is the distinctive organ music you’ve heard in a zillion movies when creepiness needs to be evoked.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘The Ethel Merman Disco Album’
Think ‘Kokomo’ is the Beach Boys’ worst single? THINK AGAIN.
Disco-tastic Italian Beatles medley from 1978 will melt your brain!

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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09.10.2015
11:05 am
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‘Suicide Is Painless’ (AKA the theme from ‘M*A*S*H’)—the disco version
01.27.2015
03:23 pm
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Not much to say about this one. If you’ve ever wanted a reason to picture Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester III doing the Hustle, here’s your chance.

In Tom Moulton’s “Disco Mix” column in Billboard of March 5, 1977, he wrote, “The strongest [of three recent singles from FARR Records] is ‘Song From M*A*S*H’ by the New Marketts. Here is a beautiful and well-orchestrated melody featuring guitar and synthesizer playing the melody line and pleasing synthesizer solo in the vamp. The record was produced by Joe Saraceno.”

It’s well known bit of movie-making lore that the lyrics of the song were written by Mike Altman, the son of Robert Altman, director of the original movie. Appearing on Carson in the 1980s, Altman stated that his son had earned more than a million dollars for his part in writing the song, while Altman himself made just $70,000 for directing the movie.
 

 

 
via Ken Levine’s blog

Posted by Martin Schneider
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01.27.2015
03:23 pm
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Fascist groove thang: Mussolini’s granddaughter recorded a disco number, 1982
12.01.2014
09:26 am
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Before she went into politics, Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of Il Duce and the niece of Sophia Loren, had a short-lived disco career in Japan. She and Japanese producer Miki Curtis formed an axis of funk on 1982’s Amore. With a dagger between their teeth, a bomb in their hands and an infinite groove in their hearts, the pair dropped this tautological single, “Love Is Love.” Listen for my favorite lyric: “The chains of your love make me free.” Nonno would have been so proud.
 

 

 
Mamma mia! That’s-a some spicy meatball!

Ms. Mussolini spent most of the ‘70s and ‘80s acting and modeling, but she’s stuck to politics since she was elected to parliament in 1992. As you might expect, she’s just a real nice kind of a person.

YouTube user PannaCottaTrash has collected the whole Amore LP in this playlist.

Posted by Oliver Hall
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12.01.2014
09:26 am
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Thrown out for kissing: A quaint guide to gay discos, 1978
04.14.2014
11:09 am
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With the first gay and lesbian couples finally permitted to legally marry in the U.K. only a few weeks ago, it is kind of sad to run across the special guide to London clubs published by New Musical Express in 1978. The “Gay Scene” category was both transgressive for the times, but quaint, and included the private, prohibitively expensive Maunkberry’s, frequented by the music and entertainment elite, as well as the Bang Disco on Charing Cross Road (opened in 1976) at the top of the list, a “good mixture of gays and punks.” The category leads with the bummer of a caveat:

Habari! Habari! Hungry for play? Well, let love and joy abound on your London safari. But first a note to all you guys ‘n’ gals, cuties ‘n’ chickens, rent boys ‘n’ muscle men, leather lovers ‘n’ sock eaters: REMEMBER, British Law permits homosexual activity IN PRIVATE between two consenting adults of 21 and over. Any sexual contact in public is forbidden.

gay scene dir
 

Sabotage Times recently mentioned in a fascinating history of London’s gay clubs:

1976 was a groundbreaking year for the development of gay discos in London with the arrival of Bang: London’s first gay superclub. Held at The Sundowner on Charing Cross Road every Monday night, subsequently opening on Thursdays due to popularity, Bang had a 1000+ capacity; a good, loud sound-system; all the hot, new disco imports played by experienced DJ’s Gary London, Talullah and Norman Scott; and dramatic lighting effects operated by the venue’s very own lighting engineer.

As 1976 was the year of the first commercially available 12” single it was perfect timing for a night like Bang – improved audio quality and extended track length for a bigger and better dancing environment.

Below, a look at the Brixton Fairies, a much-needed support network and lifeline for British gays and lesbians in the ‘70s:

Posted by Kimberly J. Bright
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04.14.2014
11:09 am
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‘60 Minutes’ supplies the establishment take on the disco craze, 1978
01.07.2014
09:27 am
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60 Minutes
 
There’s a saying in the financial world, or at least there was when people still paid attention to weekly magazines, that once a company or sector makes the cover of Business Week, the time has come to dump the stock. If Business Week knows about it, the insiders’ advantage has dissipated and you have to find another curve to get ahead of. I felt a very similar feeling watching Dan Rather very, very seriously explain to the home viewer what this “disco” thing is all about.

The problem with the 60 Minutes approach is that it’s insufferably top-down—it’s really all about money, a topic that Rather mentions incessantly. We get Billboard‘s take on the matter; we see some complacent executives plot the can’t-miss release of a disco version of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” (really?); we get a very cool and professional outfit recording a different single, Peter Brown’s “Dance With Me”; and so on.

This segment aired on April 23, 1978; keep in mind that just a year or two later, 60 Minutes was the highest-rated TV show in America—that is, the show with the greatest number of viewers, period. And it wasn’t like 60 Minutes had stormed out of nowhere, it was already an institution by that time. Rather does blandly inform the home viewer that “for a disco to be a disco, you need a very heavy bass beat” and that a “hook” is “an easily recognizable theme or musical phrase.” (Apparently nobody told poor Dan that it’s not “Moog” as in “moo” It’s “Moog” as in “vogue.”)

It’s difficult to imagine a halfway serious report on a subculture done this way today. What’s missing from the report is any vitality or verve; any mention of ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities or sex or drugs or class issues. Nobody ever breaks a sweat. You get a little footage from inside Studio 54, which is pretty interesting, and the studio sections aren’t without interest. (There’s no such thing as payola in the disco world, by the way.) The death knell of disco may have sounded towards the end of the segment, when we hear the aforementioned version of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” as the camera pans over a group of haggard swingers gyrating on a dance floor awash in dry ice.

The home viewer will have gleaned that someone made a lot of money, but otherwise won’t have a clue why anyone would ever be drawn to disco music.
 
Tuxedo Junction, “Chattanooga Choo Choo”:

 
Peter Brown, “Dance With Me”:

 
60 Minutes report on disco, April 23, 1978:

 
via Gothamist

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
X-rated disco: ‘Give Your Dick To Me,’ 1980
‘The Ethel Merman Disco Album’

Posted by Martin Schneider
|
01.07.2014
09:27 am
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‘The Ethel Merman Disco Album’
12.05.2013
02:15 pm
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The Ethel Merman Disco Album
 
In 1979 disco was at its peak—even if this particular group of baseball fans didn’t necessarily agree—and really, the only place for it to go was down. One canary in that coal mine was the release that year by A&M Records of The Ethel Merman Disco Album, a project that none other than the reflexively generous Allmusic.com has termed “absurd.”

Not that they’re wrong. Merman was 71 years old at the time of the album’s release; while her willingness to bend with the youth trends is ultimately admirable, it was always going to be an uneasy fit. Merman’s vocals and the background disco noodling scarcely interact, which makes this all the more interesting as a curio. There was a time when vinyl collectors became frantic to get a copy of this LP, but the Internet seems to have calmed that down—you can now get a copy on eBay for $20.

“There’s No Business Like Show Business”

 
“Everything’s Coming Up Roses”

 
“I Get a Kick Out of You”

 
“I Got Rhythm”

 
There’s more of the same on YouTube, which I’m sure you don’t need my help to find.

In this clip, Ethel shows Leslie Uggams and Imogene Coca (whom she calls “an idiot”) a thing or two about the true meaning of Christmas on A Special Sesame Street Christmas, from 1978:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Ethel Merman of the apocalypse’: Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke’s mind-blowing Faustian bargain

Posted by Martin Schneider
|
12.05.2013
02:15 pm
|
Disco Sucks: Relive the madness of ‘Disco Demolition Night’ in Chicago’s Comiskey Park, 1979
08.23.2013
09:55 am
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Disco Sucks
 
On July 12, 1979, the schedule called for a twi-night doubleheader between the Detroit Tigers and the Chicago White Sox. The Tigers took the first game 4-1 on the strength of a Tom Brookens triple in the second inning that drove home Jerry Morales for what would prove to be the winning run (boxscore). As it turned out, the second game never got played, resulting in a forfeit by the home White Sox and a sweep of the doubleheader for the Tigers.

Thing is, an anti-disco riot broke out in between the two games. A large collection of disco LPs was detonated in an explosion—this part was planned—but it tore a large hole in the outfield grass and eventually turned into a bonfire. The game was attended by many thousands of disco-hating baseball fans—actually a lot of them probably didn’t care much about baseball—a good percentage of whom would take the field during the insanity. It’s one of the most memorable promotions that baseball ever threw.

The director of promotions at that time was Mike Veeck, son of Bill Veeck, longtime owner of the Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns, and the White Sox. Bill Veeck was a genius deployer of gimmicks, including, when he owned the Browns, the stunt of hiring a midget named Eddie Gaedel to lead off a game in August 19, 1951, for a guaranteed base on balls. Mike’s decision to host a Disco Demolition Night would prove every bit as memorable.

Wikipedia supplies some background:

Chicago disc jockey Steve Dahl was fired from local radio station WDAI on Christmas Eve 1978 when the station switched formats from rock to disco. The 24-year-old DJ was subsequently hired by rival album-rock station WLUP, “The Loop.” Sensing an incipient anti-disco backlash and playing off the publicity surrounding his firing (Dahl frequently mocked WDAI’s “Disco DAI” slogan on the air as “Disco DIE”), Dahl created a mock organization called “The Insane Coho Lips,” an anti-disco army consisting of his listeners. According to Andy Behrens of ESPN, Dahl and his broadcast partner Garry Meier “organized the Cohos around a simple and surprisingly powerful idea: Disco Sucks.”

According to Wikipedia, the capacity of Comiskey Park at that time was only 44,492, yet estimates of the crowd that night range from 50,000 to 90,000. (As with the Beatles’ 1965 concert at Shea Stadium, the number of people who claim to have been in attendance is probably several hundred thousand by now.)

An air of menace permeated the first game:

Tigers outfielder Rusty Staub remembered that the records would slice through the air, and land sticking out of the ground. He urged teammates to wear batting helmets when playing their positions, “It wasn’t just one, it was many. Oh, God almighty, I’ve never seen anything so dangerous in my life.” ... Mike Veeck later remembered an odor of marijuana in the grandstand and said of the attendees, “This is the Woodstock they never had.”

Tigers outfielder Ron LeFlore said afterward, “It seemed like there was kegs in every aisle of the ballpark that night, you know, because everybody was drunk.”

Attendees would pay an admission fee of 98 cents (!) provided they brought at least one disco LP with them; Dahl would then destroy the pile of recordings in an explosion. (Many people got into the park without paying, however.) Dahl took the field in an army jeep wearing an army helmet to lead his anti-disco “army” and led the crowd in a rousing chant of “Disco Sucks!” “This is officially the world’s largest anti-disco rally!” cried Dahl to the crowd. And then things totally got out of hand.

The detonation scattered the broken album shards all over the outfield. Several thousand disco-haters took the field, some of them carrying banners with slogans like “LONG LIVE ROCK & ROLL.” The explosion quickly became a bonfire, and there was at least one similar fire in the upper deck of the stadium. Reportedly, 39 people were arrested (looking at the footage, that figure seems remarkably low).

Here’s a great little documentary from ESPN about the mayhem:
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Maestro’ - a film about the Paradise Garage and the birth of Disco culture
Walter & Sylvester: The Reverend & the Disco Queen

Posted by Martin Schneider
|
08.23.2013
09:55 am
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