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| From disco to disco: The cosmography of Clubbing |
| Posted on 25/02/04 at 06:22 by Dead Ball Descendant |
(From one of our mags. By Jerry Gilbert. The history of disco, basically. Part one of ten)
Club Roots: the birth of a genre
ANARCHY IN THE UK
Pinpointing the exact genesis of a movement can be a dangerous occupation. Sexual intercourse didnt really start in 1963, as Philip Larkin suggests, but the systematic distribution of germplasm can irrevocably nail its colours to 1976. And for the purposes of this selective retrospective & so did Disco.
The beauty of historical references is that they can be rewritten infinitely to contextualise with modern times. 1976 works for the nascent disco idiom because that was the year the first seeds of what would become PLASA were formed and the vast ragbag army of mobile DJs mobilised themselves into an organisation (there was no real club culture in those days). It was also the year I somehow got lost on the musical astral plane and strayed inadvertently & from the protest song of the great depression to this brave new world, scourged and vilified by musicians everywhere, called DISCO. And thats some genre-straddling exercise!
What I discovered was an ingenue industry operating in chaos. The National association of Disc Jockeys, run by proto-entrepreneur Ben Cree, had collapsed, and BADEM (the precursor of PLASA) was formally constituted on October 25 that year. To give that some historical (and topical) context, it was a couple of weeks before The Sex Pistols released Anarchy In The UK & and that pretty much encapsulated the mood.
Consequent to the NADJ debacle we are anxious to set up a properly constituted organisation to make sure that things are done properly & so that the industry is no longer brought into disrepute, said Jim St. Pier, who would become founding chairman, at BADEMs inaugural meeting.
No longer brought into disrepute. Yet the adventure had hardly begun yet. While four major club operation chains Rank Leisure Services, Mecca Leisure, The Star Group (Scamps) and Goodhews had an interest in seeing the equipment supply industry galvanise itself, the record companies had an even keener concern to see the politicised Theo Loyla (and the DJ armys natural leader) supplant NADJ with the newly-constituted Disc Jockeys Federation (to whom regional associations throughout the UK would become affiliated). Record companies were soon pumping millions into setting up disco departments at the end of 1976, believing in the influence of club DJs to break records at dancefloor level (in exchange for receiving promos they were expected to fill out dancefloor reaction forms).
OK, time to introduce the jargon police. For DJ Associations, read Record Pools. For Discos read Dance Venues. Records formed serious real estate and tonnage. 12in white labels, extended club mixes and 7in edited versions were bulked out to discos and indeed many tracks crossed over to the mainstream Billboard charts but this eco-nightmare with natural resources beggared belief, when just three years earlier the OPEC oil crisis had made vinyl too expensive to produce.
The music scene was indeed an odd tapestry in 1976. The polar opposite of the trashy, boil-in-a-bag, anodyne Euro fodder that was starting to flood the decks along with the dying remnants of classic soul was the growing surge of New Wave.
Yet with Billboard promoting their Disco Forums, North America was already undergoing its urbanised paradigm shift and the unthinkable was happening. New Yorks idiom was created overnight out of the gay haven of Fire Island an industry that some say was formed by Hispanics, Homosexuals and Insomniacs. In midtown, Studio 54, the worlds most celebrated discotheque, was opened by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager in April 1977.
In 1975 the States had arguably created the first song specially mixed for disco Gloria Gaynors Never Can Say Goodbye which is believed to be the first purpose-mixed hit in the disco demimonde.
By 1977 there was major disco label breakthrough from the tiny Miami-based TK, along with Neil Bogarts Casablanca (who proved that nothing exceeds like excess)*, Salsoul & with most of the major labels (Capitol, MCA, RCA, Polydor, Phonogram, Arista) already climbing on the bandwagon and operating active disco promotion departments.
ENTER THE EURO PRODUCER
But the undisputed queen of disco was LaDonna Andre Gaines (better known as Donna Summer). Having grown up in gospel choirs in Boston she moved to Europe in 1968-79, came to prominent in the German production of Hair, and after collaborating with producer/songwriters Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, released the orgasmic Love To Love You Baby in 1975 (a Je TAime for the dance generation). With spacey synths and electronic rhythm machines the Munich Sound now provided an alternative to Silver Convention (another Munich studio creation of exactly the same period).
It also gave birth to the extended club mix. For after a lukewarm reaction to the four-minute single Moroder decided to make a club version, stretching the song over a full 17-minute album side.
Much of the other production inspiration came from Europe (with the exception of Chics Rodgers and Edwards). Head of the list were Alex Costandinos, a Paris-based Armenian, and Frenchman Jacques Morali.
Back in the UK, however, discos were entering a kind of dystopia under threat from the Musicians Union and Phonographic Performance Ltd. The two bodies were working hand in hand, exerting continual pressure on the poor old DJ, and also threatening clubs with the withdrawal of their PPL licence if venues (over a certain capacity) failed to maintain a reasonable live music policy among their dance mixes. Restrictive practice it may have been but it led in some instances to discos reluctantly hiring bands, and paying them off at the back door without letting them near the stage of their local Tiffanys, Romeos & Juliets, Cats Whiskers or Birds Nest.
Keep Music Live, was the sticker campaign famously mounted by the Musicians Union and championed by the magazine International Musician (started by the infamous Daily Express tycoon Richard Desmond) & which industry wag Dave Simms lampooned with his now legendary Hire A Live DJ rejoinder!
Yes, there was much for the DJ to debate at those formative council meetings not least their wage structure. But why had the equipment providers needed to constitute themselves into BADEM (British Association of Disco Equipment Manufacturers)? After all, BADEM was merely another cell in a fragmented entertainment technology industry already represented by a number of other bodies such as SCIF, the APRS and AMII.
THE DISCO SHOWS
The answer was simple. In addition to running the National Association of Disc Jockeys (NADJ) Ben Cree had also promoted several equipment trade exhibitions in London and Liverpool.
But in 1976 he hit financial trouble and did a sharpish Lord Lucan impersonation, leaving the deposit moneys for the aborted Disco 76 exhibition unrefunded. The imperative was to get a Disco Show up and running and the following September, at the Bloomsbury Centre Hotel in London, BADEM succeeded.
What I remember about that show were the essential wares: records; DJ recruitment companies (cruise ships and the five-star Julianas/Bacchus hotel circuit abroad); bubble machines; jingle machines (8-track); projectors and effects wheels.
Plus, of course, it was Twindeck Central. While companies like Citronic, FAL, Haze, Cloud, ICElectrics and DJ Electronics controlled the market for all-in-one mobile DJ consoles, and Pulsar, Zero 88 and Multiform the lighting control end, companies like Optikinetics, Meteor, Pluto and Cerebrum marketed the essential tool of any self-respecting DJ, the projected light show, with an assortment of cassette and oil effects wheels.
Now this was already a mature industry in its own right, and Optikinetics were about to announce their 10,000th Solar projector sale by the time Discotek 77 came around. It had its origins back in the summer of love, and legendary London venues such as UFO, the Middle Earth and Sunday afternoon narcosis at the Roundhouse. With all that trippiness, and the redolence of patchouli oil, joss sticks and Acapulco Gold, it was no bad time to have been working as an ingenue on the rock press. Icons of the psychedelic age included the I-Ching, The Dice Man, The Whole Earth Catalogue, countless existentialist novels, while every self-respective bedsit possessed the obligatory Oriental board game Go & which takes as least as long as the sitar to master. So please permit this brief indulgence.
THE PROJECTION COMMUNES
Taking their lead from men like Mark Boyles Sensual Laboratory Lightshow (Soft Machine) and Liquid Len & The Lensmen (Hawkwind, the UKs premier psychedelic warriors) came the fabulously named Mass Spectrometer Lightshow (John Lethbridge, later of Cerebrum), Infusoria Five Acre Light Show (Neil Rice), Alpha Centuri (now better known as AC Lighting), Crab Nebula (Pat Chapman, who later started Entec), Cyberdescence & names embedded into folklore and capturing the zeitgeist even more vividly than bands like Emergency 3rd Rail Power Trip and 13th Floor Elevators rolled into one.
The axis for most of this activity in the decade before BADEM was Jimmy Doodys Krishna Lights, which commercialised psychedelic lighting. Also involved was the late Keith Canadine, later one of the co-founders of Optikinetics, Robbie Williams (later to become Pink Floyds production manager), while of course Floyds lighting designer Peter Wynne-Willson was also at the vanguard of the movement (as was his partner in WWG Tony Gottelier).
Yet the concept of the projectors that arrived at that first Discotek 77 Show were based on modified versions of the Rank Aldis Tutor 2, which had originally been designed as an industrial and educational projector, to be used in the classroom. As designed, it was not suited to the dusty, vibrating and 'in transit' environment of the mobile DJ and was prone to mechanical failure. The fan and motor assembly were particularly prone to dropping out and melting, devastating the projector centre section.
By the middle of 1977 Rank Aldis had carried out their own modification and introduced the Tutor 2E, allowing it to accept a wide variety of attachments to alter the projected image, and designed to meet the needs of effects lighting at discotheques.
Demothballing this bygone era at LDI in 1994, High End Systems Lowell Fowler lovingly promoted a retro night as a vehicle to launch Cyberlight with the late Dr. Timothy Leary in attendance.
A summarising comment from Lowell encapsulates the leitmotif.
"Originally, my intent was to have several light shows going at once. In trying to track down the old artists, I quickly learned from my end of the phone that old light show dudes have got to be the single most whacked out genre of humanity that there is on the planet (excluding, of course, Peter Wynne Willson, who seems to have survived quite well).
"We did come up with one Jerry Abrams who was indicative of the rest of the people we tried to get. He was pretty gripey at first, but once he got into really doing the show, he had a good time largely because we paid him."
Those who werent as Ken Kesey would say on the bus were probably shopping at Roger Squires in Tufnell Park. Squire pretty much controlled the retail movement in the UK, running out a chain of regional shops (and eventually a megastore in Manchester), using his buying power to set up cute OEM deals with proprietary suppliers and knocking out kit at prices that none of his competitors could match. The ongoing spat lasted well into the 80s.
SMOKE AND MIRRORS
Literally none of that yet but following the theme of adoptive technology, at the same time as Saturday Night Fever (see next month) was redefining the genre, motorised lighting effects such as scanners, helicopters and Rotolites were arriving on the London stage (the latter brought into the UK by Dick Carrier and Keith Hardys CDC). The GE 4515 PAR 36 pinspot, about to become the de facto lamp source of 99% of fixtures that would adorn the new generation of nightclubs, had in fact been developed by General Electric for the automotive market before companies like Cremesa (Kremesa) in Spain started reappropriating them for disco purposes.
However, the real boom took place at the end of the decade, and will be the subject of its own chapter during Nights commemorative 20th year retrospective.
By the end of 1981 a wave of new lighting effects was literally sweeping in from Spain and Italy & but were already starting to get ahead of ourselves.
CORNUCOKIA
(*) Ah yes, that Casablanca tale. On my trips to the States in the late 70s the central character was Casablancas round the clock gay promotion man Ray Caviano, whose coke emollients (and offers of remix sessions) to gain airplay were legion. Wallowing in the sarcophagus of his own ego, when Mo Ostin, head of Warner Bros duly poached him to set up his own dance label (for a reputed sum of $6m) he went into overdrive. At 28, he was the youngest record company president, and fuelled by the hubris of the age, he even provided his monogram RFC as the imprimatur for the label. Debuting with a massive hit (for Gino Soccio), he still effortlessly merged arrogance and anomie at the time I interviewed him . Eight years later I up a copy of New Yorks Village Voice to find him emblazoned across the front page under the heading From Hit Maker To Thief. Now incarcerated in Rykers Island, his white line fever had raged out of control, and when disco fell over (as it did frighteningly quickly), he was forced to beg and eventually steal to support his $500 a day habit.
Yes, the industry was certainly full of characters as it opened its doors to the arrivistes. It wouldnt last of course. The 1980-81 recession put put an end to excess and as it pulled out of its slump the corporate suits moved in.
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