Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (33 page)

The biggest disco artifact of them all was
Saturday Night Fever,
and it was a lie. Released in December 1977,
Saturday Night Fever
told the story of Tony Manero (played by John Travolta), a Brooklyn kid caught in a dead-end life whose only joy is going to the disco on the weekend and dancing away his blues. The movie was a tough and unforgiving look at the constrictions of working-class life, and Travolta was electric as Manero. The film’s opening shots of Travolta strutting down Ridge Boulevard in tight trousers to the undeniable groove of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” ensured that
Saturday Night Fever
would have more popular culture impact than any movie since
Gone With the Wind.
The soundtrack, which was dominated by the Bee Gees’ helium falsettos and producer Arif Mardin’s pop polish, tempered director John Badham’s rugged, masculine movie, allowing a younger, female audience into an otherwise forbidding film world. With its timeless story line and broad-based appeal,
Saturday Night Fever
was a “disco movie” made for a decidedly nondisco audience; change the soundtrack and the setting and it could have been virtually any teen movie from
Rebel Without a Cause
to
Save the Last Dance. Saturday Night Fever
grossed over $100 million at U.S. box offices, and by end of 1978 the soundtrack had sold thirty million albums and become the biggest-selling record of all time (until Michael Jackson’s
Thriller
knocked it out of the top spot). Like the movie, the
Saturday Night Fever
soundtrack was “disco” only in quotation marks. The music had most of the hallmarks of disco—the bouncy bass lines, the cod-Latin percussion, unmacho male singers, etc.—but it was really the kind of pure pop that works in any era given a rhinestone spit shine. The combination of the Bee Gees’ (and Mardin’s) pop perfection, Travolta’s iconic performance, and the commercial synergy between film and soundtrack made not only
Saturday Night Fever
inescapable but also disco, which became the subject of hi-beam media focus like never before, unavoidable as a whole.

The movie, which was produced by Robert Stigwood’s RSO (it’s no small irony that RSO also released Rick Dees and His Cast of Idiots’ infernal novelty record “Disco Duck” in 1976), was based on an article that had appeared in
New York
magazine in June 1976. “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” was written by Nik Cohn, a British journalist originally from Northern Ireland who had only recently moved to New York. The article allegedly chronicled the rising discotheque culture of New York’s outer boroughs, but anyone with even a passing knowledge of British youth culture would have smelled a rat from the very first sentence.

“Vincent was the very best dancer in Bay Ridge—the ultimate Face,” Cohn began. “He owned 14 floral shirts, eight pairs of shoes, three overcoats, and had appeared on
American Bandstand.
” Becoming a “Face” was, of course, tantamount to becoming a saint in British Mod culture; that this, or Vincent’s impressive wardrobe, had anything to do with Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, was nothing but pure fantasy. Cohn continues: “Purity. A sacrament. In their own style, the Faces were true ascetics: stern, devoted, incorruptible.”
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Again, Cohn betrays his frame of reference with the use of “incorruptible,” long a term in the Mod/football hooligan lexicon. Cohn was essentially transplanting British youth culture to New York, merely trading a Cockney accent for heavy Brooklynese. The story’s Mod aspects were retained in the film, right down to Tony Manero’s dancing, which seemed to be taken from Northern Soul. Northern Soul dancing was all about individuality, with dancers performing athletic spins and leaps; disco dancing was fundamentally communal, not the grand-standing displayed by Manero.

Of course, frameworks are inescapable in journalism or writing screenplays: All knowledge must be processed according to some ground rules. If that’s all “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” was, it would be merely another event in the long history of Britons misinterpreting American popular culture and making a fortune out of it. However, the story was a bold-faced lie. “My story was a fraud,” Cohn finally admitted two decades later. “I’d only recently arrived in New York. Far from being steeped in Brooklyn street life, I hardly knew the place. As for Vincent, my story’s hero, he was largely inspired by a Shepherd’s Bush mod whom I’d known in the Sixties, a one-time king of the Goldhawk Road.”
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Unsurprisingly, for a movie whose origins are so contested,
Saturday Night Fever
generated a wide range of interpretations. “In
Saturday Night Fever,
John Travolta decides that the only way that he can transcend his boring life is to become the best dancer in the city,” wrote journalist Jon Savage. “To achieve this individuality, however, he has to negate his own personality: the dancing steps required of a Disco champion are so formulaic that to excel he must become an automaton. This was the true blankness to which Punks never came close. The hedonism propagated by Disco was more immediately subversive of established morality.”
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On the other hand, historian Peter Carroll stated that “
Saturday Night Fever
reinforced a conservative message of conformity, expensive dress, and self-discipline. Only by embracing these traditional American values could the youthful ethnic hero, played by John Travolta, hope to attain the upward mobility implied in leaving his working-class origins in Brooklyn for a new life in Mahattan.”
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Still further, Chic’s Nile Rodgers proclaims, “I just think
Saturday Night Fever
is genius. It’s about a very racist kind of community, and he just deals with it in such a simplistic, wonderful way. He doesn’t change and become an intellectual. He changes and becomes an open-minded human being by saying something like, ‘That’s what it’s all about: Because my father gets dumped on, he gets home and dumps on my mother, then she’s gotta dump on me, then we gotta dump on the Spics because we gotta dump on somebody, and then they dump on the blacks,’ or whatever. It was just a very simplistic but accurate way of saying that racism exists and unfairness exists: ‘How could you give the trophy to us when we’re not nearly on the level of the Puerto Ricans, but you just gave it to me because I’m a homeboy, I’m like you, I’m white, I’m Italian, I’m from the neighborhood, but these Puerto Rican guys come in and venture into our community and are better than we are and we can’t acknowledge the fact that they’re better.’ And that was so powerful. Very few people go home with that message, but that’s the message of the film. That’s what the movie was all about. In New York, we used to call these Italian guys ‘hitters,’ so this hitter becomes an open-minded, broad-thinking human being who has contradictions in his world and in his life, but through music and dance he’s transformed. It’s easy to say it’s superfluous because it’s disco, but that’s just not true. Those songs are powerful; they tell the story. When they use ‘More Than a Woman’ and ‘You Should Be Dancing’ and ‘Disco Inferno,’ that’s serious stuff. That’s just as relevant and as valid—and I know people don’t like to hear stuff like this—as when the Sex Pistols are delivering a message or when Pink Floyd is delivering a message or when the Beatles are delivering a message. This is politically, socially relevant stuff, and it’s just a reflection of the times.”
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Despite its perfidious heart,
Saturday Night Fever
nailed one of disco’s most perplexing conundrums. While Cohn’s story was a fake, the truth was that disco was spreading like wildfire in the white ethnic communities of New York’s outer boroughs. These were the children and younger brothers of the construction workers who had only a few years earlier gone on a rampage against most of disco’s main constituents during the Hard Hat Riots. Now Staten Islander Tony Pagano was telling Ed McCormack, “What my old man doesn’t understand is that you don’t have to be a fag to be into this scene … My old man doesn’t understand that dancing is not a tight-assed, uptight sex role scene. It’s just a way of communicating with people you might not have anything to say to if you sat down to talk.”
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“Broadly speaking, the typical New York discotheque DJ is young (between 18 and 30), Italian, and gay,” journalist Vince Aletti declared in 1975. “The prime variable is ‘Italian,’ because there are a large number of black and Latin DJs; ‘gay’ is less variable, but here it’s more a description of sensibility than sexual preference.”
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Remarkably, almost all of the important early disco DJs were of Italian extraction: Francis Grasso, David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Michael Cappello, Steve D’Aquisto, Tom Savarese, Bobby DJ Guttadaro, Frankie Strivelli, and Hippopotamus’s Richard Pampianelli. For whatever reason, Italian Americans have played a significant role in America’s dance music culture from the teen-pop dance crazes that came out of the Philadelphia hit machines in the early ’60s (Frankie Avalon, Fabian, etc.) through the disco and freestyle scenes of the ’70s and ’80s to the House and Techno records from New York’s Tommy Musto, Frankie Bones, and Joey Beltram. While Italian Americans mostly from Brooklyn largely created disco from scratch, the two men most responsible for putting disco over the top in every sense of the phrase were Jews from Queens.

The atmosphere inside starts to take you over

Music and fantasy

I’m just inside the door at 54

Faces in the crowd

Fashions are too chic

Music playing loud at 54.

—Bob McGilpin, “54”

At Studio 54, waiting at the door

Can’t get in, just can’t win.

—Dennis Parker, “New York By Night”

In November 1977,
New York Times
journalist Anna Quindlen described a typical Saturday night on the block of West Fifty-fourth Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue as club owner Steve Rubell was performing the nightworld rite of social engineering that he called “tossing a salad.” “[H]undreds crowd the street, whining the name of Mr. Rubell,” she wrote. “With index fingers raised in a gesture of reluctant supplication usually reserved for cab drivers on rainy nights and waiters in over-priced French restaurants, they repeat over and over again, ‘Steven … Steve…’ while staff members, resembling well-groomed guard dogs, push the overanxious back and a huge man named Big George stands by, a huge disincentive to violence.”
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The throng was desperate to be anointed with Rubell’s decree of grace and be allowed past the fabled velvet ropes into the world’s most famous pleasure dome where there was a possibility that they might snort coke off of Truman Capote’s monocle or watch someone pleasure the wife of the prime minister of Canada. “‘I’ll let in anyone who looks like they’ll make things fun,’ [Rubell] says, standing behind the ropes and ignoring the repeated sound of his own name. ‘We like some guys with guys because it makes the dance floor hot, you know? There are certain people who come that we know are good. But I’ll tell you something—I wouldn’t let my best friend in if he looked like an East Side singles guy.’”
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This Shangri-la, of course, was Studio 54.

Discotheques started off as places where the elite could hide themselves from the rest of the world and confront on their own terms the youth culture of rock and roll that would help destroy their olde worlde. But as the discotheque concept was translated into a language that long-suffering New Yorkers could understand, the discotheque became more egalitarian and less stuffy, and people actually danced. It was only a matter of time, though, before the world of privilege would have its revenge on the hoi polloi. It came in the shape of the most famous discotheque of ’em all, and from two men who would have even excluded themselves from the club.
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Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager were two fairly small-time restaurant owners from deepest, darkest Brooklyn who dreamed of the big time and were desperate to escape what they saw as their lowly origins. In other words, they were quintessential bridge and tunnelers out for revenge on the world that excluded them—except that the only revenge they ever exacted was on the world that they came from. Their first entry into New York’s nightworld was the Enchanted Garden, a discotheque housed in an eleven-room mansion situated on city-owned land bordering the golf course in Douglaston, Queens (an area often disparagingly referred to as “the gateway to Great Neck”), which opened in 1975. The club was popular for its theme nights (“Island of Paradise” with a luau, hula dancers, palm trees, and fire dancers; “Arabian Nights” with llamas, camels, and a snake charmer) and its “love-nest room,” which had couches the size of beds and a gazebo filled with stuffed birds—“installed after $4,000 worth of live ones died from the constantly changing temperatures.”
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Aside from the fact that the club was about as far east as you could go in New York City without actually setting foot in suburban Long Island, the Enchanted Garden had the further drawback of being directly below the flight path into JFK International Airport. Nevertheless, the Enchanted Garden attracted a fair bit of notoriety and, in Paul Casella, it had one of the finest DJs in the city. However, it wasn’t only the 747s passing over the club that were giving Rubell and Schrager headaches. The wannabe suburbanites of Douglaston hated the club and launched a sustained campaign aimed at shutting it down. Eventually, the city’s Parks Department decided to threaten Rubell and Schrager with eviction, and the duo were soon searching around for a place in Manhattan itself.

They were introduced by club promoter Carmen D’Alessio to a consortium trying to buy an old theater/television studio at 254 West 54th Street in order to turn it into a nightclub. Rubell and Schrager loved the space, and when that group lost most of its financing, Rubell and Schrager outmaneuvered the remaining member (paying him off with a finder’s fee of $1,000) and took over the project that was already called Studio 54. The project was unprecedented in terms of both scale and symbolism. Studio 54 dwarfed Infinity not only in size and money lavished on its design but also in ambition. Previously, discotheques had recolonized the dead spaces left by deindustrialization and recession; they breathed new life into abandoned warehouses and decrepit hotels. But Studio 54 was a bold display of disco’s ascendancy over New York’s most famous entertainment industries: Broadway and television. With the opening of Studio 54, the discotheque had established itself definitively as New York’s principal manufacturer of dreams. Disco had become theater.