Eddie Kendricks hits No. 1 with “Keep On Truckin’” on November 8. Producers Gamble and Huff and Thomas Bell challenge Motown with the Sound of Philadelphia. Their drummer Earl Young stumbles upon the disco beat in “The Love I Lost” by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. The success of David Mancuso’s underground Loft inspires discos to open across Manhattan.
The Jackson Five was grasping for a new direction when songwriter-producer Hal Davis and his team came up with “Dancing Machine,” the perfect track for Michael to do the Robot to, a dance popularized by Soul Train dancer Charles Washington. The song made it to No. 2 as a single, and its album G.I.T. Get It Together sold two million copies. They named their next album Dancing Machine and put a shorter version of the track on that one. Critic Robert Christgau observed, “My friend who goes to discos tells me The Jacksons are the first major artists to put out a real disco album.”1
But Eddie Kendricks could lay the strongest claim to being Motown’s disco pioneer. He was the Temptation with the Smokey-like falsetto. After his shining moment in “Just My Imagination” he went solo, causing his disgruntled ex-bandmates to release “Superstar (Remember How You Got Where You Are).” Initially his singles barely made the Top 40, and it appeared that maybe he’d made a mistake.
But “Girl You Need a Change of Mind” gradually became so popular in the (as-yet unnamed) discos that they eventually carried it all the way to No. 13 on the R&B chart in early ’73. In the song he tries to appease a protester burning her bra: “Now I’m for women’s rights, I just want equal nights.” Historian Alice Echols wrote that it was the missing link between soul and disco because “two qualities distinguished the cut from the label’s usual sound: [producer Frank] Wilson’s inversion of Motown’s four on the top beat and his deployment of the gospel break, which emptied the track of most instrumentation and then gradually built it back up … [and] came to be called the ‘disco break.’”2
Its songwriting team (Poree/Caston) returned with “Keep On Truckin’ (Part 1),” which became either the first or second disco song to top the pop charts, depending on how you classify the O’Jays’ “Love Train.” The song’s title came from a cartoon of a hitchhiker drawn by underground comic artist Robert Crumb in 1968, an image bootlegged onto so much merchandise that in 1973 Crumb went to court to claim copyright, although he was unsuccessful.
While Kendricks’s star ascended, his childhood friend and co-founder of the Temptations, Paul Williams, succumbed to alcoholism. The Temptations started paying him to stay home after he appeared onstage too drunk to perform too many times. He threatened to kill himself if they didn’t let him back onstage. Kendricks tried to help get him back on track, producing the haunting “I Feel like Giving Up.” But shortly after the recording, on August 17 in Detroit, Williams had a fight with his girlfriend, then drove his car to an alley and killed himself with a shotgun, a few blocks from the old Motown studios, now closed.
Philadelphia was one of the centers of the pop world in the late ’50s and early ’60s because American Bandstand was made there. Future R&B producers Kenneth Gamble and Thomas Bell lived a few blocks away from the studio, but the show’s policy was to let only a few black kids in and to avoid photographing them on the dance floor.3
The two met in 1959. Gamble came over to Bell’s house one day looking to woo his sister but was quickly distracted by Bell’s piano playing. Bell, originally from Jamaica, was classically trained and could play eighteen other instruments. Gamble needed a pianist for his doo-wop group the Romeos. They started writing together.
Bell dreamed of a career on Broadway and did well on the conductor’s exam. But he was made to understand that blacks weren’t wanted on the Great White Way.4 So he signed on as Chubby Checker’s touring conductor. Gamble found a new pianist in Leon Huff and started a label with him.
They did well enough that Columbia’s president, Clive Davis, offered to distribute their music. R&B was the one genre Columbia didn’t dominate, and his research indicated it was poised to explode.5 Gamble and Huff named their new label Philadelphia International Records.
Bell had also made a name for himself as a producer by now, so they asked him to join them. He wanted to stay independent but joined them in publishing and real estate companies. They all recorded at Sigma Sound Studios and had offices in the Philadelphia International building. Bell covered his floor and wall with blue shag carpet and installed a pale blue piano. Huff put his name in three-foot letters in front of his desk. Gamble gave himself a throne. They were all obsessed, working twenty-hour days, seven days a week, according to the definitive history of Philly soul, A House on Fire by John Jackson.6 Gamble juggled up to five LPs concurrently. Philadelphia International scored its first R&B No. 1 in 1972 with “Back Stabbers” by the O’Jays. Four of Columbia’s nine gold singles that year were from Philly, and they were just getting started.
The R&B Gamble and Huff produced was harder than Bell’s, often with political overtones in the Norman Whitfield mode. Along with the O’Jays they handled Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes (“If You Don’t Know Me by Now”) and Billy Paul (“Me and Mrs. Jones”). Unlike Bell, Gamble didn’t play an instrument or read music, and Huff only wrote basic charts, so they often relied on the house band MFSB to improvise a riff or beat to get a song started. They’d arrive at the studios while the musicians were jamming and start rolling tape. Drummer Earl Young says that the O’Jays’ smash “For the Love of Money” (later the theme to Donald Trump’s TV show The Apprentice) sprang from a bass line improvised by Anthony Jackson. The producers ran it through a phaser sound processor and coated it with echo.7
MFSB noticed that they received minimum scale pay and no songwriting credit while Gamble and Huff banked $30 million a year. Young, bassist Ronnie Baker, and guitarist Norman Harris told the producers they would no longer originate anything, only play as instructed. To placate them Gamble gave them their own sublabel and publishing company. Young also was in the Trammps, who released the classic “Hold Back the Night” (which didn’t chart for a few years), and later Saturday Night Fever’s “Disco Inferno.”
Not only did most Philadelphia International songs share the same instrumentalists; they usually featured the same background vocalists—frequently only the groups’ lead singers actually appeared on record. The backing vocalists of the Spinners, the Stylistics, Blue Magic, and the Blue Notes sang onstage but not on disc, either because the producers didn’t feel they were up to snuff or because they thought it would take too long to teach them their parts.8 (Bell said the O’Jays could all sing.) On most Philly tracks, Gamble, Huff, Bell, and a few other regulars like the female Sweethearts of Sigma sang backup.
In contrast to Gamble and Huff, Bell planned out his songs in advance, and MFSB followed what he wrote down on paper. Bell was the leader of the post-doo-wop Sweet Soul movement, the missing link between Burt Bacharach and the Bee Gees. He strove to create orchestration even more elegant than Motown’s, with flutes, oboes, French horns, tympani, orchestra bells, chimes, and vibraphones.
Linda Creed often served as his lyricist, writing words to fit the melodies he constructed. “She was just one of the guys,” Bell said. “As rough as any of us. No one ever called her ‘Linda.’” Neither her sex nor race (white) was an issue. “You didn’t know whether she was white, pink or green! That was just Creed.”9 (Later she wrote “The Greatest Love of All,” recorded by Whitney Houston.)
The songwriting duo enjoyed a string of six gold singles and four gold albums with the Stylistics, mainly duets between high tenor Russell Thompkins Jr. and Bell’s orchestra. Their hits in 1973 included “Break Up to Make Up” and “I’m Stone in Love with You.”
Everybody wanted to work with Bell, so naturally he pursued a group that didn’t want him: the Spinners. They had been around since 1955 without major success, had recently left Motown, and thought they needed a white producer to make it to the next level. Bell promised he would give them each ten grand if he didn’t generate a chart-topper for them. If he delivered, they’d have to get him a Cadillac.10 “I’ll Be Around” made No. 1 R&B and No. 3 on pop. “Could It Be I’m Falling in Love,” “One of a Kind (Love Affair),” and “Mighty Love” kept the streak going. They alternated between two lead singers, smooth Bobby Smith and slightly raw Philippe Wynne. On “Mighty Love” they traded lines until Smith stepped aside to let Wynne cut loose and improv for the last minute.
Bell’s Spinners template was so distinctive that when a friend asked him to help out another band named New York City, many people assumed their No. 17 hit “I’m Doing Fine Now” was the Spinners.
Dave Marsh called the O’Jays’ “Love Train” disco gospel, but many musicologists believe the birth of the disco drumbeat came during the recording of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “The Love I Lost (Part 1).” They were another group that kicked around for a decade and a half until they hired a twenty-year-old drummer named Teddy Pendergrass. After he started piping up from the back with his powerful gravelly voice, they quickly decided to stick him up front. “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” topped the R&B chart and made it to No. 3 pop, but when they tried to perform the follow-up “The Love I Lost (Part 1)” in the same slow vein, it didn’t click. Huff suggested speeding things up. Guitarist Bobby Eli said, “Right there on the spot, [drummer Earl Young] came up with that hi-hat pattern that everybody started using, like for the disco records and everything.”11
The Motown Beat was often 4/4 time, hitting the snare on every beat in a bar. Young’s “disco beat” was “four on the floor,” hitting the bass drum on every beat, the snare on beats two and four. What was different was the variations he’d play on his hi-hat cymbal, as well as his metronomelike timing.12 “Some drummers play a little behind the beat, some drummers are a little ahead of the beat,” said guitarist T. J. Tindall. “Earl was right up the middle, almost like a machine.”13 In that sense, he was the John Henry precursor to the drum machines that rose at the end of the disco era to supplant studio musicians.
The requisite sweeping strings were added, and the single was released in September, around the time MFSB issued its second instrumental album, Love Is the Message. The title track became a standard at underground discos like the Loft, as well as on the set list of DJ Kool Herc. The percussion solo at the end of the eleven-minute version also became an ingredient of hip hop evolution. A New York after-hours club deejay named DJ Hollywood made a ritual out of rapping the lyrics of Isaac Hayes’s “Good Times” over it.14
Another seminal cut on the album was “TSOP (the Sound of Philadelphia).” Originally Soul Train host Don Cornelius commissioned Gamble and Huff to write it as a theme for his TV show. When G&H wanted to release it as a single, Cornelius insisted they remove any reference to the show, so they pulled out the ladies singing “Soul Train” and changed the title. When the song hit No. 1 on the pop charts the following year, Cornelius realized he’d lost a massive branding opportunity. It was the first TV theme to go to No. 1. It set MFSB apart from Motown’s Funk Brothers, who never had chart hits themselves.
The female vocalists on “TSOP” were the Three Degrees, struggling since 1963. Their 1973 self-titled album contained the classic “When Will I See You Again.” Originally the label passed over the song as a single in favor of the ill-advised “Dirty Ol’ Man.” But after the success of “TSOP,” they gave “When Will I See You Again” a chance, and it made it to No. 2. For one moment the Three Degrees rivaled the Supremes as the melodramatic strings and sexy South American rhythm encapsulated the yearnings of a million morning-afters. For the fade-out Sheila Ferguson did her best Diana Ross, riffing with the jaunty horns.
Within a year, Philadelphia International was the second-largest black-owned US company behind Motown. The Grammys named Bell Producer of the Year. Gamble, Huff, and Bell topped the R&B charts twenty-one times between 1972 and 1976. Gamble and Huff scored more gold singles than any other producers in the ’70s.
The Whisky à Go-Go opened in 1947 in Paris, perhaps the first discotheque. In the mid-’50s its manager, Regine, began using two turntables so there would be no pause between records. In 1969, a New York club named Sanctuary in Hell’s Kitchen became the first nightclub where men could dance together freely, often to the Bump, a “frank pantomime of buggery,” per journalist Albert Goldman,15 though the dance was later water downed to hip-bumping by the masses. It closed in 1972 amid complaints of public sex and Mafia-supplied drugs. But David Mancuso’s Loft in New York is considered the birthplace of ’70s disco as a genre and lifestyle.
Mancuso (born 1944) was a member of Timothy Leary’s meditation center in New York, called, naturally, the League for Spiritual Discovery (LSD). Leary intended to create a religion with acid as the sacrament so it could be taken legally. Eventually Leary moved to California, but Mancuso kept the flame going in New York. On Valentine’s Day 1970 he deejayed his first party in a loft at 647 Broadway (about five minutes from the Mercer Arts Center). The flyers called the party Love Saves the Day, which shared an acronym with what was in the punch. In front of his Buddhist shrine he played sets organized around the Three Bardos (states of existence) described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which had been translated by Leary, Ram Dass, and Ralph Metzner in their Psychedelic Experience book. Mancuso described the first state as “calm,” the second “a circus,” “and the third Bardo was about reentry, so people would go back into the outside world relatively smoothly.”16 Like hip hop deejays, he used two copies of the same record on two turntables to extend the most popular parts of songs.
His parties provided an alternative to gay bars, where police harassment was so frequent that men had to factor bail money into their nightly budget. Mancuso’s Loft was invitation only and sold no liquor, food, or beverages, though amyl nitrate, Quaaludes, and coke were usually easy to find. “It was probably about sixty percent black and seventy percent gay,” the Loft’s soundman Alex Rosner recalled. “There was a mix of sexual orientation, there was a mix of races, a mix of economic groups. A real mix, where the common denominator was music.”17
“If you can mix the economical groups together, that’s where you have social progress,” Mancuso said. He accepted IOUs at the door. “People didn’t abuse that system.”18 It was the antithesis of the exclusionary door policy of the club it led to: Studio 54.
By summer ’73, Mancuso helped make hits. In a Jamaican record store in Brooklyn, he unearthed an import called “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango, a saxophonist from the French-speaking African country Cameroon. It featured the hook “ma-mako, ma-masa, mako-makossa” that Michael Jackson later used in “Wanna Be Starting Something.”
After Mancuso played it at the Loft, “people went wild trying to find that record,” said deejay Nicky Siano,19 who soon became Mancuso’s biggest rival, spinning at a club called the Gallery. A band named Afrique covered “Soul Makossa” and leapt onto the pop charts in June without any radio airplay. Atlantic quickly licensed Dibango’s original, and the two versions duked it out through July: Afrique at 47, Dibango at 50, then both at 49, then Dibango passed Afrique at 37 and they dropped out. Dibango’s ultimately peaked at 35.20
By then discos were sprouting up across Manhattan. The Gallery opened in Chelsea in February, the Hollywood opened at the site of the old Peppermint Lounge in May, and Le Jardin opened in the basement of the Diplomat Hotel in June, enlisting the deejay from the Continental Baths, Bobby Guttadaro.
Vince Aletti helped point the scene toward a name in his Rolling Stone article “Discotheque Rock ’72: Paaaaarty!,” which came out in September ’73 despite the ’72 in its title. “The best discotheque DJs are underground stars discovering previously ignored albums, foreign imports, album cuts and obscure singles with the power to make the crowd scream and playing them overlapped, non-stop so you dance until you drop.”
The Gallery’s Siano described how he added drama to the records he spun. “I would turn everything off except the tweeter arrays and have them dancing tss,tss,tss for a while. Then I would turn on the bass, and then I’d turn on the main speakers. When I did that the room would just explode.”21
Many of the famous disco deejays were Italian, per Tim Lawrence’s history Love Saves the Day, “thanks to the fact that Italian Americans ran a high proportion of New York discotheques, and many of them were linked to the Mafia.”22 Thus it made sense the protagonists were Italian in Saturday Night Fever, the film that later codified the movement for the masses.
In the movie, John Travolta faces off in a dance contest against a black couple and a Latin couple. The latter reflected the third major cultural influence on the budding genre. Puerto Rican teens in the South Bronx originated the Hustle dance at house parties when adults wouldn’t allow them to grind.23
A New York record label named Fania Records housed Latin artists like Celia Cruz, Rubén Blades, Willie Colón, and Larry Harlow. They mixed Puerto Rican songs, Cuban mambo, cha-cha-cha, Dominican merengue, and boogaloo into a new genre named for the Spanish word for “sauce.” The term was popularized in 1973 when Izzy Sanabria began hosting a Latin version of Soul Train on New York’s channel 141 called Salsa.24 Soon after, Fania artist Joe Bataan released an album called Salsoul, reflecting how New York Latinos mixed soul music with salsa.25 He co-founded a new label, also called Salsoul, that poached Philadelphia International’s arranger Vincent Montana Jr. to lead the Salsoul Orchestra, a.k.a. the disco orchestra, stocked with disgruntled MSFB veterans.
On August 24, Dibango, the Fania All Stars house band, and Celia Cruz played to forty thousand people at Yankee Stadium. Music historian Will Hermes wrote, “It could have been called the ‘1st Latin Soulrock Jazz Fusion African Proto-Disco Fiesta!’ in its spectacular attempt to fuse nearly all the blooming local music scenes of the moment.”26 During the conga showdown “Congo Bongo” between Ray Barretto and Mongo Santamaria (included on the album Latin Soul Rock), “the audience went wild and stormed the field,” said Harlow. “A girl started dancing on top of my piano, and I got scared. We had placed fireworks inside the piano to set them off later, during the show. I saw that crazy crowd taking the stage, and I told [music director Johnny] Pacheco, ‘Let’s get out of here before this thing blows up.’”27 The musicians fled, and the audience stripped the stage, even stealing the piano. Coming at the dawn of disco, it made for an interesting bookend with Disco Demolition Night in 1979, when the backlash peaked. That evening at Chicago’s Comiskey Field baseball park, the crowd chanted “Disco sucks,” disc jockey Steve Dahl blew up a huge box of disco records between four and six feet tall, and the audience streamed onto the field around the bonfire. But that was six years away.
Born in 1944, Barry White grew up in South Central Los Angeles in a gang, a lifestyle that killed his brother. In jail, White heard Elvis sing “It’s Now or Never” and decided to get out of crime and pursue music.28 Upon release he wrote and arranged songs for groups ranging from the Bobby Fuller Four to TV’s Banana Splits. He finally hit the Top 20 as the writer-producer of “Walkin’ in the Rain with the One I Love” by the female trio Love Unlimited. He featured in a cameo at the end of the song, talking sexy with future wife Glodean James. He had an even more mellifluous bass-baritone than Isaac Hayes, and his business partner prodded him to sing himself. After some resistance, he did so on “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby,” the most intimate proto–Quiet Storm love music to hit the Top 5 yet.
In December he released an instrumental by his forty-piece Barry White Orchestra called “Love’s Theme,” replete with wah-wah and French horn. The New York clubs pushed it onto the charts—another disco song that sold a ton of copies before receiving substantial radio airplay. “Love’s Theme” became the third-bestselling song of 1974. After ABC Sports used it for its golf show, it set the template for TV theme songs for the rest of the decade.
The Hues Corporation also lived in LA. Until now they were best known for performing in Blacula. But their fortunes changed when they included “Rock the Boat” on their Freedom for the Stallion album, released December 7. The LP featured lush pop in the Fifth Dimension vein, but for “Rock the Boat” session drummer Bobby Perez switched the rhythm to a cumbia beat: a Columbian style that mixed African rhythms with indigenous music.29
In Miami, Harry Wayne Casey, a.k.a. KC of KC and the Sunshine Band, did all right with his first single, “Blow Your Whistle,” in September, so he entered the studio to record a follow-up called “Rock Your Baby.” He and his co-writer, bassist Richard Finch, recorded the music in forty-five minutes, with drum machine set to bossa nova, 4/4 beat with the open hi-hat sound. But KC couldn’t hit the high notes.30 So they contacted singer Gwen McCrae to sing it, but she was late for the session. Her husband and manager, George, was there, however, so they asked him to take a crack. And thus George McCrae sang on one of the fewer than forty singles in history to sell over ten million copies, soon imitated by Abba’s “Dancing Queen” and Lennon’s “Whatever Gets You Through the Night.”
In the year ahead, “Love’s Theme,” “TSOP,” “Rock the Boat,” and “Rock Your Baby” all topped the pop charts, and Kendricks’s December release “Boogie Down” made No. 2, fomenting the most unifying (and polarizing) music craze since the British Invasion.