“NOW is the summer of our discotheques,” wrote night-crawling journalist Anthony Haden-Guest in New York magazine in June 1977. “And every night is party night.”
It would have been hard to argue with him. Studio 54, the discotheque that defined an entire era of nightlife, had opened two months earlier, and Paramount Pictures had just begun filming Saturday Night Fever. By the end of the summer disco would be America’s second-largest-grossing entertainment business, behind only professional sports.
Disco even had its own top forty charts. In stark contrast with the protest music of the sixties, most disco songs were about dancing and disporting. This was no coincidence, nor was the timing of the explosion of New York’s dance scene. “People have always lost themselves in dancing when the economy’s been bad,” Bob Casey, the president of the National Association of Discotheque Disk Jockeys, told a Daily News reporter in the summer of 1975, as the city was sliding toward bankruptcy. “The discos are now doing exactly the same thing that the big dance halls with the crystal chandeliers did during the Depression. Everyone’s out to spend their unemployment check, their welfare: to lose themselves.”
Like any fad that seems to erupt into the national consciousness,
this one had been percolating below ground for years: in gay hot spots along the abandoned West Side waterfront, in the vacant sweatshops south of Houston Street, in the dingy recreation rooms of Bronx and Brooklyn housing projects, in the empty ballrooms of aging midtown hotels.
If New York’s disco scene had a party zero, it was David Mancuso’s Love Saves the Day bash on Valentine’s Day 1970. Mancuso had been throwing informal dance parties in his $175-a-month downtown loft for years, but this time he sent out invitations and collected $2 at the door. The sound system, his stereo, already in place, Mancuso hung a bobbing mirrored ball from the seventeen-foot ceiling, inflated several hundred multicolored balloons, and lined the edges of the space with church pews so revelers would have a place to rest. The image on the invites—Salvador Dalí’s melting clocks—was easily deciphered: Once you tumbled down the rabbit hole and into Mancuso’s wonderland, all sense of time would be suspended. And it was. At daybreak a shirtless Mancuso was still spinning vinyl, and about a hundred people of varying ethnicities, sexual preferences, and classes were still clamoring for more. A weekly tradition was soon born.
The parties started at a little before midnight on Saturday and ran until six or seven Sunday morning. Mancuso handled the music himself, using two turntables to ease dancers from one song to the next, lifting them up, and gently coaxing them back down as he moved seamlessly between soul, rock, R & B, Motown, and Afro-Latino. Sometimes he turned off all the lights and just let the music play. When he did, the dancers invariably screamed. “Dancing at the Loft was like riding a wave of music, being carried along as one song after another built relentlessly to a brilliant crest and broke, bringing almost involuntary shouts of approval from the crowd then smoothed out, softened, and slowly began welling up to another peak,” was how disco journalist Vince Aletti described the experience in The Village Voice.
Ignited by this small spark, an underground dance culture started to spread to other unmarked lofts and hotel ballrooms. “The whole scene was a response to the sixties,” says Michael Gomes, an early disco devotee who moved to New York from Toronto in 1973. “Instead of changing the world, we wanted to create our own little world.” In the mass of bodies, sexual boundaries became porous: “It wasn’t gay or straight. It was just this blur where you were caught up in the music.”
The ethos of this emerging subculture was continuous dancing. In its name, borders of neighborhood, class, and ethnicity were crossed. “From the Bronx, you could get on a train at certain parts of the night—two or three in the morning—and it was like rush hour,” recalls Mark Riley, a Bronx resident and disco fanatic.
The Bronx’s own fledgling dance culture, one that eventually blossomed into hip-hop, was simultaneously gestating. It was less formal than the new wave of discotheques; a DJ might set up his table in a playground, run extension cords into the nearest lamppost, and start playing. The Bronx DJs had their own style, pioneered by the Jamaican-born Kool Here in the rec room of the housing project his family lived in, which featured quick, choppy cuts and talking over the music—future trademarks of rap that would not have gone over well in the Manhattan dance clubs. But there was stylistic overlap as well. “All of the DJs were blending songs together,” says John Benitez, who started DJing at block parties and sweet sixteens in his South Bronx neighborhood in the early seventies before breaking into the Manhattan club scene.
As dance clubs multiplied, DJs turned into minor celebrities. They didn’t just play music; they made music. Record companies soon discovered their ability to sell records as well. Not only were they deluging DJs with promotional singles and dispatching scouts to dance clubs, but they also began producing their own extended play disco mixes exclusively for the discotheques. None of the hard-core dance clubs sold alcohol, but there were always plenty of drugs,
chiefly acid, amyl nitrate, pot, mescalin, coke, Quaaludes (also known as disco biscuits), and speed.
With their flashing lights and pansexual crowds, the new clubs were a far cry from the old dance halls where the first- and second-generation immigrant parents of outer borough teenagers and twenty-somethings had done the fox-trot, which caused some confusion. “What my old man doesn’t understand is that you don’t have to be a fag to be into this scene,” Tony Pagano, a young man from Staten Island, told the writer Ed McCormack for the 1976 book Dancing Madness. Between the music’s ecstatic peaks and the undulating tangle of bodies on the dance floor, it was impossible not to see a connection between sex and disco. (As Esquire’s Albert Goldman put it in 1978, “All disco is implicitly orgy.”)
Manhattan socialites were dancing too. That was the crowd that most interested steak house impresario Steve Rubell—before getting into discos, he owned a chain of upscale Sizzlers called the Steak Loft—and his business partner, Ian Schrager. The question they faced in 1976 was how to get them to Douglaston, Queens, the site of their disco, the Enchanted Garden, a place where, on any given night, the seven blow dryers in the women’s room outnumbered the VIPs on the dance floor. New York’s disco diva Carmen d’Alessio provided the answer.
Since coming to New York in 1965, the Peruvian-born d‘Alessio had worked as a translator for the United Nations and logged a stint in public relations for Yves Saint Laurent, but in more recent years she had discovered her true calling, party planning. When Rubell and Schrager first spotted her in the winter of ’76, she was wearing a bikini and dancing on the shoulders of a tall black male model at a Brazilian Carnival theme party she’d organized. Rubell and Schrager persuaded d‘Alessio to come work for them. For her first party at the Enchanted Garden, d’Alessio chose an Arabian Nights theme, complete with elephants, llamas, and camels.
In early ‘77, d’Alessio was asked to promote another disco. This
one had not yet opened. It was to be housed in Ed Sullivan’s old theater on Fifty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue. Much of the funding was to come from art dealer Frank Lloyd—that is, until a court found Lloyd guilty of defrauding the estate of the late Mark Rothko. Lloyd absconded to the Bahamas, and d’Alessio turned to the owners of the Enchanted Garden for financing. Before long Rubell and Schrager had pushed out the putative front man and were planning an April 1977 debut for their new disco, Studio 54.
In addition to any celebrity whose address she could beg, borrow, or steal, d’Alessio sent invitations to everyone on the mailing list of the Ford Modeling Agency, Andy Warhol’s Factory, and the Islanders, a group of several thousand gay men who summered on Fire Island. Come opening night, the place was mobbed. “My mother had to be carried in over the crowd,” d’Alessio recalls.
Studio 54 took the escapist ethic of the disco scene to its absurd extreme. An outsize prop of the Man on the Moon shoveling a coke spoon under his nose, shirtless busboys in white satin gym shorts and sequined jockstraps, busty women hanging upside down from trapezes, a fifty-four-hundred-square-foot dance floor crowded with undulators, balconies crowded with fornicators—this wasn’t about avoiding reality as much as it was about obliterating it. Yet at the same time, Studio’s Rome-in-the-twilight-of-the-empire feel seemed very much in keeping with this moment in the life of New York. At a birthday party for Bianca Jagger not long after its debut, the rock star’s wife was led around the dance floor on a white horse by a man and woman with circus costumes painted on their naked bodies, all to the strains of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” If this wasn’t a sign of the coming apocalypse, what was? “I don’t know if I was in heaven or hell,” Lillian Carter, mother of President Jimmy, reflected on her first visit there. “But it was wonderful.”
The disco purists were not so sure, about either Studio 54 or the rest of the gaudy dance clubs that sprouted up around New York during the summer of New York’s discotheques. With the rise of
these new clubs, New York’s disco DJs were playing to bigger crowds than ever before, yet paradoxically, their power was slipping. Radio stations were now catching on to disco, so the record companies no longer needed to cultivate club DJs. At the same time, the increased competition from radio disc jockeys made it harder for club DJs to “break” records, especially because many of the new discotheque owners expected their DJs to play songs that were already hits. And to play them repeatedly over the course of a single night.
There was also the matter of elitism. Gay blacks had been regulars on the private dance party circuit, but they were almost wholly excluded from Studio 54. Of course the door policy at Studio left almost everyone on the wrong side of the velvet cord. Not that being shut out wasn’t worth something. “[T]he borough hopefuls knew that in all likelihood they wouldn’t be admitted, but the experience still enabled them to enter into the celebrity script, albeit in a subjugated role,” wrote Tim Lawrence in his definitive book about the 1970s New York dance culture, Love Saves the Day.
To hard-core dancers, the disco scene’s evolution from sweat-soaked lofts to celebrity-studded spectacles—in retrospect, an irresistible metaphor for the city’s own journey from the gritty seventies to the glossy eighties—was tantamount to its demise. Among other things, all the new clubs served booze, which made the dancing sloppy. Michael Gomes, who was now publishing a newsletter for DJs called Mixmaster, referred derisively to the drunk and stoned dancers at Studio 54 as “discodroids.”
But disco’s real enemy came not from within but from without. The official declaration of war can be found in the lead editorial in the premiere issue of Punk magazine in January 1976. Titled “Death to Discoshit!,” it began: “Kill yourself. Jump off a fuckin’ cliff. Drive nails into your head … OD … Anything. Just don’t listen to discoshit.”
If disco music was euphoric, hypnotic, punk rock was assaultive, relentless; if discos like Studio 54 provided an escape from the ugliness
of New York, its punk analog, a urine-stained dive on the Bowery called CBGB, embraced and indulged it.
Punk was a New York creation, though in 1977 it was easily mistaken for an English one. Not only were the Sex Pistols in the process of overshadowing New York’s punk bands, but in late May a new display appeared in the windows of Macy’s at Herald Square. Scattered among a half dozen motorcycles were eight female mannequins in cutoff denim shorts, spiky hair, and sixteen-dollar T-shirts adorned with cigarette burn holes, safety pins, and such slogans as “Boredom,” “Burnt,” and “Punk Rock Lives.” To help sell this new line of clothing was an accompanying ad blitz for the “fashion trend that’s making heads turn on London streets.” (For those who were looking for something a little more upscale, the British designer Zandra Rhodes’s collection of ripped gowns was available, starting at a thousand dollars.) The New York Rocker, a fanzine that championed the city’s emerging downtown rock scene, reacted with predictable outrage in its July–August 1977 issue, accusing the English punks of cashing in on “the fruits of New York’s labor.”
In 1977, rock writers were just getting around to tracing the lineage of New York’s punk scene, which began, by common assent, in the late sixties with the Velvet Underground’s operatic odes to the city’s junkies and drag queens. A few years after the Velvet Underground came the New York Dolls, a band of outer-borough boys with a devoted following of arty bohemians and protopunks. This was the era of Andy Warhol–inspired glam rock, and with their platform heels, dark red lipstick, and satin hot pants, the Dolls looked normal enough, though there was something tartier, trashier about their aesthetic—gutter transvestite, as it was known. Onstage they strutted with a theatricality that matched their costumes; one Village Voice writer described their lead singer, Staten Island’s David Johansen, as a cross between Mick Jagger and Marlene Dietrich. If you closed your eyes, though, you heard songs about quotidian New York life set to a straightforward garage band sound. The city had no
rock ’n’ roll clubs at the time—it had been years since New York had anything approaching a rock scene—so the Dolls were reduced to playing at the Mercer Arts Center, a group of performance spaces carved out of an old Greenwich Village hotel.
Attempts were made to take the Dolls national. They produced two unsuccessful records and even did some touring but broke up in 1974 in the middle of a two-week run in Florida, largely because their Queens-bred guitarist Johnny Thunders (né Genzale) needed an excuse to get back to his heroin connection in the city.
By then the hotel that housed the Mercer Arts Center had collapsed, and Television, a rock band fronted by two teenagers who’d run away to New York to become poets, had talked their way into a Lower East Side biker bar whose name, CBGB, stood for country, bluegrass, and blues. Other protopunk acts including Blondie, Patti Smith, and the Ramones, soon followed. At a time when rock ‘n’ roll connoted suburban stadiums, a rock scene was born on, of all places, the Bowery. “Broken youth stumbling into the home of broken age,” wrote Frank Rose, noting the irony in The Village Voice in the summer of ’76.
One by one, New York’s new bands signed record contracts. The Ramones, of Forest Hills, Queens, released their first album in the spring of 1976. “Their music swept the Bowery,” read the accompanying ads in music magazines. “Now it’s gonna sweep the nation.” It never quite did; the record peaked at 111 on the Billboard charts. The Talking Heads, another one of the most popular bands at CBGB, wasn’t doing much better. Their 1977 album, Talking Heads ’77, barely broke 100. Touring the country that summer in the wake of its release, the band found itself playing mostly at pizza parlors.
But even if these bands weren’t catching on in the heartland, they were at least taking their rightful place on the sound track for 1970s New York, ensuring that punk rock would forever evoke the dirty downtown streets where it had been born.