Disco will probably always be a dirty word. When the Bee Gees came through town to promote a comeback album a couple of years ago (it flopped), the local press was condescending–the Bee Gees, it seemed, still had to live down their status as the kings of disco. And kings they were, of course: during one of the most lucrative periods in recording-industry history, the late 70s, they dominated the nation’s Top 40 charts as very few groups ever do, pulling off a dozen or so hits of their own (a couple of them among the decade’s biggest) and writing a bunch more for brother Andy (a couple of them among the decade’s biggest) and associates like Yvonne Elliman and Tavares. Though most people associate the band’s success with Saturday Night Fever, we shouldn’t forget that the Bee Gees’ comeback (they were odd, folky popsters in the 60s, remember) was already well under way by the movie’s 1977 release: their 1975 album Main Course had already produced two big, weird, and very good hits, “Jive Talkin”‘ and “Nights on Broadway,” and in 1976 Children of the World contributed a couple more, the eerily voiced “You Should Be Dancing” and the schmaltzy “Love So Right.” Then came Saturday Night Fever, and the Bee Gees entered their uncertain pantheon.
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The distrust and then the hate disco engendered is often described as a racist or homophobic phenomenon. With no evidence to give but my memories from the time (as a rock-consuming teen and record-store clerk through most of disco’s formative years), it has always seemed to me that it actually had its roots in something a little different, namely the tendency of American kids to buy into a mythos of authenticity in their rock ‘n’ roll. I remember the British critic Simon Frith saying that while the British music press plays to its audience’s craving for novelty, the American way of writing about rock generally invokes the audience’s perception of a sort of graph of rock ‘n’ roll realism, and then demonstrates how this or that band measures up on it. Maybe suburban Sunbelt teens–the shock troops of the antidisco movement–couldn’t relate to the disco milieu because they balked at rubbing shoulders with urban blacks or Hispanics in crowded clubs. But mostly they didn’t like disco because they liked guys playing guitars and sporting the rock ‘n’ roll imagery that Rolling Stone and Hit Parader told them was proper.
Disco obviously reflected little of rock’s hallowed iconography, and it lacked one other important thing as well: sincerity, or at least the appearance of it. Sincerity in rock ‘n’ roll takes many forms–from slice-of-life thoughts on drinking and womanizing to the appalling sentimentality that almost every 70s rock band took occasional refuge in. Rock ‘n’ roll fans crave schmaltz; they’ll run out and buy a million copies of any record put out by a guy with long hair, a bulge in his pants, and the chutzpah to sing something along the lines of “Baby, I love your way” or “Everything is dust in the wind.” From the most sophisticated of the old-fashioned rock (say, Neil Young) to the stupidest and most pretentious (say, Kansas) the most popular stars purveyed “messages” that could be understood even when they weren’t, if you see what I mean–you got what Neil Young was talking about in “After the Gold Rush” (“Well I dreamed I saw the knights in armor comin’”) or the meaning of Kansas’s lines “Carry on, our wayward son / There’ll be peace when you are done,” even if both songs are demonstrably just about meaningless. Both songs played to an inchoate appreciation of a sort of romanticism–knights, wars, a little sci-fi surrealism–and that’s what made them “readable” to kids.
When KC and the Sunshine Band came to be, Casey and Finch were at T.K. Productions, an umbrella for half a dozen small Miami labels including T.K. Records. While the pair certainly made T.K. Productions’ fortune, they weren’t its first auteurs: the company’s first major hit was a brilliantly constructed, almost chilling single by Timmy Thomas, “Why Can’t We Live Together.” The song’s relatively edgy, politically tinged lyric tips its hat to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” even as its minimalist instrumentation–apparently nothing but an organ, a drum machine, and a hand-held shaker–anticipates Prince’s “When Doves Cry” by about 15 years.
KC ruled for a couple of years–they managed five number-one singles in two years–but were soon overtaken in various ways. Commercially, the Bee Gees melded the music to the lushest production work of the period with the help of Karl Richardson and Albhy Galuten, and to more traditionally “rock” lyrical concerns; they quickly overshadowed KC with both hits (the Saturday Night Fever sessions) and misses (the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band fuck-up). And the happy, sprightly KC and the Sunshine Band sound soon seemed a bit declasse next to the aloof, high-toned tales of romantic anomie proffered by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers’ Chic. After some weirdness (Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”) and some surprising resurgences (like Donna Summer’s two-record tour de force, Bad Girls), disco disappeared quickly–KC, the Bee Gees, and Chic all went out with the decade and haven’t been much heard from since. Disco’s last gasp was probably the pathetic “Stars on 45” Beatles medley, and by then there were new trends in dance music. Michael Jackson, for one, was constructing a sturdier, more rock-based club music that while eminently dance-based really couldn’t be called disco. And in England the vestiges of new wave were working their way into a computer-based music that would make its mark with the synth-pop “haircut” bands.
