What did you listen to during disco's peak years ('74-'78)

[cicero2]

Oh, forgot to say - thanks finnbow and everyone else for the fun to read thread.

And I still stand by my oft asserted opinion that the popular music of my teen years was the worst: hair metal, nu R&B, non-hair metal, whatever other schlock of the times that I have blocked from my mind.

* I like GnR and Sade.

 

[visiman]

Disco years

Leo Sayer !!long tall glasses!!!

Oh yes, I can dance, I can dance, I can dance, I can dance, I can dance, I can dance, I can dance, I can dance.

Black Sabath
Deep purple
?Elton John? Captain Fantastic
Sweet
Bruce Springsteen anything from the "Nebraska" album.

Bob Seager

Uh, ?????

It would be a long list like the others

What was the question again? :scratch2:

 

[electronjohn]

74-78 I was workin' Top-40 radio...so along with such immortal nuggets as "Love Will Keep Us Together" there was PLENTY of disco spun...KC, Ohio Players, Parliament, etc. I also spun some nights at a genuine meatrack of a disco...plennnnnty of stories there.
But...at home...different story.
Steely Dan
Little Feat
Allmans
Zep
John Lennon
Bowie
Iggy
You kinda get the picture.
Essentially a non-disco, non-Top-40 environment at home & in the car. Kept work fresh!

 

[Sharpstik]

Disco really didn't get started until around 1978. I remember one of our 2 big local am stations changing formats that year.
Here's another list:http://www.musicradio77.com/Top1978.html
If you look at 1977, there's hardly any.

 

[reneborg]

if you can remember, you weren't partying hard enough

Bringin' back some memories there! The Mud Club! Haven't thought about that place in years!

So you were hanging out there too? What a friggin' small world! We'd go there after some of our usual haunts closed. If there wasn't live music we'd also hang at the Other End (was earlier called the Bitter End), and Kenny's Castaways.

The Long Island station was probably WLIR. Great station, like WNEW but a little more low-key - smaller market and all that. Very engaging personalities throughout. WBAB was another similar LI station, but they were farther out and hard to get even in western Nassau, much less NYC. Also WPLR out of somewhere in CT was a cool station in the day.

Yeah, WLIR is the station. And, I had forgetten about WPLR. I remember how sexy the "Night Bird" aka Alison Steele sounded ... And they played a whole side of an album at a time, great for recording!

It was probably right at the tail end of the disco daze - '77 or '78 or so, when I saw The Pretenders play at a large club out on the Island - Hammerheads it was called. It was in a converted supermarket. I ran up right by the stage and stayed there all night. Another nail in the coffin of tinnitus I suffer with today, but a great experience nonetheless.

Not 100% sure, but I think I was at Hammerheads a few times too. What town was that in?

Jeez, we're sounding like archaeological relics here!

 

[JonL]

I think I was at the Mud Club once or twice, but don't really remember. My ex-wife used to go there a lot before I knew her and she talked about it fairly often, that's where most of my memories of it are from. Alison Steele was on WNEW. There was also Carol Miller on WPLJ (which had been WABC-FM in the early days, and a really cool station).

Hammerheads was in Levittown I believe, or one of the neighboring towns.

 

[reneborg]

that's right, the Nightbird was on WNEW, I didn't make it clear in my post. When I was a wee lad, WABC-AM was the place to hear all the Motown sounds.

The Mud Club, like Studio 10, was decidedly NOT disco for sure. One of the things I remember about the Mud Club was they had 2 unisex bathrooms, and it sure did take a long time sometimes for people to finish using it. I use the plural there on purpose :yes:.

 

[stoutblock]

Me and my buds kept the fire lit on rock and refused to submit to the pressures of disco.

Unfortunately, we did not get laid as much as some of the weaker out there...

Aerosmith, Boston, Nugent, Van Halen etc...

 

[JonL]

My ex used to frequent Max's Kansas City a lot as well in those days. I don't think she ever frequented CBGB's though.

I had gone to Max's once in the early '70s as a guest of Roy Bookbinder who was my guitar teacher briefly. He was opening for Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. That was before Max's became a rock club.

 

[reneborg]

Damn, Jon .... having a lot of memories here ... or are those flashbacks

I had forgotten about Max's Kansas City! Seeing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee must have been wonderful. I have an album by them and it's one of my favorites.

And something had been nagging me so I looked it up. The 'Mud Club' was spelled "Mudd Club." Here's a bit of it from Wikipedia.

While I was at it, I googled Studio 10 and found this:

"10 (corner): This beautiful little building, originally an 1893 factory, was Studio 10, a Yippie music club from 1979-81, featuring bands like Bad Brains, DOA and the dBs (and free pot)." From <http://www.nysonglines.com/bleecker.htm>

I read that webpage and saw that the site of CBGB's is now some sort of clothing boutique :tears: ...


Stoutblock said "Unfortunately, we did not get laid as much as some of the weaker out there..."

I dunno man, I think that depended on where you were hanging out. :yes: Just saying .... The disco gals in my neighborhood looked beautiful, and they knew it, so, there wasn't much action.

 

[JonL]

The Disco scene was also very promiscuous. Remember the movie "Looking For Mr. Goodbar?" I dated a woman a few years ago who had been into the disco scene. The stories she told me about her sexual escapades in those days made my head spin. And she told me that there was even more stuff that she would never tell me.

 

[cicero2]

Me and my buds kept the fire lit on rock and refused to submit to the pressures of disco.

Unfortunately, we did not get laid as much as some of the weaker out there...

Aerosmith, Boston, Nugent, Van Halen etc...

I don't think pawning your soul to appease your libido is *weaker*. at all.

Though I hate Aerosmith and Van Halen (except for 'sweet emotion' and both 'jump' and 'panama') and they are prime suspects in my most hated bands of all time . . . if you stick with what you actually like, that's awesome and rare.

 

[Bob_in_OKC]

Growing up within airwave range of Dallas, for us it was The Zoo...

 

[spiderhead69]

For me it was the standard fare of Zepplin, Yes, Genesis, Zappa, The Ramones et al.
I was living in Austin at that time so there was a wide range of stuff to listen to and shows to see at that time. The Armadillo World Headquarters was still open so there was usually a good show once a week then. Often we would listen to KMAC / KISS in San Antonio as they were the first to play the up and coming groups, like THe Police.

 

[blhagstrom]

mmmm

So you admit to having developed a "real appreciation" for disco? It takes a brave man to do that, in today's world!

Huh? A lot of the music was OK to good. The Anti-Disco thing was based on the DJ playing music rather than hiring a band. The artists and bands hated it. No gigs. I heard a lot of talk about the music being "simple", no talent needed. Funny that rap didn't get the same beating. But in fairness, the music could get monotonous. Boom-boom-boom-boom-etc.... And there was a ton of bad stuff, but thats with everything.

I'll raise one parting question: Will disco ever experience a revival of interest? Will it ever be considered (retro-)cool again? If so, NOW would be the right time to start amassing that collection of disco LPs, while (1) you can still find them easily enough, and (2) their prices haven't started to escalate. You could grab a bunch of them, set up a website to praise and talk about them, with hyping on Facebook, etc.... and perhaps help kick-start the revival. Of course, you could end up sitting on the world's largest pile of the world's least-wanted stuff, if no one else ever catches on to it and jumps on your bandwagon (pun intended )...

Never know what people will trigger on. I doubt it. I think it was mostly about "clubbing" and now its rave parties and such. Jeez, I've always lived "too far out" to really experience the "latest" things. From what I see on TV and movies, the dance clubs with DJs are shown to be playing something with a heavy bass beat. No reason they wouldn't dig some of the disco tunes, if they knew of them or could find them. From the couple of years that we did a disco show, I have a pile of vinyl. Other than the stuff that was really known and over played (Bee Gees, Saturday Night Fever sound track stuff) the rest has about 10% good tunes. A LOT of it was one shot stuff that probably never got heard. Its been years since I went though it, but I know there is some obscure stuff that was really good.

I wouldn't collect the common stuff. The obscure stuff would be fun, BUT, how do you know any of it....because it is obscure. IF you found a bunch of vinyl from someone who took really good care of it and had a bunch of disco, that would be fun to play through. IF its a pile from a club that played the vinyl live, it probably got pretty beat up. We recorded the music to tape, and I kept the vinyl like I did the rest of my collection, in sleeves and covers and stored properly, so my vinyl is NM. That is what you'd want to find.

 

[ducati_EL34]

The Disco scene was also very promiscuous.

Compared to what other time period? Promiscuity has always been araound, just not so out in the open...

No disco was not promiscuous, just the people going to them were. Disco did not suddenly make people promiscuous. cocaine probably had more to do with that...

 

[JonL]

Compared to what other time period? Promiscuity has always been araound, just not so out in the open...

No disco was not promiscuous, just the people going to them were. Disco did not suddenly make people promiscuous. cocaine probably had more to do with that...

I believe the promiscuity was tied to the whole disco SCENE -- music, venues, and of course drugs. I have half-baked sociological theories about the whole thing that I won't go into. I would say though that it was as decadent and self-indulgent a time as any I've lived through. These things go in cycles I guess. I think the disco scene included a level of widespread, anonymous promiscuity that reached far deeper into mainstream society than at most other times. The music was often sexually explicit - to the point of being pornographic. How many orgasms have been recorded on disco songs compared to other genres?

 

[stabby]

I'll defend one band from the disco years, Earth, Wind & Fire. I saw them a few years back at the Vegas HoB's and they were still great.

Most disco was bad because it was just thrown together in a studio by some producer to capitalize on the disco fad. EW&F had talented musicians and Philip Bailey, who can just wail.

 

[cwall99]

Number One Band for me was The Who, but before I found The Who, there was Elton John and Queen.

After The Who, I started to move in a variety of directions and found myself listening to Pink Floyd, Neil Young (and the whole CSNY crew), Frank Zappa, The Clash, The Cars, The Ramones... All kinds of different things. Talking Heads.

A little bit of everything.

Regarding the whole disco / promiscuity thing... The punk scene was just as bad, so I don't attribute this notion of promiscuity to one genre of music. As far as explicit lyrics go, give a good listen to Frank Zappa's Thingfish. Lots of Zappa lyrics are extremely graphic (it was one of the key things that drew me to his music). Frank's music, though, was satirizing that whole self-indulgent era, not celebrating it.

Further, while the punk and disco scenes both had pockets of extreme promiscuity, they were relatively limited. There weren't too many discotheques in central Michigan that saw anything like Studio 54 or CBGBs. I suspect that much the same can be said for just about anywhere else in the midwest that wasn't close to an urban center.

I suspect Ducati's assertion that the drugs, particularly cocaine, were behind the lowered inhibitions that resulted from drug use is more of the root cause of the promiscuity than the music was. Part of this, too, was the extension of the sexual revolution spawned (pun intended) by the availability of The Pill. It's like the door was opened on this whole stored up box of pent up libidinous urges, and, like a jack-in-the-box, when the lid of that box opened, look out....

Part of it, too, I suspect, is that Americans still aren't all that comfortable talking about sex. Oh, we may obsess about it, but there's too much of that puritanical streak in our cultural heritage for us to be really comfortable with the concept that sex between consenting adults is actually a good thing.

From my POV, it was just a perfect storm of the sexual revolution picking up steam and hitting a critical mass, mass quantities of cocaine, and new musical formats that encouraged people to let their ids run the show for a while.

 

[JonL]

Regarding the whole disco / promiscuity thing...

From my POV, it was just a perfect storm of the sexual revolution picking up steam and hitting a critical mass, mass quantities of cocaine, and new musical formats that encouraged people to let their ids run the show for a while.

Pretty much describes my thoughts as well. I think popular music in general is like a resonant system. The music may start a trend in popular culture and then the popular culture feeds back into the music and the whole thing becomes amplified until people burn out on it. Surf, psychedelia, disco, punk, etc. Keeps happening. Anyway, I think high-energy disco dance music started a fad innocently enough, but then the dance club patrons discovered that cocaine let them keep going all night. Mix in the other ideas (sexual revolution and all that) and the music started to reflect the casual sexuality that was happening in the clubs. I think the graphic sex in the music created an implication that casual promiscuity was a part of the disco culture and that may have swayed many people towards pretty decadent behavior they might otherwise have shunned.

I remember a rather conservative midwestern coworker of mine (when I worked in Indiana) reminiscing about how much casual sex was available to him during the disco days, I think in Minnesota for him. So it may not have been quite the scene of debauchery that existed at Studio 54, but it was probably a lot wilder even in the midwest than it is anywhere nowadays, even in NYC.

I recall that back in those days brothels and sex clubs advertising freely in NYC, handbills posted everywhere for places with names like "Spartacus." I recall porno theaters all over the place. Explicit advertisements for adult movie theaters, bookstores, and live sex shows took up multiple pages in mainstream newspapers like The NY Daily News and The NY Post. Casual sex was all around, and I think it was the disco scene that provided a measure of acceptability that allowed (and even encouraged) more mainstream people to participate.