Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco Read Free

the Motown mold in the ’60s by inserting spaces in between the beats; the relentless, clockwork beat of “Law of the Land,” however, was perhaps his most Motown-like beat, albeit updated for a world quickly getting used to the certainties of the machine.
    Motown’s greatest rhythm mechanic, however, never even recorded for them. Hamilton Bohannon used to drum in the Motown touring band, and when the label left Detroit for Los Angeles in 1971, Bohannon stayed behind in the Midwest. No one has taken “groove” as literally as Bohannon—there are no peaks, no builds, no intensity anywhere in the records he made for Brunswick from 1974 to 1976. Perhaps because of his time at Motown, Bohannon made dance music like an assembly-line worker—his hypnotrance rhythms were so monotonous you could get repetitive strain injury listening to them. Willie Henderson was a producer and arranger at the Chicago offices of Brunswick from 1968 to 1974 before he decided to start his own Now Sound label. There must have been something in the water in the Windy City during that time, because Henderson’s “Dance Master”—a favorite at the Loft—had the same machinic inevitablity as Bohannon, the same drone of the downtrodden funk worker. Rahiem LeBlanc, the guitarist of New York’s Rhythm Makers (note the workmanlike name), had the same sound as Bohannon and Henderson—what Bo Diddley would sound like given a wah-wah pedal and a flanger—but Herb Lane’s keyboards were far too engaging to make their disco classic, “Zone,” quite as hypnotic. What “Zone” did have, though, was the most metronomic cowbell ever—you can almost hear drummer Kenny Banks counting off to himself every quarter-note hit. Without the Eno-esque ignorability factor, this numbing regularity was taken up by “the human metronome,” Chic’s Tony Thompson.
    Ironically, though, for all the talk of the disco robots removing humanity from black music, the disco beat is probably the least mechanistic of any of the rhythms mentioned so far. The battery for almost all of the classic Philadelphia International records, drummer Earl Young and bassist Ronnie Baker, were two of the most influential rhythm players of the ’70s. With the help of engineer Joe Tarsia, they experimented with all sorts of techniques in order to achieve the marvelously rich and full sound that characterized Philly soul. Baker would wrap a rubber band around his bass strings at the bridge in order to get a thumpy sound that not only anchored but propelled the music forward. Young, meanwhile, placed a wallet on his snare drum to give it a certain dynamic. Tarsia was obsessive about microphone placement, drum tuning, and which bass drum beater was the right one for a particular sound. All of these peculiar elements came together on Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “The Love I Lost.” The song originally began life as a ballad, but the session wasn’t working until producer Kenny Gamble told the musicians to let rip and crank up the tempo. Young unleashed a war dance on the kick drum with a shuffle on the snare, but instead of echoing this pattern on the cymbals, Young used a trick he had first used a few months earlier on an obscure record by the Fantastic Johnny C, “Waitin’ for the Rain.” Picking up a thing or two from jazz drummer Max Roach, Young accented the off-beats using an open hi-hat. The result was the hissing hi-hat sound that has dominated dance music ever since this record was first released in September 1973. The first drummer to pick up on this hi-hat pattern was New York session drummer Allan Schwartzberg. His beat on Gloria Gaynor’s version of “Never Can Say Goodbye” (and his later work on records like the Joneses’ “Sugar Pie Guy,” Disco Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes’ “Get Dancin’,” and the Wing and a Prayer Fife and Drum Corps’s “Baby Face”) ensured that the sibilant cymbal would become one of the hallmarks of disco.
    “LES FRONTIÈRES