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

SONT OUVERTES”
    Eurodisco
    With such a strong presence of automated beats and mechanical rhythms throughout the history of African-American music, the disco naysayers were on unsteady ideological turf when they criticized its repetitiveness and machinelike qualities. After all, they couldn’t very well denigrate their own beloved funk. So they found a scapegoat. It came from Europe like a marauding Ostrogoth in clodhoppers and a three-piece polyester leisure suit, and its name was Eurodisco. Journalist Nelson George described Eurodisco as “music with a metronomelike beat—perfect for folks with no sense of rhythm—almost inflectionless vocals, and metallic sexuality that matched the high-tech, high-sex, and low-passion atmosphere of the glamorous discos that appeared in every major American city.” 5 Funk historian Rickey Vincent further characterized the dreaded Eurodisco parasites as “producer-made tunes [that] generally lacked any sense of sequence—beginning, buildup, catharsis, release—yet they were simple and catchy enough to bring rhythmless suburbanites and other neophytes flocking to plush dance clubs at strip malls from coast to coast.” 6 Just as Native Americans thought that if you photographed them, they would lose part of their soul, the defenders of funk thought that if you made drumbeats with machines, music would lose its soul. Eurodisco was tainting the pure gene pool of black music with its goose-stepping stomp beats and beer-hall sing-alongs, and taming James Brown the way Pat Boone had wrapped Little Richard in a woolly grandpa cardigan. While there was no doubting that Eurodisco was seemingly made for the Stepford Wives and air-headed California girls aspiring to be Farrah Fawcett, it was equally true that many Eurodisco hits were practically note-for-note remakes of earlier records by Barry White, MFSB, and the Temptations.
    The history of Eurodisco is inseparable from the history of the drum machine and the click track (the metronome beat that now plays in the headphones of all studio musicians while they’re laying down a track). The first electronic drum machine, the Wurlitzer Side Man, was released in 1959. The Side Man was designed as an accompaniment for solo organ players, and even significant advances like the Kent K-100 and the Keio Donca-Matic remained the preserve of albums like Ken Demko Live at the Lamplighter Inn until the early ’70s, when Sly Stone made the drum machine as expressive as a guitar or piano. Stone was an organist, and when he locked himself in the studio to record that masterpiece of pessimism and defeat, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, he took one of these primitive rhythm boxes to keep him company. But it wasn’t just for practical reasons: The machine’s stammering, staggered, punch-drunk quality was the perfect foil for lyrics like “Feels so good inside myself, don’t want to move.”
    The most famous early drum machine hit, though, was born of purely pragmatic concerns. Timmy Thomas was a lounge musician who played at the club he owned in Miami, where he used a Lowrey organ and one of these beat boxes. His 1972 “Why Can’t We Live Together?” was essentially the same version that you would have heard any night at his club—just Thomas sobbing about racial injustice, almost funky organ playing not dissimilar from a jaunty cinema keyboard player, and a spooky bossa nova–ish preset beat. The instrumental flip side, “Funky Me,” tackled the rhythm box on its own terms and featured a beat eerily reminiscent of Suicide’s earliest records. Incidentally, a carbon copy of the rhythm box beat from “Why Can’t We Live Together?” would reappear, chained to a slowed-down Bo Diddley rhythm, on one of disco’s founding moments, George McCrae’s 1974 smash hit, “Rock Your Baby,” which was produced by Thomas’s former booking agent, Harry Wayne Casey (aka KC from KC and the Sunshine Band). Sylvia and the Moments (“Sho Nuff Boogie”) and