Make It Last Forever

My parents were baby boomers, both born in 1948. They spent their 20's doing as best they could, but by the late 70's it was clear to each of them that they were ready to settle down. Sure enough, when my dad moved to Louisville and was chosen as a part of a double-date, they met, ditched their partners, and married six weeks later.

The drama of the meeting and quick marriage that has lasted 28 years has a way of blotting out the other details, and I can't say that the details are so important: where they were working, where my Dad had lived before, each of their previous relationships. One detail, though, is the keepsake that I adore from the shoebox of memories surrounding their relationship: they met at a disco.

Louisville, KY, was not a big disco city. But, in 1978, disco was everywhere and bar owners saw a way to liven up the crowds by putting in a DJ, a disco ball, and maybe a lighted floor. Disco music kept charting on the airwaves, disco was pop, and many respectable musicians recorded disco songs so as not to be left out of any charts. Disco, unlike rock music at the time, brought people to dance together and it didn't hide the implications between couples sharing a song. If my parents had met at a Led Zepplin show, I don't know if they would have spoken again, but with disco, the possibilities of love were expounded in every song.

My parents were the fruits of the Greatest Generation, when Americans came together to fight a common cause. I was born of the hippie/disco generation, and my birth in 1981 puts me in a small category I will call the Disco Boom. Babes whose parents most likely listened to disco and danced to it at least once.

This is, of course, wishful thinking. Disco was so big that the choice for a date spot in Louisville was fairly made for them. Later, they could enjoy time at the racetrack, Lousiville's main attraction.

Before Disco fell off, there were thousands of tracks that would never see the light of day again, except for collectors and fans. I would even argue that outside of a handful of singles and two movie soundtracks (Car Wash and Saturday Night Fever), Disco isn't well known. When I deejayed on New Year's Eve, I was hounded by coworkers who listed songs from this handful or Saturday Night Fever and were dismayed when I didn't have them. Never mind that I did have several songs that are still played on the radio at times, never mind that some songs are so catchy that I can see the bar patrons shuffling about, trying to find their way into a dance step. These coworkers said to me that if I did not have these songs, I couldn't call it a Disco night. I shouldn't have to list their requests, but for completeness' sake: Sat Night Fever all, Gloria Gaynor (only one, though! I Will Survive), Donna Summer (probably Bad Girls, On the Radio, or Last Dance), and Diana Ross.

I like all those songs, but for a second it would be nice if they could have stopped to enjoy songs like Andrea True Connection's "More, More, More," and Earth, Wind, and Fire's, "Let's Groove." These are songs that have been around for a long time and are also great tunes, just like the ones they listed. The difference, sadly, is that they didn't add those songs to their disco playlist. It wasn't something that they thought of first.

Their requests became complaints, and all I could do was appeal to their logic. I showed them my stack of 60 disco records and explained that, in this limited way, I couldn't fulfill their requests.

What is disco, then, to those who don't abandon themselves to a deejay's music; for those who need to know ahead of time what they will listen to in order to enjoy themselves; for those who, essentially, need that control over their night? It comes down to a handful of singles and two movie soundtracks. And, when Car Wash was played, the coworkers looked at each other knowingly: that was a disco song, played at a disco night.

Take all the talent of American Soul, Funk, and many from Jazz, plus new guys from Europe, plus established Rock Groups. Add in a new breed of deejays whose job it is to play songs all night to crowds ranging from 100 to 3000, demanding crowds looking for the night of their life and sensitive to the changes the DJ makes to the songs. All of this exploded in 1976 and continued through 1979. Isn't it likely that there are more good songs than a handful of singles and two movie soundtracks?

In fact, there are hundreds of great dance songs from that time period. Of course, there's a lot of garbage too. Disco does not have a complex song structure: it's super-repetitive. If the main harmony or rhythm is mediocre, and the hook isn't juicy, it's not a very special record. In my opinion, the singer has to be very special, whether it's Andrea True and her off-hand, almost passive lyrics and vocals or a big voice like Loleatta Halloway, who probably could have cut some huge tracks back in Aretha's heyday. Some people don't even like vocals on the record, putting even more emphasis on the rhythm, harmony, and hook.

This is the plaintive cry of someone who loves a genre and sees all the possibilities, but can't get in the door of a culture dominated by individual choice. The same lament could come from aficionados of all kinds of recorded music, and even dance music. Instead of having one person select songs for a night, maybe people would like it if we could take all the personal music collections of all attendees, add them up, and then make a playlist from the most popular of those songs. It doesn't matter what the night is called, it fairly represents everyone's taste and is approved by the authority that is the club's sound system.

Without something like this happening, which is actually very possible and achievable, I think to myself that I have no problem turning my night over to a dance DJ. Whatever the music: 50's Rockabilly, 60's Psyche and Go-Go, 70's Funk or Disco, 80's Hip-hop and Electro, 90's trance, I'm willing to step on the floor and give it a few turns. All the music listed finds itself on the 4/4 beat and the beat is familiar and consistent. If I don't know the songs, then I at least recognize what they sound like. I came into adulthood thinking that was the point of dancing. The music plays and you have an excuse to move your feet.

America, of 300 million strong, is not a dance culture. We like music choice, but we don't like to abandon ourselves to dance. Ironically, Europe is a dance culture, but (in my observation) it's highly segregated and people know what they're getting before they arrive at the club. There are those who would dance to "Las Ketchup" every night for two years, those who like established dance genres, and those who like retro genres.

Americans as a whole aren't willing to turn their music choice over to someone else and dance at the same time. It doesn't matter that one song has many of the same aspects of a song they know, it has to be the song they know. For people who profess to love music, which is a great number, it surprises me that they're not ready to add one more song to their favorites or that they have to know what's played first. This is a new phenomenon; when radio was more dominant, frequently you would hear a track without hearing the announcement. If it was good, you kept it in your head until you could hum it to someone or catch it again. If you were dancing to the radio, you didn't stop dancing because you didn't know the track. Now, though, it's as if the club or bar deejay has to affirm the music choices of the audience.

Some of my greatest memories are of hearing a really great song for the first time. I didn't know what it was, I heard it, and I changed a little, forever.

Since when was knowing anything the key to fun anyways?

Gainsbourg's masterpiece, in need of some help

With a small mp3 player I find I always go to one album, not choosing between several. That's because, without planning, each album seems to represent a distinct style of music.

This morning's reading accompaniment was Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson, a psychedelically orchestrated concept album about a man's infatuation for a fourteen year-old. Ah, France, it was only recently that you raised the marriage age to something approaching the rest of the modern world (from 15 to 18)!

Most people, in an effort to spread the good news that this album was even created, present a hagiographic paean extolling its unparalleled excellence. Whew. I like it too, and as an album, it's probably his best (certainly his most enjoyable--I would suggest going the compilation route with Gainsbourg just like every single French/Belgian musician, pre-French Electric bands). There are two things, though, that relentlessly bother me about this album.

First of all, the mix is weird. At best, I have to think that it was mixed in some nonconformist vein. The kick drum and the bass are both heavy and low, but the rest of the album is painfully soft. It's like the engineer turned down the treble while recording. This means you're required to turn the volume way, way up to hear what's going on. Perhaps this came about because Gainsbourg is talking throughout the album in a very low tenor, which shares the low-end spectrum with the drum and bass. I just can't help thinking, though, that they could have used stereo effects better to position his voice opposite the drums and bass, and then turn the bass and drum down a bit and push the rest up.

The other problem with this album is on the track En Melody. Chicken scratch guitar and snappy snares combine to make this the wildest French psyche track ever, but it's fairly marred by one thing: Jane Birkin's teeth-on-edge laugh! And, again with the mixing issues: it's mixed way up (prominently), so you can't think of anything else but her cackling, which sounds like Fran Drescher. Oh, it's so bad. Jane Birkin is cool and all that, but that laugh is way out of place. Even a good laugh is hard on dance music. Probably the best is on Grandmaster Flash's The Message (A-ha-ha-ha-ha it's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from going under). That's not even a laugh, it's a guy saying, "Ha Ha Ha."

So, I really think this album needs remastering, or maybe the SACD treatment, though that seems to have fallen out of favor.

But, by all means, you need this album if you like any of the following: French pop culture, psyche music, Beck's album Sea Change, or sexy music. You don't have to pretend to like Jacques Brel anymore!

Also, the cover is super hot, yes, but what I've always found most alluring about Jane Birkin here is her right foot, how it's cocked up like that.

Christmaswatch 2008: CDs

CDs may be a great gift idea this year because they're relatively affordable. They also hearken back to an era when music purchase was a serious part of being a music fan.

For some of us, it still is.

Here are a couple of CDs on my Amazon.com Wishlist, and I think that they're good for fans of certain types of music. They're released as of this year, I believe:



Little Willie John, Nineteen Sixty Six: The David Axelrod & HB Barnum Sessions.

These are unreleased album sessions that Little Willie John cut at some point before he began serving a lengthy prison sentence, which cost him his life. His King compilation appears to have gone out of print, but I highly recommend this artist to fans of the young James Brown, Please Please Please era. This is high-energy R&B.



The Nerves: One Way Ticket

There are three ways to be familiar with the Nerves without knowing them: The first is that their frontman, Peter Case, wrote and performed "Hanging on the Telephone" which Blondie covered on Parallel Lines. The second is that Peter Case went on to form the Plimsouls, which had the hit, "A Million Miles Away." The third is that the Plimsouls were in the movie "Valley Girl" (Nicholas Cage's first), playing themselves in a seedy Hollywood bar. High-powered LA punk or power pop. Any fan of male-led retro rock should dig this.

More to come! If you have compact disk recommendations, feel free to let me know. Christmas isn't the same without some gifts under the tree!