Space jams

Nona Hendryx's star power

by Josh Kun

The cover of the 1977 album Cerrone's Paradise shows the eponymous French disco producer crouching on a black tile floor dressed in a white jumpsuit unzipped to the waist. Behind him is a small white refrigerator, and next to that a little jar of white powder lies spilled. A woman is lying on top of the fridge, back arched, wearing only a gold ankle bracelet. A silver sticker next to her head reads: "Hope. You. Find. Happiness. In My Paradise. Cerrone." The entire first side of the album is taken up by the 16-minute title track, an ode to dancing and temptation that's played and sung by anonymous studio hacks. The whole production is bombastically, mind-bendingly vulgar, and it probably made for endless fun in a crowded discotheque. It is, in short, the essence of disco.

But what passes for disco now is a small group of pop hits that used disco's rhythms and production sounds: "Ring My Bell," "Fly, Robin, Fly," "Boogie Nights," "Funkytown," and so on. These songs bypass disco's campy crassness, but also its grandeur and peculiarity, the way it pumped up the drama of the rhythmic moment and drew it out as long as possible. The Disco Box, a four-CD Rhino set, is an almost completely redundant restatement of the established disco canon. Of its 80 tracks, all but eight appeared on Rhino's earlier series The Disco Years; roughly half the songs on the three Pure Disco discs on Polydor are here too. And almost everything here was a hit of some caliber.

Which is problematic, because disco, as it was experienced beneath the mirror ball, was about curiosities, valley-and-peak dynamics, grooves that dancers could ride for ages. DJs liked a little bit of song and a whole lot of production; all they really needed was a mixable intro and some long instrumental passages. The modern disco canon -- and consequently The Disco Box -- works from the faulty assumption that the three-to-four-minute pop songs that radio demanded were disco's point. But the eight-chord, eight-minute perpetual-motion-machine version of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" works very differently from the three-minute cut on The Disco Box.

And disco, for all its commercial grotesquerie, was essentially experimental. It tested the limits of what could be included in a song's lyrics and arrangements; it played with duration and repetition in a way no kind of pop had before. It encompassed every imaginable variety of novelty, hybrid, and one-hit wonderment: Sphinx's ludicrous Biblical extravaganza "Judas Iscariot"; Phreek's deceptively complicated art-song "Weekend"; Santa Esmeralda's 15-minute flamenco-disco cover of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and its follow-up, a 15-minute flamenco-disco cover of "The House of the Rising Sun"; Corruption's moronic yet strangely hot come-on "Show Me Yours." Donny Osmond and James Brown and Ethel Merman and Cab Calloway and Kiss and the Beach Boys all took their turns at the new sound. But most of this stuff is too long-winded, too bizarre, or not catchy enough to be anthologized.

The other major consequence of disco's being winnowed to a list of a few dozen songs is the disappearance of the single-artist disco album meant as an aesthetic unit. Again, assuming that disco was important only as a vehicle for pop hits leads to the discarding of a lot of worthwhile stuff that wasn't intended as pop. Chic's Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, on their own records and the ones they made with Sister Sledge and Diana Ross, were responsible for some of the most interesting musicianship of its kind, and they sequenced their albums to be listened to in their entirety. The singles are still on anthologies and greatest-hits collections; Chic's four decent-to-excellent albums from the early '80s are currently out of print. The liner notes to The Disco Box include an annotated list of 50 "essential" disco albums; only about 20 of them are currently available on CD in their original form.

Actually, the liner notes are the most interesting thing about The Disco Box. Producer Brian Chin's essay on the great technicians of the era explains who actually came up with which sounds: drummer Alan Schwartzberg's distinctive open hi-hat technique; bassist Henry Davis's octave leaps; producer Tom Moulton's obsessive mix-tweaking and cranked-up treble. The notes also include DJs' vintage playlists -- which barely intersect with the contents of the box set. In May 1975, for instance, Bobby "DJ" Guttadaro's playlist at New York's Le Jardin included South Shore Commission's "Free Man," Rockin' Horse's "Love Do Me Right," Frankie Valli's "Swearin' to God," the Reflections' "Three Steps from True Love," and Consumer Rapport's "Ease On Down the Road." A compilation of his and the other DJs' favorites would have made a fascinating look at a movement that was, after all, inordinately fond of its misfits. Instead, we just get "Boogie Oogie Oogie" and "Shame, Shame, Shame" and "More, More, More," over and over and over.