True, although I lived 2000 miles from NYC so I didn’t get in there very often.
When I was in grade 10, my high school converted the annual battle of the bands event to a dance competition. Every bar in my end of town removed their stages and either expanded the dance floor or added seating.
To me, disco represents the apex of the corporate music business. I’m fairly sure that lots of talented musicians continued to find work, but I guarantee that disco killed the dreams of many young rockers. As far as new bands since then, the post-disco era seems much more fertile but maybe that’s just me.
Except, we know it wasn’t. If anything, the major rock acts at the time were just that - corporate music business. Disco, like every other genre, eventually got the same treatment, but the underground culture that was disco (as noted by @the_borderer) went back underground as house, etc.
There is a whole genre known as punk that disagrees with you. It was happening at the same time as disco down on the bowery, and then continued on as an underground genre and had an influence on mainstream music via the rise of grunge/alternative in the early 90s.
Don’t think I’ve heard this one since I was quite young, but I’ve always vaguely remembered it. I recall poring over music guides, finding a reference to Laurie Anderson’s hit “O Superman” and thinking it must have been this tune. Which seems ridiculous in retrospect, but then again, if Philip Glass can go disco…
I don’t know about being restrictive. There was a lot of variety, although you had to generally be able to dance to it. (But then there were ballads you could slow dance to, so even that restriction was flexible.)
I’m not familiar with Chicago radio so much as Steve Dahl. Dahl was in Detroit when I was a teenager so I tried following him on the dial. Here’s a history of WDAI, I don’t think there was an official, turn the switch moment when they went disco but there was a 24 hour Last Dance marathon when they went to rock.
In Detroit we had something similar when WWW W4 went from rock to country. Howard didn’t last much longer in Detroit after the switch. I grew up in a great era for album oriented rock stations and Detroit was one of the largest if not the largest markets at the time. WABX, WWWW, WRIF, WKNR(Keener 13), and later WCSX, WLLZ, WNIC, WOMC. Plus we had Canada radio with CKLW. Didn’t have enough push buttons on the car radio.
I am also a graduate of Specs Howard so I got to meet a ton of radio personalities. My wife and I (just dating at the time) were even extras for tv spot for WNIC, got paid a buck. Cool stuff.
I love SirriusXM and Pandora but I miss those radio days.
Also, it’s entirely true that playing music in the 70s when you weren’t living in and near a music center (NYC, but increasingly in LA), it was incredibly difficult to break out. The music industry was ever increasingly centralized up and down the line, and lots of places did not want to give new artists a chance. You can see the LA punk bands complaining about that issue, which is a major part of the reason why they eventually started their own labels rather than trying to get signed.
The music industry in the 70s was pretty centralized and unwilling to try new things, and that was far more due to rock music instead of disco. Disco was very much pushing back against the dominant paradigm in the 70s rather than dictating it. The genre really got mainstream popularity with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, which was in 1977!
That chart is interesting… Did they roll disco into “house/electronic/etc”… and why is there “rock” and “rock & roll”?
I think rock music does dominate the historical narrative, too, whatever happened in the charts, which tends to warp how we view what was happening in the past with regards to music. I’m reminded of Elijah Wald’s books, How the Beatles Detroyed Rock & Roll and Escaping the Delta, which deals with how blues and rock music has been mythologized in our popular culture, because of how white men tend to over identify with those genres. A great example is how country blues (think Robert Johnson) became the focus of what the blues was by 60s in part because white dudes discovered it, but what people in the 20s and 30s were actually listening to was the Blues queens, who were playing party music. Of course, that was all prior to the billboard charts, too.
Those two books are excellent examples of trying to uncover the real history of popular music and how rock myth-making has become a major problem with our understanding of that history.
Whenever me and the wife are working on Saturday or Sunday morning I’ll put on Casey Kasem on the 70s channel, they replay the entire top 40 broadcast from that date in the 70s.
The looks we get when someone comes into what should be an empty building and we’re singing along to any one of those songs in your list.
And only Micheal Jackson could take a love song about a rat to number one.
Sorry for drifting but 70s music is great, all of it.
It’s really cool how diving into any cultural art (whether food or music or clothing) reveals all these interesting historical insights!
I was a wee lass at the time of the Cominsky Park demolition and until today had no clue about the relevance of disco in Black and LGBTQ+ cultures.
Thanks, @dnealy and @Mindysan33 and @the_borderer and all the rest for the new perspective.
Do you have any thoughts about the content of the original post, or do you want to start a separate thread about how in Highschool you wanted to be a music star but then it didn’t happen and it’s all Disco’s fault?
Agreed (the Stones, too, who often would put blues artists on their tours), but my point was the blues music that was popular in the 20s and 30s was the city blues, led by the blues queens. The renewed interest in blues musicians like Johnson came after bands like Zepplin and the Stones started talking about how they were influenced by them.
Except for all the people who were playing music that weren’t records, including guitar. The 70s were also the time of punk rock, and much of 70s punk was indeed guitar based. And of course, disco also influenced all the various forms of electronic music which doesn’t take any less talent than playing a guitar, just a different kind of talent.
