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

Does Dallas. Rock critic Dave Marsh once compared rock and roll’s backbeat with the rhythm of onanism, but this was the sound of a professional grimly, resolutely performing his task until it was time for relief, particularly in the song’s seventeen-minute marathon version.
    The original three-and-a-half-minute version of “Love to Love You Baby” was extended into a minisymphony at the behest of Casablanca Records chief Neil Bogart. “He liked the song so much he wanted to have a long version of it,” producer Giorgio Moroder told David Toop with some amusement in 1992. “And that’s when I did the 17-minute one. The official story is that he was playing it at a party and people wanted to hear it over and over. I think the real one was more like the bad story. He was doing something other than dancing.” 9 Instead of just padding out the track, Moroder elongated it by using a new bass line as a tidal bridge between segments, creating waves that surged, climaxed, and crashed every four minutes or so. Moroder had applied the motorik autobahn aesthetic to the human body, and the resulting cyborg permanently changed the character of music.
    While “Love to Love You Baby” was Eurodisco’s most perfect expression, the calling card of this new subgenre was released several months earlier, in January 1975. Like so many Europop records, Silver Convention’s “Save Me” used the archetypal Motown pounding rhythm and tensile bass line as a starting point but erased any hint of gospel fury and righteousness or chicken shack sweat and sex from its structure, leaving only an anodyne bouncy castle for the air-headed vocalists to bop around in. What marked this out as something slightly different, however, was the prominence granted to the bass line and the way the string section was used. As Silver Convention producer Michael Kunze told Billboard ’s Adam White and Fred Bronson, “At that time, a lot of disco music featured brass. We knew we had a problem there because there were no suitable brass players in Munich, but we had a very strong string section.” 10 Where records from Philadelphia International and Barry White had used strings to connote luxury and upward mobility, Kunze and coconspirator Silvester Levay had flipped that notion on its head by using the most “European” instrumentation (courtesy of some slumming players from the Munich Philharmonic) as a replacement for disco’s “bluesiest” element.
    This became more pronounced on Silver Convention’s next two singles, “Fly, Robin, Fly” and “Get Up and Boogie,” where the strings became more scything, more punchy, blaring almost (although the ones on “Get Up and Boogie” were a bit like hoedown fiddles). Gone were the Motown bass line and the percussion fills; they were replaced by a robot’s version of the walking bass line (like following a square pattern on the floor) and rigid, four-square drums courtesy of Keith Forsey (and a Side Man). Despite the echo effects, vocalists Penny McLean, Ramona Wolf, and Linda Thompson were so flat they sounded like heads without torsos, like there was no resonating chamber for their voices. While the chorus of “Fly Robin Fly” had Silver Convention’s characteristic string stabs, the bridge used disco’s more standard lush sweeps and swoops (which borrowed extensively from Love Unlimited Orchestra’s “Love’s Theme”)—but on top of cymbal hits that sounded a lot like Kraftwerk’s ch-ch-ch-ch.
    Despite the assertion of Rolling Stone ’s Abe Peck that “the musicians [on Silver Convention’s Save Me album] are so low profile that their record company could not identify them when asked for a photo caption,” 11 with his motorik cymbals and almost oompah drums, Forsey became the Earl Young of Eurodisco. While his beats were relentless, more often than not his drum sound resembled someone playing two rolls of paper towels. Perhaps because of this rather weak sound, Forsey was a master of