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♪♪♪
[Billy Porter] Love always wins.
♪♪♪
[Billy] Disco is love.
Disco is a celebration of love.
Disco is a celebration of life.
A celebration of hope. A celebration of humanity.
That's what it is.
It felt like family,
in the disco sound.
♪♪♪
[Nile Rodgers] Everybody supported everybody.
That was the thing that was so cool in the seventies.
Disco felt, to me, more revolutionary than the Panthers.
During the disco movement, you could come
from any background and you just fit in
and nobody felt uncomfortable.
Everybody was... was down for everybody.
And it was like, "Let's make the best out of a bad time."
And that's what we did.
And as it went away, the world got more divided.
[Steve Dahl] Us rock and rollers here in Chicago,
think Disco sucks!
[crowd chanting] Disco sucks!
[Steve] This is now officially the world's largest
anti-disco rally.
[crowd cheering]
[Steve] We took all the disco records
that you brought tonight,
we got 'em in a giant box.
And we're gonna blow 'em up real good.
[crowd cheering]
[explosions]
[crowd chanting] Disco sucks!
♪ Lost in Music ♪ by Sister Sledge
♪♪♪
♪ Can't take away my music ♪
♪ I'm caught up in my music ♪
♪♪♪
♪ No turning back, uh-uh ♪
♪ Lost, ooh ♪
♪♪♪
♪ We're lost in music ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Caught in the trap ♪
♪♪♪
♪ No turning back ♪
♪♪♪
♪ We're lost in music ♪
♪♪♪
♪ We're lost in music ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Caught in the trap ♪
♪♪♪
♪ No turning back ♪
♪ We're lost in music ♪
♪♪♪
[Nicky Siano] From a very young age,
I knew that I was attracted to the same sex.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] Being gay was not okay, especially in Brooklyn.
I would get beat up regularly.
'Faggot' was a word I heard almost daily.
It makes you feel scared all the time.
♪♪♪
There were no celebrity gay people.
There were no out stars.
There was no one on TV that was gay.
I'm living in that world.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] And a friend of mine, when I'm 13, says to me,
"You know, there's a place I found, the West Village."
And I went down to the West Village,
and here's this place with men, same sex,
women, same sex, talking together,
laughing together,
even holding hands and walking down the street.
I was amazed.
[Nile] New York and Greenwich Village
was probably the hippest,
most liberal place to grow up.
My parents' friends were bebop musicians.
You know, I could come home and I'd see Nina Simone
or Thelonious Monk or Miles Davis
hanging out at our crib.
That was like, pretty normal stuff.
[Agosto Machado] I'm a street queen,
Christopher Street Queen.
A lot of us didn't have a steady place to live.
♪♪♪
Our gay community could be gay wherever they were.
And New York was the Mecca.
They came in such numbers,
and the music was being so vocal.
♪ Ooh-ooh ♪
♪ There's something in the air ♪
[Nile] Being a Greenwich Village kid,
a hippie, downtown kid,
I started to become a little bit more politicized.
They had formed a section called
Lower Manhattan Black Panther Party.
All power to the people.
[Nile] And I wanted to be in with them.
So there was every kind of march that would go past
my apartment and school every day,
be it the teachers strike or women's lib
or gay lib, whatever.
[Nicky] There's still laws on the book
that are preventing us from being who we are.
Like two people of the same sex cannot dance together
on the dance floor.
There were a couple of others, you know, sodomy.
All that stuff was against the law.
♪ Right now ♪
♪ Right ♪
♪ Right now ♪
[Nicky] And there was a place called The Stonewall.
It was a bar.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] The cops go into Stonewall,
they bust the place because people are dancing together.
And they regularly do this.
They start charging people,
and they take them out to a paddy wagon
that's waiting outside.
♪ The revolution will not be televised ♪
♪ No ♪
♪♪♪
[Mark Riley] The gay community had endured it,
and endured it, and endured it.
And that night at Stonewall,
they just chose not to endure it anymore.
♪♪♪
[Agosto] The collective anger unleashed us
and we were pushing and shoving.
♪♪♪
It got larger and larger,
and more people were coming,
and then they set fires to the trashcans and what have you.
♪♪♪
[Mark] And it turned into five days of riots.
[Nicky] On the second night,
I walk out of the subway and Sixth Avenue,
there's people blocking the traffic.
[crowd chanting] Hey, hey! We don't over-populate!
[Nicky] And that's like unheard of.
And there's this guy going with around a clipboard.
"Can you get arrested? Can you get arrested?"
I was like, "No way. I can't get arrested!"
I don't know who was organizing this,
but they were ready like Freddie.
[Speaker] Obviously, if we're to obtain all the rights
we deserve, we have to be willing to fight for them.
We need an alternative to the mafia bars,
and an alternative to just sitting on the stoops.
♪ I said will not be televised ♪
♪ It just won't be televised ♪
They rioted every night until Lindsay,
who was the mayor, came on and said,
"We're going to do everything we can.
We're going to change this law."
♪♪♪
♪ The revolution is gonna be live ♪
[Mark] In 1971, it led to that law being repealed.
That was the one thing that opened the ability of gay clubs
to survive legally more than anything else that happened.
♪♪♪
[Jellybean Benitez] I was really young
when I started DJ-ing.
I was like 15, 16.
I DJ-ed in my room.
Sweet 16s, school dances, parties.
I was always attracted to music that was very soulful.
For the most part, it was up-tempo R&B.
♪♪♪
[Earl Young] Back in the day, everybody had a house party.
House parties put people in touch with music so much.
They had the little record players, the little 45s
where the record drops.
I was heavily influenced by Gamble and Huff
from Philadelphia International,
and all the records they made.
The O'Jays or Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes
or MFSB,
which is Mother, Father, Sister, Brother.
♪♪♪
[Mark] Philly was a moment in time.
Rhythm &amp; Blues before that,
there wasn't a lot of instrumentation
because they didn't spend that much money
putting those songs together.
Well, Philly developed its own unique sound:
the use of lush strings,
a gospel inflection to a lot of the vocals.
Urban sophistication at its best.
And it's music that literally drove people to dance.
♪♪♪
Those grooves were so infectious
that you could play anything by Gamble and Huff,
and you'd get an immediate reaction
and people just vibe to it.
The root of like all dance music that's on the soulful side.
[Earl] We cut and wrote songs that people can relate to,
like Love Is The Message.
These are songs that bring people together.
So we came in there and we banged out hits.
♪♪♪
A lot of the songs were slow, like The Love I Lost.
♪♪♪
[Earl] This was not disco music. This was basically R&B stuff.
Back then, most of the time they looked for the drummer
to set the pace, and they deliver the grooves.
They weren't...
they didn't really tell drummers what to play.
I say, "Look, let's put this,
let's put this in another groove."
♪♪♪
[Earl chuckles]
That's the groove that I used on The Love I Lost.
They weren't really a disco group until I came in
with that groove.
♪♪♪
That's the 'four on the floor', that's a walking beat.
The bass drum, to me, is people walking like...
♪♪♪
And the high-hat, to me, is a melody.
[drumming]
[Nicky] Earl Young is the beat of disco, no doubt about it.
What he did with The Love I Lost when it came out,
the epitome of the club drummer.
♪♪♪
The standard disco beat with the bass drum,
the 'four on the floor.'
[drumming]
Now you've got to add the high-hat next.
You can add it open or closed.
I'll do it closed first.
[drumming]
Now I'll do it with it open.
[drumming]
Now I'm going to add the snare drum.
[drumming]
That's basic disco.
[drumming]
Bad luck.
[applause]
[Earl] We brought soul to New York.
Little clubs in New York supported us
from the very beginning.
[Vince Aletti] I was always really drawn to the stories
of records, about records, but about concerts
and things that I was interested in.
I wrote about disco really early on,
before it had a name.
I started going to several clubs
in the early Seventies.
I realized that there was a whole other underground
of music.
[Nicky] I'm on Christopher Street
and I'm hearing this music,
and I'm going, "What is this?" you know.
And I'm hearing this music,
and every time someone comes out, I'm saying,
"What's that song? What's that song?"
Radio was not playing this music.
[Vince] The most obvious turning point for me
was going to David Mancuso's Loft,
where I heard a lot of music that I really loved,
that I hadn't heard anywhere else.
[Mark] I had heard that The Loft was this place,
it was underground, it was private.
You had to know someone to get in.
You had to be a member, or you had to know somebody
who was already a member.
But it never felt exclusive the way clubs later did.
[Nicky] It was in the winter.
I was at a party and they were playing
this really lame like Rock and Roll music
that no one was dancing to.
And I started putting on some of the Soul music that I had.
A girl who was there said,
"Hey, you want to go to The Loft with me?"
That's how I got invited to The Loft.
[Mark] And these guys held the key to me going to The Loft.
And they said, "Listen, do you have a problem
with gay people?
This place is not all gay,
but there are going to be a substantial number
of gay people there.
You're going to see guys dancing with guys.
And if that bothers you, forget we invited you."
And I said, "Oh no, I'm going!"
[Nicky] It was 647 Broadway.
I'll never forget that address.
And it looks like a broken-down factory.
So the door opens, the stairs are all rickety.
And the thing about The Loft was you knew them
even though you didn't know them
because you had one thing in common - the music.
$2.99 each, and the door opens,
and it's dark in there.
It's, I mean, I couldn't see anything.
When we go in, the door closes behind and it's dark.
And then all of a sudden, I see that huge mirrored ball.
It was big,
and the spots are flying around the wall,
the snare hits...
a bright, bright light flashes.
Everyone started screaming!
♪♪♪
The sound was gorgeous. It was beautiful.
Like I was at a symphony.
Like I was in a theater.
[Loose Key Jr.] Okay, so there's this white guy,
with long hair, who looks like Jesus, that's playing music.
He knew how to take that song from beginning,
middle to end,
take you on a journey to bring you up and bring you down,
and bring you up, and bring you down, and bring you up.
He had a method to his madness,
which we really appreciated because it challenged us
as dancers to go to that level.
[David Mancuso] Anything that you're doing with audio
must be as pure as possible.
We're all spiritually connected.
You can't capture anything that's free.
Free in spirit.
♪♪♪
[Jellybean] I went to The Loft.
I'd never seen anything like it because it was like...
we were in a party, but it was in his house.
So it's like car keys were there, the mail was there,
dishes in the sink,
and it'd be three to four hundred people in there dancing.
And it... It was not Studio 54, it was a loft.
So it wasn't something like, you know,
some grand sort of place.
It was a loft, but great music.
[Jellybean] He didn't mix beat to beat,
so the songs would end,
and then the audience would just clap,
and then he'd play the next song.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] I had never seen anything like this.
[Mark] The Loft was magic.
It was very simply magic.
I loved it. I loved everything about it.
[Mark] David used to always say,
"If you can get groups of people from different backgrounds,
different income groups, different races,
creeds, colors, sexuality.
If you can put them all in a room and get them to dance,
that's the beginning of social progress."
That was the interesting part of it,
and that's where people connected.
That's very important to me, okay?
And The Loft was a community.
If you didn't have money, as long as you had an invitation,
you got in.
♪♪♪
[Nile] The Loft.
There would be no Nile Rodgers if it wasn't for those clubs.
I mean, this underground New York club scene
was phenomenal.
And that, to me is one of the greatest things
that came out of this thing called disco.
It was a leveler in a way, for...
for different people who had differences,
that they could come together and dance
and enjoy themselves, and love the same music.
♪♪♪
[Joe Bataan] The first wave was the R&B,
then Rock and Roll,
and then the Boogaloo came along.
[Mark] What's interesting about the influence of Latin music,
it was part geographic.
Growing up in East Harlem, you know, we had everybody.
The Italians, Jews,
Blacks, Puerto Ricans.
We all had to get along.
And music engulfed the whole neighborhood
because you could hear it coming out of the fire escapes,
people singing out of the subways.
♪♪♪
[Loose] It started in 1972
from the Latino kids in the Bronx
getting away from doing salsa, which was a quote unquote
"dance that was done by their parents."
The younger kids didn't want to do that,
and they figured out how to do the Hustle.
♪♪♪
[Joe] I recorded my first songs,
which were Boogaloo songs.
I started to get away from that style
and I kept looking for different things.
I started to attend the nightclubs,
which nobody was doing back then.
[Mark] One of the first places that really kind of stuck
in my mind was a place called the Sanctuary.
Francis Grasso.
He was one of the people to play music
in a kind of mixed concept.
To hear records segue into another
was completely something different
that nobody had been doing.
And then I saw kids dancing with one another.
It didn't matter who you were. They were doing freestyle.
It was no set movement in what they were doing.
And I said, "Whoa!"
And you can imagine what was going through my mind.
A lot of people didn't know that I didn't need the radio.
I could influence people through clubs.
♪♪♪
[Mark] From that early era of clubs,
'cause they didn't call it a disco or a club,
it was, you know, you come to a party.
In the same way as Rock and Roll had to be given a name,
instead of "Race music", it became Rock and Roll,
music that was house music, that was dance music
that we danced to became known as "Disco."
Vince Aletti wrote an article
and coined the phrase "Disco."
♪♪♪
[Mark] And Vince manages to capture the sense
of what those spaces were like,
and the effect that that music had.
What did feel unique, it felt like you were hearing,
you know, somebody's work of art.
It's one of the things that really made me want
to think more seriously about club music,
and about the talent that it took to be a really good DJ.
♪ Funky Nassau ♪ by The Beginning of the End
♪ Nassau's gone funky ♪
♪ Nassau's gone soul ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Oh yeah, funky Nassau ♪
♪ Funky Nassau ♪
♪ Huh ♪
[Nicky] I'm seeing the invention of dance floor things.
And I'm understanding that
this is a very new kind of industry.
I started playing records in 1971,
and that took me into the winter of '72.
I start thinking the only way I'm going to do something
like The Loft, where I can really create atmosphere
like David was doing, is to own the place.
That's the only way it will happen.
And I opened in February of 1973.
I was still 17.
This was the back entrance to The Gallery.
This was not here.
People would come outside because it would be hot inside,
especially in the summer,
and they would hang out over here.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] Initially, any bar would throw two speakers up
and be a club.
This, we walked in and we painted the canvas.
And a lot of people call it the first disco,
and it really was.
It was really the first space that was stepping forward
in the design of clubs was The Gallery.
♪ It's gonna rain, yeah ♪
♪ Oh no ♪
♪ It's gonna rain, yeah ♪
♪ Oh no ♪
♪ It's gonna rain, yeah ♪
♪ I can see the rain, y'all ♪
♪ It's gonna rain, yeah ♪
♪ I can see the rain, yeah ♪
♪ It's gonna rain, yeah ♪
♪ I can feel the rain ♪
♪ It's gonna rain, yeah ♪
♪ Oh, I can feel the rain, yeah ♪
♪ It's gonna rain, yeah ♪
♪ My body's soaking wet, y'all ♪
♪ It's gonna rain, yeah ♪
♪ Oh, my body's soaking wet, y'all ♪
♪ It's gonna rain, yeah ♪
♪ Oh, my body's soaking wet ♪
[Vince] Nicky Siano,
I think was one of the Wild Men of disco.
Nicky was just, you know, out there,
and his crowd was out there along with him.
♪♪♪
[Freddie Taylor] If it was a big change from one record
to another, that was fabulous.
Everybody would be jumping up on the floor and screaming
like a mass orgasm, verbally.
I remember this guy who walked in the first night we opened.
And he goes,
"The future!" [laughs]
That's what he says.
Let me tell you, this place is a joint.
This is the kind of place you could bring
any one of your cool friends.
They have all types of people,
they have people who dance, people pop up and down.
You can get high, stay here all night.
You can live at The Gallery every Saturday night.
I mean, there were a few gay clubs in the city,
but, you know, there was kinda sort of stereotypical gay clubs.
The Gallery was something that was completely different.
Myself and Larry Levan were probably
the most popular black kids hanging out.
And I hired Frankie at the end of that first night
to work for me as my decorator.
And he brought Larry along, and he said,
"This guy's a little bit crazy, but he's really talented."
And I said, "Okay, we can use the help."
[Mark] Larry and Frankie came up under Nicky's tutelage.
There were days that all three of us were in the booth
and he was teaching us how to actually operate
the equipment, how to listen to music
and what to listen for.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] And eventually they become DJs.
Frankie, the Godfather of House.
Larry, the Paradise Garage.
Listening to Nicky, he spins a story.
[Frankie] He always stressed to us,
"You need to know your music."
Because people who went to the clubs -
back then in the beginning -
heard basically the same songs at every club
because they were only so many songs to be played
that were danceable, that we liked.
Walter Gibbons, Jellybean and other DJs
used to always hang around my booth
to see what I was playing.
♪♪♪
I would be there with a pad and a pen
and every record that he played that I didn't know what it was,
I'd go up and ask him what it is.
I was such a pain. [laughs]
He talks about it to me what he sees me.
"I'm going to play this record.
I know this kid's going to come up here
and ask me what it is."
[chuckles]
And then in the later days, they would hang around
my booth to see if I passed out
and they needed a DJ to fill in for me.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] I didn't look at what genre it was.
Was it danceable?
Did it have a musical break?
And if it's vocal, does it have a message?
♪ Soul Makossa ♪ by Manu Dibango
♪♪♪
[Nicky] Soul Makossa,
that record became a huge hit for the DJs
and for club music.
And without any airplay, it started to climb to sales chart.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] Record companies started noticing it.
Atlantic Records picks up the import,
puts it out and starts promoting it.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] In the bottom of all this are the radio stations.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] Radio stations were a very powerful network,
and they were being forced to play records
that they hadn't wanted to play before.
These were records that were just part of the fabric
of New York City dance culture,
as well as the hip-hop culture.
They were just big New York records.
♪ Lady Marmalade ♪ by Labelle
♪ Hey sister, go sister, go sister, go sister ♪
♪ He met Marmalade down in old New Orleans ♪
♪ Struttin' her stuff on the street ♪
♪ She said, Hello, hey Joe ♪
♪ You wanna give it a go? ♪
♪ Yeah, gitchie-gitchie yeah-yeah-da-da ♪
♪ Gitchie-gitchie yeah-yeah here ♪
At the time, we weren't trying to make a song
that would fit into some sort of category.
♪ Creole Lady Marmalade ♪
[Nona] For LaBelle, the Continental Baths
was really most significant
in terms of gay nightlife.
♪♪♪
It was really a bathhouse where guys went to meet.
They were in towels as we performed,
and we were like... there.
When you're that close to people,
it was a very call and response type of interaction.
And you're singing and they're responding.
It is like being in church.
♪ Marmalade ♪
♪ Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? ♪
[Nona] We were kind of matching our audience.
The more flamboyant we became,
the more flamboyant they became.
Of course, we couldn't let them look better
than us on stage, so...
Okay, when the music starts getting big,
and stank, meaning funky,
you gotta start dancing, okay?
Do the best you can.
♪ Oh! ♪
♪ Gitchie-gitchie yeah-yeah-da-da ♪
♪♪ Gitchie-gitchie yeah-yeah here ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Mocha-choco-lata-yeah-yeah ♪
The leaning into all of the fantastical costumes and stuff,
that's queer stuff.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] I loved LaBelle.
I mean, that sound that they had was so exciting.
It was everything that we stood for in the early Seventies.
♪♪♪
♪ Voulez-vous ♪
♪ Coucher ♪
♪ Avec moi? ♪
♪ Babe ♪
[cheering]
[Nile] Up until the FBI basically disbanded
the Panthers,
the Black Panther Party was probably
the most loving situation that I had been in
with a group of people.
♪♪♪
[Nile] My girlfriend, Paula,
she and I were walking up Eighth Street.
When we got to Eighth Street and Broadway,
a pop-up disco happened
and we walked in there, and they played three songs.
Donna Summer, "Love to Love You, Baby,"
The Village People, "San Francisco,"
and Eddie Kendricks, "Girl You Need a Change of Mind."
♪♪♪
[Nile] And we hear...
[singing] I love to love you, baby.
♪ I... ♪
[Nile] And it was just like, "Wow, what is this shit?"
I'm telling you, man, for a brother like me... [sighs]
that was like... like the first time you have sex
and you're flying.
And then Eddie Kendricks.
"I am for women's rights,
but I want equal nights."
You know, so it was all political.
♪ Love to love you, baby♪
Mmm!
♪ I love to love you, baby♪
[Nile] The 12-inch record had just become this new format,
and they were really long,
and I had never really been in an environment
where the music didn't stop.
This night, nothing stopped.
♪ Love to love you, baby♪
♪ Oh ♪
♪♪♪
[Nile] A totally disparate crowd.
Gay people, straight people.
Asian people. Black people. Puerto Rican people.
Everybody was dancing
and everybody was having a good time.
It's magnetism that was from this disco world
that people just couldn't help,
that they were just being drawn in.
To be a disenfranchised Black child
and to grow up, and you become this teenager.
You walk into this joint
and you know everybody is down with you.
It almost brought tears to my eyes.
I couldn't believe it.
And I looked at my girlfriend, and I said,
"This shit is more revolutionary than the party.
They're getting people who don't normally
associate together to be down."
So I called Bernard up. Bernard Edwards,
my former partner who passed away some time ago.
I said, "This is the music I want to play."
And two weeks later, I wrote Everybody Dance.
"Doo doo, doo doo. Clap your hands."
♪♪♪
Nile and Bernard, they were going to start this new group
and they were looking for a female vocalist.
Mind you, now, by the time I hit New York,
I had worked with a number of bands on the road
and worked with The Spinners.
So I'm a little critical, you know.
When I heard Nile, Bernard and Tony play,
I was blown away.
[Nile] Bernard loved my sense of rhythm
and what I could do.
And he just said, "Man, if you learned how to chuck."
"What do you mean, chuck?"
He says, "Well, let me just show you."
And he picked up the guitar,
and he just was just doing something like...
[guitar strumming]
And I was like going...
[guitar strumming]
He said, "No, no, no, don't do that."
He said, "You got to keep the 16th notes going all the time."
[guitar strumming]
Imagine now the drums just go, "Boom, boom, boom, boom."
And you...
[guitar strumming]
♪♪♪
The engineer who recorded us
was also a DJ at one of the coolest clubs in New York,
and it was a downtown club where all of the new
black urban professionals -
or we call them 'Buppies' - would go.
About two or three weeks go by
and I get a phone call, and he says,
"Man, I need you to come down to the Night Owl."
I was like going, "Dude, I can't get into the Night Owl.
They're not going to let me in.
You know, I only have, like, jeans and a plaid jacket
or something."
He said, "Trust me, bro. Just tell them
that you wrote Everybody Dance."
I said, "That's... okay. Cool."
So I go to Night Owl and the door man goes,
"Hey, my man, you can't come in here dressed like that."
And I said, "Oh, I know. But Robert told me to tell you
that I wrote Everybody Dance."
"Everybody Dance? My man, come here. Come on inside."
He takes me inside.
The woman who's now going to take the money says,
"Whoa, whoa, you can't come in here dressed like that."
"He wrote Everybody Dance."
"Everybody Dance? Yo, come on in here, my brother."
So now I'm thinking that there's some kind of joke going on.
I get into the club. I don't know how the DJ spotted me.
He saw me, and right away, he put on Everybody Dance.
And just from the drum fill...
[makes bass sound]
You heard this bloodcurdling scream.
Everybody - "Oh!!" -
packed the dance floor.
And I went, "What?"
I couldn't believe my eyes.
I walked over to him. He was giggling like crazy.
♪ Everybody Dance ♪ by Chic
♪ Do-do-do, clap your hands, clap your hands ♪
♪♪♪
Then the clubs, it's, you know, it's instant.
Folks wouldn't stop dancing.
Everybody Dance. I mean, that was...
When you hear it, you have to dance.
[Nile] He played it. He then played it again.
He played it again. He played it for at least -
and I'm not saying this for dramatic purposes -
played it at least an hour.
That was my first time hearing my first pop composition
out in the real world.
I was blown away and I don't think I've ever
had that feeling again.
I've probably been chasing it all my life.
♪♪♪
♪ Everybody dance ♪
♪ Do-do-do, clap your hands, clap your hands ♪
That unison singing was like [gasps]
"What is happening?!"
They weren't in harmony.
The voice sounded like one voice at times.
It was that connected.
Glamor went hand in hand with disco music.
Nile wanted it to be a stylish group.
[Nile] This beautiful, fashion-oriented Black crowd.
"Wow, we want to be their band!"
♪♪♪
The labels understood how to make better dance records.
♪♪♪
Being seven years old in Wellsville, Ohio,
and hearing Knock on Wood for the first time,
I lost my mind. I was like, "What on Earth is this?"
♪ Knock on Wood ♪ by Amii Stewart
♪ Lightning ♪
♪ The way you love me is frightening ♪
♪ I think I better knock ♪
♪ Knoc♪
I feel seen in it.
♪ On wood ♪
♪ Baby♪
[Norma Jean] Disco was a blessing.
It wasn't an A&R guy that was deciding what the music was.
It was people because it started in the clubs.
And I think that's a reason why
so many people broke through.
The door was wide open for a lot of talented people
to break through, a lot of them African-Americans,
a lot of them women.
It opened up a door that I don't think
would have normally been open,
and the record labels couldn't resist the fact
that there was something going on here.
[Nona] A lot of the music that was made
during that period had something to say.
People were not just, not just doing the sign, Y M C A,
but people saw it as like a music you just jump around to
rather than looking at the deeper meaning.
And there were other songs, other examples.
♪ I Will Survive ♪ by Gloria Gaynor
♪ I was petrified ♪
♪ Kept thinking I could never live ♪
♪ Without you by my side ♪
♪ But then I spent so many nights ♪
♪ Thinking how you did me wrong ♪
♪ And I grew strong ♪
♪ And I learned how to get along ♪
♪ And so you're back ♪
♪ From outer space ♪
[Nona] Probably the, I would say the greatest
disco era song ever.
That is like, "You're not going to mess with me anymore.
Whatever you've done, I'm done with that.
I will not be going there because I will survive.
No matter what you do to me, I'm going to survive."
♪ Just turn around now ♪
♪ 'Cause you're not welcome anymore ♪
[record scratching]
♪♪♪
[Fab 5 Freddy] So in the beginning,
disco was the thing that was happening.
Hip-hop really didn't become this thing,
literally "Hip-Hop," until the early Eighties.
What went on in the Seventies was a combination
of different things.
When you have records like The Mexican by Babe Ruth
or Love Is The Message by MFSB
or Bra by Cymande,
these records were getting played in the hip-hop scene
as well as at The Loft, or Nicky Siano's Gallery.
♪♪♪
[Grandmaster Flash] And hip-hop.
I had already been doing it up in the Bronx.
Uptown, there'd be very few whites,
mostly Blacks and Latinos where we came from.
Versus downtown, blacks and whites
in the room, jamming.
♪♪♪
I came up with a system where I would take
the drum breakdown of particular songs
in the areas of pop, rock, jazz, blues, funk.
♪♪♪
♪ We've got our own thing ♪
♪ We've got it ♪
♪ We've got our own thing ♪
♪ We've got it ♪
[Grandmaster Flash] A lot of those songs
were quote unquote "disco songs."
♪♪♪
Disco records, they had heat to them,
but I had to do, like, serious research.
♪ Got to be Real♪ by Cheryl Lynn
♪ What you find, ah ♪
♪ What you feel now ♪
♪ What you know, ah ♪
♪ To be real ♪
The disco 12-inch, I would put it up with a light,
and if I put it up with a light and the shiniest part
was where the least band members were playing
with the drummer.
And I would put it down there, and that's where
the break would live.
I would take these particular areas where the drummer
had a minute to solo and that there,
with duplicate copies of it, I would manually cut and paste it,
and extend that area,
so that I can come up with a music bed for the breakers,
and then later the rappers.
♪ Frisco Disco ♪ by Eastside Connection
♪♪♪
♪ Ladies and gentlemen ♪
♪ Welcome aboard Disco Airlines Flight 78 ♪
♪♪♪
♪ With disco you can't go wrong ♪
♪♪♪
[DJ Spinna] Hip-hop and the industry owes a lot
to what that scene, that movement created.
As far as DJ culture is concerned,
this thing was brand new.
The whole phenomenon of taking a record
and segueing it into another record.
These guys had the ability to keep the music going
was a revelation unto itself.
And then other innovations came and built on top of that.
[clapper snaps]
All right. I just want to say that there are some DJs
who are classics and some who are not.
[Freddie] The DJs, they gave me a chance.
You know, they sort of, they let me in their inner circle.
I was the first person to ever substitute for David,
nobody else ever did. And I said to myself,
"You know, there's two turntables here,
and there are two, there's a knob on each turntable.
What the hell do I need a mixer for?
Just, you know, fade one in and fade the other one out,
and do it at the same time."
And everybody was like, "Crazy. Wow, wow, wow.
There's a mix at The Loft!"
♪♪♪
[Nicky] The blend, this is how you do it.
You take the needle and you listen in your headphones.
You know these two records have a very similar beat,
and you have a turntable that only goes 2% one way
and 2% the other way.
So it's got to be close to the beat.
And then you keep putting the needle on the record
and you hear it kind of match,
and then you bring volume up,
and you turn the other one down.
And then I said to a friend, I said,
"How do I hold the record?"
He said, "Oh, put the 45 underneath the LP,
it'll slip on the LP."
And sure enough it did.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] And I slowly was able to start beat matching.
Once I had a dream of having three turntables,
and in the middle of a change
there would be a sound effect.
The next week I got a third turntable.
Nicky would play Love Is The Message.
He had two, three turntables, and he would loop it, loop it.
When you would get to the break of the record,
Nicky would just play it, and everybody started chanting,
"Turn this motherfucker out,
turn this motherfucker out!"
And that was ecstasy for me.
I would match up lyrics in songs to create...
And sounds. And the lights would match the music.
You don't get that anymore.
Those tweeters, boy. You did all the highs.
It was wonderful.
The bass made you feel like you were getting done royally.
[laughing]
That was a very sexual thing.
♪♪♪
After a week of being, I guess, a busboy,
a waitress, a hairdresser, a dancer,
a mother, a husband, you know, any of those things.
And then get it off, get rid of it, you know,
and dance it away,
get excited about watching other people.
♪♪♪
Just... I was a club bunny.
♪♪♪
[Nona] I went to Mudd Club, I went to Danceteria,
I went to Studio 54,
I went to Paradise Garage.
[Grandmaster Flash] The DJ. I probably went to go see
the most was Larry Levan.
His mixing ability was quite incredible.
[Kevin Saunderson] I was in my own world,
I was dancing for hours and hours,
and I got educated to like... Supernature.
I never heard Supernature on radio,
but I heard it at the Paradise Garage.
By Cerrone, just this great track to me
that took you in different dimensions.
And it seemed like that lasted like two hours, that record.
[Nona] There was this freedom.
You were just in a sea of people moving to the same beat,
joyously and very, almost tribal.
♪♪♪
He was charming and reckless,
and he could get away with anything in the Garage.
It was his house.
♪♪♪
What the record company felt was that we had
this magical fairy dust that we could sprinkle over anybody.
They offered us Bette Midler.
They offered us the Rolling Stones.
They offered us all these big acts.
We were like, "Sh... we're going to tell Keith Richards
what to play? I'm going to tell Mick Jagger what to sing?"
So we basically said, "Look, instead of giving us
the most popular group, why don't you give us
the least popular group?"
They literally said, "Give us some obscure group
that no one knows."
We didn't have any hit records.
I would have records out that were never played
on the radio.
They were played in other countries, but never at home.
Jerry Greenberg started describing us,
"You got to meet these girls, they're family.
They flock together like birds of a feather
whenever they come up to the label."
He said that they were like family to us.
That's all we needed to hear.
We had just been in Germany recording
with Silver Convention,
"Fly, robin, fly! Up, up to the sky!"
And now the "Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah"
people want to work with you.
And I remember saying, "I don't know..."
♪ We Are Family ♪ by Sister Sledge
♪♪♪
♪ We are family ♪
♪ I got all my sisters with me ♪
♪♪♪
[Kathy Sledge] When we worked with Nile Rodgers
and Bernard Edwards,
it was different from any other session.
They knew what they wanted.
♪ We are family ♪
And we were just finishing up the last lyrics
to We Are Family as she walks in,
she hears it, "What is this?"
Uh, "This is your album."
I wasn't allowed to hear any of the songs
until it was time to record it.
♪♪♪
♪ Everyone can see we're together ♪
♪ As we walk on by ♪
♪ And ♪
I can honestly say the first time I heard Greatest Dancer,
and We Are Family, or any of those songs
was the first time the public heard them.
Because I didn't know how they were going to come out.
Kathy pulled me aside.
Because I was like this goofy... 15 then,
16 by the time the record came out, with braces.
And I would always ask him.
"Nile, is this ever going to be on the radio?"
And I looked her right in the face, and I said,
"Yes, Kathy, I promise you this is going to be on the radio."
I didn't know if it was going to be on the radio,
but I felt it in my heart.
♪ We are family ♪
♪ Get up everybody and sing ♪
♪ Sing it to me ♪
[Kathy] He would always say, "Just trust us,
like, we know what we're doing."
♪♪♪
I remember waking up to -- you know,
because the alarm would go off
and the song would come on -
our song's being played on the radio for the first time.
♪ ... in you and the things you do ♪
♪ You won't go wrong ♪
♪ Oh no, this is our family jewel ♪
I mean, Sister Sledge, that album was the best album
we've ever written, pound for pound.
Those are the best collection of songs.
And man, she went out there and tore those songs up.
Well, this is our first really big break,
so we're taking advantage of it, even if it is tiring.
They may be the only group in the top ten
where two of the group still have the bands on their teeth.
Isn't that interesting?
Yeah.
That's nice.
[laughs]
Can you imagine the Bee Gees all coming out
with their hits and all having bands on their teeth.
[audience laughs]
"Stayin Alive, Stayin Alive."
I think disco is something that made us look really great,
that it really was one of the first few times
that queer people, black folks, and anyone in between
were able to really shine.
♪♪♪
It was amazing to me as someone who grew up
in the Fifties and Sixties,
to see what seemed like genuine acceptance
of a gay culture at the club level --
and not just curiosity, but acceptance
and interest in gay life through club life,
and through people like Sylvester.
♪ You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) ♪ by Sylvester
♪ ... I've been dancing ♪
♪ On the floor, darlin' ♪
Sylvester might not have been able to exist as an artist
in the Fifties.
♪ Feel your body close... ♪
[Mark] He broke a whole lot of really new ground.
♪ Make me feel ♪
[Martha Walsh] It was a time when people
could be who they were, and be free.
[Billy] Sylvester is a forefather,
not only disco,
but of the queer expansion,
the non-binary of it all,
when there was no language for it.
♪♪♪
[Martha] I was singing with Sylvester.
Originally we were doing a lot of Top 40,
and that evolved into a disco sound.
♪ And I know you love me ♪
♪ Like you should ♪
♪♪♪
[ Martha] During that time, there were those
that didn't want him to be who he was.
Being a gay artist,
let alone a Black gay artist,
was something that was very hidden.
They were out there,
but they were very closeted.
And they wanted to market him as a straight artist,
you know, R&B, whatever.
And he wasn't having it.
And Sylvester was the one that said,
"I'm not doing it. I am who I am.
Accept me or, you know... bye!"
♪ I feel real ♪
[Jellybean] You Make Me Feel Mighty Real.
Sylvester had brought it to me
when it was a work in progress,
and I played it, and the album went gold.
I still didn't really understand what that meant.
I just knew, like... I put it on,
people went crazy all the time.
But the fact that he gave me a gold record for it, oh...
Was great.
My style and from, where I come from
is so totally different from another place.
It's like night and day.
No, I don't compare myself to anyone.
That's why it's hard for me to get a job sometimes.
I stand on that man's shoulders.
There would be no Billy...
If there wasn't a Sylvester.
♪♪♪
[Sylvester] I've been singing, like, since I was a child.
Really. Gospel singing, always singing in church
and stuff that.
But I still sing Gospel music everywhere I go.
♪ You make me feel ♪
[Sylvester] No matter what I do, or where I go,
or what I'm into, it just does not leave me.
It's just there.
That feeling, that sound is just embedded in me,
and it just won't ever come out.
And I don't ever want it to come out.
♪ You make me feel ♪
♪ Hey ♪
♪ Mighty real ♪
♪ Hey ♪
The shrieking that leaves you, like, euphoric.
[laughs]
You know it's, it's like...
that's Gospel.
♪ Mighty real ♪
[Billy] Everybody felt seen in it, in the music.
♪ You make me feel ♪
♪ Ooh-ooh-ooh ♪
[Akia] It's the fellowship.
A lot of people, especially in disco,
they were ostracized in those communities.
It doesn't mean that they still don't have a love
for the Black church.
♪ You make me feel ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Mighty real ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Yeah♪
♪Ah ♪
♪Yeah ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
♪Ah ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
♪ Mmm ♪
♪ Oo♪
♪♪♪
[audience cheering]
Look, nothing is, is pure and utopian and fantastic,
but it was certainly as close as I've ever seen.
Being a Black Panther and going,
"Man, all we wanted to do was touch people.
All we wanted to do was bring in the masses
and say, Man, we're one. We're one America,
one army, even though we're disparate people."
That's what we used to say, "Power to the people."
And we met all the people.
And that's what disco gave us.
They gave us power to all the people.
If you could dance.
[laughs]
♪♪♪
So in the beginning, disco was a cool thing,
before it became over-commercialized,
watered down,
cornball. You feel me?
Because it was something that we felt
like we made happen.
[Newscaster] The very popular and very lucrative
new business called Disco.
It's bigger than Elvis,
bigger than the Beatles.
And I saw the reaction of people around New York,
and I saw hits being made on the floor here.
150,000 singles were being sold in the New York market
with very little radio play on the pop stations.
[Sharon] All of a sudden, it was not
underground anymore.
It was commercially viable,
and people were making mad money,
and it was like, "Well, if you handle it the right way,
we can make more mad money."
And so it was like, you know...
♪♪♪
Hey Jerry, what's the story?
You want a party, you want to dance,
you want a great night out? Come on down to Jerry's Disco.
[Newscaster] These students are enrolled
in a ten week class at Humber College.
Billboard Magazine now stages two conventions a year
so promoters can promote their products.
[Vince] Once disco became a name,
a sellable thing that record companies
wanted to make money off of,
it became so formulaic.
Just one bad record after the other.
♪♪♪
[Legs McNeil] I don't think that 'hip'
can be a mass movement.
♪♪♪
[Legs] Everything became disco music,
for at least three years.
You know, it's like anything else.
You know, familiarity breeds contempt.
A lot of the songs, you know,
when I started shopping for them,
they had "Disco! Disco!"
They would, the singer would say that in the song.
And that was the part like, ugh,
we didn't want that part.
It was on the 12-inch, "Disco 12-Inch."
That was kind of like a "hell no" too.
Disco sucks. Disco is a disease.
Disco is fascism.
♪♪♪
[Legs] When Punk Magazine first came out,
we were rebelling against everything.
We wanted to be new.
The label of the editorial was - in very bold letters -
"Death to Disco."
♪♪♪
It was annoying because they were believing the hype.
It was like, we fought so hard to have something else heard
other than what was on the radio.
Disco seemed to us to be the quintessential music
of mediocrity.
And we said, "Where's the great Rock and Roll?"
And the fashion of disco, it looked like you know,
swingers at a Holiday Inn.
We didn't. We wanted to wear T-shirts and sneakers
and black leather jackets.
And we had a big Fonz poster.
We loved the Fonz, you know.
He was what we aspired to be.
[John Ferrara] And listen, right from the head.
Start off with just snare drum... or just bass drum.
Just bass drum, nothing else.
♪♪♪
Leave this out.
Everything's going to be based around the bass drum.
Okay. Let's get it as hot and as pulsating as we can.
♪♪♪
Yeah, that sounds bad!
♪♪♪
[Jellybean] It got to a point where there was
just so much disco.
I mean, I was getting hundreds of new releases a week
and I was DJing three or four nights a week.
So I was constantly listening to new stuff and going,
"This is not danceable. Why is it on a 12-inch?
Why does it say 'disco'?"
That branding, you know, "It's a disco tune,"
please. That started making me sick.
It was all about sales.
It wasn't about the love of the music
and how good it was.
It was just about money.
Have no fear, Paco is here. Paco's my name,
and disco's my game.
We'll boogie down 'til 10 o'clock tonight
with the best disco songs in the nation.
♪♪♪
[Nona] Over time, when it sort of exploded
into the real "disco" period, it became extreme.
The extremes of sexuality,
the extremes of drug abuse,
the extremes of, you know,
sort of individuals doing harm to themselves.
♪♪♪
You're offered all sorts of drugs and drink,
and you're going to say no?
Please, you want to experiment and have some fun.
You know, roulette. "Come on, take this."
"I'll take the yellow one."
"That red one. What does it do?"
"You'll find out."
♪♪♪
[Nicky] Ethyl Chloride is something that tennis players
use if they have an injury to numb them.
And people were spraying it on rags and inhaling it,
and getting a buzz off of it.
So they would spray it and give you the hankie,
and it was just out of their mouth.
Yeah, they'd go like this on you.
It's horrible. Probably fried our brains.
I was using a lot of drugs and I was out of control.
It was out of control.
Everyone was high.
♪♪♪
My best friend called me and said,
"I tried heroin. And it's fantastic."
The drugs had taken over my life so much
that I felt like there was a wall between me
and other people.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] That was the beginning of the end for me.
♪♪♪
♪ Disco Inferno ♪ by The Trammps
♪♪♪
[Newscaster] Saturday Night Fever,
one of the most successful films of the year.
The movie already has grossed nearly $100 million
in the United States and Canada alone.
♪♪♪
[Newscaster] Over 10 million albums of the soundtrack
by the Bee Gees have been sold,
and it has made a superstar out of 24 year old
John Travolta.
It's a young man, going through,
trying to think of what he wants to do
for the rest of his life.
And I think it's a very important film.
[Mark] That was a seminal point
because it was a mass-marketed movie,
and it introduced literally millions of people
across America to a particular element
of the club scene at that time.
♪♪♪
♪ Burn, baby, burn ♪
♪ Disco inferno ♪
♪ Burn, baby, burn ♪
♪ Burn that mother down ♪
[Mark] Clubs were siloed in those days.
There were the underground clubs,
there were Black clubs like Leviticus and Othello
and other places.
But in Bay Ridge and some of these other neighborhoods,
which is where Saturday Night Fever was, was set,
that was a whole different thing.
All kinds of places were converted at night to discos.
Some places - restaurants or whatever.
And it was a separate scene,
and that was the scene that got projected.
That was the scene that blew up.
I think for a lot of people it became aspirational.
He became this 'King of the Night', you know,
dressed and spinning women around.
And one of its by-products was that everybody
made a disco record.
[Jellybean] Ethel Merman made a disco record.
Yeah, there was an Avon lady made a disco record,
it was endless.
It became like a marketing tool for record companies.
And then next thing I know,
it became this next level big thing,
and it's like super huge, and Studio 54,
and all these other super expensive discos that...
the folks that really laid this foundation
really couldn't go to those places.
We didn't, you know, you couldn't get in.
[Newscaster] This is the scene outside
a New York disco called Studio 54.
This is the place that's 'in' with the disco crowd,
except that these people are still out.
No pushing!
[Newscaster] Of course, Liza Minnelli
and her kind of celebrities sweep right through
the protective ranks of door keepers.
One of the owners, Steve Rubell, works the door.
He is choosy about who gets in,
and that adds to the mystique
and the desperation to be accepted.
Oh, I just want to watch the stars.
I saw Cheryl Tiegs, Beverly Johnson,
quite a few celebrities.
Open up the doors now!
[crowd chatter]
... because I'm going back to Atlanta, Georgia tomorrow,
and I've seen it in People Magazine in every issue.
The zoo?
You go to the zoo to watch the animals.
These people are crowded here right now
to watch all these freaky people file into this place.
[Nicky] Steve is like my biggest fan.
He's at the Gallery every Saturday night
and he's opening this club,
and they want me to play there.
I was the first DJ at Studio 54.
[Jellybean] On the night that it opened,
I had some friends over.
I was like, "Let's go check it out."
So only one person that was with us got in.
And then, I went there every night and stood outside
until I was finally let in.
♪ Everyone's a Winner ♪ by Hot Chocolate
♪♪♪
You're not shaved. There's no way you're coming in.
There was that whole curated crowd
that was there from Calvin Klein, Andy Warhol,
Truman Capote. So there's a lot of celebrity-driven...
in Studio 54.
♪♪♪
♪ Everyone's a winner, baby ♪
♪ That's the truth ♪
♪ Yes, that's the truth ♪
♪ Making love to you is such a thrill ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Everyone's a winner, baby ♪
♪That's no lie ♪
♪ That's no lie ♪
♪ You never fail ♪
♪ To satisfy ♪
♪ Satisfy ♪
Everyone talked about it.
If you were dressed exotically like we were,
Steve would wave us in.
It was glamorous, and there was celebrities,
and so forth, but I felt uncomfortable.
It's just my opinion, I thought we were part
of the scenery for people who were wanting something
exotic at the same time.
But it was 'approved', and they could go to the VIP room
with Halston, and Liza Minnelli and these people.
When you're going, "You, not you, you, not you."
You're hurting a lot of feelings.
And it created a big backlash.
♪♪♪
We tried to get into Studio 54 one night
because Grace Jones had called us up and said,
"Hey, you're my personal guest.
Just go to the stage door,
and tell them your personal friends
of Miss Grace Jones, verbatim."
Thing is, we didn't know that Grace Jones's speaking voice
is her real speaking voice.
She sounded like a cross between Marlene Dietrich
and Bela Lugosi.
♪♪♪
[Nile] We were young, man. We were kids.
We didn't know anything.
Somebody said, "Knock on the door
and tell them you're personal friends of Miss Grace Jones
with that accent?"
And we kept trying to get the accent right.
"We are personal friends of Miss Grace Jones."
Instead of the guy letting us in,
he went, "Aw, fuck off!"
We said, "No, no, no!
We're personal friends of Miss Grace Jones!"
He came back to the door and he said,
"Didn't I tell you to fuck off?"
It's like, wow.
[Nile] We are freezing, our shoes were wet.
They ruined my expensive Maud Frizon suede shoes.
Fortunately, I live one block away.
♪♪♪
On the way to my apartment, we picked up two bottles
of Dom Perignon, which we used to call
'Rock and Roll Mouthwash' back in the day.
We were pissed off, so we down the bottles of champagne
very quickly and I picked up my guitar and jam.
So we wrote this song called, 'Aw, Fuck Off'.
And it was pretty good.
"Aw, fuck off!"
[makes guitar sounds]
You know it was like, that kind of song.
And we were crying. We had each other on the floor.
But Bernard then looks at me and says -
he used to always pull his sunglasses down over his nose
when he got serious.
And he says. "Yo, my man,
you do know this shit is happening, right?"
You got to remember, this is a couple of years
before hip-hop.
And I'm like, "Bernard, we're not going to get,
Aw, Fuck Off on the radio."
He's like, "Let's work on it man, that's what we do.
Let's work on it."
'Freak' is a good euphemism for the other F-word.
And so we wrote Aw, Freak Off.
No matter how many times we sang it and played it,
it was not lifting my skirt.
Boom. Light bulb goes off over Bernard's head,
and he says, "Damn, it's like that dance my kids are doing."
"What dance?"
♪ Le Freak ♪ by Chic
♪ Ah, freak out!
♪ Le freak, c'est chic ♪
♪ Freak out ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Ah, freak out ♪
♪ Le freak, c'est chic ♪
♪ Freak out ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Now freak ♪
♪♪♪
[Nile] Le Freak was so big, you know.
Now everybody was interested in Chic.
That was the disco group.
That was the disco group that actually made it.
And they were playing their music inside,
and they couldn't get in the club.
They wouldn't let them in.
♪♪♪
When Le Freak came out,
I was doing The Freak. [laughs]
♪♪♪
♪ I said freak ♪
♪♪♪
[Kathy] What disco music did do, is it opened the barriers
of music being separated and segregated.
There was R&B charts, there were Pop charts.
I remember, I think it was
You Don't Send Me Flowers Anymore
with Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand was #1.
And then, then Le Freak came out,
and it went right to #1.
And people were livid.
I remember that was like, "That can't happen.
We've got to do something about this music,
it's out of control.
It has no color. It can do whatever it wants.
And we can't control it."
♪♪♪
I played for the Bianca Jagger birthday party
where she rode in on the white horse.
And all that was really nice,
but I got fired.
[laughs]
It was out of control.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] He wanted a certain type of people,
and created a big backlash.
♪♪♪
[crowd chatting]
[Nile] And that became the vibe
for big clubs after that, you know.
Quite a few of them opened up and did extremely well.
I mean, you know, until the summer of '79.
[explosions]
[Reporter] Comiskey Park hosted a disco demolition today.
[Reporter] They blow up any disco records
you bring to the park.
[Reporter] WLUP's Steve Dahl led his followers
in song and chants on the field.
Us rock and rollers here in Chicago
think Disco sucks!
[crowd chanting] Disco sucks!
[Martha] Telling people to bring their disco records
and, "We're going to burn them"
and all this other kind of stuff.
I just thought it was absolutely stupid.
We are the Insane Coho Lips, that's the anti-disco army.
It's not so much the music that I dislike,
it's actually the culture. And we're a Rock and Roll station.
That's true. Hardcore Rock and Roll station.
And it's actually quite intimidating
to most Rock and Rollers because you have to look perfect.
Your hair has to be beautiful.
I can't dance.
I can't find a white three-piece suit
that fits me off the rack, that hangs well.
For other people to say,
"Well, we don't like that kind of music
and we don't like those kinds of people."
Let people be who they are.
Us Rock and Rollers here in Chicago
think disco sucks.
[Nile] If you didn't know it was 1979,
and you somehow put the footage in black and white,
and you looked at book burnings...
What kind of world is this?
What is this?
Like, all of a sudden, we're going back to the Dark Ages.
[Nicky] Underneath this whole thing
are the radio stations, who designed and pulled off
Comiskey Park.
It was a radio station.
Radio stations were a very powerful network,
and the radio station jocks got tickets to this,
really nice limousine rides.
And we cut them off in a lot of ways.
♪♪♪
[Radio DJ] Detroit rockers engaged
in the abolition of disco...
We'll be right back with your...
[static sounds]
[Radio DJ] This is your Rock and Roll General,
so stick around!
[Radio DJ] Our phone lines are now open.
Let us know how you would like us to destroy this record.
♪♪♪
They were a powerful force against us.
The record burning, the explosions on the field.
It wasn't as anti-disco as it was anti-people of color.
It was anti-gay people,
it was anti-impoverished peoples.
It promptly burgeoned out of control,
and turned into a full-blown riot.
[Reporter] This garbage of demolishing a record
has turned into a fiasco.
♪♪♪
Stonewall was a riot.
And here we have ten years later,
this disco backlash was also a riot.
And what are they rioting about? Music?
It seems always to be that, you know,
"You're having too much fun.
You just having too much fun.
We're fine with you being in the closet."
♪♪♪
[Mark] What are they rioting about?
A loss of influence, a loss of power,
and a loss of a narrative that they had controlled
for a good long while.
Part of a larger backlash against change.
♪♪♪
I always thought it was white people,
the middle class, who didn't want the integration.
The Village was Sodom and Gomorrah,
and anything that downtown New York embraced,
"No, no, no, no."
♪♪♪
Well, I... I can't take any credit.
I've said all that it's not my battle, it's God's battle.
♪♪♪
[Akia] I think it's easier for folks to live in shame
because you can be controlled in that way,
where watching black queer people
unapologetically be who they are within their skin
allows other folks to claim theirs as well.
When we legalize, and even normalize,
and even glamorize homosexuality,
many, many boys and girls
who don't have the benefit of homes
that teach them right from wrong are easily recruited,
subverted, great, great damage.
♪♪♪
Thank God for a president who agrees in totality
of what we morally stand for here.
'Disco Sucks' was so all encompassing
that we totally lost our way.
We didn't know what to do.
'Disco' was now a dirty word.
No one wanted to use it anymore.
I hate disco. It sucks, man.
Disco sucks.
We went through the disco period
along with everybody else.
I mean, Paul McCartney made disco records,
The Stones made disco records.
It's easy, I think, for the world out there
to slag you off and just say,
"Oh, great, it's the Bee Gees again," you know?
Well I resent the idea of people out there slagging us off,
and I don't want to do an interview
that's going to be like this. Thanks.
No, I don't, sorry.
[Legs] White audiences in the suburbs
who wanted to listen to heavy metal,
hated this music too.
MTV and the big hair bands, you know, came about.
That became a male dominated period in terms of Rock.
But, you know, they were wearing this spandex that we wore.
So I was like, "Really, guys, why do you have a problem
with me in spandex, and you don't have a problem
with David Lee Roth," you know?
There were a lot of people ready to jump in
and go back to something
that they were really comfortable with,
that didn't involve gay people and black people.
♪♪♪
And at that point we decided that we were a disco band
just to be defiant.
"Hell yeah, we're disco band."
Chic couldn't get arrested, and no one would call us back.
We were hurt. We didn't understand how people
who once loved us, the very next day, discarded us.
Hence, the beginning of our drug and alcohol downfall.
So, you know, my world started to crash because of drugs.
It ramped up faster than you could have ever imagined.
Someone came to the back of the booth,
1979, and said to me,
"They say disco is dead, Nicky. What do you think?"
And I said, "Yeah."
For us, like, the whole world changed.
We...
It's making me a little bit emotional here.
I get a little emotional over this
because this the start of life for me,
this was... this was validation.
I still feel really emotional about that period
because it was really kind of amazing.
It was like tribal. It was wonderful to be...
to feel part of something that was much bigger than me.
It's still really moving to me.
♪♪♪
Federal health officials consider it an epidemic.
[Reporter] It's a disease first detected
in the gay community, that has now spread beyond that.
My own family
won't come to San Francisco
for this parade because they're afraid by breathing the air
that they're going to get AIDS.
When I came down with this disease,
I found this button.
It absolutely reflected my position.
You know, I, I may be down, but I'm not out.
[Akia] What we lack in is all those folks that were involved
in this music, they passed away.
So a lot of those stories,
and a lot of these really beautiful moments
that came out of people trying to seek refuge through this --
I wouldn't even call it disco, really like, music.
It's a culture.
♪ At Last I Am Free ♪ by Chic
♪ At last I am free ♪
♪ I can hardly see in front of me ♪
So I went from The Gallery closing
to this place called Buttermilk Bottom,
where I played until 1981, and...
David Rodriguez, who was my DJ mentor,
dies of AIDS.
We were so close,
and it just blew me away.
[Jellybean] The AIDS epidemic was so quick.
It was really sad, you know,
to see the amount of creative people
that died in a very short period of time.
We've lost a couple of generations
of promising great artists.
♪♪♪
It was like you didn't know who was going to be next.
It took away almost all of my friends.
And these are the people...
[sniffles]
I really thought some of them, I would...
I would grow up with, or have them to talk to.
And I think about it now, sometimes.
[weeping]
♪♪♪
I think by '84, I stopped going to bars
because people would move away.
I was DJing at Xenon,
and we had a big Gay Night on Thursday,
and it kept getting smaller and smaller.
There were nights I went home screaming at God.
♪♪♪
I had went to see him in San Francisco
about six months before he passed,
and I was glad that I did.
♪♪♪
But...
He kept up a brave fight.
♪♪♪
I decided I had to step out of the music thing
in order to save my own life from drugs
because everybody, every one of my friends
thought I would be dead in a couple of years.
[Billy] I came out in 1985,
right at the beginning of the AIDS crisis.
The communal spaces in which disco music was played
were also havens.
There's a saying in the church,
take your burdens to the Lord.
"I take my problems to the dance floor."
It's the same thing.
For us, it became gay church.
It was a place where we could engage spiritually
without being judged for our queerness,
for our transness,
particularly...
in the moments where I began to start feeling
put out by the church because of my gayness,
because of my queerness.
It's been very healing for me.
♪♪♪
[Nigel] So I was hanging out at one of my favorite clubs,
Leviticus, and then I hear the Good Times bass line.
[vocalization of Good Times bass rhythm]
And I'm hearing, you know, "I said a hip hop, the hippie..."
you know, all this stuff.
And it was, it was great. It was groovin'.
You know, as soon as I hear the song,
I hear the bass and I go,
"There's only one guy in the world who plays bass like that."
I said, "That's Bernard."
♪ Rapper's Delight ♪ by The Sugarhill Gang
[Nile] I asked the DJ to show me a copy of the record.
He was so excited. He said,
"Man, I just picked this up in Harlem today."
Whoa, wait a minute. That's a little weird.
[Grandmaster Flash] Rapper's Delight was everywhere.
And it took what we were doing in the streets -
little business - now became big business,
and that became the new bar to set.
♪♪♪
Walking past a laundromat,
and I was just hearing these sounds coming out,
and they were playing like, old Planet Rock.
I just fell in love with the music,
and started to fall in love with the culture.
Like Rapper's Delight, what's funny about that
is as much as I love that song,
it really, it really didn't hit me the way it did
until I realized that it was an old Disco record.
You know, it was Nile Rodgers and Chic.
And I started to get more into Disco,
even as a producer,
really when I started working with KRS and BEP.
[Billy] I believe that disco pushed the boundaries
of what masculinity could be.
And there was a backlash that came in the Eighties,
that shut that expansion of gender
and performative gender down. It shut it down.
For a little while. It just went underground.
♪♪♪
[Mark] I mean, even going back
to the beginning of house music in the early Eighties,
it was always like lightning in a bottle.
I moved to Chicago so I can have an opportunity
to try to create something on my own.
[Mark] What was it, four years after that demolition thing,
which was in '79?
By '83, the earliest house music was coming out
of that same city that everybody thinks destroyed Disco.
So when Frankie says that House was Disco's Revenge,
that's what he's talking about.
"House music is disco's revenge."
It hits it right on the nose.
It was a little bit more laid back,
and it always made me feel sexy.
♪♪♪
There was always some new musician,
new singer, new producer.
Disco was always able to kind of revitalize itself.
♪ Good Life ♪ by Inner City
♪ I know you want to go ♪
[Kevin] I never really paid attention to that
"Disco was dead"
because commercially they tried to kill it,
but it evolved.
Really, it went back underground.
♪♪♪
[Kevin] It just kept evolving because the 'four on the floor,'
that's always been the key to Disco.
[Earl] They use the 'four on the floor,'
the bass drum.
But they don't use a high-hat in a song like that.
You don't hear the...
[vocalization of high-hat rhythm]
because they think that's Disco.
They just use the...
[vocalization of bass drum rhythm]
♪ Good life ♪
Having this technology,
it was the next step.
It opened up the doors.
I want to make this record, I'm going to master it,
I'm going to put it out.
And can't nobody tell me I can't.
♪♪♪
All these independent labels started releasing records
and became sort of like mini majors.
♪♪♪
[Reporter] How hot is house music now?
On a scale of one to ten? It's a twelve.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] Frankie did his own thing.
Immediately, I was drawn to house music.
I knew that this was a successor to what I was doing
because it reminded me of the very early club tracks
that I had played.
I would say House music is refined Disco,
the new sound of Disco.
The Warehouse itself inspired it,
and what I was doing at The Warehouse
is nothing different than what Larry was doing
in The Garage.
We were playing in clubs that were more so our homes
than they were anything else.
♪♪♪
♪ Move your body ♪
♪♪♪
I'm directly influenced by the work that Frankie Knuckles
and Larry Levan were doing
because they were specifically creating spaces
for black queer people,
and they just amplified what was going on.
You get to really see a person blossom in those spaces.
Historically, as we can see with the history of disco,
a lot of nightlife culture is birthed from queer people
just trying to exist.
Where would I be? Where, what would I be listening to
if I was not existing in the time that I'm in?
[audience cheering]
[Nile] Alright, are we ready to get this party going?
[audience cheering]
♪ We've come too far ♪
♪ To give up who we are ♪
♪ So let's raise the bar ♪
♪ And our cups to the stars ♪
[audience cheering]
So that song, I co-wrote with Daft Punk
and Pharrell Williams.
♪ Get Lucky ♪ by Daft Punk ft. Pharrell Williams, Nile Rodgers
♪I'm up all night to get some ♪
♪ She's up all night for good fun ♪
♪ I'm up all night to get lucky ♪
Daft Punk came to my house to possibly work together.
So I went to Electric Lady
for what would ultimately become Get Lucky.
I told Guy-Man,
"You know, Thomas, he's standing right exactly where
Bernard Edwards was, was standing
when we cut our first Chic record."
So Thomas overheard that, and he was like,
"How did you do Chic Records?"
♪ We've come too far ♪
♪ To give up who we are ♪
So I said, "Well, let me hear the song."
He turned the song on. I wrote out a chart.
I listened to what everybody was playing.
I said, "Now do me a favor.
Turn everybody down except for the drums,
and let me play."
And to me, that felt like the groove.
It felt like that's the way the song should sound.
♪ I'm up all night to get lucky ♪
♪ We're up all night till the sun ♪
♪ We're up all night to get some ♪
[Nile] Daft Punk somehow did something amazing
at a time where nobody was doing that.
♪ We're up all night to get lucky ♪
[crowd chatter]
Now, I don't have my glasses on.
[laughing]
I'm going to the gig. In London.
After Pride, the stragglers who are still partying
after a day of partying.
Hey, how are you? Good to see you!
I'm so glad you're here.
♪♪♪
[Kathy] It keeps coming back.
They want to dress like it because they're feeling it.
Like my dancers are all... they're all in their twenties,
whatever, but they love Disco!
A very cool thing to a whole new generation.
There's a story behind this, and where it came from.
♪♪♪
When I travel, over 50% of my audience
are people under 25.
And these people know every word to every song I play.
♪♪♪
♪ But it's alright ♪
♪♪♪
♪ If you give them all ♪
♪♪♪
[Nicky] I know that this music did something to people
that other music doesn't.
It not only has a great beat,
and a great funk to it that moves your soul,
but it's got words, and meaning that really talk to people.
I do believe that disco was the beginning of a conversation
that we're actually deep in the middle of now.
We're in a time right now where all status quos
are being questioned.
Imagine a guy like me, now I'm 70.
Imagine I'm in the Seventies, and in the Eighties
and things are just awesome, and people are cool,
and... Yeah, friends for life,
and they're just, they're just great.
I thought by the year 2000,
that this planet and people would be just highly educated,
kind to each other, really cool.
It was like man, just... it was all falling apart.
It was like the antithesis.
Let's begin this morning with the deadly shooting overnight
at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs.
And then...
I don't know what happened.
You'd think that the civil rights struggle ended.
But it didn't.
I mean, look at what we're going through now.
It didn't end.
We put a Band-Aid on a wound that needed stitches.
♪♪♪
[Reporter] Three weeks on from the first reports
of this virus, it has now spread here,
and to other parts of the world.
But to what extent, and severity,
cannot yet be predicted.
♪♪♪
We were isolated in our own silo spaces
for almost three years.
With a government that didn't do anything to help.
We were just trying to get by.
We were just trying to hold onto our mental health.
We were just trying to figure out how to not lose our minds.
We were just trying to figure out how to eat.
How to take care of our families...
♪♪♪
[D-Nice] Club Quarantine, you know,
to me that was a chance to actually just play music,
you know. No one was paying me,
people chose to stay with me.
I felt like this was a good time
to actually show people who I am.
It was a moment during quarantine
where I was trying to feed my own soul.
I needed to feel something spiritually,
and I connected with this song called,
"Thinking of You," by Sister Sledge.
♪ Thinking of You ♪ by Sister Sledge
♪ Just keep on doing what you're doing to me ♪
♪ Oh, it's ecstasy ♪
♪♪♪
My daughter told me, there's this DJ
who's playing Thinking of You,
and he's really loving your song, you know?
It's funny how, like, I listened to those records
for one reason back then,
but then later on when I became a DJ,
I started to rediscover these records.
We are one in here together,
we are celebrating together,
we're fighting in this together.
And I felt like, not only was it feeding my soul,
but I was introducing a whole new world
to one of the most beautiful records I ever heard.
In the darkest time that we've experienced in our lifetime,
I wanted to celebrate love, and life, and family.
We got a hundred thousand people in here
rocking with us right now!
This is absolutely insane!
♪♪♪
Disco endures anyway because it's bigger than you,
it's bigger than me,
it's bigger than any disease,
it's bigger than any backlash.
It's bigger than that. It's classic.
It's necessary.
And now disco is having the kind of resurgence
that is the kind of thing that cements it
in the annals of everything forever.
♪♪♪
[Kevin] What I see is more talent being born out of this
to continue it, because technology will continue.
People are going to want to dance forever.
They won't want to go back to anything.
They're going to always want to dance,
that's for sure.
♪♪♪
[Nile] The deep hidden meaning of all of our songs
was about a life that we wanted to lead.
We didn't have it yet, but we aspired to it.
The great thing about all the people around us,
we had a real family set-up.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] Club music, dance music
brought people together to dance.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] From The Loft, to The Gallery,
to The Paradise Garage,
it became a movement.
♪♪♪
[Nicky] We have a bond that goes way deep and long
because we connected on that dance floor,
where the emotional charge was beyond
our wildest dreams.
♪♪♪
Hopefully this all means something,
and that we will all cosmically find our way back home.
I really believe we're on our way back home.
♪♪♪