Original subtitles

# Oh, freak out! Le freak, c'est chic... #

The sound of disco was everywhere.

It was huge.

# Oh... #

We made people realise that they could be themselves.

# Freak out! #

It started in the underground, and then it became mainstream.

# Have you heard about the new dance craze...? #

Last night, 29 of the 43 Grammy Awards

went to disco artists and songs.

Just a further indication of how disco fever

has swept the country.

# Surely can be done... #

We have created a culture that's unstoppable.

Exercise classes work out to the beat.

The fashion industry has created clothes to match the music.

National magazines do cover stories about it, and business has never

been better for dancing instructors.

Once it started happening, a lot of people wanted

to capitalise on that.

Disco got bloated. It also got rich.

You had songs out there that was powerful.

Then you come with corny songs, you kill the whole vibe

of what disco was.

In every successful thing, it has the seeds of its own destruction.

That was personal.

Disco started with soul, but totally lost it.

This was, "We want the money, so let's do this bullshit."

Not going to work.

# Oh, freak out! #

The Beatles, 15 years ago, had five tracks on the chart.

They also had the number one that week -

I Want To Hold Your Hand.

Our number one this week is,

of course, Village People.

# There's no need to feel down, I said, young man... #

You've brought the Australian audiences very much great pleasure.

I'd just like to walk back and I'd like you to take

a bow for us.

# No need to be unhappy, young man

# There's a place you can go

# I said, young man

# When you're short on your dough

# You can stay there

# And I'm sure you will find many ways... #

What would you like to sing if you would decide yourself?

YMCA.

Let's hear it. OK.

The Village People were a studio band.

That means that they were

a group of musicians picked to record a song

that a producer wanted to make.

# It's fun to stay at the YMCA... #

The answer with a record company is if there's money in it,

I'm interested.

People wanted it, they made it.

I want to present to you the record producer who is responsible

for creating the Village People.

Here from France is record producer Jacques Morali.

I met Jacques Morali in New York in the '70s.

He came to me and he said, "I had a dream about you.

"I wanted to build this new group that I have an idea

"about around you.

"I'll come get you and I'll make you a star."

And Jacques had put

an ad into the trades asking for young men

with moustaches to come to see if they wanted to be a part

of this group.

The Village People was from Greenwich Village.

It's always been a place in New York for alternative lifestyle.

But this was a disco group put together for the mainstream.

They took all of the stereotypes within gay culture,

the cowboy,

the construction worker,

the leather man,

and presented it to the mainstream in a very tongue-in-cheek way.

The first album was basically about gay life.

When I wrote the second album,

I had to broaden the spectrum

of it because I wasn't gay.

When I would write lyrics,

it could be taken by any type

of lifestyle, more than just one.

I wanted to write it to where it could be comfortable for gay people

or it could be comfortable for straight.

They were a great group of guys and they were a lot of fun.

They brought energy to a room or to an audience and they knew

how to perform.

# Where can you find pleasure

# Search the world for treasure

# Learn science, technology...? #

Their songs are very repeatable and singalong.

In The Navy or YMCA

was universally loved

and universally flew under the radar

and still does, weirdly.

But everybody who got it

kind of couldn't believe

how popular it became.

# In the Navy

# Yes, you can sail the seven seas

# In the Navy

# Yes, you can put your mind at ease

# In the Navy

# Come on now, people, make a stand

# In the Navy, in the Navy... #

And what are the audiences like?

Is it as much fun as what we're seeing here?

Oh, yeah, everywhere. They just love the music and the group.

Everywhere we go,

places where they don't even speak English,

people just react to the music and to the energy.

And we have the same reaction.

The US Navy wanted to use In The Navy as a recruitment tool.

The agreement was they would allow us to use one of their ships

to shoot the video if we allowed them to use the song.

They gave us the destroyer The Reasoner, and at the end of it,

they gave us jets that flew over.

And it just proved to me that the US Navy didn't get

that the group was filled with gay stereotypes and that it was kind

of a off-colour joke to a lot of people.

# In the Navy

# Yes, you can sail the seven seas... #

So mainstream audiences didn't realise

that the guys behind the scene probably couldn't have gotten

into the Navy just because they were out and they were gay.

# Can't you see we need a hand? In the Navy... #

Not a lot of people understood.

And I say "hooray" to that.

It was quite a Trojan horse.

# In the Navy... #

Gold represents $1,000,000 worth of sales in albums,

and platinum means that two of your albums have sold

a million albums!

Think what a great corporate entity

you particular freaks are, you know?

Now you're establishment and you're worth millions

and zillions of dollars.

The Village People!

The Village People and YMCA and Macho Man and all of those

sorts of things,

you know, that was great, but that was literally for people in Kansas.

Queer people of colour, you know, we weren't listening

to those kinds of records in the clubs.

This was a time when New York was the clubbing capital

of the world.

The club culture was just wide open.

There were no holds barred.

You know, a lot of people lived for nights at Studio 54

or Paradise Garage.

The Paradise Garage for a lot of people was church.

Paradise Garage was an old garage that was converted into this dance

space, and it had the ramp that you'd walk up to.

You could hear the bass through the wall.

Whoomm! It's like, wow.

It was extremely loud and the quality of the sound

was really, really good.

My friends and I, we used to come with different outfits.

We made those outfits for the night.

They had nothing to do with fashion.

We came up with a theme and we'd dress like fantasy.

A lot of people who came there, that was their life.

They would become a persona that made them feel free.

There were no clocks, there were no windows.

There were no mirrors.

There was no alcohol.

Hmmm. What could they have done to stay awake...?!

Could it have been drugs? Ohh!

There was a smell of poppers in the air.

There was the smell of marijuana.

And they say that the punch was spiked with acid.

Grace Jones, Mick Jagger, Boy George, Michael Jackson -

they would all come and hang out at the Paradise Garage.

Gay, straight. Any colour.

It was mostly gay.

Back in the day, the best crowd WAS the gay crowd.

Never any violence. Never any arguments.

Never any drama.

It was quite a place.

Then I started to hear about Larry Levan,

who was the DJ at Paradise Garage.

Larry was always up front and grand entrance.

And I'm here.

I'm queer. Get used to it.

Larry and I were friends.

And one afternoon Larry said to me,

"Nicky, would you teach me how to play records?"

From that moment on,

I would work with him on mixing techniques,

on how to beat match, how to pick the next record.

Immediately, I saw in Larry

that eye for making stuff become fabulous.

# Have a good time... #

No other clubs had a DJ like Larry

who played the kind of music Larry played,

who made the decisions that he made,

who was as much in charge of the night as Larry.

He would be messing with the sound system as people were coming

into the club.

That's how obsessed he was

with making sure that the sound

wrenched your guts out.

He could do anything.

Larry could stop a room cold and people would just start,

"Larry, Larry," just waiting for the next thing that he was going to do.

And he might just not do anything.

He'd stop the music, get out a ladder and clean the mirror ball

at two o'clock in the morning with 1,000 people sitting on the floor.

And then he'd take the ladder down, shut the lights, put a record on,

and the place would go crazy.

Larry definitely controlled the crowd.

He had magic.

He would remix, he would play new things all the time.

He would tell you stories.

He got the idea of saying, "Look, I want to play stuff

"that I feel strongly about."

You've got the trend of music that you didn't hear no place else.

It was incredible.

Larry was way ahead of his time.

The first DJ remixer,

the first DJ producer, the first DJ artist.

He is the modern template of what a DJ is now.

Larry would often go into the recording studio,

see through all the excess tracks,

and pull out the gold that would make a hit.

# Oh, baby... #

Ain't No Mountain High is what we call a "Garage classic".

So if you've ever heard the record,

it starts off with just ta-da-da-da...

..da-da-da-da...

And then Jocelyn Brown sang...

# Oooh, I ain't going nowhere... #

What a great voice.

# I'll be right here

# As long as you want me, baby... #

Ain't No Mountain High Enough had been such a huge song

back in the day, in the '60s.

But Larry took risks. He didn't care.

He thought this was something that he could turn into a signature

piece for her.

# Ain't no mountain high enough

# Ain't no valley low enough... #

Larry Levan allowed me to sing it the way I sang it, and it allowed

another generation of time to come back around,

but in a different manner.

It might not have been number one, but it was number one in a lot

of people's heart.

And that's what was major to me, you know?

# Cos, baby, there ain't no mountain high enough... #

Performing the song at the Garage was one of the most major situations

I've ever been involved in in my life.

Everybody was singing.

It was fantastic,

and I'm trying to stay a good girl and not cry,

because sometimes the way it musters inside your soul

about things that were touching on that level

because it's more spiritual than anything else,

it tore me up, and it still tears me up.

Fast Frankie Crocker at radio station WMCA in New York

reaches one of the biggest and youngest audiences in the country.

Every promoter wants his song on Fast Frankie's show.

Frankie Crocker from WBLS, number one radio in New York City, would

come to the Garage and steal things from Larry or force him

to give it to him. And then the next day, you'd hear records

on WBLS that were not going to come out for six months

and that suddenly everybody

was crying to get a copy of

and could not buy it because it's not out.

All these record companies were like,

"Get Larry this record! Get Larry this record.

"It'll be on the radio next week."

The DJ had power in those days.

Like, Larry's fame made the Garage bigger,

then the Garage itself got so big, it made Larry's fame even bigger.

And when I would go overseas to work or visit other countries,

they'd be, "The Garage, the Garage, the Garage!"

That's when I realised to myself, I said, "Wow...

"The Garage has infiltrated Europe and in other countries.

"This is incredible."

I mean, it's just, really, a simple little weekend club,

but it became more than that.

At that time in the '70s,

there was this really beautiful energy...and vibe.

Corporations did come in.

Record companies came in.

Clothing companies came in and capitalised on that.

"We are part of this movement."

"We are part of this dance culture."

"We are here to make your life beautiful."

You know, figured out ways to market it.

Fun. That's disco. That's really what it's all about.

It's also all about money.

It's got a lot to do with it.

Big money.

A lot of money.

Record company business was very much like the film business

back then. The big hit paid for the losers.

And so, record companies really went for the big hit.

And the more you sold, the more money you made.

# I'm glad you're home

# Now did you really miss me? #

How innocent! My goodness.

# ..you did by the look in your eye In your eye

# Look in your eye... #

Was that Top Of The Pops?

That just came to me!

I was trying to... Top Of The Pops!

That was a big show!

# ..you and me can rock-a-bye

# You can ring my bell

# Ring my bell... #

When I was younger, I never thought about having a hit record.

That never came to my mind at all.

I graduated from college in '78

with a degree in psychology because I wanted to be a counsellor.

After teaching for about four months,

Ring My Bell came out.

It was a hit overnight.

# You can ring my bell

# Ring my bell Ring my bell

# Ding-dong-ding, ah! #

I actually would have preferred to have done more ballads

and probably more R&B, but everybody was doing disco.

They didn't think they were going to make it...

..in life, if they didn't do something disco!

They really did not push that song.

It was one of those songs they didn't have to.

The song was such a huge success.

# Ring my, ring my, ring

# You can ring my bell

# You can ring my bell

# Ding-dong-ding, ah!

# Ring it!

# You can ring my bell any time... #

I was called a one-hit wonder,

which, in the beginning, when I was trying,

I'm saying, "Well, that's not very nice."

# Ding-dong-ding, ah! #

"You're a commodity. That's what you are.

"You're just the latest new car that came out."

But the song was in 14 movies.

If that's the kind of one-hit wonder...

I don't think that's too bad.

OK!

# Ah! Ring it!

# You can ring my bell Any time, anywhere... #

They weren't seen as artists, per se.

They were seen by the record company owners

as vehicles for the producers,

which was a very, very different thing.

# You can ring my bell Any time, anywhere... #

Most of the one-hit wonders were on independent labels.

Independent labels were always looking for the next hit.

They weren't looking to develop the artists.

Did you get a chance to listen to that Tuxedo Junction,

Chattanooga Choo Choo single?

Chances are you haven't heard about Butterfly Records.

Well, it was put together last summer, mostly with borrowed money.

Since then, they've put out five albums, four of them disco.

All they wanted to know was, what songs do people want?

And we did a lot of music testing as to which songs people liked,

and there was kind of a universal like for the same songs.

So they looked for more artists who sounded like that.

And that's always the route to mediocrity.

It's like making multiple copies of something -

eventually, they start to fade.

The popularity of disco can be seen right here in Billboard,

which is the Bible of the music industry.

In its chart of the 100 top hits across the country today,

at least 50 of them are disco recordings.

That's what the record labels do.

They didn't understand what was going on half the time.

They oversaturated a market that was...that couldn't absorb it.

Everything became disco, disco, disco.

So much money to be made from the business of disco.

Now the sales are going to substantially increase.

They had commercialised it so massively

that every record was sounding exactly the same.

And I no longer had interest in words that said,

"Shake your booty," or, "Get up and disco dance."

I didn't want to hear about it.

I thought, "This is turning into a shitshow."

# ..to a party the other night...

# All the ladies were treating me right... #

There was novelty songs,

and I think that's what people

were starting to get upset about.

You took away... like, the feeling of what disco was.

# Disco, disco duck... #

# Disco, disco duck... #

You had garbage cash-grab music coming out of

garbage cash-grab record labels.

# Disco duck... #

All right!

I really hated it...

It was just so corny to me, you know, like...

# Disco, disco duck... #

There were some goofy disco songs.

# When the music stopped I returned to my seat

# But there's no stoppin' a duck and his beat... #

Artists could not get their music out!

You put out a record and you were just a regular ballad singer

or a regular folk singer, country singer.

You couldn't get your music out!

People wouldn't listen to your music.

They were too busy disco-ing, you know?

So...

It had a real impact on the music industry.

It was too much. I think people were sick of it.

I think if...if you're going to oversaturate...

..the culture with a sound to that degree,

people are going to turn on it.

The fact that rock and roll was

overtaken, for a while, by disco

to a lot of people in the country

had a really negative effect.

People saw disco as a threat to a hegemony that white straight people

had had for the better part of a decade, decade and a half.

And so, I think there was a racial backlash because so many

of the disco stars, like Donna Summer,

Gloria Gaynor, were black

and they were huge, huge stars.

And I don't think that white rock-and-roll America

was really ready for that in the '70s.

Eventually, there became a lot of negative backlash.

Like, "You sold me a record with a disco banner

"that was absolute crap."

"My girlfriend went out again with those fucking gay guys

"to go out dancing instead of being home with me!"

And then you had Studio 54 turning away about 1,000 people a night.

It's three in the morning in Manhattan and still,

at Studio 54, people crowd the doors hoping to get in.

But first they have to do something even harder

than finding a place to park here, and that's to win the approval

of the owner, 28-year-old Steve Rubell.

Oh, you're not shaved. There's no way

any of you guys are going to get in.

It doesn't matter, if you're not shaven. Listen, just go home.

So every night, almost, the news cameras were there

showing people being turned away,

showing people being turned into losers,

showing people being turned into unworthy.

Now, this is a country that had just, ten years earlier,

gone through a period of massive inclusion where, you know,

racial walls were torn down for the first time in a century,

everyone wanted to "kumbaya", love their brother and sister

and sing in a circle.

And then, all of a sudden, the news cameras all over the country

show people being excluded.

I was really not a fan of disco.

I was definitely more in the rock category.

The Studio 54 image was terrible among rock listeners

because you couldn't get in unless you looked the right way

or acted the right way or just had that we'll-let-you-in look.

America in general saw New York City as being this very decadent,

wild, drug-taking,

everybody-sleeping-with-everybody- else kind of place.

There was already in America a move to turn the stations that were disco

back to a rock format.

Well, now, where're you folks going with all that disco?

Uh, here, Oregon.

Here in Oregon, we like rock and roll, nice and pure, KGON style.

You don't want to be bringing that unnatural music up here now, do you?

So you had a lot of stations doing things like disco demolitions.

# How deep is your love? How deep is your love?

# I really need to know. #

Gimme a kiss.

There was a radio station in Chicago in 1979, and the morning

disc jockey, a guy named Steve Dahl, came up with the idea of, well,

let's blow up disco records on the air.

So he'd play a few bars of a Bee Gees song and then, boom,

blow it up.

And listeners loved it because it was like somebody standing

up for rock and roll in the face of this disco menace.

And that's when stations in other markets started copying

the disco demolition idea.

Kaboom. Kaboom.

I think we'd better do it.

Not this record! Not this record! Not this record!

Aaaah!

I think it came to a head at Comiskey Park.

Let's go to the videotape. Let's pick it up right here.

Comiskey Park, July 12th, 1979.

It was billed as Teen Night at Comiskey Park for the twi-night

double-header between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers.

The feature attraction was a Disco Demolition between games.

Local radio morning man Steve Dahl was the catalyst.

He is anti disco.

Tickets were 99 cents, which is really, really cheap.

So it was packed.

People brought their kids. Everybody was there.

Why? 99-cent tickets.

Hard to beat, double-header. Two games.

It's the best bargain in the world.

Chicago's a very segregated city.

90% of black people prefer the White Sox.

The Cubs are more North Side and have a lot more white fans.

Between games, Dahl was to lead the crowd in song and chants

and then finish by blowing up a box full of disco records,

which the fans were to bring with them to the ballpark.

So you had all these white people coming to a White Sox game to blow

up disco records.

They were really pushing it,

blowing up black people's records on the South Side.

People were just taking an album they didn't like and throwing it in.

They weren't throwing anything they wanted in there,

because they just wanted to see something blow up.

Steve Dahl goes out in Comiskey Park

in a Jeep and he's in full military gear.

Morning radio was theatre.

Everyone knew that.

They knew it wasn't real, but they all wanted to play along.

The listeners did.

There was a countdown on the scoreboard, ten, nine, eight,

seven...boom...

..and the records blow up.

But it didn't stop there.

Dahl departed the field, but some 7,000 to 10,000 fans poured onto

the field, ripping up bases, setting bonfires in centrefield and burning

more disco records, and ultimately delaying game two for over

an hour-and-a-half.

The crowd was too big, the crowd got too crazy, and they had to cancel

the game, which, by the way, to this day in Chicago

was the great crime there -

was cancelling the second game of the double-header.

You know, the people might have got hurt or whatever.

"Oh, yeah. But they cancelled the game."

I remember seeing it on television.

There was rioting involved and that kind of thing.

I didn't see any rioting on the South Side, but it was a lot

of outrage about it.

It was an amazing promotion, one of the greatest promotions probably

in the history of radio.

It's kind of like Woodstock. Everybody was there.

Of course they weren't. They say they were.

And it was either the greatest moment in rock and roll

or just evil, like burning books.

It depends who you talk to.

But at the time, it was sort of the perfect storm.

The Christian right, or the Bible-thumping people, were like,

"Nnnng," trying to press it down as it was coming up

and the record companies were pushing it.

And the crushing and the destruction of disco, I think, was not aimed

at the singers and everything.

I think it was aimed at the record companies.

But, of course, the singers are the ones that get hurt.

No-one was ringing my bell any more to check to see could I come

to a show. That wasn't happening.

And so I did go back to teaching.

I hate disco because I can't find a white three-piece suit that fits me

off the rack that hangs well, and I'm allergic to gold jewellery

and I don't like pina coladas. I'm allergic to coconut.

So what does it hold for me?

Probably nothing.

Nothing.

I was so mad at him.

What is wrong with you? Come burning all our disco records?

Shame on you, Steve.

What are you burning?

What the hell are you burning?

A song that you gave the label to as disco. The singer didn't.

You put the name on it and now you want to crush it?

Black, anti-gay was never a factor in the creation

of the anti-disco movement.

It just never crossed our minds.

If anything, it was a musical thing.

Rock and roll was about guitars.

Disco wasn't.

Rock and roll was about, you know, drummers. Disco had electronics.

Rock and roll, long hair, T-shirts, grabbing a beer

and disco was about champagne.

And so just so many cultural and musical factors

that really drove the whole thing rather than racial

or sexual matters.

They just bought a black person's record to blow up.

They didn't know whether it was disco or not.

They just said, "Disco sucks, disco sucks."

They didn't know what they were blowing up.

So that's the racial edge of it.

Disco stations all ran for their lives.

The musicians who were making that music were shifting

to something else.

You didn't have another hit disco movie.

It was kind of end of an era.

Someone came up to me in '79 at the DJ booth and said, "Nicky,

"they're saying disco is dead.

"What do you think?"

I said, "It's pretty much dead."

Scientists at the National Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta today

released the results of a study which shows that the lifestyle

of some male homosexuals has triggered an epidemic of a rare

form of cancer.

Robert Bazell now in Atlanta.

It was happening in San Francisco and California,

and then it started to hit New York.

They were talking about this gay cancer and how friends

of theirs had it and how friends of theirs were dying.

This suggested to Dr Dritz and her colleagues at the Centers

for Disease Control that their worst-case scenario was the answer -

a new and lethal infectious agent.

A virus was loose in the gay community.

I was scared to death.

We didn't know how it was spread or...

..whether it was really going

to be fatal for everybody.

It was a horrific time.

There is a one-in-five chance a victim will die

within the first year of the illness.

We quickly learned that having a diagnosis of Aids meant

you had two years to live.

In the past six months, the number of people who have come

down with Aids has nearly doubled.

The vast majority of those people will eventually die.

So as the numbers increase, so does something else -

and that is fear.

Gays became stigmatised because of it.

People who would go out to clubs at night didn't necessarily

want to go out to clubs because at that point in time,

you didn't know how you contracted Aids.

It was scary shit because people who you've known for decades

all of a sudden, you know, were gone.

I lost two partners from Aids.

So...

So many people disappeared.

It's like coming back from a war.

Seeing people like, "Oh, you made it out."

And I'm serious, you made it out of a war.

During that period, I lost friends.

I lost my business partner to that.

You know, my business partner, he was my partner from

New York with me.

And I was scared to even go over to his house or touch him,

you know, and he was like, "Why are you acting funny?" You know?

But that was because of my ignorance to the disease, you know,

I didn't exactly know what was going on and where it came from.

It was, like, overwhelming.

Three years ago, I was just one of the guys.

I was one of the people in the crowds.

And then this diagnosis came along and all of a sudden

I was stereotyped as a fast-lane liver, as the sick person

that was going to bring contagion to the rest of the world.

What was awful about it was the ostracism, the incomprehension

and the total lack of any empathy whatsoever

from the general US population.

"Yeah, you're gay, you deserve it," or whatever.

You know, "Good riddance."

It was just bad in every way.

There was never a moment the Garage looked emptier, but you'd notice one

person not in that group, and you would say, "Where is he?"

And they would look at you sad, and you knew he's either very sick

or he died.

And that would start to happen once a month, twice a month, three times

a month, two different groups in a month.

It was happening more and more.

Most of my friends have died of Aids.

David Rodriguez, one of the greatest people - funny, DJ -

was the first person I knew close to me died of Aids.

Walter Gibbons, fabulous DJ, died of Aids.

Michael Brody, the owner of the Paradise Garage.

Steve Rubell, the builder and owner of Studio 54.

The list goes on and on of talented, artistic people

who were lost to Aids.

It got so bad that I started, like, a notebook and I would write

somebody's name on it and then put down my personal thoughts

about that person so I wouldn't forget them.

It got really overwhelming.

That was a huge part of what changed

the club culture during that time,

and that's about the time that Ronald Reagan came into power.

I consider the trust that you have placed in me sacred.

And I give you my sacred oath that I will do my utmost

to justify your faith.

It was like we needed somebody strong. It was right after Carter.

I mean, he was the cowboy that fought the Indians.

He was strong in his image.

One of the worst days of my life was watching Ronald Reagan get elected.

I knew how bad it was going to be.

Angry demonstrators managed to close down

the Food and Drug Administration today.

They accused the agency under President Reagan of wasting

time in the war against Aids.

For some of the protesters, time is a precious commodity.

Storm the NIH! Storm the NIH!

The Government was not very concerned about Aids

because it was affecting a population that they didn't want

to talk about.

Seize control of the FDA! 52 will die today!

Ronald Reagan was hoisted in effigy this morning as hundreds of Aids

activists descended on the Food and Drug Administration.

The demand - that the FDA speed up approval of drugs that show

any promise against Aids.

Seize control of the FDA!

Ronald Reagan wouldn't close the blood banks, and blood

was being transfused, and straights then started getting HIV and Aids,

and it all fell on Reagan as being anti-gay and everything.

What do we want? Money for Aids. When do we want it? Now.

I remember where I was when Ronald Reagan first said the word Aids.

That was a very historic moment.

We'll not stop, we'll not rest, until we've sent Aids the way of

smallpox and polio.

I'm not sure how much the disco world came back after the Aids

crisis began to dissipate.

I don't think it did.

Sex is the other major way to transmit Aids.

Bathhouses and nightclubs that cater to casual sex

are going out of business.

Casual sex has become a fearful thing.

The hardcore disco life in Manhattan changed.

Kind of felt a little frivolous going out to dance

when, you know, so many people who used to be there with you

are no longer there.

But unless you want to sit home and dwell on yourself

and be miserable, people had to live, you know,

you just keep it moving.

As we all know, the music industry is always on the lookout

for new million-sellers.

I went to America to look at the latest sound to make an impact

on the charts, which has its origins in Chicago's black gay scene.

You can't stop creativity.

Yeah, you got rid of the disco.

Now, wait till you see what's coming next!

We, as poor and moderate-income people, cannot afford condominiums.

But we need some place to live.

We want to stay in the city, where transportation is.

Chicago was an interesting place because you had the migration

of the South, you know, people that came up from Mississippi

and that kind of thing or, you know, came from west, you know, Kansas.

Like, my folks are from Kansas.

But the city is more industrialised.

There's more opportunities, you know, to not be busting

your hands out with cotton and breaking your back in the sun

and this kind of thing, you know.

So, a combination of factory work, bartending, you know, whatever.

Also, let's be clear, there was just a big budding scene, if you will,

that was happening on the underground outside of the factory.

You know, you could be a musician.

What happened in Chicago is what African-Americans do.

We take the scraps off the table and we turn them into something

high cuisine, if you will.

And that's exactly what house music is.

Oh, that's a nice tight kick.

A house record is the coolest

underground dance music.

So I have the four on the floor right now.

Next, I select another instrument.

I'm going to select the snare drum now.

OK.

A house record is anything that Ron Hardy, David Mancuso, Larry Levan

or Frankie Knuckles would have played at their clubs.

Next, I'll bring in a closed hi-hat.

Frankie Knuckles is considered the godfather of house.

And so if you know anything about early house music,

it was basically disco breaks in R&B songs, and Frankie Knuckles

used to play a lot of things on reel-to-reel,

and he had early drum machines.

And so he was using these drum machines and these disco break

loops, and he was creating this new genre of music

without anyone really knowing it.

Frankie worked at the Warehouse, and house music,

the term house music, came from the Warehouse.

Then later it became synonymous with a style or genre

that was being created out of Chicago producers

that were influenced by the music that Frankie was playing.

House music was disco's revenge.

The very parts of disco that were lost, the parts of black

and brown creativity, its queerness,

its ways that disco was part of a soundtrack of exploration

before its whitewashing,

house music kind of picked that up and ran off with it.

And there you have your basic house beat.

Now you can bring in different stuff after that.

Bring in claps

and other instruments.

That's house music.

Underground, cool dance.

Oh, man, I might put this track out.

Listen to the crescendo.

When the disco sucks movement came, all the budgets got cut.

You know, strings were such a big part of disco music

in the '70s, and suddenly there was no money for them any more.

But I think those cut budgets made people have to become

more innovative with the sound.

Back in the day, obviously, the, you know, the four on the floor,

you know, boom, boom, boom, boom,

it might have been a drum machine and one keyboard or, you know,

one turntable.

Whatever you could kind of get your hands on.

We're talking about teenagers.

We're talking about people that don't have money trying

to figure out how to express themselves with this equipment.

It was unique. It was different.

It was fresh off the block.

Sort of in the same way that hip-hop grew out of the physical

disinvestment in the black and brown communities in New York,

house music also grew out of these neglected spaces and became

spaces of community and creativity, and also entrepreneurship.

I didn't go to Chicago to open a club, but when we saw this

little Art Deco building, which was 206 South Jefferson,

and I was like,

"Oh, that's a cute building. It's for rent."

We ended up getting it.

The Warehouse was primarily a gay

club with African-American members,

though other folks came as well, and it was a place where you could

go and dance, and feel safe.

I asked Larry Levan, "Would you come out and look at the club

"and possibly think about playing for me?"

And he replied with, "No, Robert.

"The way you talked about Chicago the last time you were there."

I was like, "Oh, darn."

The only person I thought was Frankie.

That was Frankie's entree to Chicago, was when Larry said no.

Your Love by Jamie Principle & Frankie Knuckles

I didn't get drawn into the whole culture until I met Frankie.

I wanted to do something a little bit different.

I didn't want to be, like, the norm.

# When I'm with you I believe

# That your love is true

# When we love you turn me out

# You know what to do... #

How do I feel about being the first house vocalist?

I didn't know I was going to be the figurehead

of that, because I look at myself, I sing all right, but I've heard

other singers and they do great.

Maybe I was the first person that people gravitated

towards that they could actually see and feel connected with.

# I begin to sweat

# When we touch I lose control

# Now you know what's next

# Fantasising all the time... #

His sound was ethereal.

It's got, like, somewhat of a rock drum line.

I mean, it's real basic, you know what I'm saying?

But the strings and the bass line and then his vocals -

it was something else.

# Well, I need your love

# I need your love... #

It's a formula that Jamie put together that I don't think

people really understand.

It's very simple, but very powerful.

# Don't make me wait too long... #

Your Love was actually a three-minute song,

but Frankie wanted it to have a certain feel in his club, so he said

he was going to strip certain parts down and bring in certain things.

He wanted it to build.

So it was mostly an arrangement thing, but all of the writing

and playing is me.

Frankie Knuckles would do a mix tape and give one copy to someone.

And from that copy there would be, like, 10,000 other copies!

That was our version of going viral.

That's what the DJ is doing, is actually taking the music

and presenting it to the people, and that's how a lot of records got

introduced to the public.

I didn't know how, like, popular the song was.

But there was a traffic jam on a Saturday.

Me and my boy was in the car, and he was like,

"That's your song playing."

And it was jumping from one car to another car to another car,

and we were, like, stuck in traffic. He was like, "You should tell them that's your song."

I was like, "Really? You think they're going to believe that that's me?"

But I was hearing Your Love and all of the songs,

like, being played at the same time.

That's when I kind of, like, figured how widespread it was becoming.

Crocodile Rock by Elton John

# I remember when rock was young

# Me and Susie had so much fun

# Holding hands... #

I just love piano because of Elton John.

It sounded like he came straight out of the church, right?

Elton John had so much soul in the '70s,

they had to put him on Soul Train.

It really affected my music-making.

That's where the house piano came from.

Marshall's a smart man and he came up with something, you know,

that changed the pulse.

At that time, there was nothing even remotely resembling

piano in house music.

I was at work on a letter-sorting machine, and a song came to me.

You would type in the postcodes on the keys

midnight to 8:30am every night.

The graveyard shift.

It was as boring as it sounds.

I'm hearing music cos I'm making music now.

"Oh, this is a cut."

# Gotta have house music

# All night long... #

# Give me that house music to set me free

# Lost in house music is where I wanna be. #

And that's it. Four lines.

Trick was getting home and recording it before I forgot it.

I have this thing called a Yamaha QX1,

two keyboards,

a Prophet 2000, a Roland JX-8P,

a drum machine, 707. That's it.

The entire session, recording and mixing, took about two hours

and we were gone for the day.

# Rock your body Rock your body

# It's gonna set you free... #

I still hadn't been asleep yet.

I said, "I've got to give it to Ron Hardy at the Music Box."

Ron Hardy listens to it.

Plays it six times in a row.

Everybody, "Aaaaah!"

And that's been the default response ever

since for the following 30-plus years.

# Move your body

# Sexy body. #

Very underground. It was different.

There was nothing like it.

This freedom of expression certainly seems to be selling house records.

But is it a passing fad?

No.

It's like... It's reminiscent of the old disco.

It's the kind of music that is just simple music that's exciting

and gets people moving.

And that's why it's going to be around for a while.

And it will become classic music, classic disco music,

because it has an energy of its own.

Probably April or May of 1986 is when it started really blowing

up and leaving the city.

And that's because all these magazines flew to Chicago

and started interviewing me.

They started interviewing everybody else

that had something to do with house music.

All of us just got record deals and with major labels.

And that's when it really started blowing up.

House music started becoming the big thing.

But Larry hated the word house because we played house music

that came out of Chicago, that came out of the Warehouse,

and then suddenly all kind of dance music, because the word house

was cute, was put under the umbrella of house.

So if that means EDM, that means Afro house, that means tech house...

There was Latin house, there was soul house...

..Nu-disco. That means hip house.

..my house, there was your house, there was Aunt Ethel's house.

You have this whole alternative

expression where people

were marrying punk and disco

and new wave.

It was just a wildly, wildly creative time.

Disco didn't go away. Just the name went away.

The beat, the rhythm, the sounds of disco carried on.

Everybody stands on somebody's shoulders.

Let's be very clear.

Hell, talk about hip-hop.

I used to be into disco rap.

That's how I got started.

Later '80s, early '90s,

here comes rave culture.

The scene is now being taken over by this new crop of people.

It turned into another whole thing.

Now the story is being rewritten a bit.

But if you take all the music today, every genre of electronic music owes

everything to disco.

If it wasn't for Mancuso, or if it wasn't for Siano,

if it wasn't for Levan and Francois, and those DJs

that first went in the studio and mixed records and made hits,

all these big DJs nowadays that really produce music and travel

the world and make millions of dollars wouldn't happen.

Never in a million years would have thought that my world

would have the impact of how it is now.

Today, disco has a real resurgence.

People love to dance.

You know, we're all going out and we're all dancing to a variation

of what disco was.

It just always evokes something in you somehow.

There's a lot of new artists that are coming

through that are still carrying that torch.

Like Bruno Mars.

And Madonna continues to do it in different ways as well.

Rihanna and Beyonce, they are making this same type of music

we were making back in the '70s.

Different lyrics, same beat.

Beyonce is doing a great job at saying

remember the Loleatta Holloways,

remember the Anita Wards,

remember the Sisters Sledges.

It's their voices that you dance to.

Dance floors do what religions and governments do not.

They bring people together from all walks of life.

As a trans woman of colour this is where I found home.

This is where I found my community.

And I was celebrated for who I was.

# I think I deserve to be choosy... #

Everything that we do now as queer people living freely, being able

to live our truth,

has come from the people at Stonewall,

fighting for their right to just be.

Today, the mainstream culture has sort of caught

up to what happened back in the '70s in New York.

The consciousness that, like, OK, we're all here together

and we're all having fun. It's all OK.

That person is definitely different than me, but that's OK.

They're cool, you know?

That's what's so nice about it.

Disco's legacy is there to teach, educate, inspire, elevate.

And I think a dance floor that's playing disco is always

going to be a generous, joyful and liberating space,

a safe space, a fun space.

It must be protected at all costs.

The future of disco is more disco.

Don't Leave Me This Way by Thelma Houston

I'm very thankful for the forefathers.

I'm very thankful for the kings and queens and everything in between.

Let's continue the legacy of great dance music made

by queer people -

for, by, with, all of those things.

Thank you to everyone for having me, for doing this, for making a record

of times gone by, because it's so important that people know this.

This is history. I thank you.

# Don't leave me this way... #

Bye.

# I can't survive

# I can't stay alive without your love

# Oh, baby

# Don't leave me this way

# No, I can't exist

# I'll surely miss your tender kiss

# Don't leave me this way

# Ahhh, baby!

# My heart is full of love and desire for you... #