Original subtitles

This programme contains some strong language

How would I define disco?

Erm...

Oof!

MUSIC: Disco Inferno by the Trammps

It means the happiest time in my life,

celebrated by the best music I ever loved.

Where you could be who you wanted to be. Good times, good feeling.

The disco era encouraged the diva to be brought out, guns blazing,

feathers blowing, sequins spinning.

It was release and it was fantasy.

It's like being out of yourself.

# Burn, baby, burn... #

It brings people joy,

but people need to know where the joy comes from.

# Burn, baby, burn... #

You had disco really starting from the underground

and marginalised people finding sort of solace and home

in the music.

Disco freed me, it saved me.

Everything. It meant everything to me.

These clubs were places for black and Latin and queer people to go

to feel safe, and they created art that has influenced the world

from nothing.

Disco is a phenomenon.

It's the hottest thing that has hit the music business.

It was something that became loved by everybody.

I think of the Village People.

ABBA.

Donna Summer.

John Travolta in a white suit on a lit dance floor,

the Bee Gees,

clubs like Studio 54.

There's no way anyone here's going to get in. Listen, just go home.

Disco was the greatest thing in the world.

But in every successful thing, it has the seeds

of its own destruction.

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

HE GROANS ..trying to press it down.

There was a great deal of resentment.

They damn near killed it.

Who has the last laugh today?

Disco. Cos disco is back!

In order to really understand the glitz and the glamour,

you have to go through the build of what happened.

Disco has a history.

# Burn, baby, burn

# Burn, baby, burn... #

MUSIC: Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In by The 5th Dimension

# When the moon is in... #

I'd just come out of military service in the Navy.

I was living a very straight life, straight-laced.

Married, had children, worked hard.

I was living the American Dream.

I was not aware that other people could not access the dream.

# This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius... #

THEY CHANT

NEWSREEL: We are living through one of the greatest revolutions

in history, the birth of a new civilisation.

Collective protests shatter the structure of the old.

# Harmony and understanding... #

The United States was a divided nation.

It was "power to the people", the Black Panther Party

and stuff like that.

# Mystic crystal revelation And the mind's true liberation

# Aquarius... #

All of us must stand up together and say, "No more."

NEWSREEL: No area of male-dominated American culture is spared.

It was fighting for women's rights, fighting for peace.

You know? HE LAUGHS

And the flower power, you know?

THEY CHANT

It was mostly back then about the anti-Vietnam War movement.

We were burning our draft cards and we were all getting arrested,

and there was an awful lot of energy.

# This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius... #

There was a "Fuck you" attitude among a lot of people.

Younger people, generally.

The establishment was serious about squashing this level of dissent

because they knew it could bring about fundamental change.

And that was something that they didn't want to hear out of hippies,

and they didn't want to hear out of black people,

and they didn't want to hear out of gay people.

If any one of you have let yourself become involved

with an adult homosexual or with another boy,

and you're doing this on a regular basis, you better stop quick

because the rest of your life will be a living hell.

I realised I was gay, like, when I was 13.

There were many things that were illegal on the books -

sodomy, cross-dressing...

..two people of the same sex dancing together.

There were gay bars, all illegal.

Most were operated by the Mafia, which paid off the police.

Most gay bars did not allow dancing

because that was pushing the limit.

The Stonewall was one of the first dancing bars.

Even though it didn't have a disc jockey, it had a jukebox.

People were rabid, wanting to dance.

SIRENS WAIL

What did happen in Stonewall is that when the police came

to raid the bar, that night, people decided not to take it any more.

JEERING

The Stonewall riot broke out,

and there I was outside the raid on Stonewall.

They knocked out the windows and threw in Molotov cocktails

and then commenced three days of vigorous rioting,

and it took the police that long to control these homosexuals.

It's the first uprising of gay people showing any sort of pride

and power.

Everything that happened at the Stonewall that night

happened because people were dancing.

Stonewall and the whole dance music, disco movement

is entwined forever.

MUSIC: Surrender by Diana Ross

It's a really interesting thought,

gay liberation being born out of that desire for us to be able

to dance with one another.

Being able to dance, and being able to dance together,

is part of what makes us human.

MUSIC: Yes We Can Can by the Pointer Sisters

Stonewall was a watershed moment for people

who were seeking freedom at that time,

and the following year was when David Mancuso gave his first party.

New York in the early '70s was kind of falling apart.

There were whole blocks that were completely devastated.

Manufacturing and factories were leaving the city,

whole neighbourhoods that were becoming empty, including Soho,

including the West Village.

There were these large, warehouse-sized buildings

that were empty.

MUSIC: Part Time Love by Ann Peebles

They became great opportunities.

# Gotta find me

# Gotta find me a part-time love... #

David Mancuso's loft was at 647 Broadway,

at the corner of Bleecker Street.

David was an orphan, he grew up in the orphanage.

Once you do that, you learn to make your own family.

There was Sister Alicia who ran parties on Sundays for the children.

She always had balloons and she always had music and records,

and he took a cue from that.

Disco started almost as an unintentional movement.

It started with parties,

it started with people dancing together.

# Next time, the next time he leaves me

# Oh, I need a part-time love... #

David Mancuso opened his doors for the first time

on February 14th, 1970.

The significance of that date is it's also Valentine's Day!

SHE LAUGHS All about love!

# But I'd rather be dead Six feet in my grave... #

It was his house, and you had to have an invitation.

# He came home this morning, asked him where'd he been

# He said, "Don't ask me no questions..." #

It was a private party and it couldn't get busted by the police,

and so anybody could dance.

The Loft was about building a community that kind of recognised

the civil rights movement, gay liberation, women's liberation,

and bringing all these people together

from different walks of life to dance together.

If you can mix the economical groups together,

that's where you have social progress.

That's very important to me.

# Oh, I suffer the whole time he's gone... #

The majority of the people at The Loft were people of colour.

I'd say 75, 80% were African-American

and Spanish-Hispanic,

and maybe 20% white.

The Loft welcomed everyone -

young, old, doctors, cooks,

white, black, gay, straight.

It didn't matter.

The first party was called Love Saves the Day - LSD.

It's perfect, isn't it?

David had, I guess what you would say,

a love-love relationship with LSD.

There was a coffee urn that they used to fill with spiked punch.

LAUGHS: And everybody drank the punch!

I'm starting to hallucinate a little bit,

and suddenly this bubble machine goes on.

I felt like Pac-Man, like those bubbles were going to eat me.

HE LAUGHS

And that's when I said, "I think I love acid."

David said, "Music is wonderful. Let's play all kinds."

No-one called it disco.

It was called danceable R&B.

One track that captures the essence -

Girl You Need a Change of Mind by Eddie Kendricks.

# La, la, la, la, la, la, la

# Baby Let me tell you

# Girl, you need a change of mind... #

Eddie Kendricks going, "Girl, you need a change of mind,"

that will always be the song for me.

You would hear the first few notes and the room would just go crazy!

THEY CHEER

# Now, I'm for women's rights

# I just want equal nights

# Help! Baby... #

It moves like a roller-coaster, goes down, up, down, up

to that final peak.

There's a break where there's nothing but a little tambourine.

But you couldn't hear it.

It was the catalyst for David creating a smashing sound system!

# And I won't chain you up... #

The technology wasn't there.

You know, necessity's the mother of invention.

It was a necessity.

# Baby, what you say to that? #

Before David Mancuso,

the sound systems in clubs were mostly

mid-range speakers that looked sort of like this,

and they contained bass, mid-range and highs.

In the club, and the background noise that's there,

it masks the high frequencies.

David Mancuso wanted high-frequency tweeters which could

shoot the sound in all directions - north, south, east and west.

And I thought it was not such a terrific idea.

I thought that it would be too much.

He said, "Never mind, just do it."

So I had built this kind of configuration

and it turned out wonderful.

TRACK PLAYS AT MID-RANGE FREQUENCY

Now there's no tweeters at all.

HIGH FREQUENCIES INCREASE

Everybody copied it, from...

In every club, they copied it, all over the world.

When the sound is better, you want to dance harder,

you want to dance more.

It was as if that entire dance floor had become this living organism

and everybody kind of had a commonality of purpose,

which was to dance.

And then the mirrored ball just turns on.

Boom! Like that.

And everyone screams!

SCREAMING

Dance floors unite people through sound in a way

that our governments and religions try to separate us.

It's the great equaliser.

No-one cares, you know, who you are, what you are,

and everyone just is about celebrating life

and celebrating music.

This kind of environment offered hope.

And it was wonderful. It was...

..freedom.

My going to The Loft and being associated with David

definitely transformed my life for the better.

I would consider David Mancuso the father of clubbing...

..because he created an atmosphere

within an environment that would blow your mind while dancing.

And I said, "I want to do what he's doing."

People started going to David Mancuso's Loft parties every week

and word got around New York City, and other places started popping up.

Nicky Siano famously started The Gallery.

A lot of DJs went to The Loft.

They became inspired and started their own nights

because of what David was doing in his own home week after week.

He was really the foundation, building block

for the disco movement as we knew it.

There are marginalised cultures that find a home at clubs.

Once they stepped foot in the club, they were safe

and it was their place.

I think they took their lives in their hands

getting from their apartments to the club, you know?

REPORTER: Is there a concerted effort

to get gay people off the streets?

Oh, there certainly is.

At least 300 people have been arrested by the police

in the New York area during the last three weeks.

Why?

Apparently, it's part of an overall nationwide programme

to drive homosexuals back underground

now that we're coming out.

These are men, and for men in this society to hold hands in public

is at least shameful and more often offensive.

I was one of the people that was oppressed by all that was going on.

There were so few of us at that point

that were willing to be public.

ARCHIVE: I was teaching at a private school in Manhattan,

and I went out on a Friday night.

I was holding hands with another man, we went to see a movie,

and one of the assistant principals from the school saw us.

And the following Monday, the principal fired me.

You gave up a lot -

career-wise, family-wise, friend-wise -

by coming out of the closet and being known as a homosexual.

And it was terrifying.

GARBLED POLICE CHATTER

There were always murders.

Sometimes they made it to the news, and most of the times they didn't.

It would be like, "Next!"

It was horrible.

We can't depend on the police to protect us.

So there was this, at the same time,

a sense with gay men looking out for each other.

I went to a meeting of the Gay Activists Alliance.

It was at an old firehouse, and as soon as I got in there,

my whole world opened up.

If you've been here for a while,

you've heard me talking incessantly about this directive thing,

a directive that would prevent the police

from using pejorative slang against gay people.

The Gay Activist Alliance kept gay rights in the news constantly.

We had demonstrations, we disrupted people's offices,

we disrupted institutions.

With security precautions heavier than those provided,

President Nixon, Secretary of State Kissinger...

Gay people are protesting CBS's policy!

Now, how did the Gay Activists Alliance fund its operation?

Back in the day, nobody in the gay community would write a cheque,

because a cheque is a paper trail that can lead to your being outed.

MUSIC: Popcorn by Hot Butter

The firehouse was this great, big open space.

perfect for discotheque.

And so Saturday nights at the firehouse

was turned into a discotheque.

I think, of course, $2 to get in on a Saturday night - phenomenal.

I mean, it was the best dancing in New York, because it was ours.

There was a sense of joy and celebration there

that did not exist other places.

In the very early days of the Gay Activists Alliance,

we were trying to find examples of, you know,

of discrimination, which was hard to do,

because since people were so closeted, they wouldn't report it.

In 1971, New York City made it legal for same-sex couples,

male and female, to dance together in a public space.

But it was not accepted by wider society.

Well, that's the way it was.

They didn't want guys dancing with other guys.

They didn't want that back then.

The Rainbow Room was a dance venue that did not allow two men dancing.

It was not a discotheque.

It was a very fancy dance establishment with an orchestra.

It's on the top of Rockefeller Center,

and I put together a group of us to go down there.

We were going to challenge the regulations

and see what happens when the management sees us dancing.

One of them was my partner at the time, Lew Todd.

And this was a challenge to see if they would be stopped.

I arranged for Earl Wilson, who was a very prominent journalist,

to be there when we did our "same-sex" dancing.

I'm wearing a suit and tie, the women wore dresses.

And they got up on the floor and just started dancing.

In the middle of a song, we switched partners -

and it was male-male, woman-woman -

and we danced.

The other people on the floor were, like, stopping and staring at us.

Management came over.

They came to stop us, but we had the press there.

They didn't know what the hell to do.

But they did not throw us out.

Earl Wilson was a very important newspaper columnist.

It got a lot of publicity.

The newspaper had a column saying, "Gays win in a waltz."

Dancing brought gay people together as a community.

We knew we were making history.

"Is disco political?" is the question.

Life is political.

So, yeah, disco is political.

MUSIC: What's Going On by Marvin Gaye

I always had the sense that New York was a dance culture.

Aside from the fact that I knew gay people were always looking

for a place to dance, I knew that there were all these

other cultures where dancing was key to their entertainment.

There were all these Latin clubs.

And, you know, it was also a black thing.

# To bring some lovin' here today, yeah... #

Equal rights of everybody

was basically just a statement. It wasn't for real.

# Mother, mother... #

HE SINGS ALONG: # Mother, mother

# There are too many of us crying

# Brother, brother, brother.... #

Marvin Gaye, What's Going On.

I call it the truth.

They sending a message and they telling the truth.

Segregation, by law, was over.

But that doesn't mean segregation was over.

REPORTER: In our first special report on America's Cities,

we observed that their crisis was no overnight thing.

Part symptom, part cause is a swirling movement of populations

around the inner core of the cities,

whites moving out toward the suburbs.

The result is that the make-up of the inner cities

has become increasingly poor,

increasingly black, increasingly explosive.

A black family would move into a home,

and all the white people on the block would leave.

There was white flight at that point,

moving out to the suburbs, moving away from the city.

They didn't want us on an equal measure.

And I understood that.

But we didn't let that stop us from doing what we do.

MUSIC: I'm Doin' Fine Now by New York City

People gave private parties, and we were playing music with beats

that made people just want to dance.

The party could be up on Tremont, in the Bronx.

The party could be out in Bed-Stuy, in Brooklyn.

Just not in Manhattan.

Party is jumping crazy.

People having a good time.

What was happening in the country, though?

The money was slowing down.

REPORTER: Right now, everything you buy costs more -

not just food, not just fuel,

but most things.

REPORTER: The manager of this spaghetti restaurant

says he's down to his last meatball.

At a restaurant called the Whopper Burger,

you can't even get a mini burger.

A lot of the people that cooked were black people in these restaurants.

And the beef crisis, it meant they didn't have anything left to cook.

And the venues were paying decent rents at that time,

so they needed to make some money.

Restaurants weren't popping, they weren't getting that crowd,

so they started to rent their venues out.

MUSIC: Funky Stuff by Kool & The Gang

At night, they'd move the chairs and tables out the way,

and let music come in and rock for the rest of the night.

That was really the first time that black people were allowed

to go into venues and give parties in the central core of Manhattan.

Here I am -

I'm in a restaurant below 57th Street.

Unheard of!

People who came to our parties

basically joined our network to party at.

It wasn't a disco sound,

and at the same time, it WAS a disco sound.

But it was all marinated into a groove.

And that groove that we provided was right down their alley.

Hollywood was a very popular DJ.

There were numbers of people that would go wherever he went.

When I develop a conversation to go with these grooves,

nobody else was really doing it.

We just...

RAPS: # Throw your hands in the air

# And wave them like you just don't care

# And if you've got on clean underwear

# Somebody say, "Oh, yeah!" #

It just takes...

..a lifting.

# I can't get enough... #

Those places, they spawned an entire movement.

The black club scene and the gay clubs,

they kind of grew up in parallel with each other.

But there was not all that much co-mingling.

Eventually, these different groups of people began to recognise

each other and come together around music and around dancing.

And there was a particular song that transcended

every level of party.

MUSIC: Soul Makossa by Manu Dibango

I heard the first eight drumbeats -

"Wow!"

I knew right away.

Oh, yeah, as soon as I heard it, I'm feeling that...

HE MIMICS DRUMBEAT

I'm there. It's got me, it's glued me, soon as I'm hearing that.

You just hear that groove...

..and just that little... That whisper.

"Makossa...!" Here we go. It's coming.

You just know that it's lightning in a bottle.

# Mama ko, mama sa, maka makossa Mama ko, mama sa, maka makossa

# Mama ko, mama sa, maka makossa Mama ko, mama sa, maka makossa... #

Soul Makossa? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love this track.

The record, Soul Makossa, is a great game changer,

because I think it's a transitional record.

It's a cross-cultural piece of music.

# Mama ko, mama sa, maka makossa... #

# Mama ko, mama sa, maka makossa Mama ko, mama... #

# Hey, mama makossa... #

# Mama ko, mama sa, maka makossa... #

Then it had, like, a breakdown.

Like... HE HUMS MELODY

It was so unusual, so different.

You went, "Oh, let me go through this door.

"Ooh, listen to that! Oh...!"

LAUGHS: It made your shoulders shake.

Soul Makossa broke a lot of moulds all at the same time.

It was a song that appealed to multiple levels of parties,

whether it was The Loft or The Gallery

or, you know, The Hevalo Social Club,

or any of these other places.

It was one of those songs that literally took you

by the seat of your pants, and even if you couldn't dance,

you got up and danced to it.

It really came from underground, which made it more exciting.

It was on a little African label that someone found.

I was a writer. I ended up using Soul Makossa as the key to a piece

that I wrote for Rolling Stone about what was my sense then

of a new kind of movement going on very much underground.

We were hearing the same kind of music

and we were responding to certain things in the music.

At that point, there was nothing called disco.

It didn't need to be narrowly defined.

And people who went out dancing to it didn't need to call it anything.

Rolling Stone, September 13, 1973.

It's called "Discotheque rock."

And I start out, "Party! Party!"

"It's a call to get down and party.

"The underground where the hardcore dance crowd,

"blacks, latins and gays was."

There was the sense that all these places were happening,

and they were all called discotheques,

and it was exciting to hear -

that they'd feel like I was sharing this experience

with a lot of other people who are probably going out dancing, too.

# Step by step

# I've got to get close to you... #

They have all types of people here -

people who dance, people who pop up and down, get high.

Everybody that be here makes this the party that it is.

# Got to get to know you Oh, yeah

# You came into my life... #

Vince Aletti was the first one to ever write about discos.

It was us against the world,

meaning the world was going their way

and we seemed to be in unity with the music.

# But as sudden as you came

# Oh, you vanished into the night... #

You need to have a name for something to become big.

I don't know who shortened "discotheque" to "disco",

but it was inevitable, it seems to me.

# Step by step I've got to get close to you

# Step by step Girl, I've got to get to know you

# My friends all tell me

# Tell me you're a woman of the street... #

HE PLAYS DRUMBEAT

I didn't have anybody to teach me to play drums.

I went and got four phonebooks,

and I had two Maxwell House coffee cans, and that was my cymbals,

cos I came up very poor.

All them kids, y'all missed it - y'all missed the phone book days.

EARL LAUGHS

Philadelphia is a music city.

So, Philadelphia's always done well in music,

even in hard times.

REPORTER: A high percentage are unemployed,

and most others experience the frustration of underemployment.

Gamble and Huff set up Philadelphia International Records

to help musicians and recording artists develop.

Its combination of orchestra and rhythm was inventive,

at that time.

We were musicians that would play for anybody that came through

the door with a cheque.

Always got to have...

..the bat bag wallet, cos the wallet is what makes the hits.

Sometimes the vibration from the bass drum

would make the snare drum rattle.

So I used to put a wallet, tape a wallet on it,

so I would get a dead sound.

When playing disco,

some people play it like this... EARL HITS SNARE DRUM

..but you don't get the real fat sound.

You need the back of the stick.

STRONGER SNARE HITS

That's how disco is played.

The rhythm track would be done first -

Baker, Harris and Young, drums, bass and guitar.

It was pretty amazing, that rhythm section.

Earl Young had an internal clock.

HE LAUGHS

You know, his timing was literally perfect.

First thing I do is I check my high hat,

because this is the baby here, this is all the timing.

So, then the Blue Notes came in.

We had a ballad called The Love I Lost.

It started out with...

# The love I lost

# Was a sweet love... #

Which was nice. I like ballads.

But I'm a dancer.

So, I said, "Look, why don't you try this upbeat groove?"

To be able to dance to it, you got to have, first of all, my groove -

the four on the floor, four beats on the bass drum.

EARL STRIKES BASS DRUM

That's how it starts.

The bass drum is just hitting four on the floor -

"Boom, boom, boom, boom!"

It's a heartbeat.

And your body wants to move to the heartbeat.

Next, you got to go to the high hat here.

HE STRIKES HIGH HAT

Earl Young hits that high hat - it's open -

but he slams his foot down and it closes every beat he does.

Like, that's the groove. That's part of the groove.

Yeah!

I mean, that's disco right there, baby.

He hit it on just about every disco hit.

You hear that... HE IMTATES DRUMBEAT

But you didn't hear before The Love I Lost

or the Sound of Philadelphia.

You could arguably say that the first disco track

was The Love I Lost.

# The love I lost

# Was a sweet love... #

Ah... It's a sweet one.

The Love I Lost is a sweet one.

You just hear the first few notes, and it just gets you all excited.

# The love I lost... #

All of the sudden, your hand's got a mind of its own and it's moving,

and then you're kind of drawn into it.

And that's why I always say your body seems to catch on

to something before you do.

The Love I Lost, a dance floor hit.

Unbelievable!

# I can remember hoping

# That you and I could make it on through... #

People who could not dance actually learned how to dance

by going to clubs, because the rhythm was so strict

that you no matter where you were on the beat,

you were on the beat.

# I'm in misery, can't you see?

# The love I lost... #

Earl Young, he was the man.

He took it to another level, his own way.

# The love I lost... #

That becomes the drumbeat for everything.

That becomes the drumbeat of disco.

# I would never... #

Gorgeous. Gorgeous song.

Just having those type of four on the floor grooves,

having a really beautiful love story, like, at the back of it,

just really timeless.

At the heart of disco, there's rhythm, soul, melodrama, character,

romance, sex, heartbreak.

It's everything and anything.

EARL PLAYS DRUMBEAT

That's why they call me the Disco Daddy.

LAUGHTER AROUND ROOM

MUSIC: Hollywood Swinging by Kool & The Gang

In the mid-'70s, New York was still the leader,

in a sense, of disco.

There were clubs opening all the time.

Not all of them lasted.

Most of us never had a lot of money,

but there was this sense of release in the clubs

and escape from whatever was bothering you.

Real life, that was what we wanted to forget on the dance floor.

# What ya got to say? #

This is just that time when music was a good time.

People having a good time was the most important thing

that a DJ could do.

# Hollywood swinging

# Hollywood... #

DJs will say again and again that they want to take you on a journey.

They want to structure the night so that you're elevated

to that place over the rainbow.

In the late '60s, DJs would play one record after another -

simply let the first record end and then play another.

The dance floor would just stop in front of your eyes.

RECORD SCRATCH SOUND EFFECT

MUSIC: Love Is The Message by MFSB

Then Francis Grasso comes along.

He's the DJ at The Sanctuary,

which was an enormous club at the time.

And he starts blending,

which is putting on a record while this record is playing,

and then he would fade it in, fade the other one out.

And then Francis started doing beat matching.

The record that you're bringing in, you change the speed

in order to align it with the kick drum that's playing.

RECORD PLAYS

Francis Grasso was the first guy to really disco DJ.

When he played, he went from one to the other and was so smooth.

So, when one record was fading out, this other one would come up,

but it would have the same exact beat.

MUSIC: Boogie Down by Eddie Kendricks

# Boogie... #

One of the most exciting experiences for the dancers back then

is when - cos no-one was doing it -

is when the record changed, and they could dance right through them.

That would make them scream.

It excited and ignited the dance floor,

and it ignited the DJs.

# And I know I can satisfy... #

I want you to have the best time you ever had in your life,

and I'm going to do my best to make that come true.

# Make ya feel all right... #

Playing records for an audience back then,

they didn't have extended breaks.

They didn't have long beginnings.

So we did that ourselves.

We were creating new productions from the records that we had.

We were creating the extended mix that became so popular.

Love Is The Message comes along, the MFSB orchestra,

the track that I became identified with.

# Love is

# Love is the message that I sing to you... #

Love Is The Message featured the really unique drum pattern

that Earl Young had created.

So, I started to think about what I could do to make the track

a featured record, something that people would go crazy for.

The groove, the good part, was two minutes and 40 seconds.

So, I looped it.

You would hear the horns and the beginning,

and then you would hear this breakdown,

where I would turn up the bass.

And the piece de resistance,

a sound effect that I found,

which was a jet plane.

RECORD PLAYS

And then I started over again,

and do the same thing over and over and over again.

They loved it.

# Love is... #

Nicky was amazing.

I mean, he was very avant-garde for the time.

He made it so dramatic that you just had to stop and pay attention.

The crowd was in the palm of his hand.

The Gallery is a beautiful place to go if you want to enjoy yourself

and have big fun. It's a hell of a place to go.

Now, I'm telling you, it truly is.

What about Nicky? And he's the best disc jockey there is.

Nicky Siano was a leader.

He was an alpha when he came to DJ.

# Love is the message that I sing to you... #

Those of us that came from the '70s, early '80s,

we mixed differently, cos everything was about the story.

"The best discotheque DJs are underground stars

"discovering previously ignored album cuts and obscure singles

"with the power to make the crowd scream."

I had been reviewing records for Rolling Stone for a while.

There were a lot of records that were remaining fairly underground,

that were not on the radio, that had not been chart records.

But they were extremely popular in New York,

because people went to dance and heard them.

And there was this kind of sense for me that

that was not going to be underground for long.

During the 1970s, most people were hearing new songs

primarily from radio.

# Spill the wine Take that pearl

# Spill the wine... #

Radio was very, very powerful.

RADIO DJ BROADCASTS

REPORTER: The key to million-dollar profits

is getting the record on the radio.

Larry Lujack, one of the country's top disc jockeys.

I'm convinced that you can make..

..any half-decent record a hit if you play it enough.

Boring. Boring!

The underground world didn't want to be playing

what the radio was playing.

I only play songs that I believe are good.

So, if there's a B-side that actually is better than the A-side,

then I will play only the B-side.

It's part of my job to find good songs that people could dance to.

24 hours a day, always going out, always getting new records.

And absolutely had to be on top of it.

MUSIC: It Really Hurts Me Girl by The Carstairs

# Reminiscing... #

I got hired to play on Fire Island...

# How I felt sure in the love we shared... #

..an island off of Long Island that is filled with beach resorts.

Two of them are gay, the Pines and Cherry Grove.

You could be openly gay because the island

is so isolated from policing.

It was a really beautiful retreat for queer people to get together

and dance and be who they are.

Fire Island plays a very crucial role in the telling

of the story of disco.

Gay clubs want new, exciting music.

David Rodriguez and I were invited by a new promotion man

to his office, and we saw an album cover on the floor,

and it had three women of colour with big Afro wigs.

So, David Rodriguez said, "What's that?"

He said, "It's a damn album. Here, take a box."

The song was Love's Theme.

It was so well produced,

and Barry White really knew how to work strings, OK?

And I love orchestration.

It makes my heart sing.

Love's Theme had such a Fire Island gay sound

that they embraced it and made it their own.

Love's Theme was one of the songs I remember when I would be dancing

at Fire Island, which was a very intense time to dance,

cos everybody on the dance floor was really doing something wild.

That used to be played a lot.

It became like an anthem,

and it had just the right sound

to make it go all the way to the top.

It became huge from our play -

getting on the charts, climbing the charts -

and it did it without radio play and usual record company promotion.

The music was always better in the gay clubs.

I mean, the straight world knew the gay world was always

first on something. They just didn't give you credit.

The gay community in the US was the first, basically, to latch on

to the disco phenomenon.

And it has come up through those roots.

And it's gotten to the point now where the major record labels

cannot ignore what's happening.

MUSIC: Rock the Boat by The Hues Corporation

When Love's Theme broke big, it was important not just because

it was a great record and it was suddenly on the radio,

but it sort of brought along two other club records

that also hit sort of simultaneously,

records that had been played in the clubs for months...

# Rock the boat Don't rock the boat, baby... #

..Rock the Boat and Rock Your Baby.

Those broke in the discos,

and that's when people started paying attention.

RECORD PLAYS

You got to have that feel first, the bottom.

Right back to Earl Young. Yeah, you got to have the bottom.

# Woman

# Take me in your arms

# Rock your baby... #

HE IMTATES DRUMBEAT

That's the Miami sound.

There's a Latin influence at the nucleus of it.

And everything is like sugar on top, with the vocals and everything else,

to round it out.

# Open up your heart

# And let the loving start

# Oh...

I just think with men singing in falsetto over a dance beat, it...

There's something about it that really has a sort of magic.

# Yeah, hold me tight... #

The track was already E flat.

I could sing it different, low key and high key.

HIGH-PITCHED: Because sometimes I could speak like my mother.

LOW-PITCHED: And then other times I could speak like my father.

HE LAUGHS

I have a long range.

# Ah

# Woman... #

I know it's going to sound very strange, but it almost

sounds like the kind of song you would hear in heaven.

LAUGHING: I know it sounds very strange.

No, and I don't take drugs.

# Take me in your arms

# Rock your baby... #

Before Rock Your Baby, it was a live drummer.

The innovation of the drum machine was the first machine

to really start dance music,

disco music at the time.

Electronics started becoming extremely important

to the disco sound.

Drum machines and synthesisers kept the beat going.

The way the drum machine is just, like, in a loop,

you are able to really, like, sing into it

and lose yourself in them sounds.

When they did my Rock You Baby, the club DJs that was underground,

they picked it up and started playing it.

DJs would come and say, "George, as soon as I put Rock Your Baby on,

"the whole floor - boom!"

I didn't believe it till I saw it with my own eyes.

I didn't realise the song was that hot.

All of a sudden, I get a phone call from James Brown.

James Brown call...?

"I want you to be my opening act."

So, the whole summer, I toured with James Brown.

At the end of the tour, here I am performing in Madison Square Garden,

opening for James Brown in Madison Square Garden.

And all of a sudden, it crossed over into Europe.

They tell me, "You have to go to England.

"Oh, and also we have a tour in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy."

Rock Your Baby sold, I think, 11 million copies.

And that's a good tally.

We were making record companies a lot of money.

We were outselling rock, jazz, every category.

They could no longer deny how influential club DJs were.

When the Hues Corporation's Rock The Boat was followed by

George McCrae's Rock Your Baby on the pop charts,

that was the commercial beginning of disco.

That signalled a new era.

Rock Your Baby was the start of the disco sound,

and I'm happy to be a part of it.

This is the time we crossed from the underground

to the mainstream.

It integrated everybody - red, yellow, black or white.

It didn't matter.

It made everybody happy.

This is the time that disco came of age.

# Woman

# Take me in your arms

# Rock your baby... #

When life gets hard, you party harder.

Disco had become what felt to us like a global craze.

The black disco diva was a breakthrough persona.

We broke the glass ceiling for women.

I said, "Man, I love this!"

# There's a very strange vibration

# Piercing me right to the core

# It says, "Turn around, you fool

# "You know you love him more and more"

# Tell me why

# Is it so

# Don't want to let you go

# Hey, I never can say goodbye, boy... #