![]() It was clean, grand, and Grecian in style. Gay bathhouse Continental Baths wasn’t like other New York saunas. Inside the club, dancers could forget about Nixon or unemployment or the Iran Hostage Crisis and get lost in music. A freedom from the Vietnam-era apathy spreading across America, of identity politics or the foreboding times ahead. Sandwiched between the politically turbulent Sixties and the AIDS epidemic and Republican grip of the Eighties, dancefloors in the Seventies symbolised a certain sacred freedom. And then there was Diana Ross, Cheryl Lynn, First Choice, Rose Royce, Candi Staton, Gloria Gaynor, and Chaka Khan – their manifestos of survival, independence and being ‘real’ brought a new sound of empowerment to the charts at a time when second-wave feminism was publicly dominated by white activists and the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment was consistently thwarted. With 16 minutes of orgasmic moans over Giorgio Moroder’s iconic beat, Donna Summer’s “Love To Love You Baby” filled clubs with the sound of brazen female sexual desire. With disco records dominating the charts, it meant that so too did black women. Disco Action amplified the popularity of black artists championed by indie labels and disc jockeys onto Hot 100 success. The chart compiled the Top 10 most popular songs played in New York discos – Gloria Gaynor’s “Never Can Say Goodbye” was the first #1 – and regional charts soon popped up with distinct Philadelphia, Chicago, and LA sounds. As Studio 54 resident DJ Nicky Siano put it, they made “billions off an industry that we created” and labelled it ‘disco’. Then other people would sit on them and have sex on them.”īillboard launched its Disco Action dance music chart in 1974, sending the sound of New York discotheques into the mainstream. There would always be at least one person screaming at the coat-check girl: “Yes, it was a black leather jacket!” At The Loft, people would folds their coats and put them on the floor so they could kind of keep an eye on them. “You were afraid that the coat-check girl would steal it, and you couldn’t afford to lose a winter coat. Coat stress in the club might seem a vain anxiety, but the struggle was real even in the carefree disco heyday. “I was always very concerned about the coat situation,” says writer Fran Lebowitz. They all had a home at the disco.” C IS FOR COAT-CHECK “There was a very strong sense of inclusion and acceptable of all people, straight, gay, transgender, lesbian, black, white, old, young, famous and not famous. “There was something important going on.” Bernstein said. ![]() So many familiar photographs that chronicle the disco era were shot by Bill Bernstein, a photojournalist for New York’s Village Voice. B IS FOR BILL BERNSTEINĪndy Warhol hobnobbing at Studio 54. The remix was Walter Murphy’s only chart hit (he’s had a respectable post-disco career doing soundtrack work), and soundtracked John Travolta’s cocky entrance into the club in Saturday Night Fever, in which he full-mouth kisses women in the crowd and huh huh huhs his way across the floor his red leather jacket. A bit silly, yes, but somehow right nonetheless. It took one Madison Avenue jingle writer to turn Beethoven’s Symphony Number 5 in C Minor into an unexpectedly perfect disco anthem.
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