Tim Lawrence: Love Saves The Day: A History Of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-79
For a movement that came to define a decade, disco has never really gone through the historical grinder. As a cultural phenomenon, it's been appraised in the tangential terms of celebrity and bad fashion. As a musical idea, it's been written off as an embarrassment, a best-forgotten affront to the righteous enterprise of rock. Of course, disco did abound in stars, flares, and dicey musical excess. But as Tim Lawrence illustrates in Love Saves The Day, the story of disco is richer than its battered reputation lets on.
Surveying the roots of a movement that would become an enormous lifestyle industry, Lawrence starts with the handful of downtown New Yorkers who set disco in motion in the late '60s. David Mancuso was a grizzled urban hippie who charted musical journeys in The Loft, a private apartment open to an eclectic mix of people—white, black, straight, gay—on utopian grounds. While the idea of the discotheque had already existed in New York, The Loft expanded it into a playground for dancing and prancing. A DJ before the distinction bore notice, Mancuso played floaty psychedelic records alongside string-swept soul and galloping African rhythms, placing an emphasis on mood and movement that signaled sounds to come. He was also a hi-fi fiend: He commissioned custom-made speakers and gear (including a $3,000 turntable needle) that goosed up drum sounds and reached previously unheard high-end peaks. While Mancuso had his disciples at The Loft, a growing number of gay clubs and bars forced the relaxation of male-on-male dancing laws, reveling in the newly open environment that would fuel disco's glamorous rise.
The parallel lines of changing music and changing social norms bracket all of Love Saves The Day, an exceedingly well-reported history that reads as too focused on occasion. Regarding the music, Lawrence traces the disco sound through its roots in Philly soul and its debt to machine music flown over from Europe. He also surveys the birth of the DJ as showman, telling gossipy stories about names still getting their proper due, and tracing the lineage of turntable tricks most often attributed to hip-hop. On the social front, Lawrence proves most pointed when surveying disco's sexual and racial swirl. He keeps a steady eye on the gayness that circulated through disco, even at its suburbs-storming peak, and comes down hard on the hints of homophobia that stoked its storied backlash. Some of the abundant details seem geared to insiders only, but on the whole, Love Saves The Day works as an eye-opening history of a movement that found a nation taking time out to dance.