DO IT!: Van McCoy: "The Hustle"

 

There is nothing quite like waking up to frankly miserable weather/news only to hear about it and then be thrown by an overly upbeat announcer telling you to cheer up and dance and get moving and DANCE ---

Disco is a fine thing, but like everything it does have its place.  It has been more than suggested that it is the popular music everyone likes and the one music which people turn to when things are relentlessly tiresome or numbing.  But it wasn’t music for just anyone at the beginning; in fact it was music for those who liked to dance and also a refuge for those who were not exactly welcome elsewhere. 

In early 1975 Van McCoy was working on an album to be called (of course) Disco Baby.  In need of some inspiration information, he sent his business partner Charles Kipps to a disco to see if he could pick up any moves or grooves, and he brought back two dancers from the Adam’s Apple.  McCoy watched these dancers do the Hustle right there and then and was stunned and a little puzzled, but fell hard.  The next day (yes, the next day) “The Hustle” was recorded, and the rest is history.  We have, inadvertently, reached the second half of the 70s, the disco half.  The fog has lifted and the sun is shining and all is elegant and glamorous and exciting, emotional even.  A dance that came up from the Bronx gangs, the Latin Hustle (close to salsa) has bumped into some very seasoned studio musicians and a composer who clearly wants to write the disco song. 

Make no mistake:  this song is just one of many varieties of Hustle, but it takes OFF.  It’s catchy, simple, sweet –  kind of like Philadelphia International, but lighter and determinedly open somehow.  It is an anthem, an ode to the spirit of New York City, which was bankrupt but continued nevertheless.  It bumps and soars and sweeps and entreats you to join in and dance, never exactly telling you how to do the Hustle, but just to do it.  It is the little engine that could's triumphant lap.  It's emotional because McCoy had been in the music business for so long as a writer and producer and this dance appears one night and YYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAH "The Hustle" comes to him, as if in a fairy tale, and the joy he has had in creating it is right there in the music.  It is devotional music in a way, a tribute, and all it asks is that you dance however you want to and voila - you are doing the Hustle.  (It is significant that it's a dance for two people, though I always imagine the housewife in Des Moines dancing in her kitchen, as well as professional dancers in Hustle contests across New York City.)  

McCoy lived to see disco thrive and prosper, and was working on a 12" version of "The Hustle" when he died in 1979 - DJs wanted a 12" of it, which goes to show you what an instant classic it became.  That no one expected the song to do very much business is the cherry; it was merely supposed to be filler.  Thus I cannot claim McCoy to be a prophet but he inadvertently set the second half of the 70s agenda and there were those who (in the fullness of time, not now) bitterly resented him and disco in general.  But I don't think these people deserve my writing about them.  The happiness here erases all that, supercedes it, has already gone past it.  There is no looking back for disco now, and those who insist on playing it at 7am are, as irritating as they can be, doing everyone a favor by reminding people to dance, the Hustle or otherwise.

Next up:  the umbrella underneath which all other musics stand.

                                                                                                                    

 

 

 

Very Strange Vibration: Gloria Gaynor: "Never Can Say Goodbye"

There are few moments better than the one where confusion and doubt are conquered, even eliminated.  We are in disco when this particular and precise emotion happens to make sense, as disco is about that joy, a joy that magnetic and crushing and inexplicable, an energy that cannot be denied.  That it comes in with Max Roach-inspired drumming, swirling strings and an I’ve-lived-this-and-we-can-share-it vocal from Gloria Gaynor (who sounds as caught up in the song as anyone) is just as well.  We are far from the laid-back pleasures of "Rock Your Baby" or the get-down Miami horn blasts of KC & the Sunshine Band here.  Gaynor is singing to be heard, and that this is a Jackson 5 song seems to make no impression on her whatsoever.  She is making this her own.

What those who bought this en masse may or may have not known was that “Never Can Say Goodbye” was the middle of a trilogy from her album of the time – a “mix” really – by Tom Moulton*, which starts with “Honey Bee” and ends with “Reach Out I’ll Be There.**”  This mix was the first to appear on an album – let’s just pause to ponder this – and capitalized on Moulton’s ability as a mixer to really get into the songs – not in a complicated way, just in a way that was supposed to elongate the song, and have Gaynor’s voice in your head *even when she wasn’t audibly there*. Dancing in your head? That the very male world of disco (I have been reading Peter Shapiro’s book on it and early discos were definitely male territory, with disco becoming a more female-friendly phenomenon later on) should have a woman taking on Levi Stubbs’ aria of a song and making it sound like the veritable audio version of the last helicopter out of Vietnam is, to say the least, quite something. 

The power of the song is to worry away in the verses and then dismiss these worries in the chorus with a rising "I love you ssssooooooooooo" that has in it right there a real vulnerability/strength moment which disco (when it wasn't just exhorting you the listener to dance, which it often did) does so well.  Can you stop?  Is stopping on the dancefloor possible?  Tom Moulton didn't want you to stop, and put this together with oh say Eddie Kendricks' "Girl You Need A Change Of Mind" and it won't stop.

 

Next:  A radio, a woman, a man. 

 *Tom Moulton is the first person to use a 12" single to do the pressing of a song, giving the song more space to breathe, sound better and of course have more time to let the song be itself. That he found this out by accident is charming. 

**We are not done with Motown yet and in a few entries the topic of jazz will appear, with Motown popping up unexpectedly.

Hold Her Tight: Barry Blue: "Dancin' (On A Saturday Night)"

As this blog meanders into much-dreaded thing known as The Fog, there are some small comforts along the way, and this is one of them.  The mid-70s were not such a terrible time that songs like this couldn't be hits; indeed it was because of their somewhat slapdash naivete that people got through it at all, I sense. 

Not that Barry Blue (nee Green) was naive.  He had been working in the music business for years (much as Suzi Quatro had, and yep, they're born in the same year too) and was already probably figuring out that his real metier was in songwriting and producing; but this is an utterly charming song, unpretentious, with an odd nod to, of all things, Greek music (not since "Bend It" has this blog heard anything so Greek*) and the fact that he can't really dance that well is the clincher here - this is may be pop but it is the people's pop, if I may put it that way.  This is bubblegum in the best sense - fun, innocent, his "bluejean baby" being his center, his joy, the bliss of dancing being the one thing on his mind...as Bob Stanley (hello!) noted in his essay about Blue, this wasn't even supposed to be Blue's song - it was written by him and Lynsey De Paul** for the band Mardi Gras, but Blue decided to do it himself, and thus ended up on tv wearing a blue satin jumpsuit and coming across as the nicest Glam star around.  However, as the Glam era ended, he had the good sense to move back into producing and songwriting, and I will be getting to one of his best productions in 1977, which showed that he had an ear for funk as well as bubblegum - Heatwave's immortal "Boogie Nights."

Girls wearing blue jeans, dancing, good times - here it's catchy fun, but with the next song, it sounds as if it's a matter of life and death, no more, no less.    


*Greece had a kind of hypnotic hold on the UK psyche at this time - sure, it was a relatively nice place to go for a vacation, but then so was Spain.  Perhaps Greece was more hip at the time?  Seen as more exotic in some way?  (And now that I think of it, why was the cheese shop in the Monty Python sketch playing bouzouki music in the first place?)

**He and De Paul wrote her hits "Sugar Me" and "Getting A Drag" amongst others; songs that couldn't be further from this one if they tried.

Going Out On Top: Spencer Davis Group: "Gimme Some Loving"

And here we are, dancing wildly on the edge; the crowning song of the beat boom rightly belongs to the hardest working band out there, the Spencer Davis Group. The band (even in this...Swedish?...version) is tight, Steve Winwood sounds as if he's much older than 19, and the kids are raving in the sweating club, the emblematic Hammond organ conjures up all sorts of images of what 'groovy' and 'Swinging' could mean...

...and there is something sweet, too, in a band from Birmingham - right in the center of the country - uniting everyone in the face of a cold and uncertain winter (Cathy Come Home had just been aired on tv; unemployment was rising yet again). The effervescence of the mid-60s was slowly wearing off, for various reasons; obviously the party continued for many, but even from this version I get that something more contemplative and not quite as simple is around the corner for Winwood. There are only so many nights you can pound out foot-stomping classics - even one as elemental and contagious as this one - without wanting to vary things up a bit, expand what you can say and how you can say it. In short, this is another club banger, from a band used to making people dance, and there is no topping it (though the Winwoods' last single with them - "I'm A Man*" - is as fitting a goodbye as possible). Both of these songs were produced by Jimmy Miller, an American who had drifted (anyone know how or why?) to England (see also Tony Visconti and Joe Boyd - here beginneth the era of Americans helping to push UK music forward**). He got to work with The Rolling Stones with his success here - making a song sound as if it was the apex of the boom itself, the figurative end of the long hard week so many bands had had so far, zooming through the years, riding on their own hard work and good luck and love of music.

I hope I am not getting too sentimental about this time, but the joy and innocence and simple good times of the mid-60s should not be forgotten; they help to define the decade as a whole and are the only way the late 60s make any real sense. By now, John had met Yoko; drugs were in wide use, LSD in particular being what the self-consciously cool types were dropping; those mutant energies were growing stronger and would not always be satisfied with a simple "boom-boom-boom-boom-BOOM-boom." That is sad, maybe, but expanding minds were going to change the way music sounded, the way it sold, even the way it was performed.

For now we are going to leave the sweaty club, the land of a thousand dances, happy to hear this pounding out and even now I can hear the giddy "Hey" and hands clapping in unison. Goodbye mid-60s, you won't be forgotten.



*Forewarned: I will be including as many songs from my wedding cd on this here blog as possible, because I can. I hope you enjoy them!

** Shel Talmy, producer of the early singles by The Kinks and The Who, is also American. This makes me wonder just how British the British Invasion was, sometimes...

Let The World Know: Swinging Blue Jeans, The: "Hippy Hippy Shake"

After great complexity and grief, something is needed to clear the mind, refresh the soul and encourage people to just let go and make fools of themselves; the world may be different now, but life does, indeed, go on. That the song makes almost no sense is almost a necessity (as Lester Bangs writes, "...rock and roll is at its core merely a bunch of raving shit, its utterly hysterical transience and intrinsic worthlessness the not-quite-paradoxical source of its vitality") and of course it's a cover version, pumped up on a desperate need for release. The sickness of "Hippy Hippy Shake" is something that doesn't need a cure because it is the cure for numbed-out grief, a positive sign of being ALIVE, dammit. Then, once the shaking stops, some people can go back to however they were, maybe a little abashed, perhaps. For some though, this is just the start of the high-octane Sixties, when anything goes. The Merseybeat boom is at its peak, about to take over the world, effectively. So why not dance?

A Strand of Sand: The Shadows: "Atlantis"

This somehow reminds me of the last weekend before it's too cold to go to the beach; to sit and picnic; to happily just gad about, getting lost and then finding your way. It reminds me of these things because, as big as The Shadows were, the tide (so to speak) was turning against them. They had lost Meehan and Harris (replaced by Brian Bennett and Brian "Licorice" Locking, both from Marty Wilde's band) and thus had also lost some of the energy that made them so popular in the first place. "Atlantis" is a sprightly song that sounds almost ready-made for Winnipeg boys Young and Bachman to practice for hours on end, not to mention many others, but it is also a bit too polite, even as a song about a long-lost probably (how can anyone know?) mythical water kingdom can be.

The whole thing sounds unreal, Marvin's guitar as liquid as can be, the soothing strings a song that doesn't even sound like the 60s, or at least my understanding of the 60s; I don't know if The Shadows were at all envious, say, of the Surfaris (about to have a hit with this) or The Chantays (who had just had a hit as well). It could simply be that the saltwater-in-your-face abandon of The Surfaris or the hang-ten cool of The Chantays were simply beyond the experience of The Shadows; or perhaps it just wasn't their style, or that they were produced by Norrie Paramor, not a man given to adventure as much as George Martin or Joe Meek (how would they have sounded produced by either of these men I leave up to you). The neatness and tidiness that served them well as it could in the late 50s/early 60s was beginning to be beside the point; of course they still had hits after this (and remain popular to this day - witness their successful tour with Cliff a while back). But it is poignant that I get to them when they are still popular but are about to be eclipsed by many groups who were inspired by them, from The Beatles on down. I can only salute them as pioneers, once and future kings of British rock, imitated and copied but never really duplicated.

Free For All: Chris Montez: "Let's Dance"

It is usual that in crisis, there are two responses; flight or fight. But what to do after? Or, rather, what to do if there is no actual sane response? What if the problem is so big as to be out of your control? What if you're a kid, it's 1962 and the adults are all huffing and puffing about something that may well be a problem, but even you, as a kid, can see there is nothing concrete to be done? The only sane thing to do, then, is dance.

Dancing may seem absurd, at first*, but it's not too far-fetched to say that periodically there are songs that assert that the only thing to do is dance - or as Lady Gaga (one of the many direct descendants from this song) sings, "Just dance, gonna be okay." Dance is an assertion of the continuation of life in the face of chaos there - but Chris Montez, however, isn't even that worried; he wants to dance with a girl - he doesn't really care what it is they dance to, how they dance - it's just pure instinct. Other songs that take their cue include this one, which doesn't even mention dancing, as such, but it's the beat, it's the "Round and round and round - Whoooooooooo!" defiance that can be traced right back to the "Oh wail!" of Montez and his delightfully chirpy organ bopping along top the steady (dare I say...primal?) beat. (This garage classic is also a direct descendant, obviously; I could go on...)

The feeling that the world could very well end doesn't really apply to this song; but the general sense that it's the end of something...and the beginning of something else can be seen in the chart itself, where a certain quartet of young men sit unobtrusively, for now; and in a short while I will be visiting the NME chart to talk about a song so stunning that it opened the ears of anyone who heard it.

(I should also add that after this huge hit Montez - unlike Little Eva - was encouraged by his label to go and get a college education; having done so, he returned to music and has been making music ever since, in both English and his native Spanish; clearly some are more lucky than others in the music business, and in the early 60s the artistic side of music - of regarding pop as art - was not necessarily a view shared by all.)


*I have nothing to back this up, but I think dance and music grew up together and were the first arts, beyond cooking, of course.