Like its emblematic mirror ball, disco was just a vibrant, fractured reflection of our hedoniism in a post-1960s nyc where the political dreams of our teenage years banged right up against the landslide re-election of Richard Nixon. Fuck art, let's dance. Forty years later, the metaphor might be closer to Swing era jazz, but the concept: beat, dance, movement, burn baby burn .of disco is the same form of release. Or, as the wheels of time turned, what has remained, has remained to be danced to. Chic's co-writer and bassist Bernard Edwards has been dead seven years now, Niles Rodgers is in remission from cancer, The Trammps lead singer, Jimmy Ellis, died on March 8th, Tavares MC Feliciano "Butch" Ventura is 72 years old. "The clock keeps turning, it just won't wait…"
The couple in this picture are my friends Cathy And Andre Dupuis. Andre was more a punk rock cat, his wife was just a kid during the disco age. But his wife's older sister, Patricia Cauldwell, was a very close friend of mine in the mid 1970s. Pat used to tend bar at a disco called Sidings in Macclesfield, England, and when we weren't there we'd be at clubs like English soccer superstar Georgie Best's "Slack Alice". It is at the latter I met David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Phil Lynott and Errol Brown (of Hot Chocolate!).The scene was a constant buzz of speed, bass, synths, booze, broads and make out music. The twenty somethings who hung there were the Quality Street Gang, immortalized in Thin Lizzy's "The Boys Are Back In Town". The music played off one trick, a goodie, they took any hit soul song, stuck a nondescript vocal on top, a drum machine on the bottom and sold it again.
That guy with the moves in the picture is Denny Terrio, he taught John Travolta to dance for "Saturday Night Fever" and was a star of TVs "Dance Fever". He looks healthy and dances all night long. Sometimes on the dancefloor, where Cathy says he was sweating like a pig. And sometimes on stage, with women hustled on and off the stage. The constant movement reminds those of us who had been there of something that is difficult to keep in tune: The bands we will see today are simply utilities for dance and whatever else they ever achieved is dependent on that, upon a producers auxiliary needs and not live performance. A nostalgia trip, yes, but a nostalgia to hustle. Denny and CBS-FM's "The Sound Of The 70s" DJ Joe "I'm Sicilian not Italian" Causi do a fair to middling job MCing the event. Upstairs, people who paid an extra fifty bucks are VIPing with the stars and, oh my god, actually sitting from downstairs. Downstairs, we paid a hundred bucks and we came to dance. For nearly five hours straight.
Let's get one thing understood: except for Chic, everybody is old and everybody is singing to back up tapes. Except for Chic, the bass is so heavy the sound is atrocious. Harold Melvin and former lead singer Teddy Pendergrass were legends of Gamble And Huff Philadelphia. And both are long gone. So who are this first up band performing under that name? Former members singing the old hits and if it wasn't for the dreadful mix, they would be pretty good. They open with the terrfic "Where Are All My Friends"(an influence on James Murphy) and, despite defining geriatric, can still move, more or less. They follow with "Don't Leave Me This Way" and then a superior "The Love I Lost". You think they'd be building to "Don't Leave Me This Way" but no… they go past that and they shouldn't have. Known for their ability to pull off a ballad with daunting power, they should have played before Tavares and Trammps should have been up first. It is a mistake, but not a deadly mistake.
Fraces Jolie had a hit with "Come To Me" at the age of 16 in 1979 and is a, how you say, full bodied woman today. And gave a full throated rendition of her song as well as her latest record, a discofied "Hallelujah", which settled as an apt reminder of one of discos great tricks. The Soprano also covered "Rolling In The Deep" -proof that nothing can save the crappy song, not even a back beat. Lions (I think that's that they're called) are a duo with a hit in the early 1980s. They look like aerobics instructors.
Tavares were first rate. It helps that the brothers have been playing together since 1972. You can tell. They are a very tight unit, the four singers come across as a take on doo-wop and they cream everything they come within a mile. Amazingly, Tavares can still move pretty well. Though all of them are older than Mick Jagger, they show off dance moves tKevin Barnes would've envied Friday night at Webster Hall Tavares hit it big with "More Than A Woman", which they kill, and which, somewhat dauntingly, follows three Bee Gee's giant dance tracks at the top of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Then, as now, it is a hugely romantic piece of beauty. With a different production, we'd call it soul. Despite a useless "Killing Me Softly" sung A cappella, the brothers, move, sing and on a "More Than A Woman" , their second SNF track, they sing the backing track right back where it should be. It is so good, I included a snippit at the end of the post.
Tramps shouldn't have been here tonight, but I can see why they couldn't turn it down. Their lead singer Jimmy Ellis died on March 8th of this year, and the Trammps haven't had time to rework their sound. MC Earl Young and the rest of the band worked their talils off but it simply wasn't enough. A lesson in doo wop was… actually, why prolong this? I saw Trammps at a "Saturday Night Fever" reunion in the 1990s and they were fine (live back up as well),on vinyl they own the last ten minutes of SNF with a disco cum funk workout "Disco Inferno" that defined not just disco but pointed directly to Chicago House. Paradise Garage was built for this sound.
SNF was released in late 1977 but its musical height was already passing. In 1978 Chic released "Le Freak" and gave birth to the synergy that would create New Wave. Chic set the stage for every pop star on the charts today,, Trammps are the template for House and even dubstep (aka House plus Reggae production values)
It is hard to imagine modern pop without chic. if you can't imagine Lady Gaga without Madonna, how can you imagine Madonna without Chic? They cover the Madonna classic "Like A Virgin" and it was produced by Niles Rodgers (Ps: Madonna should get it out of the mothballs -we want to heard it a thousand times more than anything on Hard Candy). They also play "We Are Family", and "I'm Coming Out". The latter two were co-produced with the late great bass player Bernard Edwards. Later, Niles would state "Nearly everything you have heard tonight, I wrote and played". This is a lie by omission. He wrote out Edwards? Why? They weren't even fighting when Edwards died (the morning after playing a Chic gig in Japan). McCartney has been proven by Tim Riley to have lied about Lennon's contribution to "Yesterday". How much praise is enough praise?
Here is some more, anyway. The surprise for someone like me, who has never seen Chic live, is what a great guitarist Rodgers is. He is one of the greatest rhythm guitarists I've ever seen: is all bottom and all squiggly licks from the fret to the neck, pushing the song from the insides out. On "We Are Family" he plays a simultaneously supple and heavy guitar lick, breathtakingly in its smartness and subtlety.
The rest of Chic are simply back up players, and with the exception of the bassist, immediately replaceable cogs. But center stage, Niles leads them with ease.Before playing a Sister Sledge song, Niles says "We used to go to the studio and play for hours, days, weeks…. months. Lost in music". Yes, Chic, like disco as a whole, is a producers art form. Niles genius Saturday night was his superb translation. You can't help but be in awe of a set that includes "Everybody Dance", "Dance, Dance, Dance" "Le Freak". Really, a setlist ANYBODY would die for and all played with the precision so necessary for dance.
They closed the night with "Good Times" -everybody on stage. Which leads me to the quote from this song that began the post. "The clock keeps turning, it just won't wait." Like the beating of a heart and the stopping of the clock, Niles took us outside the bounds of time to a simpler, sexier time.
Grade: A-