What's Your Favorite Fake Disco Song?
When disco hit, everyone from Frank Sinatra to the Grateful Dead tried their hand at the trend. Some of these attempts were more worthwhile than others.
There’s a new documentary out called Disco’s Revenge. I haven’t seen it, but the perceptive review by Adlan Jackson at Hell Gate got me thinking about my favorite pet micro-genre, which I like to call attempted disco. Adlan’s take is that the movie overextends itself in trying to capture the full breadth of the music’s story and significance in 90 minutes, and particularly that it “moves [too] briskly through the commercialization of disco, which really provided the ground for the genre's collapse in the court of popular opinion.” That fraught period of commercialization is what I want to talk about in this week’s Sound Off.
Attempted disco, as the name implies, is what happened when musicians from outside of the continuum of R&B and club music that fostered actual disco, driven by some combination of industry incentive and genuine interest, decided to try their hands at the sound. Some attempts at disco were fantastically successful—like the Bee Gees’ entire late-’70s career peak—and others—like Frank Sinatra’s 1977 disco-fied take on the Cole Porter standard “Night and Day”—were duds that probably left the attempters embarrassed within a few years of their release.
There are good reasons to be suspicious of attempted disco: aside from the general stink of corporate trend-chasing, there’s the glaring reality that most of disco’s originators were black and/or queer and most of the Johnny-come-latelies were straight and/or white. Still, without ignoring those complications, I also see the phenomenon as a testament to the music’s undeniable power, to the gravitational pull of a groove so strong that even Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed tried setting their country-jazz acoustic guitar shredding to a four-on-the-floor pulse.
Disco remade the pop landscape so quickly and thoroughly that anyone who wanted to remain current had no choice but to reckon with it. Hippies suddenly had to hear disco at Grateful Dead shows, whether they liked it or not. John Lydon quit the Sex Pistols and started a new band that heard the future of punk in its piston-pumping rhythm. Disco’s totalizing force clearly had something to do with the eventual backlash, but the motley crew of pretenders it gathered is also evidence of the music’s remarkable flexibility and undeniable appeal. And most importantly, disco's pop-takeover era produced a ton of flat-out bangers, whether or not their creators would have been turned away at the Paradise Garage.
So the question is: What’s your favorite attempt at disco? The one I’ll put forward is “Don’t Let a Thief Steal Into Your Heart” by the great British folk-rock duo Richard and Linda Thompson, whose music splits the difference between ‘70s singer-songwriter stuff and full-on renaissance-fair revivalism. Adding disco to the mix sounds like a recipe for unmitigated disaster, but this song is incredible. It grooves so hard thanks in part to bassist Willie Weeks, best known for his work with Donny Hathaway, who provides funky low end. But it also doesn’t abandon the Thompsons’ usual musty vibe entirely: there’s an accordion on this thing, and I swear that accordion is sexy as hell. But don’t take my word for it—just ask the Pointer Sisters, who liked “Don’t Let a Thief Steal Into Your Heart” enough to cover it two years later. To be fair, they did get rid of the accordion.
