That was the year that was. Gas lines, J.R. Ewing, The World Champion "We are Fam-Uh-Lee" Pittsburgh Pirates, and Benny Hill's syndication to the United States (well...OK...it meant something to me).
Two other things bubble up from the ooze that is my memory of that year. One is caused by my continued reflection on what impact Amp Radio will have on the business and the southland; the other is something that has revisited our consciousness as would an unsettled meal: Michael Jackson. Like what emerges from a crypt in a Zombie movie (and with the pallor to match), he is risen, once more.
Jacko, as the British call him, is a talcom-powered example that the relative few who attain icon status in this world can get away with almost anything. If you don't believe that's true, try slathering on kabuki make-up, dressing like Mohamar Qaddafi gone wild with Bedazzler, and start favoring the company of non-adults. See how fast you get taken to the psyche ward or beaten up, or both, with all deliberate haste.
His (alleged) misdemeanors notwithstanding, Michael Jackson is a pitiable soul. He's a lasting reminder of what can happen to talented, precocious youngsters when they are cruelly exploited and robbed of their childhood. By the same token, M.J. embodies our own basic human need to worship at the foot of the charismatic, regardless of their foibles or felonies. The innate ability of people to forgive allows Michael to exist. Not as the ground-breaking, breath-taking, one-gloved performer he was in 1979, but as the celebrity so burned into the iris of the public's vision, that he made news world-wide when he announced a series of "final" concerts, this week.
I'm not a fan of the individual. It's not easy to remain unsettled by a 50-year-old man who's beginning to resemble a Star Wars Storm Trouper. There is, however, no denying the talent...a talent that has come to represent what little was compelling about Top 40 music in 1979.
Last week, I wrote at length about the debut of Amp Radio, and why it's always exciting when a new Top 40-CHR (Contemporary Hit Radio) station starts. That made me recall how much fun it is to be a young person when something new is breaking. I always felt I'd missed something having been just four years-old when the Beatles exploded on to these shores. My brothers got to experience that as teens...plus The Stones, The Animals, Motown and James Brown.
Every teen or young adult has a music scene to embrace, but it's once in a couple of generations that an act like Elvis or The Beatles come along to rattle cages and shake up the landscape of popular culture. The rest of the time, people between 10 and 20 years are either digging what's cool, or searching for something more iconoclastic. What broke big when I was 18 was huge, but eventually loathsome, and had, by no means, the enduring impact of Beatlemania.
Disco. To say the word, even today, after semi-revivals and nostalgic reunions, is to blanch a little with disgust.
In 1979, Disco was at its height, a fact that speaks to the patchwork quilt that was Top 40 music in the 1970's. The decade began as a series of tributaries that flowed out of the radio: Soul, rock (the "roll" half of the name faded away for a brief time), some million-selling country hits, and a syrupy melange of mush and chewed bubblegum. We're talking James Taylor and Carly Simon as a couple, Elton John's softer efforts, The Partridge Family, The Osmonds, and abysmal one-hit wonders like Reunion (Life is a Rock, but the radio Rolled Me). On Top 40 stations from coast to coast, songs by those artists were linked by jingles to Led Zeppelin, Chicago, Charlie Rich, Jerry Reed, and Isaac Hayes doing The Theme From Shaft. It was true Top 40--hits from all fields, but nothing comparable to what shifted tectonic plates when the British landed in 1964. There was no real "craze" that gripped the country until Disco was delivered forth from burgeoning technology in the recording studio, and the glitter-balled excesses of New York night clubs. And it took over the airwaves in late 1977.
A previously low-rated album-rock FM station in New York started playing Disco records in Top-40 styled rotation and shot to the top of the ratings. They knocked off Dan Ingram and the venerable WABC, the city's leading Top 40 station for a decade. In L.A., KUTE 102, with a bad signal and ratings to match, went Disco in '77 under the helm of Bill Stevens, and zoomed past all the Top 40's except KHJ, and even they were feeling the heat.
Of all the music trends of the 20th Century, though, from ragtime to the big bands, from the birth of rock and roll to hip-hop, Disco is the most difficult to assess in a fair, even-handed way. For a music style that accounted for millions and millions of records sold, thousands of dance lessons taught, and hundreds of Discos opened, it was vastly reviled. Sticky-sweet, simple, thumping and monotonous, Disco was the first music trend since the Cha-Cha that entailed having to learn steps from professionals. What really caused its disconnect was the robotic tempo. You HAD to dance to it, because it didn't lend itself to listening for long periods, and reduced those not dancing to spectator status. As it blared, you sat, you drank, you ogled, as you were bombarded by this catchy, happy music that, after a while, just wasn't very good.
Rockers, particularly, were offended by having to abide a music form that ignored the depth and nuance of stirring chord progressions, textured guitar solos, and all the elements that afforded hard rock its artistic credibility. One of the cultural changes as a direct result of the Beatles influence was Rock's evolution from high school dance accompaniment to concert event experience. A steady buzz, comfortable pair of jeans, and some roaring guitar licks what all a rocker needed to get his (or her) groove on--no dance lessons needed. From the Rocker's disdain for its homogenized milieu, came the prevailing chant of the time: Disco Sucks!
Students of pop culture will tell you Disco died because it didn't develop enough stars; that its flame burned bright, then quickly burned out. I submit that unlike most other items that are plastic, its shelf life was doomed by its inability to change, as all things must.
While it permeated the charts and the radio, Disco momentarily obscured the music that would climb out of clubs and neighborhoods, and last for 30 years and counting. Call them alternative and hip-hop today--they were known as punk/new wave and rap in 1979. These are the forms that would merge into the mainstream, and resurrect the Top 40 radio format that was on life support after an overdose of The Bee Gees and Donna Summer.
I was one of those guys who got sick of Disco pretty quickly. In the summer of 1978, when it was a relatively new thing, I had fun hitting dances in a three-piece suit, downing Seven and Sevens though I was underage, and trolling for halter-topped, long-haired girls. By 1979, the music was no longer tolerable. Even TV dance shows stopped about music and artists and spontaneous fun, as much as they were a showcase for semi-gymnast professionals. It wasn't very participatory. I told friends that the next dance move we'd see would be some heavily-cologned, expensively permed Disco King throwing his partner in the air and shooting her down with a skeet gun.
Disco waned in 1980, and by the end of the year it was done. It bobbed like a cork in the tub until groups like The Pretenders, The Go Gos, and a vanguard of what was new wave became 1980's Contemporary Hit Radio, CHR, the former Top 40. And yes, one of the biggest beneficiaries of Disco's death was the fellow who's music stood out in the midst of the Disco lemmings in 1979. In 1982-83, Michael Jackson's Thriller became (for decades to come) the biggest selling album of all-time.
30 years later, with music even more fragmented from market to market, itemized by demographic group, the odds against another trend as encompassing as Disco run high. We who love music can be thankful for that. Its vestiges live on, as evidenced by the popularity of ABC-TV's Dancing with The Stars. People will still dance and love it, to salsa, meringue and big bands, but Disco will continue to peacefully push up daisies.
The same odds that would gleefully prohibit another Disco-like phenomenon would also, sadly, rule out a future event as world tilting as Beatlemania and its aftermath. And those four lads from Liverpool didn't have MySpace, Facebook, Twitter or Texting to conquer the universe and alter a generation.
