by Kevin Burton
There would come a time, in a year or so, when you could not escape disco. But at its inception 50 years ago, you couldn't have seen it coming.
"Disco snuck up on America like a covert operation," wrote Alice Echols in her book "Hot Stuff, Disco and the Remaking of American Culture."
Unlike the British Invasion, which had an electrified national launch Feb. 9, 1964 with the Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, disco was hidden from view of the mass culture.
"One reason that disco lingered below the radar was that the clubs in which it incubated were predominately gay and with the exception of the glitziest, relatively unknown to the larger population," Echols wrote.
Disco wasn't even recognized as a musical genre in 1974, when "Rock Your Baby," a tropical-tinged, minimalist song sung by the obscure Miami singer George McRae, started racing up the Hot 100.
"To most consumers George McRae's "Rock Your Baby" was soul, not disco, a word barely even in circulation outside of industry circles," Echols writes.
On this day 50 years ago Rock Your Baby was in the middle of its two-week stay at number one.
Many point to "Rock Around The Clock" by Bill Haley and his Comets as the first rock and roll song ("The Billboard Book of Number One Hits" starts there), even though there are good arguments for many other songs, such as "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats. to have that distinction.
Similarly, many songs could be called the first disco hit, such as "Girl, You Need A Change of Mind" or "Keep On Truckin'" by Eddie Kendricks or "Rock The Boat" by the Hues Corporation.
I'll make the case for "Rock Your Baby" based on a compelling argument from Tom Breihan in his book, "The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits that reveal the History of Pop Music."
"At the beginning of the 70s, disco wasn't even a genre," Breihan writes "Instead it was a loose, underground network of clubs and parties in New York rooms where people, mostly black and gay, would dance to anything with the right kind of beat."
"By the time Vince Aletti wrote about what he called party music and discotheque rock in a fall 1973 issue of Rolling Stone, gay men had been dancing in discos for three years," Echols wrote.
With no disco label to go by, these dancers and club DJs were choosing from the best of the funk, R&B, rock and anything else available. The DJs took pride in finding the most exciting music.
The sound that became known as disco started because DJs in these clubs began re-mixing records to emphasize the bassline and drums, the elements most important to dancers, rather than the songs' vocals and other elements. The dancers in turn would request these songs from local radio stations. So demand for certain records began to bubble up from non-traditional channels.
This is how "Love's Theme", a lush instrumental by Barry White but credited to the Love Unlimited Orchestra, was saved from obscurity.
"Eddie Kendricks was not making records for night clubs. Instead he was doing his best to make wide appeal pop music" Breihan wrote.
"When I began hearing reports about what was happening with the record in the New York disco clubs, I was shocked," said Kendricks' producer Frank Wilson, quoted in Love Saves The Day, a history of disco and house music by Tim Lawrence. "That was not what we were going for. We were after radio."
Meanwhile in Los Angeles, singer Wally Holmes started the vocal trio Hues Corporation as a vehicle for his songs. Their album Freedom for the Stallion, tanked badly. It "was headed for the glue factory" wrote Fred Bronson in the Billboard Book of Number One Hits.
"Rock the Boat" was an album cut, an afterthought on the record with no chance of being released. But then it became a hit in the dance clubs of New York.
"Suddenly, when the record wasn't on any radio station, it sold 50,000 copies in New York City," Bronson wrote.
"When RCA realized that Rock The Boat was resonating in clubs the label released a remix version of the song boosting the bass and drums so that they would sound better on club speakers," Breihan wrote. "The tactic worked. In July, "Rock the Boat" reached number one."
"Down in Florida, Harry Wayne Casey and Richard Finch were watching," Breihan wrote.
They were two white kids who grew up in south Florida and loved R&B. They were low-level staffers at TK Records, an independent R&B label of Hialeah. Casey was an unpaid warehouse worker and Finch was a part-time recording engineer.
"Both of them had noticed that up-tempo R&B records were doing well in the clubs and on the charts and they paid close attention as Rock the Boat scaled the hot 100," Breihan wrote.
"Inspired by what they heard in those clubs Casey and Finch wrote a sparce-but-slinky R&B song called "Rock Your Baby." Casey programmed in a samba beat, Finch played drums to it," Breihan wrote. "Thanks to that samba preset, Rock Your Baby doesn't have that same 4-4 pulse as most of the disco hits that would come later. But it does have a mechanical insistence that would become key to the genre's appeal."
Casey knew he was a limited vocalist and that the song needed a singer who could work in a higher register.
After finishing the demo, Casey and Finch played it for TK boss Henry Stone. Stone was recording some songs with a singer named Gwen McRae who made a few minor R&B hits. Her husband George was a singer himself and happened to be at the studio when Stone heard the demo.
Casey and Finch took an hour to record George McRae on Rock Your Baby. McRae had feathery falsetto, loose and seductive, exactly what the song needed.
"Rock Your Baby was the song that knocked the Hues Corporation's Rock the Boat out of the number one spot. And there is something deliciously poetic about disco, a genre that 70s rock fans would come to despise, having its big pop chart takeover moment with two consecutive hits that had the word rock in their titles," Breihan wrote.
"Rock the Boat, like Keep on Truckin' and Love's Theme before it, was an accidental disco hit," Breihan wrote. "McRae's Rock Your Baby intentionally imitated Rock the Boat but the song was a different beast."
"McRae's song was the first crossover hit written and recorded with club DJs in mind. It's the first truly intentional disco hit."
Of course you know Casey and Finch were the main forces behind KC and the Sunshine Band, which played what Echols called "bubblegum funk." The band matured into full stardom with "Get Down Tonight" in August of 1975 and would be a fixture at the top of the charts for the rest of the decade. Now you know their influence in disco began at least a year earlier with Rock Your Baby.
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