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| I didn't mention the sci-fi theme? |
I was listening to a podcast the other day - You’re Wrong About, Disco Demolition Night (August 2020) - that framed that dumb, destructive (racist, homophobic) night by talking about disco music and how it came about. Keeping people dancing was one major inspiration - which meant ditching pop music’s plus-or-minus-three-minute time limit, because who wants a three-minute party?
Marc Cerrone - just Cerrone on stage - embraced that format/argument by filling the A-side of his debut album with just one song, “Love in C Minor.” Despite (or because) clocking in at just over 16 minutes, it became an international hit - or, more likely, the radio edit did - topping out at No. 3 in the United States in 1977. The scene/sound opens with “ladies night” - in this case, a group of sophisticated women sizing up the night club fauna (“that ain’t no banana”; “any more champagne in there?”). Right after that vignette's swinging singles come together, the electric violin bleeds in, followed by the insistent bass beat that formed the spine of disco. After a delay, a funk bass bubbles over the beat, counter-poised with more slashes of violin, then comes the high-hat, then the “chicka-wah” guitar, really just one instrument/tone after another - flutes, jittering synth scores, and so on. As said in a contemporary review in Billboard, it was:
“…a 15-minute disco opus with strings and female vocal harmonies behind a relentless beat that should wear out all but the most durable disco dancers”
Before six minutes are gone, orgiastic audio snippets join the general orgy of sound. Whether in music or on album covers, Cerrone embraced human sexuality with gusto. When Atlantic Records released Love in C Minor, the album, in the States, they replaced the naked woman on the original album cover with four hands grabbing four wrists in a square. American/marketing puritanism strikes again…
Cerrone had already established himself in his native France by the time he went solo, but his arrival in the States came both by accident and organically. As explained in a worthwhile 2018 interview/retrospective in PopMatters:
On hearing that some guy named Frankie Crocker recorded his (frankly, flatter) own version and got a minor hit out of it, Cerrone flew across the Atlantic to meet with Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun. Who immediately signed him.
The Rest of the Story
First and foremost, Cerrone only counts as a one-hit wonder for twits who measures everything against and entirely within the U.S. market. As noted in Wikipedia’s intro (among many other things), he has sold 30 million-plus records over the length of a crazy-long career, 8 million of them on an album that didn’t include his U.S. hit. He did spend a good deal of time in the U.S. - during the disco era, naturally - and he still had enough cache three albums after that debut to preside as the guest of honor at one of the biggest parties thrown for a recording artist to that time (the time being 1978). Cerrone put on a show for 800,000 in Tokyo Harbor in 1992, fer crissakes, and he still had enough juice to (maybe) organize a 2007 NYC-city-wide dance party with Nile Rodgers. Near as I can tell, the guy started killing it and never stopped. A (very? too?) little on how he got there…
Marc Cerrone was born in Vitry-sur-Seine (aka, not-too-outer Paris), France to Italian parents in 1952. Despite his father discouragement, he fell in love with music early and one step at a time, starting with Otis Redding and passing through Jimi Hendrix and Santana, before arriving at Blood, Sweat & Tears. It took him (very, very) little time to reach the fringes of the industry: he was the A&R scout for 40 Club Mediteranee resorts by the time he turned 17. I couldn’t find much of anything on how he fell for the drums, but it also didn’t take him long to take on composing - and organizing his original band.
“I chose the bass player, guitar player, and keyboard player. I found two great percussionists from another band. I asked the two percussionists to leave the other band and come with me. I deemed the group ‘Kongas’. The name corresponded to the music we did. The sound of the group was Afro-rock.”
That’s Cerrone on his original band, Kongas, which formed in 1974. Because they lasted only as long as he stayed with them, and only reunited when he called them back, perhaps it was fair for Cerrone to talk about Kongas as his band (even if he did work with Alec R. Costinados, aka, "Robert Rupen" to come up with the sound and some songs). However it happened, they managed some form of hit in Europe with “Boom” (from the 1974 album, Afro Rock; also, can't find it); Cerrone also wrote his first song with Kongas, “Pastel.”
I wish the story got better from here, but it doesn’t have even one damn twist. Coming as it did at the peak and crash of disco, I’m sure the parties were wild, but it’d probably take reading a book - probably one in French - to find anything more salacious than, “dude recorded a bunch of music, it kept working out, and he played with a lot of famous people.” No evil/stupid management, no drug overdoses, no inflated, alienating egos, no fistfights, no stolen girlfriends (of record), no villains, just a hero: thin on the (barely-hidden) inspiration for this series, aka, broken/sabotaged dreams. Cerrone had and has a long and successful career, if mostly in one genre. All those early influences poured out of Marc Cerrone as successful and critically-acclaimed disco music. And, as noted earlier, it has a certain inescapable sensibility. From a review of Love in C Minor in Robert Christgau’s Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (quoted in Wikipedia):
“Catchy tracks, a remake of 'Black Is Black,' and a new standard in disco porn—the protagonist brings three women to simultaneous orgasm while keeping one finger on the 'Door Close' button.”
Sadly, all the above doesn’t leave much left to do but talk about when this album came out, or when that collaborator (e.g., Toto, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Lene Lovich) worked with him. Thrilled as I am to see anyone living of their art (very), sustained success bores me, cataloging it feels like reading someone’s credits, etc. I find it hard to write about, basically, but that’s on me, not Cerrone. It was one line from the PopMatters retro that sent me back to that episode of You’re Wrong About:
“’For my first solo album, I did not want to make any concessions to the music business,’ he says. ‘So I did exactly as I wanted: create music for clubs that can be played, or not, on the radio.’”
Some form of that phrasing comes up in everything I’ve read or watched with Cerrone in it and, arrogant as that and his take on forming Kongas reads, he has always known the audience he wanted to court:
“How I achieve that is by the choice of the sound, the harmony, who is going to sing - ultimately my objective is to make the public smile. Watch some live clips on my site, you can see people of all ages dancing and they are always smiling! That's a big gift for me! There's no greater message in my music - it's for the body if you want to move it.”
For what it’s worth, he comes off cockier in print that he does face-to-face - e.g., he seems delighted, almost flattered in one video I found [Ed. - includes some fun segments on making “Supernature” versus “The Impact” decades later; brought in Jane Goodall on the latter] - but it’s hard to knock a man for having an ego when so much of the world keeps telling him he’s amazing. Cerrone earned his artistic freedom.
About the Sampler
For reasons I’ll close on, this is more a map of Cerrone’s early material than a sampler I compiled with any thought. With the exception of “Midnite Lady,” I’ve already flagged the big hits from Love in C Minor above (and I included the radio edit on the sampler). I pulled the title track (that's the original video, the man himself in his prime, in action; here's the full 16+-minute cut), “Take Me” (more cooing/moaning) and “Time for Love” from his follow-up, Cerrone’s Paradise (but I spared the sampler from a second A-side length song). I just added “Sweet Drums” from Supernature, but, honestly, most of what I (easily) found came off compilations, so nailing down what came from where would take more digging than I have in me, so…
To continue a thought from above, Cerrone reformed Kongas in 1978 - after he hit it big - and they released an album called Africanism in 1977, which featured “Dr. Doo-Dah” and a cover of Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’.” When he got back to his solo work - i.e., 1978’s Golden Touch, aka, the occasion for that really big party from the intro to the rest of his story. That included some notable tunes, including, “Rocket in the Pocket” (Jimmy Page on guitar), “Look for Love” (one of Cerrone’s all-time favorites), and “Music of Life” (I got nuthin’).
One weird day I might have imagined aside, I found a pocket of Spotify that had all (or a lot) of Cerrone’s many, many albums as stand-alones. When I lost that, I mined a compilation or two - The Best of Cerrone Productions more than the rest - to round out the sampler with songs like “Why Can’t We Live Together,” “Your Love Survived,” “You Are the One,” and “Club Underworld.” Add “Rock Me,” a decent rock-fusion number from Cerrone V - Angelina and you have the sampler.
The fact that I gravitated toward The Best of Cerrone Productions didn’t happen by accident. Unlike most of his material, nearly all those songs are radio edits - i.e., regular, short-attention-span pop music. Friends and/or the 1990s in general meant I never advertised it, but I’ve always had a soft spot for disco. Dance music, on the other hand - i.e., actual, 15-minute, in the club bangers - lose me for listening for the same reason they keep dance marathons writhing in the clubs: they go on for-goddamn-ever. I keep reading about the nuances in Cerrone’s music and don’t doubt them for a minute; I just lost them in that (throbbing) insistent beat…
…it’s not for everyone, which includes me. Till the next one
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