One Hit No More, No. 90: Anita Ward, Disco Demolition Night and...the End of a Moment?

Plan A, apparently.

The Hit
Anita Ward was working as an elementary school teacher when she recorded her sultry, literal chart-topping single, “Ring My Bell” in 1979. After graduating from Rust University, majoring in Psychology, she had no intention of embarking on a music career, but, as Stereogum (helpfully!) noted in a 2020 entry in a series that shares the same theme as this series (Numbers Ones), a school administrator at Rust U. heard her audition for Godspell (I can just hear here on “Turn Back, Oh, Man”), and offered to become her manager. Said administrator put her in touch with Frederick Knight, a local celebrity in his own right, by way of his regional/Stax Records hit “I’ve Been Lonely for So Long.”

Knight had originally written “Ring My Bell” for Stacy Lattislaw, “an 11-year-old kiddie-R&B singer,” but he sexed up the lyrics for Ward, though Ward was, per Stereogum’s article, “a clean-living Christian girl.” [Ed. - Though, here, “sexed up” means loosely implying that sex is something that might happen when someone comes home from work.] It was the last song they recorded for Ward’s debut album, but it shot to No. 1 within two weeks. Ward even switched to substitute teaching just in case the single took off. And it very much did, hitting No. 1 in the U.S., the UK and Canada.

Another fun (probably) fact: “Ring My Bell” was the No. 1 single in America on the night of Chicago’s rightly infamous Disco Demolition Night, a detail that became the lede/nugget for Stereogum’s piece. To quote/contextualize in full:

“Disco was a form of underground music that had improbably risen up out of New York’s black and gay clubs to conquer the pop charts. It upended social norms, changed fashion and drugs, and moved the balance of music-business power away from the petty-aristocrat California singer-songwriters who’d been running things up until then. From a music-history standpoint, it’s possible to see disco as a great democratizing force, a push to turn pop music into something fun and silly and cheap and glamorous. When people like Chic’s Nile Rodgers describe Disco Demolition Night as a fascist rally, that’s what they’re talking about.”

For fans of podcasts, there’s a really good episode of You’re Wrong About on the same subject, for what it’s worth. Anita Ward does not make a cameo…

As a piece of music, it’s pure dance/disco, content with repetition - does that single-note pulse on the one ever let up? [Ed. - After the first verse, yes, it does…only to return around the third minute] - and even-keeled to a fault. It’s a song to get lost in, a mix of ecstatic and primal; a vehicle for the dance-floor. On the production side, it foregrounds the hooks, so you don’t really hear the rhythm, but, those backing vocals are one of your better hooks. It’s hard to believe something so hypnotic can only happen once for one artist…

One Hit No More, No. 89: Cheryl Lynn, Keeping It All the Way Real

Literally no better place to start...

The Hit
You know what’s on the second you hear the horns, but Cheryl Lynn’s “Got to Be Real” coasts into nice bubbling funk bass, warm pulses of electric piano and a beat so simple that the most two-footed dancer couldn’t lose from there. The bass gets a top-end through the bridge/chorus. If you listen to the extended version (as opposed to the radio edit), you get a long swinging bop passage with a treble piano part and a rising horn progression dancing over it.

Recorded in 1978, it has to rank near the top of the most famous songs of the disco era. For all that, it didn’t show up in nearly as many movie soundtracks as you’d expect - 1990s Paris Is Burning is the only one mentioned in Wikipedia’s entry for it - though Mary J. Blige and Will Smith covered it for 2004’s Shark Tale.

Lynn co-wrote it with a guy named David Foster and the Marty and David Paich songwriting team - the latter went on to become the keyboardist for Toto - and it launched her career. The original recording featured at least one more name/reference I knew besides Paich - Ray Parker, Jr. played guitar on it (to finish the thought, David Shields played bass and James Gadson hit the skins) - and Lynn would work with famous names throughout her fairly robust career.

With the single to carry it, Lynn’s eponymous debut album hit one million copies sold in a blink and topped out at No. 5 on the Billboard album charts. The single only reached No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, but went all the way to No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B charts - another touchstone in her career. As noted in a glowing retrospective of her anthology on a site called The Second Disc, another single from her debut, “Star Love,” charted at No. 16 - a fact that, for me, rescues her from the (alleged) stain of being a one-hit wonder; count the R&B charts (and why wouldn’t you?), and she’s not even close.

Lynn’s smash has a hell of a legacy, as a guy named DJ Prince Language explains in his notes on Paris is Burning:

One Hit No More, No. 88: Walter Egan and the Muses Behind "Magnet and Steel"

Receipt.

The Hit
When he described the bones of his bigger hit, Walter Egan recalls having something very specific in mind: “a '50s throwback that was consciously in my mind. I was trying to write a song that had the Stroll beat, which is the snare hits every other one, that kind of 6/8 feel” - and you’ll definitely hear that (assuming you already haven’t). He hated his first pass at the lyrics, though, so he parked that part of the creative process and waited for inspiration. He found the first part while working with one of the producers on his first album, and the second while driving up the 101. As he recalled to a site called The College Crowd Digs Me in 2016:

“We had been doing recording sessions for Fundamental Roll...a song on there called ‘Tunnel O' Love.’ And Stevie was singing her wailing, banshee, background vocals. This was at Sound City. The now famous Sound City. And that was the night I just went...'oh my God, how am I so lucky?' Ya know, all the superlatives you could think of about someone falling for Stevie. In my young youth, at the time, it was just another girl who was very talented.”

His second muse was “one of those completely customized Continentals with the lights under it and the diamond window. We used to call it a Pimpmobile in those days.” He titled the song “Magnet and Steel” and, yes, the “Stevie” in that recollection was Stevie Nicks, who co-produced Egan’s debut album, Fundamental Roll, and who shows up all over it. He borrowed his second album’s title, Not Shy, from the vanity plate on that Continental and the phrase “with you I’m not shy” repeats throughout the song. Stevie Nicks wasn’t alone of the backing vocals for that track - Lindsey Buckingham, the other co-producer on his debut album (it’s a funny story), and a woman he’d worked with for years named Annie McLoone (or McLoon, depending on the interview) - but Buckingham put a lot of late-70s polish on the 50s chassis.

“Magnet and Steel” dropped around the same time as Fleetwood Mac’s notorious masterpiece, Rumours, and, as Egan told Classic Bands, “all of a sudden there was my record with Stevie's voice all over it and Lindsey's very precise production and playing on some of it, and so it was noticed because of that.” All that happened in late winter/early spring 1977 - Rumours was released in February 1977 - which pumped “Magnet and Steel” to No. 8 on the Billboard (No. 18 on the Easy Listening charts). Egan felt like he had a strong follow-up with a nostalgia-tinged “medium-rock” number called “Hot Summer Nights” - a song with a story of its own - and he recalls having a conversation with CBS Records’ Walter Yetknikoff, who assured him they’d push him just like they pushed Billy Joel, Springsteen, Les Dudek, and Boz Scaggs, all of whom Yetniknoff told him took four albums to break through. Egan would wait until the hot summer nights gave way to the long, cold nights of October…

Crash Course Timeline, No. 26: Blanche Calloway, as Big as Her Brother's Shadow, Maybe Bigger

Damn legend.

As noted in the prior chapter on Cab Calloway, he grew up in the shadow of his older sister, Blanche Calloway. Pulling from multiple sources, first quoted from a website called Jazz Rhythm:

“Cab Calloway borrowed key elements from his elder sister’s act -- her bravura vocal style and Hi-de-Ho call and response routines. His 1976 memoir acknowledges her influence, declaring Blanche ‘vivacious, lovely, personality plus and a hell of a singer and dancer,’ an all-around entertainer who was ‘fabulous, happy and extroverted.’”

Now, from a site called The LeEMS Machine:

“She is relentlessly written about as residing in the shadow of her younger brother Cab Calloway. However, scholars and researchers have pointed out that, at one point, Blanche Calloway had attained more fame and renown, helping her brother in his show business breakthrough and inspiring his famous style.”

She would wind up living in Cab's shadow by the end of the 1930s, but, all things considered, Blanche Calloway arguably had the bigger life; it wouldn’t surprise me if neither one of them cared one way or the other. He borrowed from her style, she borrowed phrasing and characters from his songs (see cameos by Minnie the Moocher and the King of Sweden in Blanche Calloway’s hit, “Growlin’ Dan”), and so on. Both Calloways made their mark during the period when white audiences finally woke up to what black artists had been doing for decades. In this chapter, the “Hi De Ho Man” makes room for the woman who started her famous “Just a Crazy Song” with “Hi Hi Hi.”

Like her younger brother, Blanche Calloway was born in Rochester, New York, only five years earlier, in 1902. The family returned to their real home, Baltimore, Maryland, when Blanche was a teenager, with their mother, Martha Eulalia Reed, and her second husband, an insurance salesman named John Nelson Fortune.A church organist, Ms. Reed taught her children to play and love music, while trying to steer them away from careers in music, and she failed with at least three of them. In Blanche’s case, the betrayal came at the hands of a music teacher who pushed her to audition with a local talent scout. After Blanche dropped out of Morgan State College in the early 1920s, she wouldn’t hold another straight job until somewhere around the end of World War II.

One Hit No More, No. 87: Through the Back Door of the Disco (Round) with Alicia Bridges

If you know the actors, you know the genre.

The Hit
Even people who haven’t seen Love at First Bite, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and The Last Days of Disco (strong recommend on the latter) have a 90% or better chance of knowing Alicia Bridges’ 1978 mega-hit “I Love the Nightlife (Disco ‘Round).” Now, for the things 90% of people don’t know…

For one, while Bridges and her songwriting and then-personal partner Susan Hutcheson made a conscious choice to write a song with the word “disco” in it, they did not did not sit down to write a disco hit. According to her Wikipedia entry, Bridges/Hutcheson had hoped to shape it into a Memphis Soul tune, while the producer of her debut album, Steve Buckingham, pushed for an R&B sound as well as suggesting she go with “I Love the Nightlife” for the title instead of the original “Disco ‘Round”; the decision to go full-disco came from her benefactor (with emphasis on “bene,” i.e., good), Bill Lowery, while the work of crafting the hit fell to a disco producer/DJ named Jim Burgess (who delivered other hits like The Doobie Brothers’ “What a Fool Believes” and KISS’s “I Was Made for Lovin’ You.”

Lowery guided the Bridges’ hit to its final version in other ways: Bridges/Hutcheson’s first draft had the song’s narrator making up with the man in the second verse, but, as Bridges shared with a site called Queer Music Heritage in 2008, Lowery pushed against that (“no, don’t make up with this joker”), while pushing for the specific line “make a man out of you.” A second-hand quote from Bridges posted in a Songfacts blurb undoes the rest of the origin story:

“That wasn't cut at all with disco in mind. Disco was just where I was gonna go after I'd told this man to leave me alone, it wasn't meant to be the theme of the song. We do love the nightlife in the sense that we love to be awake at night when its quiet and we can do some bizarre and productive thinking. But actually I don't care for discos at all.”

The song turned into a disco anthem, of course, if not one of the great disco anthems of all time. It peaked at No. 5, but parked in the Hot 100 for 27 weeks (over half a year, for those counting at home). The eponymous LP hung on even longer (35 weeks) and, in something you couldn't see coming, but for the times, the single crossed-over as a hit on the country charts as well.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 25: Cab Calloway, So Much More than the "Hi De Ho Man"

For those who first saw him in 1980.

“Cab Calloway is hip-hop.”
- Jon Landis, Director (The Blues Brothers, among others)

I’m a big fan of Landis, that movie and several others, but…yeah, that feels like a bridge too far to an anachronism. Related, raise your hand if The Blues Brothers was the first time you saw Cab Calloway perform. [Raises hand.]

At the same time, those few words from Landis hint at how unique, innovative and just plain massive Cab Calloway was in his 1930s-1940s heyday. As much as he had to claw (and disappoint his solidly-middle-class parents) to get there, once Calloway took over the house-band at the Cotton Club after Duke Ellington (profiled earlier) departed in 1931, he wouldn’t more than glance back for the next two decades. He hosted a twice-weekly radio, appeared in movies, wrote a succession of books on slang (1938’s Cab Calloway’s Cat-alogue was the first jive language dictionary available for circulation in New York’s public libraries), and featuring in a Bettie Boop cartoons (e.g., “Minnie the Moocher,” “The Old Man of the Mountain,” and “Snow White”) with his own dance moves translated to celluloid by the miracle of rotoscoping. In between all that, he invented The Moonwalk (though, as he remarked, “it was called the Buzz back then.”)

Calloway made a splash in every media available to him at his peak and, though racial discrimination was very much alive and unwell at that time, the hip ‘n’ high-brow felt the change in the air. When he starred opposite the then-fading Al Jolson (profiled earlier) in 1936’s The Singing Kid, film critic Arthur Knight saw a passing of the torch:

“…when Calloway begins singing in his characteristic style – in which the words are tools for exploring rhythm and stretching melody – it becomes clear that American culture is changing around Jolson and with (and through) Calloway.”

To think, had a followed his parents advice and gone to law school, none of that would have happened.

He was born Cabell Calloway III in Rochester, New York, in 1907 to two college graduates, his father, Cab Calloway, Jr., a lawyer with a sideline in real state, his mother, Martha Eulalia Reed, a teacher and church organist. (Not everyone who grows up with music in the household becomes a musician, but a lot of musicians grew up with music in the household.) The family relocated to Baltimore, Maryland when Calloway III was 11…which put him close to Pimlico, which gets a little closer to where his story begins. He skipped school often to work, selling newspapers, shine shoes and, when he could get out to the horse track, cool down horses after a race. A taste for gambling followed like a chaser and, after someone caught Calloway III “playing dice on the church steps,” his mother and stepfather (Calloway, Jr. died shortly after the move) shipped him to a reform school called Downington Industrial and Agricultural School.