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| 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.
Given its long-time relevance in pop culture - Priscilla, in particular, gave it new life when it came out - it barely feels worth breaking down “I Love the Nightlife,” but it has some fun elements. It rests on top of a basic back-beat that doesn’t do anything more interesting than pause here and there; an electric organ provides a steady warm tone and a fairly subtle, plucked guitar comes into the melody like someone tossing glitter, but both leave space for a bass-line that anchors it. All those melodic elements soar higher in the chorus (while the rhythm section does…more of the same), then there’s the blast of saxophone in the bridge, but “I Love the Nightlife” keeps it simple for anyone who wants to dance to it. Think of it as, if a singer-songwriter took a stab at disco.
The Rest of the Story
Alicia Bridges was born in Charlotte, North Carolina back in 1953, but grew up small town mountain county. Her mom had her tap-dancing on stage early as age 5 and generally let young Alicia do what she wanted in terms of performing - something that didn’t extend to the rest of Bridges’ personal life. As she told Queer Music Heritage, Bridges had a vivid memory of her mother telling her in anger that “she was not going to have a homosexual living in her house.” Bridges never doubted her sexuality, but, growing up where and how she did, she didn’t know even know the meaning of the word “homosexual.” She took up the work of filling in the blanks with some help from the local library. Bridges doesn’t recall a time in her life when she wasn’t open about her sexuality and, happily, she was able to surround herself with people who knew and accepted her as a lesbian - including all the bandmates she had and people like Bill Lowery. When she finally publicly came out in 1998 to The Advocate, she comes off as mildly puzzled that everyone didn’t already know. Back to the career…
She hosted her own radio show by age 12 and, as noted in (literally) every thing I read about her, “ran all the dials, the turntables, cued the records and made all the announcements live on the air,” something in which she clearly takes pride. Bridges learned to play guitar two years prior and was playing shows with a couple North Carolina bands - first, The Ray Ledford Band, then as lead singer for a band called Zachary Ridge - starting in her mid-teens. Both bands mainly, if not exclusively, played covers, but there’s an odd, accidental debate about what she played: while a site called GayCultureLand has a loose sentence about how “she sang for the Love Generation and Flower Children of the early 70s,” you get a different sense of the music when she ticks through the bands her bands covered on stage for Queer Music Heritage (e.g., ““the Rolling Stones, Led Zepellin, Uriah Heap, Grand Funk Railroad”). Bridges recalls playing “rough” venues, but has fond memories of her time with Zachery (sp?) Ridge, in particular. Moreover, the connections she made during that time wound up introducing her to the people who would ultimately introduce her to Lowery.
Lowery operated out of Atlanta and, once he invited Bridges and Hutcheson to write songs for him, he gave them a literally incredible amount of time and freedom to work. He paid cash advances large enough to spare them the double-duty of playing live shows and song-writing and, during the production of Bridges' debut, Lowery kept telling Bridges not to worry if they didn’t land a hit, because they would just try again on the follow up. Who knew they'd hit gold (maybe platinum) on the first time ‘round.
Bridges had a low opinion of disco and no intention of continuing in the genre (as quoted in Songfacts, “I will never do a disco album. I'd prefer to do deodorant commercials. I didn't sing since I was ten years old so I could stand up like a moron and go 'Getfunkynow, getfunkynow, getboogie-woogie, getfunkynow'"). As such, when the time came to pick a follow-up, they chose the guitar-anchored rocker “Body Heat.” The choice wasn’t odd as it sounds, at least according to the Wiki-editors on her story:
“It was a ‘rock/dance’ song released at a time when there was some rivalry between disco fans and rock fans; this time period began to see more songs which mixed the genres of rock and disco to create a ‘rock/disco’ flavor.”
It didn’t fail outright, but it didn’t meaningfully chart either and that more or less ended Bridges’ time in the brighter spotlights. She continued in music working as a producer and a DJ and, when she no longer had to work through studios - and this pushes the story into the 2000s - she started releasing material on her own, mostly remixes of her old material, including an updated spin on “I Love the Nightlife,” only with her overseeing the production [Ed. - That one made the sampler, but there's too much clutter to get through to find it on Youtube.] Near as I can tell, the rest of her life played out the same way it would for most professional musicians and that’s, more or less, Alicia Bridges’ story.
About the Sampler
First things first, anyone interested in the story behind some of Bridges’ other material would do well to hit the link to the Queer Music Heritage post and scroll down (as in about halfway through) where she gets into the stories behind the other songs on her first three albums. To share the history of one song, “This Girl Don’t Care,” (very 80s rock) she described the songwriting process, which happened to coincide with the end of her relationship with Hutcheson:
“And I remember when I came to her and said you got to listen to this song, here's what it says ‘I don't like you any more. You treat me like a wholesale item, and I can't see you anymore.’ And I said, ‘What do you got on that, Susan?’ And then she wrote the second verse, right in each other's face, and not with anger, but that's how that song was written.”
That one made the cut, obviously, but by some happy coincidence, I added most of the songs covered in the Queer Music Heritage post to the (factually, badly-named) sampler, which came in at 12 songs. Nearly all of them play against Bridges’ most famous type - i.e., they’re mostly in a rock vein, some of it pretty damn meaty - e.g., “Bullets Don’t Talk,” “City Rhythm,” “Diamond in the Rough,” and “What Would You Do If Your Heart Stopped Beating.” The rest of the selection showcase her range as a songwriter, numbers that border on stuff you’d hear either in a musical or from a professional songwriting shop. Those include the airy, dreamy “High Altitude,” a pair lounge piano ballads - “Cheap Affairs” and “Broken Woman” - and what I’d call, for lack of a better word, an 80s pop ballad called “If You Only Knew.”
Most of the above misses my several sweet-spots (by a good bit, too), but, if you thought of Alicia Bridges as some throw-away disco act, all the above should disabuse you of the stereotype. Whatever you (or I) think of her material, she had the chops to write scores of well-constructed, mostly thoughtful songs. In some ways, she came from a different tradition and stumbled to disco fame through the wrong door. And she still wrote and performed one of the most iconic anthems in a genre she didn’t even rate. Crazy shit.
Till the next one…which is a guy I’ve never heard of. Good times...
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.
Given its long-time relevance in pop culture - Priscilla, in particular, gave it new life when it came out - it barely feels worth breaking down “I Love the Nightlife,” but it has some fun elements. It rests on top of a basic back-beat that doesn’t do anything more interesting than pause here and there; an electric organ provides a steady warm tone and a fairly subtle, plucked guitar comes into the melody like someone tossing glitter, but both leave space for a bass-line that anchors it. All those melodic elements soar higher in the chorus (while the rhythm section does…more of the same), then there’s the blast of saxophone in the bridge, but “I Love the Nightlife” keeps it simple for anyone who wants to dance to it. Think of it as, if a singer-songwriter took a stab at disco.
The Rest of the Story
Alicia Bridges was born in Charlotte, North Carolina back in 1953, but grew up small town mountain county. Her mom had her tap-dancing on stage early as age 5 and generally let young Alicia do what she wanted in terms of performing - something that didn’t extend to the rest of Bridges’ personal life. As she told Queer Music Heritage, Bridges had a vivid memory of her mother telling her in anger that “she was not going to have a homosexual living in her house.” Bridges never doubted her sexuality, but, growing up where and how she did, she didn’t know even know the meaning of the word “homosexual.” She took up the work of filling in the blanks with some help from the local library. Bridges doesn’t recall a time in her life when she wasn’t open about her sexuality and, happily, she was able to surround herself with people who knew and accepted her as a lesbian - including all the bandmates she had and people like Bill Lowery. When she finally publicly came out in 1998 to The Advocate, she comes off as mildly puzzled that everyone didn’t already know. Back to the career…
She hosted her own radio show by age 12 and, as noted in (literally) every thing I read about her, “ran all the dials, the turntables, cued the records and made all the announcements live on the air,” something in which she clearly takes pride. Bridges learned to play guitar two years prior and was playing shows with a couple North Carolina bands - first, The Ray Ledford Band, then as lead singer for a band called Zachary Ridge - starting in her mid-teens. Both bands mainly, if not exclusively, played covers, but there’s an odd, accidental debate about what she played: while a site called GayCultureLand has a loose sentence about how “she sang for the Love Generation and Flower Children of the early 70s,” you get a different sense of the music when she ticks through the bands her bands covered on stage for Queer Music Heritage (e.g., ““the Rolling Stones, Led Zepellin, Uriah Heap, Grand Funk Railroad”). Bridges recalls playing “rough” venues, but has fond memories of her time with Zachery (sp?) Ridge, in particular. Moreover, the connections she made during that time wound up introducing her to the people who would ultimately introduce her to Lowery.
Lowery operated out of Atlanta and, once he invited Bridges and Hutcheson to write songs for him, he gave them a literally incredible amount of time and freedom to work. He paid cash advances large enough to spare them the double-duty of playing live shows and song-writing and, during the production of Bridges' debut, Lowery kept telling Bridges not to worry if they didn’t land a hit, because they would just try again on the follow up. Who knew they'd hit gold (maybe platinum) on the first time ‘round.
Bridges had a low opinion of disco and no intention of continuing in the genre (as quoted in Songfacts, “I will never do a disco album. I'd prefer to do deodorant commercials. I didn't sing since I was ten years old so I could stand up like a moron and go 'Getfunkynow, getfunkynow, getboogie-woogie, getfunkynow'"). As such, when the time came to pick a follow-up, they chose the guitar-anchored rocker “Body Heat.” The choice wasn’t odd as it sounds, at least according to the Wiki-editors on her story:
“It was a ‘rock/dance’ song released at a time when there was some rivalry between disco fans and rock fans; this time period began to see more songs which mixed the genres of rock and disco to create a ‘rock/disco’ flavor.”
It didn’t fail outright, but it didn’t meaningfully chart either and that more or less ended Bridges’ time in the brighter spotlights. She continued in music working as a producer and a DJ and, when she no longer had to work through studios - and this pushes the story into the 2000s - she started releasing material on her own, mostly remixes of her old material, including an updated spin on “I Love the Nightlife,” only with her overseeing the production [Ed. - That one made the sampler, but there's too much clutter to get through to find it on Youtube.] Near as I can tell, the rest of her life played out the same way it would for most professional musicians and that’s, more or less, Alicia Bridges’ story.
About the Sampler
First things first, anyone interested in the story behind some of Bridges’ other material would do well to hit the link to the Queer Music Heritage post and scroll down (as in about halfway through) where she gets into the stories behind the other songs on her first three albums. To share the history of one song, “This Girl Don’t Care,” (very 80s rock) she described the songwriting process, which happened to coincide with the end of her relationship with Hutcheson:
“And I remember when I came to her and said you got to listen to this song, here's what it says ‘I don't like you any more. You treat me like a wholesale item, and I can't see you anymore.’ And I said, ‘What do you got on that, Susan?’ And then she wrote the second verse, right in each other's face, and not with anger, but that's how that song was written.”
That one made the cut, obviously, but by some happy coincidence, I added most of the songs covered in the Queer Music Heritage post to the (factually, badly-named) sampler, which came in at 12 songs. Nearly all of them play against Bridges’ most famous type - i.e., they’re mostly in a rock vein, some of it pretty damn meaty - e.g., “Bullets Don’t Talk,” “City Rhythm,” “Diamond in the Rough,” and “What Would You Do If Your Heart Stopped Beating.” The rest of the selection showcase her range as a songwriter, numbers that border on stuff you’d hear either in a musical or from a professional songwriting shop. Those include the airy, dreamy “High Altitude,” a pair lounge piano ballads - “Cheap Affairs” and “Broken Woman” - and what I’d call, for lack of a better word, an 80s pop ballad called “If You Only Knew.”
Most of the above misses my several sweet-spots (by a good bit, too), but, if you thought of Alicia Bridges as some throw-away disco act, all the above should disabuse you of the stereotype. Whatever you (or I) think of her material, she had the chops to write scores of well-constructed, mostly thoughtful songs. In some ways, she came from a different tradition and stumbled to disco fame through the wrong door. And she still wrote and performed one of the most iconic anthems in a genre she didn’t even rate. Crazy shit.
Till the next one…which is a guy I’ve never heard of. Good times...
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