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. 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.

One Hit No More, No. 81: Cerrone Makes "Love in C Minor"

I didn't mention the sci-fi theme?

The Hit
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: