It has been some time since I've posted one of Sean Lawrence's Discaire columns from Christopher Street. I've had some moments to delve into the archives lately, and this, to me, is one of the most interesting of Lawrence's Discaire installments.
While the record reviews are, as always, enjoyable in both their style and point-of-view, I love how he implores listeners to play a Celi Bee single at the wrong speed for example. His cultural observations, however, are probably the most interesting part of this particular column. Given the time it was published, (officially July, but likely printed in late June of 1979), it seems he was quite accurately taking the cultural temperature regarding Disco in the US.
Speaking to that, while commercial oversaturation is one part of the Great Disco Backlash(tm), the role that homophobia and racism played, while widely acknowledged these days, wasn't always so. Even still, it remains occasionally downplayed, especially by those who spearheaded it; Lawrence was one of the few, especially from this time, who seemed to clock it straight-on, especially here. It would be a good couple of decades or more before mainstream journalists would catch up and fully recognize it in the same way.
Interesting historical note: Lawrence references Barefoot Boy, or rather "Barefoot Boy Zeus" in the 9th paragraph, a small but legendary gay disco and bar, that would change its name to Zeus, likely not long before this article was printed... Among the DJs who played there was Tony Smith, who passed recently. When I spoke to the late Montreal DJ Robert Ouimet, he mentioned how Smith's selections were always a New York highlight for him.
Discaire: Peter & Celi & Bette & Rod... & Donna
by Sean Lawrence
Woody Allen and Peter Allen may be related. Both are as essential to New York City as Zabar’s and both are revered as personal icons by many of the same Manhattanites. While Woody Allen writes the Everyman stories of the man who couldn’t, wouldn’t and shouldn’t assimilate himself into the Big (inauthentic) Apple, Peter Allen sings the songs of the uninvited. Partly because Peter Allen uses many lyricists, he is many things to many people; Peter Allen fans are so possessive that I expect to see decoder rings at his next concert.
Peter Allen’s reviews are usually a little like the letters you get from home after you’ve come out—odd, disaffected, emotionally dishonest, glossy-eyed, and ultimately wrong. Critics often refer to Peter Allen as androgynous when they mean something else. They reach for words like decadent and polymorphous and, when their vocabulary fails them, turn to the audience for a gay body count. And then the Peter Allen mystique survives yet another review. (During his Broadway show, Up in One, Allen parodied a Village Voice review. Part of his ethos now consists of self-consciousness about being misunderstood.)
Allen’s new album, I Could Have Been A Sailor (A&M SP-4739), is a solid and listenable achievement. While the songs may not, as Joni Mitchell says, stick to your senses like butterscotch, they do resonate with Peter Allen-ness, which is to say they remind you that he has dibs on Upper West Side rainy Sundays, with their arc of pleasure and depression. One expects to find Bacon Bits in his songs, so derivative of the sensibility of brunch is the Peter Allen milieu. I Could Have Been A Sailor is a six-mimosa album.
Self-effacement unifies the work of Peter Allen’s stable of lyricists into a sort of consistent persona, enabling his fans to entertain the conviction that Peter Allen shines through even though the words are often not his own. Allen can even survive a Carole Bayer Sager lyric; in “Two Boys,” he has made a virtue of her simplicity (simple-mindedness?) And Marvin Hamlisch’s pastiche. The title track and “Paris at 21” are about roads not taken, bittersweet visions of the unattainable. “Don’t Wish Too Hard,” and “I’d Rather Leave While I’m In Love” ponder the ironies of will and desire. “Two Boys” and “If You Were Wondering” are vulnerably, openly gay expressions of identity.
Periodically Peter Allen writes a song that makes him very rich. “Don’t Cry Out Loud” on this album is one of those songs. (Oddly, he doesn’t interpret it better than Melissa Manchester did.) Allen is the only one who can sing his monster hit, “I Honestly Love You”—the song that transformed him from “a mere songwriter into a mere songwriter with a swell house on the beach”—without the audience demanding insulin. There’s a good chance that this album will break Mr. Allen’s 50,000-sale batting average; but whether or not it will be, I Could Have Been A Sailor is certainly a whole lot better than “that album with Melissa Manchester’s song on it.”
Celi Bee is one of those international disco stars with a delightfully inverted past who has gone multiple-gold without my friends knowing who she is—one of those performers it is fun to introduce others to. She was born in New York and moved to Puerto Rico when she was thirteen. Formerly known as Celines, she and her husband, Pepe Luis Soto, were Spanish singing stars in Puerto Rico in the early Seventies. She’s a star in Japan, where she has done TV specials, and she’s well known throughout Latin America and France.
Introducing a friend to Celi Bee’s latest song, “For the Love of My Man” (TK Disco, TDK 126) is like introducing someone to cocaine or masturbation or snails. It’s supposed to be played at 45, but I prefer it at 33-1/3, at which speed the song sounds lost, druggy, as if sung from a pre-alpha dream state. This is an appeal for love from the dungeon, a longing full of entropy—the kind of longing one comes across, cheek to cheek, in those monasteries of ex-lovers, the baths. If a junky had enough energy to fall in love, this would be that love’s anthem. It’s the kind of song that makes you think you hear someone crying in the distance at the baths, but assume it’s only your imagination or conscience.
On the flip-side of this twelve-inch disc is the more energetic “Fly Me On the Wings of Love,” which is also affecting and full of the ironic Celi Bee sound (which should be called “Eastern Mellow”).
I was at the Barefoot Boy Zeus when I first heard Bette Midler’s new single, “Married Men" (Atlantic DK 4800)—which I vote to be the summer song most likely to fight it out til September with Donna Summer’s equally wonderful new material on Bad Girls (Casablanca NBLP-2-7150). I would love to heave heard the conversation out at Casablanca Record and FilmWorks: “Hey gang, let’s do a Donna as Prostitute album!” Next time she drags her daughter Mimi out on stage and sings the lachrymose and laughable “The whole world needs me” to her, the lyric will have a new meaning. Whenever Bad Girls comes on at a disco I want to go up to gay men, shake them out of their poppers-induced stupor, and say, “No, this is not another euphemistic song about you.”
On the political disco front, I think I detect that a couple of DJ’s on New York’s WKTU-FM, the nation’s top disco station, actually hate disco. Given the decline in taste on that station, one can understand why. Those of us who switched from WBLS may have to reconsider. A recent check of the WBLS playlist indicated that they’re more in touch with the cream of the disco sounds.
During one of Rod Stewart’s recent Long Island Railroad concerts at Madison Square Garden the kids momentarily stopped the Sieg-Heil motions commonly called dancing in the teen world and went limp. Stewart was singing “Do You Think I’m Sexy?" Boy, have these kids decided to hate disco and peer-pressure one another into hard-rock conformity (a subject I’ll have more to say about next month). Maybe it has something to do with not being able to dance in size 42 Jockey shorts (white, of course). As the names of various groups coming to the Garden (Yes, Bad Company, Teddy Pendergrass) flashed on the electric billboard the young masses booed Pendergrass and the Village People. Yup, the kids are just as anti-gay and racist as mom and dad. (One down and 133 to go). “Disco Sucks” is a common slogan at these concerts, one that may be as anti-orthodontic as it is anything else.
I’m always swearing that I’ll never go to another rock concert at Madison Square Garden; then, just as my hearing returns to normal, I get the self-destructive urge. I’ve picked enough depressing sociological details at these concerts to write The Total Teenager. At one Bruce Springsteen “I Love New Jersey” gala, some pudgy, macho teenager kept hollering out the name of a shopping centre I think his father owned. Ether Bruce had once played there or the kid just wanted everyone to know where he was coming from.
____________________________________________
PREVIOUS RELATED ENTRIES:
vintage articles: sean lawrence’s discaire column: kitchen disco // christopher street - june 1979 (friday may 28, 2021)
disco delivery interviews robert ouimet (saturday may 24, 2014)
vintage articles: sean lawrence’s discaire column: supply without demand // christopher street - may 1979 (sunday february 23, 2014)
LINKS:
christopher street - the magazine of gay culture and ideas
wikipedia: peter allen - i'd rather be a sailor (album)
discogs: peter allen - i'd rather be a sailor lp
discogs: celi bee - fly me on the wings of love/for the love of my man (us 12")
wikipedia: married men (song)
discogs: bette midler - married men (us 12")
wikipedia: donna summer - bad girls (album)
discogs: donna summer - bad girls (us lp)
instagram: queer happened here - barefoot boy
discomusic.com: dance clubs & discotheques - barefoot boy, the (web archive)
chelsea community news: eight gay bars and clubs we miss this pride (by michael musto) (june 25, 2022)
CATEGORIES: VINTAGE ARTICLES
