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Disco - The Term: Why It Had To Go!

If you don't know who I am, here's a quick history lesson. They call me THE VYNIL JUNKIE! Why? You must think I am obtuse because I mis-spell the name. A vinyl junkie is a avid, sometimes rabid collector of vinyl records, of which I must confess, I am a charter member. THE VYNIL JUNKIE is ME, my persona, a great DISCO deejay who remixed the hell out of every record I had two copies of! And I had two of almost everything!

I wasn't "politically correct". Sometimes it was held against me because I loved women. That is a reason most of you never heard of me. I didn't kiss ass, ever! I always TOLD IT LIKE IT IS!! Lost many great jobs that way. Didn't get hired at a lot of clubs because of my no bullshit attitude. A lot of people hated me for it. I was TOO honest, I rocked the boat! So I became this PERSONA who wrote a music/DISCO/record/deejay/night club business magazine in the eighties, the self-titled VYNIL JUNKIE. You couldn't buy it at the news stand, only people in the business got it. And they really GOT IT!

They loved the TELL THE TRUTH attitude I had. If they sent me a record; despite that the Record Pools told them these records were great, and the deejays on their mailing lists told them it was great. If THE VYNIL JUNKIE said it sucked, they knew IT SUCKED!! Everyone else was kissing their ass, not wanting to disappoint the record companies who were sending them all these free records! I told them the TRUTH!! BLUNTLY!! Never pulled any punches.

The record companies looked at it as if I was saving them money by not telling them to go ahead and invest tons of money on a PRODUCT that wasn't going to sell!! That was the ORIGINAL purpose of the PROMO copy! FEEDBACK, honest feedback. We did ourselves no favor by telling them the record was great, and then you never played it! That cost them valuable money that these companies needed. The way I saw things was like I always do, DO THE RIGHT THING!! THE VYNIL JUNKIE was very much appreciated by every record company. They couldn't get enough of me and my views. That, in turn, made whatever I said about a record, that much more powerful. If I praised a local record release, let's say it's 1984, and LEWIS MARTINEE gives me a press test copy of his new project, EXPOSE. And I play this record, THE POINT OF NO RETURN. The crowd response told me that this was a sure thing. I informed the world of that fact, and the next week, ARISTA records signs them. I don't take or get the credit. But I KNOW that my opinion was very vital to the A & R guy, because he told me so. This happened literally hundreds of times.

That is part of the VYNIL JUNKIE. The other part was my mixing. Always kept the dance floors packed. Great mixing, but THE VYNIL JUNKIE was the best remixer in the game. Give me three turntables and the right amount of records, and instead of, lets say, one hundred records played in an eight hour night by the average deejay. I only played sixty during that same time span. I remixed more hits, they were on longer, the dance floor only heard the BEST, I needed no FILLERS!! That too was the VYNIL JUNKIE

The whole reason for that explanation as to who I am, is so that you understand me a little. You know that I KNOW that what I say is not only the truth (from my perspective), but that when I tell you how WE ruined DISCO, you'll see where I'm coming from. We let the thing we love most, get misunderstood, over-saturated and picked on without doing a thing about it! Those THREE things (along with other issues as well) were the main cause of the DEATH of the TERM "DISCO".

I mean even night clubs don't refer themselves as DISCOS any longer. That word, the term: DISCO!! It is like "cooddies"! Yes,that is what little kids called a slimy disease, and that is what happened to that word outside of our world. We let DISCO get a terminal case of the "cooddies".

We love that word, but the rest of the world, especially the UNITED STATES, absolutely sees that word as a sort of SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASE. They removed it from our reference of NIGHT LIFE. That is just the latest tragedy that has fallen my favorite word. No-one DISCO dances anymore? There is no such thing as DISCO music either. They killed that disease in between a double-header baseball game in Chicago almost thirty years ago! And WHO was the main person responsible for the BLOWING UP of DISCO records? A F*CKIN DEEJAY!!!

You see where I'm going with this!!?? We stood by, and let the ROCK N' ROLL guys push us out of the world we created! No one fought back as everyone told us DISCO SUCKS!! Well, actually I kicked a lot of ROCK ass in those days!!! But that was a pebble of sand to respond to the tidal wave of ANTI-DISCO sentiment that swept the nation. We stood idly by wit out defending DISCO or ourselves! Where were the chants of ROCK SUCKS!!

I did not like to hear comments about my profession. About my love, my life. It hurt, in more ways than met our eyes! It was a misunderstanding of the concept by everyone else. I can't be positive as to what that was. Sometimes I think it was the GUYS who couldn't DANCE worth a lick that started the homophobic attitude that every macho man had towards DISCO. I went to DISCOS to get laid, isn't that the same thing they were also looking for? But, you see, they didn't have the balls to learn how to dance! So they attacked us with sayings, even BUMPER STICKERS that said DISCO SUCKS, or that DISCO IS FOR FAGGOTS! We did nothing!! That was strike one. Remember how to play ball, three strikes, you're out!!

As DISCO ruled the mid-1970s. Everyone and their brother decided to somehow, jump on board the DISCO gravy train. Anyone with some records and two turntables became a "DEEJAY". The new kids on the block, really didn't get it, they were just out to have a good time. "I'm the deejay at..." and that was good enough to get the ugliest guy laid. So it was fun, sexy and exciting work. Here starts another problem. Over-saturation. Not only of the deejays, but every TOM, DICK and RICKY DEES think they can make a DISCO record. The problem was that the record labels saw the earning potential, they became desperate, and let IDIOTS like RICK DEES spit on our faces and turntables (more on RICK in a minute).

Everyone thought they had the next DONNA SUMMER or ABBA. People who had no right even being fifty feet from a recording studio now had record deals! In 1979 I ran the FLORIDA RECORD POOL for Bo Crane in Miami. We had over 150 members receiving over three hundred records every three days! Most of this vinyl sucked!! The record companies were told by US, the deejays, that their product was great, fantastic, awesome. What we should have done is tell them the truth, how they are wasting money on this worthless crap they were shipping to us. If you were one of the "lucky" top ten deejays in your respective record pool, you could look forward to , easily, over a thousand records a week from August of 1979 until December of 1980! Out of that thousand, you were lucky if you could add ten records a week to your rotation. My friends, in the world of business, that is a classic case of OVER-SATURATION!!

This article came to me as I was going thru the vinyl Disco record section of DiscoMusic.com. Reviewing the many records, the thousands of records, that other deejays have listed. I am going thru them alphabetically, and see so much crap from those days. I just skip past them, since I never played them. All except one, and I'm almost there! The over-saturation of deejays, DISCO records and now we have two strikes against the term DISCO!

The deejay has to bear the responsibility for the death of the term DISCO. Those two big points I just brought up are not acceptable. But nothing in comparison to our, the deejays, biggest mistake!! That mistake, I'll explain in a minute exactly why, is RICKY DEES!!! We, (I generalize, because I have never, ever, played DISCO DUCK. Never have, never will) played his stupid song with a dumb smile on our face as he was spitting in it. Rick Dees, a deejay, hated DISCO (probably can't dance a lick) so much, that it was a running joke on his show in a Los Angeles radio station. He would say that DISCO SUCKS, that DISCO music is boring, anyone can do it. You starting to see what he did.

He bragged on the air, that he was going to make a DISCO song. Push came to shove, and he had to back-up that big mouth of his, and found some studio musicians to give him a "catchy tune", that would sound good blaring inside a DISCO. He added the stupidest lyrics he could create, not to actually be an artist, but to make fun of DISCO. SO we, not me ,as a culture embraced this disaster as a FUN record. It was ammunition for his despise of DISCO. He made fun of the fact that DISCO was making him a ton of money. We threw gasoline on the fire of the anti-DISCO movement!! How stupid could we get. Obviously, so stupid that it ruined the TERM DISCO. STRIKE THREE, DISCO'S OUT!!!

In closing, now you see what happened to our favorite word. It still gets laughs, but the spirit lives on. In todays' music, across the board, the DISCO influence exists. Every genre of music today has BEATS, the danceable thing in todays music, is DISCO! In night clubs that are the grandchildren of the great DISCOS of yesteryear, it is our blueprint they follow. And in the over-saturation of RAP and all its cousins, I see the same mistakes happening. Only today it has a lot of BLING!---- So we simply sit here, writing about it now. I, for one, acknowledge that we screwed it up ourselves, by not fighting back, and doing the right thing! We let it happen, DISCO, it had to go!!!

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