Disco Supreme in Seattle

[JussiK]

Hail Seattle's Music Experience Project museum. Their disco exhibit is everything you can hope for and definitely more.

The building itself is an experience, a huge, morphed, cavernous and organic structure straight from the ultimate Alien film. How Frank gehry the architect ever designed it or how they actually managed to build it is beyond me.

The exhibit is an impeccably presented journey into everything disco. It showcases intriquing curiosfrom the dawn of the era, yers from clubs such as The Loft, playlists with bpms, magazine articles, freebies given to punters, all sorts of fascinating artifacts. There are video screens everywhere, flashing with divas, dance instruction material, sequins, dancers emerging from clubs at sunrise. Priceless stuff. There are listening posts with all types of sounds well selected by rolling stone critic barry Walters,costumes worn by Donna Summer or the Labelle girls, vintage synths used by Giorgio Moroder, a fun do it yourself mixing deck that allows you to pitch and seque from this to that, plus visual images that do not go the safe route. The music thumps and the lights flash. If you ever wanted to go back in time this is your change.

The EMP also gave us an opening party and the huge Sky Church venue was discofied to nth degree with the immense wall showing clips from farrah lookalikes in shampoo ads to Pink Lady concert footage. The warmup dj did a good job and therewere fun costume and dance contests. Then Nicky Siano came on. I discussed his set with Seattle djs the next day and we all agreed it presented a bit of a problem - the music was mostly very familiar tracks like Funkytown and You should Be Dancing. And it was all prerecorded and not spinned with vinyls like the great god pan or bacchus or whoever meant djs to do. Nicky seemed just to tweak the controls and eq the sounds sometimes to bothersome degree. There were good passages with "Wild safari" or Loleatta Holloway, but overall, it was too mainstream even if the crowd obviously wanted to hear Funkytown. But hey, we had a ball nevertheless and boogied along with the kids and sang along just like back in the day, only with less hair and maybe a few extra kilos and better fashion sense!

Do go and see the exhibit, it's a once in a lifetime kind of thing.

[Nano]

OK Jussi, but I read your post 3 times and still can't find the drugs.

[Outsider]

I read about this exhibit not too long ago, and I think it's great to see something like this. It's proof that there is still interest in disco. I would love to see it, but I won't get to travel to Seattle anytime soon. There should be a disco exhibit in Los Angeles. :evil:

[JussiK]

OK Jussi, but I read your post 3 times and still can't find the drugs.

Drugs? Even cigarette smoking is a taboo in Seattle. The only drug you'll be able to score there is caffeine. :-)

[Nano]

No cigarettes? Owwww... that must be hard! What to do after the orgy? :)
Something tells me this was not like your last parties...

[NickNack]

Hi Jussi,

Glad to hear you had a good time. I know you were concerned about it possibly being a bust. Sounds like you had a pretty decent experience.

Sorry to hear my (secret) mentor and idol, Nicky Siano, wasn't on his game. I don't understand travelling that far to such a big event and then not actually playing. Did the warm up dj actually spin? I'm asking thinking it might have been a tech problem or something. Or, maybe he felt it wasn't worth his time or their money. Who knows? Can't back him up without facts. So, despite the music being mainstream, how was the tape mixed? Just curious cause I haven't heard the man play in so long. Would like to have been there.

Well, I have brother out there in Washington. Have to find out how close he is to Seattle.

[JussiK]

The warmup dj spinned vinyls so there was no reason Siano could not have done the right thing. His set was most likely played off preprogrammed cds as we could not see him change the discs between the tunes. All he seemed to do was fiddle with the knobs a lot. The tracks were sequed together very choppily with no overlaying of beats at all. It was as if he or someone had just pushed the pause button and selected the next title in the same BPM range. Many dancers there of course could not care less how the music was delivered but there were hardcore clubbers present as well, regulars from The Last Supper and Seattle Eagle used to the invigorating track selections and careful blends of djs like Eugene. Siano did stay up there on the stage for several hours but that is no excuse for not carrying a sufficently big bag and not presenting a proper set. One would have expected a proud, exciting display of dj bravado, with proper mixing, as the event was all about the glorification of disco.

The music itself was indeed very mainstream though there were Gallery and Loft classics like Everlasting Love, Love Hangover and Soul Makossa scattered in between the Bee Gees and Lipps Incs. Still, those more street titles could have been inserted there by anyone as the set had no signature character or attention to detail, structure or artistry. If there were stories told we did not notice those either.

I may sound harsh here but we are indeed talking about Nicky Siano, by reputation one of the true greats. He seemed to be an amiable character but the diehards I spoke to thought him giving fans a preprogrammed cd set did not signal a high level of dedication. We all have had our bad gigs but an affair like this was an important one for those of us who truly love and worship the music and the pioneering deejays.

[Robbie]

Of course the public only wanted to hear "Funkytown" or "You Should Be Dancing" because they were mainstream pop records and everyone and their brother knows them. It's easy for us to be picky and wonder why the lesser-known records weren't to be seen or heard most likely, and that's the way it is. I'm sure it would be a totally different story if this exhibit were in New York City, for I think even the most mainstream of New York audiences would know some Salsoul and Prelude tunes.

[QUINNY]

Personally, I think the guy was on to a hiding no matter what he played.
The trouble with anything retro like this, is that there are not the immediate must plays, that there would have been at any one time back in the day. Therefore any music played is more likely to be wholly subjective.
Let's face it, you could put together what you thought was a great playlist, that would be frowned upon by almost everyone, and for a whole raft of reasons. When there's many, many thousands of tunes to choose from, where do you start? At least back in the day, we all more or less, played the same tunes at any given time in history. That's what gave us the disco movement. From then on, all it could ever become is what it is today.......disparate groups holding out for their own narrow interests. Mix those with luvvies from the advertising and PR industries, with the 'C' list personalities and what do you get? A DJ playing safe.
Now, he should have put his heart and soul into playing safe, but that's another discussion.

[JussiK]

You're probably quite right in that if you or I had spinned what we thought would have been fabulous for that crowd we would have bombed and badly. But then again we might not have! Think about it, a great bizarre set with swinging jazzy funk grooves alternating with heavy snare drum amyl nitrate sleaze tracks made in Munich. And listen to many recently realesed disco compliation double vinyl sets ( or cds if you must :-) ) and you won't find Funkytown there, either. The Latin Disco one is a great example with rather obscurish titles yet ones that have Got The Power to make anyone move. A good strong rhythm is just that no matter if it's 25 years old, people will dance. Any old dj can get a reaction from a bit of KC and The Sunshine Band but if you have arrived to hear a living legend you should be rewarded with a set done with style.

Playing retro even to a huge crowd does not necessarily mean resorting to the safest possible sounds. And, should you program You Should Be Dancing even that can be acceptable by mixing it in an exciting manner in and out of stuff.

And it goes without saying that one who does not play any Cerrone you should be punished - and severely! :-)

[QUINNY]

Jussik; Punish me!, punish me! Cerrone has never been to my liking (although I used to play some of his stuff), so I doubt if I'd programme his stuff today, even though it might make me look more hip.
I agree with your sentiments though. Personally, I'd wonder as to how good the man actually was (back in the day). I have the impression that many a DJ's reputation wasn't earned and that generally it was the ones who could shout loudest that got noticed. It was surprising that the guy didn't spin live. Even a pre-taped programme could have been mixed flawlessly and made to be exciting (especially if you put the toons into something like SADiE or ProTools). Surely it's like riding a bike; once you've got the hang of it, you never loose it, so hence my comment above?
Maybe he just wasn't being paid enough (no excuse though).

[NickNack]

Personally, I'd wonder as to how good the man actually was (back in the day).

I worked with Nicky Siano too long to have to wonder. The reputation he gained 'back-in-the-day' was well deserved. Personal opinion? Yes, but shared by many industry and plain-old party people who knew a good dj when they heard one.

I have the impression that many a DJ's reputation wasn't earned and that generally it was the ones who could shout loudest that got noticed.

It wasn't Nicky doing the shouting, it was those of us shouting about him. A lot of those shouts coming from the likes of Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles, Richie Kaczor, Walter Gibbons and others. People didn't invite you to play on Fire Island and at Studio 54 if you didn't know what you were doing.

I don't want to make excuses as to why he didn't 'play' at the Seattle fest. I think an event like that deserves a dj's full attention. On the other hand, it's a little unfair of you to try and cast doubt on one's past career simply because a "tape isn't tight".

Nicky was by no means perfect each and every night behind the turntables. What he was was a master during the early years of the disco phenomenon. He knew how to put records together and make them work a dancefloor. And not just by beats, but by what they said or what they made you feel. Storytelling at it's early best and studied by many in the profession. Love is the Message for the longest time was said to be Nicky's song as he introduced it to so many other dj's who heard it for the first time at The Gallery.

Yeah, Nicky may not be "up there" right now, but he will always be one of the jocks I'm proud to say, "I knew when".

[QUINNY]

NickNack: Not trying to tarnish or anything. It's just that in my own experience, once someone attains a certain level of professionalism, they will not willingly drop standards. This is what sorts out the men from the boys, so to speak.
I just wondered if our opinions of ourselves may be slightly better than they actually were and therefore even the people we looked up to were, in reality, actually no great shakes.
I for one, would say that today's jocks are so much better at mixing than we ever were (O.K. with some caveats). This is certainly what I felt when I retired. There was an 18 year old guy who could mix far better than me, could scratch and played such good tunes, so I knew my time was up.
Things move forward, so that it makes it hard sometimes to put things into perspective.

[NickNack]

Quinny: OK, I understand. You probably don't know Siano's reputation as many of us do here. As a matter of fact, it was tarnished --- and very badly. The reason: D-R-U-G-S. It's common knowledge and Nicky has never tried to deny it. It took him a lot of years to get it back together. At one time many thought he had committed suicide. So, who knows what was going through the man's head or why he even took the gig if he didn't intend to play :-? .

I'll admit, I can be defensive about Nicky Siano. I admired his talent quite a bit back then. When I started working with The Gallery crew he was only 18 or 19. One fucking talented teenager :D .