Donna Summer ..Once Upon A Time

[Dayna]

I was Jogging and I put the " Once Upon A Time" CD in my headset..VERY LOUD..
WTF is an I-pod..lol..
I hadn't listened to the Cd "Once Upon a Time"in quite awhile.I was again AWE struck by the beauty of the Record and how it told a story.
with songs like
Working The Midnight Shift
A Man Like You
Sweet Romance
and nothing is as fabulous as when "Rumour has it" goes into
"I Love You "then into "Happily Ever After"..
and of course the Title cut the Fast and slow versions.
Listening to this transported me back to a most magical time in my life.
As I was running ,exhilarated , feeling one of the first day's of fall on my face and Donna in my ear it brought tears to my eyes .
The memories it envoked were so precious that just to know no one could ever take those away from me brought a big smile to my face and the tears were gone..

[Discoimperium]

What beautiful words .. I guess that the 'first generation' disco lovers get a lot of these feelings nowadays, as it IS all about 30 years ago now...
Personally (looking back) the 'Once Upon A Time' album is the most beautiful disco album i've ever heard .. 'Now I Need You' in particular .. it still sends shivers down my spine... (how many disco records can do that ?). Giorgio Moroder at his very best on production. I've always had a fantasy about Donna doing a Musical about this album .. i don't like musicals really but as this album is a true concept album .. "Once Upon A Time" right up to "Happily Ever After" it would be just magical !.
The whole 2nd side (act 2) of the album has been described as 'curiously removed from time, sounding at once retro and futuristic', a perfect description.
YouTube - Donna Summer - Now I Need You (1977).

Cheers.

[needlefingers]

It is the 30th anniversary of the release in November. Coming on the heels of her I Remember Yesterday lp.

Those were the days; when artists released albums twice a year.

Though I never saw it, I think Donna did a TV special that had borrowed from the Once Upon A Time record.

Can anyone confirm this?

[Discoimperium]

A remaster of this album would be great with the 30 year mark coming up.
As far as i know there was no TV special surrounding 'Once Upon A Time' but she did do some tracks from the album in later tv-specials (Once Upon A Time, Fairytail High) but that's all really ..

[remicks]

The memories it evoked were so precious that just to know no one could ever take those away from me brought a big smile to my face and the tears were gone..

The power of the music ......how grateful I am that it likewise moves me so ....


..... so it's winter of (197?) when ONCE UPON A TIME is released . And Donna Summer is making an appearance at a casino in Reno (four hours or so from San Francisco). So a group of us ....mostly waiters from The PS Restaurant on Polk St. (remember that place anyone?) agree to meet up there for it . It was a beautiful time of year to trek up and through the Sierra Nevadas as they and the tall conifers on them were blanketed in the season's first snow .

Imagine driving through it (in a new lime green Porsche too... to complete the picture ) while becoming familiar with the entire new LP of ONCE UPON A TIME as you are driving along knowing soon you'd be seeing Donna perform it in person.

Upon arrival we gambled and all that while anxiously awaiting the night's concert ...then held Donna in adoration as she put on a great show (couldn't be anything less) ... ... and typical of my partner at the time when she was finished he approached the stage and handed her a dozen red roses (as did others ...many bouquets were laid at the stage) .

The next day, as a group still feeling the high from our Donna Summer rush , we went off into the woods and did some sledding in that fresh snow , finally reloading into our separate cars to wind back down the mountain pass while once again listening to ONCE UPON A TIME all the way home, loving it even more.


Yep the music that was ( and is) the soundtrack to our lives.... :icon_cool:




*****

[Discoimperium]

It was the winter of 1977.
Do you remember any details of that appearance, as in the tracklist, how many tracks she performed, etc. ?
Did she do 'Now I Need You' (and more tracks from that album) for instance, or was it just a bit of a 'greatest hits' gig ?.

[Dayna]

The power of the music ......how grateful I am that it likewise moves me so ....


..... so it's winter of (197?) when ONCE UPON A TIME is released . And Donna Summer is making an appearance at a casino in Reno (four hours or so from San Francisco). So a group of us ....mostly waiters from The PS Restaurant on Polk St. (remember that place anyone?) agree to meet up there for it . It was a beautiful time of year to trek up and through the Sierra Nevadas as they and the tall conifers on them were blanketed in fresh snow .

Imagine driving through it and becoming familiar with the entire new LP of ONCE UPON A TIME as you are driving along knowing soon you'd be seeing Donna perform it in person.

Of course we gambled and all that ...then enjoyed Donna as she put on a great show (couldn't be anything less) ... ... and typical of my partner at the time when she was finished he approached the stage and handed her a dozen red roses (as did others ...many bouquets were laid at the stage) .

The next day, as a group still feeling the high from our Donna Summer rush , we went off into the woods and did some sledding in that fresh snow , finally reloading into our separate cars to wind back down the mountain pass while once again listening to ONCE UPON A TIME all the way home, loving it even more.


Yep the music that was ( and is) the soundtrack to our lives.... :icon_cool:

*****

I Can feel the love you have for the Music and the Era~!!!
That sounds HEAVENLY...................:icon_biggrin:

[remicks]

I Can feel the love you have for the Music and the Era~!!!
That sounds HEAVENLY...................:icon_biggrin:

:icon_cool: :icon_cool::icon_cool:

And I thank you Dayna for unexpectedly drawing forth from me such a vivid memory of an exciting weekend so many moons ago ....

DISCOEMPERIUM: Do you remember any details of that appearance, as in the tracklist, how many tracks she performed, etc. ?
Did she do 'Now I Need You' (and more tracks from that album) for instance, or was it just a bit of a 'greatest hits' gig ?.

Wouldn't that be great if I could just relive that entire concert in my mind ...alas ... no can do.:icon_sad: I do recall though that when getting her LIVE AND MORE album I thought how familiar much of her banter was ....and I'm sure that she was already polishing up her performance that she knew would soon be recorded onto vinyl.


*****

[ol'skinflint]

I was Jogging and I put the " Once Upon A Time" CD in my headset..VERY LOUD..
WTF is an I-pod..lol..
I hadn't listened to the Cd "Once Upon a Time"in quite awhile.I was again AWE struck by the beauty of the Record and how it told a story.
with songs like
Working The Midnight Shift
A Man Like You
Sweet Romance
and nothing is as fabulous as when "Rumour has it" goes into
"I Love You "then into "Happily Ever After"..
and of course the Title cut the Fast and slow versions.
Listening to this transported me back to a most magical time in my life.
As I was running ,exhilarated , feeling one of the first day's of fall on my face and Donna in my ear it brought tears to my eyes .
The memories it envoked were so precious that just to know no one could ever take those away from me brought a big smile to my face and the tears were gone..

doesn't your CD player skip and mistrack when you're jogging and moving around a lot?

[Dayna]

doesn't your CD player skip and mistrack when you're jogging and moving around a lot?

Not if you have a good one...and hold it steady when you run............

[thommy2458]

To hear "Faster and Faster' and "Now I need You" in a club setting is to be in pure disco nirvana....Absolutely,a classic and favorite.

[SandraDee]

In a previous thread about this brilliant classic LP someone said that Bob Esty had a big hand in the production as well as Giorgio. When I listen to Now I Need You/ Working The Midnight Shift I often imagine myself driving through a snow-covered bavarian forest in something like a Porsche 911 Carrera so remicks memories are really strange to hear -he almost lived my dream!:icon_confused: How strange. Spooky even.

[QUINNY]

I still have a mint copy of the album....that tells you a lot, doesn't it?:icon_rolleyes::icon_lol:

Being the sort of guy who invariably liked singles over albums, concept albums were a personal pet hate, especially after one of my favourite early influences, the Who, went ga-ga on me when they released Tommy. IMO, a few great songs padded out by too many also rans, only included to make the concept work. However, I see that 'Once Upon A Time' is considered by many of Donna's fans to be her (&Moroder/Bellotte's) finest hour.

Maybe one day I'll discover it!

[kdavid13]

ONCE UPON A TIME is a masterpiece.

To this day ; just seeing the jacket sends me in a happy place.

NOW I NEED YOU is pretty much my #1 favorite Donna song of all-time.

As a major contributor to a Donna Summer forum ; I have written a lot about this album and all the others.
But OAAT [along with BAD GIRLS] will always be thought of as her best album ever.

[BrunoRepublic]

Being the sort of guy who invariably liked singles over albums, concept albums were a personal pet hate...

A lot of disco concept albums failed as a concept, but I would say that Once Upon A Time is one of the few where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The story is actually coherent, and although a little trite, still enjoyable. The album is worth it for Act II alone.

It's quite telling that so many fans consider this her best work, despite the fact that unlike all her other 70s albums, it doesn't contain any of her major hits.

[EricHG23]

This is probably my all time fave Disco album. Bad Girls in some ways has a more sophisticated sound, and sometimes I prefer it but I always end up back at Once Upon a Time.

A few things that always impress me--one was how good it is despite of (because of?) the speed it was written at! Moroder did the basic melodies, Donna with help from Pete Belotte did the lyrics VERY fast and then they recorded it.

Also, not to take away ANYTHIGN from Moroder's magic, but the underated Bob Esty deserves a huge amount of the credit for this record and probably shoulda gotten a co-production credit instead of Belotte (who basically just helped with lyrics) the way he did on some pressings of Last Dance (which he also played a huge role in) and on Roberta Kelly's Gettin' the Spirit. There's a quote with him that goes to prove this--Moroder of course basically did most of the synth masterpiece of Act II on his own...

And I really wish this would be remastered--the CD is decent quality but...

Anyway this is the info on Bob Esty's involvement, from Demetz wonderful Moroder page:

"The "Once Upon A Time" project:

I had some e-mail correspondence with Bob Esty in whitch he told me very interesting and inside info.

Bob Esty wrote:

Yes, I did the double LP "Once Upon A Time".
We used the Munich Machine rhythm players (including the incredible drummer Keith Forsey) and the Munich Symphony. Giorgio stayed away from the studio for the entire project and left me to format the order of the record. He left me alone and let me do whatever I wanted. His partner Pete Bellote was in the studio for the guitar overdubs and later co-wrote lyrics with Donna.
Giorgio had given me a tape of himself at an electric piano singing "la, la, la" the melody and giving some chord changes in his playing. I then did a demo of the entire album w/synthesizers in L.A. After that, I flew to Munich to stay at the Arabella Haus where Giorgio's studio Musicland was.
Everything you hear instrumentally was completed before Donna heard it. I had sung the melody for her on the tape and she took it from there. It took about 4 weeks to do all the music, then Donna flew in from her tour of Italy and wrote the words to the songs. I didn't know what the lyrics were until she sang them. Then we added background vocals and Giorgio mixed it. During this process, I did the Roberta Kelly LP "Gettin' the Spirit" which had the song "O Happy Day". I added a gospel choir and some overdubs in L.A. then it went to Munich for Giorgio to mix it.

I asked Bob to tell me how he met Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer,

He friendly wrote:

I met Giorgio Moroder when I did "Last Dance" (summer of 1977). Neil Bogart (president of Casablanca Records) was the force behind doing the song. He thought it was a "hit".
Paul Jabara had "trapped" Donna in a bathroom in Puerto Rico to make her listen to the song idea. She said OK, and Paul and I finished the song and I developed the way the song was to be done: slow intro, fast, then slow again, then fast. It was to be the first time to my knowledge a disco track did this.
Giorgio was initially against the song because it wasn't his, and, vocally, Donna would be singing "full voice" (not high and breathy). This was not like "I Feel Love" and the other previous tracks. Also, we were to use a full orchestral arrangement, not electronic.

We recorded the entire track in one day at Record Plant. Giorgio was not involved in the recording of the track except we had Jurgen Koppers (his engineer) at the console. Mr. Moroder was present at the end of the instrumental session when Donna sang her vocal (2 times only, as was her habit). Donna and I had made a "demo" of the entire full length version with piano and voice, so she knew the arrangement and the song before the vocal session.
I mixed the song with Bob Stone at Larrabee Studios and it was done. After hearing the final product, Giorgio asked me to arrange "Once Upon A Time". This double LP was released before "Last Dance" because the movie "Thank God It's Friday" came out some months later.

Bob Esty -

And a great recent review/retrospective on the albumt hat basically gets exactly why this album is SOO great IMHO:

25th Anniversary of Donna Summer's "Once Upon a Time"

By Jason Shawhan

It was an incongruous pairing of sound and image. Tourists being mowed down by a runaway car, chaos reigning and, from the car's radio, a familiar, plaintive voice. "That's Donna Summer!" I said to my friends while immersed in the computer game Grand Theft Auto III, trying to avoid rolling their car after taking out several police officers and prostitutes with a particularly vicious sideswipe. It was Summer's voice, from "Sweet Romance," a harpsichord-based ballad from her 1977 opus Once Upon a Time..., now sampled as the refrain for Black Rob's "By a Stranger," which is how it came to be in the game.


Just in time for its 25th anniversary, Once Upon a Time... is creeping back into the zeitgeist. Conceived as a musical storybook for Summer's daughter Mimi, Once Upon a Time is a concept double album (divided into four acts, one per side on the original LPs) about fairy tales, love and life's cruel realities. The basic narrative follows a nameless girl on her journeys in the land of Never-Never, including her rendezvous with destiny and true love. Timeless archetypes, to be sure, but ones that Summer and her songwriting partners and producers, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, explored in new ways--namely, by conveying them through the sounds of disco and its adult concerns.

Once Upon a Time... yielded only one hit single, the dreamy and euphoric "I Love You," but the record still went multiplatinum--the first of Summer's four consecutive double albums to do so (in just three years). The record received mixed reviews upon its release, its detractors citing its opera-like conception as heavy-handed; today, it stands as perhaps the most ambitious and fully realized dance music album ever made.

A Nashville resident for the past seven years or so, Summer has long been hailed as the Queen of Disco, but that designation fails to do justice to the many musical forms--from funk and rock to blues and gospel--over which she and her collaborators demonstrated mastery. What is rarely addressed, and what certainly distinguishes the Summer/Moroder/Bellotte (S/M/B) collective from most dance groups, is the strength and versatility of their songwriting. It isn't just the enduring nature of so many of Summer's singles; it's the boldness and reach of the albums on which they appeared.
Love to Love You Baby (1975) and A Love Trilogy (1976), for example, devoted their entire first sides to experimental, vampy versions of their respective centerpieces. "I Feel Love" from 1977's I Remember Yesterday took all the loops and programs Kraftwerk had been working with, injected some soul into the machine and helped pave the way for contemporary electronic music. Act 2 of Once Upon a Time... is devoted to this kind of sound--Eurodisco before it had a name, Hi-NRG and synth-pop several years ahead of their time. The triptych of "Now I Need You," "Working the Midnight Shift" and "Queen for a Day" that comprises side two of Once Upon a Time... is almost curiously removed from time, sounding at once retro and futuristic.

Musically, Once Upon a Time... is a marvel, quintessentially disco yet more than just simple bass-line vamps over thumping kick drums and eighth-note percussion sequences. The chorus to "Rumour Has It" has an amazing lead-in where the hi-hats go double-time, the staccato feel marvelously conveying the movement of a rumor through a community. A similar adventurousness pervades the paranoid delusion of "Faster and Faster to Nowhere"--the only appearance nightmare makes on an album of dreams and fantasies. Using analog vocoders, unearthly screeches swirl in the mix and Donna breaks down in fear; it's the epitome of catharsis on the dance floor.

Nowhere is the ambition inherent in the S/M/B collective's songwriting more apparent than in the funk-sass of "If You Got It Flaunt It." The track takes a Mel Brooks maxim and reworks it as a bluesy strut, wherein the record's protagonist throws shade at "catty creatures" who try to diminish her as a human being. This flirtation with the chords and structure of the blues would lead to one of Summer's finest lesser-known songs, the funky "Love Will Always Find You" from the following year's Bad Girls. S/M/B's experiments with rock reached their fruition with that record, particularly on "Hot Stuff" and the equally imperious title track.


Like their latter-day counterparts Timbaland and Missy Elliott, S/M/B were constantly evolving creatively. Not content with letting any of their songs embody just one particular style, they began to blend tracks together, taking DJs mixes and combining them with artful segues to create a continuous record, one in which the beat didn't stop and the BPM defined an entire side of the record.

Take "Queen for a Day" from Once Upon a Time...: In keeping with the rest of the record's second act, the track is completely synthesized; yet as it progresses, it devolves into piano, congas and strings. The effect is staggering. The stop-and-start dance beat of "Dance Into My Life," however, may be the most revolutionary aspect of the album, foreshadowing Summer's Oscar-winning "Last Dance," which actually comes to a complete stop before revving back up again.


The album's centerpiece, and what may be the finest example of intricate composition and arrangement for synthesizers, is "Working the Midnight Shift." The track, a mournful lament about the painful costs of working nights, is equally ethereal and visceral. Half the sequencers seem to be working in a minor key, and at least a couple of banks are putting out a major key, and over it all--those cool glissandos of sound waves--is Summer's voice, weaving a counterpoint with her backup singers. The overall feel is something akin to what Phil Spector might have done with Ralf and Florian of Kraftwerk. Summer was equally at home with R&B, funk, rock, the sexy purr of the clubs and the clarion call of the church. Above all, she meshed magnificently with machine, forever changing the sound of popular music.

On its 25th birthday, Once Upon a Time... sounds as fresh as ever, even as the soundtrack to mowing down tourists in cyberspace on Grand Theft Auto. That said, given the album's energy and conceptual adventurousness, it could just as easily become a Broadway musical. Those are pretty much the two extremes of modern popular culture, and it's rare to find something that can span that much social and emotional distance.

[EricHG23]

And two quick comments I forgot... I know I Love You was a minor hit in the UK (was it even a single in the US?) but did this album get club play much? It;'s so good--woudl DJs just put sides 1, 2 or 4 on randomly? Anyone remember/know?

I agree with Graham that it very much is a rare e3xample of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts (although all of Donna;'s disco albums hold together as coherent wholes, to varying degrees, compared to many disco artists).
It's also a disco album where the slower songs (and the wonderfully slow/fast Dance Into my Life) really deserve as much playing as the disco acts--and act as a nice little breather when you listen to the album back to back to back to back...

That she released this and I Remember Yesterday and recorded Last Dance all int hat year makes the unberable wait for new Donna material even more frustrating.

[thommy2458]

And two quick comments I forgot... I know I Love You was a minor hit in the UK (was it even a single in the US?) but did this album get club play much? It;'s so good--woudl DJs just put sides 1, 2 or 4 on randomly? Anyone remember/know?

Eric-"I Love You" was released as a single.And in the clubs
I went to in Los Angeles the songs were usually played in
"two's"-IE:"Rumour Has It/I Love You","Now I Need You/Working the Midnight Shift" and the trio of "Once Upon A Time/Faster and Faster/Fairy Tale High"
Thom

[EricHG23]

Man I'd love to be able to hear those in a club setting someday... As much as everyone loves Now I Need You I've grown to even prefer Midnight Shift--I love the synth bridge between the two songs which just *sounds* to me like a lonely, empty, downtown at night.

E

[totoman]

And two quick comments I forgot... I know I Love You was a minor hit in the UK (was it even a single in the US?) but did this album get club play much? It;'s so good--woudl DJs just put sides 1, 2 or 4 on randomly? Anyone remember/know?

I agree with Graham that it very much is a rare e3xample of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts (although all of Donna;'s disco albums hold together as coherent wholes, to varying degrees, compared to many disco artists).
It's also a disco album where the slower songs (and the wonderfully slow/fast Dance Into my Life) really deserve as much playing as the disco acts--and act as a nice little breather when you listen to the album back to back to back to back...

That she released this and I Remember Yesterday and recorded Last Dance all int hat year makes the unberable wait for new Donna material even more frustrating.

I bought my first copy of Record Mirror in January 1978 and it would contain a Disco Top 20 for the UK and the US (Billboard). The UK chart (I noticed as time went on) very rarely bundled songs together like the US and Love's Unkind was No 1 (the label was milking all the tracks of I Remember Yesterday as singles). No 16 was a new entry of Once Upon A Time/Rumour Has It/I Love You/Happily Ever After together. That was its highest placing although I think I Love You did chart separately later.

toto

[thommy2458]

Man I'd love to be able to hear those in a club setting someday... As much as everyone loves Now I Need You I've grown to even prefer Midnight Shift--I love the synth bridge between the two songs which just *sounds* to me like a lonely, empty, downtown at night.

E

Absolutely perfect description.When "Once.." came out
Rolling Stone reviewed it as the feature LP,I always remember it,cause 1)it was favorable and 2) the reviewer
described the LP as icey,dark and distant with Summers
warm expressive vocals coming through the chilliness..

[DiscoBall]

A DJ at one of our clubs use to always play Say Something Nice from this album. Doesn't do a whole lot for me at home but in the club it sounded great. I don't think it was a big hit at all so I was surprised to always hear it.

[kdavid13]

One day as a special request a DJ played the entire ACT II in a club.

It was during the daytime but still to hear it in a club on a full blown sound system was magic.

Hard to imagine that it is 30 years old...

[remicks]

When I listen to Now I Need You/ Working The Midnight Shift I often imagine myself driving through a snow-covered bavarian forest in something like a Porsche 911 Carrera so remicks memories are really strange to hear -he almost lived my dream!:icon_confused: How strange. Spooky even.

That is weird Dee ! You know I've always felt that that music had a cold wintery feel to it .... but I figured that's because thats when the LP was popular and my own personal experiences surrounding it ...

Big holiday record ...Christmas... New Years ...



*****

[SandraDee]

That is weird Dee ! You know I've always felt that that music had a cold wintery feel to it .... but I figured that's because thats when the LP was popular and my own personal experiences surrounding it ...

Big holiday record ...Christmas... New Years ...



*****

I was alerted to this LP's release by a Saturday morning TV show called 'Multi Coloured Swap Shop' that was big in the UK at that time & I think it was the Xmas edition of the show & they played a bit of 'Now I Need You' & I thought 'wow the follow-up to I Feel Love at last' & rushed out to get it; I thought that Now I Need You would be the obvious choice for single, especially as that was the track played on TV but alas it wasn't to be.:icon_sad: Isn't it interesting that a rmagazine review of the LP called it 'icy'?