Double Platinum Record [Level 9]
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.... 1975 ..... the year disco is defining itself and is just about to take the world by storm. New recording concepts are occuring .... special disco remixes , longer song versions tailored for club play......twelve inchers ! .... This was
revolutionary in an era when a pop song going beyond 4 minutes was almost guaranteed a suicidal death from no radio play. Songs were intentially squeezed into a 3 minute format. Now, in 1975, it gets completely flipped and the goal becomes exactly the opposite ... if you want your record to be a hit ..a club hit ... you'd better take it well beyond four minutes. Old timer Frankie Valli for the first time in his career releases a song that is over 10 minutes in length! When first presented to him in it's completed form , he must've said "You're s****n' me !" ....
The word amongst the labels is out.... DJ's are embracing these longer songs , preferring them over having to mix two copies of shorter versions themselves . The longer the better. In fact some artists' medleys .... Gloria Gaynor in particular, are intentionally blended to take up an entire non-stop , single-play, side of an LP. ..... Revolutionary.
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It is 1975 ...disco is developing it's creative juices , it's a new music being presented and marketed in new ways , and for the first time ever ... a singular disco composition takes up an entire side of an album all by itself . . One song/one album side. The song , of course , ....... Donna Summer's " LOVE TO LOVE YOU BABY " . This concept was monumental! ..as is anything when done for the first time .... What nerve Casablanca had .. to dare to release a single song as an entire album side ..and to try to sell it priced the same as any other album ..... all those with much more material! The idea is hugely successful this very first time it's attempted ....#1 disco song, # 2 Hot 100 ( edited radio version ) , and the album itself sells gold. .
Soon certain producers would cater their careers almost exclusively to this format . But for right now , within the timeframe of all recorded music ...Giorgio , Donna Summer and Casablanca are the first to do so ....... Revolutionary.
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Was "LOVE TO LOVE YOU BABY" not only the first disco song to be presented this way , was it in fact the first hit song ever to occupy the whole side of an LP ?? ( not considering classical , jazz or soundtracks... etc.)
Earlier possibities that come to mind could be " In-A -Godda- Da-Vida " by Iron Butterfly and "Get Ready" by Rare Earth .... ??? .....
Any ideas/ input anyone ?? ....................... :-?
all comments/corrections welcomed :D
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*** Forum Leader / Moderator ***
"LTLYB" is a double diamond track. I instantly adored it and not only because of the sexual thing, the track is embedded in. The variations on the theme, the orchestration, the build-up, everythings fits right in.
And the funny thing: it was intentionelly recorded as a short track and a little bit later reworked into a full-side opus.
No Longer Charting
I can't help thinking the long version is overblown, as is almost every one of the full album side tracks that I've heard. Just can't fathom why they did them, unless the makers were high on pretentiousness.
No one I knew played these things all the way through (unless they weren't proper DJs or just feeling lazy), but none of the people I knew had their heads up their own asses.
Give me a five minute piece of disco dynamite any day.
*** Forum Leader / Moderator ***
I agree with you when you talk about playing this in a Disco but in other circumstances it works very well. It never becomes boring IMO. I think with this one we are re-opening the topic of full-side songs like "Romeo and Juliet". There were DJ's who played the whole track and some didn't. When I pull out my Casablanca box and listen to the edited version of Costandinos' opus magnum I still feel hungry and grab for my vinyl :D
Second runner-up is "Je t'aime moi non plus" from the "TGIF" soundtrack. Beautifully done and an opus to play again and again.
Double Platinum Record [Level 9]
*****
---- Quinny --- I get the feeling you were relentless as a DJ ...your love for the profession and (selectively :D 8) ) the music always comes through. (btw ...do you have tapes ? )
..... I don't want the exploring of what was going on in the music scene in the mid-seventies, because of the arrival of disco, to get lost in the debate of whether songs became too long for play in the clubs ..I agree ..many songs got ignored or underused ( or misused) because they were toooo long !!! That would make an interesting thread on its own .. hmmm....
Believe it or not ..sometimes it helps to take off one's DJ hat in order to appreciate certain ideas about disco music ...I know that sounds odd.... :roll: :-?
Just as the point being made here is that disco changed the way music could be approached ..now producers and composers could entertain their creative desires and more fully explore and expand the music they were creating ....The bottom line wasn't trying to squeeze music into a 2: 36 playable radio song to be sandwiched between "Helen Wheels" and ""Rhiannon" .
Can you imagine how exciting this must have been for the Costandinos and the four Ms (Moroder, Meco, Montana, and Midney) and the many others during this time . !!!!!
I agree with Videoskooter .... these longer songs provided some awesome listening pleasure ...finally the song wasn't over in a paltry 3 minutes ... often times fading out just as the song was getting started. How wrong was that ?? I REMEMBER buying "LOVE TO LOVE YOU BABY" when it came out ... .. and just being knocked out by the continuation of this great sound .. more than fifteen minutes of one song and loving every second of it ......I was in college and could just put it on the turntable and let it play ( I didn't have a record player in my dorm room ..I used to take my records and my books to the listening booths on the fourth floor of the library ... the one male classically-oriented librarian in charge of the library's record collection was always telling me to "TURN IT DOWN !!" --- they finally made me wear head phones!!! :D )
So anyway , the point is, these longer songs weren't only about how they'd play on the dancefloor..some of this disco was actually timed longer in order to fully explore the song , and to be enjoyed at length on a personal level as well ... to buy (of course) and then listen to on one's own time ..to enjoy in the school library if need be... :D
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Indie Release [Level 4]
I was just recently dancing at a disco where they played the long version! It was so exciting! I thought they would stop after about 3 or 4 minutes when the first long instrumental section begins, but they played all of that as well. Then just when Donna was about to really get into her moaning, they inexplicably mixed into some other song! I was furious! But at least got to dance to the first 8 minutes of the full version of LTLYB!
No Longer Charting
I just thought such tracks were pretentious. After all is said and done, Disco was a 'pop' genre. Too many of these producers had delusions of grandeur IMO and/or a need to be taken seriously (in their own minds the way to do this was to take the well trodden quasi-classical route). For myself, the records just didn't work (and I'd say the same thing about some of the Jazz performers who took their art too seriously....albeit that Jazz is a much more serious artform than Disco ever could or SHOULD be).
The fact that this 'conceptualising' didn't become de rigeur within the Disco genre, more or less proves the point, doesn't it?
I was fairly relentless as a DJ, but as has been written many times before, my crowd(s) didn't have the same reactions as others may have had, so whatever floats yer boat. My only reason to post in this thread is to point out that not everbody fell in love with this toon in its extra long version, for me, especially as a purely listening exercise.
Double Platinum Record [Level 9]
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You know Quinny, I appreciate your input ( I really do ) ...but I am trying to get beyond these " I like it" .... "Well , I don't like it " type entries .. ...... Whether you liked it , whether I liked it , whether Chelsea Clinton liked it , don't matter diddley .... It doesn't change the fact that the radically different song : "LOVE TO LOVE YOU BABY " went # 1 , sold millions of copies and knocked the music industry off its ass! They had never seen ( or heard ) anything like it before ...ever...and this 16 minute orgasmic tune is a major occurrence in the history of recorded music. And this is what matters, this is what I am looking at and wanting to explore further ... and I hope you and others will offer input about it.......... :D
Casablanca truly tried something very risky by putting just this one long song on one side of an album .. ( again, something never ..[perhaps ??? ].... done before ) and it was a bold & successful endeavor that opened the doors for some fantastic NEW music that followed it !!.
I'm not sure I understand the ease at which you put down the achievements of these disco composers. If you believe that they were somehow just casually tinkering around with their music .... OK ..... but I'm convinced they were doing much more than that .. . ..And I like a lot of jazz too .. but to elevate it as some superior music form is also 'pretentious". Disco is no less a musical art form.
Quinny , have you gone back and listened to some of these conceptual pieces ( taking off that damn DJ cap first!!!) and given them a chance ? .... ... I think you may discover a whole 'nother element to disco you've previously too quickly dismissed because it didn't fit into your particular style of programming at the time ... :D
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Platinum Record [Level 8]
:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:Originally Written by remicks
Gold Record [Level 7]
:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
some people have to learn the hard way....
here's some fun facts for the classic:
R&B #3
POP #2
DISCO #1
I wish I could elaborate more but it was around 8 months before I could go hang out at VFW dances... by then it had already past it's chart run.
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