Published by Rolling Stone Books in 1976
Which is pretty quick off the mark (and again, another strike against the idea of the blinkered rockism and exclusionism of the rock press)
Abe Peck was a serious journalist, whose pedigree included stints on the Underground press of the Sixties
What I like about Dancing Madness is how different its perspective is from the disco scholarship of recent decades
The culture’s historical origins are in there but mostly it is about disco as a mass phenomenon - discotheques not just in New York, San Francisco and Miami but in towns all across America - and the world, as the global reports included show.
And it is a distinctly cheesy subculture - all about learning dance steps, dancing in formation, singles bars, glitzy escapism, tacky clothes.
Basically there is a refreshing dearth in Dancing Madness on the Record Pool or what was played on April 12 1978 at the Loft.
Peck’s book precedes by three years Albert Goldman’s Disco, which is a slumming highbrow’s quasi-anthropological take on disco: the word "Dionysian" crops up, the fascination for Doors fan Goldman is “dancing madness”: the insanity and excess of disco as craze, a kind of sociological disease. But the book is well researched and thorough and it's enjoyable to read precisely because of the gap between Goldman's windy locutions and the vulgar vernacular decadence of what he is documenting.
More images from Dancing Madness.
2 comments:
You can always be depended upon to puncture a hipster bubble Simon (The Loft). I went to a Loft revival do in London about ten years ago. All a bit self-conscious and hence rather dull. Gay abandon it was not. I think I've mentioned it here before, but I thoroughly recommend James Hamilton's Disco Pages, a compendium of his Record Mirror columns from the late 70s and early 80s. The first couple of years documented by the columns are notable for the DJs' wide-ranging playlists (Sex Pistols, even Television, get mentioned) before the more familiar jazz funk & soul tunes take over from '77 onwards. Aside from the music, the book is a very "thick" description of social life at the time (at least in the south of England).
Yes I have been meaning to get the James Hamilton book.
Its approximate equivalent in America terms is that compendium of week-by-week writing by Vince Aletti.
Again, it's fascinating how much "uncool" music was released in this zone and as you say, how much that wasn't strictly disco got dropped by deejays.
The sheer size of it internationally is astonishing - those pages above talk about 9000 discos in Italy, 30 thousand discos and mobile DJ operations in the U.K. Again, the facts on the ground agitate against a New York-centric approach.
Also as I discovered doing the glam book, there was a thriving discotheque scene before disco-as-music got codified. https://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-days-before-deejay-was-cool.html
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