Steve Reynolds Program - Dazz
Slumber, Interrupted
Happy December, all! The newsletter had a hiatus due to technical issues, work and other stuff. At the start of the year, I set my Goodreads Reading Challenge at 45 books. I’m almost done with 43 and I’m reminded that reading books is a great activity. Much better than doomscrolling through half-formed and reductive singultuses by people I’d avoid if I saw them in public.
Christine McVie just died. She had an instantly recognizable voice and style aboout her. I’ve obsessed before about her song “Over and Over” being the opening track on Tusk. The song is deceitfully simple and slow. A tension builds and her voice grows louder by the end. It’s one that has to be cranked to catch the band’s interplay. The thing is it does not match any of the other songs, especially Lindsay Buckingham’s trebled to the max frenetic songs that recording probably involved some septum damage. So to the front it went, like a slow title sequence before a Mad Max movie.
Song #14
Dazz
by Brick
I cannot separate disco from my college life. A local bar held a monthly disco night with all-you-can-drink beer for a $10 cover, where I’d try to make each beer cost $0.77. And I danced. I loved disco dancing so much, I woke up many nights with “a disco cramp”—a calf or thigh muscle seizing up (I learned how to pinch my earlobe at a certain spot to ease the pain – accupressure works!). It may have been hard for a dispassionate observer to watch my body move to the groove, but I had lots of fun.
When I was 19, I had a disco party. This wasn’t a ragin’ full on affair with lights, mirrored globes and cocaine. No, this was just playing disco loud instead of REM at medium volume like every other party that year.
An anarchist pal bumrushed the party and tried to change the music from Rose Royce to Ministry, the industrial band who had just played Tulsa and converted attendees into crazed diehards—lots of black t-shirts and black shorts, and bad haircuts over the sink going on then. I asserted the authority of The Host (hey, my 100 dollar share of the rent afforded me that privilege) and yelled no way, disco only, at this shindig; the three people currently dancing demanded it! He put the cassette tape back in his pocket and told me disco parties were cool five years before.
Fact is, any disco song older than six months cannot be cool. They’re not composed or played for cachet. The primary directive of a disco song is to make your ass dance. I guess EDM now follows the same rule and the buhbuhbuhbuhbuhBUHBUH BUHBUHBUHBAHBAHABAH SKREEEEEEEEEK!zurpzurpzurp that got dancers jumping up and down last year, won’t work this year. Disco in its heyday (1975-1979) can be dated by sound and style to the year more easily than any genre, besides maybe punk.
1976, when “Dazz” is released, is pre-Saturday Night Fever, when vocals took more of the lead. This year had more guitar and bass grooves, less strings. “Dazz” fits right in.
“Dazz” purports to be the fusion of disco and jazz, but if it is, it’s not a 50/50 blend. The amount of jazz is like the amount of pepper the Thai restaurant adds to a suburban American’s curry. In “Dazz,” the jazz is intuited with its lower BPM, the less rigid drumming and the fact they sing the word jazz in the chorus.
Or is it the amazing flute solo that makes it jazz? The movie Anchorman demolished any present-day attempt to take jazz flute seriously. That’s a bit of a shame, because this one (I guess it’s “dazz flute”) rips.
The band Brick never found success like this song. They tried to recapture the magic with a single called “Dusic,” a redundant blend of disco and music. They were still solid. I’d put their style and skill up there with the Brothers Johnson.
But now, I’m hard at work on a song called “Dindustrial” so I won’t have a party that’s so passe the next time.
Afterword
This week’s Song I’m Mad I Forgot To Put On The List is Bad Bad Whiskey Pt. 2 by James Rivers. This is the funkiest flute ever pressed on wax.
All right, back to the factory. See you sooner than later.