Donna Summer: She Said It Really Loud on the Radio

LaDonna Adrian Gaines, 1948 – 2012

Donna Summer was a phenomenon. Everything she did was on a grand scale. When her career broke through it was an explosion that lasted a decade, changing everything in its wake: our ears are still ringing.

When "Love to Love You Baby" hit the airwaves in 1975 I was in high school. The short version was a ubiquitous hit. The abbreviated moans and groans on the radio edit made it a novelty song: just naughty enough to make me slightly uncomfortable on weekend drives with my mom in the suburbs where we were briefly stranded. Minnie Riperton had already introduced the eargasm to the radio the year before with "Lovin' You," which was no doubt catchy but altogether different in scale. This song's slinkily suggestive groove was impossible to resist. But it was late at night as I lay in my bed reading and listening to the radio when I heard the full 16 minute glory of the song. It turned out not to be a few moans and groans but an extended symphonic orgasm, an intense aural documentary of ecstasy and passion. The guitar, the keys, the sweeping strings, the breathy voice, that funky long screw of a groove. I was a virgin but I knew what that song was about. I felt it. To not feel it, to not be swept up by its sensuality, one would have to be dead. It's the kind of song still, today, that makes me want to reach for a cigarette when it ends. And I haven't been a smoker in 25 years.

Two years later I had finished my first year of college and was spending a couple weeks in New York City. It's a longer story I've told parts of elsewhere on this blog, but I ended up late one weekend night down in the Village, the pre-gentrification Village, a block from the darkness under the still-standing elevated West Side Highway and the mysterious darkened ruin of riverside piers. It was Christopher Street Liberation Day 1977, and this incredible song was blaring from a soundtruck near the armory at the end of the street in the midst of a gay street festival. It was a synthesized beat like nothing I could have ever imagined, with dancing electric lines of crackling noise weaving in and out against a relentless pulsing beat. And there was that same breathy voice, singing once again about feeling "love" but clearly meaning raw, fiery sex. "I Feel Love" grabbed me like the superheated thick New York City night air. I wasn't yet out as a gay young man, and wouldn't be for a little while, but this magic moment cemented in my mind everything I imagined about future possibility.

A year or so later I was finally out, and as I gathered gay friends and learned to navigate the subterranean world of that long-ago hidden gay world, Donna Summer's music remained a constant. There were other artists I found more interesting, but none I ever found more compelling. Her sound was huge. I remember discovering her two-LP concept album "Once Upon a Time." Sure I listened to jazz and soul the rest of the time, but this amazing disco symphony was impossible to ignore. I first heard these songs on a dance floor somewhere in Chicago, probably at the Bistro. Lyrical, romantic, with a dramatic, almost operatic sweep: compositions with a pop catchiness but a furious grandiose ambition to seize the listener not in a heady idyll but in an ecstatic fury of dance and motion. As "Rumour Has It" segued into "I Love You" the lights in the disco would shimmer, the rhythms percolating against that insistent base drum and the sweep of the strings; the dance floor would fill with emotion. It was the happy ending of a fairytale come to life. I don't think I have ever listened to "I Love You" without feeling the memory of tears for the lost bliss of those fleeting otherworldly moments. I loved that record.

I also loved the song she recorded for the B-movie "The Deep," about as close as she ever got to doing a James Bond song (which would have been great!). I had that soundtrack with "Down Deep Inside" on otherworldly transparent blue vinyl. Her 15-minute version of Serge Gainsbourg's "Je T'aime" from Thank God It's Friday? To die for. And hearing her duke it out with Barbra Streisand on the 11-minute version of "No More Tears" is priceless.

I'm not sure that I heard Donna Summer's 17-minute cover of Jimmy Webb's lyrically obtuse epic of loss "MacArthur Park" dancing at the Bistro, but I know that it played the night that my friend Joe announced he had scored a few hits of windowpane acid. Let's just say this song is fried into my brain. Who turns a strange and melancholic song about a cake melting in the rain into a 17-minute disco song? I don't know if it was Summer herself or her producers who came up with this audaciously insane bit of genius. It's like an opera's mad song: beginning with a slow piano against stately strings, like something out of a drama queen's handbag, it takes almost two minutes even to understand what's happening. Suddenly Summer gives a theatrical laugh and it's on. That unforgettable horn-laden hook. It's ecstatic nonsense but it works: anyone who heard this song at that time surely knows what I mean. These songs were all huge at the clubs. Everyone jumped up from their banquettes and bar stools and filled the dance floor to catch the wave.

I remember when her triumphant double album "Bad Girls" came out. I remember the shiny shiny gatefold on extra-thick stock. Unlike the anonymous cooing female voices of so many disco acts, here was Donna Summer the star. While she had always flirted with musical styles beyond disco, "Bad Girls" was her successful power-grab for pop fame. Disco, soul, rock, even country. She not not only did it all, she did it all well. She understood in 1979, well ahead of many of us, that the disco genre she had pioneered couldn't sustain her indefinitely. She did amazing things with disco concept albums — there were several — and with giving new disco life to  Barry Manilow songs, but she knew when she needed to reinvent herself.

Well, we all seem to need to do that now and again. I note how Donna Summer was around (again!) a few times at significant moments in my own life. When I moved to New York City there was her ambitious eponymous album produced by Quincy Jones. It wasn't her biggest commercial success but it's a great record.

I remember her 1983 record "She Works Hard for the Money" with some ambivalence. This was a super big pop hit for her, and certainly the songs were grandly envisioned. But I didn't love this new Donna Summer, and her new openly born-again Christian identity was hard to reconcile with the Donna Summer who helped a generation of gay men dance out of their closets on to the streets. I am prepared now to accept that the fading of her reputation among gay men was the product of inaccurate malicious rumor, but there was a moment when we felt a sting of betrayal. I've said it before but the 1980s were a terrible decade.

Her later records were never huge, though the ones I know have a few magic moments. To my great regret I never saw her perform live.

But eventually all was forgiven. She didn't take back what she gave us, even if for a moment there was uncomfortable silence. Donna, we loved you, we really loved you.

Another one gone too damn soon; this part of growing up and older is hard, to see the people who helped shaped us, even from the other side of speakers and wires, drop away. Dim all the lights, sweet darling.... Love it don't come easy. But when you find the perfect love, let it fill you up. 

Thank you Donna. Thanks for being the soundtrack to my growing up.

Echoes of a past life: A Ball of Mirrors

It's a cold and rainy day after Christmas. I spent part of the afternoon ripping Madonna CDs to my computer so that I could listen to them at my desk; it was a little like watching my life flash before my eyes. Sure she's celebrity at its worst: the fake English accent, the African child-stealing, the atrocious acting, the overall narcissism. But she's actually a talented musician with a point of view and a shrewd sensibility for brilliantly surfing trends in pop dance music, leaving her junior imitators floundering in her wake. I can wax rhapsodic about obscure spiritual jazz, Brazilian art music, and obscure seventies gay disco, but somehow Madonna, as mainstream as she is, has held my attention over the years.

I actually remember the first time I heard of her: it was shortly after I moved to New York City, I believe. A graffiti artist named Michael Stewart had been killed by NYC cops. This was the era of Keith Haring and that whole East Village art scene, and the artsy counter-culture looked out for one another. I was walking in the village and was handed a flyer for a benefit in Stewart's honor: there would be a quite unknown singer at the benefit and her name was Madonna. To my regret I didn't hang on to that flyer or attend the event; shortly thereafter I heard her name again on the radio, singing this catchy new tune called "Everybody" that was becoming a big hit: a catchy urban sound with just a schmear of new wave and NYC proto-hiphop. I'm sure she never looked back.

I used to love to go dancing; and dance music, being so tied to its age, paints an easily-traced story of the decades. While Madonna stepped onto the scene after the heydey of disco and my youth, she's been there ever since. For the record Madonna and I are about the same age, and I can't imagine putting my own achy 51-year-old body through a night of dancing like I used to; I'm surely in awe of Madonna's physical regimen.

I wrote this essay on the power and meaning of dancing for the Queer Pagans zine back in the 1990s. In Madonna years that would be about the time of "Bedtime Stories." (For the record my favorite Madonna album is probably "Ray of Light" from 1998; its spirituality and rock- and trancemusic-influenced intensity has really held up for me more than some of her more sugar-coated earlier material.) Anybody following my writing here will note a repeated reference to an episode recounted in an earlier piece "Will the Gay Movement Survive AIDS." I'm happy that the point of view in this piece some ten years later is so much less bleak.

I opened this article with a bit of ancient Greek pagan poetry: an excerpt from Euripides' "The Bacchae" beginning "When shall I dance once more with bare feet the all-night dances." Click on the graphic to read this full size; this is a scan from the original QP zine.



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A Ball of Mirrors Like the Moon,
Communion, Like With God
by Ian Scott Horst
from QP #11, Ice & Promise 9994 [Feb. 1994]

I remember my first visit to a queer disco. It was in Chicago, probably late 1978. The place was the Bistro, located in a near-north noman's land home to low industrial buildings, drag clubs and leather bars. The crowd at the Bistro was mixed, a combination of gay men dressed down with fag-hags and adventuresome heterosexuals dressed up.

Near the entrance was a bar for serious drinkers and lost singles, but everyone else headed for the labrynthine arrangement of tables, potted palms, and velveteen divans circling the raised light-box that was the dance floor.

If I remember correctly, the dance floor was a checkerboard of flashing under-lit panels and shiny black gloss. At its edges were vents through which a dry ice fog would be pumped in the peak of our ecstasy. Hidden in a false ceiling above were trap doors from which confetti and feathers would swirl. Huge thumping speakers vibrated at the corners of the floor. Hanging from the rafters amidst a tangle of spinning colored lamps and flashing strobes was the mirrored ball, the ubiquitous idol we would worship there. For this disco was not just a place to socialize, but a place to lose oneself to the dance, to vibrate to rhythm until we soared through the very clouds to worship physical and spiritual ecstasy. Of course, a little LSD helped too.

Since it was the late '70s and not the late '80s, our dance was sexually charged ina way uncomplicated by mortal fear. And this was when we could dance to the entirety of Donna Summer's "MacArthur Park" suite without pangs of guilt or pains of betrayal over her as yet unuttered quips about "Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve."

It is interesting to me that pre-AIDS gay male culture was wrapped so inseparably with the dance. The disco become a kind of ritual religion, a spinning, whirling rite, a prelude to sexual abandon, a cultural center, a meeting ground. It was also, of course, self-absorbed, inward-looking and narcissistic. It was as though the mirror ball was not just a mechanism for spinning colored rays about the dance floor but a glittering symbol intoxicating us with our own images. For as we spun about the floor we found ourselves pulled in, to our center, finding our souls touched by the fire but in a way that left each alone, as though dreaming. It is an odd thing to be able to dance in a crowded floor and find the crowd melt aaway and disappear as the music seizes control.

Those were the days, you may remember, of the great schism between boys and girls. Chicago, like New York, is a big city, and there was little of that brother-and-sister-under-fier camaraderie of 1970s small town queer America. We dancing queens assumed at the time that lesbians were all stomping around the woods with their shirts off criticizing us for our puerile humor and hedonistic excesses. I suspect the truth is that queer women were undergoing their own formatice ecstasies, dancing in new found and self-shaped freedom.

Who would have dreamed this future, there, under those circumstances? Yet that which is dear to us now grew from seeds in those times. Even Queer Pagans as both people and thing owe direct lineage to those times of the dreaming dance. Starhawk's "The Spiral Dance" was first published in 1979, and is to considerable extent a product of the separatist lesbian feminist culture of that time. "The Spiral Dance" was a major force in opening Paganism to an audience beyond the heterosexist orthodox English traditionalist Wiccans. The Radical Faeries were officially founded also in 1979,a product of the new gay male self-awareness albeit in rejection of its materialism. And from the Faeries Pagans learned much about ritual innovation.

And so eventually the world spun on. I remember in the mid '80s going out with a friend to soem short-lived dance club in Manhattan. It was a weeknight, and the place was empty. Alone on the dance floor was a man with a pair of fans, lost in music. He was beautiful, his face a portrait of rapture, his solitude exquisite, lost in an act of inner communion both furious and serene. By chance we found out his name, and to sum up the 1980s, a month or two later we read his obituary in the gay press.

But the dance that is life continued, and something happened, at least to me, at the turn of the decade.

Jutting off the edge of Greenwich Village into the Hudson are the remnants of several abandoned piers. For years these piers were a kind of seedy sexual Disneyland. Even when there was no more privacy when the buildings on these piers were dissembled and carted away, the sex continued. Eventually the organizers of lesbian and gay pride day decided to throw an after-parade party, a dance, on one of these piers. And it was magic.

Under the sky, with laserbeams and fireworks instead of spinning lamps, with speakers two stories tall, thousands of us danced together. Queer people, men and women, survivors, entranced together, raising a powerful energy. It was different this time: we were high on adrenaline and pride. Instead of feeling like a vortex, pulling it all inside, I felt like bursting, like exploding with queer fire into an expanding, sweaty mass of brothers and sisters. Our mouths were open, roaring joy. Within the year I became a Pagan.

Dance is madness. Invisible bonds spring from music, wrapping themselves about your limbs, writhing around your hips, pulling and turning, transforming your body into the manic puppet of energy, of ecstasy. It is a seizure of the spirit. Open yourself to the invisible fury. Surrender to it. Cut the bonds of self-consciousness. Let it go. Become invisible. Dream a new world.

Accept communion.

Happy Holidays

Here's "Turkey Lurkey Time" by Burt Bacharach, from the Broadway Show "Promises Promises" as performed at the Tony Awards in 1968. This infectious holiday ditty, featuring Donna McKechnie's thighs, is about the only seasonal tune -- well, not counting Candy Samples -- I can stomach. Enjoy!