Disco Inferno ‘79
I lost my disco virginity at the hottest club in town, the same night a wild crowd tried to burn the genre down
Riding the Bolt Bus to Baltimore this past spring, I thought about those many yesterdays ago when I was a teenager coming of age on those same streets. Unlike the drugged-out decline that has plagued certain areas of the city since the Ronald Reagan era of the 1980s — well documented in David Simon’s heroin and crack sagas The Corner and The Wire — my recollections were from a different era. As the sleek bus crept down North Avenue, my mind drifted back in time to the summer of ‘79.
Staring out of the window as the driver drove past blocks of abandoned houses, I remembered how this part of the city was once vibrant with businesses and pedestrians; it was sad to see that the neighborhood now looked like a ghost town. While there were changes happening further up North Avenue, with the expansion of the Maryland Institute College of Art and the slow conversion of crumbling structures into cultural spaces, the changes can’t come fast enough for some residents.
Suddenly, as though it was the specter of better days, as we turned at St. Paul Street, I caught a glimpse of the building that once housed the famed disco Odell’s. Painted beige and brown, as opposed to the black and white of its heyday, the once-fashionable club was where former Baltimore resident Oprah once partied and boxing champ Sugar Ray Leonard used to pickup groupies. Owned by the savvy businessman Odell Brock, who died in 1983 from bone marrow cancer, his namesake club remains a holder of myths and a place of legends even if the building itself is now just another nondescript structure on the block.
It was within the soundproofed walls of Odell’s that I lost my disco virginity on July 12, 1979, back in its golden days. Ironically, that was the same explosive night when, thousands of miles away in Chicago, one man was leading an asinine army in an attempt to destroy disco culture as we knew it.
Odell’s opened in 1976, back when G.Q.-dressed soul brothers still led their ladies by the hand to the massive dance floor to hustle and freak. In those days, disco was the soundtrack for most of my high school friends and Odell’s was where young, black Baltimore boogied. “You’ll know if you belong,” was their motto, which was broadcast regularly on radio commercials between ads for Champale and jheri-curl juice. The words were also bumper-stickered on countless cars.
With Thursday nights being the time when many teenagers claimed the club as their own, at a high school reunion years later former classmates talked about those Thursdays at Odell’s with reverence. “That place was our Studio 54 or Paradise Garage,” says Teddy Douglas, one-third of the Baltimore-based production team the Basement Boys, who later crafted addictive dance tracks for Crystal Waters, Ultra Naté and Byron Stingily. “The door fee was $3 for members, $5 for non-members, but everybody wanted to get into Odell’s. On some nights, the lines were around the block.”
In 1979, writers Arthur Lewis and Raheed penned “Discomania in Baltimore” for the Afro-American. Describing Odell’s as “a family-owned enterprise, at any time you can see a nephew, a brother, some sisters and even Daddy Brock running the two-story club—fixing a toilet, testing the lights or just making sure things are running right for the night.”
The journalists also interviewed proprietor Odell Brock, perhaps the coolest black businessman in town during the 70s. “We have no competition in Baltimore,” Brock told the writers. “We have never ripped people off, so obviously we have to be doing something right. After all, we started off very slowly and now we’re hotter than ever.”
Indeed, if you talk to any lifelong B-More residents over a certain age, they’ll tell you stories about Odell’s: of the membership cards, the fake palm trees, the mirrored DJ booth, the smoke, the lights, the sunken seating area and enormous floor where they danced to records spun by Wayne Davis, whose music remains majestic in the memories of many.
“Whenever I hear Sylvester’s ‘Mighty Real’ and Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans-Europe Express,’ it makes me think about Odell’s,” Cheryl Robertson, a regular in the late-70s, recalls. “Wayne always introduced us to new music, and he had a way of blending everything at just right moment. He kept the momentum going. We were dancing hard in there.”
Wayne Davis is currently the owner of the popular Baltimore club The Paradox, which has its own rich history. He was introduced to Odell Brock a few years before the club opened. Hearing Davis play at local basement parties, Brock was impressed. Brock hired Davis as the DJ for his first club, the Carousel. A year later, he opened Odell’s. “Sound was my passion. I played good dance tracks that could be any genre of music, even rock or folk,” Davis says. Inspired by the mixing styles he’d heard at underground clubs in New York City, he brought that technique to Odell’s.
“Nobody was really doing it like that. I would buy some records in New York or a local store called Music Liberated would order them for me.” Before the age of 12-inch singles, Davis would buy two of the same 7-inch. “These days DJs are like rock stars, but I was getting $25 to $50 a night.” In the 80s the club obtained a celebrated Richard Long sound system—the same team that created the sound for the Paradise Garage—but initially a local guy named Steve Johnson built their system
While Wayne was inside making people perspire, outside of the club the mating rituals of teenage wildlife were always in full effect. The street lamps burned bright and cool boys drove by in their rides, scoping out the honeys. “Sometimes the scene outside was crazier than in the club,” recalls my old friend William Green, who we used to call Billy. His high school sweetheart Carol was my best friend. In fact, it was Billy who took Carol to the club her first time.
Back in 1979, Billy was a frequent patron and drove to Odell’s in his just-cleaned burgundy ’76 Plymouth Feather Duster. There were times that, before going inside, he cruised up North Avenue just digging the scene or parked in front checking to see who was going inside. Looking out of his passenger window, he would see plenty of dressed-to-impress females with their mushroom hairstyles, Jordache jeans and high heels.
“We always wore the most happening clothes,” Carol says. “Shoulder pads in the jackets and gold tassels hanging on the side. I remember it was really dark in Odell’s, but I just loved to dance and the music was always right. As loud and monstrous as those speakers were, we should all be deaf.”
Outside, some girls might’ve flirted sweetly, but none were trying to do anything to be banished from the line by the stern-faced doorwoman Jackie, who was also Odell Brock’s wife.
Wearing big glasses and designer dresses, Jackie sat in the front deciding the fate of those trying to get through the door. As folks stood there patiently in anticipation of her decision, some people thought her petty, jealous, a bitch or a queen bee power tripper who modeled herself after velvet robe czar Steve Rubell. “Everybody had an exchange with Jackie,” Carol says. “She would be cutting her eyes at people, looking at them as though she had a problem.”
Yet, while the patrons might not have been aware, Jackie contributed greatly to the club’s success. “Pee-Wee (Odell’s nickname) owned the club, but it was Jackie who created the scene,” Wayne Davis says. “Part of the club’s mystique, the whole ‘you’ll know if you belong,’ was getting Jackie’s seal of approval.
“You could be wearing a nice suit, but if she didn’t like your shoes, you weren’t getting in.”
There might have been somebody beefing at the door for not being allowed inside, but just in case something jumped-off, the club had one security guy named Karate. “Odell’s was more Soul Train than Saturday Night Fever, but it was also very classy,” Green says. “There wasn’t a bar, just a punch fountain, so there were never any drunken arguments or fights over women. There was never any trouble. People just wanted to have fun.”
Having moved to Baltimore two years after Odell’s opened, I attended Northwestern High School where I’d befriended a diverse bunch of new friends including my disco-loving buddies Billy, who was in my printing class, and Carol. One of the more popular girls, she dressed in pretty blouses and designer jeans, while I was a bohemian wannabe with rock-n-roll leanings. Although I usually wore wrinkled jeans, t-shirts and sneakers, when Carol called that summer evening to ask if wanted to go out, she requested, “Please wear something nice tonight. No sneakers, no wrinkled jeans.”
Suspiciously I asked, “Why?” Having spent six years in Catholic school, I hated dressing up unless someone had died.
“We’re going to Odell’s.”
“What? Me? Get out of here.” Besides the Marble Bar—the infamous punk spot in the basement of a dilapidated hotel downtown—I’d never been to any clubs and dreaded the idea of dancing in public. For a moment, I panicked. My idea of fun was listening to Hendrix through headphones and reading comic books. “Oh, come on, we’ll have a good time,” she coaxed.
The truth of the matter was, Carol couldn’t find her boyfriend Billy and believed he might’ve been at the club with another woman. “This is the first I’m hearing of it,” he laughs more than three decades later. “She probably called my mom and grandmom and couldn’t find me, so she automatically thought I was at Odell’s.”
The same night Carol invited me to Odell’s, the dreaded Disco Demolition Night occurred 700 miles away, at Comiskey Park in Chicago, Illinois. The event was sponsored by radio station WLUP-FM and led by twenty-five year-old disc jockey Steve Dahl, who started a vicious (some say racist, others say homophobic) campaign against dance music. Dahl’s stupid mission was: “Dedicated to the eradication of the dreaded disease disco.”
Using the demolition as a baseball game promotion, the White Sox requested each patron bring a disco record to the double-header against the Tigers. For ninety-eight cents and a disco record, the patron could watch Dahl and his crew blowup a mountain of vinyl. Although 20,000 people were expected, the crowd swelled to 50,000. Those unable to get in legitimately began scaling the stadium walls and wreaking havoc throughout the ballpark.
Weed was puffed, cherry bombs were thrown and obnoxious, drunk teenagers threw beer and screamed, “Disco Sucks! Disco Sucks!” Flinging vinyl as though they were black Frisbees, one ballplayer, interviewed years after that disastrous night, recalled seeing a copy of the Beach Boys’ “‘Fun, Fun, Fun’” fly past his head. “And that wasn’t even a disco record,” he said sadly.
While I waited for Carol to pick me up, in Chicago pudgy Steve Dahl, dressed in a military uniform, was leading his drunken troops of 50,000 in a senseless battle of disco destruction at Comiskey Park. What started as a stunt began and ended in mayhem. After the disco records were blown up between games, the unruly youth stormed the fields and destroyed everything in their midst, literally stealing bases. The cops were called and the second game of the doubleheader against the Tigers was cancelled.
Clubland author and former Village Voice nightlife writer Frank Owen recently told me, “The Disco Demolition was a white riot, a pep rally for bigots held in the contempt capital of the USA. Did it have any effect on disco as a musical movement? Not really, because the music was already getting old by that point. What really killed disco was when artists like Kiss and Frank Sinatra starting making dance records. Still, how ironic is it that within six years, in the same city, disco would be reborn as house music?”
Meanwhile back in Baltimore, Carol sighed into the phone. “So what are you going to do?” Although I wasn’t one of those rock boys who thought disco totally sucked, I was a wallflower who imagined the laughing eyes of millions as I stood nightmare naked beneath the strobe light, shaking my groove thing as though having a seizure.
However, coming from New York City, the home of Prelude Records and Salsoul, whose “Ten Percent” by Double Exposure was the first 12-inch single commercially available, I secretly dug some of the music. Growing up above 110th Street, disco had roared constantly from passing cars, neighborhood block parties and five-hundred pound boomboxes.
In my old Harlem hood, where I’d once spent my last dollar buying the proto-disco “Keep on Truckin’” by Eddie Kendrick at Bobby’s Happy House, my mom read Interview and After Dark. Flipping through those same magazines, I was introduced to a world beyond the neighborhood grit. as I was captivated by the glam photo spreads of party people like Grace Jones, Andy Warhol, Diana Ross, Cher, Calvin Klein, all having a blast at Studio 54, Xenon’s or Empire Skating Rink in Brooklyn, the same borough where homeboy Randy Muller built dope dance tracks for Brass Construction (“Changin’”), Charles Earland (“Let the Music Play”) and Skyy.
In other words, since I was a kid, I’d wanted to go to a discothèque in the worst way.
Although Odell’s wasn’t one of those pleasure palaces I used to fantasize about, I could finally see if I was missing anything special. “All right,” I replied finally. I could hear Carol smiling; she always smiled loudly. “You’ll love it, Mike, don’t worry.” Hanging up the phone, I sat still in the chair for a few minutes feeling scared and excited before getting up and stepping into the shower.
An hour later, dressed in a starched black button-down shirt, matching slacks and laced-up black church shoes, I sat patiently on the couch waiting for Carol to arrive, more than ready to infiltrate that Mecca of black teenage cool known as Odell’s.
To understand the hold that disco had on popular culture in 1979, it is helpful to trace the emergence of the sound. In 1970 pioneering DJ David Mancuso opened his genre-shaping club The Loft in downtown New York City. It quickly developed a cult audience while also inspiring legions to open their own spots. He could not had known he was creating a monster.
The sound blaring at Mancuso’s members-only sensation was danceable soul music. A year later, brightly-clothed kids were grooving to similar music as they swayed down the line on Soul Train. Two years after that, Philly music men Gamble and Huff laced the world, courtesy of powerhouse vocalist Teddy Pendergrass, with “The Love I Lost,” a song which was my disco-obsessed gay uncle’s favorite song. A month later Barry White’s hustle classic “Love Theme,” played majestically by Love Unlimited Orchestra, became the closing music for the local Channel 7 News.
Although not alone in the canon, those two classic cuts not only helped disco become commercial, but also radio-friendly. Granted, I was merely listening to songs on the AM dial (“Super 16,” WWRL), but soon after Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder kicked in the door with “Love to Love You,” regular soul and/or funk barely made the playlist. “Disco took over everything,” soul singer Wilson Pickett complained during that era, and he wasn’t lying. As the night music began getting more airplay in the day and disco became even more mainstream, rockers like the Rolling Stones started making their own strobe-lit dance songs (“Miss You”), and some rock folks began to get nervous.
Originally created as an alternative to the mainstream pop and rock, a soaring soundtrack enjoyed mostly by African-Americans, Latinos and gays, disco soon became the music of suburban dads doing the hustle, and soccer moms shaking their booties to “Fly Robin Fly” while packing sandwiches for their kids in official DISCO lunchboxes. By the time Saturday Night Fever dropped like a bomb onto the pop-cult landscape in 1977, with its mostly Bee Gees-written-and-produced soundtrack that stayed on top of the Billboard charts for months, disco had become a fire-breathing sonic Godzilla devouring the nation.
Alice Echols notes in Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture that “as popular as disco already was, Saturday Night Fever threw it into manic overdrive.” A year after Saturday Night Fever, Mike Wallace did a segment on Disco for 60 Minutes. In 1979, the words “Disco Takes Over” screamed from the cover of Newsweek, the text superimposed over a vibrant photograph of Donna Summer. That same year, Rod Stewart’s screeching “Do You Think I’m Sexy” caused rockers to flip out, and Blondie’s hypnotic “Heart of Glass”—the first 12-inch I ever bought—made punkers call the group a sellout.
Maurice Brock, one of Odell Brock’s young nephews who used to help out at the club, says, “The tension between rock and disco was thick. When I first heard people saying ‘Disco Sucks,’ I thought, ‘I just hope Odell’s doesn’t close.’ Back then, the radio stations in the city were picking up on what we were playing, but we still thought of our sound as more underground than mainstream.”
Much like the protagonist in the Odyssey song, Carol Cooper was a “Native New Yorker” who knew the score. A veteran writer and former Black music executive, she remembers those days well. “Corporate disco (from ‘76 to ‘79) had forced funk and jazz fusion as well as hard rock off pop radio, so a creative and consumer backlash from all quarters was inevitable. The Disco Demolition bonfire arrived late to an underground revolt that was already underway. Even Donna Summer had changed her sound by then.
“All that Midwestern event and its white DJ ringleader succeeded in doing was giving American bigots an excuse to blame blacks and gays for a capitalistic trend run into the ground by clueless corporate Svengalis. I think that event had more of an effect on what commercial radio and record retailers did than on club life.”
A few months later, as though constructed from the aural ashes of that Windy City bonfire, Chic’s disco anthem “Good Times” was used as the foundation for the Sugar Hill Gang’s debut “Rappers Delight.”
Disco singer Anita Ward’s ubiquitous “Ring My Bell” blasted from the sound system as Jackie Brock allowed Carol and me to enter through the hallowed doorway of Odell’s. I could feel the bass rumbling through my chest. As I nervously strolled across the floor, some people I knew from school greeted me, surprised to see me. Others danced enthusiastically, lost in the grooves.
“I’ll be right back,” Carol said, leaving me on my own. I leaned against the wall tapping my feet to the beat. An hour later, Carol came back. She’d never found Billy with another girl, but she wasn’t about to leave Odell’s without dancing. Knowing full well that I was a spaz, she obviously wasn’t going to let that simple fact get in her way, especially when Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop Until You Get Enough” playing.
“You’ve just been standing around all night. Do you want to dance?” I smirked. “You know better than that.”
“Just follow my lead,” she replied with a smile. Grabbing my right hand, we pushed through the packed room until reaching the middle of the floor. Nervously, I tried not to laugh. Leaning over, I whispered in Carol’s ear, “You lucky they’re playing Michael Jackson.” Staring at her pretty face through the smoke, I threw my skinny arms in the air and moved awkwardly. In the spirit of Odell’s motto, if only for a few minutes, I too belonged.
Follow Michael A. Gonzales on Twitter @gonzomike.
Don’t miss a beat! Follow Cuepoint: Twitter | Facebook
