Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (2 page)

Meanwhile, landlords began a concerted, if largely unorganized, campaign of disinvestment in an effort to overturn the city’s rent control regulations and to squeeze every inch of profit they could out of their properties. As “desirable” tenants fled to the suburbs, rather than accept controlled rents from the city for low-income tenants, landlords neglected their maintenance responsibilities, stopped providing utilities, refused to pay taxes, and eventually indulged in arson on their own properties, leaving vast areas pockmarked with burned-out buildings, destroying communities and neighborhoods in the process.
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The worst ravaged area was the South Bronx (the communities of Mott Haven, Morrisania, and Hunts Point), a few square miles just over the Willis Avenue Bridge from Manhattan that had been abandoned to the drug abusers, street gangs, and roving packs of wild dogs, and largely left for dead. Dr. Harold Wise of the neighborhood’s Martin Luther King Jr. Health Center called the place “a necropolis.”
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In the late ’60s, organizations like the Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam attempted to act as the sheriffs in these urban ghost towns, but their influence was waning in the face of the FBI’s COINTELPRO (a massive covert action program that sought to “neutralize” what FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called “Black Nationalist hate groups” and “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country”).
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The void left in their wake was filled by street gangs like the Black Spades, Savage Skulls, Roman Kings, Javelins, and Seven Crowns to which disenfranchised young African-American and Hispanic men turned in droves.
19
By 1973, there were 315 gangs with more than 19,000 members in New York City.
20
Even though many of these gangs evolved into politicized empowerment groups like the Young Lords Party and the Real Great Society (which grew out of the Lower East Side Dragons and the Assassins) and started to attack the drug dealers who ravaged their neighborhoods with heroin, the gangs’ association with violence and their intimidating presence colored the city with a steely brutality. As Nelson George noted, “Civil rights, self-sufficiency, protest, politics … all of it faded for those trapped in the shooting galleries of the body and the mind.”
21

New York’s members of the Silent Majority who had swept Richard Nixon into power in 1968 felt like they were being outnumbered and ignored, and reacted with fear and resentment. Their response to growing black militancy, the antiwar movement, bra burning, major demographic change, and hedonistic hippies “tuning in, turning on, and dropping out” was America’s thermidorean reaction and prompted
Time
magazine to name the Middle American as its Man and Woman of the Year in 1969.
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The Middle American was the square heartlander who rallied around Old Glory and still believed in Mom, baseball, and apple pie; he was the anti-intellectual narrator of Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” who doesn’t “smoke marijuana … take trips on LSD [or] burn [his] draft card down on Main Street [because he likes] livin’ right and being free”; she was the mother concerned about kin and decency who put an “Honor America” bumper sticker on the family car. These Middle Americans were the ones responsible for a law in West Virginia that absolved the guilt of any policeman involved in future deaths of antiwar protesters or race rioters, the ones who defied almost two hundred years of separation between church and state to encourage their kids to pray in a public school in Netcong, New Jersey.

Despite being that den of iniquity and vice so close to decadent Europe and the seat of the Northeastern liberal elite, New York City had its own Middle Americans—the working-class white ethnics who lived in the outer boroughs. They were, as described by New York City mayor John Lindsay’s biographer Vincent J. Cannato, “men and women descended from German, Irish, Italian, Polish, Greek and Jewish immigrants who were either civil servants (teachers, firemen, policemen), union members (welders, electricians, carpenters), or members of the petite bourgeoisie (clerks, accountants, small businessmen). Their culture was middlebrow, traditional and patriotic.”
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They were enshrined in popular culture by
All in the Family
’s Archie Bunker, who became the country’s favorite TV character as soon as he appeared in 1970. His vision of America was “the land of the free where Lady Liberty holds her torch sayin’ send me your poor, your deadbeats, your filthy … so they come from all over the world pourin’ in like ants … all of them free to live together in peace and harmony in their separate little sections where they feel safe, and break your head if you go in there. That there is what makes America great!”
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The Bunkers were traditional Democratic voters who had grown disenchanted with the liberal experiment of the 1960s and blamed it for tearing apart the fabric of American society. One particular target of their ire was the welfare program, which in the popular imagination had become permanently associated with African Americans and had exploded out of control.
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But since welfare did nothing to address the real problems of ghetto life, racism, and endemic poverty, urban African Americans continued to protest vociferously their social and economic conditions. “But,” as writer Peter Carroll noted, “these complaints seemed particularly outrageous to working-class whites, who themselves teetered on the brink of economic disaster.”
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In a chilling article in
New York
magazine, veteran New York newspaperman Pete Hamill wrote that the white working and lower middle classes “see a terrible unfairness in their lives and an increasing lack of personal control over what happens to them.” Instead of turning to the government or the unions or community groups for help, they were increasingly arming themselves, forming vigilante groups, and talking of a race war. Hamill ominously warned that “All over New York City tonight, in places like Inwood, South Brooklyn, Corona, East Flatbush and Bay Ridge, men are standing around saloons talking darkly about possible remedies. Their grievances are real and deep, their remedies could blow this city apart.”
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Even though the prophesied race war never happened, on May 8, 1970, their grievances bubbled over into physical violence. A group of about two hundred construction workers carrying crowbars and hammers descended on a gathering near City Hall of one thousand students who were protesting the deaths four days earlier of four students who were killed by members of the National Guard at an antiwar protest at Kent State University in Ohio. Chanting “All the way, USA,” they beat the protesters with their helmets, tools, and steel-toed work boots to the accompaniment of applause from the suited and tied executives at the brokerage houses overlooking the square. “Bloody Friday” was only the beginning of two weeks of virulent flag-waving, pro-Nixon demonstrations that were known as the “Hard Hat Riots” and culminated on May 20, when between 60,000 and 150,000 construction workers and their allies marched down the Canyon of Heroes in lower Manhattan in a tickertape parade.
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The “Hard Hat Riots,” however, weren’t so much prowar rallies as they were potent symbols of class resentment. The working class felt the effects of the military action in Vietnam much more strongly than the middle-class families whose children were safely ensconced in college, where they were protected from the draft. Peter Carroll recalled “one worker whose son was serving in Vietnam lament[ing] the inability of poorer boys to ‘get the same breaks as the college kids. We can’t understand,’ he added, ‘how all those rich kids—the kids with beards from the fancy suburbs—how they get off when my son has to go over there and maybe get his head shot off.’”
29
While their sons were dying on the killing fields of Southeast Asia, members of the working class were dying at similar rates back home. In 1970, there were 14,200 deaths in the workplace, while thousands more suffered chronic illnesses resulting from workplace exposure to dangerous substances like asbestos. In construction work (one of the country’s most dangerous occupations), this misery was compounded by the fact that in 1970, 30 percent of the construction workers in the United States were unemployed at one time or another, largely due to reductions in public works programs caused by inflation and budget cuts.
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THE OCEAN HILL TEACHERS’ STRIKE

If one event epitomized the stress and strife of New York in the late ’60s and early ’70s, it was the series of strikes called by the United Federation of Teachers in 1968. In May, thirteen teachers, five assistant principals, and one principal were dismissed from their positions at Junior High School 271 in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville school district in Brooklyn. The recently elected district school board was the result of an experiment in community control over schooling in an effort to help improve the quality of education in an area that had shifted rapidly from a predominantly Jewish neighborhood to a predominantly African-American and Puerto Rican one. Almost all of the educators who were fired were Jewish, while the school board was almost entirely black. In perhaps the only sector of the employment market where Jews and African Americans competed for the same jobs, tensions were high, and accusations of racism and anti-Semitism flew from all corners in the dispute. A little over a decade after Arkansas governor Orval Faubus had called in the National Guard to prevent black students from entering a school in Little Rock, black parents were now blockading the school to prevent the dismissed teachers from entering. In protest, the city’s teachers’ union called a series of strikes that severely disrupted the school calendar and bitterly divided the city. Its most profound effect was the severing of the bond that had existed between blacks and Jews, who had played a huge role in the civil rights movement. Previously, Jews had thought of themselves, and perhaps more crucially were thought of, in a racially nebulous way. But during this dispute, their racial identification became definitely “white,” and they even formed previously unthinkable alliances with New York’s Catholic communities. The result was that for the next three-plus decades, New York’s Jewish community became much more conservative, and the city’s traditional liberal alliance was broken.
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And nowhere were these cutbacks more severe than in New York. As stagflation—the economic condition of rising inflation, intractable unemployment, and near-zero economic growth that defies almost every theory of classical economics—reared its ugly head, due to a swelling bureaucracy, increasing municipal operating expenses, and escalating debt-service costs (principally paying interest on city-issued bonds), the city had accumulated a $3 billion budget deficit by 1975. In May of that year, Gotham reached financial meltdown when the institutions that had been underwriting the municipal bonds used to pay the city’s costs decided to stop lending money to such a high-risk enterprise as the city of New York.
31
Facing default, the government of New York State created the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), which was chaired by banker Felix Rohatyn. MAC would issue long-term, high-interest bonds backed by municipal revenues in order to pay off the city’s creditors. But this help came with a condition—sacrifice. The city slashed services, fired sixty-three thousand municipal employees (including fifteen thousand teachers and four thousand hospital workers)—“the first municipal layoffs since the Depression”;
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closed firehouses; increased transit fares from 35 to 50 cents a trip; and ended the free tuition offered at the City University of New York to all graduates of New York City high schools. On October 30, 1975, after the city had failed to persuade the federal government to help bail it out of its fiscal crisis, the
Daily News
ran a headline that effectively summed up the rest of America’s feeling toward Gotham: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

But while the remains of New York’s infrastructure were withering away, its artists and musicians produced a groundswell of creative activity that aimed to reclaim the city. In the spaces left by deindustrialization and disinvestment, they forged their own communities outside of the traditional industry-backed and commercially oriented channels. Just as avant-garde artists like Nam June Paik, Joan Jonas, and Gordon Matta-Clark were making works in tune to the new topography of New York and were busy turning the abandoned warehouses of SoHo (at the time it was still called “Hell’s Hundred Acres”) into the world’s most vibrant artistic community, musicians were seeking their own form of rapture from within the city’s crumbling cast-iron skeleton. The “loft jazz scene” saw free jazz musicians gather in disused loft spaces like Studio We, Studio Rivbea, and Ali’s Alley that were owned by the musicians themselves
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in order to hone a seemingly structureless, searching sound that was dubbed “ecstatic.” Young rock musicians, especially those from the outer boroughs, who congregated at old theaters like the Mercer Street Arts Center and sleazy dives like Max’s Kansas City reacted against the increasingly bloated, corporate nature of rock by stripping down the music to its barest essence of attitude and noise and by finding enlightenment in the discarded ephemera of trash culture. Young kids at outdoor parties in the parks in the Bronx would find their own nirvana by isolating the two or three bars of utter musical perfection on obscure albums and extend the pleasure indefinitely by manipulating two copies of the same record on a pair of turntables that were usually powered by illegally tapping into the city’s power grid. And, in fading hotels and former churches, gays, blacks, and Latinos were feeling the exaltation of the damned as they danced to a new style of syncretic music that was being pieced together by the clubs’ DJs. This glittering beast that eventually rose on sateen wings from the burrows of the Big Apple’s worm-eaten core was disco.