The first band I ever played in was back in 1976, and it was called “Gypsy.”
It was put together by three guys graduating high school, led by Anthony M, who was a musical genius at that age, but none of us knew it at the time. (He went on to play bass for Buddy Rich)
Anthony was part of a three piece progressive band that freaking rocked. But they couldn’t get any gigs, being so young, so Anthony asked me, a trumpet player and another sax player from our high school if we wanted to join a band. We weren’t very good at the time, but we could read music and Anthony, by ear, charted out all the horn parts.
We recruited the trumpet player’s cousin, who had a tremendous voice but was very shy to be the lead singer. And so we were born. We lasted a couple of years and then we all moved on.
To this day I still enjoy songs from that era because of the great melodies and grooves which were fun and exciting. But it didn’t take long for disco to start parodying itself.
I remember hearing Disco Duck for the first time and I said to myself, what the f*ck was that?” I knew it was a parody song, but a lot of people took it seriously.
DD came out in 76′ and it was only a few years later that a Chicago disc jockey got behind a crazy promotion called Disco Demolition Night, at Comiskey Park and that was the beginning of the end.
Check out the PBS doc The War on Disco.
Put in the comments some of the worst disco tunes you can remember or some of the songs you liked.
