transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] In several prior episodes of Hit Parade, we've talked about this period in a music superstar's career, the moment when any project they take on is met with success. Elton John in 1975, Prince in 1984, George Michael in 1988. Because Donna Summer's imperial period, in the years 1978 and 79, coincided with a musical movement some people never liked, and some would prefer to forget, her stature in music history has been somewhat diminished. Where do you feel you stand now?

Speaker 2:
[00:35] Well, I just, I don't, I really couldn't even tell you. I hope I stand in a light of legitimacy, I think, in a place where people will respect what I do, and understand that any songs that I make, I do because I choose to and not because that is my limitation. And I think that before that was the problem, they thought that that was my limitation, as opposed to that as, it being something that I desire to do.

Speaker 1:
[01:03] Well, initially, everybody thought that that first song was going to be it, it was a flash in the pan.

Speaker 2:
[01:06] Exactly. And it was probably because of the way it was sung, and the fact that there weren't, I won't say any great philosophical words to be found, but it was whatever it was, and indicative of a particular time and movement in music, and it played an important part in my life.

Speaker 1:
[01:27] Even if you are a hater of all things late 70s, however, Donna Summer's Imperial Period showcases two things, her talent and her instincts. What makes the apex of her reign as Queen of Disco fascinating is how much culture she brought under the umbrella of that moniker. She didn't try to escape disco, she sought to expand it. For example, listen to the opening of Summer's first hit of 1978. Probably, her most iconic single. If you've heard Last Dance at a wedding or a public event recently, you probably think of it as a quintessential disco record. This despite the fact that its structure was highly unusual, even for the period. The song is a ballad for more than a third of its running time. Co-producer Bob Esty proposed the unusual structure, which he modeled after Diana Ross's Ain't No Mountain High Enough, largely because he knew Summer could handle it. The song only picks up the tempo after nearly a minute and a half has gone by. Last Dance was featured in the musical film Thank God It's Friday. Summer actually appears in the movie, her only film acting experience, alongside young stars Jeff Goldblum and Deborah Winger. The film takes place in a Los Angeles disco, effectively an LA answer to the New York based Saturday Night Fever. Unlike that movie smash, Thank God It's Friday did modest box office business, was panned by critics, and is largely forgotten today. But Last Dance is a standard. It reached number three on the Hot 100 in the summer of 1978, and the following year won an Oscar for its primary writer, Paul Giubara. What makes the song remarkable, what ultimately won Giubara his Oscar is Summer's performance. From her dramatic reading of the opening balladry, to the potent high note she hits in the final minute, the song is a vocalist's showcase. Last Dance paved the way for Summer's most ambitious project to date, an album capturing her eclectic live show. Summer was known for concerts that would run the gamut from disco to jazz to show tunes. And she finally had the clout to capture it all on a double live album. As its title suggested, 1978's Live and. More was a two-record set, but with only three vinyl sides filled with concert material. The fourth side was reserved for a studio recording. Given their history of filling LP sides with lengthy tracks, it's unsurprising that Summer, Moroder and Bellotte decided to record another symphonic suite. What is surprising is the song they picked as its centerpiece. That is the original version of MacArthur Park, recorded by the Irish actor Richard Harris, a famed stage and screen actor who played King Arthur in Camelot and three decades later, would portray Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films. Harris was only intermittently a recording artist, and MacArthur Park was his only top 40 hit, peaking at number two in 1968. The song was written by Jimmy Webb, the famed American songwriter responsible for such classics as Glenn Campbell's Wichita Lineman and The Fifth Dimensions Up Up and Away. The florid, overly lyrical MacArthur Park, the song about the cake with the green icing left out in the rain, was perhaps Webb's strangest composition, originally intended for a cantata that he never recorded. Harris, with his classical actors training, had managed to make the song a campy novelty hit at a moment in the late sixties when Baroque songs were doing well on the charts. Ten years later, Giorgio Moroder reckoned the ungainly song could be made into something else entirely. With a propulsive brass arrangement, ghostly synthesizers, screaming guitars, melodramatic power vocals, and even a witchy cackle, Donna Summer's MacArthur Park was disco's own thriller, a mini movie that, even in its four-minute radio edit, went through several movements. The craziest thing of all, MacArthur Park became Donna Summer's first ever number one hit, topping the Hot 100 in November 1978. The same week MacArthur Park topped the Hot 100, Live and. More became Donna's first number one album. It even spawned a second hit when the midsection of the MacArthur Park suite, a soaringly catchy song by Summer, Moroder, and Bellotti called Heaven Knows, was issued as a standalone single, co-credited to Brooklyn Dreams, the group whose leader Bruce Sudano would later marry Summer. Heaven Knows was a number four hit in early 1979. Live and. More wound up spending nearly a year and a half on the album chart, and it became Donna Summer's first platinum album. In just over a year, Summer had succeeded with a string of projects that, while all broadly in the disco idiom, were crazily wide-ranging, from a Cinderella concept album to an Oscar-winning torch song to a Rococo 60s remake. While Summer was hitting her stride, the rest of the rock world was moving her way. The disco explosion was bringing rock bands into the fold, from 60s stalwarts like the Rolling Stones, to a new wave of post-punk groups like Blondie. If the rockers were going to move on to Donna's disco turf, she was within her rights moving on to theirs, and she did it on her terms. Hot Stuff was the ultimate hybrid single, the crunch of a rock song, the thump of a disco song. Written by Pete Bellotte, with future Billy Idol collaborator Keith Forsey and future Axl F keyboardist Harold Faltermeyer, Hot Stuff would go on to win the very first Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance over songs by Bonnie Raitt, Carly Simon and Ricky Lee Jones. Summer sang Hot Stuff with a snarl, more Pat Benatar than Gloria Gaynor. And the track even sported a guitar solo by Jeff Skunk Baxter, the former guitarist for Steely Dan and the Doody Brothers. Hot Stuff was the lead single to Donna's brand new album, Bad Girls, released in May 1979. It was her third consecutive double album and her second in a row to top the album chart. Team Donna didn't even wait for Hot Stuff to reach the top of the Hot 100 before issuing the follow-up single, a song she co-wrote with future husband Bruce Sudano, the album's chugging, chanting title track, Bad Girls. Hot Stuff and Bad Girls scaled the Hot 100 together. The former topped the chart in June 1979. Two weeks after Hot Stuff exited the top slot, Bad Girls replaced it, and also became her first ever number one on the R&B chart. Here to fore, Summer had scored several black radio hits, but had often been more popular with white pop audiences than black audiences. But the Bad Girls album made her the top crossover act of the year. Meanwhile, on the Hot 100 that summer, for the better part of two months, Donna was blockading the top of the chart. Casey Kasem counted them down.

Speaker 3:
[12:45] Talk about a hot record. Thirteen weeks on American Top 40, and eleven of those weeks in the top three. Including three weeks at number one, Donna Summer and Hot Stuff. Four out of the past seven weeks, Donna Summer has held down the number one spot. This week, she makes it five out of the past eight weeks. And here's the song that does it. At number one across the nation for its second straight week, here's Bad Girls by Donna Summer.

Speaker 1:
[13:16] Bad Girls was not only Summer's longest studio album ever, it was her best seller, Going Double Platinum, and her most acclaimed and sonically diverse work. Rock critics who betrayed no love for disco lined up to praise it. Even Rolling Stone grumbled that it, quote, ranks as the only great disco album other than Saturday Night Fever, unquote. It's 15 songs, about half written by Summer herself, ranged from the balladry of There Will Always Be a. You to the electro dance of Our Love. Sometimes the sonic variety took place within the space of a single song. Dim All the Lights, the album's third single, and for your information, the all-time favorite Donna Summer track of your humble Hit Parade host, is multiple songs in one. The song starts off as rock balladry with a saloon-like, almost country twang before transforming to a Latin-flavored dance record. Summer, who wrote the song herself, later told music historian Christian John Wykane that she conceived Dim All the Lights for Rod Stewart. For the song's first 30 seconds, you can absolutely hear the raspy rocker crooning it. That is, before Donna's voice explodes with one of the longest sustained notes in pop music history. Before the song is through, there's an electro-funk breakdown and even a section where disco dancers can do the bump. Dim All the Lights is to Donna Summer, what. Over the Hills and Far Away is to Led Zeppelin. All of the artists modes in a single song in under five minutes. Dim All the Lights reached. No. 2 in the fall of 1979, stuck at first behind the Eagles Heartache Tonight. But Summer's hit was not only competing with the likes of Glenn Frey and Don Henley, it was also going toe to toe with another single by Donna herself, a duet with a new friend. Barbara Streisand, ratifying Summer's status as the premier vocalist on the charts, invited Donna to duet with her on the feminist anthem No More Tears in the late summer of 1979. Released in the fall, the single, subtitled Enough Is Enough, topped the chart in less than two months, giving Summer her third number one hit of 1979 and actually preventing her own Dim All the Lights from reaching the top. Of course, these chart battles weren't the only musical happenings in the second half of 1979. Disco sucks!

Speaker 2:
[17:00] Disco sucks!

Speaker 1:
[17:10] Disco Demolition Night was an ugly publicity stunt, a bonfire of disco records that took place in Chicago's Comiskey Park during a White Sox double header in July 1979. It turned so violent and damaging that the second game of the Sox double header had to be canceled. I needn't spend much time discussing this now infamous event in which a crowd of largely straight white men publicly expressed their frustration with a musical culture composed largely of women, gay men, and people of color. Thank heaven such rallies don't happen anymore in 2017. Disco Demolition Night makes an appearance in virtually every documentary about the so-called death of disco. And to be sure, it was a leading indicator of Americans' pushback against the now omnipresent music. Within a year, disco sales would plummet, pulling the recording industry into a slump. For artists who thrived during the disco years, the charts at the start of the 1980s would become more treacherous. By that measure, Donna Summer's glass was more than half full. Summer kicked off 1980 atop the charts one more time with one last double album, this time a greatest hits compilation. Entitled On The Radio, the collection spanned Donna's entire Casablanca oeuvre and featured two new songs, the Barbra Streisand duet and the album's title track. The On The Radio album topped the chart in January, and the On The Radio single, another of Donna's patented blends of Torch Song and Dance Jam, reached. No. 5 on the Hot 100 by March. Having set a record as the only active recording artist to score three straight. No. 1 double albums, Summer's imperial high point was over. But entering the 80s, she sought to diversify her musical palette. A song she co-wrote with her husband, Bruce Sudano, became a. No. 1 country hit in May 1980 for superstar Dolly Parton. Not long after, Summer became the first signing on Geffen Records, the then-new label founded by legendary music impresario David Geffen. Signing Donna Summer in the year 1980 might appear to be like entering the buggy whip business in 1910. Other frontline disco acts, like the Bee Gees and the Village People, fell off rapidly in 1980. Fortunately for Geffen, Summer and her producers showed they could adapt to the 80s the same way they had adapted to Rock. The Wanderer was the title track of Summer's first Geffen album, and more significantly Summer's first full-on attempt at New Wave. Summer's staccato vocals on the track were a radical shift from the lush full-throated singing she'd employed at her disco high point. Several 70s superstars attempted this makeover in 1980 to varying degrees of success. For example, pop vocalist Linda Ronstadt attempted the sound and scored a moderate hit. And piano man Billy Joel actually topped the charts with his sly, snarky commentary on new wave trend hopping. But Donna Summer was more closely tied to disco specifically than either of these artists, making her transition to New Wave that much harder. When The Wanderer soared into the top 10 in the fall of 1980, ultimately peaking at number three, it had to be regarded as a modest triumph. The Wanderer album, produced once again by Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotti, was not timid about Summer's remodeling. Cold Love, a number 33 hit in early 1981, was written by the same team led by Bellotti, who penned the prior year's Hot Stuff, and it sounded even more like Rock and even less like Disco. Despite the relative success of The Wanderer, it would turn out to be the swan song of the Summer Moroder-Ballotti team. The trio did work on one last album together, 1981's ill-fated I'm a Rainbow. Geffen, unsatisfied with the album's commercial prospects, decided I'm a Rainbow was unfit for the marketplace and shelved the album. Only a couple of tracks saw release, including the synth pop Romeo, which wound up on the chart topping Flashdance soundtrack. Pete Bellotte went on to record with numerous artists, including Tina Turner and Janet Jackson. And Giorgio Moroder kept on topping the charts. While still recording with Summer, he scored a number one smash with Blondie. And after their parting, he racked up two more 80s chart toppers and two Oscars for his work on Berlin's smash, Take My Breath Away from Top Gun and Irene Cara's Flashdance, What a Feeling, a song that could just as easily have been sung by Donna. Summer entered the wilderness of her post-Moroder years working with a string of new collaborators to varying degrees of success. In 1982, Geffen teamed her with legendary producer Quincy Jones, who manned the boards for an album simply titled Donna Summer. While the Quincy album was not the smash Geffen was hoping for, the self-titled disc did go gold and produce one solid top 10 hit, the on-trend synth-funk track Love Is In Control. With hindsight, the album could be regarded as a near miss for Donna, as it echoed the sound Quincy would produce to much, much greater success just months later on Michael Jackson's Thriller album. To date, Summer had proven she could adapt to the sound of New Wave, but not necessarily the era of MTV. The video channel, which launched in 1981, was scarcely even playing black artists by 1983. But many of the white rock acts of the period were directly borrowing the rhythmic approach of vintage dance and disco acts. But Summer finally got her ticket punched at MTV with a 1983 single and video that almost never existed, a one-off project Donna did outside of her deal with Geffen. When she left Casablanca for Geffen in 1980, Summer still owed the label one more album, and legally had to fulfill the obligation by producing that one album for Mercury Records, the label that had absorbed Casablanca. For the Mercury Project, Donna worked with producer and songwriter Michael Omartian, and the title track they wrote together wound up being Summer's biggest pop hit of the decade and her biggest R&B hit ever. Inspired by an encounter Summer had with an exhausted attendant cleaning a Los Angeles ladies room, She Works Hard for the Money was a number three pop, number one R&B smash in the summer of 1983, a season dominated by the police, Eurythmics, Duran Duran, and other MTV titans. In the elaborate music video, Donna wore Wayfarer sunglasses and a geometric dress and appeared alongside a cast of dozens of choreographed dancers prancing in the middle of a city street, a cross between a feminist march, an aerobics workout, and the movie Fame. The video was not only played by MTV, Summer became the first African American female to be placed in heavy rotation, just months after the channel embraced Michael Jackson and Prince. Unfortunately, the monster success of She Works Hard for the Money did not really transfer to any of Summer's other mid-80s projects, either with Mercury or Geffen. She continued to show her versatility through the middle of the decade, scoring minor hits with the reggae song Unconditional Love, a duet with musical youth, and a synth pop cover of The Drifters' There Goes My Baby, the latter a. No. 21 hit in 1984. But it seemed Trends had finally moved away from Donna Summer. It wasn't until the late 1980s that the pendulum swung back, when a new production team with a hot sound began sweeping pop radio. Now, brace yourselves, because the sound of these producers was rather edgy. I've always wanted to rickroll a podcast audience. That, of course, is British crooner Rick Astley, with his 1988 chart topper Never Gonna Give You Up. It was Astley's first number one hit, but not the first for his signature producers, the British trio of Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman. For roughly three years, Stock Aitken-Waterman, the production team whose name sounded like a brokerage firm, had been producing hits for acts ranging from Dead or Alive to Banana Rama to Kylie Minogue. What was perhaps most notable about Rick Astley's success in particular was the production's obvious debt to vintage 70s clubbers. The synthesized string arrangement on Never Gonna Give You Up was unabashedly indebted to classic disco. For seven years, dance and pop music, especially on American Top 40 radio, had tried to hide its connections to disco after the music's 1980 implosion. String effects would crop up on such hits as Michael Jackson's Billie Jean or Billy Ocean's Caribbean Queen, but they were subsumed into more current, post-New Wave production elements. Rick Astley and, by extension, the stock Aiken-Waterman production sound were proudly square, populist and indebted to disco. The time was finally ripe for one last Donna Summer comeback on the pop charts. This time, I know it's for real. The lead single from Summer's 1989 album, Another Place and Time, was a savvy amalgamation of the stock Aiken-Waterman, Europop style and Summer's vintage disco sound. And Donna's voice, just as she was turning 40, appeared to have lost little of its power. The single reached. No. 7 on the Hot 100, Summer's last US. Top 10 hit, and went gold. In the UK, where the SAW sound had been incubated, this time reached. No. 3 on the charts, and the album went gold, and generated two more Top 20 hits. In Donna Summer's homeland, even as she no longer scaled the Billboard Hot 100, she continued to grace other Billboard charts, including the R&B chart, and especially the dance charts. Deep into the 90s and 2000s, Summer scored chart toppers regularly on the club play chart, and was, after Madonna, one of the most consistent club DJ favorites of the turn of the century. One of the most successful was her 1999 house cover of the Andrea Bocelli hit Conte Partirò, I Will Go With You. It was one of the five biggest club hits of 1999, and sold a quarter million copies in the US alone. Summer remains the only artist to score a number one hit on Billboard's club play chart in five different decades, the 1970s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, and yes, 2010s. Her last club number one, To Paris With Love, reached the top of that list in November 2010.

Speaker 2:
[33:13] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[33:33] In the final quarter century of her life, Summer's reputation waxed and waned. A controversial and persistent rumor in the gay community alleged that Summer, at a meet and greet with fans after a 1983 concert, had made disparaging remarks about gay people. Summer had come out as a born-again Christian at the turn of the 1980s, and at the height of the AIDS crisis in the 80s and early 90s, the gay community, which had supported Summer unwaveringly in her 70s heyday, took the 1983 allegation very seriously. Several credible witnesses to the event claimed that Summer had been misrepresented, that the disparaging remarks were made by fans, not Donna herself. And Summer spent years of interviews attempting to correct the record and express devotion to her gay fan base. Donna's revived popularity in dance clubs in the 90s and aughts indicated that the rumor, however unrelenting, was not a permanent blight on her character. The other tough crowd was the rock community. Summer had earned respect from music critics for her groundbreaking work with Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotti. But old prejudices about disco and its relationship to Rock and Roll die hard. Summer first became eligible for induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the year 2000, 25 years after her first American release Love to Love You, Baby. She was nominated four times during her lifetime, from 2007 to 2012, and passed over by the voters each time. Her non-induction grew more controversial, especially after Madonna, an artist whose legendary dance pop career was indebted to Summer's, got voted into the hall in 2008 on her first ballot. Privately, Rock Hall nominating committee members grumbled about the voters' snubbing of Summer, whom the insiders regarded as a pioneer, not just in disco but in the shape of rock, especially electronic music. Summer would not live to see her induction. On May 17, 2012, the woman born LaDonna Adrienne Gaines died at 63 years of age. Summer died of lung cancer despite being a non-smoker all her life. A cruel irony. For years before her death, Donna had theorized privately to friends that she had inhaled toxic fumes after 9-11 while living in New York City. Tributes to Donna poured in from the music community. Everyone from Quincy Jones, Barbara Streisand and Aretha Franklin to Kylie Minogue and Moby. Among the luminaries praising Summer's career in the press was the ever effusive and unfiltered Elton John, who told the London Daily Telegraph, quote, that she has never been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a total disgrace. Her records sound as good today as they ever did, unquote. The following year, on her fifth nomination, Donna Summer was finally inducted into the Rock Hall posthumously. At the ceremony in Los Angeles, Summer's widow, Bruce Sudano, and her three daughters took to the podium to accept the honor and Sudano said a few gracious words.

Speaker 4:
[36:53] This is obviously a bittersweet moment, but as a family, we kind of determined that tonight, we would lean on the sweet side of the occasion. Because if Donna was here tonight, she would be very excited. You know, she was somebody who was about what comes next. She was somebody who wanted to push the envelope. She wanted to create something new at all times.

Speaker 1:
[37:23] As the crowd at the Nokia Theater rose to its feet to honor Donna Summer's legacy, a video screen showed her performing live on stage in her 1978 Prime. And the song she was singing? You can probably guess that one. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Hit Parade. Special thanks to critic, historian, and R&B and dance music expert, Christian John Wykane, whose research and extensive writings on Donna Summer were invaluable to me in putting this episode together. Also, this episode is dedicated to my late cousin, Rosemary Dispenza Ayacampo, who played Donna's records for me nonstop in Brooklyn in the late 70s and made me a lifelong fan. Rest in peace, Roro. My Hit Parade producer is Chris Borube. The executive producer of Slate Podcasts is Steve Liktai. Panoply's chief content officer is Andy Bowers. Check out their entire roster of podcasts at Panoply.fm. You can subscribe to Hit Parade wherever you get your podcasts, in addition to finding it in the Slate Culture GabFest feed. If you're subscribing to Hit Parade on Apple Podcasts, please rate and review us while you're there. It helps other listeners find the show. Thanks for listening, and I look forward to leading the Hit Parade back your way. Until then, keep on marching number one. I'm Chris Molanphy.