It incorporates more than twenty special DJ discographies–listing the favourite records of the most important spinners of the disco decade – and a more general discography cataloguing some 600 releases. Love Saves the Day includes material from over three hundred original interviews with the scene’s most influential players, including David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Tom Moulton, Loleatta Holloway, Giorgio Moroder, Francis Grasso, Frankie Knuckles and Earl Young. They are interspersed with a detailed examination of the era’s most powerful DJs, the venues in which they played, and the records they loved to spin–as well as the labels, musicians, vocalists, producers, remixers, party promoters, journalists, and dance crowds that fuelled dance music’s tireless engine. Tales of nocturnal journeys, radical music making and polymorphous sexuality flow through the arteries of Love Saves the Day like hot liquid vinyl. “Opening with David Mancuso’s seminal Love Saves the Day Valentine’s party, Tim Lawrence tells the definitive story of American dance music culture in the 1970s–from its subterranean roots in NoHo and Hell’s Kitchen to its gaudy blossoming in midtown Manhattan to its wildfire transmission through America’s suburbs and urban hotspots such as Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Newark and Miami. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-79 by Tim Lawrence There’s an incredible book that answers these questions definitively, and breaks down the true story of disco and dance music culture:
These pop rock groups had “suburban appeal” and cashed in on the commercialization of the hot sound of the time, disco. But a “true” disco mecca is kind of a hard thing to quantify. It was the most famous disco that peaked at the height of the disco era. Studio 54 had bouncers to try to keep out the so-called “bridge-and-tunnel” types and tourists, unless they were properly wealthy, gorgeous, famous, creative, or had drugs on them. And many ABBA songs are proper 4-on-the-floor disco bangers, especially songs like “Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight).” Night Fever, Stayin’ Alive, You Should Be Dancing, Jive Talkin’, More Than a Woman, etc., are all pretty strongly disco songs.
The Bee Gees weren’t disco until about 1975 or ‘76, probably starting with Wind of Change. It’s a story that happened to use a sanitized version of the New York disco scene as supporting context. It’s far too white and straight for that. Saturday Night Fever wasn’t supposed to be an accurate portrayal of the New York disco scene.