The Heart of Rock and Soul by Dave Marsh

83 DISCO INFERNO, The Trammps Produced by Norman Harris; written by L. Green and Ron Kersey Atlantic 3389 1977 Billboard: #11

Like a lot of rock and roll yobos, I felt pretty damn hostile to disco at first. Too much of the new dance music seemed cold and mechanical; if you weren't working out on the dance floor, it seemed a stylistic dead end, especially after enjoying a decade of soul music that was emotionally fulfilling and danceable, too. Those judgments weren't entirely off the mark. Disco was more machine-tooled than any previous kind of pop music, its range of expression quite deliberately narrower than previous descendants of rhythm and blues. But leaving the argument there strands you pretty damn close to those who condemn rock and roll itself because of its failure to conform to Western Europe's standards of harmonic development. Culture is understood through its effect, and my problem was that I'd just never found a comfortable place where disco could show me its potential for transcendence. The static thump that sustained dancers all night long seemed just static on the radio or on the turntable at home. But disco was nothing if not pervasive, and on Opening Day 1978.at Yankee Stadium, even George Steinbrenner paid his respects, as the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack blasted through the slowly filling stands during batting practice. Then Reggie Jackson stepped to the plate, and took a couple cuts. Warmed up, he began sending balls flying out of the park -to right and right center and one or two to left, each clearing the fence by yards. Reggie was crushing the ball as well as he would six months later against the Dodgers in the last game of the World Series, when he hit three that counted. But those practice shots also counted, for me, because you could feel Reggie get pumped up right along with the music. The track was "Disco Inferno," of course, and Jackson made me feel the vitality of the music as a bubbling stew of drum and bass, building and building and boiling over and building again til you were wrung out and breathless. The chant of "Burnin'," the subdued Stax guitar lick, the horn riffs, and the hoarse vocal were anonymous to me then, but they were also as soulful and alive as the rest of the music 1 loved. For that matter, a dozen far more mechanistic years down the line, a presence remains inside the grooves created by Norman Harris, Reggie Baker, and their crew that constitutes one of the period's most important musical personalities. Afterwards, I felt about disco kind of the way I felt about Reggie himself: not exactly something I aspired to be but pretty damn awesome when it found its groove.

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