By Billups Allen Billups Allen Is a Record Store Clerk Who Spent His Formative Years in and Around the Washington D.C

By Billups Allen Billups Allen is a record store clerk who spent his formative years in and around the Washington D.C. punk scene. He graduated from the University of Arizona with a creative writing major and film minor. He currently lives in Memphis, Tennessee where he publishes Cramhole zine, contributes regularly to Razorcake, Lunchmeat, and Ugly Things, and writes fiction (cramholezine.com, billupsallen@ gmail.com) Illustrations by Danny Martin: Zines, murals , stickers, woodcuts, and teachin’ screen printing at a community college on the side. (@DannyMartinArt) Zine design by Todd Taylor Razorcake is a bi-monthly, Los Angeles-based fanzine that provides consistent coverage of do-it-yourself punk culture. We believe in positive, progressive, community-friendly DIY punk, and are the only bona fide 501(c)(3) non-profit music magazine in America. We do our part. One Punk’s Guide to Patrick Cowley originally appeared in Razorcake #107, released in December 2018/January 2019. This zine is made possible in part by support by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles Arts Commission. Printing Courtesy of Razorcake Press razorcake.org n 1978 a DJ subscription-only remix of the already popular Donna Summer song “I Feel Love” went out in the mail. It was 15:43 long. The bass line was looped so overdubbed synthesizer effects could be added. This particular version of the song went largely unnoticed by the general public and did nothing to make producer Patrick Cowley a household name. But dancers in nightclubs reacted. They may have been unaware and/or unconcerned about what they were hearing, but they reacted. They danced. The first time I heard the name Patrick Cowley I was in a band with a friend in Brooklyn. She figured out songs to cover and brought themI in without playing the originals for us. Thinking the mystery was fun and not being totally internet savvy at the time, it was a while before I heard Cowley’s original version of “Teen Planet”: a boppy rocker released as a single for his label Megatone Records. The song came across as Devo-inspired to me, with sci-fi lyrics and bouncy melodies carried on a raspy-sounding keyboard. Years later, I discovered Devo to be devotees of Cowley’s sounds and his seminal dark electronic album Time Warp. Cowley’s interests spanned a range of music. During his short career, he released electrocuted versions of rock’n’roll, morose electronic masterpieces, and quality pornographic soundtracks. But Cowley is best known as a disco producer who broadened the definition of electronic dance music. The word disco often evokes images of The Bee Gees dressed in white suits and Donna Summer’s teased hair swaying high above a madly refracting sequin evening dress, creating an idol under the wildly rotating light of a disco ball. And for many, those are the more palatable images. Disco in America is largely remembered as a joke: an embarrassing fad Americans let themselves be taken in by. It clogged the market with artistically bereft records. It caused family restaurants across the country to open after business hours and During Cowley’s short career, he released electrocuted versions of rock’n’roll, morose electronic masterpieces, and quality pornographic soundtracks. serve as cocaine-fueled playgrounds to people in unfortunate suits. It forced established artists to make a disco song for a paycheck. Established rock groups like The Rolling Stones and Kiss had disco- laden tracks to answer for at the end of the ’70s, stuffing their rock sensibilities into the legendary “four on the floor” drum beat—a steady, uniformly accented beat in 4/4 time—a rhythm pattern that’s easy to move to even if you can’t dance. Muppets, Disney characters, and popular movie themes got the disco treatment. It was easy to disco up anything during this time and make it marketable. This ad nauseam practice helped run disco as a genre into the ground as quickly as any fad that’s swept the nation. Yet disco often doesn’t get credit for its globalizing properties. Soul and funk bands with a penchant for the correct use of the “four on the floor” drum beat broke through to mainstream success. African American artists broke through to the mainstream. Latin music found a forum in new markets. Working DJs pulled records from a variety of danceable genres—which had polarized the disenfranchised— and created welcoming and multicultural stomping grounds where people could be themselves away from the judgment of mainstream society. Mixing elements of funk, samba, soul, and leaving no stone unturned in search of a beat, DJs blurred the strict line of culture at the edge of the dance floor. Some musicians found the loose restrictions on dance music to be an opportunity to experiment with electronic music. On the outskirts of the emerging and extremely commercial market, Cowley became a producer in a producers’ genre. He went on to make extended use of a new instrument that changed the shape of music in many genres: the electronic keyboard. Keyboards available by the early ’70s were archaically simple compared to the modern keyboard: an instrument that often took the form of bulky wooden furniture meant to replace the piano in the home. While the factory-direct keyboards were extremely limited musical instruments, Cowley was not afraid to pull apart a keyboard and wire it back in novel ways to obtain a specific sound. His library of electronic bleeps and mishaps were fused with heavy bass lines and drum breaks, pushing dance music beyond the speed of funk. Cowley was an analog innovator using “misplaced” wires and tape machines to construct beats and melodies that came across as otherworldly. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Cowley played drums in local bands and studied English in his hometown until the call of freedom—in the form of an opportunity to study keyboards at City College of San Francisco—drew him to California in 1971. Using electric keyboards in pop music was a fairly new phenomenon. The loose curriculum at City College allowed Cowley to focus his studies primarily on Cowley was an analog innovator using “misplaced” wires and tape machines to construct beats and melodies that came across as otherworldly. electronic music. He also worked in the checkout cage for the A.V. equipment at the college, giving him unlimited access to the school’s instruments and editing equipment. Cowley created keyboard loops and ominous tones that would eventually contribute to the new electronic sounds in music. He spent hours connecting wires and tape machines, looking for sounds that would inform his otherworldly dance singles. Cowley’s first loops were severely analog, assembled on tape machines, with Scotch tape splicing the sounds together. The effect of these rhythmic squawks and blips was often a space age sound with a furious pace interrupted by moments of space-age ambience. Like many musicians interested in electronic and ambient music, Cowley was informed by the cold, synthesized ambiance of Giorgio Moroder. Moroder was a pioneer in dance music and soundtrack production. Moroder won an Academy Award for his somber electronic soundtrack to the grim 1978 film Midnight Express. The controversially not-tough score to Brian dePalma’s Scarface (1983), including the montage standard “Push It to the Limit,” is also among the long list of ’80s movies Moroder put his electronic stamp on. Stars such as David Bowie, Donna Summer, and Blondie worked with Moroder, utilizing his space-age sounds to create an alien landscape for their talents. Blondie’s slow-grind “Heart of Glass” Cowley and Sylvester beat became iconic for the selling out of punk rock. Dance music with dark sounds arranged in movable beats were arriving and quickly being accepted in the funk-infused dance clubs springing up across the nation. Cowley took Moroder’s danceable style as an inspiration for a new style of dance music he unwittingly helped create: Hi-NRG. Cowley’s extended remixes were among the types that wouldn’t quit, creating long dance sessions and standing out among the funk classics that made up the average disco playlist. While major cities like New York and San Francisco had thriving dance scenes where nightclubs employed seasoned, forward- thinking DJs, mainstream America was being introduced en masse to the exploding disco market. After the release of the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, the disco fad had a meteoric rise. Nightclubs across the country popped up anywhere a dance floor and a bar could be erected. During this brief moment, and on a surprisingly large scale, disco’s melting pot dance floor reached a wider audience by unwittingly crossing tense racial lines and creating a place for groups oppressed by bigotry to feel at home. The unified club scenes gave voice to communities largely ignored Cowley and Sylvester and unorganized, even in large cities. If there was one example of a scene where this all worked harmoniously, it was in San Francisco’s Castro District: a microcosm for how the world could come together through music. If you were in town and wanted to party, it was likely you were heading for The Castro. If you possessed bigoted tendencies, you would be run out of The Castro. Celebrities and regulars partied into the early morning hours. Cowley lived in a cheap apartment among the all-night discos and nightclubs where an endless array of performers and club regulars spent their free time. Cowley would produce in his apartment crammed with keyboards, busted machines, and loose wires during the afternoon and then join the late-night crowd.

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