Could the BBs have had a disco hit by remaking a different song instead of HCTN?

[Steve Latshaw]

Matchpoint was a disco song.  Would have been a very commercial track in the fall of 1978.  Very tasty top forty sound.

[Peter Reum]

Personally...I really enjoyed the 3'18" version of Here Comes the Night. Had it been issued at that length, it might have made a good album track along with two other tunes added to fill out the album.

[donald]

won'tcha  come out to nite?   Has a nice flow that could have mutated to a disco dance number.     And I mean mutated

[beatnickle]

 To me the Beach Boys caving in to disco was a low point.

http://popdose.com/lost-in-the-70s-the-beach-boys-here-comes-the-night/

[Steve Latshaw]

<<Personally...I really enjoyed the 3'18" version of Here Comes the Night. Had it been issued at that length, it might have made a good album track along with two other tunes added to fill out the album.>>

Peter - is this available anywhere?

[bonnevillemariner]

I can't believe we've spent two pages talking about disco.  Surely we can shoehorn in an argument or two about autotune and C50 just to mix things up, right?

[CenturyDeprived]

I think maybe what the BBs needed for a disco hit was to remake some Surfin' Safari tracks as disco jams.

Disco Cuckoo Clock and disco Heads You Win–Tails I Lose, anyone?

[Joel Goldenberg]

Just to point out, She's Got Rhythm celebrates disco.

There's a lot of good disco music. My main problem with HCTN is the overload of gimmicky disco-type sound effects. A hard driving rhythm would have served it better.

[Steve Latshaw]

>>There's a lot of good disco music. My main problem with HCTN is the overload of gimmicky disco-type sound effects. A hard driving rhythm would have served it better.<<

I read an interview somewhere with Dennis at the time.  He didn't object to disco; liked some of it, especially Miss You by the Stones.  Because it retained the band's raw edge.  But he hated HCTN, because it sounded so programmed, especially the drum sound, which he described as boring.

[donald]

>>There's a lot of good disco music. My main problem with HCTN is the overload of gimmicky disco-type sound effects. A hard driving rhythm would have served it better.<<

I read an interview somewhere with Dennis at the time.  He didn't object to disco; liked some of it, especially Miss You by the Stones.  Because it retained the band's raw edge.  But he hated HCTN, because it sounded so programmed, especially the drum sound, which he described as boring.

My thoughts exactly.    some bands and artists managed to take on disco on their own terms.  some didn't.     same as electronica.    some of it is fine,  some of it short circuits my auditory cortex and just plain drives me nuts.  Can't hit the skip button fast enough.   I really tried to get thru one listen to HCTN recently....I lasted about 20 seconds.   I' d rather listen to Make It Big or even almost anything on LBWL.

[RangeRoverA1]

Someone - I think seltaeb1012002 - made a disco mix of "Pacific Ocean Blues". When I heard it, the original seemed much better and it was already my favorite. Speaks volumes. However, I never had issue with "Here Comes the Night", 10 minutes or no.

[rn57]

This is a pretty interesting question.

To start with whether HCTN was at the tail end of disco: It is sometimes argued that "Disco Demolition Night," masterminded by Chicago-area DJ Steve Dahl at that city's Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979, marks the point after which the music's popularity went into a tailspin. The disco HCTN came out in Feb '79 so it predates this event and so could be said to have come out in disco's heyday, or towards the end of that heyday.

After that bizarre "Demolition" event which became a riot, disco records hung on in the charts through the rest of the year and into 1980.  But nearly the last really big definite four-on-the-floor disco hit that I remember was the Spinners' "Working My Way Back To You/Forgive Me Girl" 45 which peaked at #2 in March 1980. (It had been released six months before but had trouble getting airplay partly because the negative reaction to disco had set in.)

 And the very last one I remember is the Spinners' follow-up, "Cupid/I've Loved You For A Long Time," which reached #4 on the Billboard chart in July 1980. They did two more singles after that which failed to chart, and then a version of the Carpenters' "Yesterday Once More" in a less pronounced disco style which stalled in the 50s in early '81.

I remember "Heart Of Glass" coming out as a single and topping the charts in the early '79.  For punks and new-wavers in those days it looked like disco's ultimate triumph - it had corrupted their own music! But listening to that song now, it's got a lot more in common with what evolved into '80s dance music than it does with disco. So it was more like new wave co-opting disco instead of the other way around.

Then there's "Stars Of 45." Interesting case. The first version of the record came out in Holland in Dec. '79 when disco records were still charting worldwide. By the time it started to catch on in Europe, disco was otherwise finished.  It reached America in the summer of '81 and served to spur a medley boom that kept the four-on-the-floor beat on the charts for another year.  But the "on 45" records could hardly be called disco apart from the beat. No strings or Latin percussion for the most part.

And so it was that the disco beat ended in a string of novelty records.  Kind of the reverse of rap, which was at first marketed to white audiences as a kind of novelty, as was the case with the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" when it cracked the bottom of Billboard's Top 40 in Jan. '80. Blondie's Rapture was a big hit a little later but is not a rap record per se.  After "Rapper's Delight" the first record in a recognizably rap style that I can remember hearing on stations aimed at white listeners is Chatsworth & Burt's thoroughly novelty 45 "Preppy Rap" in early '81, a record now so utterly obscure it isn't even mentioned in Wikipedia.

But heck, let's answer the question.  There are several BBs songs that could have been hits with the disco treatment. I still think "Honkin' Down The Highway," if it had been souped up with four-on-the-floor, strings and a little steel guitar, would have been the first country-disco crossover hit - well before Glen Campbell's "Southern Nights" - and would have changed not only the career of the BBs, but music itself, had something like that happened in '77.

 Let's face it - would punk really have been necessary if country-disco had come into being, especially with the BBs creating it? But unfortunately, the man who could have hatched up that idea, Bruce, wasn't working with the guys at the time.  

Songs that could have worked as disco remakes per se include "Darlin'," "Do It Again" (in fact, four-on-the-flooring that intro would have sounded like, say, Kraftwerk doing the "on 45" intro) and "Don't Worry Baby."  

"Don't Worry Baby" would especially be a natural for it not only because B.J. Thomas's version of the song from '77 was pretty close to disco, but also because a very similar sounding song had been a proto-disco #3 hit at the end of '75 - the Four Seasons' "Who Loves You."  Indeed, had I been in Bruce's shoes, DWB is the song I would have chosen for the disco treatment.  Disco remakes of '60s hits tended to favor either big hits from that era or at least records that had gotten enough airplay in that time to be vaguely recognizable to an audience a decade later.

[Joel Goldenberg]

"Songs that could have worked as disco remakes per se include "Darlin'," "Do It Again" (in fact, four-on-the-flooring that intro would have sounded like, say, Kraftwerk doing the "on 45" intro) and "Don't Worry Baby."

There was a disco remake of Do It Again, On and On and On by Abba and, if it had a disco beat, Mike Love.