Classic Pop Icons

When Louie DePalma, a character on the classic sitcom Taxi, needed a reason to avoid intimacy with his girlfriend he used Donna Summer as his excuse. Donna, he explained, was the other woman in his life. “We want to get married, but she’s always shaking it in front of other guys.”

The shout-out summarized Summer’s unique place in popular culture, and the reason why her achievement has seldom been given its proper appreciation. On the one hand, such a reference demonstrated the vastness of the singer’s success. A mention of her name was supposed to ring bells for a mass audience, many of whom had never even entered a disco or listened to Top 40 radio. A use of her name carried a list of automatic associations.

That public identity though was as the sex Goddess of the moment, the Mae West of the 1970s. Summer certainly was that but she was also so much more and as we have moved onto new sex gods and goddesses, it’s been too easy to forget the unique achievement of the singer, who passed away from cancer at age 63 on May 17. She was actually one of the most diverse, exciting and innovative popular musicians of the late 1970s and early 1980s. If the disco movement produced one genuine artist, it was Donna Summer.

Born Adrian Donna Gaines in Boston, Massachusetts on the last day of 1948, she listened to and enjoyed a variety of musical styles, including gospel (she first sang in church), rock, soul, and songs from the musical theater. After singing unsuccessfully with some local rock groups, in 1967 she auditioned for a role as an understudy in the Broadway production of Hair. She was offered the lead in the German production of the play instead and moved to Germany to take the part.

The move was pivotal because two things happened in Europe that altered her destiny. The first came when she married Austrian actor Helmut Sommer while she was working in Austria in 1971. The marriage didn’t work out, but she kept an altered version of the actor’s surname as her own. More crucially, in 1973 she did some session work singing backgrounds at the Musicland Studios in Munich. There she met and clicked with the label’s owner Peter Bellotte and his partner Giorgio Moroder. The pair signed Summer to their Oasis record label. They would be her advisers, producers and collaborators for most of the next decade. Summer would develop an especially close relationship with Moroder.

Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder

The trio scored some local success, but couldn’t break into the lucrative market of Summer’s home country. In 1975 that changed when Summer got the idea for a song called “Love to Love You Baby.” “I loved the title ‘Love to Love You,'” Summer told Alan Light in 1993. “I thought up the concept and went to Moroder with the idea.”

At first, Summer was unsure the piece was for her. He took her into the studio to record what they had intended to be a demo for another artist. “I adlibbed a vocal pattern,” she told Light, “just goofing around, and creating an atmosphere, and figured we’d just get together and write the rest of the song later.”

It was a good thing that Summer and Moroder never got to properly finish the primitive song. The demo they laid down became a hit record that changed the shape of popular music. Opening with Summer singing the title phrase in falsetto, echoed only by an insistent rapping on a drum cymbal, “Love to Love You Baby” captures your attention immediately with its stark minimalism. When the rest of the band kicks into the syncopated rhythm, it becomes something shocking as Summer, who recorded her vocal lying on the studio floor in the dark, begins to mimic the sounds of sexual ecstasy, not just cooing but actual moaning to the throbbing beat. You could almost see her writhing in your imagination.

It was one of the most explicit records of its era and helped set the standard followed by Madonna, Janet Jackson and today’s female pop and r&b artists, many of whom have adopted an overtly sexually aggressive performance stance that would have been unthinkable before Summer. Without “Love to Love You Baby” it’s much harder to see a path where we could hear Rihanna tell us how chains and whips excite her.

The record’s ultimate impact, though, was even greater than that. Searching for an American distributor Moroder and Bellotte sent the demo to Neil Bogart, president of the now defunct Casablanca record label. Bogart played the song at a party he hosted and his guests flipped for it, asking him to play it over and over. He asked Moroder if it was possible to extend the song. Once dancers at discothèques found a groove like this one they didn’t want to give it up. Moroder worked up a 17-minute extended dance version of the song. Bogart released this version to discos and an edited version to radio. This was the introduction of the 12-inch disco dance remix.

“Love To Love You Baby” – Donna Summer

Both the single and the 12-inch mix were fabulously successful. The single made #2 on the pop charts and sold a million copies while the 12-inch mix dominated club play in early 1976.

Summer and her producers were unable to find another property as commercial in her follow-up singles, and she was out of the Top 40 for a year and a half after “Love to Love You Baby” fell from the charts. Many no doubt viewed her as a potential one-hit wonder novelty artist at that time. Her albums continued to move in decent numbers and those who paid attention found concept works reflecting the ambition of the producer/artist trio.

In the fall of 1977, Summer again found the Top 10 with “I Feel Love,” a driving, repetitive synthesized number that presaged the sound of what would become House and electronica in subsequent decades. Singing the title phrase over and again in a disembodied voice that did not differentiate itself from Moroder and Bellotte’s backing, Summer might have seemed a producer’s tool when the record dominated the airwaves; one more instrument in someone else’s mix.

“I Feel Love” – Donna Summer

Viewed today it seems one part of her many musical personalities, something that would become increasingly clear by the end of 1978. It was “I Love You,” a smallish hit from early 1978, that set the pattern for what became the classic Donna Summer sound. Unlike her first American hits, Summer’s subsequent records made full use of her gospel heritage. On the often grandly emotional choruses you could also hear her training in the musical theater. Buoyed by Moroder and Bellotte’s balance of synthesizers, traditional instruments and orchestras, and their dizzying array of special effects, Summer filled her records with rage, melancholy, and desperation. If she wasn’t always the most nuanced singer, there was no questioning the power and commitment of her singing. On her string of hit records that dominated the airwaves in the final two years of the ’70s, like “Hot Stuff,” “Bad Girls,” “Last Dance” (which replaced the Spaniels’ “Goodnight Sweetheart Goodnight” as the ultimate sign off number for DJs), “Heaven Knows,” and “I Love You,” Summer provided an answer to those who found disco to be robotic and emotionally vacant.

She also proved how many shadings a talented performer could find in the medium. She recorded melodramatic Jimmy Webb numbers (her rendition of “MacArthur Park” was a #1 hit), duets with Barbara Streisand, love ballads like “Dim All the Lights,” and intense soul rave-ups like “Heaven Knows.” The LP track “On My Honor” even flirted with the edges of contemporary country.

1979 was Donna Summer’s year. She spent an amazing 33 weeks in the US Top Ten, a figure that would have been more impressive had her record company not released her singles so close together. For a dozen weeks, Summer had two singles in the Top Ten (“Hot Stuff” and “Bad Girls” then “Dim All the Lights” and “No More Tears (Enough is Enough)”), a feat only matched or exceeded to that time by the Beatles, Elvis Presley and the Bee Gees at the absolute heights of their careers. (And Donna’s singles spent more time in the Top Five than the Bee Gees’.)

As impressive as her success was, it didn’t match the boundary busting music that achieved it. With a huge backlash against disco led by an audience that had once defined itself by its tolerance, “Hot Stuff” and its follow-up “Bad Girls,” the lead tracks on Summer’s great “Bad Girls” LP, exploded the comfort zones of every rock ‘n’ roll fan who ever chanted “disco sucks.”

Summer’s records obliterated the line between the two genres and, perhaps uncomfortably for some, drove home the fact that rock ‘n’ roll had started as dance music. At the same time, both underlined how intelligent, ambitious and downright listenable dance music could be.

“Hot Stuff,” penned by Bellotte, keyboard whiz Harold Faltermeyer, and drummer Keith Forsey, is a howl of sexual frustration. “Sitting here eating my heart out waitin’/Waitin’ for some lover to call/Dialed about a thousand numberss lately/Almost rang the phone off the wall.” The crunching guitar and duel drum beat on the intro, and the best guitar solo of Jeff “Skunk” Baxter’s career tell us this is a rock ‘n’ roll song. Bellotte and Moroder’s synth heavy production take us back to the dance floor. The fury of Summer’s vocal makes such distinctions irrelevant. Her singing particularly on the chorus is maybe the best demonstration of the dark underbelly of sexual longing. When it’s not satiated, it can morph into anger. Mick Jagger has based his entire career on this assumption and Summer connects the dots in a way that matches even his best moments. In the context of its era, perhaps Summer’s point is even more radical because the mix of elements achieved by her, Moroder, Bellotte and Faltermeyer makes the case that disco, its audience and its concerns are no different than rock ‘n’ roll, its audience and its concerns.

“Hot Stuff” – Donna Summer

“Bad Girls,” a song almost as inseparable from “Hot Stuff” as “With a Little Help From My Friends” is from “Sergeant Pepper,” is in its way even more remarkable. Another rock fusion this provides an outlet for some of the sexual frustration, the hookers on the L.A. strip. Like Summer’s later recording and co-composition “She Works Hard for the Money” the song shows a concern and humanity for neglected women. Unlike that song though, this one’s not a celebration. It’s not a condemnation either. It’s a representation of a style of life without judgment.

Summer’s lyric “Friday night and the strip is hot/Sun’s gone down and they’re about to trot/Spirits high and they look hot/Do you wanna get down” puts you smack on the Strip face-to-face with the women of the night. Combined with the police whistles of Bellotte and Moroder’s production, the driving horns, the constant thrum of the backing vocalists’ “beep beeps,” mocking the sound of car horns on the street, and Summer’s shouts of “Hey Mister” it’s one of the most atmospheric pop records ever made. It’s like stepping for five minutes into another world.

More than any other, this record was a tribute to Summer’s singular musical vision. She had originally written (along with the vocal group Brooklyn Dreams) and recorded it back in 1977. Bogart though thought it was too rock oriented and refused to release it. He urged Summer to offer it to Cher, a suggestion that frustrated the adventurous artist, who refused to be pigeonholed. One of Moroder’s assistants found the tape in 1979 and brought it up to the singer who asked Moroder to reproduce the song with thrilling results. (The “beep beeps” were one of the changes that came about in the second production.)

“Bad Girls” – Donna Summer

The #1 album that spawned that amazing tandem of singles fully lived up to their promise. From the opening “Hot Stuff,” to the closing “Sunset People” the LP was a fully mature expression of the art of Summer, Moroder and Bellotte. Switching moods and musical styles with the same ease and assurance, it used the cultural idea of “Friday night” as a forum for the exploration of various manners of romantic and sexual anxiety, desire and fantasy.

Summer never topped 1979, but the following year she made history once again when she left Casablanca and became the first artist signed to Geffen Records, a label that would be one of the most important industry players of the next two decades. Her first record for the new label, “The Wanderer” (not the Dion classic), was one of her best, a galloping interpretation of the then emerging New Wave sound. It hit #3 and helped establish Geffen as a commercial force.

After 1980, for a variety of reasons, Summer recorded with less frequency although, when she did record, she could still be as thrilling and as unpredictable as ever, as evidenced by the effortless grace of her airy 1983 duet with Musical Youth “Unconditional Love.” A reggae pastiche, it’s unlike almost anything else she recorded. It’s as gentle as her late 1970s records are forceful. Some might have bet money that she wouldn’t have been able to make that move and they would have been wrong. Of course, you could say that about many Summer tracks. She was never one to stay still and the audience was always better for it.

Donna Summer deserves far more credit than she has received. Even in her prime, she grew tired of her sex queen image, complaining often that male reporters would be so intimidated by her image that they wouldn’t be able to interview her. Separated by three decades from the era when she first set America and the UK into a tizzy, it’s easy to see that she was much more than the Mae West of her generation. Even a cursory listen to her best recordings, as they’ve been replayed on oldies stations these past few weeks, should reveal that she was a great singer and a genuine artist. In the weeks since her passing, listening to the diversity, passion and ambition of her best work, and considering the changes that she, along with Moroder, Bellotte and even Neil Bogart, wrought in the industry, it’s become increasingly evident to me that she was something even more. She may have been one of the industry’s giants. Because of her sex queen image, because she was associated with a seemingly disreputable musical form of expression like disco, it’s been very easy to take her for granted. The more you look at that body of work and what it meant to the pop music industry, it’s hard to see her as anything less than one of the greats.

Sources:

Fred Bronson – The Billboard Book of Number One Hits
Alan Light – Liner Notes- The Donna Summer Anthology
Adam White and Fred Bronson – The Billboard Book Of Number One R&B Hits
Joel Whitburn – The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits