ExpatMichael's opinion of anything relating to disco, Italo disco, funk and boogie music. Promotion for my Ebay and Discogs stores which concentrate on the sale of Disco, Funk, Italo Disco, Hi NRG, New Wave, morning music, sleaze and anything pressed on vinyl. There's a link to my Ebay store on the bottom of the page, right under the counter widget. Thanks for visiting and feel free to leave comments. Follow my twitter and join the Disco Vinyl Fan Page on Facebook.
1979's DJ of the Year TINA FABRIQUE ALIVE WITH LOVE
This double A side is one of the earliest examples of a genre of disco that became huge in the 80's particularly in gay clubs, HI NRG. This genre was especially big at the San Francisco mega disco The Trocadero Transfer whose resident DJ Bobby Viteritti was 1979's Billboard magazine DJ of the Year. In fact he even did a take on it and I've included it in the zip below.
The duo also previously recorded under the names Hott City and Graffiti and were composed of Mildred Vaney and Ortheia Barnes.
The follow-up was the sublime Rising Cost of Love though it's much less well known then Without Your Love. I still have the original double A side 12" on Ear Hole Records in my discogs store.
I was also able to come up with some rare remixes for my zip including the Razormaid and the Hot Tracks remixes. Then there is even a take by the guys at Almighty which was released in 2003. They tend to do an updated Hi NRG sound which has a big gay club appeal.
Apparently the Hot Classics Version from 1985 features uncredited synthesizer work by the master Patrick Cowley.
SO MUCH LIME Vocals on helium and a full-stop embrace of HI NRG. Lime really gets a bad rap. Do they really deserve it? If you were going to judge them on success alone you wouldn't. In fact on the Billboard Dance Charts they had a string of hits including their debut single Your Love/You're my Magician which hit #1 in January 1981 right on up to Unexpected Lovers which peaked at #6 in 1985. At the bottom of the post is a very recent effort to download.
My 2 favorites were Babe, We're Gonna Love Tonite which peaked at #6 on the U.S. Dance Charts in the summer of 1982 and the aforementioned Unexpecte Lovers which also peaked at #6 in the summer of 1985. Babe for the incredible sing along hook and how much it meant to me and Unexpected Lovers for it's Latin beat which is danceable yet manages to also be melancholy at the same time.
They worked hard and had a lot of releases. A married couple from Montreal, Denis and Denyse Le Page generally never toured or performed in public choosing to send Joy Winter and Chris Marsh who lip-synched the tracks. They figured that they were younger and more attractive so why the hell not?
One of the distinctive features of Lime was their record cover art work. It was real bright and neon influenced, usually with yellows and greens. A lot of it looks real cheesy in retrospect, but that could be said about a lot of disco era photography as well. Which was often sexy just for the sake of being sexy. Some would say tacky for the sake of trying to be sexy.
What they were able to do was to provide a distinct sound and look. Lime was lime and a soundalike would only sound like a rip-off. But then again for some people listening to Lime was like nails on a chalk board. I was not one of the haters. To me Lime is simply the soundtrack to those years for me. A time when I felt young and free and hadn't a care in the world. The Lime sound always brings back favorable memories.
Some of their releases were under the name of Lepage rather then Lime, Kat Manudu and even one was listed as Mother (F) Hot Wax and a couple others using that moniker. Joe La Greca was part of this act as well as the writer and producer of all the Lime stuff.
Some of the Almighty remixes updated Lime to a House sound
One of the Almighty Records remixes
In 2002 they released a CD called Love Fury. They have modernized their sound but I don't think they got any new fans in the process. The label Almighty however has had some success updating the sound on a lot of their classics.
Tracklist :
01. Guilty (07:34) 02. Angel Eyes (08:36) 03. Come & Get Your Love (07:34) 04. Your Love (05:15) 05. On The Grid (04:28) 06. Babe We're Gonna Love Tonight (Instrumental) (06:46) 07. Guilty (Instrumental) (07:32) 08. Angel Eyes (Instrumental) (08:36) 09. Come & Get Your Love (Instrumental) (07:35) 10. On The Grid (Instrumental) (04:24)
Pardon me while I go off topic. But Candy J (Sweet Pussy Pauline) brings back a lot of great memories for me. Let's just say I have a penchant for porn beats and bitch tracks. Naturally Candice Jordan in all her incarnations is an idol of mine. She has the definitive potty mouth. She first came to my attention when Ellis D. (Junior Vasquez), Work This Pussy was a massive underground house record in N.Y.C.
My favorite Candy J. was the release labeled as Hateful Head Helen in 1989. WORK THIS PUSSY Personally I find this type of nasty to be the height of feminism. She's taking back the power and letting us know exactly how she likes it. You could have found this gem in my Ebay store a while back but someone snatched it up. I do have another sealed copy in my Discogs store.
Candy J. had a few early house records which I don't know. But I did used to have a copy of 1989's Hurt Me, Hurt Me on Echo U.S.A. I also used to have Shoulda Known Better a 1993 release on Vinyl Solution which later got picked up by Tribal America which an old buddy of mine Rob DiStefano used to run. I've provided a zip with a potpurri of Sweet Pussy Pauline. I have also provided you with a link for Fee Fi Fo Fum a British release by The Candy Girls. Yet another moniker for our Candy J.
Do let me know which are some of your favorite Sweet Pussy Pauline lines. I still regularly say "you're makin' me bark, you're makin' me bark!" But I've stretched the term to be used at any moment of extreme pleasure. Even a particularly delicious ice cream sundae can encourage me to toss out the line. Usually with a look of orgasmic pleasure and perhaps even crossing my eyes for full effect. When I'm bummed out all I need to do is put on the acapella of Climb on Top. It absolutely always puts a smile on my face and perhaps even a good belly chuckle. Put your coins on the table and move on out the door! NEXT!!!!!
What can be said about Bobby Orlando, (Robert Phillip Orlando), the king of Hi NRG. I've heard he was a homophobe who clearly made a lot of his money from the gay scene. I've heard he was idolized by the Pet Shop Boys and are the reason why they decided to make that kind of music (and of course collaborated with him until they got a better offer). I've heard many things but don't really know much factually. make it on my own free enterprise
He certainly had a prolific career and some of his stuff is a lot better then others. The sound is clearly repetitive. But it was a winning sound and he just kept repeating it over and over in different ways. The disco era was over but people still really wanted to dance, so why not? Especially in Europe where the dance music never really stopped charting after the disco era. Divine who is truly one of my idols worked with Bobby Orlando for a lot of his earlier releases. Some of which even became pop hits in Europe. A fate that eluded him in his American homeland. SOME DIVINE
The 1983 release Waterfront Home Take a Chance on Me was the perfect straddling of italo disco and hi nrg. This is one of the acts that Bobby was actually in himself along with Tony Caso and Christina Criscione. In this zip there is a marvelous edit done by my friend the illustrious DJ Paul Goodyear. TAKE A CHANCE ON ME
I'm not even going to tell you what's in the zip. I will say that it's got a great combination of things. Some better known and some less. But all in high quality mp3. Bobby Orlando, the definitive sound of club music in the 80's. White NRG club music. WHO'S YOUR BOYFRIEND by ERIC
Bright Nothing World was a 2010 release. Nice to see he is still embracing dance. Question is, is anybody listening?
Here at disco vinyl we have always celebrated the authors who want to tell the story. The story of our times in the disco era. A very young man named Sam Lefebvre just got his first byline in the N.Y. Times and he did so interviewing one of my close friends Jorge Socarras. So here below I am re-posting what you might have missed in yesterday's New York Times.
On Oct. 9, 1982, the songwriter and producer Patrick Cowley observed the release event for his third solo album, “Mind Warp,” from the mezzanine of the glamorous Galleria event space at the San Francisco Design Center. Mr. Cowley, the disco innovator who spawned hi-NRG — an up-tempo, mechanized strain of dance music calibrated for the peak of the party — wore black patent-leather pants and a matching jacket. The sickly-sweet smell of the inhalant club drug known as poppers wafted up from the dance floor, where gay men dressed in jeans and white T-shirts churned to the album’s breathless pulse. But the revelry belied the grim content of “Mind Warp,” a meditation on the body besieged that Mr. Cowley created while withering from the effects of a mysterious affliction.
Mr. Cowley looked ashen against his stark ensemble, his friend Theresa McGinley recalled in a recent interview, overseeing the party from his wheelchair. The event featured performances by collaborators including the strapping singer Paul Parker and the inimitable androgyne Sylvester. Marty Blecman, Mr. Cowley’s business partner at Megatone Records, later remembered in an oral history of the era, “Tears were streaming down his face, and he said, ‘Those stupid queens, don’t they know?’”
Mr. Cowley died almost exactly a month later from AIDS-related illness at home in the Castro district. He was 32. Mr. Parker’s “Right on Target,” one of Mr. Cowley’s compositions released on Megatone that year, still lingered on the dance charts after hitting No. 1 that summer. In the decades that followed, Mr. Cowley’s influence as a producer was cited by new romantic acts such as Pet Shop Boys and New Order; the critic Peter Shapiro recognized his work with Sylvester for “pretty much [summing] up the entire disco experience.” And in recent years, his profile has assumed a new dimension as listeners and scholars excavate disco’s intersection with gay liberation.
That’s partly because of the belated release of a deep cache of Mr. Cowley’s recordings, first uncovered in 2007, that more than doubles the amount of his available work. And more is coming. In October, “Candida Cosmica,” an EP compiling five songs recorded in the mid-1970s that illuminates Mr. Cowley’s pre-disco collaborations with underground theater ensembles, arrives; and next year, “Afternooners,” a double album collecting some of his final recordings, will be released.
Since 2013, Honey Soundsystem — composed of Josh Cheon, Jacob Sperber, Robert Yang, Jason Kendig and until 2012 Ken Woodard — and Dark Entries Records, the label operated by Mr. Cheon, 35, have issued four compilations of Mr. Cowley’s work. The releases reveal an artist who explored San Francisco’s sexual vanguard for a decade and, exploiting an expressive new palette of synthesized sound, articulated his findings — even as the scene hurtled toward oblivion.
Sexuality and music were inextricable for Mr. Cowley, whose music reflected and later stimulated the rites and environments of gay life in 1970s San Francisco. Fittingly, it was Honey Soundsystem — a gay D.J. collective descended from the dance music scene that Mr. Cowley helped define — that found the neglected reel-to-reels in the Megatone archives. That discovery led to a key trove of corroding tapes in the Van Nuys storage unit of a retired gay pornographer. Mr. Cowley’s formative synthesizer compositions had been set to explicit films in the early 1980s and were rarely heard outside of that context.
“It’s a way to reconnect with an awful but important part of queer history, the onset of AIDS,” said Mr. Sperber, 29. “It’s our responsibility to retell that story, because there’s a generational gap; there are young people getting into these records now, but only so many people who were actually there.”
Mr. Cowley arrived on San Francisco dance floors in 1978 with an unauthorized remix, padded with billowing synthesizer additions, of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” the Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte production famous for replacing disco’s orchestral arrangements with all-electronic instrumentation. That he stormed the discothèque on the strength of a decadently elongated bootleg is a bit of poetic justice. Since mainstream disco regularly denied its origins among gay and African-American artists, the remix now seems a coup for the genre’s secret history.
Mr. Cowley, who was born in Buffalo, had moved to California seven years earlier. As his roommate Janice Sukaitis writes in the liner notes to “Candida Cosmica,” he sent postcards adorned with drawings of male genitalia back home to announce that he was gay. At City College of San Francisco, he withdrew into the newly established Electronic Music Lab, which had a set of early, compact analog synthesizers. Electronic music then required patience: conjuring blips and scree from fickle machines, often in laboratory-like settings, and recording them individually to tape before splicing together (hopefully) semi-coherent pieces.
Mr. Cowley and classmates Maurice Tani and Arthur Adcock constructed their own production and recording studio off campus and formed a sound design company, Short Circuit Productions. “Patrick would record a band and add so many synthesizer tracks that, by the end of the day, he’d remove the band,” Mr. Tani said in an interview. “When Patrick wasn’t at the studio, he was at the bathhouses. He was interested in the full spectrum of sex in San Francisco, and music was another way for him participate in those worlds.”
Jorge Socarras recalled how Mr. Cowley — reserved and slight, with sandy blond hair and a literary air — relished initiating him at the Jaguar bookstore, a Castro retailer known for its back-room sex club. Mr. Socarras also remembered that Mr. Cowley admired the elegantly composed gay pornography of filmmaker Wakefield Poole.
“Patrick was all about sexually charged atmospheres, places where rituals could happen,” said Mr. Socarras, whose unreleased collaboration with Mr. Cowley, “Catholic,” emerged in part from an archive belonging to John Hedges. Mr. Hedges assumed control of Megatone after Mr. Blecman died of AIDS-related illness in 1991. “It was about mythologizing, really dramatizing the experience.”
Mr. Cowley also worked with theater troupes White Trash Boom Boom and the Angels of Light, offshoots of the anarchic commune dwellers the Cockettes. Their thrift-store extravagance inspired him as much as the dank leather dens on Folsom Street. “Candida Cosmica” — which Mr. Cowley recorded with singer Candida Royalle, who later achieved fame as a feminist pornographer — includes the tellingly absurd musical theater ditty “The Tomato Song,” written from the perspective of a self-described “tomato cocktail.”
Mr. Cowley’s output from this period — the early to mid-1970s, before his fortuitous meeting with Sylvester — remained largely unknown until the 2013 release of “School Daze.” As with “Muscle Up” (2015) and next year’s “Afternooners,” “School Daze” mostly compiles recordings that quietly appeared in a gay pornographic film of the same name produced by Fox Studio.
The material captures Mr. Cowley’s affinity for synthesizers’ potential not to replicate sounds but to forge new ones. Tracks murmur and thrum or surge and palpitate, flush with bleary murk and melodic curlicues reminiscent of earthen atmosphere and galactic ascent alike. The duality evokes the carnal grit and transformative, escapist role-play that characterized sexual scenarios available to intrepid San Franciscans. As the reintroduced soundtracks illustrate, Mr. Cowley’s music seemed to seek sexual application well before his explicitly lascivious hi-NRG releases of the early 1980s, including “Menergy.”
In 1978, Mr. Cowley’s connection with Sylvester — the former Cockette — yielded epochal singles like “Dance (Disco Heat)” and “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” which coupled synth rays and the singer’s ecstatic melisma to staggering effect. “Stars,” an album redolent with Mr. Cowley’s playing, consummated Sylvester’s newfound stature with its 1979 release event at the War Memorial Opera House.
But Mr. Cowley’s commercial rise mirrored his physical decline. In 1981, he helped found Megatone and released the solo albums “Menergy” and “Megatron Man.” That November, he arrived for the first time in the hospital, where doctors puzzled over his deterioration. Throughout 1982, he struggled to eat and walk. Nevertheless, propped up with pillows in the studio, Mr. Cowley recorded many of his most popular singles, including Sylvester’s “Do Ya Wanna Funk,” and toiled over “Mind Warp.” Friends called it “the death record.” Its opener, “Tech-no-logical World,” darkly refers to “Dr. Terminus” — “That was him just totally losing faith in the medical system,” Ms. McGinley, his longtime friend, said.
On Oct. 18, 2009, the eve of what would have been Mr. Cowley’s 59th birthday, Honey Soundsystem held its first party to celebrate his life. “It became part of the Honey identity,” Mr. Cheon said. “Playing his music, summoning his spirit.”
For Mr. Cowley’s remaining contemporaries, the revival is painful but vindicating. Mr. Hedges, who recalled the Galleria event as a sort of festive wake for his friend on the mezzanine, was taken aback by Honey Soundsystem’s interest in the archives. To Mr. Hedges, the audience for hi-NRG had been practically eliminated by AIDS. As he remembered, “Watching sales drop — that was us losing our friends.”
Lately, however, Mr. Hedges has heard D.J.s reintegrate Mr. Cowley into their sets: “And on these new systems they’ve got, he sounds even better.”
A man like Bobby Orlando is the king of 80's dance music. Bobby "O" that is, the alias he used. Bobby worked with so many artists including Roni Griffith, Claudja Barry, The Flirts, Divine, The Pet Shop Boys, and others that were really just aliases for him and some vocalists he brought in for one-off's or even two-off's (is that a word) like Barbie & the Kens, Waterfront Home, O Romeo, Eric, Teen Rock and more.
I hate to make sweeping generalizations but in this case I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Bobby O is the most prolific dance artist that ever was. I think I personally had about 50 singles of his.
Bobby O also became synonymous with one specific sound, High Energy, which was sort of ghettoized as gay music. Many of his songs were embraced at The Saint and on Fire Island. Ironically Bobby Orlando was a bit homophobic as legend goes.
Certainly his biggest mark was made with the original version of Pet Shop Boys West End Girls. They apparently idolized Bobby O and specifically wanted to work with him. But they quickly got too big for him and were signed away. I think it may have been an ugly parting and Bobby got paid off kindly in the deal.
Bobby O never really had that pop crossover success that so many dance artists are able to have now. But his classic She Has a Way did crack the dance Top 10 in the states and remains one of the songs most associated with his legacy.
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