eric justin
04-07-2003, 11:34 AM
Here is an article that a friend of mine wrote for a local paper.
IN THE MIX WITH TERRY KICKS
A brief history of disco in the Steel City,
as embodied by house music hero DJ Terry Kicks
BY JOHN EPERJESI
The 1970s in Pittsburgh are often remembered as the decade when the National Football League and Major League Baseball were ruled by teams from Pittsburgh. When this city wasn't at work, it was gazing out at working-class heroes like Jack Lambert and Willie Stargell, who were sacking and slugging Three Rivers Stadium into ecstasy. But the hard-working people of this city did a lot more than just sing and clap their hands to Sister Sledge's disco classic "We Are Family." When the lights went down, they got up and danced. And when they were dancing, there was a good chance that the man behind the turntables was named Terry Kicks.
Popular memory associates disco music with New York City and elitist clubs like Studio 54, or underground clubs like the Paradise Garage. While there might not have been puddles of celebrities soaking this area's dance floors in the '70s, Terry Kicks, along with DJs like Gene Molnar, Lizz Jankowski, Rick Jankowski, Bruce Harr, Michael John and Bob Shorthouse, among others, presided over a disco music scene that was every bit as electric as what was going on elsewhere. It was a dance culture that was much bigger, more mature, more imaginative and more unified than it is today. It wasn't just at Three Rivers Stadium that people believed that "We Are Family"-- in the cluster of nightclubs glittering throughout the Mon Valley, people sang the same song.
Terry Kicks learned the trade from his father, George. During World War II, George Kicks was stationed in Philippines. Terry believes that when his father returned to the family's home in Braddock in 1946, "all he wanted to do was make people happy" because he had been traumatized by the experience of war. Trading his military title for the name DJ Poge, Kicks Sr. began his rhythm therapy by spinning all over the city, at VFWs, American Legions and church socials, playing big band music and polkas, as well as records many white DJs wouldn't touch because of the color line -- Tito Puente, Chubby Checker, Little Richard.
During the 1960s, it was the DJ who created dance music. In Keep on Dancing: My Life and the Paradise Garage, the "godfather of disco" Mel Cheren describes the dark ages before disco: "There were no producers who specialized in creating music especially for people to dance to, no groups whose main claim to fame was their ability to get people on their feet... One of the most important jobs of the early DJs was to wade through the ocean of material being released each month, seeking out the most danceable songs."
Every Friday afternoon, George would go to the Braddock Record Store, pick up a stack of 45s at a quarter a piece and use Terry and his brother Andy as guinea pigs. "He'd see if we'd jump to it," Terry remembers. "If we did, then he would play it that night."
Terry's turn came on Halloween night in 1969. After 23 years as a DJ, his father said that he'd had enough. George was supposed to play a dance at West Mifflin High School that night; he passed his collection of 45s, two RCA record changers, the switch box that connected them, several guitar amps and the keys to his '65 Chevy station wagon to his son, who was then a freshman at Wilmerding Memorial High School. With shaky hands, Kicks played a mix of R&B, soul and rock for five hours in the packed gymnasium.
The late '60s and early '70s saw a number of revolutionary changes both in the production of records, as well as in what DJs were starting to do with those records. Most importantly, DJs were beginning to find the three-and-a-half-minute pop song contained on a vinyl 45 too limiting. As soon as you got into the groove, the song was over. So DJs would buy two copies of the same record and extend it to seven minutes. While at Scepter records, Mel Cheren hit on the idea of putting an instrumental version on the B-side, which allowed the DJ to remix records on the spot. "DJs began to seek out new ways to spin records," Mel Cheren writes. "They wanted to go beyond merely fitting one record seamlessly into the next...Now they wanted to figure out new ways to alter songs themselves, to jump into the middle, extend a song, create a personal signature of their own to a song."
Record labels like Salsoul and West End hit on the idea of spreading the grooves of a record over a 12-inch piece of vinyl, which created a sound that was both richer and louder and gave DJs a lot more room to play.
To make sure that all the DJs, and not just an elite few, had access to new releases, record pools were set up. Some regularly working DJs would be given advance promos from the record companies, who were sluggishly realizing that DJs could make hits out of obscure songs -- the best example being "Heartbeat" by Taana Gardner, which cleared the dance floors when New York DJ Larry Levan first played it. But after playing it several times a night until people caught on, Levan made the song into an era-defining disco track.
Kicks' first big DJing gig during the pre-disco era was at the Zodiac in White Oak. The Zodiac was owned by Bob Mac, who Kicks considers to be "the greatest club owner ever in Western Pennsylvania." At the Zodiac, Kicks would mix songs by household names like War, the Commodores and James Brown, along with obscure records like "Mind Over Matter" by King Biscuit Boy, "Nowhere Road" by Chis Youlden, "Fever in the Funkhouse" by General Crook, "Do It Over," by the Olympic Runners and "Stuck in the Middle with You" by Stealers Wheel. This era of dance music is absent from histories of popular music that jump from classic rock to disco. Most of the records played in the clubs weren't on the radio -- "If it was on the radio, we didn't play it," Kicks asserts -- but the records weren't lost on the dance floor.
"All you just had to do to these early dance records is speed them up for the dance floor," says Kicks. "You had to work the record to get the audience to dance to it."
On the dance floor at the Zodiac, 3,000 people from all over the region would come together for a hard night of dancing. The edges of the dance floor, where the tables and chairs were located, were another story. The unspoken rule was that different parts of the city -- Homestead, McKeesport, White Oak, Duquesne, etc. -- owned specific tables. If you crossed into foreign territory, you were in trouble. But what if you happened to be attracted to someone from another part of the city? That's what the dance floor was for. "The dance floor was safe ground," Kicks says. And if a woman brought a man from another part of the city up to a foreign territory, then he was cool and wouldn't get beat up.
Gradually, disco music began to take over Pittsburgh clubs. While the first disco beats began to be heard in New York in early 1973, with songs like "Girl You Need a Change of Mind" by Frank Wilson and Temptations vocalist Eddie Kendricks, it wasn't until 1974-75 that disco made its way to Pittsburgh. Kicks says that the first really big disco record here was Gloria Gaynor's 1975 hit "I Will Survive."
By 1977, things were in full hustle.
On any given weekend night during the late '70s, 15,000 people between the ages of 21 and 40 were spread out in disco clubs throughout the area -- the Backstage Holiday House on Rt. 22, 2001 on the North Side, 2002 in White Oak, the Disco Factory in Plum Borough, the V.I.P. in Bridgeville, #1 Park Avenue in the South Hills and the Hollywood Showbar in East Pittsburgh, to name just a few. Clubs like these were packed five nights a week, from Wednesday through Sunday. At the high point of his career, Terry was playing seven nights a week, making $4,000 a month. On Friday and Saturday night, clubs like 2001 and 2002, owned by Bob Mac and Joe Martinelli, would open at seven p.m. for the under-21 crowd and close at 11 p.m. They would reopen at one a.m. for the 21-and-over crowd, and swing till six in the morning.
In 1979, an event was held during the Three Rivers Arts Festival called "Partisco Disco," an outdoors disco which drew thousands downtown to dance.
On the dance floor, people knew what to do. Like his father, Kicks was also a dance instructor. In addition to giving private lessons, club owners would pay him $75 to give lessons during the night when he wasn't spinning. The whole club would line dance for several songs, doing dances like the Swing, L.A. Hustle and the Rope, then break up into small groups of friends. Kicks learned to dance from his father, and, he says, "I watched every Fred Astaire movie at least 40 times." He was also one of the most popular dancers on the local televised dance show, The Terry Lee Show, a kind of local Soul Train, on channel 53. "Today, people are lazy, nobody wants to work on their dancing," he says. "Nobody wants to practice."
One of the most obnoxious legacies of Saturday Night Fever is the fact that it has carved groups like Abba and the Bee Gees into the popular imagination, giving disco music a straight, white, public face that has been reinforced by countless K-Tel compilations and garish, '70s-themed nightclubs. But there was a vast difference between the commercial disco on which the mainstream music industry capitalized and the sounds coming out of the clubs. African-American female vocalists like Taana Gardner and Linda Clifford dominated DJs' playlists. Along with Salsoul, one of the most important labels putting out disco music at the time was West End Records, founded by Mel Cheren. "We played grooves out of West End tracks," Kicks says. The West End sound, also known as "Garage" because of the club Cheren co-founded, the Paradise Garage, had deep roots in African-American musical traditions, combining funk, R&B rhythms, Afro-Carribean and tribal beats, gospel-driven vocals and jazzy instrumentals, and is kept alive today by artists like Little Louis Vega and Kenny "Dope" Gonzalez, who together form Masters at Work. Classic disco tracks emerged out of New York's oppressed black and Latino gay communities, and captured with equal intensity the despair and hope, the reality and dreams of life in a country that promised so much but delivered so little.
As Cheren writes in Keep on Dancing, "I have always believed in the transformative power of dancing. From my earliest days in the music industry, I had seen how dancing brings people together, how the drudgery of daily life can be erased and pain transmuted when the music plays." An article in a 1979 newsletter for the Greater Pittsburgh Record Pool reads, "Disco deals with Black, White, Gay, Straight. We are spinning basic Black music, with some great White producers as well. Most of the spinners and promotion people are gay...Let's wake up, we can see the party, we can hear the music. We can enjoy each other having a good time. Join in on the fun, let yourself gooooo!"
A lot of this fun was fueled by the fact that, thanks to the unions, working-class people in this city during the 1970s made pretty good money. The clubs had strict dress codes, and an outfit to go out in, probably picked up at Our Father and Sons Boutique downtown, could cost between $100 and $200. "Nobody wore polyester suits like you see in the movies. If you wore polyester, you would be laughed out of the club," Kicks says. "We wore silk, satin, cashmere...We looked good." Many of the people dancing the night away spent their days at places like U.S. Steel, Westinghouse Electric, Westinghouse Airbrake, Union Switch & Signal, Mesta Machine. A strong sense of community permeated the discos because people were dancing side by side with people they sweated and punched time cards with during the day, and whom they saw walking the same streets in close-knit, working-class neighborhoods. As the group Sparque sang in their 1981 West End hit, "Let's Go Dancin'," "Working hard just ain't no good/ Do something else if we only could/ The only chance we get to come alive/ is after our nine-to-five."
The institution of community dance-release would be slowly destroyed over the course of the next decade. Why? "When Ronald Reagan became president, the city flat-lined," Kicks says.
When Reagan started going after the unions and hypnotizing the media with a "trickle-down theory" that didn't trickle, the working-class communities that filled the clubs began to fragment -- people began to move away, and there wasn't nearly as much disposable income floating around as there had been. All you have to do is drive through places like Braddock or Homestead -- the real Homestead, not the atrocity exhibition along the Waterfront -- and look at all the boarded-up shops to get the picture.
Compounding the problem was a vicious homophobic backlash against disco, launched by disgrunted rock-and-roll radio jocks, that swept the country in the early '80s. These rock-and-roll DJs, who had been left out in the cold when disco took over the airwaves, convinced America that "disco sucks." On July 12, 1979, Chicago radio DJ Steve Dahl organized a "disco demolition" rally at Comiskey Park. Fans paid reduced admission if they brought in disco records to be blown up between the games of a double-header. In a rally that would have made Leni Reifenstahl proud, after the massive pile of records exploded, drunk and delerious fans poured onto the field, began fighting, digging up turf and starting fires in true rock-and-roll fashion, forcing the White Sox to forfeit the game. As if that weren't enough, scientists at the University of Ankara claimed that listening to disco music made pigs go deaf and turned mice into homosexuals.
Kicks' career, like those of many of the city's DJs, declined during the '80s. He had managed to spend his money as quickly as he got it -- on records, on clothes, and most preciously, on a black '64 Ford Galaxie 500 convertible with a white leather interior, rebuilt himself, that got a whopping one mile per gallon. Looking back, Kicks says, "I never thought it would end."
Club owners realized that they could save money by hiring "jukebox heroes," DJs who would undercut established DJs and play whatever the manager told them to play, which meant whatever was popular. Kicks enjoyed a brief renaissance during the '90s thanks to Joel Bevacqua, a.k.a. DJ Deadly Buda, who introduced raves to Pittsburgh in 1991. Bevacqua, now a DJ and mixed-media designer in Los Angeles, says, "Terry has an exciting sound that combines a lot of different mixing techniques that he has learned over the years. He has a large library of music, so there is always a good mix of real new edgy tracks, straight-ahead commercial and some classics that most other DJs are just not going to have access to. We would always ask him to play some disco late night to add some warmth after we pounded the crowd with hardcore techno for about six hours."
Kicks has let his beard grow out, and he's traded the canary yellow pant suit for a black leather biker jacket -- his father was also a biker -- but he is just as dedicated to dance music today as he was in the '70s. In addition to being a self-described "biker, DJ, mechanic, lunatic," Kicks runs the BPM Record Pool and still makes the yearly journey to Miami for the Winter Music Conference. Alex Carmenates (DJ Cubanito), the CEO of Salsamania, a Houston Texas company that produces and promotes Latin music all over the world, as well as regular writer for Dance Music Authority magazine, says, "I love Terry because of his enthusiasm and profound love for dance music. He is one of those truly genuine and sincere persons rarely found in this business of ours."
Pittsburgh's dance music culture is at a crossroads. The rave scene, which reincarnated the spirit of disco culture for a while, dressing it up in big pants, has tripped over itself and isn't going to get up. And thanks to those annoying Brits, the big clubs have all been invaded by commercial trance. Perhaps most frustrating, there is little communication between the Hi NRG Cher marathons in the gay clubs and the fundamentalist house music community. There are quite a few house DJs who know their history and want to take this city somewhere, but it's unclear whether they will ever attract enough mature, committed, party people to make their events grow into something special.
As Mel Cheren, who at age 69 is still dancing, says, "Nothing happens by accident, and if you have been blessed with a good life, giving back to others is the ultimate high. I pray that the true spirit of the Paradise Garage will return for a new generation. A place where black, white, straight and gay people from all over the world can come together to celebrate life as one."
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