Nowadays you can catch him numerous times per week on tru TV‘s hit series “The Smoking Gun Presents: World’s Dumbest“. He’s 47-year-old Leif Garrett, and over 30 years ago he was one of the hottest television, movie, and music stars on the face of this Earth. He was a Rock, Pop, and Disco superstar with no less than 10 Billboard HOT 100 hits from 1977 to 1982. This was the biggest of them all – “I Was Made For Dancin'” – a TOP 10 Disco SMASH from 1979 !
‘The Major’s Friday Night Disco Party’ is a joint MASSIVESMASH.COM / The Major’s Life Blog production.
It started as an experiment 5 weeks ago to replace the now defunct ‘Friday Night Blogroll Review’, and now it’s a runaway smash hit that’s become the fastest-growing weekly blog series of the summer.
Back during the Autumn of 1976 I was a 9-year-old kid attending the 4TH grade at Magnolia Elementary School right in the middle of my Lanham Maryland neighbourhood. My little brother was just learning how to walk on his own as he approached 18-months-old. WPGC ‘AM & FM Morningside’ was the TOP 40 radio station to dance to as the disco beat went on and on.
Here’s a classic track that took its sweet time to reach the top of the Billboard Hot 100 – over 4 months – but it finally got there in October of 1976. It’s 23-year-old (at the time) Walter Murphy with his modern (at the time) disco remake of Ludwig Van Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5” from 170 years earlier ! It’s “A Fifth Of Beethoven”, and here’s how Walter Murphy & The Big Apple Band performed it LIVE on the legendary “Midnight Special” on NBC-TV on Friday August 20TH 1976:
‘The Major’s Friday Night Disco Party’ is a joint MASSIVESMASH.COM / The Major’s Life Blog production.
While growing up as a kid of the 1970s and 1980s we had an ENORMOUS stereo system downstairs in our family room. I think that my Dad bought it while he was stationed in the Philippines during the mid-1960s. I think that it may have actually been custom-made. I do know this. It was HEAVY – several hundred pounds. If the insides of it had been gutted out and made hollow an adult version of me would have been able to lay down inside of it rather comfortably, and you could have stacked another 9 of me on top of me inside of it.
I don’t know how it got there (because of its MASSIVE size and weight), but it was there in our 1969-1972 apartment in Greenbelt Maryland, our 1972-1975 house in Bowie Maryland, our 1975-1980 house in Lanham Maryland, and our 1980-1996 house in McLean Virginia. It did NOT make the move to Jacksonville Florida when my family moved out of the Washington D.C. area.
The ENORMOUS stereo system had a really bad AM / FM radio with no antenna and no reception, but it had a rather decent record player. Down below it all were compartments that were chock-full (a couple hundred) of vinyl records from two distinct time-periods. Half of the albums were from the mid-to-late-1960s, and they were bought by my Dad overseas and stateside. The other half were albums from the late-1970s to early-1980s that I bought via the mail from the old Columbia Record Club.
Since Disco was King back then a large majority of these albums bought by me were from the genre. It was mainstream back when it was the hottest thing going in the entire free nation. Nowadays it’s looked upon in mostly negative ways, but it’s just so very easy to criticize something that’s past its prime, or run its course, or faded out into oblivion. You can’t deny that it’s a vital part of Americana.
The Village People – currently LIVE on tour here in South Florida – released a half a dozen albums during a short period of time from 1977 to 1980, and they were one of the hottest Disco groups around. I think that I had all of their biggest albums of the time. One of them – “Go West” – included this 1979 Disco smash:
The music video was shot aboard the USS Reasoner (FF-1063) which was owned and operated by the U.S. Navy from 1971 to 1993. It is now a Turkish ship.
We sure knew how to party back in 1976 – the year of our U.S. Bicentennial. We turned 200 on July 04TH of that year, but we didn’t look a day over 175 !
Disco music was still growing up during the Summer of 1976, and 26-year-old Memphis Tennessee Radio Deejay Rick Dees (one of my personal all-time ‘American Idols’) decided that the time was right to gather his ‘Cast Of Idiots’ together in a recording studio and lay down that track all about that ‘Disco Duck’. It went on to become a U.S. # 1 platinum retail and pop radio smash later that year, and the whole nation was quacking up a storm out on the dance floors.
So you think you can dance the duck ? Give it a shot !
CountUp 