To Disco With Love

Over 250 Disco-era album covers-from sexy to silly, elegant to outrageous-that brings alive a time when fashion, politics, and sexuality all converged in harmony on the dance floor. Paging through To Disco, with Love is like catching Saturday Night Fever all over again. From Diana Ross and Donna Summer gazing fiercely from their chart topping albums to the Village People's trademark costumes and the Bee Gee's blinding white jumpsuits, To Disco celebrates the days when the dance floor ruled the world. Gathered together and presented chronologically, these striking covers tell the story of a moment in time when art and photography, music, and dance changed the world. We see a rapid evolution, from the early days when Disco's roots were firmly planted in Soul, Latin, and Jazz, all the way to the digital revolution of the 1980s. Like fleeting moments caught in the strobe, these covers vibrantly capture our takes on fashion and beauty, wealth and status, sex, race, and even God. As the hair gets bigger, bell bottoms wider, and platform shoes steeper, the vibrancy and energy of this moment in music history is brought back to vivid life. Accompanied by insightful, spirited descriptions that showcase the evolving trends in photography, illustration, and design, To Disco, with Love charts the history of the music and the industry during its groovy heyday.

Opening with David Mancuso’s seminal “Love Saves the Day” Valentine’s party, Tim Lawrence tells the definitive story of American dance music culture in the 1970s—from its subterranean roots in NoHo and Hell’s Kitchen to its gaudy blossoming in midtown Manhattan to its wildfire transmission through America’s suburbs and urban hotspots such as Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Newark, and Miami. Tales of nocturnal journeys, radical music making, and polymorphous sexuality flow through the arteries of Love Saves the Day like hot liquid vinyl. They are interspersed with a detailed examination of the era’s most powerful djs, the venues in which they played, and the records they loved to spin—as well as the labels, musicians, vocalists, producers, remixers, party promoters, journalists, and dance crowds that fueled dance music’s tireless engine. Love Saves the Day includes material from over three hundred original interviews with the scene's most influential players, including David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Tom Moulton, Loleatta Holloway, Giorgio Moroder, Francis Grasso, Frankie Knuckles, and Earl Young. It incorporates more than twenty special dj discographies—listing the favorite records of the most important spinners of the disco decade—and a more general discography cataloging some six hundred releases. Love Saves the Day also contains a unique collection of more than seventy rare photos.

A vivid, dramatic account of how half a dozen kinds of modern music--punk rock, art rock, disco, salsa, rap, minimalist classical--emerged in new forms and cross-pollinated all at once in the middle seventies in NYC. Punk rock and hip-hop. Disco and salsa. The loft jazz scene and the downtown composers known as Minimalists. In the mid-1970s, New York City was a laboratory where all the major styles of modern music were reinvented—block by block, by musicians who knew, admired, and borrowed from one another. Crime was everywhere, the government was broke, and the infrastructure was collapsing. But rent was cheap, and the possibilities for musical exploration were limitless. Will Hermes's Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is the first book to tell the full story of the era's music scenes and the phenomenal and surprising ways they intersected. From New Year's Day 1973 to New Year's Eve 1977, the book moves panoramically from post-Dylan Greenwich Village, to the arson-scarred South Bronx barrios where salsa and hip-hop were created, to the lower Manhattan lofts where jazz and classical music were reimagined, to ramshackle clubs like CBGB and the Gallery, where rock and dance music were hot-wired for a new generation.

What is love? Is it something spiritual or wholly physical? Can our feelings be explained and quantified? Or are we all actually two halves of a whole? Ask Alice and Luke and you’d receive vastly different answers. Despite her world having been recently dismantled by a messy break-up, Alice would tell you that love is the most important – albeit ineffable – human experiences. But when she once again crosses paths with her old school nemesis, Luke, he challenges this. Luke is a scientist and he’s certain love can be measured and explained – just like everything else. So the two decide to make a bet: they’ll each venture back into dating and if one of them falls in love, Alice wins, if not, then Luke does. But can anyone win when you’re playing with emotions?

Disco began as a gay, black, and brown underground New York City party music scene, which alone was enough to ward off most rockers. The difference between rock and disco was as sociological as it was aesthetic. At its best, disco was galvanizing and affirmative. Its hypnotic power to uplift a broad spectrum of the populace made it the ubiquitous music of the late '70s. Disco was a primal and gaudy fanfare for the apocalypse, a rage for exhibitionism, free of moralizing. Disco was an exclamatory musical passageway into the future. 1978 was the apex of the record industry. Rock music, commercially and artistically, had never been more successful. At the same time, disco was responsible for roughly 40% of the records on Billboard's Hot 100, thanks to the largest-selling soundtrack of all time in Saturday Night Fever. The craze for this music by The Bee Gees revived The Hustle and dance studios across America. For all its apparent excesses and ritual zealotry, disco was a conservative realm, with obsolete rules like formal dress code and dance floor etiquette. When most '70s artists "went disco," it was the relatively few daring rockers who had the most impact, bringing their intensity and personality to a faceless phenomenon. Rock stars who "went disco" crossed a musical rubicon and forever smashed cultural conformity. The ongoing dance-rock phenomenon demonstrates the impact of this unique place and time. The disco crossover forever changed rock.

"This book is a joy" - Woman&Home, on Walking with Angels This second collection, published six years after the author was widowed, describes her journeys of discovery - of new loves, new places, new experiences, and of herself. Yet through all of her adventures, near or far, in or out of love, someone was always close by and it was to him, Claire-Louise always returned. Entertaining yet compassionate, light-hearted yet profound, these poems are about life after death in more ways than one. Extract from Walking with Hope I do not see a light Or hear a step upon the stair I can almost touch you I know that you are there. I can feel your presence So strongly, so unseen But I cannot tell anyone They’d say it’s just a dream