How quickly did " Disco " catch on?

People associate " the Disco craze " with SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER and it's immediate aftermath, but we can agree, I think, that music that was played in places called " discos " where people danced to them (There, I am avoiding turf/terminology wars about " Don't call it ' disco '! It's..."!) started to be widely popular, in the Top 40/mainstream sense, a few years previous, when, symbolically, 2 back-to-back Number Ones, by the Hues Corporation and George McRae, in 1974 marked " Disco "'s coming-out party, though I'll have to double-check after this to see if my.memory is right!! But people tend to say " Saturday Night Fever " made disco popular "! I'll certainly grant that it elevated it to mania/fad, but wasn't disco popular already? After all, Stigwood's company decided to make SNF because they saw it as something that would be commercially successful, cash in on something that was popular already. It seems to be that there were plenty of disco-y hit records prior to SNF - as far as media hype for " Discomania! ", I recall Newsweek magazine having a cover story along that line in 1976! In my earlier teenagerhood, I was more a Top 40 and oldies listener, I didn't really listen to " FM rock " Tim's a little later. Others here who were aware then might've been in more a " rock " bubble than I and not really noted " Disco! " until SNF led to massive hype & trend-jumping. I even remember a Rolling Stone-issued book called " Dancing Madness " cashing in on disco in 1976 or so. I was exposed to NYC radio, perhaps disco caught on extra-early in NYC, on radio-level?

 

Yes. SNF was a cash in. Riding the wave that was already breaking.

 

Not sure if Saturday Night Fever was a cash-in, I'd rather call it a release (and movie) at the right place and right time. Yes, there was plenty of Disco before SNF, but it co-existed relatively peacefully along other music genres. After SNF's massive success Disco dominated the mainstream for a while. Saturday Night Fever certainly was a game changer.

 

In Italy, very quickly. FM Radios began to proliferate in 74/75, discos too. They started immediately to play stuff like George McCrae, TSOP, Barry White, Carl Douglas, Gloria Gaynor, Bohannon, Hues Corporation, Labelle and Donna Summer.

 

discotheque

 

Thanks for the insightful post

 

'Disco' as it was called (as distinct from discotheques) emerged around 1974. It sort of became silly and overhyped around the time of the SNF film and the Bee Gees jumping on the bandwagon. Even Rod and The Stones cashing in with disco style tracks. I think there was a forum thread on the first disco record - maybe Rock Your Baby, George McCrae (1974), recorded in 73?

 

Discotheque, the name of a kids music show on TV in the late sixties here in the UK.

 

Much too fast to my taste It totally ruined the fun of going out in my twenties to meet the girls. I was raised dancing on Satisfaction, Gloria and Need Your Love So Bad
My suspicion was raised when I first saw the mirored balls appearing in the local discotheques

 

SNF was Hollywood meeting music how could it not be cash in. Hollywood doesn't create fashion it follows.
Disco was an all devouring virus. Much like The British Invasion it made all other forms of music obsolete in terms of consumer profile. No one else got a look in. There was no peaceful co-existing.

The Bee Gees didn't jump on the bandwagon with SNF. The had been Jive Talkin for 2 years before Robert Stigwood got them involved with that atrocious movie.

The popularity that SNF had with the wider mainstream audience gave Disco a boost prolonging its popularity & influence.

"Bill Oakes, who supervised the soundtrack, asserts that Saturday Night Fever did not begin the disco craze but rather prolonged it: "Disco had run its course. These days, Fever is credited with kicking off the whole disco thing—it really didn't. Truth is, it breathed new life into a genre that was actually dying."

The true winners from the Disco era was the LGBT community who must have been quite bemused by the popularity of their music (& their messages) with the straight community.

It is fun to stay at the YMCA. You can make real your dreams

 

I love disco!

 

The Supremes a go-go
You can't hurry love

 

It happened overnight and it was everywhere. Discos were the only place to be after 10:00 p.m. Amazing time. Despite being a classic rock guy at heart, I still love the music - it was a very special time in my life.

"if I can't have you, I don't want nobody baby, if I can't have you, ha- ha - ha . . . . "

 

Disco came to prominence, faded a bit, and then SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER hit and re-launched it higher than before.

 

If you look at the UK and Germany, how they rode the infamous Northern Soul, R&B, Reggae genres, the culture for the disco was just riding over these things. Trends in music changed, you also had certain clubs all over Europe that catered to certain styles.

SNF was a shameless grab.

 

SNF an atrocious movie? I thought the general consensus is even if you disliked the music, Travolta was electrifying in his performance and really made people think he was going to be one of the best actors of his generation. The fashion was dated in no time and I can see where people got sick of the music, but the movie itself is a classic with perhaps a career best performance from its lead (though a future Tarantino comeback role comes close)

 

It said a lot about Disco, when it managed to survived SNF

 

In the UK, there had already been a strong following for anything RnB/Soul and especially Motown, which from the late 60s onwards was evolving into funk, picking up on what Sly Stone had been doing - The Temptations particularly. Everyone danced to that music (or headbanged to rock or both). There was all that Northern Soul thing going on as well. So there wasn't a thing where it happend fast or anything, it was just a follow-on, a morphing. There also wasn't any notion whatsover that it was a threat to rock or anything. Rock, disco, reggae, funk, punk,... all co-existed in blissful fun.

 

...Does anyone remember that Rolling Stone disco cash-in book from '76 I mentioned? It bad horizontal pages and a jokey " back of baseball cards " internal design concept. And does anyone remember that Newsweek cover? I think it might have been the week before Election Day. For that matter, I remember an early " looking at this new" disco " thing " piece appearing in the Sunday color magazine section of the New York Daily News (I remember a couple other of.pop'culture pieces in that same Sunday magazine that were not about disco so I won"t ask about them here,), a tabloid newspaper that I tend to doubt is either widely kept in libraries or, really, even preserved by the News itself????? I don't know how easily you could find this piece.

 

Hardly happened overnight. There were a slew of disco hits in 74, 75 and 76. This is way before Saturday Night Fever hit.

 

First post, basically unreadable.

 

First big Disco(theque) hit was 1972 when David Mancuso started playing "Soul Makossa" by Manu Dibango during his Loft parties. The mostly latino/black gay men at those parties went nuts over it, import copies got gobbled up and Frankie Crocker started playing it heavily at WBLS.

 

hmmmm popular popular...72-74 then kc and the sunshine band really hit big with that's the way I like it (uh huh!) and get down tonight in 1975,

 

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A fun bit of hyperbole, but your claim doesn’t really hold up...

Harmony. Almost the definition of peaceful coexistence.

 

Great fun times!