After years of absence the rainy season finally rolled in this week with authority, announcing its presence with the kind of stormy weather we rarely see in the area. Last week it was thunderstorms over the Oakland hills; this weekend, hail fell and funnel clouds were sighted in the Central Valley. And so the refrain in my head this week has a disco beat: “It's like thunder, lightning/the way you love me is frightening/you better knock on wood.”
“Knock on Wood” was the first single disco star Amii Stewart ever released, back in 1979. Stewart, like many disco stars, is something of a one-hit wonder. She started her career as a Broadway dancer before stepping up to the mic. She saw disco as a passing fad and her singing as a sideline; decades ago she relocated to Italy, where she still resides. “Knock on Wood” is actually a cover version of a song
originally written and performed by Eddie Floyd in 1966 and covered by everyone from David Bowie and Eric Clapton to Otis Redding. Stewart's revved-up version went platinum, however, and remains the best-known. In its late-70s heyday, disco loved to cannibalize older genres of music for material. Walter Murphy scored a hit by disco-izing the first movement
of Beethoven's 5th symphony. Disco would in turn provide plenty of material ripe for sampling by the emerging genre of hip-hop.
Disco began in the post-Stonewall dance clubs in New York, where men were now allowed to dance together and many discovered that they liked it. Cue endless movie and TV scenes of pretty white boys gazing rapturously at glammed-out disco divas onstage just before discovering their own personal groove thing – including a moment from Studio 54 with Ryan Philippe on the dance floor and Mary Griffin performing, you guessed it, “Knock on Wood.” Some music historians argue persuasively that in reality, the disco scene was much more racially diverse and sexually fluid, queer rather than gay as it were. Regardless, in mainstream commercial terms, the disco era was startlingly short-lived.
Saturday Night Fever broke the club scene for the rest of the country in 1977; by 1979 the infamous “Disco Demoliton Night” at Comiskey Park signaled straight white America's rejection of disco. (Some people like to portray this as a coast vs. heartland conflict, but remember that Chicago is also where house music was born not long after that night at the baseball park.)
It's easy these days to treat disco as the junk food of music, full of pleasurable but ultimately empty calories. Dance music in general is still treated as shallow and disposable – sometimes by the artists themselves. It's true that dance beats are designed to get your body moving rather than inspire higher thoughts; they target your hips, not your head. And it's also true that music is mathematical enough that, given a beats-per-minute target range and a synthesizer, you can crank out all sorts of get-the-job-done grooves without much thought or effort. Plaster a soulful female vocal on top and you're all set. But the mind-body dichotomy is a false one (your ears are on your head, not your booty, after all), and simple pleasures are not the same as empty ones. Disco's long tail is due in part to the fact that it works. It'd designed to make you want to move, to make you feel good while you're moving. That's it. That's enough.
Amii Stewart's version of “Knock on Wood” sounds appropriately stormy, and not just because of the thunder-and-lightning sound effects dubbed into the chorus. The the speeded-up tempo, backup singers, and stuttering pauses between Stewart's phrases all add up to a song that ties together tempestuous relationships and unsettled weather into one tight three-minute package. The bass line rolls with thunder. The horns bring down the lightning. Knock on wood, and we'll all have plenty of opportunities this winter and beyond to be reminded of Stewart's stormy disco moment.