DONNA SUMMER was writing “Love to Love You Baby”; I was Miss Missouri. “Last Dance” came out in 1978, the year after the BeeGees and John Travolta blasted on the scene and shook American culture. I was Broadway bound and once I got there one thing I’ll never forget is a couple of years later walking up 8th Avenue to pass the small intersection where Studio 54 was ensconced. It was the very last gasp of the lines, costumes and revelry that was well beyond my coolness, but I gawked at the glorious spectacle, even if it was a dying belch. The club was sold in 1981, when everything changed everywhere and forever.
Ronald Reagan was in, but the partying had just started, as it turned westward, and so did I a few years later.
Donna Summer and club dancing, joyous, raucous and wild partying on the floor like you’re on stage in your own “Saturday Night Fever” contest, went together like 8 balls, hot women and fast cars in Los Angeles.
As a professional dancer, once I walked happily away from the decades of grind, I began enjoying the right of passage for the unattached and permanently single.
Partying. Hard.
It was a time of L.A. rope lines, flashy dressing, and late nights that ended at sunrise.
Everyone thought they could live forever, while an entire generation of gay men were dying in dozens as the band played on. Somewhere around 1983, culture answered the Reagan devolution with Madonna and the bustier as outer wear. We didn’t wake up until Iran-Contra crashed around us, followed by the Keating Five, then Michael Milken and the financial catastrophe that was Ronald Reagan. The union busting, deficit imploding nightmare, and deregulating hatch of Rush Limbaugh hate radio, you know, the years Barack Obama remembers fondly. Henry Hyde’s war against women revved up through Reagan’s embrace of Jerry Falwell’s Immoral Minority, which segued into an awkward introduction of America to the new face of Alzheimer’s and the question of whether The Gipper had been sick during his presidency.
It explained so much.
The Cold War was over and the decade of the last gasp of America’s youthful exuberance would be a great economic boon, while conservatives worked to get even for Watergate, and the press dreamed of Pulitzers, after the Reaganites were turned out by the hicks from the sticks, Bill and Hillary Clinton. A couple who turned the Republican party into knots that took their eye off the biggest ball of all.
It all ended the first year of the 21st century, when frittering away the time during Clinton over sex exploded in the Twin Towers, because a man’s penis became more important than following terrorists and heeding William Jefferson Clinton’s warnings. Republicans don’t listen to Democrats even if it costs a nation its soul.
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s “Gulf of Tonkin” WMD fiction was followed by torture.
All that was left was memories and dreaming.
…about the years of Donna Summer and the lighthearted effervescence her singing and that music unleashed in those of us who could hear it and dance to it, or just wish they could.
Donna Summer is dead. We look back on her music wistfully today, because it reminds those of us who listened to it or moved with it that the teenager country that once believed everything is possible and dreams come true, because we can do anything in this country, the place where that America actually existed, is dead, too.
Beautiful and thorough tribute, Taylor. What I like especially is that you take it through the present day. So many discard Summer’s music after her first years of success, but the 80′s, 90′s and even the last decade saw some of her best work.
Over 30 Years can still remember…
…audibly marking off sidewalk squares with the “toot toot hey beep beep” mantra as a tween walking home from tennis practice; making so many friends in my 20′s and 30′s through the bonds of her music (dancing and singing); and driving my NYC roommates crazy for a year straight relentlessy playing her version of Conte Partiro in the late 90′s.
Was lucky enough to be in the 2nd row at a performance for the Crayons tour of 2007. During MacArthur Park, just at the “I will have the things that I desire, cause my passion flows like ribbons from the sky” line, she looked at me, smiled and winked. And it was like I was 14 again!
If there was a better voice in the last 100 years, capable of such vocal acrobatics, I never heard it. Thanks again for this.
Something we can all agree on and beautifully written, Taylor. Her remixed dance tunes were common anthems in my young gay boy days. Very good times.
I didn’t even know Donna was sick, and her young age makes it all the more tragic. I remember exactly where I was — on my motor scooter putting down 10th street here in Atlanta — when I heard the news through my earbuds.
She deserved another 30 years of living diva-hood, but thanks to recordings, we will have it … only without the Diva herself.
I remember when word got out that she was going to do a duet with Streisand; I first thought it would never work, but It ended up sounding great
Beautiful, lyrical piece, Taylor. Our lives seem to have run somewhat parallel except that I remained behind and watched a huge swath of my community cut down in their youth. For what it’s worth though, Studio 54 is once again a theatre where the Roundabout puts on productions so you could say it has come full circle.
I was dismissive of disco and Donna Summer at the time she graced the charts. But when I listen to those songs now, in the post-digital time, I realize how much miss tracks with lush strings, real drums and even a Mark tree shimmering. Music to this old soul.
Nicely written ode to a nations descent into madness while the band played on. But DAMN there was some good partying and fast times….oh to be 26 and in California again!
Thanks Taylor for the article. I was born in the 1980s during the Reagan Administration, so I missed out on all the fun. I was born during the Conserative Era I guess, but I do remember the song “She works hard for the money” and it was about working women and how they should be treated right. Then I listened to her music on the radio stations when they play 60s and 70s music. Bad Girls, Love to Love You Baby, among others were awesome. I also didn’t know she was sick. May she rest in peace.
You are just a baby then! I know as I graduated from HS in 81.
I loved Donna Summer… Last Dance… Works Hard for the Money… Love to Love you Baby… Bad Girls…. All good!
Beautiful and touching tribute to an wonderful lady. Thank you, Taylor.
Taylor, is your finest essay. You wrote it from your heart with memories and love. Thank you. I became a DJ in college the year Love to Love You dropped. Donna, Neal Bogart, and Casablanca Records created and defined Disco. During the day we worried about gas shortages, recession, the backwash of Watergate and the end of Vietnam, but after sundown, it was time to party. And, L.A. knew how to party the night away. The media tried to destroy disco but it survived being kept alive by youth, truth, and passion to shake one’s booty.
I don’t think that I can take it
’cause it so long to bake it
And we’ll never have that recipe again.
Oh no.
Lovely woman and amazing talent, and her music was a big part of my life as I was in High School from 1978-82.
But….MacArthur Park? Really? Worst. Song. Ever. I’ll remember her through “Last Dance,” myself.
The chorus of MacArthur Park is the perfect description of the disco era – not Donna Summer. That was a time before AIDS, Reagan, Just say no to drugs, and cable television. The “greed is good” ethos was still immoral, but finding real amateur athletes performing, real regional food to eat, and real personal privacy was yet to be compromised by the government. We can never go back to that America.
You couldn’t go anywhere in the late ’70′s without hearing Donna Summer in the bars and discos – brings back so many fond memories of my college days and early twenties. Life was so darn good! I remember dancing countless times to “Last Dance” when the discos were closing at 2 a.m. And that famous whistle cadence in “Bad Girls” still rings in my head. I absolutely loved Donna Summer – what a great voice she had.