Here's Summer singing "I Love You" on The Tonight Show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS4jtS_sNuE
"Faster and Faster To Nowhere":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c51x39rfGzI
"Working the Midnight Shift":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASYOPRpZOZA
Long, long ago - around 1977 - there was a disco singer named Donna Summer. Disco Donna had already released two Top 10 singles in two years that had changed the face of pop and dance music - "Love To Love You Baby" and "I Feel Love." "I Feel Love" wasn't just a single, it was an aural delight born for headphone escapism that transported listeners to a futuristic world. Donna and her co-producers and co-songwriters Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte knew they needed to top it. But how? Their answer was to create a double album "disco opera" (my term, not theirs), a rock opera like The Who's Tommy that told a story. Their tale was a thin fairy story about a woman who finds an escape from the gritty city life when she meets her dream man. One track, "Now I Need You," even sounded like "I Feel Love" with an operetta-like chorus. Unfortunately, the record buyers were not as pleased with the resulting work titled Once Upon a Time... The album sold well and hit #26 but failed to generate a big hit single with only one Top 40 hit, "I Love You," that made #37. Disco Donna lived happily ever after the next year, however, as 1978 saw her scoring her first #1 song ("MacArthur Park") and album (Live & More) in addition to having a Top 5 hit with the disco anthem "Last Dance." The album's slight storyline does not detract from the music, and only the slow songs ruin the escapist experience. "Faster and Faster To Nowhere" adds the new word "daymare" (the opposite of "nightmare") to our vocabulary and probably serves an an accurate description of NYC '77, while "Fairy Tale High" was probably the coke-snorting soundtrack at Studio 54. "Fairy," "Working the Midnight Shift" and "Queen for a Day" have keyboard sounds that provide the missing link between disco and New Wave synth pop. Not surprisingly, Moroder would score Top 40 hits in the 1980s by collaborating with acts like Berlin and Limahl. GRADE: B+ Here's the album's choice cuts:
Here's Summer singing "I Love You" on The Tonight Show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS4jtS_sNuE "Faster and Faster To Nowhere": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c51x39rfGzI "Working the Midnight Shift": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASYOPRpZOZA
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Walburgh's BlogMostly retro, mainly music, but generally whatever's on my mind. Archives
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