British journalist Nik Cohn’s “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night”, though he’s admitted since that it was largely fictional.
Interesting! I did not know that.
I remember those days, and I’m not sure if the “disco kids” and “rock-'n-rollers” were as cut and dried as Detroit Rock City made them out to be. What there were, were a bunch of awkward high school kids trying to be cool any way they could. (Yep, I was one.) Kiss is playing the Gardens? Better get tickets. KC and the Sunshine Band are having an outdoor concert? Let’s go! Not going (or trying to go) to either would be decidely uncool. As long as you made the effort, you were OK.
There were those who definitely lived for one style of music–heck, if you look at my 1979 high school yearbook, you’d think we all listened to nothing but Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (the cliquey and snotnosed yearbook committee made sure of that, and no, I’m not bitter)–but for the most part, we listened to everything. Top 40 AM radio, with its mix of genres, made sure we did. There was a lot more tolerance of disco (and rock and country and light pop and so on) in the mid-70s than you might think.
What Saturday Night Fever did, IMHO, was to turn disco from a musical genre into a lifestyle. There had been “disco” music earlier in the 1970s: the Hues Corporation’s “Rock the Boat,” the Love Unlimited Orchestra’s “Love’s Theme,” and Van McCoy’s “Do the Hustle,” but they were just danceable songs in the midst of so many other kinds of music: Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle,” Glenn Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy,” and the Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together” were all on the charts in the early-to-mid 70s also.
But when Saturday Night Fever came out, you had to be like Travolta. You had to have the hair, the clothes, the cars, and so on. At the risk of sounding trite, it stopped being about the music, and started being about the lifestyle. A disco was no longer a fun place to go to meet girls and drink beer; it became a place you were looked down upon if you didn’t measure up to the standard Travolta set. Many of us said, “Screw this,” and returned to rock: I’m not surprised Meat Loaf’s Bat out of Hell was as successful as it was; it represented a guitar-fuelled rock that was as far from disco as you could get. The only dancing you’d do to Meat Loaf was in the back seat of your car. 