Flashback: When Long Island caught disco fever

She had heard the Donna Summer songs, she had watched John Travolta ooze across a dance floor in “Saturday Night Fever” and she had amassed an impressive collection of 12-inch dance mixes. But in the late 1970s, Laura Poggi, of Valley Stream, was too young to get into a bona fide disco. So it didn’t take her long after turning 18 in 1980 to put on a pair of Capezios and head down to Escapes, a nightclub on Sunrise Highway in Merrick. Poggi recalls being awed by the dance floors on two stories and the swimming pool in the basement.

“There would be a bar, and you could see the pool through the glass at the bar,” says Poggi, now 62 and living in Long Beach. Back then the drinking age was 18, so Poggi would knock back an Alabama slammer and boogie until 3 a.m. “You can’t beat that stuff,” she says of the classic disco tracks that she still enjoys today. “It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.”

Nearly 50 years after its late-'70s heyday, disco will be memorialized in a three-part PBS documentary, “Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution,” which begins June 18. Featuring interviews with many disco icons — from singer Anita Ward (“Ring My Bell”) to pioneering drummer Earl Young of The Trammps (“Disco Inferno”) — the series traces the history of a rhythm-driven genre that empowered Black, Latino and queer communities even while enduring a sometimes vicious popular backlash. Though New York City’s notorious Studio 54 nightclub was the music’s epicenter, nearby Long Island followed close behind, with new clubs opening almost weekly and no shortage of young dancers to fill them.

“There was so much freedom. It was pre-AIDS, it was a wild time,” says Loretta Sears, 69, who grew up in Amagansett and frequented such East End discos as The Attic and Club Swamp. “Everything was on the table.”

In the beginning

In the early '70s, “disco” — short for discothèque — would have referred generically to just about any venue with a dance floor. Rock fans at the time largely preferred live concert halls, but Black, Latino and gay clubgoers were grooving to funk, soul and R&B records. Those genres began developing an elaborate, orchestral sound thanks to producers like Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, the now-legendary Philadelphia duo; some of their tracks, including The O’Jays’ “Love Train” (1972) and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ “The Love I Lost” (1973), laid the foundations for the coming disco craze.

As such songs gained popularity in urban nightclubs, a complex culture began to emerge. Partly it was an escapist reaction to the Watergate-inspired cynicism of the era; partly it was aspirational glitz. But it was also a full-throated embrace of the new-found freedoms that the 1960s had ushered in.

“We’re talking just eight years after Stonewall, a little over 10 years after the Civil Rights Movement and women’s liberation,” says Meryl Meisler, a photographer who grew up in North Massapequa and chronicled Fire Island’s gay disco scene. At a time when Long Island was mostly segregated, she says, discos offered a “refreshingly diverse” alternative.

“Everyone was welcome, and everybody came,” recalls Meisler.“People were just celebrating being alive. And you could make friends regardless of whether you were exactly identical.”

A gay bar on Long Island is where Billy Stewart, the lead singer of a long-haired rock band called Calhoon, first heard the mostly Black music that would become disco. Stewart remembers the year as 1972 and says, “there was a DJ spinning records that nobody had heard. They weren’t on the radio or anything. We told our manager, and he jumped right on it.”

The six young members of Calhoon quickly went from playing shaggy rock to rhythmic dance-funk, complete with sleek new trousers and open-necked shirts. A move to hedonistic South Florida followed, then came a record deal with Warner-Spector, an imprint launched by producer Phil Spector. That led to Calhoon’s one major single, “(Do You Wanna) Dance, Dance, Dance,”  which was released in 1975.

Before Calhoon could fully capitalize on the coming disco trend, management problems and an aborted full-length album stalled the band’s momentum. But Stewart, 72, remembers the early years fondly. “A lot of bands were laughing at us,” he says. “But we were definitely ahead of the curve. It was cool — you’d listen to the radio and you’d hear your song right next to Elton John.”

It was “Saturday Night Fever,” of course, that launched disco into the mainstream. Released in December 1977, it featured John Travolta in a star-making turn as Tony Manero, a working-class Brooklyn teenager whose entire life is wrapped up in a local disco called 2001 Odyssey. Based on a New York magazine article by Nik Cohn and directed by John Badham, “Saturday Night Fever” had surprising authenticity and depth (the storyline touched on subjects such as suicide and abortion) and critics raved over what had initially appeared to be a superficial “youth” movie.

(Few knew at the time that the magazine story was actually a fiction. Cohn, a Brit, had merely looked back to London’s early-‘60s mod scene — another working-class youth-culture obsessed with flashy wardrobes — and transplanted it to Brooklyn. “My story was a fraud,” he admitted years later.)

It probably wouldn’t have mattered. Audiences were awe-struck by Travolta’s macho yet sensual dance moves and galvanized by the propulsive yet dreamy soundtrack — especially the opening song, “Stayin’ Alive,” a hip-swiveling track from the Bee Gees.

Comprised of the brothers Gibb (Barry, Robin and Maurice), the Bee Gees were a floundering soft-rock trio that — much like Calhoon — had recently shifted to soul and R&B. It was one of the savviest pivots in music history: The “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack sold 40 million copies, turned the Bee Gees into superstars and established their harmonious falsettos as the very definition of disco.

Other disco anthems followed, including “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor, “Good Times” by Chic and “Bad Girls” by Donna Summer. Even classic rockers got into the act: The Rolling Stones’ “Miss You” (informed by the band’s frequent club-going) and Rod Stewart’s slinky “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” both came out in 1978.

On Long Island, the disco floodgates opened. For the remainder of the 1970s and into the ‘80s, scores of new clubs proliferated. One of the first was Decameron, on Hempstead Turnpike in Levittown, which featured a heart-shaped dance floor and a restaurant that served late-night dinners and wee-hours breakfasts. Others included 2001 in East Islip, Cherry’s in Glen Cove, Zachary’s in East Meadow and the iconic Uncle Sam’s — tricked out with multiple bars, moving light fixtures and a smoke machine — on Hempstead Turnpike in Levittown. (That thoroughfare boasted so many clubs that it became known as “the Disco strip.”)

“Seventy-eight was one of the best years of my life,” says Diane Fuccello, 63, who grew up in Williston Park and became a platform-shoed regular at many Long Island discos. Fuccello says she even took hustle lessons at an Arthur Murray dance studio. “My first question when I met a new guy was: One, do you like the Bee Gees? And two, do you like to dance?”

Mitchell Karduna, who grew up in Brooklyn, says Long Island’s discos were more welcoming than their big-city counterparts, where fashionably dressed celebrities ruled the roosts. “If they didn’t like the way you looked, they didn’t let you in,” says Karduna, 65, now a talent manager based in Oceanside. Long Islanders were “more easygoing, less pressured than city people,” he says.

As the disco-industry boomed, an ambitious 22-year-old from Roslyn named Gary Brustein spotted an opening. “I saw all the young kids seeing what their older brothers and sisters did,” says Brustein, who now runs FlexWealth, an asset-based lending firm in Jericho. With a partner, he opened an under-18 disco — no grownups and no alcohol — called Guys and Dolls in Franklin Square. Inside, it featured a dance floor, food court and arcade-game area; outside was a taxi stand where young patrons could catch a ride home. The captains of local high school sports teams served as bouncers, according to Brustein.

“We ended up doing 1,500 kids a night at $10 a shot,” he says. “It was more or less a sophisticated babysitting service,” he admits, but adds: “It was a lucrative business, and it was needed.”

Not everyone embraced the new trend. Rich Branciforte, founder of the long-running Long Island rock magazine Good Times, was not a fan. “Disco almost put Good Times under,” he says, explaining that while rock fans wanted to read every scrap of information about their favorite bands, disco fans did not. “They wanted to listen to the music. They don’t really care about the personalities.”

Michael “Eppy” Epstein, owner of the Roslyn rock club My Father’s Place, admits he “absolutely” felt threatened by the disco craze and even owned a “Disco Sucks” T-shirt. “It was so overground, it was as big as rock,” he says. “Every single disco act played the Garden, and they sold out one after the other.”

Fuccello, the young disco fan, recalls shopping at Record World in Uniondale's Roosevelt Field mall and spotting an anti-disco item for sale at the register: “They had bumper stickers saying ‘Shoot the Bee Gees,’ ” she says.

The antipathy came to a head in July 1979 with Disco Demolition Night, a stunt organized by the Chicago White Sox of Major League Baseball. Between games of a twin night doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, a local shock-jock blew up a crate of disco albums on the field. The advertised event drew an unexpectedly large crowd of 50,000, many of whom spilled onto the field after the explosion; riot police were called in to disperse the revelers and the second game had to be canceled.

It’s hard not to see undercurrents of racism and homophobia in the backlash against a music known for its Black, Latino and gay fan-bases. (That topic was itself the subject of a PBS documentary from last year, “The War on Disco.”) After the Comiskey Park debacle, disco began to fade.

“People wanted to dance and have a good time,” Karduna says, “but after a while that got old.”

As the 1970s came to an end, New Wave and hip-hop edged out disco as the hot new sound. Yet disco never fully died. Some Long Islanders can recall going to '70s-themed discos well after the era had wound down. “They were still around even through the '80s and the early '90s,” says Jordan Brachman, a 57-year-old graphic designer and onetime DJ who grew up in East Meadow. “There were so many clubs, and they were all fighting for people.”

Over the decades, the music has perennially reentered the public consciousness, whether on the soundtrack to 1997’s “Boogie Nights,” in Abba’s “Mamma Mia!” musical (and movies) or in Dua Lipa’s 2021 hit with Elton John, “Cold Heart (Pnau Remix),” which set “Rocket Man” and other John-penned songs to a disco-ized beat. There are also disco-themed cruises and nationally touring disco cover-bands such as Montreal’s Boogie Wonder Band and New York City’s Disco Nights, who'll play The Paramount in Huntington in July.

Locally, Meisler, the photographer, will show her disco-themed pictures as part of “Fire Island: The Art of Liberation,” an exhibit that will run July 18 through Dec. 15 at the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook. And Earl Young, the drummer widely credited with defining the disco beat, will play a free concert with his iconic band The Trammps (supported by Harold Melvin’s Blue Notes) on July 12 at Huntington’s Heckscher Park.

“It is still such a popular genre that people of all ages are into,” says Ethan Maccoby, a co-owner of Burwood Media, a live-event company that holds themed dance nights at nightclubs across the country. Five years ago, Maccoby says, Burwood launched Gimme Gimme Disco, “which has far and away been our most popular and successful party.” Most of the company’s events might peak at 2,500 tickets, Maccoby notes, but a recent Gimme Gimme Disco party at Pier 17 in Manhattan maxed out at 4,000 tickets — the company’s biggest show to date.

“It’s happy, it’s positive, and I think people love having that kind of positive energy in their lives,” Maccoby says of the music. “There’s just this insatiable appetite for disco.”

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com@raferguzman