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In the summer of 1979, sixteen-year-old me landed a job as a houseman at a brand-new Marriott hotel outside Washington, DC — and quickly stumbled into a most unlikely new job. While disco dominated the airwaves and a certain red-haired waitress dominated my imagination, I learned about the painful gap between fantasy and reality.
Disco. By the spring of 1979, it seemed to have taken over.
The pop music featuring driving beats over a variety of rich musical fabrics was way more than just popular. To some it was like musical kudzu, pushing rock-and-roll albums into ever shrinking bins at the record store.
Disco dance clubs were opening everywhere. Rock radio stations were turning into disco radio stations, playing every Bee Gees song from the hit movie Saturday Night Fever until rock fans wanted to vomit.
Little did anyone know that, by the end of 1979, the craze would be over. For many, disco would suddenly be all but forgotten.
I would never forget disco. Nor would I ever forget a certain woman I met that summer—let’s call her Donna. We met at a hotel. I was 16 years old.
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I first saw the Bethesda Marriott from school bus number 914, carrying me each morning to Walter Johnson High School in Montgomery County, Maryland.
The hotel was still under construction in early 1979, rising farther each day above the treetops lining the Capital Beltway just outside Washington, DC.
I needed a job for the upcoming summer, so I went to the Marriott and got hired as something called a houseman.
For a little more than the minimum wage of $2.90 an hour, all I had to do was set up tables and chairs in meeting rooms.
In the weeks before the hotel opened, the other housemen and I learned the ropes from an impatient manager whose name tag read Assistant Food & Beverage Director.
We called him Mister Assistant and followed him like goslings, traipsing over off-gassing carpet while learning basic room arrangements, how to clip a skirt to a table, and how many hard candies to place beside each Marriott notepad and pencil.
The night before the hotel opened, off-duty employees could dine in the restaurants—for free—to give the staff some practice.
I gorged myself at one of the restaurants. Then I took a stroll through the hotel lobby, stopping at the entrance to the hotel bar, a dark place called the Stirrup Cup Lounge.
Inside I could make out an empty dance floor, a rainbow of lights, and a booth with a pair of turntables in it
A disco!
Peering inside, I made out giddy employees ordering free drinks from cocktail waitresses dressed like jockeys. The only thing missing was music.
I could see Mister Lee, the hotel Food and Beverage Director, Mister Assistant’s boss, inside the deejay booth trying to figure things out. The hotel deejay wasn’t scheduled to start until the next night.
“You can’t go in there,” Mister Assistant said, spotting me at the door. “You’re not old enough.”
When his pager beeped, Mister Assistant unclipped it from his belt, looked, and then dashed off. I went inside the disco.
“Need some help?” I asked Mister Lee.
“Get in here!” he replied, waving me into the booth. “We spent a fortune on this stuff and it doesn’t work!”
As I got a closer look at the mass of equipment, a feeling of trepidation swept over me. This gear was way more complicated than I’d expected.
“He’s going to fix it!” Mr. Lee yelled to the employees on the parquet wooden dance floor, who waited beneath hot lights and massive, silent speakers.
As the stationary dancers watched me, I started having second thoughts about wandering in there.
I got on my knees for a closer look at the dozens of controls, toggle switches and indicator lights. Then I figured it out. Mr. Lee had the volume bar pointed to the wrong turntable. So I pushed it.
The sound system roared, filling the Stirrup Cup Lounge with loud and luscious decibels that entered your body not just through the ears but through every pore.
On the floor just in front of me, dancers came to life like beans on a hot skillet.
More employees poured onto the dance floor, starting with Mister Lee. The heavyset man boogied onto the floor, surrounded by a bunch of corporate types who didn’t know the first thing about dancing.
But they were having fun. And so was I, wrapped in the communal blanket of bass-rich music pouring out of a sound system so perfectly tuned you could feel every note.
As the song came to an end I realized I had work to do. I grabbed the next record in the bin.
With no time to read the label, I yanked the vinyl disc from its paper sleeve, and jammed it onto the knobby spindle of the turntable.
Placing the stylus on the outer groove of a record is the most delicate thing a deejay does, and I felt like I had on boxing gloves when I sent the tone arm bouncing across the vinyl.
When at last I got the record going I jammed the slider to the other turntable.
It was a terrible transition: the tempo of the new song was much faster than the one already playing.
But the dancers didn’t seem notice. They kept jiggling and knocking into each other, half drunk and wholly happy, soaking up the music.
This went on for nearly two hours. When my impromptu shift came to an end and Mister Lee came over to shake my hand, I couldn’t tell which of us was more drenched in sweat.
And I really had to pee.
After dashing out to take care of that in the lobby restroom, I headed back to the Stirrup Cup Lounge but saw the door was closed. It was a relief. I was exhausted.
It was a miracle I didn’t break anything in there, pretending to do something I was so unqualified to do, as an accidental deejay for a night.
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Back on my real job of setting up tables and chairs, I would always find some excuse to wander up the service corridor to the back of the Stirrup Cup Lounge and peer inside.
The professional deejay was a wizard with the gear, and the waitresses were always flirting with him.
I pictured him at closing time, taking one of these waitresses home—maybe two.
To my teenage mind, that might have been the point of disco: having sex.
Donna Summer even simulated an orgasm in her hit song Love to Love You Baby.
This would intrigue countless teenagers—including this one.
If I were a real deejay, I figured, then I’d have sex in no time. But I wasn’t. I was a houseman, setting up tables and chairs in meeting rooms.
Until one night. That’s when my boss’s boss, Mr. Lee, called me to his office.
“Have a seat,” he said as I entered.
“You really saved my skin when you played records that night. How about doing it every night?
I left his office juggling contradictory feelings of euphoria and panic. I had to say yes. The hotel would pay me $50 a night—nearly three times my houseman pay—to play records. In a disco!
That was the euphoric part. The panic was realizing I would have to learn all the equipment, and all that music, in a hurry. Would the current deejay give me some tips?
I went straight from Mr. Lee’s office to the Stirrup Cup.
“Hi!” I said to the guy in the booth.
He reminded me of a balding Sonny Bono – moustache, a vest over an unbuttoned shirt with a huge pointy collar, and slightly more hair on his chest than on his head.
“What’s happening, my man?” he replied, barely moving his head long enough to acknowledge my presence.
“My name’s Mike Durbin!” I said. “I’m your replacement!”
He stopped what he was doing.
“You’re my what?”
The professional deejay stared me down like the imbecilic kid I had just proved I was, not realizing this guy didn’t yet know he was being fired. “Stick around, kid,” he said as he stepped out of the booth and shot past me. “You might be starting tonight.”
I did not stick around. I bolted into the service corridor and got the hell out of there.
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Disco defined the 1970s like no other musical genre, but its initial presence was hardly noticed.
The first song to reach the top of the disco chart was Gloria Gaynor’s cover of the Jackson 5 song Never Can Say Goodbye, released in 1974. It featured a relentless bass beat that would characterize countless disco songs to come. Another hit that year was The Sounds of Philadelphia. It had all the iconic features of a disco song and became the theme song to the TV show Soul Train.
In 1975, Van McCoy had a hit with The Hustle, named for a dance style popular in New York clubs. That’s also when the Brothers Gibb, or Bee Gees, resuscitated their flagging musical career with their song Jive Talkin’.
And then came the movie.
Before December 1977, the actor John Travolta was known as the wisecracking Vinnie Barbarino in the TV show Welcome Back Kotter.
Now, the dimple-chinned Travolta was Tony Manero in the blockbuster movie Saturday Night Fever, mixing paint in a Brooklyn hardware store by day and dancing like a Baryshnikov of the disco dance floor by night.
Besides being a blockbuster film, the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack album featured a slew of Bee Gees songs that would soon dominate the charts.
These hits created an updraft for a number of other disco hits such as Boogie Oogie Oogie by A Taste of Honey, Disco Inferno by The Trammps, and I Love the Nightlife by Alicia Bridges.
With the help of this one movie, disco went from a trend to a craze. And people didn’t want to just listen to these hits, they wanted to dance.
That required someone to play those songs in just the right order, strung together in one continuous musical experience. That someone was the deejay.
On my first night working at the Stirrup Cup, I arrived hours early to figure things out, starting with the Technics SL-1200, or Tec 12, turntable.
Its platter was edged in rings of black dots, one ring each for different speeds and a little LED light whose red glow made the dots appear to stand still when the speed was perfect.
Two turntables, a mixing console to shift volume from one to the other, and some records. That’s all you really needed.
The first job of a deejay is getting people to dance. You can’t rush this. You don’t want to put on Donna Summer’s Hot Stuff, or Le Freak by Chic, only to watch an empty dance floor. But there are some songs for testing the waters.
Something like Shame by Evelyn King. It has a quick tempo but mellow organ licks and lazy clap track.
Once people are on the floor you want to keep them there. And the way you do that when starting a new song is by beat-matching.
The Tec 12 has a pitch control that lets you speed up or slow down a song, just enough to make its tempo match the song currently playing.
And you do this with your oversized headphone, held up with your shoulder to free up both hands, and covering only one ear so you can hear both the current song and the one you are cueing up.
Once the beats line up you use the fader to turn up the new song while fading out the other.
If you do it right the dancers will just keep dancing, like it’s all one song.
I bought a three-piece suit for my deejay wardrobe, which was great because you could take off the jacket and still look dressed up with the vest on. My first night wearing a suit at the disco was the first time I had ever worn a suit, and I wondered if I looked as conspicuous as I felt.
The cocktail waitresses didn’t seem to notice me, but I sure noticed them.
I had almost given up getting their attention when I heard “Nice suit!” from an especially attractive waitress who stopped at the booth.
She had red hair and, like everyone else in the place, was a few years older than me.
“Thanks!” I said, staring at her name tag and leaning in for a closer look. It said Donna. Then I realized she probably thought I was looking at her cleavage. No wonder she didn’t hang around.
My old houseman pals would sometimes stop by the Stirrup Cup and give me a wave from the service entrance, until Mister Assistant sent them away.
For some reason, he let one of the houseman come over and talk to me. His name was Glen. He didn’t like the music at all.
“Do you know the band Spyro Gyra?” he asked.
“Never heard of ‘em. Are they disco?”
“No. Jazz fusion, and it’s really cool stuff,” he continued. “Don’t you ever get tired of playing disco?”
I reminded Glen, as nicely as I could, that this was a disco, and no I did not get tired of it and neither did the patrons.
He clearly didn’t know music, but Glen had one thing going for him: a perfectly toned body and blond hair and a big square chin that made him look a lot like Robert Redford. I never fit in with guys like that.
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My job at the disco gave me plenty of time to think, in chunks of free time between song changes.
Surrounded by happy couples, touching and drinking and dancing, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I was in that world too.
I took mental notes on clothes, dance steps, the way the guys led their dates to and from the dance floor.
I started saying hello to more waitresses who passed by the booth. Most would ignore me, some might return my smile.
Donna was the only waitress who might utter a complete sentence. Once in a while we’d have an actual exchange, as we did the first time she stopped to rest her empty tray on the edge of the disco booth.
“Hi, Donna.”
“Hi. What’s your name?”
“Mike.”
“Hi, Mike.”
And then she went back to her tables to get drink orders. And I went back to dreaming.
I wondered if Donna had a boyfriend. There were no rings on her fingers, so I figured she wasn’t married.
I chose to think she was unattached, and watching her move between the tables ringing the dance floor I pictured our chit-chats growing into something more.
There was a microphone in my booth though I never wanted to use it, until one night when Donna stopped by and waved for me to come close.
Holding a tray of drinks with both hands, she stretched her neck to put her face close to my ear. As she talked, her lips touched my earlobe, sending a tingling sensation to each and every nerve ending on my teenage body.
Her voice was full, and satisfying. Feeling her words pour into me was like swallowing a milk shake.
When she left, I went over to the microphone and turned down the music. The dancers all looked up at me. I took a deep breath.
“This goes out to… the owner of a Datsun 280Z in the parking lot. Your lights are on.”
Donna passed by a moment later. She gave me a wink, and I gave her one back. She liked me. She liked me!
And now she knew I liked her back. This was incredible. I began picturing our future: The next time she paused at the booth, she’d linger for longer. The time after that, I’d lean on the rail to get close, and she’d put her hand on my arm.
She would do that again. Then I’d ask her out. She would say yes. Then we’d go to a disco where neither of us worked, and we’d dance, and then we’d go to her place.
And then my life would be complete.
———————————–
There was nothing special about the night of July 12, 1979 at the Stirrup Cup Lounge. I worked through my usual sequence of songs, playing things safe. The crowd was thin and most tables were empty.
Seven hundred miles away, on the south side of Chicago, 75,000 rowdy fans squeezed into a baseball stadium designed for 45,000.
It was Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park. After the first of two games in a double-header, between the Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers, the radio deejay Steve Dahl blew up a crate of disco records on the outfield as a stunt.
The explosion tore a hole in the grass, started a small fire and kindled an uproar by his fanatic followers.
Dahl had been on a crusade to kill disco since being fired from a rock-and-roll station that changed its format to disco.
He was surprised by how many fans showed up at the event, and, like the White Sox staff and Chicago Police, was startled by what happened next.
Drunken fans swarmed the field, started more fires, stole bats from dugouts, and forced the White Sox to forfeit the second game of the double-header.
The event got plenty of national attention and some dubbed it The Night Disco Died.
Although it didn’t die that very night, Dahl’s publicity stunt did seem to be a mortal blow.
The anti-disco movement had grown quickly as the summer peaked, and while no other event quite matched Demolition Night in Chicago, you could find people wearing Disco Sucks tee shirts in cities across the country.
Over the weeks that followed, the number of disco songs on Billboard’s top ten dropped steadily. Hit disco songs were falling off the charts like leaves from a dying tree.
I wasn’t fazed by this massive change sweeping over pop culture. I didn’t even notice. I was making $50 a night–more than $200 in today’s dollars, spinning records on the edge of adulthood, all thanks to disco.
One night before work, figuring things could accelerate quickly with Donna, I decided to spruce myself up.
After my weekly shave, I helped myself to my dad’s Old Spice aftershave.
I wasn’t expecting the sting, but I liked the scent, and figured the next time Donna came close to my face, she might like it too. So I put on a little more. And then a little more.
An hour later I stepped into the Stirrup Cup Lounge, charged up and ready to change my life.
And one step after that, I was bewildered. Something wasn’t right.
Glen was in my booth. He was wearing not his houseman uniform, but a suit—a two-piece and a tie.
He had records on my turntables. One was playing some melodic, modern jazz I didn’t know. I walked over.
“What are you doing?” I asked. He seemed to be expecting me.
“I’m playing Spyro Gyra. Didn’t I tell you it was better than disco?”
Glen pointed to the dance floor. It was nearly full and the place had just opened.
“Who said you could do this?” I asked.
Glen didn’t answer. He was sniffing the air.
“Is that Old Spice?” he asked. “Did the cap come off or something?”
I started to repeat my question. “I asked you—”
Glen pointed to the service entrance where Mister Assistant stood. I rushed over to see him.
“Why is Glen in my booth?” I asked as evenly as I could.
“He works there,” he answered. “We don’t need your services anymore, Mister Durbin.”
“What does Mister Lee say?” I asked.
“He doesn’t work here anymore.”
I looked at the name tag pinned to his lapel. It read Food & Beverage Director.
Mister Assistant had been promoted into Mister Lee’s old job. This guy really was in charge now. And I really was fired.
I sped out of the lounge just wanting to go home. But I couldn’t resist taking one last look at the deejay booth. I wish I hadn’t.
Glen was leaning on the rail of the booth, looking all Robert Redford as he chatted with a giggling waitress—whose hand rested firmly on his arm.
It was Donna.