[ Guitar plays haltingly ]
[ Tempo quickens ]
-When I was a kid, I grew up
with this television show called "American Bandstand."
And every time they rated a record,
if it was a good record, they would say,
"It's got a good beat and you can dance to it."
And I would go, "Okay." [ Chuckles ]
That's what I want my records to have --
a good beat, and you can dance to it.
-♪ Sweat
♪ Sweat
♪ Lose yourself to dance
-♪ Come on, come on, come on
♪ Come on, come on, come on, come on ♪
-♪ Lose yourself to dance
-♪ Come on, come on, come on, come on ♪
♪ Come on, come on, come on, come on ♪
-Rhythm is at the root of the music we love.
When the groove is good, it's irresistible.
-Music can get you wild.
Music can make you funky.
-What makes music exciting is the counterpoint.
It's this melding of opposites.
-It's about the punch and it's about that thing
that makes you want to stand up and dance.
-And it gets inside and it fills you
and sometimes you can't articulate it.
-It's that primal thing in dance music
that brings us all together.
-♪ Hot pants
♪ Hey
-Our world has changed, and so has the beat.
It's gotten bigger, louder, and more exciting.
-James Brown -- you can't listen to James Brown
without getting up and wanting to move.
-Brown said that everything sounded like a drum to him.
It was this kind of symphony of percussion.
-Oh, my God!
James Brown music just messed me up.
-♪ Shake your groove thing
♪ Shake your groove thing, yeah, yeah ♪
♪ Show 'em how they do it now
♪ Shake your groove thing, shake your groove thing ♪
-I think that disco probably has a more lasting effect
than historians are willing to admit.
[ Electronic dance music plays ]
-It's amazing and wonderful
that EDM now almost sort of rules the planet.
-Computer-driven music is the future.
-The main reason why EDM is so popular
is because you just start to move.
You can't sit still.
-From the manmade to the machine-engineered,
it's all about finding that perfect beat.
-Because that's what makes the people adrenaline go up.
Huh huh-huhhh,
uhhh...bam!
♪♪
-Okay, then. Okay.
-It'll be an F for you.
-Here we go.
-Right after I say, "Are you sure?"
Da da da -- yeah.
-Oh.
-Hal, here's how I want to do it. Takes like this.
-All right, it's fun time. Fun time.
-Here we go.
-Oh, really? -17, take one.
-This will be the keeper.
♪♪
-♪ All the single ladies -♪ All the single ladies
-♪ All the single ladies; Now, put your hands up ♪
-♪ Up in the club, we just broke up ♪
♪ I'm doin' my own little thing ♪
-♪ Trick started this beat with just a drum
and the quirky sound that -- that we heard.
[ Drum plays ]
♪ Uh, uh, uh
-♪ I'm up on him, he up on me ♪
♪ Don't pay him any attention
-And I just sat in the back.
I just thought about if I was Beyoncé,
I would say "What?" -♪ 'Cause if you liked it
♪ Then you should've put a ring on it ♪
♪ If you liked it, then you should've put a ring on it ♪
♪ Don't be mad once you see that he want it ♪
♪ If you liked it, then you should've put a ring on it ♪
♪ Oh-oh-oh oh-oh-oh
-I'm thinking. I'm quiet.
-He's not giving me no -- no love.
He's not -- he's not -- We're not in it together.
He's just... -I'm giving him nothing.
I'm Jedi.
Trick stopped the beat. And I look at him.
He was like, "What's wrong with you, man?"
-"What are you doin'?" -"What are you doin'?"
And he's like, "What do you mean?
I was gonna start another beat."
I was like, "Yeah, you just go and sit in --
sit in there. I'll be right... "
-He's like, "I got the whole thing."
He's like, "I just wrote the whole song."
-♪ I got gloss on my lips, a man on my hips ♪
♪ Hold me tighter than my Deréon jeans ♪
-The anatomy is there.
The heart's there, the lungs, the -- the stomach.
You know, the -- the...
I just have to put the legs on it.
-♪ Don't pay him any attention
♪ 'Cause you had your turn and now you gonna learn ♪
♪ What it really feels like to miss me ♪
♪ 'Cause if you liked it...
-She came by to just kind of poke her head in
and kind of hear what it was, and she was like, "Oh."
-And she immediately -- There was no lyrics typed out.
Like, there was no nothing.
It was like, "Yeah, let me get with that."
Like, and the next thing I know,
she was on the other side of the booth...
-Singing. -...singing.
And we were like...
-♪ Oh-oh-oh
-Yeah. -...this is --
this is happening. -♪ Should've put a ring on it
♪ If you liked it, then you should've put a ring on it ♪
-He's thinking about how to connect the dots.
Lyrically, I'm thinking about, "B is from Houston."
I'm thinking about Southern. I'm thinking about...
Like, to me, it's a church beat.
So I just started with the...
♪ Chuh-chuh chuh-chuh chuh-chuh chuh ♪
It's, like, that's a sanctified beat.
-Because she's a Southern girl. -She's a Southern girl.
-♪ All the single ladies [ Rhythmic clapping ]
♪ All the single ladies -♪ All the single ladies
-I can see the paper fans in church
and the wooden benches and the reverend
and the baptisms that are going on
and knowing what's happeningafter that.
That's everything I get from one sound.
-So I'm like, "How do I get this Southern girl
on the dancefloor?"
-♪ Oh, oh, oh
-High-five, man. Yeah, man.
Yeah. Totally rad, man.
-I think that one's a keeper. -It's randy.
-[ Chuckles ]
-♪ Talk about little David
-♪ Sit down
-♪ He's a mighty man
-♪ Sit down
-♪ Well, he killed Goliath
-♪ Sit down
-♪ Took his head to the king, Lord ♪
-♪ Sit down, servant, and rest a while ♪
-A lot of people, when they think of gospel music,
think of the sound of the vocal.
They think of spiritual aspects of gospel.
But they very often don't think enough
about the rhythmic aspects and the driving beat.
-♪ Yeah, sit down, servant -♪ I can't sit down
-♪ Sit down -♪ Woh, I can't sit down
-♪ Sit down, servant
-♪ I can't sit down
♪ I just got to heaven, and I can't sit down ♪
-♪ Says you can watch the sun, see how steady she runs ♪
♪ Don't let it catch you with your work undone ♪
♪ Joshua, Joshua, the son of a nun ♪
♪ Thank God almighty, was a gospel son ♪
-Gospel has a...
♪ Dun, da-dun, da-dun, da-dun, da-dun ♪
Right? It's influenced by boogie-woogie and other styles.
That pounding, sort of frenzied aspect of gospel
is really important to its spiritual aspects.
It's -- it's what caused people in churches
to -- to catch the spirit and to go wild.
-♪ Come later
♪ When I get to heaven, I'm gonna put on my shoes ♪
♪ And walk around heaven and tell my news ♪
♪ I look up to David in the heat of the day ♪
♪ Tune up my harp and begin to play ♪
-But it directly got transferred into rock 'n' roll music
through the gospel fervor and energy
of people like Little Richard.
-Ooh, my soul! [ Chuckles ]
We're gonna do a little thing for ya.
♪ Saturday night, and I just got paid ♪
♪ I'm a fool about my money, don't try to save ♪
♪ My heart says, "Go, go have a time" ♪
♪ Saturday night and I'm feelin' fine ♪
♪ I'm gonna rock it up
♪ I'm gonna rip it up
♪ I'm gonna shake it up
♪ Gonna ball it up
♪ I'm gonna rock it up and ball tonight ♪
-A guy like Little Richard, as with any sort of black artist
from that era, is giving you the black church,
as well as the black juke joint.
-♪ Gonna shake it up
♪ Gonna ball it up
♪ I'm gonna rock it up and ball tonight ♪
♪ Everybody
-Richard said, "I want to bring you to this train station.
I want you to hear something."
[ Train chugging ]
Said, "Now, listen to the train. The train's going all
choo-choo, choo-choo, choo-choo, choo-choo."
He said, "Now, watch when it pick up speed."
Choo-choo, choo-choo, choo-choo, choo-choo.
[ Train chugging ]
He said, "What kind of notes are those?"
I said, "Those are eighth notes."
He said, "Well, that's what I want you to play behind me."
[ Drum plays chugging rhythm ]
-♪ Keep a-knockin' but you can't come in ♪
♪ Keep a-knockin' but you can't come in ♪
♪ Keep a-knockin', but you can't come in ♪
♪ Come back tomorrow night and try it again ♪
-I mean, Little Richard, man, was exciting.
-♪ You said you love me, but you can't come in ♪
♪ Whoo!
-And the beat was contagious.
-♪ Come back tomorrow night and try it again ♪
♪ Wah!
-The power -- the sheer power,
the visceral power of the beat of that driving rhythm --
he actually had two drum kits onstage.
And as soon as the music started,
I mean, it was just pounding
and it was -- you could feel it in your chest.
-♪ I'm goin' downtown
-There was a swinging, tough Southern beat...
-♪ Yeah, you rock me fast
Too fast, too fast.
-...that was coming out of New Orleans.
-Listen to me. Listen. Listen to me, you guitar.
Listen to the way I'm playing.
-So many of Little Richard's most famous records
were recorded at J&M Studios by the engineer Cosimo Matassa.
-Bass do... ♪ Bom bom-bom, bom bom-bom, bom... ♪
-There wasn't a lot of advanced technology in that studio,
so they basically had to just record performances
as if there was a kind of live audience.
-May I get that -- that -- that -- no no no no --
that hillbilly thing?
It's a riff, you know?
-What it did for rock 'n' roll was plant a --
a stone in history -- "We started here."
-♪ And -- you know just what I mean ♪
-It was a sound and a flavor all unto itself.
And they took it out in the world.
-♪ Wop bop-a-loo bop-a-lop-ba ♪
♪ Tutti frutti, oh, rutti
-It was really an awakening.
Of course, we're talking about a time
when, in America, it wasso, so puritanical.
-Rock 'n' roll music is a contributing factor
to our juvenile delinquency of today,
I 100% believe.
Why I believe that is
because I know how it feels when you sing it.
If you talk to the average teenager of today
and you ask them what it is about rock 'n' roll music
that they like, the first thing they'll say is,
"The beat, the beat, the beat."
-Oh, my God! Richie over there!
-Across-Canada, "Hit Parade" debut,
jumping into 10th position this week, "Tutti Frutti."
And here to sing it in person,
Pat Boone.
-♪ Wop bop-a-loo bop-a-lop bom bom ♪
♪ I got a gal, her name's Sue ♪
♪ Knows just what to do
♪ I got a gal, her name's Sue ♪
♪ Knows just what to do
-And then we would white-ify it
and you'd have Little Richard and Fats Domino
bustin' their hump with great songs
and then Pat Boone would cover it.
I mean, how do you cover Little Richard?
It's like suicide. [ Chuckles ]
-We were not allowed to hear the real thing
and it was like a sort of cloak of respectability
put over the record.
-Pat Boone sold more records than we did.
-He did a good version. You know, after all,
for him to say, "Wop bop-a-loo bop-a-lop bam boom,"
that wasn't too easy.
A lot of the new people want to hear the -- the originators.
They say, "Let us hear the real thing."
Shoot, it just like if you been lookin' for a girl,
and you see a man every day, you want to see the real thing.
That's enough.
I can't look no better than that.
-Everything that I loved about rock 'n' roll --
the danger, the explosive sounds of those records --
was gone from about 1960 onwards.
-But it was -- it was just beginning.
A new form of rock 'n' roll, as we called it,
came into play during the '60s,
when that was ushered in by companies like Motown.
[ "Dancing in the Street" plays ]
-♪ When there was a nice backbeat, beautifully sounding,
good-balanced-sounding records, all-American.
-♪ Calling out around the world ♪
♪ Are you ready for a brand-new beat? ♪
♪ Summer's here and the time is right ♪
♪ For dancing in the street
-"Dancing in the Street,"
they would always kick off the night in any club with that.
One of the great Motown hits.
-Motown music brought my world into abundance of color
and soulfulness because those melodic lines
and those fantastic chord changes and those beats,
as soon as you heard the very first note,
you knew exactly what this was.
-It came out sounding like God.
-♪ Doo-doo doo-doo
♪ Doo-doo doo-doo
♪ Doo-doo doo-doo, doo-doo
-♪ Doo doo doo doo
-♪ People say I'm the life of the party ♪
♪ 'Cause I tell a joke or two
♪ Although I might be laughin' loud and hearty ♪
♪ Deep inside, I'm blue
♪ So take a good look at my face ♪
♪ You'll see my smile looks out of place ♪
♪ If you look closer, it's easy to trace ♪
♪ The tracks of my tears
-♪ Doo-doo doo-doo
-On the very first day of Motown,
Berry Gordy was there, and four other people,
and I -- I was among them.
And he said, "Okay, I'm starting this record company.
We are not gonna only make black music.
We're gonna make music for everybody.
We're gonna make music for theworld.
We're gonna make music with some great beats
and some great stories.
And we're gonna always do quality music."
♪ Take a good look at my face
-♪ Oh oh oh
♪ You'll see my smile looks out of place ♪
We would go places in the South, takin' our --
our Motortown Revues down there, you know.
♪ Whoo!
There's a big stage in the middle of the hall
and white people are on one side,
and black people are on the other side.
It's segregated.
But, you know, maybe you can do something about it.
The next time we got to those places,
the kids, they were dancin' with each other
They were talkin', intermingling, holdin' hands.
Here's a little black boy,
holding a little white girl's hand, or vice versa.
That was his idea of what he wanted his record company to be.
-The basic elements
or the main elements of the Motown sound
had to do with a very solid but controlled gospel sound.
It was rooted in -- in a -- in a big beat,
lots of bass, tambourine, drums.
You know, very, very rhythmic.
-The Funk Brothers at Motown were very important.
They had such a sense of music, a -- a feeling for it.
I used to give James Jamerson,
the bass player in the Funk Brothers,
the feeling of what I was going for.
I would start, uh, sometimes on the piano.
♪ Dun-bom-bom-ba, bom-bom-bom-bom bom-bom-ba ♪
[ "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)" plays ]
And then, when the changes would come in,
eight bars later, he would follow that feeling.
-♪ Ooh, sugar pie, honey bunch
♪ You know that I love you
♪ I can't help myself
-Motown had their rhythm section
that they used pretty consistently.
They created a beat that they kept using over and over again.
-Beats were kind of this classic, like,
♪ Unh unh unh-unh unh-unh unh
You know, those kind of beats
where you have those, like, amazing rhythm sections
with the James Jamerson bassline.
And you start to think of the way it moves around, like...
♪ Doom doom badoom
♪ Badoo-badoo doo-doo, doom-doom ♪
-The drum sound and the bass are
the backbone of that sound, never to be equaled.
-I got a chance to see these acts.
As a teenager, I would sneak out of the house
to go and see them, at age 14, up in Flint, Michigan,
and that's where, you know, when people got big,
like James Brown, that's where they would perform.
-But when you're talking about James Brown,
what he's doing in the '60s and what Motown's doing
in the '60s are two very different things.
There's no way a Motown artist
would've put out a song called "I'm Black and I'm Proud."
-♪ Say it loud
-♪ I'm black and I'm proud
-♪ Say it loud
-♪ I'm black and I'm proud
-♪ Looky here
♪ Some people say we got a lot of malice ♪
♪ Some say it's a lot of nerve
♪ But I say we won't quit movin' ♪
-Black power, brothers. -♪ Until we get
♪ what we deserve
-It was the vibe he put on the music --
you know, the grunts and the sound effects
and just the way he -- I mean, it was really organic.
I mean, that's exactly what it was.
James took it back to the root.
-♪ I said, "I lost someone"
♪ But I know where I'm gonna find them ♪
♪ All aboard -♪ Yeah
-He bought it from the root to the fruit.
-♪ All aboard -♪ Yeah
-♪ For night train
[ "Night Train" plays ]
♪ Miami, Florida
-James Brown and the J.B.s, in the mid-'60s,
changed the sound of what dance music is.
If you listen to "Live at the Apollo,"
it's a great band.
It's a great show. It's still very bluesy.
Very church-y, the show is.
Over the next -- next couple of years,
as the band begins touring, they have --
'cause Brown likes to dance, so we need to create
a bed where we can have him dance.
So they begin playing these instrumental things,
which are interludes from song to song,
so that Brown can do the Mashed Potato and the --
the hully gully and the whatever.
They're a part of a slow evolution
that's happening as Brown tours the country.
So basically, the road,
they really kind of use it as a laboratory.
They begin to influence the actual records.
-♪ All aboard for New York
-Sometimes, they would just grab a studio
wherever they were and make these records.
-One of the watershed moments in 20th-century music history
is the moment in 1965
when James Brown went into the studio
to record this new song he'd written,
"Papa's Got a Brand New Bag."
He wanted to make a record where the guitar sounded like drums,
where the bass guitar sounded like drums,
where the horn sounded like drums,
this kind of symphony of percussion.
-♪ C'mere, sister
♪ Papa's in the swing
♪ He ain't too hip
♪ About that new breed, babe
♪ Ain't no drag
♪ Ow! Papa's got a brand new bag ♪
♪♪
-He went into the recording studio
with this in mind.
So he had his guitar -- his guitarist was playing
this chicken-scratch style that is now so famous.
He wasn't singing the tune
so much as he was a kind of, if you will, human beatbox,
grunting and groaning and exclaiming.
That's what he did, was he invented this music -- funk.
-♪ Doing the jerk
♪ Doing the fly
♪ Don't be ashamed
♪ 'Cause you know he ain't shy
♪ The Monkey
♪ Mashed Potato
♪ Jump back, Jack
♪ See you later, alligator
♪ C'mere, ooh
-James Brown had a rhythm band.
I mean, you couldn't resist it.
You had all those rhythms coming out
with a strong backbeat, which they called funk.
That was a funky thing. Mnh-mnh-mnh.
You know, and he was screaming over the top of it!
-♪ Oh
♪ Like the boomerang
-He was on fire.
-♪ Hey, come on
♪ Come on, come on
♪ Said you uptight, you outta sight ♪
-Oh, my God!
James Brown music just messed me up.
[chcukle] in a good way.
-♪ Come on
♪ See what you know
♪ I just want you to play along some more ♪
-It was the drum playing, the...
[ Scatting ]
-It was funkier than Motown.
Motown wasn't really funk.
-That, to me, is the hypnotic power
of the James Brown Effect.
-He influenced Sly. He influenced Stevie.
He influenced Prince. He influenced dance music.
-He brought the rhythm together in this new idiom in a big way.
At one time, he had three drummers
in his band, maybe even four, in the very beginning.
And, uh, that's kind of where I got the idea
of, you know, maybe multiple drummers.
That would really be great.
-♪ Please don't dominate the rap, Jack ♪
♪ You've got nothing new to say ♪
-You know, wow! What a sound.
Sometimes they play in tandem.
Sometimes they're splitting the rhythms up.
But there's rhythm all over.
We were trying to create that state of mind
that changed all the priorities.
It's a trance band.
We weren't after the beginnings and endings
or even the right notes.
-♪ One step done and another begun ♪
♪ And I wonder how many miles
[ Instrumental music plays ]
-There is not a culture that does not have its dance,
has its own rhythm, its own music.
I could see a Led Zeppelin audience or the Beatles
or the Grateful Dead or Santana.
[ Drums play, rhythmic clapping ]
-Just keep that going.
♪♪
-Carlos Santana really brought something totally different
that none of us had, um, experienced or heard before.
You know, it was a big deal. It was like, wow.
This guy playing rock guitar, in a sense, with drums,
you know, timbales, congas, bongos,
and then all of the singers
playing hand percussion, as well.
It was something that -- that changed music.
-Carlos Santana's story is good timing,
the fact that his family moved into San Francisco
just before the youth culture explosion of the late '60s.
There were the jazz clubs. There was the rock emporiums.
There was places where the blues was happening.
[ Conga music plays ]
And then there were these conga parties.
You started to hear certain conga players --
Willie Bobo, Ray Barretto.
And that's how he comes to the music.
And then the band becomes this little laboratory
trying to put together electric blues and Latin percussion
and getting these different languages
to talk one language together.
[ Santana's "Fried Neck Bones And Some Home Fries" plays ]
♪♪
-This Latin radio station,
all night they used to have, "Let's party! Party time."
And they put on Joe Cuba
and Eddie Palmieri and Ray Barretto and Tito Puente,
'cause at that time, like today, I play to everything,
the radio or anything, just to learn what's happening.
And I say, "This is not too far from B.B. King.
You know, this is -- this can work together."
-But, of course, how does that translate to a radio single?
How does that translate to a recording?
Bill Graham was one of the first
to actually go up to them and say, "Guys,
let me tell you about song structure."
And he plays them Willie Bobo's recording "Evil Ways."
[ "Evil Ways" plays ]
-♪ You got to change your evil ways ♪
♪ Baby
-And they take this tune, "Evil Ways,"
and they figure out a way to bring in the electric guitar,
bring in the rock rhythms, just enough
so that it's gonna be palatable for a rock audience,
but it's gonna be true to what "Evil Ways" was,
which was this Latin boogaloo, you know,
irresistible dance-rhythm kind of tune.
-♪ This can't go on
[ Intro to "Evil Ways" plays ]
♪♪
♪ You got to change your evil ways ♪
♪ Baby
♪ Before I stop lovin' you -The Carlos Santana view
of rhythms, what he's talking about there
is Afro-Cuban, Afro-Caribbean rhythms,
which eventually, you know,
if you trace it back, all goes back to Africa.
-♪ Baby
♪ With Gene and Joe and-a who knows who ♪
-And a lot of people don't know the influence of Latin music.
When I was growing up, you saw films, I mean,
that had bands from South America.
I mean, the Carmen Miranda thing, the samba.
♪ Bo-boo-bing-ba-ba-doo
♪ Brazil
♪ Ba-ba-bi, ba-do-ba-ba-ba
♪ Ba-ba-ba-bi-do
-When I hear Latin, Latin jazz, salsa music, it's just, like,
it warms my heart, it makes me feel good.
That's my DNA. That's who I am.
That's the foundation of who I am.
-♪ When I come home
♪ Baby
♪ My house is dark and my pots are cold ♪
♪ You hangin' 'round, baby
-Woodstock was probably the biggest door I ever walked into.
I remember that I was under the influence of LSD.
Damn, why did I take LSD before I went on, you know?
The guitar neck, it felt like a --
a electric snake that wouldn't stand still.
That's why I'm making ugly faces,
trying to make this snake stand still
so I can, like, play it, you know?
I remember saying over and over,
"God, I'll never do this again, ever.
If you can just keep me in time and in tune,
that's all I ask."
That was my first mantra.
♪♪
-Seeing those instruments,
not just in salsa traditional but mainstream now,
now it's crossing over to not just the Latin community
but, you know, everyone else.
[ Guitar solo ]
-♪ Ah!
♪♪
[ Music stops ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
Thank you.
-We're groupists.
The group makes us stronger.
When one person is playing in the groove, that's good.
When two people are playing in the groove,
that gives more power.
Three people, four people, that's the groove.
So things change. Needs change in a culture.
Why wouldn't the music change?
[ "Rock Your Baby" plays ] -I grew up, I was a hippie
with embroidered jeans and big platform shoes
and flower power and stuff like that.
I was a Greenwich Village kid,
so, everybody who hung out down there
sort of looked like us and were hippies or beatniks
or cool people. It was, like, total -- total hippie.
-♪ Woman
♪ Take me in your arms
♪ Rock your baby
When I became aware of disco, that's the last thing
I wanted to do, was play dance music.
Well, my girlfriend worked at a jazz club.
So I went to a disco with her. And I walked in
and they were playing the song "I Love to Love You Baby"
by Donna Summer.
-♪ Ahh
♪ Ahh
♪ When you're layin' so close to me ♪
♪ There's no place I'd rather you be than with me, oh ♪
♪ I love to love you, baby
-When the song ended, the deejay segued it into another song.
[Mystique's "In the Bush" plays] And...
I saw people dancing from disparate backgrounds.
We saw gay people, straight people in the traditional sense,
and they were all dancing to the same music.
I was like, "Whoa!"
And it felt orgasmic to me to hear continuous music.
I went into a trance and I was like, "Check this out."
And all of a sudden, we fit into this disco crowd.
And I said to myself, "I want to be
a part of that crowd where the music never stops."
And I wrote "Everybody Dance" maybe three weeks later.
-♪ Everybody dance
♪ Doo-doo doo-doo
♪ Clap your hands, clap your hands ♪
♪ Everybody dance
♪ Doo-doo doo-doo
♪ Clap your hands, clap your hands ♪
-It was the first time
that I knew I could do this for a living.
It was all about the groove. It was all about the sound.
It was all about the vibe and the feel.
And also we have a virtuoso bass performance by Bernard Edwards.
But it's still grooving.
[ Bass solo ]
-♪ Everybody dance
Hello! There are bits of Motown. There's bits of soul.
There's bits of Memphis.
There's all sorts of stuff in that music that Nile did.
-Disco was a very funky, soulful beat, you know,
you was able to dance and glide to.
It wasn't really stuck-up.
It was like -- it was like a different beat than --
than the funk and even what James Brown was puttin' down.
It was just different. It was graceful.
But it wasn't -- it wasn't snooty.
-♪ Don't leave me this way
♪ I can't survive
♪ Can't stay alive -One of the things we have to
remember about disco is that when you went to the dancefloor
and you listened to "Don't Leave Me This Way"
by Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes
or Thelma Houston's version, it was possible for you to have
a spiritually transcendent experience
that would be akin to what you might feel in a church.
-♪ Ahhhh
♪ Baby
♪ My heart is full of love and desire for you ♪
-One of the most important things
about the emergence of that era is that this was a safe place
for black and Latino gay men to gather.
-It was cool if you dressed differently.
It didn't matter. You were embraced in this world.
-The beat brings people together.
It integrates communities -- black, Latino communities,
gay communities, women --
and it gives those voices cultural capital.
-Disco, for the most part, was very underground.
It remained pretty much underground
until "Saturday Night Fever."
[ Bee Gees's "Stayin' Alive" plays ]
-♪ Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk ♪
♪ I'm a woman's man, no time to talk ♪
♪ The music loud, the women warm ♪
♪ I've been kicked around since I was born ♪
-"Saturday Night Fever," when an established producer
called from L.A. and said, "You know, John Travolta,
he's this new guy out of 'Welcome Back, Kotter'" --
he was in this film.
He's rehearsing to "You Should Be Dancing"
on the set with the others,
who've never heard of the word "disco."
And what we considered what we were writing was just R&B.
-From the time we first heard Otis Redding,
we became obsessed with R&B music.
-So in a sense, what you're essentially hearing
with the Bee Gees is this black American rhythms
that were going on in the '50s
and that came to fruition in the '60s and '70s.
-Beautiful.
-Okay, let's do it again. Second half of the chorus.
But bring that sound in. That's great.
-Dance grooves, things like that,
even in our day, you had to play it.
You had to play it.
And, uh, we found a way of creating a drum loop
that made rhythm accurate before drum machines.
We had a downbeat and backbeat.
It was like a 2-inch tape that went 'round a brush.
And it was dead-on.
And so we could do "A Woman in Love,"
"More Than a Woman," and perhaps two or three other songs
have exactly the same loop.
So right through that whole era, right through "Fever,"
we'd found another sound.
[ Up-tempo music plays ]
-And then the film exploded in Christmas of that year.
It just blew wide-open.
And that is still the biggest-selling soundtrack
in history.
[ Up-tempo music continues ]
-♪ My baby moves at midnight
-This looping of that four-beat
or eight-beat moments really preserves the magic,
finds the magic,
and then creates that tension that never resolves.
-The disco period affected all of us.
-Studio 54. Disco was huge.
Everybody was comin', partyin', and life was good.
Fur coats and Rolls-Royces and movie stars
and sex and drugs, and, oh, it's okay in the '70s!
-It was billed as teen night at Comiskey Park
for the twi-night doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox
and the Detroit Tigers.
-I think it was 1979 in Chicago, Comiskey Park,
and a local Chicago deejay
asked people who were coming to the game
this particular night to bring their disco records.
-Between games, Dahl was to lead the crowd in song and chants
and then finish by blowing up a boxful of disco records,
which the fans were to bring with them to the ballpark.
And they did, and he did.
[ Explosions ]
[ Crowd cheers ]
-And this turned into just a huge riot.
-We were actually on tour and we couldn't believe
how all-encompassing the "disco sucks" backlash was,
because we didn't think of ourselves as a disco band.
We were just being opportunistic.
We were a funk band taking advantage of a movement
that was totally open, that would let us in the door.
Our first record came out in '77.
Now, summer of '79, we sucked.
We had gone from being the darlings
to sucking in 2 years.
It felt like it just reeked of racism, sexism,
homophobia, everything.
It was, like, "Holy..."
And it was really ugly to watch.
Chic never had another hit record ever again.
-♪ I know your eyes in the mornin' sun ♪
♪ I feel you touch me in the pourin' rain ♪
♪ And the moment that you wander far from me ♪
♪ I wanna feel you in my arms again ♪
-I've often found conflict with the word "backlash."
But it's real. It's real.
And you have to move on from that.
And I think that that's what led to our own self-realization
that we couldn't be this all our lives.
-♪ How deep is your love? -♪ How deep is your love?
♪ How deep is your love?
-♪ I really mean to learn
-You can't wear white suits all your life
and you can't be a kid all your life.
This bubble will burst. -♪ Breakin' us down
♪ When they all should let us be ♪
-Nothing ever lasts forever.
-♪ We belong to you and me
♪ La la la la
♪ Lo-o-o-o-o-ve!
-♪ How deep is your love? How deep is your love? ♪
-Even though Chic's career was derailed by "disco sucks,"
my personal growth was inspired by it.
But still, the heart of my music was groove,
was funk, was dance, disco,
whatever name you want to call it.
-There was an urge to break the mold,
to try to find various rhythms and changing sounds.
That's what led us into production of other people.
-I did Bowie's biggest record. I did INXS's biggest record.
I did Duran's biggest record. I did Madonna's biggest record.
-Working with Barbra was great fun.
Working with Kenny and Dolly was great fun.
Having Diana Ross have an enormous hit,
for us, was incredible.
We were able to apply these different styles
because, you know, we'd lived through all of them.
And we were able to emulate them.
-My experience is that the word "disco" was gone.
But the sound and the way to record,
the way to sing the lyrics, they were still disco.
[ Drum plays up-tempo rhythm ]
-New York City, the venues
opened at 9:00 or 10:00 and went till 4:00.
So when I was playing a 7-, 8-, 9-hour shift
to play a 2.5-minute version of a song,
I mean, you needed a lot of records.
So the remix thing really helped in that, you know,
you sort of created, like,
almost like a symphony, in a way.
You took a song that was 3 minutes long
and made it 7 or 8 minutes long.
It still felt, on the dancefloor,
it felt like it was 3 minutes.
-It was more done cutting things up.
So you'd get the vocal, you'd get the instrumental.
And you'd extend bits and sort of make something new
out of two things that already existed.
-All of a sudden,
every song that was worthy of a moment on the dancefloor
should also have a remix that would go along with it.
So you'd not only have the original song
as it would come out on an actual album,
but you'd also have the remix version,
usually in the form of a 12-inch single.
-The brilliance, you know, in what they did
to create the remixes
is that they really created a real musical experience
that the music just never stopped
and you never left that euphoria.
You were always in that space.
-Hi, I'm Madonna and this is New York.
-Madonna was, you know, just like a club kid.
Wanted to be a singer and had a lot of ambition, you know?
-Madonna was a New York scenester.
She's dancing in the most alt clubs in New York,
singing, dancing, doing trap dates.
-♪ Don't put me off, 'cause I'm on fire ♪
♪ And I can't quench my desire
-We met, um, while I was deejaying at the Fun House
and she had just released "Everybody,"
which I had been playing for a while
and was a big record at the club,
and just came by to say hi
and then asked me if I'd be interested
in working on a remix for her next single.
[ "Physical Attraction" plays ]
♪♪
When she heard what I did with "Physical Attraction,"
she thought that it would be a good idea
to bring me in and work on the other songs on the album.
I was remixing the other songs on her record.
So she said, "Oh, I only have seven songs.
I need one more song."
I had a piano-vocal demo of "Holiday"
and I played it for her, and I said, you know,
"If I could put a groove underneath this,
this could be a big record."
I had never produced a record from scratch
but I had, I don't know, maybe 20 number-one dance records,
so I knew all the things to fix a record
[laughs] after someone recorded it,
but I had actually never recorded all the basic tracks.
I used a LinnDrum machine
and a bunch of digital synthesizers.
I basically didn't sleep for 5 days, working on it.
[ "Holiday" plays ]
♪♪
I mean, Madonna loved it.
I -- I was so thrilled
that I actually got to produce a record.
I was playing it at the Fun House.
-♪ Holiday
♪ Celebrate
-The record company would come by
and I think they were caught completely by surprise.
I don't believe they truly understood
what was happening on the streets of New York.
I mean, but most record companies at that point didn't.
You know, they kept saying dance was dead.
"They went from disco to dance.
House music's a fad, you know.
None of this stuff's gonna last."
-♪ One day out of life
♪ It would be
♪ It would be so nice
♪ Everybody spread the word
-There were, you know, thousands of clubs in New York
with thousands of people in them,
dancing, every Friday and Saturday night.
-The dancefloor in those rooms
are the best teachers in the world,
to sit and watch and see what makes people move.
There are certain beats that make them move.
And it's really apparent when you play some stuff
and you watch it and you just see, "Oh, that works.
Oh, that sucks," you know? And you can see it.
-When they started adding percussion instruments
to the disco, I wanted to dance, as well.
And I thought it was kind of cool to add those elements
of the Latin percussion in pop and disco music.
-♪ She wears a long fur coat of mink ♪
♪ Even in the summertime
♪ Everybody knows from the coy little wink ♪
♪ The girl's got a lot on her mind ♪
"Glamorous Life" was a song that didn't have any lyrics
and it was more of a -- of an instrumental.
My intent was to do something very percussive and dance.
I played congas and timbales, bongos,
hand-percussion, maracas.
♪ The glamorous life
♪ She don't need a man's touch
"Glamorous Life," the scene was
a big Linn machine -- LinnDrum machine.
I embraced the drum machine because it was something new.
I love technology.
I loved that something in this machine
was doing something different.
♪ She wants to lead the glamorous life ♪
♪ Without love, it ain't much
[ Instrumental music plays ]
[ Drum machine playing ]
-The early drum machines were not programmable.
In other words, they had set rhythms.
You could play a rumba beat, or you could play a cha-cha-cha.
So the intervention of something like the LinnDrum machines
or the DMX or the 808 is that these were programmable.
You could say, "Well, okay, I want a kick drum here.
I want the snare here.
I want the weird, doinky cowbell here instead."
-Drum machine don't have no soul.
It just a machine. It don't lose time.
It don't pick up the tempo. It don't drop the tempo.
It just... [ Slapping legs rhythmically ]
-I'm a drummer. My first instrument.
But I grew up playing drums my whole life.
So I play drum machines like -- like the drums.
-We're payin' attention that it can't be perfect,
you know, because it shouldn't be.
Like, it shouldn't be right on time.
There's something just unhuman about it.
-Music is peppered with purists,
populated with purists, isn't it?
Every genre has its own particular notion
about how it has to be this and that's not authentic
and this is the real deal.
And so drum machines are fantastic.
-The technology made it so much easier for creative people
to sit wherever they want to and create.
And it gave people the freedom to actually make more records.
And it created more genres.
It made specific genres of dance.
-The rise of house and techno, and hip-hop, too,
these are all happening, you know,
contemporaneous with one another in the 1980s.
[ The Future Sound of London's "Papua New Guinea" plays ]
-You've got the rise of rave music.
It's creating these different sort of experiences
for young people on the dancefloor.
♪♪
It was certainly a much harder and more aggressive sound
than some of the earlier sounds we've heard
in gospel-influenced or blues-influenced house music.
-I want to thank all the stormtroopers in the house.
-Most raves were not happening in real clubs.
They were not happening in concert halls.
They were happening in warehouses and VFW halls.
So they would find these off-venues and these lofts.
A lot of them were illegal.
That was a big part of the aura of it, as well.
The See the Light tour featured Moby as the headliner.
See the Light was this bridge into the mainstream.
A lot of the kids who were going to the parties,
writing about them on the mailing lists,
were really against that
and for a lot of them, Moby was a sellout.
-Hey!
My approach to making music and loving music
has never been a loyalty to a genre.
It's a loyalty to how the music affects me emotionally.
I'm way more interested in how I respond to a piece of music
than who made it or how it was made.
[ "Go" plays ]
♪ Go!
[ Instrumental music plays ]
-"Go" was significant
because it was the first American dance record
to cross over to the rave scene in England.
That song went top 10 in England.
That was the dance song
that the people who hated dance music liked.
What Moby brought to it was a really defined melodic sense.
Early house music and early techno music
were aimed at the dancefloor, specifically.
They weren't necessarily made for listening.
And Moby had been a songwriter.
He'd been playing in rock bands.
He was coming to it from a composer
and a songwriter's perspective,
as opposed to a deejay's perspective.
-As a record maker, it's funny.
I really feel like I should do a better job
of pretending that I have broad
and diverse intentions behind making music.
All I want to do is make music that I love.
And I truly don't care how it's made.
Drums from the late 20th century,
live bass, programmed bass, analog synths, digital synths,
all these different compositional elements,
it simply makes people curious.
And if you have art that makes people curious,
they're gonna lean towards it.
[ "Continuous Mix" plays ]
-"EDM" stands for "electronic dance music,"
every music that has been made electronically or with keyboards
and on computers, which you can dance to.
The deejay producer is like a conductor.
He puts everything together and he makes sure
that every piece of the puzzle in the song does his thing.
When I build a track, it's my vision
of what I want to hear,
what I want to see on the dancefloor,
and how it would hit people, so extra beats,
extra bassline, an extra piano line.
-It is very hard for a techno producer to do exactly that,
that it doesn't sound like a computer made it.
Then when you have it, like, alter it.
Give it, like, dirt and stuff so that it sounds --
it gets a human touch, a human feel,
even though you need to have, like
[Smacks lips] fall-to-the-floor bass drums.
So it has to be in the pattern
without sounding just like pattern music.
-The big thing back then was that you could compare me
to, like, what the Grateful Dead does in America back then.
It was just the music that was so different
because you could never hear it on the radio
and you could not even buy it in the stores.
You have to be there to experience it.
-♪ Oh...yeah
[ "Maximal Crazy" plays ]
[ Crowd cheers ]
-Instrumental songs are so full of life
because they are the actual emotions,
because vocals never can be true emotions
because they are in words.
Only sounds can transport it.
That's why it's such a global movement,
because it goes beyond all borders of language.
-I think the EDM thing
is sort of, like, it's interesting.
I know why kids like it. It's, like, it's an event.
It's a communal kind of music.
-When you see thousands and thousands of people
dancing and losing their mind to a song,
I mean, obviously, it may not be for me.
But they like it.
So there's nothing wrong with that.
-I mean, we can't speak about the dance
unless you speak about the trance.
It really lends itself to people escaping.
And those qualities are found in today's dance music.
-EDM is like Woodstock. EDM is like Studio 54.
EDM is like a rock concert. EDM is an experience.
It's the same thing as dance. Itis dance.
You know, it's just different initials.
-At the same time, I think people also have a hunger
and a desire to hear acoustic sounds, to honor and respect
musicians who can play their instruments and so on.
So the rise of singers like Bruno Mars
reminds us that it's still very important.
-♪ Whoo, whoo, whoo
-♪ Oh, yeah, yeah
♪ Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
-Bruno, pound for pound,
is absolutely the best entertainer, musician,
kind of all-around pop star that's out there.
-♪ Never had much faith in love or miracles ♪
-When Bruno first asked me if I wanted to come and work
on his second album, he had a few demos around
and "Locked Out of Heaven" was this song that he knew
there was something super special about the chorus.
Looking back on it now, the rhythm section
sort of wanted to be, you know, Chic,
like, you know, Nile Rodgers.
It was definitely the beat that drew me in first.
The sound of the drums is always
the most important kind of building block.
-♪ Show-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-s
♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah
♪ 'Cause you make me feel like
♪ I've been locked out of heaven ♪
-It seems as though the music of the future
and of the present has to do with rhythmic accuracy.
And there's a monolithic groove.
Mono, mono, mono, mono.
One, one, one, one.
-You know why dance music and disco music works so well?
Because the human heartbeat beats around 120 BPM.
So that's the music of the soul.
-I've played with
an extraordinary amount of people in my life
and the ones I always love the best are the groovers.
I describe it as a flock of birds.
You've ever watched a flock of birds fly
and they all know when to turn,
and they do that thing together?
And there can be hundreds of them,
but they all do that together.
It's almost telepathic. It's -- it's -- it's magical.
-♪ To see the light
-You got to have a beat. You got to have a beat.
I mean, if you get sick and they call in the paramedics
and you're laying on the floor, the first thing
they're gonna know, do you have a beat.
You got to have a beat.
-♪ And it show-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-s ♪
-If you're in the creational mode,
you look for the new.
That's what a rhythmist is.
You're constantly scanning for new rhythms
because the world is changing.
It makes you whole, gives you happiness.
Good rhythm, good life.
-♪ Oh oh
♪ Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
-♪ Unh!
♪♪
-"Soundbreaking" is available on DVD.
The companion book is also available.
To order, visit shopPBS.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
♪♪