Before there was Saturday Night Fever there was underground
disco. DJs across America went out and found the music to
play; dancers went out and found the clubs. At this point, in
the early seventies, the disco was the venue and not a genre of
music.
" By the time Nik Cohn's short story Tribal Rites of the New
Saturday Night was published by New York magazine in June
1976, disco was the biggest genre of music on the charts and
was about to get bigger still, becoming an all-enveloping
cultural phenomenon. Cohn sold the film rights to Robert
Stigwood, and his classic club yarn became Saturday Night
Fever.
" "Tribal Rites Of The New Saturday Night" is the soundtrack to
Cohn's story, where disco began; a 1975 score for the
underground clubs of Brooklyn and Queens that played R&B,
soul and Latin beats to people who lived for the weekend.
" Bob Stanley has put this collection together, sourcing what
was actually played in Brooklyn discos in 1974 and 1975. Only
a few specific records were mentioned in Cohn's feature, but
two of them - Ben E King's 'Supernatural Thing Part 1' and
Harold Melvin's 'Wake Up Everybody' - were cosmically great
and both are included here, alongside underground favourites
like Moment Of Truth's Four Tops-like 'Helplessly' and Gloria
Scott's Barry White-produced modern soul classic 'Just As
Long As We're Together'. Ivano Fossati's incredible 'Night Of
The Wolf' has fans in northern soul, disco and prog circles.
" Without Cohn's original story, it's quite possible that disco
would have remained an underground phenomenon - "Tribal
Rites Of The New Saturday Night" paints a scene in full flower.
Saturday Night Fever would eventually, if unintentionally,
wreck the underground nature of this scene, and clubs like
Studio 54 would destroy the democracy of the party, but for
two or three years the scene was largely undocumented and
magical. This album is the sound of disco before it was
captured.
