Dance Dance Evolution
Disco Never Died; It Just Went Back Underground. Now, a New Generation of Music Lovers Embraces the Beat.

By Dan Zak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 16, 2007

When "Saturday Night Fever" thrust its hips into America 30 years ago today, disco had already detonated in Washington. Dance palaces lined the streets of Georgetown, downtown and the strip off South Capitol Street. Within a year the sequin-spangled fallout had blanketed the suburbs.

In many ways disco was a uniter. It was continuous dancing to continuous music, a concept that bloomed during the '70s, when people needed a driving, positive sound to blot out the malaise and discord in the world. It also meant different things to different people. One person's disco track could be another's funk. Or boogie. Or soul. Or house, which is what disco evolved into in the '80s.

"It had its R&B side, it had its jazz side, it had even a classical side," says Frederick resident Bernard Lopez, proprietor of DiscoMusic.com. "It was a white thing, it was a black thing, it was a Hispanic thing. It was a wonderful melting pot of different types of music. Where else could you hear violins and congas in one song?"

At the end of '77, John Travolta and the Bee Gees touched off the mainstreaming, commercialization and, ultimately, the bastardization of disco. It got too big too fast. Eventually everyone was in on it, which meant no one was in on it. All of a sudden people were burning disco records, and the sensation became a punch line that remains punchy to this day.

Disco mania bit the dust in the early '80s, but disco itself (and its dance culture)

went back underground, where it started and where it lives on. Even here. Today. Disco is alive, in many ways and forms, from DJ booths in Dupont Circle and Northeast Washington to a

retro cover band in Adams Morgan to a hustle school in Fairfax County. To explore these finds, turn to Page 4.

ON THE DANCE FLOOR: Never Can Say Goodbye

Every Monday night, a discotheque erupts in a second-floor dance studio just outside the Capital Beltway in Fairfax. At 9 p.m., the fluorescent lights blink out and colored spotlights pop on. Disco balls rotate and "Fly Robin Fly" comes on.

And people dance the hustle. ( Do it.)

The first lady of hustle, Joyce Szili, 55, teaches it for beginners at 7:30 and intermediate dancers at 8:15. ( Do it.)

Then the experts -- the people who danced it on the D.C. club scene during discomania -- glide onto the floor. ( Do do do doo-doo doo-doo do do, do do do doo-doo doo-doo do do.)

People drive from Richmond and Baltimore to do this.

Szili got her first whiff of the hustle in 1974 at Zanzibar, a club above a carwash on L Street NW. Out-of-towners brought the partner dance down from New York, where it was refined in the Hispanic community as a reaction to the mambo. The 1975 song "The Hustle," by the District's own Van McCoy, jump-started the line-dance version. Washingtonians dressed up and club-hopped, searching for that precise riff, that perfect vibe, the ideal moment to show off. There were hustle contests nearly every night.

Fairfax resident David Nyce won plenty of them. Now 53, he's a regular at Szili's Monday Night Hustle, where the vibe is both a virtual wormhole into the past and an affirmation of disco's durability and accessibility.

"There's always been an underground," Nyce says. "It's hard to let go of something you enjoy." As for mainstream perceptions, he makes one thing clear: "To me, disco is not 'Y.M.C.A.' I hate that with a passion. I like the idea of disco, the dance version."

The dance aspect draws in a generation that didn't even live it. Arlington residents Chuck Daniel, 29, and Katsumi Saito, 30, dropped into the beginner hustle class last month on a whim, looking to branch out from their regular salsa lessons.

"I enjoy dancing in clubs, and I'm trying to get away from freestyle and incorporate actual steps," Daniel says. "I like that we're starting with turns. In our salsa class, it took us two weeks to actually start moving."

Until nearly midnight, the place moves. The vinyl spins. So do the dancers. Everyone is partnered up, leading and following themselves into a whirl. They never stop smiling.

Monday Night Hustle. Mondays. Basic hustle at 7:30 p.m., intermediate at 8:15, open dance 9-11:30. Elan DanceSport Center, 8442 Lee Hwy., Fairfax. Lessons and dance $15, dance only $8 (includes refreshments). 301-946-2080, http://www.justhustle.com.

Saturday Night Fever (also organized by Joyce Szili). First Saturday of the month. Dance instruction 8-9 p.m., open dance 9-midnight. Rendezvous, 11910 Parklawn Dr., Rockville. Lesson and dance $15, dance only $12 (includes refreshments). 301-468-2582, http://www.dance 911.com.

IN THE BOOTH: For Love of the Music

Chris Burns, 24, goes record digging once a week at yard sales, libraries and flea markets. Under the name Disco City, he spins vinyl once a month at the Rock and Roll Hotel on H Street NE. To the sounds of such disco-era artists as David Joseph and Marta Acuna, 20-somethings form dance circles in a narrow space not intended for such activity. Last weekend one guy actually struck a Travolta pose, a mainstream exclamation point to an underground sound -- the sound Burns prefers.

"It's a little bit rougher, a little more left field; I would say it's a lot more soulful," he says. "Don't get me wrong: Donna Summer is a great, great vocalist. That's great music, but KC and the Sunshine Band is poppy and flowery. It doesn't touch you somewhere."

Burns bought his first turntable while growing up in Silver Spring, joined a DJ club at Colgate University in New York state, discovered classic disco and Chicago house, and started going to Club Shelter in Greenwich Village, where he tasted the kind of dance-floor nirvana created by quality music, a superb DJ and a crowd both willing and able to lose itself in the beat.

"Oh, man, it's coming back now," Burns says about disco. "It's a new generation of DJs just discovering great music. It's the thrill of the hunt in finding these records. And when you find that gem and the hair stands up on the back of your neck, there's nothing like it."

Burns, who lives near Meridian Hill Park in Northwest, found one such gem recently in Philadelphia: Joseph's "You Can't Hide (Your Love From Me)," remixed in 1983 by Larry Levan, the marquee DJ at the Paradise Garage in New York from '77 to '87. Haven't heard of Joseph or Levan? That's why it's underground.

" This music -- I feel it inside of me, if that makes sense," Burns says. "I react to it so strongly. . . . I'm trying to find these great records and put them in a context that is meaningful to myself. It's almost like a classical violinist studying Mozart."

If Burns is the scholar, then Daryll Harris is the professor. He has gone by the name DJ Mandrill since his days spinning at the Clubhouse, a renovated warehouse on Upshur Street NW open from '75 to '90. The Clubhouse was liquorless, open only to members (there were 4,000 during discomania) yet home to people of all races, sexual orientations and backgrounds. It opened at 12:30 a.m. and closed eight hours later.

"There were clubs in Washington then like there are bars in Washington now," remembers Harris, 49, who lives in Hyattsville. "There were clubs on every corner. In that era, disco was what you did." Case in point: Harris spun a lunchtime disco set every day from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at L.A. Cafe (now Club Five) for a packed dance floor.

In this era, Harris is still in a DJ booth. Every week, he pulls a batch of 300 records from his stock of 65,000 and hosts Sunday Soir¿e at the Fab Lounge in Dupont Circle. He drops the vocals of Sylvester into the beat of the Weather Girls, bleeds early Sting into Miquifaye vs. Kung Fu and samples the Trammps and Raze. This decades-spanning set brings him to an important point:

"The term 'disco' is going to be relative to who you're talking to," he says. "It's going to be a cultural thing, a racial thing, even a gender or sexual orientation thing. For straight people, disco was one thing; for gay people, it was another."

Disco City with Chris Burns. First Friday of the month (next regular gig is Jan. 4), 9:30 p.m.-2:30 a.m. Rock and Roll Hotel, 1353 H St. NE. Free. 202-388-7625, http://www.rockandrollhoteldc.com, http://www.myspace.com/discocitysensation.

Sunday Soir¿e with DJ Mandrill. Sundays at 6 p.m. Fab Lounge, 2022 Florida Ave. NW (second floor). $5 cover (includes rail drink ticket). 202-797-1122, http://www.thefablounge.com, http://www.djmandrill.com.

ON THE STAGE: In Boogie Shoes and More

Washington's only live disco band rehearses in what amounts to a garage in an alley.

Walk down Naylor Court between Ninth and 10th streets NW on any given Saturday afternoon, and you might hear the muffled but instantly recognizable bass line of "Disco Inferno" coming from behind the garage door.

Inside, wedged between speakers and amps, are the four members of Superflydisco. For two hours every week, they rehearse mainstream hits by Sister Sledge, Anita Ward and Donna Summer. For gigs, they dress the part: giant Afros, tight pants, shiny shirts. They are walking, jiving, flesh-and-blood, manufactured nostalgia.

The band mates have their own musical endeavors outside of Superfly (bassist Aaron "Funky Chuck" Evans, 29, is a classical violinist; drummer John Fawkes, 38, plays with a rock band; vocalist Deb¿rah Bond, 31, is working on her second progressive soul album), but they get a kitschy kick from performing in costume for people who love the music.

"The everyday folks who want to come out and party, they want to hear things they're familiar with," says Bond, who lives in Wheaton, idolizes Chaka Khan and hosts a soul show on XM Satellite Radio. "But I won't be surprised if in the next year we get thrown into something where we take it to another level. We're doing the favorites and tipping the iceberg, but I think we can really break it down and play some unexpected classics, some real deep stuff."

Superflydisco celebrates its first anniversary this month and plays monthly at Chief Ike's Mambo Room in Adams Morgan. For whatever reason (the nostalgia, the chic allure of retro, the upbeat joy), the music is a hit with the crowd.

"As soon as you lay down KC and the Sunshine Band or the Bee Gees or Rick James, anyone in the room is going to move to it," says guitarist Tim Blanchard, 37, who started the band and grew up in the District. "It's fun stuff to play. It's a true rhythm-section genre. It's not dead in any sense."

Superflydisco. Fourth Friday of the month at 10 p.m. (Regular gigs resume in January.) An anniversary party for "Saturday Night Fever" is set for this Friday at 10 p.m. Chief Ike's Mambo Room, 1725 Columbia Rd. NW. $5 cover. 202-327-1036, http://www.chiefikes.com, http://www.superflydisco.com.