How Donna Summer’s Bad Girls Kept Disco Alive in the New Wave Era
Looking back on 45 years of a dance-floor classic
Disco was often thought of as a singles medium — the 45s in stores, the 12″ versions in clubs. That’s not to say it couldn’t be perfect for albums.
Donna Summer, with her team of collaborators, made a strong case for the disco album with the release of Bad Girls 45 years ago today.
Summer had been committed to the form, having released concept albums like 1976’s Four Seasons of Love (self-explanatory) and 1977’s I Remember Yesterday (sides based on different decades) and Once Upon a Time (using the Cinderella story).
While Summer had no desire at that point to completely leave the disco, she wanted to expand her boundaries.
She was hardly absent from the Top 40, even if her more recent studio albums hadn’t been crossover singles factories. The stunningly forward-thinking electronic disco of “I Feel Love,” from I Remember Yesterday, was a 1977 hit. The 12″ version arguably remains the best thing Summer put to wax, sounding fresh almost 50 years later.
“Last Dance,” another career pinnacle, was the title song to a cheesy disco cash-in movie. It became a transcendent smash the following year.
VIDEO: Donna Summer “Last Dance”
Also in 1978, Summer had her first No. 1 hit in an edited-down cover of “MacArthur Park,” a triumph of Moroder’s producing, arranging and instincts (feeling Summer’s upper register would be a great fit for it).
Summer had grown up in Boston, then came to New York to try to make it in a rock band, Crow, but that fizzled. It was the theater that opened the door for her eventual big break.
She won a part in the musical Hair, later agreeing to perform in the German production. Settling in Munich, her own career hadn’t taken off on record, but she was getting steady theater and session work.
Somewhere along the line, producer Paul Bellotte became aware of her, which led to her teaming up with him and his musical partner, fellow producer Giorgio Moroder.
Before long, her demos with them drew interest. She signed with Casablanca and by the end of 1975, “Love To Love You Baby,” written by Moroder and produced by Belotte, was sprinting up the charts. It was her first hit, reaching No. 2 on the pop charts and, even more memorably, a smash in the clubs with a nearly 17-minute version recorded at Casablanca head Neil Bogart’s suggestion. It’s believed to have ushered in the 12″ single for clubs.
Whatever reservations Summer initially had about the song, she clearly had no reservations about Moroder or Bellotte, who she kept working with.
By the time of the Bad Girls sessions, she and her producers wanted to broaden her sound, incorporating more elements of rock, pop and soul into the mix.
The sessions were not a long, drawn-out affair, going from December, 1978 through March, with Summer, Moroder and Bellotte working with a team of studio musicians which included the likes of Keith Forsey and Harold Faltermeyer. Moroder later recalled how smoothly the recording went.
“We didn’t even do demos,” he said in the booklet for the 2003 deluxe reissue of the album. “At that time, whenever we had a melody, I would just give the musicians the tempo and Keith would know what to do. I remember vividly mixing in one room at Rusk, while Keith, Harold and Pete (Bellotte) were in another studio with a guitar and a keyboard, and they composed ‘Hot Stuff.’ As soon as I was done with the mix of one song, we went right in and recorded. Usually we composed and recorded in the same day.”
AUDIO: Donna Summer “Hot Stuff” (12-inch version)
This was a period where some rock acts experimented with disco. The Stones incorporated its rhythms into the hit “Miss You.” Rod Stewart’s tongue-in-cheek “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” was a chart-topper while Bad Girls was being recorded.
Summer came at it from the other direction. “Hot Stuff,” written by Bellotte, Forsey and Faltermeyer, gave her a chance to explore that direction while keeping a foot under the mirror ball.
The earworm riff comes from keyboards. The beat is insistent. Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, then a Doobie Brother and later a military defense consultant, delivers an appropriately fiery solo. The lyrics are straightforwardly lust-filled.
“Love to Love You Baby,” especially in the 12″ version, leaned into the coital, full of alleged orgasms during the recording. The reality was that Moroder had Summer lie down on her back to get the breathy vocals and she was far more amused than aroused.
“Oh my gosh, that was very strange. Being a sex symbol was a joke to me: ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. How am I going to do that?” And Giorgio was like, “You’re an actress. Just act,'” Summer told The Telegraph decades later.
Summer came from a strict, religious upbringing and could be quiet offstage, but knew she had the more outgoing part of herself. With that attitude and her voice, she could absolutely sell the sexier material.
On “Hot Stuff,” she was unabashedly in autonomous control, singing lines like, “Lookin’ for a lover who needs another/Don’t want another night on my own/Wanna share my love with a warm-blooded lover/Wanna bring a wild man back home.”
It was a role for Summer, who had found love in real life. Bruce Sudano had been a founding member of one-hit wonders Alive and Kicking (“Tighter, Tighter”). By 1977, he was in Brooklyn Dreams, whose music was distributed by Casablanca. He met Summer in the label offices. Soon she was writing with Sudano and his bandmates, before the two started dating. They’d be married for over 30 years until her death.
The first successful music of their collaboration was “Heaven Knows,” a studio track included on her 1978 album Live And More. With Summer and Brooklyn Dreams’ Joe “Bean” Esposito trading soulful lead vocals, the song became a Top 5 hit.
Another song they’d come up with was “Bad Girls,” which she’d recorded with the group as a demo.
The song had real-life inspiration. A friend who was a secretary at Casablanca was harassed and threatened with arrest on Sunset Boulevard because the cop thought she was a sex worker. Summer got to thinking about the women plying that trade on Sunset, building the song around that.
Bogart, according to Summer, bizarrely thought the song was too rock-oriented. He wanted to give it to Cher to record.
Summer’s told NPR in 2003 her response to Bogart: “I don’t think so. This is my song. And I keep Cher – I love Cher, but she can’t have my song right now.”
Summer set the song aside, resigned to her label not letting her release it. It might have stayed there, if not for Steve Smith, one of the engineers on the album. Smith was going through tapes, heard “Bad Girls” and kept listening to it. He told Summer the song was a hit and insisted she should record it, regardless of what Bogart thought.
Summer told him to play it for Moroder when he got there to see what he thought. The producer liked the demo, immediately starting work on it. Summer did some additional vocals, but felt the song needed something else. Then it hit her– the honking horns johns used to get the attention of those sex workers on the street. Thus, that “toot toot, hey, beep beep” hook was born.
The final product wasn’t judgmental as one might have expected. These might be “bad girls” and “sad girls,” but they’re working hard for the money. The horns and whistles give it a festive feel.
A disco pop classic, it quickly moved up the charts. When “Hot Stuff” dropped one spot after three weeks at the top, “Bad Girls” was right behind it. Two weeks later, it began a five week stay at No. 1.
VIDEO: Donna Summer performs “Bad Girls” at the VH-1 Presents Live and More Encore
The collaborative process that turned “Bad Girls” from solid demo to hit was emblematic of how the album came together.
“While I was recording Donna, say Pete would be recording a basic track for another song,” Moroder said in the deluxe booklet. “But we had our sounds. We were on a roll. Donna is a great artist, very easy to work with. She could complete two or three songs a day, easily, without straining her voice or getting tired.”
The next single was a particular point of pride for Summer. “Dim All The Lights” was written solely by her. Originally intended for Rod Stewart (thanks to the laryngitis she was battling while recording the demo), she decided to record it herself. It was a wise move.
The song starts midtempo with Summer singing the first verse with pop backing, then she sings “Let it fill you up,” staying on the note on “up” for several seconds as the disco goodness, with that stellar Moroder production kicks in. What stands out all these years later is the joy in her performance.
Things were set up for the album to have its third No. 1 single, but Bogart had other ideas. Summer had recorded “No More Tears (Enough is Enough),” co-written by “Last Dance” writer Paul Jabara, as a duet with Barbra Streisand. The single would appear on Streisand’s Wet album (due for a release that fall) and Summer’s upcoming greatest hits compilation.
Bogart agreed to hold off on releasing the single for a month, then went back on that. The duet, a reasonable approximation of the Bad Girls album’s sound while launching thousands of drag interpretations, hit No. 1. It blocked the Summer-penned song from doing so. The move widened the gulf in the relationship between the two, which already was strained by the stress-induced health issues Summer had and her dissatisfaction with the way the label pushed her image.
The album wasn’t divided by theme, but by song type. The first disc was where disco, rock, soul and pop came to party, with more of the rock elements, generally on Side 1. The first side of the second disc was a ballad showcase, before the album closed with a return to the futuristic sounds explored on “I Feel Love.”
There are rock guitars on “Love Will Always Find You,” but not prominent in the mix, lest they disturb the horn-punctuated groove too much.
“Walk Away,” which closes out the side, fares better with its soulful, late night feel, a single that deserved a better commercial fate.
The rest of the songs on Side 2 can’t help but pale in comparison, but “Journey to The Center of Your Heart” delivers some sassy fun (and sax work that instantly evokes the period). “One Night in a Lifetime” has a nice little bass groove.
There’s honest-to-goodness pedal steel on the lovely “On My Honor,” a pledge of devotion that hinted at a countryish avenue that would have been intriguing.
“There Will Always Be a You” plays like the love theme from a hit movie soundtrack. Like all of Side 3, the de-discofied arrangements let Summer’s voice take the full spotlight.
Best of the bunch is “All Through The Night,” co-written by Summer and “No More Tears” co-writer Bruce Roberts. It’s an effective showcase for Summer as a ballad singer with great pipes, away from the stage moans, with the production kept restrained.
Side 4 is where Moroder and Bellotte got to play, bringing the synths out in earnest. “Our Love” has various sounds that would get blown up by new waves and house producers. But Summer’s voice holds its own.
“Lucky” burbles along musically like the cousin of “I Feel Love.” But whereas that song was ecstatic, here Summer turns it on its head, creating a sad song of feeling unrequited love. It’s an effective move.
The album closes strongly with “Sunset People,” where Summer returns to the boulevard to sing about the hustlers, the girls too young to know what they don’t know, the aspiring mingling on the street away from the penthouses they wish they could be in. Empathetic and catchy, it was in line to be a single, but that was scrapped for reasons I’ll mention soon.
The deluxe edition provided bang for the buck. There was the “Bad Girls” demo that showed their instincts about it being a hit in the making were right. The rest of the bonus tracks were 12″ singles, starting with “I Feel Love” and “Last Dance.”
The full “MacArthur Park Suite,” containing both the Harris cover and “Heaven Knows” from Live And More, is present and accounted for.
The edition wraps up with the longer versions of “No More Tears (Enough is Enough)” and “On the Radio.” The latter, written by Summer and Moroder, was the other new song on the compilation. A winning continuation of what worked on Bad Girls, it was her eighth straight Top 5 hit.
The working relationship between Summer and Bogart fell apart during the Bad Girls album cycle. Summer sued to get out of her contract. Casablanca countersued and ended plans to release the “Sunset People” single in the U.S. In the end, Summer didn’t get the additional money she sought, but still walked away with her lucrative publishing rights and the right to sign with another label.
Whatever happened that year, Summer still had enough positive feelings for Bogart that she sang at his funeral after he died of cancer two years later.
The Summer-Moroder-Bellotte team lasted for one more album, 1980’s The Wanderer, which moved away from disco by injecting hints of new wave as well as an embrace of gospel (as Summer was becoming a born-again Christian) into the mix.
Work on the follow-up, I’m a Rainbow, was slower going, but showed promise. David Geffen, perhaps expecting more finished songs at that point in the sessions, angrily shelved the album. Just two years after Bad Girls’ success, he insisted that Summer part ways with her producers.
Moroder began to work more on film scores (he’d won an Oscar while Bad Girls was in progress for his work on Midnight Express) before mostly taking a break from music, eventually returning in earnest by working with Daft Punk on Random Access Memories. Bellotte moved back to England and pretty much left the music business.
Geffen pushed for Quincy Jones to produce the next album instead. While the self-titled affair did have some successful singles, it didn’t sell like Geffen hoped. Additionally, Summer didn’t enjoy the experience, further souring her relationship with Geffen, a label she’d leave by decade’s end.
In the end, she’d traded one way of butting heads with a label owner for another.
Her best post-Moroder/Bellotte during the period, it turned out, would be She Works Hard For The Money, which was recorded for Casablanca’s owner, Mercury, as part of the settlement with her departure.
Summer’s commercial fortunes waned as the ’80s went on, hurt by changing tastes and albums that didn’t reach the overall quality of her best work. She eventually slowed her pace, spending more time at home with family and painting. Her last album, Crayons, her first since 1991, was released four years before her death in 2012 at 63 from cancer.
Bad Girls remains Summer’s biggest seller, deservedly so. Even with her producers and co-writers, it was still her name on the front cover. It’s clear she wanted to go outside the lines a bit while still playing to her strengths, with plenty of space to play with ideas.
At the end of the day, it’s a testament to what can happen when a talented, charismatic singer finds the right collaborators and they get on a serious roll.
All these years later, Bad Girls tops the discussion of best disco albums ever. Beyond that, it’s a stellar pop album, one whose DNA can still be heard in others to this day.
- Shannon Vetter’s Whiskey Lullaby - May 14, 2024
- How Weezer Forecasted Stardom With Debut LP - May 11, 2024
- The ALBUM Section: April 2024 - April 30, 2024
You May Also Like
-
May 6, 2019 -
July 21, 2021 -
February 15, 2022
