Overview: Disco began as a gay, black, and brown underground New York City party music scene, which alone was enough to ward off most rockers. The difference between rock and disco was as sociological as it was aesthetic.

At its best, disco was galvanizing and affirmative. Its hypnotic power to uplift a broad spectrum of the populace made it the ubiquitous music of the late ’70s. Disco was a primal and gaudy fanfare for the apocalypse, a rage for exhibitionism, free of moralizing. Disco was an exclamatory musical passageway into the future.

1978 was the apex of the record industry. Rock music, commercially and artistically, had never been more successful. At the same time, disco was responsible for roughly 40% of the records on Billboard’s Hot 100, thanks to the largest-selling soundtrack of all time in Saturday Night Fever. The craze for this music by The Bee Gees revived The Hustle and dance studios across America.

For all its apparent excesses and ritual zealotry, disco was a conservative realm, with obsolete rules like formal dress code and dance floor etiquette. When most ’70s artists went disco, it was the relatively few daring rockers who had the most impact, bringing their intensity and personality to a faceless phenomenon.

Rock stars who went disco crossed a musical rubicon and forever smashed cultural conformity. The ongoing dance-rock phenomenon demonstrates the impact of this unique place and time.

The disco crossover forever changed rock.

Verdict: In what is a mighty fine job from author Steven Blush in describing the advent of the disco lifestyle and the subsequent backlash from the rock world as the movement peaked in 1979, the just-released tome When Rock Met Disco is, and quite easily, one of the most fascinating reads I have had the pleasure to undertake in the past few years.

Laying the foundations of the culture before focusing on his topic of the rock crossovers, the book begins with a brief overview of rock music in the ’70s, showing that most bands were hungover either from success or excess, with song making or even performing high on their lists of, well, highs!

Into this grew a music that brought people to the dance floor, with beats and grooves that made even the squarest person want to dance, and for those who could dance, this lead to more of a chance of meeting others of the same, or opposite sex who also wanted to move and groove.

The book states that it is an important read as it caters informationally to those who were not there at the time, and thus it feels that they need to know the whys, the hows and the wheres to get the full picture. I’m not totally sure that is true, as we’ve all seen Saturday Night Fever and those of us that are old enough do still fondly recall the time period, and those of us not old enough, well, they just don’t seem to care, but that said, we get one entire chapter devoted to talking about several of the most famous New York City discos and how each had their own unique vibes and flavors.

As most all of us now, within a very short period of time, disco was big business, with actual Discos opening and attracting crowds who would pay to get into a club to dance, buy drinks, and peacock to all and sunder on the dance floors.

Soon, the much-beloved (especially by DJ’s) 12 inch singles became big money, which made more money for the music companies, but with that landslide of money, the music industry slowly began to get corrupted. Thus, into this breaking apart tsunami of a closing decade and an awakening new one, came rock musicians, looking to take their own version of the new music scene onto the dance floors and, of course, hopefully into the Hot 100 Charts. In fact, and in a personal sidestep, my neighbor still listens to the disco music of that era, and still adopts some of the fashions that were swirling and twirling back then! Gloria Vanderbilt Jeans, Candie’s shoes, Danskin top and Faberge perfume. Yup, still today she is a most glorious sight to behold.

But I digress, for this book from Blush is so descriptively written that it brought me right back to the smells and feel of the fabric, the way my hips used to move on the differently colored, light up dance floor tiles, and thus I even personally recall the rise of disco, together with the backlash, as well as rock groups getting on the disco-vibed train to produce their own cross-bred hits: KISS, Grateful Dead, Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, to name a few.

A solid, informative and thoroughly entertaining read from start to finish, When Rock Met Disco does a great job of giving everyone an honest view of an era that everyone says they hated musically, and yet was one of the most successful of its time.

Complete with a rundown of which shows rock songs that used the disco influence, complete with producers and studio musicians and other little tidbits of information, Blush also never over examines any part of the substance that he discusses, moreover allows you, the reader to fill in the blanks.

Indeed, within this latter half of the book, which primarily focuses on the rockers who ventured into the disco waters and the extreme backlash that the dance genre received come 1979, Blush’s writing style is never less than engaging and creative.

Inclusive of quotes from musicians of the era and thereafter, simply put, When Rock Met Disco is a mighty fine, albeit very different look at music in the ’70s and ’80s and the legacy that came from disco meeting rock music. [FYI: Personally, I had no idea that Ethel Merman made a disco album or that there was an album called Sesame Street Fever!]

STEVEN BLUSH has written five books about rock music: American Hardcore (2001),.45 Dangerous Minds (2005), American Hair Metal (2006), Lost Rockers (2015), and New York Rock (2016) — and one about Billie Jean King’s rebel tennis league, Bustin’ Balls (2020).

His journalism has appeared in over fifty publications, like Spin, Details, Interview, Village Voice, and The Times of London. Blush was a contributing editor to Paper Magazine. He got his start in the early ’80s promoting punk rock shows in Washington, DC, and then moved to NYC in 1986, where he published fifty-two issues of Seconds Magazine through 2000.

He wrote and produced the theatrically released Sundance Film Festival-premiered doc film American Hardcore. His follow-up film with director Paul Rachman, Lost Rockers, about great forgotten rock musicians, came out in 2017.

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