In the mid-1970s, I walked into a club in San Francisco — a small room whose name I’ve long since lost. Four guys in leather jackets hit the stage and blasted through song after song, each one under three minutes, most of them sounding nearly identical to the last. No guitar solos. No moment built for you to catch your breath. Just a crush of noise and raw excitement, one song bleeding into the next. I turned to my date and said, “I don’t get it.”
At the time, disco owned the radio — polished, orchestrated, engineered by a machine to keep bodies moving and minds occupied with nothing else. What I was watching was the opposite of every part of that. Raw. Sloppy, and clearly on purpose. Ugly, and not remotely embarrassed about it. My instinct was to write it off — three chords, two minutes, repeat, nothing a trained ear should take seriously.
