Written by Larry Harris, with Curt Gooch and Jeff Suha. $24.99; Backbeat Books; 299 pages
"Perhaps no other popular art form is more closely identified with gay culture than disco and dance music," notes Professor Joe A. Thompson in his "disco" entry at www.gltbq.com, an academically oriented "encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, transgender, & queer culture."
Indeed. And expectations for entertaining and intriguing revelations were high for this tell-all memoir of the heyday of Casablanca Records—the label of Donna Summer and The Village People—a label virtually synonymous with disco.
There are revelations galore, but they skew toward endless detail about deal making, drugs and dames. In Party Every Day, author Larry Harris—a self-described "kid from Queens" and one of the founders of Casablanca—recounts the entrepreneurial rise and cocaine-addled descent of his cousin and mentor, Neil Bogart, and the entertainment empire he created.
Casablanca Records was initially bankrolled by Warner Brothers Records in 1973 and the new label's first signing was KISS, the heavy-metal band that would go on to international success. The first half of the book is replete with minutia regarding the development and promotion of KISS. Aficionados of rock and roll history and students majoring in Music Business will find this aspect of the "ultimate insider memoir" educational, but for the general reader it begins to wear.
Throughout the chronological narrative, there are abundant anecdotes of casual and frequent ( heterosexual ) sex and rampant drug use—from pot to Quaaludes to endless lines of cocaine—as well as tales of larceny, payola, back-room deals and tax dodges that certainly walk a fine line between amorality and illegality. All of this is told with a disturbing dispassion that fairly takes one's breath away and brings to mind both historian Hannah Arendt's conceptualization of "the banality of evil" and "Razzle-Dazzle," the brilliantly cynical song from John Kander and Fred Ebb's musical Chicago.
Perhaps the most valuable stories in this book detail the creation and marketing of the Casablanca artists, particularly the lesser disco groups. "To this day," Harris writes, "it still surprises me that most people don't really understand that the typical disco act was just a producer and a concept." For both their disco and rock acts, Casablanca spent seemingly endless sums of money on created events and promotions to package and brand their acts. While this practice certainly dates back to the bubblegum pop of Frankie Avalon and Fabian, and is today's standard operating procedure, Casablanca broke new manufacturing ground in the an entertainment culture where celebrity trumps talent.
For the LGBT reader, the memoir picks up a bit on page 174 with the chapter "The New Bubblegum," and the entrance on the scene of The Village People and the high ( or low ) era of Studio 54 and the club phenomenon. But alas, if the reader hopes for any kind of cultural analysis of how and why the gay aesthetic became at once acceptable and invisible to heteronormative audiences during the days of disco, they will come away disappointed. While Harris acknowledges "the gay mindset that pervaded the genre" and that major labels "had a hard time" dealing with the "gay mindset," there are no deeper questions posed or answered.
Harris walked away from Neil Bogart and a crumbling Casablanca Records in July, 1979 with a nice buy-out package. Bogart died of lymphatic cancer in 1982 at the age of 39, having built an empire, wheeled-and-dealed, screwed and snorted, his way through a fortune.
Harris now lives—quietly one surmises—in Port Angeles, Wash. In a recent interview with The Onion's AVClub he admitted to "constantly" experiencing "pangs of longing" for the Casablanca days. His memoir of daily excess and casual corruption could be read as a cautionary tale. But what, in the end, does it mean?
