Saturday Night Fever is remembered by most as the moment that propelled disco skyward for the next 18 months. For Joey Carvello, that movie ruined everything. He didn’t like the movie’s stereotyped Italians. He didn’t like the unhip crowds it drew to the club scene. Or the neighborhood hangouts suddenly replaced by clubs with grandiose Studio 54 aspirations. He also didn’t like the fuel Discomania provided for the “disco sucks” crowd, including “Disco Demolition” organizer and Chicago DJ Steve Dahl.
Carvello is an industry legend who went on to be MD of WXKS (Kiss 108) Boston, Atlantic’s director of dance music, and a VP of Promotion at Priority Records. The Boston Hustle is Carvello’s memoir of his first five years in the music industry as one of Boston’s pioneering disco DJs.
Carvello’s book is two coming of age stories — his own and that of disco itself. He is brutally candid and cinematic in his description of both, particularly the drug and alcohol excess of the era; the DJ’s bottoming-out moment was being sent to open a disco at a Howard Johnson’s in Waterville, Maine. But there’s also the excitement of seeing disco come into its own as an industry force for breaking records.
The Boston Hustle is also the story of how disco brought a famously segregated city together, at least on the dance floor. At his first big job, Carvello’s bosses allowed him to play R&B, but not funk, and allowed a racially mixed crowd, but not too mixed. Eventually, Carvello would walk out, effectively taking his following with him, before the owners relented.
Carvello has a very different take on the moment when disco literally imploded. He sees Dahl not as motivated less by racism or homophobia than being “outside of a cultural movement that he couldn’t take part in [because] he didn’t want to wear clean clothes.” That’s not so different from Dahl’s own take. Carvello also believes that major labels played a role in aiding Dahl because some of their own staff were rockers, jealous of disco’s sudden importance.
The Boston Hustle, co-authored with Chris Moore, was published in September. This week, Carvello taped an interview with SiriusXM’s Studio 54 classic dance channel and is also due to appear Friday (6) with Kiss 108’s Billy & Lisa. There are also book signings and an all-vinyl DJ set in Boston coming this month. Carvello speaks about the book with WBUR’s Noah Schaffer here. It can be ordered here.
The most interesting thing about disco is how it never really died if you think about it. And ironically, the rock, now has much of a disco flavor to it. Briefly, it became alternative’s calling card, much like disco itself, any sub genre could be easily overexploited after about five years. I think that’s just a natural cycle of things.