Donna Summer, Queen of Disco, shows her range
By STEVE KNOPPER
The story of how Donna Summer’s heavy-breathing “Love to Love You Baby” expanded to 16 minutes, 48 seconds, is one of the classic yarns of the disco era. Neil Bogart loved the 1975 single so much that he licensed it to his record label, Casablanca, then played it one night in a haze of marijuana, cocaine and caviar during a hot-tub party in Los Angeles.
The small crew of revelers got frustrated every time the four-minute single ended and somebody had to flip the record, Buck Reingold, head of the label’s promotions department, recalled in the 2014 Casablanca history “Going Platinum.”
So Bogart commissioned the longer version. “That was the best idea Neil had,” said Giorgio Moroder, who co-produced the single at his Munich studio. “I was sleeping when he called, around 3 o’clock at night. It took us, I guess, two weeks to extend the song.”
“Love to Love You Baby” became a No. 2 smash 50 years ago, transforming Summer into the Queen of Disco. But Summer, who died in 2012, spent her career frustrated that fans knew her only as the Queen of Disco. “No one in America had any real clue that I had an extensive and quite successful European background in live musical theater, or that I could actually sing other types of music,” she wrote in her 2003 memoir “Ordinary Girl: The Journey.”
A new box set, “Donna Summer: The Casablanca Studio Albums,” released this month strives over seven CDs or 10 LPs to capture the musical breadth Summer spent much of her career trying to prove. During her four-year period on Bogart’s label, she of course scored disco hits with “I Feel Love” and “Hot Stuff.” Also included in the compilation is Summer’s nearly 18-minute version of the much-recorded pop hit “MacArthur Park,” which exploded back onto the charts this year after Alysa Liu’s dynamic free skate to the song at the Olympics.
But it also chronicles Summer’s detours into Broadway-style show tunes (“There Will Always Be a You”), new-wave synth-rock (“Journey to the Center of Your Heart”), the ’60s girl-group sound (“Love’s Unkind”) and torchy nightclub jazz (“I Remember Yesterday”).
Along with Pete Bellotte, a co-producer, Summer and Moroder conceived “I Remember Yesterday” (1977), an album inspired by British novelist Anthony Powell’s 12-volume series “A Dance to the Music of Time,” as a chronological music lesson from the ’40s to the future. It was “the first of her albums for Casablanca where listeners began to see, ‘There’s really a range here,’” Christian John Wikane, who wrote the box set’s liner notes, said in an interview. “That album is a good place to start to understand she was not a one-dimensional vocalist.”
Wikane added that 1979’s “Bad Girls” album is full of rock touches — “Hot Stuff,” one of the climactic hits of Summer’s disco career, contains a solo from prolific rock guitarist Jeff (Skunk) Baxter. In the “Casablanca Studio Albums” liner notes, Bellotte is quoted as saying, “I was desperate to get Donna away from pure disco. I loved rock bands and guitars and all that sort of stuff.”
Casablanca, whose top artists also included Kiss and Parliament, had a reputation as a “regular fraternity house,” according to “Going Platinum,” where dealers accepted drug orders as if making lunch runs for sandwiches. “Neil Bogart was a brilliant record man,” Bruce Sudano, Summer’s husband and co-writer, said of the label boss. “Casablanca gets a bad rap: ‘Oh, well, it was a disco label,’ and there are all these stories about drugs and limousines. But what gets overlooked is the quality of the work.”
Sudano met Summer in 1977, at the Los Angeles home of a mutual friend, Susan Munao, a Casablanca executive who later became her manager; Summer had just moved to the city and Joyce Bogart, Neil’s wife, was giving her a stick-shift driving lesson when they decided to drop by. “We started writing songs immediately and that was the beginning of our relationship,” Sudano said.
Not long afterward, Bellotte added, he showed up at Summer’s house for a co-writing session and an apologetic Summer made him wait half an hour as she finished a phone call. It was with an astrologer, advising her on whether she should dump her boyfriend and take up with Sudano. Bellotte scribbled out the lyrics to “I Feel Love” while he waited.
“It couldn’t have worked out better for Donna,” he said. “So here’s to the astrologer.”
Summer’s time with Casablanca didn’t end well. She complained that Bogart denied her ambitions to record more rock music and criticized his “Svengali-like role” in overseeing her career. For that reason — as well as what she argued were inadequate royalty payments — she sued Casablanca after it released her “On the Radio: Greatest Hits Volumes I and II” compilation in 1979. The lawsuit ended in a settlement, and Summer left to sign with David Geffen’s namesake label.
Sudano, who manages Summer’s estate with the couple’s three daughters, authorized the Casablanca box set from British label Demon Music Group, which put out a broader collection of her work, “Summer Time — The Singles Collection 1974-2010,” in January. Both collections emphasize Summer’s diversity: “Let’s face it, Donna could sing the phone book in one take,” said Michael Neidus, Demon’s global commercial manager.
Still, Moroder, 86, widely known as the Father of Disco, related to Summer’s frustration. “I don’t think she ever said she was not happy,” he said. “Maybe she was not happy-happy. Which is a little bit my problem, too. I love to be called the electronic guy more than the disco guy.”
