Donna Summer, the musical ‘Hair’, and the birth of disco: The audition that changed music
While enjoying the well-deserved ‘Queen of Disco’ mantle, Donna Summer’s performing career was forged amid the very different world of countercultural musicals.
And she really was queen. During disco’s dancefloor heyday, the full spectrum of Chic’s glittering pop magic to Village People’s discoball camp never touched Summer’s exquisite pop heights across the 1970s. From ‘Love to Love You Baby’s erotic charge to ‘Bad Girls’ street groove, Summer’s winning studio collaborations with Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte stand tall as the era’s finest dance peaks, the synth-coated ‘I Feel Love’ as important to electronic music as anything from Kraftwerk’s classic output at the time.
Yet, Summer’s road to pop royalty was a dogged, years-long journey reaching back into the late 1960s. Still a teenager, Summer fronted Boston’s The Crow, a psychedelic soul rock outfit shaped by the likes of Sly & the Family Stone and Big Brother and the Holding Company.
Despite regional acclaim and a near signing to RCA Records, an audition for the Hair musical truly launched her career. A revolution in the world of Broadway, Hair’s hippy tale of youthful rebellion against the Vietnam War, racism, sexual conservatism, and general straight mores upended the world of musical theatre with its fiercely political critique and rock soundtrack.
Summer was eager to get involved. Back when she was operating under her birth surname, Gaines, Summer auditioned for Hair and managed to score the part of Sheila Franklin and joined the German cast for its Munich debut in 1968. It was off her starring role in the psychedelic production that she’d eventually cut her first few records, lending lead vocals for the German cast soundtrack Haare (Deutsche Originalaufnahme), followed by further musical LPs The Me Nobody Knows, Ich Bin Ich, and Godspell.
Disco was way off in the midst of rock musicals, yet Summer’s first step on the road to dancefloor gold would be forged in her early German days. It was in 1973 that she first met Moroder while recording backing vocals for Three Dog Night. Working on demos with Bellotte, the trio would eventually drop the European-only Lady of the Night the next year, a far cry from her future disco shimmer with its symphonic folk rock stylings and dramatic production.
Summer’s debut solo LP was dropped to little fanfare and lukewarm commercial reception, but the trio’s eyes were already on the burgeoning disco scene simmering across the New York underground.
Inspired by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg‘s erotic ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus’, Summer conjured similarly racy and orgasmic vocals for the steamy ‘Love to Love You Baby’, scored by Moroder and Bellotte’s signature Eurodisco beat. The ‘Queen of Disco’ had arrived. Her first US single, ‘Love to Love You Baby’, would sail to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1975.
Greater hits were on the horizon, but the road to disco’s dazzling songbook was paved by the musical upheaval of the counterculture’s insurrection and the musical theatre’s bulldozing to Broadway, a unique moment of creative clashes that Summer was able to wield to her own ends.
