Picture yourself dressed in a white silk suit, blow drying your hair and dancing to a Bee Gees tune. It might have seemed hip at the time, but you knew there would be a price to pay. Though I was not quite a teenager, pictures of me in a sky blue leisure suit are floating around. Not fun.
Disco came crashing down around 1977. Exactly 25 years later, another bust occurred–telecom. I don’t know how KC and the Sunshine Band handled the end of disco, but the Telecom Meldown was painful for me and lots of my friends.
It is a little known fact that the disco craze and the telecom boom are inter-related. Like Nostradamus, the Trammps had visions–albeit blurry ones–of future events. It was one of these visions that inspired them to write their fantastic dance song “Disco Inferno”. As I explained in prior posts, Tina Turner caught on to this as did Madonna. For those keeping score, Tina and Madonna sold their telecom stock in 2000–it is what allowed Tina to divorce Ike and Madonna to buy a new home in Aspen, Colorado. Yes, what I am implying is true: if we were paying better attention during the disco era, the telecom meltdown might have been completely avoidable.
If you aren’t following me, I’ll give you a factoid that both Tina and Madonna knew. When the Trammps wrote their famous song, they took it to famed producer Tom Moulton, who mixed the record. He loved the song, but he felt the title was too long. Against the objections of the Trammps, Moulton demanded that ‘nnect’ be removed from the first word of the title. Henceforth, the song was known as Disco Inferno instead of its original name Disconnect Inferno. If you listen to older versions of the song, you can hear Jerry Mills Collins belt out the original “disconnect inferno” lyrics.
If you were in the telecom industry circa 2003, you know what it is like to be in the disco(nnect) inferno. Like leisure suits and blow dryers, not fun!
If you need a visual from the Saturday Night Fever era, click here.
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