Saturday, December 11, 2004
Saturday Reading Room Now Open
Generous extract from Everybody Dance: Chic and the Politics of Disco, by Daryl Easlea, published by Helter Skelter Publishing, priced £14
(Blurb) "Chic supplied the uplifting soundtrack to the dark days of the Seventies. But, as Daryl Easlea reveals in his new book, behind the good times lay a fiery tale of black power, radical politics and a battle against the forces of Middle America"
That fiery tale described in microcosm in a paragraph devoted to how things can go funky in a heartbeat: a few hours from a single evening when the military, a bad acid trip, a rape, and a bleeding Andy Warhol combine as a real life experience you can only wish was an hallucination:
By the late 1960s, unknown to one another, both men were living nearby in New York's Greenwich Village. The precocious Rodgers was not slow in embracing all the experiences the Village had to offer. The night of 3 June 1968 was one such evening, though it was to go frighteningly wrong: "I went out one day with this girl, April, and met these military guys, who were on leave or had come back from Vietnam. We had all seen [the hippie musical] Hair. They slipped hallucinogenic drugs in our drinks and I ran out of the house we were in, suffering from some kind of panic attack. They subsequently raped April, which I found out about later. I called the police and they took me to a hospital. I'm there in the waiting room and I now believe I'm a lizard." To add to this confusion, the ward doors were flung open and a new patient was wheeled past at high speed. "All of a sudden, everything changed and they wheel in Andy Warhol, who had just been shot by Valerie Solanas." As all medical attention was shifted to the Pop Art guru's pressing needs, Rodgers felt somewhat hard done by: "All I could think was power to the people, because I had been there first - I know he was famous, but first come, first served!"
Disco Inferno
¶ 12/11/2004 01:00:00 AM
Generous extract from Everybody Dance: Chic and the Politics of Disco, by Daryl Easlea, published by Helter Skelter Publishing, priced £14
(Blurb) "Chic supplied the uplifting soundtrack to the dark days of the Seventies. But, as Daryl Easlea reveals in his new book, behind the good times lay a fiery tale of black power, radical politics and a battle against the forces of Middle America"
That fiery tale described in microcosm in a paragraph devoted to how things can go funky in a heartbeat: a few hours from a single evening when the military, a bad acid trip, a rape, and a bleeding Andy Warhol combine as a real life experience you can only wish was an hallucination:
By the late 1960s, unknown to one another, both men were living nearby in New York's Greenwich Village. The precocious Rodgers was not slow in embracing all the experiences the Village had to offer. The night of 3 June 1968 was one such evening, though it was to go frighteningly wrong: "I went out one day with this girl, April, and met these military guys, who were on leave or had come back from Vietnam. We had all seen [the hippie musical] Hair. They slipped hallucinogenic drugs in our drinks and I ran out of the house we were in, suffering from some kind of panic attack. They subsequently raped April, which I found out about later. I called the police and they took me to a hospital. I'm there in the waiting room and I now believe I'm a lizard." To add to this confusion, the ward doors were flung open and a new patient was wheeled past at high speed. "All of a sudden, everything changed and they wheel in Andy Warhol, who had just been shot by Valerie Solanas." As all medical attention was shifted to the Pop Art guru's pressing needs, Rodgers felt somewhat hard done by: "All I could think was power to the people, because I had been there first - I know he was famous, but first come, first served!"
Disco Inferno
¶ 12/11/2004 01:00:00 AM
