I Was Seduced by Disco at an Early Age ...

... unlike my third-degree-of-separation connection Jimmy Page, who was -- as he once claimed in a "Best of ..." LP commercial that ran incessantly on early cable -- "seduced by rock 'n' roll at an early age."



So today, I highlight an album that I knew of but hadn't actually listened to until recently, Stairway to Love by The Wonder Band.

While disco was known for its many remakes of well-known rock tunes -- a subject of another post on another day -- I remember articles in 1979 damning to hell the evil producers who dared to desecrate an authentic classic like "Stairway to Heaven" by reducing it to mere disco. In fact, I'm convinced it was this album that ignited the whole "Disco sucks" bandwagon that ugly people with no access to cocaine and easy sex jumped on.

In my world, "Stairway to Heaven" was the soundtrack for losers who sat around smoking pot and drinking six packs of Bud. Not my scene then, not my scene now.

The worst present I ever got was when I was in high school. I can't remember exactly what piece of sheet music I was carrying around, but a casual friend asked me if he could make a copy -- back in the days when copies were so blurry that you might as well have transcribed by hand. I said sure. In return, he gifted me with a handwritten vocal-and-guitar lead sheet for "Stairway to Heaven." All I could think was, "What the hell am I supposed to do with this?" And that is why I never actively sought out Stairway to Love by The Wonder Band.

Now here we are almost 30 years later and I have a copy. And you know what? It's pretty darn tasteful -- and I mean "tasteful" in a good way. It's got lovely string arrangements that died the day that dance music discovered sampled strings via the Fairlight synthesizer. It's also got the late, great Gwen Guthrie on vocals. And it makes -- for me at least -- Led Zeppelin tolerable. (And since disco is just sped-up, classed-up blues, doesn't it make sense that Led Zeppelin would work as disco?)

It was produced by a trio that I know next-to-nothing about: Sílvio Tancredi, Israel Sanchez and Armando Noriega. According to the IMDB, Sílvio Tancredi did the soundtrack for 1978's Cheerleaders Beach Party (I've never seen it but I already know it's one of my favorite films). Israel "Issy" Sanchez is a member of the Dance Music Hall of Fame. Armando Noriega seems to have fallen off the earth around 1980 but he played saxophone on one of the best albums ever, Easy Going's Fear (on which  our friend Sílvio Tancredi also gets a thank you.)


So please enjoy this cleaned-up-as-best-I-could, direct-from-vinyl slice of disco goodness, Stairway to Love. P/W in comments.