How America's Working Class Died on the Disco Dance Floor

Editor's Note: An epic account of how working-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the ’70s, Jefferson Cowie's Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class presents the decade in a new light. Part political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American music, film and TV lore, Cowie's book makes new sense of the ’70s as a crucial and poorly understood transition from the optimism of New Deal America to the widening economic inequalities and dampened expectations of the present. From the factory floors of Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Detroit to the Washington of Nixon, Ford and Carter, Cowie connects politics to culture, showing how the big screen and the jukebox can help us understand how America turned away from the radicalism of the ’60s and toward the patriotic promise of Ronald Reagan.

The following is excerpted from Jefferson Cowie's Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (The New Press, 2010):

In 1975, rock journalist Nik Cohn embarked on an underground tour of the working-class disco scene in Brooklyn with a black dancer named Tu Sweet. "Some of those guys," explained Tu Sweet, "they have no lives. Dancing is all they got." That idea sunk into Cohn, whose British roots gave a class edge to his understanding of pop music. "I'd always thought of teen style in terms of class," Cohn reported; "Rock, at least the kind that mattered to me, attains its greatest power when havenots went on the rampage, taking no prisoners. 'Dancing's all they got.' It sounded to me like a rallying cry."

His adventures at a club named 2001 Odyssey ended with a stellar piece of reportage for New York magazine about living to dance and dancing to escape called "The Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night." The theme of the piece was that only a select few were capable of rising above the "vast faceless blob" of humanity that does most of the nation's working and dying. Only a select few "faces" knew "how to dress and how to move, how to float, how to fly. Sharpness, grace, a certain distinction in every gesture." As Vincent, king of the 2001 Odyssey explained, "The way I feel, it's like we've been chosen." The New York article became the foundation for the most popular movie of the decade, Saturday Night Fever (1977).

There was only one problem: Cohn fabricated the entire story -- from the characters to their performances, from their looks to their dreams. His editors did not know of his deceit. Concerned that the public might not buy the veracity of Cohn's tales of the disco underground, the editors went so far as to include an inset, claiming "everything described in this article is factual and was either witnessed by me or told to me directly." But Cohn's journalism was just one more part of the '70s hustle. He did show up at the club to do his research with Tu Sweet after wandering lost in the "dead land" of Brooklyn, but when he stepped out of his gypsy cab, there was a brawl taking place in the parking lot, and then someone spun around and threw up on his pants. Figuring nothing could be worth such a price, he immediately headed back to Manhattan. After other failed attempts to penetrate the scene, he gave up and decided to make up his tale from thin air and a few fragments that were burned into his mind from his unsuccessful excursion over the class divide.

One particular image provided the inspiration for the fiction of "Tribal Rights." Before retreating to his cab, Cohn recalled "a figure in flared crimson pants and a black body shirt standing in the back doorway, directly under the neon light, and calmly watching the action. There was a certain style about him -- an inner force, a hunger and a sense of his own specialness. He looked, in short, like a star." This random encounter with '70s street-cool would be transformed into the quintessential icon of the decade, Saturday Night Fever's Tony Manero (Vincent in the article). Although Cohn later failed in his efforts to transfer his myth-making into a screenplay (Norman Wexler, who had done two other '70s blue-collar scripts, Joe and Serpico, had to be brought in to do the job), his brief moment in a Brooklyn parking lot was the spark that made pop culture history.