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Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret stories and little alone details about your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. We are your disco DeVos of details, your historians of Homeronic hymns. To him, you're insensitive portrayals of indigenous people of ananity.
My name's Jordan run Tag and I'm Alex Heigel. I was good. I thought you would have liked the indigenous and peoples of ananity. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well today, in casey I haven't guessed already, we are talking about a glorious bit of sonic seventies spray Cheese, a song that will be a staple of bar Mitzvah's retirement parties in the pre nine PM time frame of wedding receptions until the end of time.
That is right.
Today, we are discussing the history of YMCA by the Village People, or possibly Village People. I think they're one of those bands that as a shoot an article, which is one of the many things they have in common with talking heads. The discussion of YMCA has two separate
sides of my professional brand at odds. The longtime music journalist, then May, feels compelled to say that it's lame, because in a certain sense it is, but the long time events DJ that lurks within me also suggests it's actually pretty great because I've seen what YMCA can do on a dance floor, and folks, let me tell you, it
gets results. It's just so unapologetically goofy and upbeat that regardless of how much you think you hate it when it comes on, you can't help but love it if you punch it in right here, just as like I jump scare, yeah, uh here I go. I mean to me, I love YMCA because it's unique in that it's so firmly of its time, and yet it's transcended it's time. It's almost like how the film Grease portrays this of the fifties that never really existed. That's kind of how
I feel about WHYMCA. It paints this extremely sanitized yet also innuendo leaden as we'll later discuss cartoon portrait of the disco era.
I wouldn't want to live there, but I.
Think we can all agree that it's sometimes a nice place to visit. Heigel, I can see you going either way with this. It has horn charts by Horace Att, It's got that goal for it.
What do you think of Whymca?
You know, it's like what do you think of the air? You know? Like what I struggled with, it's like, you know American pie, well know, I hate American Well I was gonna say, yeah, yeah, I don't know, man, It's like it's just one of those things that's like woven into the tapestry of American life that it's inextricable and so bisy. Isn't that weird? Yes? It is. It is. That's what I'm saying. It's deeply weiz are. It's like the most successful like queer infiltration of mainstream culture since
like Rock Hudson. I don't know, but he was pretending otherwise. Yeah, I mean I insert any number of like deeply closeted Hollywood people can't say that, say, they'll bull up a big bleep on that. Yeah yeah. Uh. Kevin Costner before he before he was just a predator. First he was a closet a gay, No no different Kevin Oh yeah, Kevin Spacey. God, how much would have rule of Kevin Costner was gay? Just do a series of bleeps and then me going, God, how much would rule of Kevin
Costner was gay? It would explain his obsession with cowboys. Oh yeah, I don't know, man, it's weird. I like I associate this with like a deep cosmic malaise because I know that your sister steady state, Well that's true, but like I know your wedding DJ man, but does anybody like like when I picture someone doing the YMCA or being in a room where YMC is playing, it's just like the most.
There's some self loathing.
Well, it's just like the most performative, listless thing. And like, you know, there was a roller rink in central Pennsylvania that I used to go to because we didn't have much to do, and they would play YMCA and it was just this perfect image of like American life, like people just circling this big thing, not going anywhere for any reason, and just sort of like half acidly making
letter shapes with their hands. And like, I don't know any other pop song with an accompanying dance that really does that, Like Makarena at least you could be like, well it's quasi hispanic. You know. The electric slide is electric athletic. It's something chacha, real smooth. That's it has. It has its stupid shuffle. I don't even know that one.
Oh really that's a I'd be more of a Southern one.
Yeah, I just so, it's it's so weird, man. It feels like it's like this national anthem thing that's like you just obligated to respond and it says nothing. It's like ticks something in our brains where we're like, oh, time to sing along and do the hand shape thing. And I don't really know what other song other than like the national anthem just elicits such a resigned sense of group think, you know, like you can play this on death Row and someone would put up the YMCA thing.
It's just like it's just so drilled into our culture in a way that I don't think anything else really is. You know.
That's a phenomenal both visual and insight. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean you know what I mean. It could possibly be that it's the dance that requires the bare minimum. That's true, you know, I mean we love the bare minimum.
You gotta know how to do quarter notes, yeah, and big obvious letter shapes. Although I tend to have a problem knowing which way the sea goes. Oh sure, yeah, is it your see or is it the is it like like stage left or no, it's the other way exactly.
Yeah.
Well, I mean we won't be talking too much about the song's musical merits in this episode, but as you said, more of the cultural phenomenon, that is, the village people are the village people something like that, and you know.
You laughed, But they moved sixty five.
Million records in the space of like six years, five years.
It's pretty insane. Yeah, I mean part of me is always just inclined to like ignore anything that happened in like mid to late seventies in the record industry, maybe just the entire seventies for the record industry because it was at its like Imperial era. You couldn't you know, pirate vinyl and everyone had a nice stereo. Cable wasn't so much a thing. So it's like, yeah, twenty million then, but like you know, Disco Duck sold over four million, HAA, well, I mean that was the thing.
This group was signed to Cusablanca Records, as we'll talk about later, as a novelty band. I mean, the guy who ran the record label had come from basically running a novelty label, and so every act he sign Kiss was one of them. Donna Summers was one, and that was Once You Had Loved to Love You, which is like nineteen minutes of her grown.
Yeah, but that's genuinely subversive, man like, because that's that is that that's moroder Is on program that one. I think, so yeah, I mean that's just so like, that's almost avant garde, right, Kiss, for all of their lack of merits, except as businessmen like you see, you saw the niche that they filled. I just don't know who's clamoring for this. I have a thought. I mean, it's it's a fine line.
Let's not do any let's not do any facts. Let's just pontificate about YMCA for I don't know an hour until we both sort of go hoarse and then we just the whole thing just ends.
Both wander away.
I mean, no, this is sort of the carollary the spinal tap. There's such a fine line between clever and stupid. There's a fine line between novelty and avant garde. I mean, oh, I was listening to some podcast about the history of the recorded music and they mentioned they're coming to take me Away.
Yeah, the novelty song from.
A and all the sped up tapes and stuff on that was like actually viewed as fairly groundbreaking.
Oh yeah, Chipmunk still yeah, yeah, I mean because music Concrete was like the music Concrete was like the big thing at the but dumb. Yeah, yeah exactly, And yeah, I don't know, man, It's just I would love to be inside that guy's head. Like, I also understand the idea of Casablanca Records as like an operating hole. Like you know, you have Donna Summer, You've got R and B disco dance crossover, you've got Kiss, big meaty lunkhead rock, and they dress weird. Where the do the Village People
slot in? How did that come into his brain where he was like, I want to make the gayest band in the world, and that's it, full stop. Somebody didn't read ahead on the outline, No, I sure didn't. Well, well, we'll get to that.
But I mean, I as you very correctly noted, arguably the Village People's greatest legacy, not arguably it is the greatest legacy, is that it helped int a greate gay culture in the mainstream largely through the use of subcultural stereotypes. And this brings us back to our recurring segment of the show that we like to call two straight white guys discuss queer culture.
Hey, I know who Sylvester is. I have some crid.
I mean the village people did play a crucial role in integrating gay culture into the mainstream, but don't.
Take our word for it. Karen Tongsen, a.
Queer studies scholar and associate professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California, makes the case that the YMCA song, and particularly the video, which was filmed on location at the wise famous McBurnie location in Manhattan's Chelsea District, illustrates the way that queerness has long existed in real life and pop culture. She says, a
lot of queer expression has happened through innuendo. That's essentially how queer popular culture has existed as something that could be read in multi sltiple ways.
There's a sense of having to be able to communicate with.
Each other in plain sight, but without other people figuring it out. In England, there was a dialect call and maybe it made its way over here.
I don't think it did called polari. Are you familiar with this, I'm not.
It's basically queer Cockney rhyming slang. It was lingo and because in the UK homosexuality was outlawed and was illegal until nineteen sixty seven, Yeah, it was you'd go to jail, So there was a whole dialect that evolved to be spoken.
I would generally not be able to tell if it were completely invented by like Anthony Burgess, you know, yeah, oh seriously. Yeah.
No, it's from the Italian polare to talk to the Italian verb, and it was used in Britain by actors, circus and fairground performers, professional wrestlers, merchant navy sailors, criminals and sex workers, and particularly among the gay subculture.
What a beautiful cross section. Yeah, I was gonna say, people man at that party, circus folk. No, it's it's very fascinating.
And you know what Professor Tonkson said earlier about YMCA being able to be read in multiple ways, this is a recurring theme throughout this episode, people insisting that YMCA has multiple potential meetings, which was very much not my perception of this song. I thought it was pretty cut and dry. But as we'll talk about Victor Willis, who's the Village People lead singer, and he's the guy who
wrote the lyrics of the song. He is straight, and he's vehemently denied, with threats of legal action, that he knowingly wrote a gay anthem, though he says he doesn't care that it's been adopted as such. Randy Jones, the Cowboy and the Village People, made this point to Spin magazine in their oral history of YMCA. He said, I think you can go into the lyrics of YMCA and if you're a straight jock who worked out at the why,
You're gonna perceive it one way. But if you happen to be a gay man and have the experience and perspective of hooking up with each other, that's another way it can be perceived, Okay, man.
So that was news to me. I thought it was like very clear that it was about one thing. But yeah, well, I mean it's once you get the like the roster of gay stereotypes. I mean I understand that like in the seventies, like many people did not have exposure to full throated gay culture, but like I don't know, man, like if you're in San Francisco and you saw like a guy dressed in leather, you'd be like, I recognize
what's going on there. And then the rest of them are all these macho archetypes, like a macho man if you will, yes, yes, yes, indeed, very clever. I forgot they had like more than one hit because it was about yeah, I was about to positi at one point they're like, whither the novelty artist? But like, we don't really have those anymore. We have like TikTok flukes, and some of them are like genuinely talented, and then some of them are like you know, your Megan Trainers.
I mean I think, I mean, because of the timeline of TikTok, I would say it kind of went out with YouTube viral songs like what did the Fox say type?
Yeah, I mean yeah, I mean it's really just like you don't even get a viral song anymore. You get a viral riff, you get a viral SoundBite, and then you got to go play that on a hastily arranged stadium tour like poor Steve Lacy did and just screaming zoomers. You still want to be a musician yeah exactly, dude.
Oh god, that was so funny. By the end of that tour, people were like holding up their phones and being like, say how to my mom and he just flatly goes no and starts paying the next song, like, uh anyway, yeah, okay, man, let's get cool. You didn't know that, like the large buff men so mirrored other large buff men in your metropolitan area. Yeah, I mean, like, idiot, Like, what's my dumb ask? Like, I mean, how do you
misinterpret that? Like, no, it's totally straight. I just like I'm surrounded by like beefy men, uh, dressed as cops and like leather guys, and you know all these other guys out on the street dressed in leather. That surely has no bearing on what I've done. Must be a coincidence. Dunce Well, a lot to unpack here.
Dive in from the initial conception of the band from a Frenchman walking around Granwich Village, the band's tragic and honestly quite surprising connection to nine to eleven. The charitable organizations allege a connection to the CIA, the historical legal precedent that resulted in the wake of the song and the Rolling Stone hit it helped inspire plus the origin of that famous dance. Here's everything you didn't know about Ymca by the village people. The village people like so
many of life. Some pleasantries are a fault of the French.
Thank you for citing that in for me. You're welcome.
I recently discovered that I have in the analytics can see where very precisely, like down to individual cities and like large towns where people are listening. I haven't checked to see how many how many French people are listening, So if you're listening right now, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, at least I don't know. If I go is no, I'm gonna do a segment and it will be part
of our kofee thanking the fans kind of thing. I want to go through and look down because there were some like fairly small like so somebody listening from Wookesbury, Pennsylvania, which is next to the town where my mom grew up. So hello folks, if you're listening right now, we should drive past the Carousel Strip Club on the way to visit my grandparents, and I, as a little kid, thought it was a real carousel and always wanted to stop and go, and my parents would always find reasons to not.
I don't know if it's still there, but said my best to everybody in Woosbury, Pennsylvania. Anyway, back to Leatherman, The Village People were a brainchild of French music producer and promoter Jacques Morale, and it was essentially to appeal to, some may say, exploit, the burgeoning disco scene of the late seventies, which.
As we discussed in our Studio fifty.
Four episode, was largely gay disco we forget now. It was originally the music of the disenfranchised, the queer community and anybody else who'd essentially been othered gathered in downtown loft parties in the late sixties and early seventies of Manhattan because they essentially had nowhere else that they could drink and dance publicly due to discriminatory cabaret laws that prohibited same sex dancing, and the music played in these underground parties.
Were generally soul.
In R and B, you had guys like David Mancuso, who's arguably the most famous underground DJ of the early seventies, playing stuff like Mandudubango's nineteen seventy two proto disco classic soul ma Cosa, which is probably best known these days for its reference or sample in Michael Jackson's want to be Starting something.
I'm say, mam say, ma'ma sokas. Yeah, I'm say mamaselle, what's that mean? Macosa means dance in Cameroonian, which is where Manu Debongo was from.
So David Mancuso passed Saul ma Coosa to a broadcast DJ friend who started playing it on air, and that arguably became the first true disco hit. And so more of these sounds started to escape these downtown loft parties and it started to break into the mainstream and call us into a genre which we now know is disco and has its origins in soul, funk and salsa traditions of the Black and Latino communities which were played at.
These gay dances. So, despite its reputation these days.
As corny or hackey, disco started off having all the musical and cultural integrity in the world. But one of the factors, the biggest factor I would say that gave disco a bad name was the second and third and fourth wave of castions perpetrated by guys like our frenchman Jacques Moraley.
Did that miss anything there? Like thumbing the else sketch in the origins at disco?
Yeah, I mean it's it's I think I've mentioned him before, but I had a college professor named Thomas Stanley. Yeah. He was just like, I don't get why people bag on disco. Man. It says like everybody can dance to disco. It's four on the floor, you know, give people a quarter note. Everybody deserves the dance. Yeah, everybody deserves to dance.
Give people a quarter note. Yeah, I mean, ah, with distance and knowing that we put up with now, it just sounds like it's all gold to me, you know, like even like even like Boogie Boogie Wonderland, I'm just like, what a oh, that's that's earth Winded Fire. Sorry, what's the one? Boogie Woogie Shoes? Can you sing a little bit? I want to put them. I wanna put on my boogie shoes.
I actually don't know that song. Can you believe it?
That's a wedding DJ I really, dude, I'm thinking of the Boogie Ogi Ogi one. That song also actually goes You've got to know this song. You you lived through the era when it was a huge hit, for when it was not maybe not huge, but the sample was for a trick daddy.
First place I heard the horns, Oh.
Yeah, I mean like, I don't know. I listen to that and I'm just like, yeah, this smokes. These are like real musicians playing in a room. You know. It's just I'm so I've my attitude towards almost all disco has softened. Yeah.
No, that's a good point, you know.
Now now I'm looking up the origin of the term boogie boogers. The origin of the term boogie woogie is unknown. Oxfording in sixth United States that the word is a redoubling of boogie, which was used for rent parties as early as nineteen thirteen, maybe derived from Sierra Leone term a bogie, which means to dance. Also maybe akin to the phrase hoosa boogoo, which means to beat drums.
Huh.
In the late twenties and early thirties, the term could mean anything from a racy style of dance to a raucus party or a.
Sexually transmitted disease.
Cool.
Well, this concludes your history of disco and boogie. Jacques Moraley, the man who is.
The godfather of village people. I suppose he's a fascinating man.
He started out writing music for live orchestras in France, including the legendary slash infamous Parisian nightclub Crazy Horse. He also produced a record by a future member of the band King Harvest, who would go on to have a massive hit with Dancing in the Moonlight Great Song, which was.
My prom theme.
Yeah yeah, yeah, that band King Harvest was named after the band song.
I did know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think you told me that.
I probably. Yeah.
I love making things that have a lot of artistic integrity, a lot lamer and kitcher.
Yeah me too. Well.
Jacques Moraley apparently came to the United States after winning a twentieth Century Fox slogan contest. I that's what a rolling Stone piece says, and I have no further info on that, okay, but I enjoy that. He soon fell in love with the sounds of disco and started co producing Philly soul adjacent axe like The Richie Family, which tragically does not feature Lionel Ritchie. In nineteen seventy five,
Moraley took a fateful trip to Greenwich Village. The story has been told many many, many times, in multiple ways. I'm going to choose to print the legends with the most colorful version. Morale would say that he was walking through the village when he heard the sounds of bells jingling. He turned and looked and caught sight of a man in a full on Native American outfit, complete with headdress and bells on his feet.
The year was two thousand and nine, it was Coachella.
Intrigued, Moraley followed him into a nearby gay club called I Believe the Anvil, where this man was reporting to work as a dancer and bartender. Maraley started peppering in with questions and learned that his name was Philippe Rose
and he was actually part Lakota Soue. Inspired by the fancy dress of all the men around him, cowboys, etc. Moraley dreamed up the idea for a band, and Maraley's business partner, a man named Henri Bololo, happened to accompany him on the strip downtown, and Belolo recalled it vividly in a two thousand interview with discodisco dot Com. Philippe Rose was serving and also dancing on the bar. I bet he was serving and while we were watching him
dancing and sipping our beer. We saw a cowboy watching him dance, and Jacques and I suddenly had the same idea. We said, my god, look at those characters. We started to fantasize about what were the characters of America, the mix, you know, the American man. And we named this mix the village people because they were in Gretich village.
Get it.
The French are unable to like not condescend to us in our own country. But I guess so, I mean, we do that to them all the time, with like the cigarette smoking and the existentialism, and like they really really loved to come over here and just talk down to us, the twentieth centuries, pre eminent Nazi collaborators coming over here and making fun of us. For the legend of the American West cough Oh.
By nineteen seventy seven, producers Moraley and Audria Bololo. I can't I love saying that name assemble the group designed to attract a gay audience while parroting, or some would claim, exploiting, that same constituency stereotypes. These roles were all very carefully considered, you know, the Native American, the cop.
The construction worker, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, union man, good guy, union guy. Yeah.
The timeline of how the band came together is a little fuzzy. I've seen that the first person Moraley invited to join was Philippe Rose, the American guy from the bar, just because he was the guy that he saw first. Some reports say that he invited him to join this project that very night at the bar.
It seems that sounds like something that you would do at a bar in Greenwich Village in the nineteen seventies, like come up with a million selling band, like whacked out on good coke, and like watching a buff to gay dude dance. It's the beach scene from the doors where he's like, you and me are going to form a band and we're going to make a million dollars. But he's like murmuring it to a torque gay dude dancing at a bar in a headdress with pictrusive paps. Oh man, So.
We'll call him even it was that strictly true, we'll call him the founding member because he's definitely spiritually the founding member.
Felipe Rose.
He was raised in Brooklyn, where he displayed an interest in the arts during his childhood and he first dressed as quote an Indian while in school for the Christopher Columbus Day parade.
Oh I love this though.
By twenty fourteen, he'd become an ordained minister to marry fans, including a gay couple who spontaneously decided to get married while aboard a ship in Australia, which is adorable. Arguably, the most important hire was the next one. Victor Willis, the lead singer and eventual lyricist for The Village People. Marley would call him quote the young man with the big voice. He'd seen him on Broadway performing in The Whiz in the original cast before inviting him to join his new musical product.
And truly incredible opener.
I had a dream that you sang lead vocals on my album and it went very very very very big.
Can you say that on a French accent please? I had to dream you played inhale cigarette just pictured Serge Gainsburg. Yeah, you're gonna assemble the image of like five o'clock shadow and lidded eyes like smoking a cigarette. I had to dream you sang lead vocalis on my album and it went valet valet valet meeg.
I'm gonna put the uh the Surge Gainsburg song that was bands like the opening instrumental part under what you just said?
I had to dream You sang lead vocalis on my album and it went Valet Valet and Valet meeg God, he sucks. What a clown? People like the video of hit them in the late nineties with a little kid. Yeah, stressedes him painted on stubble and he's like moved to tears by it, like pathetic. I'm sorry, I forget that must be moving to you as a person, but like, no idiot. He fumbled Jane Burkin. He fumbled Jane Burkin.
He said like he was within a foot of Whitney Houston, which not many people got to be, and like fumbled that. I mean, not that there was ever a chance. But he like immediately pissed her off by being a weird pervert. So like, oh yeah, yeah for him, man, that's who people think of you as you know, why don't celebrate that well.
He also made a concept album starring his wife playing a fourteen year old that he hit with his rolls Royce and then obsessed.
But he I didn't even get into the pederast. I didn't even get.
Into the Lemon Incess too, the song with his Yeah about that.
Yeah, yeah, super weird considering all the kids later dressed up as him and the weeping Oh just as clownish clownish people can.
We discussed lemon incest on one episode. I forget what it was for, but yeah, he did a song with his daughter Charlotte, and the video for it was them in debt if I recall, yeah.
She defended it, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think she defends it to the stage because they're weird people, the French. You know, she lives here now though, right you think it would have been like trained out of her. No, we can't do that. That's the thing. Like they're impervious to American programming. You cannot find a French person who's been americanized. I'm serious, I'm not joking about this. Like, think of every French person you met in New York.
You would never go, oh, that's like an American with a slight accent. You're like, that's a French person. You know, they always staring out a window or like the Berets, like come on, So, yeah, you can never break that programming. I mean it's just not possible. Imagine being so fucking weird for your dad that, like thirty years later, you're like, no, that Incests song was funny, good bit. Pah.
I don't think she said funny. I think she said beautiful.
Well that's even stupider. I mean, you know it's funny. Though I was at a performance at this school last night. Well, I can't mention my place of work on here, even though it's obviously visible on my Twitter and LinkedIn. I was at a performance the other night and heard a
lot of Debusy performed, and man, I fucking love Debusy. Dude, his harmonies are just his chord voicing is just like when people talk about like, oh, composers integrating sounds from other cultures, like it's usually so fascile, but like that guy really heard like ragtime and dominant seventh chords and was like, no, this is my thing now because I didn't realize. But his like mature period that people consider when he wrote all the Bangers started at forty, so
you know, yeah, anyway, Debuty's cool. Didn't he do weird stuff too?
Uh?
I mean yeah, dude, every one of those composers was like fucking on and like living like rock stars. Well back to the assembly of Yeah, I mean just cut off that young men, just fade me down in the background and just paste in like like yeah, or I was going to say, like an MTA lady like robot voice, like Alex goes on anti French rant. Sorry, what about Okay these guys village people. That's two. We're up to two.
So now he's now he's got the Native American and uh Victor Willis who was the cop, he was the cop and I think he was occasionally a naval commander. To Victor Willis invited his friend, a fellow musical theater veteran named Alex Briley, who was at various points a soldier, a sailor following the release of in the Navy, and also a naval cadet.
It's just so funny they had they had a pinch hitter. He was like, I need you to come in and play three to five gay stereotypes because in the beginning it was just a studio enterprise. So having a utility guy in the Village People was just a funny to me, Like, oh yeah, throw him in. He's good in any position. What you got, Yeah, the sixth Man Award for the for the People.
This is not the most interesting fact about Alex Briley.
I need to modulate my tone for this. Yeah, go to Syria to go to True crime guy.
Interesting side note about Alex Briley, his brother Jonathan is believed to be the man depicted in the iconic, slash horrifying photograph taken on nine to eleven by Richard Drew, known as the Falling Man. It defies description, but if you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about.
And if not, I was.
Gonna say google it. No, maybe don't.
It's an image of a man falling from the upper floors of the North Tower.
It's unclear if he jumped or fell.
Just this is gonna sound grotesque, but just the angle of him and the angle of the building, it's it's a very striking image. Deeply upsetting, very striking.
I can say, some would say haunting. Yeah, extremely haunting.
Elton John, for some reason, owns the original Jesus Christ and he's described it as the most perfect photo ever taken.
But you didn't think I was.
Going to Elton John, But yeah, he is an enormous photography collection, and he has the original and he's described it as the most perfect photo ever taken. I believe the image is the subject of an amazing Esquire piece
by Tom Janaud. He wrote the profile of mister Rogers that was turned into the movie with Tom Hanks a few years ago, and it's also the subject of a two thousand and six documentary film called The Falling Man, all of which are trying to determine the identity of who this man is, because obviously it's even those a telephoto lens, it's hard to make out. But the most likely candidate so far is the younger brother of the Navy guy from the Village People.
His name is Jonathan Briley.
He worked as an audio engineer at the Windows of the World restaurant on top of the North Tower and the World Trade Center, and the impact of the plane rendered all of the exit stairwells impassable, so everyone above the impact zone died.
Should we get back to Disco, imagine clocking in at your job running the PA at the Windows in the World planeheads.
Yeah, it's and they were not far from the I believe it was the observation deck. They were almost on the top floor, so they were only one or two floors down from the observation deck and for some reason they couldn't open the doors up there because they were going to try to have helicopters land up there to hoist people off.
But yeah, let's just get off. Let's get off nine to eleven. Just maybe as a general I did. I did, and to my peril, I forgot how much you actually know about it a week after the election. But we're in a political podcast here, folks. Let's roll anyway. As they say, remember remember the weird I was talking to all these zoomers at our school and I was like, man, you guys like they genuinely do not know what nine to eleven was like, like the fallout from oh yeah,
oh yeah, they like. I was like, you got I mean they, I said, like, they renamed French fries at my high school. That was like a nationally really that was like a national but that was a national story, right like they were. So they didn't do it. I think we laughed at the people who did do it. It was in the White House cafeteria, as I remember, and then they what's.
Different what Bush's House.
My point is is that there was somebody in Central PA who took that at face value and did it in a high school, And these kids were like laughing, and I was like, you don't know, Like when we found out that let's roll was like the last words from that one guy. Yeah, I was like, didn't Florida or some Neil Young stop just naming things. Didn't some like top ten college adopt that is like their slogan or something. Tide.
I don't know.
I know it wasn't roll Tide, but I don't know. Truly crazy times eclipsed by every year since.
Yep, yeah, pretty much boy.
Okay, Jesus Christ. The main lyricists for The Village People's first album were Phil Hurt and Peter Whitehead, who were brought in purely because producer Moraley was French and could not speak English. God, this whole story becomes so much funnier when you imagine him doing all of this in like a brick thick French accent, not even lightly accented.
Whitehead wrote lyrics that Morelly deemed too obscene for mainstream pop, so he had Peter Hurt, who'd already topped the charts by writing I'll be around for the Spinners, which is like a top ten song of all time.
I'll be.
Yeah great bass break anyway, he has some He came in to straight wash the song Hurt. Was reportedly offered the lead singer spot initially, but he turned it down. It's an important to note that, as we did previously but really underscored after all the nine to eleven talk,
that not all the Village People were gay. Singer Victor Willis, who did have a handwriting some of the group's biggest hits, including Yes Ymca, was married to Felicia ayers Allen, who would go on to play Claire Huxtable on The Cosby Show The Nuts Yeah, good for him, and Willis would repeatedly say over the years that he did not co write Ymca in the Navy or Macho Man with the specific intention of making them gay anthems, which, Jesus Christ again,
you're either lying or genuinely one of the stupidest people alive, especially when you realize that The Village People's self titled first album contains four tracks which are San Francisco parentheses, You've Got Me in Hollywood parentheses, Everybody Is a Star, and then Fire Island, before closing with Village People, which was the name.
Of the band of New York Spirits.
Village Also, if for those of you who don't know, Fire Island is like a intensely popular it's Long Island technically, right, I believe so. Yeah, it's a very popular gay nation stop for the the moneyed class. I mean, I think at one point it was like genuinely very like on the when when Long Island was like in the Hampton's were like the wilderness, when no one out there. I think it was like a big kind.
Of like Capodi would go out there.
I think, yeah, like clandestine or just more hidden, more bohemian kind of spot. And then of course, like everything, it became fucking terrible. As you meditate on that. We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages. Village People's first single, because the afore mentioned San Francisco parentheses, You've Got Me, did actually not well. It didn't crack the top one hundred on Billboard. It hit one oh two.
The Village People were signed to Casablanca Records, which was at the time a new label formed by a guy named Neil Bogar, an incredible seventies name.
If I've ever heard one Yeah Yeah yeah.
After cutting his teeth by producing the group Cute question Mark and the Mysterians, including their garage rock classic ninety six tiers Hell Yeah Yeah or the er garage rock song it's.
Like that in Louis Louis, Oh Yeah, oh yeah. I was gonna say and maybe something like them.
No, I don't know, no too Irish. Yeah, it's gotta be something America. It's gotta be like the Seeds or the Sonics. I was gonna go to Van Morrison thing that I don't care. Van Morrison is too like, he's not he's not tough enough. I mean, he's like a drunken a but he's not like the entirety of moon Dance is about him, like being moved to tears by drinking water from a Irish stream. That's not garage rock.
I mean, if you say the word fantabulous and Jeff fox Worthy voice, you're not you're not garage rock.
And Bilgert had done a bunch of other dogs like green Tambourine by the Lemon Pipers, Yummy, yummy, yummy parentheses, I've got Love in my tummy? Is that the full title? Okay?
No, I don't think that's the full title, but I'm glad. I'm glad you know it.
Speaking of innuendo songs, man, good.
Lord, oh my right, I mean god, I never really thought of that, to be honest.
You live an incredibly cloistered life in that little head of years, don't you. Just a whole infrastructure they're dedicated to keeping them a lot of things out.
I just did a tight five on nine to eleven. What do you want from me?
I gotta balance it out somehow, et cetera. New Bogart his CV Bogert very much Sawivillage People was following in this lineage of novelty hits. If you look at the acts that he signed, Kiss Donna Summer, who, as you mentioned earlier, was best known for like an insanely long playing song crafted by an Italian coke maniac, consisted mostly
of orgasmic sounds. But Casablanca seemed to luck into having some of the best acts of the seventies on there that had not just Kiss Donna Summer and Village People. They had share lips inc uh, Parliament, one of George Clinton's I'm actually still too white to understand how Parliament and Funkadelic came together and then split again. I know, Parliaments was his like do wop group, and then Funkadelic was like a separate thing that he started and then they became one.
When a funk band on a duop group love each other very much.
And George Clinton is doing prodigious amounts of acid, like acid and coke, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, No. I just think it's funny because he was, like I just think of him as like one of the outliers of Black American acid consumption, you know, like yeah, other than other than Hendrix and sly Stone. I mean, like, you know, Barry Gordy wasn't doing acid, Booker t was not doing I wasn't doing acid. Like all those Southern Fried guys were not acid heads anyway, got p funk rules? Yeah,
Flashlight song rips. We should pick one of their forty records to do. Did you ever hear the story about them driving into the filming of Night of the Living Dead?
This sounds familiar, but I know, did they not know it was a movie with it?
No, they didn't. They were all extremely on acid and driving through like outside Pittsburgh where that movie is filmed in Monroeville, Oh my God, and like late at night and just happened to stumble across like a zombie scene being filmed, the er American zombie text being filmed in the middle of the night while they were all extremely up on acid and whatever else. Like. Imagine what that must have been like to be a fly on that
bus wall sadly knew. Bogert died in nineteen eighty two of lymphoma at the very young age of thirty nine. His son, though, has continued his proud legacy. His name is Evan Bogart, and he is a crazily accomplished modern pop songwriter, co writing Halo with Ryan Tedder for Beyonce
and Rihanna's SOS. He went semi viral recently for revealing that SOS, which of course samples the synth line to Soft Cells Deathless hit Tainted Love features a verse that is just titles of hit eighties songs strung together and no one ever noticed, No Yeah, And that includes take on Me. The verse lyrics are take on me, you know inside you feel it right? Take me on. I could just die in your arms tonight. I melt with you. You got me head over heels. You keep me hanging on, man,
that is so funny way you make me feel. Keep Me hanging On, of course, is a sixties one, but there was a there was a.
Cover of it in the eighties by It might have been by Soft Cells, somebody out of Kim Wilder eighties Kim Wile.
Someone didn't read ahead in the outline hoisted by your own petard. Uh Jesus Christ, this is a real bad one for staying on topic. Man. I took an adderall to day when there's self titled. I did. When their self titled album was released in July nineteen seventy seven, the Village People were essentially at that point a studio group.
But when the album sold a million, and the singles in Hollywood parentheses Everybody is a Star and San Francisco parentheses You've Got Me began to chart in the burgeoning disco markets, it became clear that they needed to take this show on the road. And Jordan, you've heard it said that it was good old Dick Clark that perennially Rick dis grinning teenager of the American Psyche told them to do it.
Yeah, it's like the son of Sam the neighbor's dog told them to do it. Dick Clark told to do this.
Dick Clark does tell me to do a lot of things. Actually, it's Casey case It's in.
That, Yeah, yeah, Alex. Dick Clark's a harder impression.
The hang on, Alex, this has been casey k. I don't have it at hand, Alex.
I don't think you should take any more adderall today. Alex, grab that cops gun. Here's a letter, okay.
Moraley solicited young hopefuls by putting this unforgettable ad in the trades, as they called them, macho types wanted, must dance and have a mustache. Vocal talent was not mentioned because the idea was that they would just be lip syncing all these songs. That ad found the band's eventual leatherman, construction worker, and Cowboy, three of the remaining American archetypes.
Aspiring actor Randy Jones was brought on by the Cowboy, presumably because he was raised on a real North Carolina farm. David Hodo was the construction worker with the mirrored shades who would later tell Spin for their oral history on the song, I had just finished a musical about the Grand Ole Opry and I had a mustache. It was Christmas time and I needed money. They wanted a cowboy, and I had just finished a Western perfect But when they said they wanted me to be a construction worker,
that was my dad's dream come true. I'm handy, but I've never built anything of consequence. I wouldn't say that my greatest fear. I wouldn't say that. David I was on hook for every next word in that statement musical about the grand Ole Opry Christmas time broke. He wanted to be a cowboy, they wanted to be a construction worker. His dad loved Dad, and then that tremendous kicker. I'm handy,
but I've never built anything of consequence. It should just be the entirety of do you ever hear of Alvin Lucier, who's his avant garde composer, who recorded I Am sitting in a room. Oh yeah. He just loops a certain amount of text. He repeats it over and over until the overtones and echoes and everything render it this like non speech sound art consolation. We should do that for
an episode. But I'm just looping the rays. I'm handy, but I've never built anything of consequence with increasingly distorted tape echo. I'm handy, but I've never built anything of consequence. I'm handy, but I've never built anything of consequence. I'm'm a handy, but I never really consequence. I'm a hand I'm handy, hand I'm hand consequence. Uh Anyway, rounding out the group was the only member who didn't come from an entertainment background. Glenn Hughes had been a Brooklyn Battery
Bridge toll collector. Is that corrector I'm just now hearing this, that's correct when he was enlisted as the leather clad Biker. He is recognized for his extremely expressive horseshoe mustache, while his outfit was drawn from the dress code that was mandated at the infamous BDSM Leather Bar Mine Shaft, which is one of the two gay bars that are the inspiration and or filmed at in William Freakin's Cruising, starring a very obviously too old for this al Pacino playing
like a twenty seven year old male cop. Is that worth watching? Ah? You know, I've heard a lot of people say it is, but it's I think all of those people hate you, No, are like freaking dorks. What are the actual clubs Get Pulse Orrivinos in There's a Oh Man. Richard Gear was going to be the lead in that movie. Oh oh okay, so here it is. It was intended to depict scenes cruising. Was intended to
depict the scene at the mine Shaft. However, the mine Shaft would not allow them to film in there, so instead the scenes for Cruising were filmed at the hell Fire Club, which was then set decorated to resemble the mind Shaft and then populated with regulars from the mine Shaft as extras and also exterior shots were shot around the mind Shaft, and al Pacino visited the mine Shaft to research the role, so freaking once again demonstrating his apex pettiness as a filmmaker, was like, Oh, you want
to let me film there, I'll just make it look like this in every single way anyway.
This comes back later actually in this episode wonderful.
In any event, mister Hughes was seen as a dandy of the disco age and no less an authority than our former employer. People Magazine named him one of the most Beautiful people of nineteen seventy nine, but this was the same era where they were thrown it like Nick Nolty, right.
No, this is this is seventies when they when they were serious about it. Now the biker from the Village People made the cut, Nick Nulty sixiest, that was like ninety one, ninety two?
No was it? Oh my god, you're right it was No, it was ninety two.
Yeah.
On the basis of what when was that mugshot photo? Yeah, Jesus Christ cool man. He was not acting when he was clad in those leathers. He was. He died in two thousand and one at the age of fifty. When did he live to see it?
You know.
What Shrek I was striving for the Dana Carve movie. That paused for a moment of silence on this set. The impression the great impersonator was March.
No, it was March died in March.
Ah bummer.
Wow.
He was buried in all of his leathers. The title song from the second Village People, lp mancho Man, also became a best selling single in the summer of nineteen seventy eight, while the album itself went platinum as well. The group began touring, often featuring a young up and comer named Madonna as the Air Opening Act, but by nineteen seventy eight their fame would grow exponentially with YMCA. Where does the leather guy archetype come from? Is that
a tom of Finland construction? Nope, gay servicemen returning from World War II?
While leather because they spaw wrinkles Paul linn carry over from the Bewitched episode.
No it, I guess it was part of biker gangs in the fifties.
Now, Okay, this is a sincere question that you probably won't have the answer to. Are these looks aspirational, like we are attracted to that, and therefore I'm gonna dress like that because that is what I'm attracted to? Or is the implication that a lot of homosexual men are actually bikers, or are actually construction workers, or are actually cops or whatever?
You know what I mean?
Why can it be? Can it be? Can it be both? Can it be both? Jordan? You know, we don't. We don't want to limit them anymore.
The conversational stylings of two straight men discussing gay stereotypes from fifty years ago. Don't let anyone ever say that we just show doesn't.
Have any take on back Jesus Christ.
We had a very cool comment from somebody who listened to our Studio fifty four episode that was talking about how they.
It was like their mom or something.
No, I think they would go there. Oh okay, yeah, I don't know how to say this. I'm sorry, d D. Ferrera or Faery. The reason a list there was such a share Gloria Gaynor or Grace Jones would be turned away from a Studio fifty four was because some nights it was strictly Dickley and gay sex was allowed to be anywhere and everywhere.
No women were allowed.
Because they wouldn't be wanted or partaking. Studio fifty four documentary mentioned that.
You wouldn't get it. I remember seeing this archival photograph collection at some point when I was in Brooklyn about disco gay subculture, and that was when I was introduced to the practice of shirt cooking, which was like a thing in clubs when you just wore you would just wear like a button down, like a button top and
like nothing else. No, like Winnie the Pooh, Yes exactly, but with your shlongout you know, Okay, all right, I mean I guess it was maybe presumably it was a bit of a self policing scene, like you didn't really shirk unless you like had to back it up shirt no, because the point was it wasn't un it. It was unshirted. Well, I know it was unbottomed.
Even I'm just aesthetically that's not a good look, though, I don't know.
I'll talk with either.
No, I mean but there, I don't know, think about any number of uh like eighties like like, think about the stereotype of like the woman in the man's dress shirt the morning after. You know, that's such a.
M thinking of it.
I'm thinking, hang on, okay, I'm thinking of it.
Thank you.
Now just imagine it's a dude with a big Okay, okay, I'm thinking of it. Yeah, so it's a thing. Hey, you get it. You get it, this guy gets it. You would have been allowed as strictly ticularly you like to party.
Well from uh wun't of the poohing to YMCA, I guess it's not that far of a jump. Before we go any further, we should probably talk about what the YMCA, which has since been re christened the Why in twenty ten I believe, actually is, since it's kind of archaic these days, I feel like maybe a lot of people don't know. YMCA stands for Young Men's Christian Association. A lot of people know that, and it's generally associated with gyms and at the time provided temporary housing to men.
The organization was founded in England in eighteen forty four, when the Industrial Revolution was bringing the young to urban centers in droves. The YMCA was founded essentially as an alternative to taverns and brothels, which is ironic given its future reputation.
In the seventies at least.
Author J.
William Frost describes them thus in his book Christianity, a Social and Cultural History. Sounds interesting, That sounds interesting.
From the crusadest Yeah, and the rest from the same period. Really, yeah, that's true.
Philanthropists saw the YMCAs as places for wholesome recreation and that would preserve youth from the temptations of alcohol, gambling, and prostitution, and would promote good citizenship.
And so, in addition to being.
A place to gather for these wholesome activities, they also provided inexpensive lodging, with one room units containing a bed, as well as use of a shared kitchen and bathroom facilities. And this sort of became the place for a certain period, at least where you landed when you arrived in the big city with your big dreams and you were trying
to figure out more permanent accommodations. These lodgings started to disappear at the end of the seventies due to a combination of a real estate boom overseen by Mary ed Koch and the general social demonization of the poor following
that Debbie Downer train of thought. It's been noted that the song YMCA is a stark reflection of the homeless crisis among members of the LGBTQ community in the seventies, a time when most were forced out of their homes or unable to find employment after coming out of the closet. Hence why so many men came to stay at the YMCA in the first place. It was a charitable organization that offered a warm bed and a shower to these
people who often had nowhere else to go. The place was significantly less freewheeling than the song would have you believe. For example, there was a ten pm curfew and no access to a cafeteria or any shared social spaces.
Other than a gym.
The bathrooms were clean, but like a gym locker room facility. One longtime resident of the YMCA in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood, the one that inspired the song, would tell the website Gothamist there was more supervision of your social life, a kind of management as to how you behaved in the why than there would be in a commercial rooming house, which mostly just wanted to make sure that the rooms
were rented. He also added that the housekeepers came by both the off of you clean sheets and towels, and also to keep an eye on you and make sure you were alone and not misbehaving.
Yeah, it's really interesting, Deck Rante about Season of the Witch.
No you taught It's funny. There's two books about Season of the Witch. One about a cult is in Rock and Roll. I assume this is the other one.
The other one, it's about San Francisco from sort of the early sixties, well late sort of the fifties eate
until like it essentially ends with the AIDS crisis. And it's interesting to note that despite being sort of the punching bag for like a liberal California city gone woke, San Francisco was an extremely conservative town based largely on Irish and Italian super catholic like dock labor and union power really and the sort of spill towards the west that made it what it is in the popular imagination today really started with the Summer of Love, like that
was just that was the first wave of an insane
amount of youth culture up the Beats. Yeah, but I think the Beats were less like the Beats didn't have I mean, this is this is also an interesting thing about San Francisco as far as where it landed in the popular culture, because the Beads I don't think, like they were on talk shows and stuff like you know, you would have seen like Jack Carrek reading on like Steve Allen or something, but they weren't radio ubiquitous, like, so they didn't have the cultural cachet as far as
youth culture, I think I think the Beads were largely a little bit more of a you know, academic cultural intellectual crowd as opposed to just like let's take acid and lie in the grass all day. So that westward migration of people who like quote unquote didn't fit in anywhere else and just wanted to be starts with kind of the Summer of Love era. But at the same time,
San Francisco is not really queer friendly. There was a point at which the SFPD was issuing more tickets for like public indecency than the NYPD by a factor of like ten in the early seventies.
Wow.
So I think a lot of it and it's sort of this, you know, you can see this sort of trickle down effect of like the liberating sixties. The backlash of that was maybe kids who were emboldened to start displaying their identity more openly on the East Coast found it unwelcoming and wound up in a YMCA and then just saved up enough money for bus fair to San Francisco because they heard that it was changing. But like that is not a deep seated part of San Francisco culture until this time, you know.
I mean you talk about the backlash, I mean it wasn't this around the time and was seventy eight, I want to say, and Harvey Milk was assassinated and George Moscone.
Uh yeah, that was I mean, Dan White was a loser piece of who killed himself and is in hell. But I think a lot of that was also a reaction to just George Moscone, because Moscone was famously like very liberal as opposed to the previous power structures in San Francisco. And if I'm remembering correctly from this book, he had fired Dan White or like removed him or he was like not unelected, like removed from the Board
of Supervisors, and then he came back. And I think Harvey Milk was a convenient target because of what he represented, and I believe was literally in the same room as Moscone. But I think that killing was less targeted at orientation than it was just sort of a general cultural malaise of like the straight irishman who saw their their city disappearing or whatever.
Oh that is, that's interesting. I actually don't know a whole lot about San Francisco history. I always saw it as for a Lingetti and the Beats giving way to.
Timothy learriacolytes. Yeah, no, I mean it was. It's really This book doesn't get into it, but another book I'm reading does. It was fully like lawless for a while. I mean, vigilante mobs were an incredible thing, like roving gang like they were because it was until the nineteen o six quake in the fire. The whole city was like a tense city that sprung up around the gold Rush, So it was all like right right, like shantyuns like you know, and these people were just hanging people in
like the street. And there was one point one famous lynching where the governor of California at the time was like put out a statement that was like, yes, this is good and correct and a message from California that we will not tolerate like lawlessness or something insane.
Well, Heigel, it's been a minute since we've had a Heigels and saying conspiracy theory corner, And I feel as though you should take this because it has to do with the CIA, which is an all real passion point for you.
Oh absolutely, I mean even dovetailing, even even getting aside from the fact that they may have started the Canyon and Hippie Rock to take the teeth out of the genuine new left and historically powerful labor coalition that was forming in many places around the country, even putting that
I believe plausible theory aside. You know, there is documented evidence that they spent a sh load of time just with people during this period, like the American presidents were actually horrified to learn the extent to which the CIA had been operating without oversight. And back in the day when we used to actually do something about this, this was when all these commissions were formed and they were
like actually sanctioned. But like we know for a fact that the CIO is paying guys like Jolly West to just post up in hate Ashbury and throw around acid and write about what see what happens? Yeah, anyway, So that's why I believe that the YMCA is actually a front for the CIA. Ooh tell us long long, rambling, long wrapping up with people tune back in, and that's why I go and the YMCA is a front for
the CIA anyway. One of the sources for this rumor is a British lawyer named Fenton Bresler, tremendously British name, who published a book in nineteen eighty nine titled Who Killed John Lennon? And in this book he argues that Lenin's assassin, Mark David Chapman, was programmed by the CIA
Manchurian candidate style. This is also a very popular theory among fringe conspiracy theorists that a lot of mass shooters or serial killers from the quote unquote Golden Age of serial killing, which is, believe it or not, an actual thing,
were like rogue CIA assets. This was going along the theory that there were developments starting in the nineteen twenties and building into the era when the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, was formed, that there had been some of the first psychiatric research into disassociative states as a result of trauma, and so their pet theory was they would recruit people who had generally been abused, who maybe went into the army and as a result of army screening,
displayed some apparant tendencies, and then they would be institutionalized at several California institutions known to have colluded with the CIA, and then they would come out a few years later and all of the sudden they would just start murdering people. Anyway, if you want to read more about that, there's a book called Program to Kill by David Allen, who also wrote the Laurel Canyon conspiracy theory book, and he died in a uh what I deemed to be suspicious. Oh
they all do. I mean, you know, I was also reading about Gary Webbman, like this shit that this country did to Gary Webb is honestly conscionable. The guy basically uncovered Iran contra and ties between the federal government and drug trafficking in south central LA. And like the rest of the media came at him like Main Street, like Newsweek, and people in the New York Times denounced this guy as like, how dare you assail the FBI and the
integrity of the CIA? And then he mysteriously died alone in his house of two self inflicted gunshots allegedly two Yeah, crazy bad am Yeah right.
Uh.
You know, the FBI killed Martin Luther King, but everyone knows that, and the John landis kill those and John Land has killed those kids. Yeah, and Vic Morrow, God rest his soul. And that about wraps it up for tonight. Thanks for listening everyone. Bresler went on to note that the YMCA has offices in more than ninety countries, making it an ideal front for the CIA. Mark Chapman had strong ties to the YMCA throughout his life. An incredible
sentence I was delighted to just read. He worked as a counselor at one YMCA throughout much of the seventies, and he stayed at one on the Upper West Side when he came to New York to murder John Lennin. In all likelihood this is merely coincidence. But there is one weird fact that emerged from all of this fringe postulating. There's a non profit organization called the United States Youth Council, which operated from nineteen forty five to nineteen eighty nine.
It was a coalition of sixteen organizations, one of which was the YMCA. In nineteen sixty seven, The New York Times revealed that ninety percent of the United States Youth Council funds came from the CIA, which was in turn dictating the organization's agenda. Also an incredibly common thing, like the CIA has all these shell companies that they funnel money through. It's all dog I mean, if even if you just want to drill into the they did with
ASCID as part of mk Ultra, that's all documented. A full list of false companies that were receiving CIA money to post weird dudes up in secret compartments and record acid trips. This country, man, God damn, I know that book wal Courier, hair Man Acid Dreams. The CIA LSD in the nineteen sixties.
That is as that they be gone.
No, No, that's two people. It's like the definitive text on the on the the CIO Martine Lee and Bruce Shalen. Yeah, that is the the definitive text on this kind of and it is horrifying. I had to put it down for like two weeks because I got to the part where in one of these California mental institutions, God, it might have been Stanford. Stanford has been involved in a lot of this. Yeah. They he gave a mentally ill person or possibly one of the like alcoholics and drug
addicts they were also all testing this. They gave him a local anesthetic in his brain and then they just carved into his brain while he was conscious and tripping and asked him just interviewed him about the process.
Did he live? I don't know.
Detail was not elaborated upon, I imagine not unless they were careful about it, which spoiler alert they rarely were. Back to disco. Alex Heigel found dead alone keep gunshot wounds to the chest with a military grid handgun. Sources say he had been troubled recently and his whole life. A message was found scrawled in his own blood, Jazz that's jazz baby, that's Nascar baby. Yeah. Terry Gross interviews the Cia spook who did it next? On Fresh Air?
It's like a voice modulator guard being like just broken news apartment and who was just sitting there? Like listening to Albert Iler was really easy anyway, you just had a big mouth and that stupid podcast is you know, we just got cigrevete. Terry Gross lips extremely close to Mike. Thank you. This has been Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. A lot of good riffs, good riffs on this one.
Yes, back to disco, Yes, Yes, Smithers with the gun mean, big smile.
Everybody's happy.
Ah. The ymca in question that inspired the song was arguably the most famous, know it as the mcbernie ymca. It was located on twenty third Street between seventh and eighth Avenue in the Chelsea district of New York City, which is adjacent to Greenwich Village. It's directly across from the Chelsea Hotel where the slightly richer bohemians stand. Leonard Cohen and Jennis Joplin and the rest stayed there. And yeah and Sid Vicious killed Nancy there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The McBurnie WYMCA had a storied history. It was there that Charles Merrill met Stockbrooker Edmund Lynch to form Merrill Lynch.
Yeah, it sucks.
I didn't dig deeper into that. Those guys weird place for that to farm. Other notable members who stayed at the McBurney YMCA have included Andy Warhol, Edward Alby, who who's afraid of Virginia Wolf, and.
Al Pacino his second appearance then fought Alpacino.
And we should also add village person Randy Jones, the Cowboy, also stayed there.
The story goes.
That the village people were leaving a photography session on twenty third Street nearby in nineteen seventy seven when they passed the McBurney YMCA, and their manager, Jacques Moraley asked, in his French way, what.
I can't do? What is this is not its Italian? What is it is? No? I can't do cluse So what is a whim anyway? Yeah? Actually if he had, if well, it would be in fringe of emsa ah, because you say im.
In David Hodo's recollection we told him why. It was a place where you could go when you first came to New York and you didn't have any money.
You could stay there for very little.
And of course someone joked, yeah, but don't bend over in the showers, and Jacques bless his heart, said, I will write a song about these.
That.
This is funny to me? Is he seeing you Americans? Do you out of poverty and desperation? The poetry of the dispossessed? They No, some of the best facial work I've ever seen. You do.
I wish you could see, but the eyebrows fuse.
Imse. Your mom is a French teacher, right, yeah, sure is Yeah?
Are you fluent?
Had to take French instead of piano ruined my life? Oh no, wonder you hate the French so much? Associated with things you could have done. I associated with the lost potential of being Keith Jarrett. Yes, not to say that I would have been, but who's to say. Heigel goes on anti French rant. So I hated it. Took it all through high school, and then I got to college and I was like, I'll learn Italian. That's my
mother tongue. And may I tell you absolutely all of the brain cells I should have been using to conjugate Italian and become fluent. I used to learn jazz bass, so consequently I speak nothing other than English and music, which they say is the universal language, but that's actually not true. One of the other compositions that we saw at this thing the other night was this alumni who's from He immigrated from Iran, and he was talking about
how much of it he's at UC. He's at the Herbalbert School, which is usc main campus, and a lot of his work is actually trying to transpose things like things from the Middle Eastern and South Asian diaspora are like quartertones that have no conventional notation in Western system
and rhythms that don't really make sense across bars. So he had this string quartet that premiered last night and it was super cool, but like you could see people in the crowd wincing at some of these really close, weird dissonant intervals because they don't we don't have those intervals in Western music, closest thing you get as a
half tone, but string players can do it. So one of our violin faculty was lead violin in this, and you know, she has incredible pitch, but it was so rankling people in the crowd to be like, ah, quarter tone, you know, and something Philip Glass talked about when he was transcribing Ravi Shankar stuff. He was like, I tried to notate that stuff in bars, and none of it made sense until I removed bar lines and just thought
of everything as rhythmic unit like cells. So music's not the universal language, I hate to tell you, guys, actually a ton of international variants except for the pentatonic scale that sticks around. We all love the We love the pentatonic scale, don't we, folks. Beautiful it's a beautiful scale. Five notes, friend of the pod, the pentatonic scale, end of the pod. The minor pentatonic major pentatonic is less good. I'm practicing fingerpicking patterns right now. Can you hear that?
On?
Very softly? Unplugged the electric guitar on my Oh no, I can? Yeah, okay, disco.
So the French guy wanted to write a song about poor young men going to stay at the YMCA. That's where we're at right now. They were walking by the YMCA. He said, what's this the village person who stayed there? Randy Jones? So, oh yeah, I used to stay there, and the kind of gave him the deal about what it was, and he said, I took there three or four times in nineteen seventy seven and he loved it.
He was fascinated by a place where a person could work out with waits, play basketball, swim, take classes and get a room. Plus with Jacques being gay. I had a lot of friends I worked out with there who were in the adult film industry, and he was impressed by meeting people he had seen in the videos and magazines. Those visits with me planted a seed in him. Oh raising, then that's how he got the idea for YMCA, by literally going to the YMCA.
You know they say, never meet your heroes. Yummy, yummy, yummy. Oh God, I've got love in an orifice or two three. You're giving me the more signal you already keep going, No, I'm counting. Oh okay, here we go. What do we got? Yeah, vam vamp. Yeah, do more stuff about anal sex that'll play well in Des Moines.
Yeah, play good and Mooksbury.
We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. The song Yma It was written at the tail end of sessions for the Village People's third album. When they realized they were coming up short and needing what David Hodo would recall one more song as filler. Jacques wrote YMCA in about twenty minutes, the melody, the chorus, the outline, and then he gave it to Victor Willis, the lead singer of the band, and said, fill in the rest.
That was a bit skeptical about some of our hits, but the minute I heard YMCA, I knew we had something special because it sounded like a commercial, and everyone likes commercials.
Know about that?
Yeah, man, Okay.
The narrative that Willis put together is about a young man who's down on his luck and looking for a place to stay. The narrators trying to cheer this guy up, telling him I was once in your shoes.
Willis says, this.
Whole story comes from a very personal experience. He said, I would go to the Why to pick myself up. Then I'd go back home and get ready to get back to my life.
I have no idea what that means, but what is that? Okay, man, No, that's weird. That's a weird thing to say. As we've mentioned so many people. The lead singer of the band who wrote the lyrics, not least of which maintain that it can be read as just a wholesome celebration of the Young Men's Christian Association. You know, it can be read as a celebration of gay culture or of the working man. Willis doesn't mind that it's been embraced by the LGBT community, but he does say it was intended
as quote a song for everyone. He related it to YMC on Buchanan Street in San Francisco, just blocks away from where he grew up. As he says in a twenty seventeen interview with NewsCorp dot Au, YMCA was not written to be a gay song because of the sim fact I'm not gay. I wrote it about hanging out in urban neighborhoods in my youth. You can hang out with all the boys was a term about me and my friends playing basketball at the why the boy. I wanted to write a strong song and they could fit
anyone's lifestyle. I'm happy the gay community adopted it as their anthem. I have no qualms with that. It's so funny the way that that kind of evolves. Man Like there was there's some blues book where they talk about being like slang for a women's genitals and like these you know this writer or a musician or something was talking about being like completely taken aback. When he went to the South the first time, was traveling around with Muddy Waters, and Muddy Waters was talking about how much
he loved eating cor Ah. They were like, I beg your guam partner. He was like, yeah, you know, like dining at the y. They like that means something very different, Bud. Anyway, I was just hanging out, you know with my gay fellows who I had a gay time with, and we would just josh each other and jerk each other around, and they would come over and I would come over or around and inside I would come inside and we would just have a gay old time. Sorry, you're looking
less and less amused. But then in September twenty twenty, things changed for mister Willis. Apparently, in the midst of Lockdown, he was fuming over the reputation that his song earned and decided to do something a little about it.
He learned how to Google during Lockdown, and he didn't like what he saw.
He posted the following note to his Facebook page, notice about ymca okay, misleading. There would be like a community note on Twitter not notice not actually from the CYMCI quote hammered to a tree, have to a church door Lutherian thess Yeah, the theses quote news and news and Twitter trending of YMCA is off the chart right now with false accusations about the song. Could have used another pass. But okay, but as I've said numerous times before, parentheses,
and this was proven in federal court. I wrote one hundred percent of the lyrics to IMCA, so I ought to know what my song is about. YMCA is one of the most iconic songs in the world. I will not stand idle and allow it to be defamed. Therefore, I will sue the next media organization or anyone else that falsely suggests YMCA is somehow about illicit gay sex. Get your minds out of the gutter, please, it is
not about that. Worthwhile noting that gay marriage had been legal for about eight years at this point, so weird definition of illicit. My guy, No, it wasn't the first one in twenty twelve.
I think a Supreme Court was twenty fifteen.
All right, And again this coming from the guy who did you know, macho man, and in the navy, see if we can parse some innuendo. And in the navy, it's a good point. Where can you find pleasure? Search the world for treasure? Where can you begin to make all your dreams come true? Where can you learn to fly, play in sports and skin dive? Okay, come on, sign up for the big band, or sit in the grand stand when your team and others meet. In the navy, can't you see we need a hand in the navy?
Come on and join your fellow man. They want you, they want you, They want you as a new recruit. Don't you hesitate? There is no need to wait. They're signing up new seamen fast. Oh my god, maybe you are too young to join up today. But don't you worry about a thing, for I'm sure there will always be a good navy protecting the land and the sea. Absolutely dog scansion and slant rhyme. What are the parenthetical insertions in this song? After they want You? Is oceanography?
What you kidding? I'm not? And then it simply just repeats all of those aforementioned lyrics. So you know, let's just go to Machaman now and see what we got. Also, misinterpreted.
I only know the chorus.
Body want to feel my body, body. Then there were parenthetical interjections from the chorus, such as baby, such a thrill, my body want to touch my body, it's too much my body, check it out my body. Don't you doubt my body talking about my body checking out my body. Everyone wants to be a macho macho man, to have a kind of body always in demand. Jogging in the mornings, go man, go, workouts in the health spa, muscles grow.
You best believe me, he's a macho man. Glad he took you down with anyone you can Humm, it's so hot my body. Love to pop my body. You'll adore my body, Come explore my body.
Well, it's not totally clear who the song's dressing.
You can tell him macho. He has a funky walk. His western shirts and leather always looks so boss funky with his body. He's a king. Call him mister ego. Dig his chains. Have your own lifestyle. Every man ought to be a macho macho man to live a life of freedom. MACHOs make a stand, have your own lifestyles and ideals. Possess the strength of confidence that's the skill. You can best believe that he's a macho man. He's the special godson in anybody's land. I've got to be
a macho parenthetical. Dig the hair on my chest. Macho macho man, parenthetical, see my big thick mustache. I've got to be a macho parenthetical. Dig broad shoulders. Yeah, macho macho man, parenthetical, dig my muscles. This man is either in the closet so far, or he is one of the stupidest beings to ever grace God's green earth, and everyone else involved in this was just guffawing behind his back. Those are the only two plausible explanations. Or its just
denied till you die. I mean, I guess that's fair. Is he? What's is he? He was? His name Willis h Victor willis see Catholic son of a Baptist preacher. There it is h anyway, son of a Baptist preacher. That explains everything. I retract all of my other postulations for legal reasons. Career Dave Hodo, the construction worker the Cat had a different take. Victor Willis Ymca certainly has a gay origin, he told Spin. That's what Jacques was thinking when he wrote it because our first album was
possibly the gayest album ever. I mean, look at us. We were a gay group. So was the song written to celebrate gay men at the YMCA? Yes, absolutely, and gay people love it regardless of the demographic it's aimed at. Randy Jones, the Cowboy, the Demon, the Quiet One made this important point to gold Mine to gold Mine. Why do I say that like Matt Berry made this important point to gold Mine gold Mine? We were always very positive about our energy and what we did. We never
sang about broken hearts, lost love or shattered dreams. We always don't. With positive things in a very positive place is the YMCA. I think people had forgotten about whys and they're positive qualities. They provided food, shelter and spiritual encouragement to a lot of people for more than a century. Yes, they provide excellent physical programs for young and old, and it's a very positive institution. That's why we decided to
sing about it. That's like corn flakes or wheedies or something made by dude trying to get people to stop cranking their hogs. Yeah. Yeah. The video, which was at the time rare for pre MTV act, was filmed at the McBurney YMCA on twenty third Street, the same facility that inspired the idea also as well as the west Side piers, Hudson River Park and a gay club called Ramrod. I'll just leave that as anything, but sadly you cannot stay at this YMCA anymore. It was closed in two
thousand and two and moved to a fifteenth Street. Its ground floor was it David Barton Gym for a while, and then it was a Crunch Fitness. Above it are boutique condos, the large of which actually encompasses the old basketball court with a running track.
Above affordable housing is now multimillion dollar apartments.
Ah that's great. Yeah, you had to read it. Blood would have started running out of my nose had I started it. Per The New York Times, imposing steel rafters and soaring twenty nine foot ceilings there hark back to a time when the space was used as a gymnasium and an indoor running track. It is returning to the market with a fourteen point five million asking price and monthly carrying charges totaling eight thousand, eight hundred and seventy three dollars.
As we mentioned, YMCA appeared on Village People's nineteen seventy eight album called Cruisin.
Cruisin. What do you think about that?
The fuck? More? Really? Come on? This guy? Willis like, you're how old? Does he? Man? Make peace with yourself, Like Jesus Christ, the.
Village people saw, the song is no more than an album filler. But Neil Bogart, the president of Casablanca Records, their label, saw its potential and made the decision to push it, push it real good.
He's seventy three, He's conceivably got a number of years. But like Jesus Christ, man, you know, get correct with.
God, or at least try pegging.
Oh, one of your better ones? Question with all the discourse around stealing valor these days around our boys, you know, and the.
Oh you saw his picture when he's in a decorated.
Military like a Navy admiral's uniform with like the obscene number of inscrutable fabric patches, like he looks like a doffy, Yes he does? Or idio mean yeah or idiot yeah exactly, idio meme would have been rocking the kilt.
That's true.
Wow, man, this is such a fascinating snapshot of America back when you could steal valor safely and have an incredibly closeted song hit the charts and then just deny it the whole weight of the bank and back. And he was married to Claire huxtaballt. Yeah, good god, what a what a CV Victor Willis. I salute an Era, I salute you, you absolute mad lad in America.
YMCA spent a full half year on the charts, peaking in number two on Billboard for three weeks in February nineteen seventy nine, being held off the top spot by La Freak By She thank God, and then for two weeks behind another disco burner, Ooh not as good though.
Do you think I'm sexy?
Boy?
Rod Stewart, That's song blows?
No, it doesn't. That song goes? What incorrect tweeted us. We have a poll, does do you think I'm sexy? Blow or go? A question Alton asked about the village people.
I'm kind of shocked that I've never heard that expression blow, Like that should be our that's going to.
Be our new blower go, that's a new segment.
Yeah, sure, we could be totally closeted. Weird guys stealing queer valor.
Contribute five dollars to the KOFE if you think it blows, or ten dollars at the Ghost.
No, I actually do like that song. I think it's uh that it sounds like Abba. That's why I like it. What I mean, No, it's not good for it's not good for like faces raw, but it's it sounds like Abba.
I just think you're wrong.
I just think that sounds terrible, you know, all right.
All right, agree to disagree, my friend. That's what makes this country great.
Yes, this makes this podcast great.
The YMCA single sold the report of twelve million copies worldwide. That's insane, becoming especially popular in the United Kingdom or it stayed at the top spot for three weeks and in Australia, where it was number one for five weeks. The song's success is due in part the awesome horn arrangement from Horace Ott, who did the same for people like Aretha Franklin, That King, Cole, Joe Cocker and Earth the Kit And he also wrote Don't let Me Be Misunderstood?
Made famous by being on your point of view and music taste, Nina Simone or for me the animals.
Yeah, yeah, didn't I go on a whole rant about Nina Simone and the animals in that song. I believe I did.
It was, Yes, it was for I think it was for the Moby episode.
Yeah, it was about sampling.
Yes, sampling.
Horace At also still alive. That means ninety one. Oh yeah, yeah.
Horice AT's horn arrangement is one of the things that makes the song great.
Uh.
The Financial Times, who covered the song for some reason, presumably because it made a stupid amount of money, have their own take on what makes YMCA so unforgettable. They write the song's rousing spirit can be attributed to its use of.
How do you say that ekfhanis ekphanicis e phansis?
That works for me?
An emotional exclaimat to phrase originating from ancient literature. It's rallying cry of young man acts as a sort of wake up call, urging the listener to forget their woes, chin up and make a change.
So there you go. That's a stupid thing to say. I'm sorry, that's dumb. A dumb thing to say about a gay sex song by nakedly profiteering pop producers and confused a befuddled Frenchman. That is a dumb over intellectualizing. Shame on you, Financial Times, Shame on you for making me read that we were all the dumber for it. So people all around the world's automatic. That's like an
something that like a chat GPT. If I was like chat GPT, write me a stupid Pitchfork article about some like heinously violent rapper, you know, with like a like confirmed rapes and like murders, they'd be like Young Genese's new song I killed everyone. I did it. I killed them all. My God, I killed them all and I loved it is really rooted in ekphonesis an emotional exclamatory phrase originating from ancient literature criticism. Sometimes I think it really does deserve to be a dead art.
I mean yeah, writing about music, dancing about architecture.
Yeah, for me, it really became about like it was Pitchfork, you know, honestly, I mean I don't love like I'm not like a Bangs or christ Gal or any I don't deify any rock critic. I think they're all pretty stupid, except for Jim Derogatus, who's like took down r Kelly
single handedly out of a love for Chicago youth. And you know, there's obviously great music writers across the world who I'm short selling, But like it really was when they just started Pitchfork just started to write impressionistic reviews about like the colors they saw, Like come on, man, just reach out to find out what mixing board they used, or like, find out why they wrote the song. Don't just postulate about how it makes you feel or say
like e herds. Now, I can't have a job doing it, he said, bitterly, having never been a professional music critic. So people all around the world love this song, But how about the actual YMCA organization. What's the YMCA say? What's Josh saying? They didn't really like it at first? Yeah they're religious.
Oh yeah.
Soon after the single was released, the YMCA is shoot a statement claiming that its trademarked name was used without permission and stated their intention to pursue an out of court settlement.
The band were surprisingly sympathetic to this.
Randy Jones the Cowboy later told Spin, we understood their points of view, and we actually talked about it before we cut the song. YMCA is a trademark, and a trademark needs to be protected. If they allowed one person or one group to violate the rights that would put YMCA into the public domain. David and I try to communicate this to our producer, but couldn't get through, So that's presumably.
That's the coach the friends shot.
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. But then the YMCA organization basically realized that the village people had made a great advertisement for them, which was extremely effective, so they soon backed off. Today the YMCA website actually shouts out the song on their website and at one point even had instructions.
For how to do the dance on their homepage.
That's like one guy in accounting who was like, we're cool with the gay thing because it's raking in money, And then a bunch of other people sat around a table and discussed for hours and they were all very unhappy for it, and the accountant kept having to come in and explain it to them.
Yeah yeah, we at.
The YMCA celebrate the song.
Media relations manager Leah Powell told Spin in two thousand and eight, it's a positive statement about the YMCA and what we offer people.
All around the world.
Former residents of the McBurnie Why, however, weren't quite so impressed, particularly by the video, as David Garrett, who lived there for twenty two years between nineteen seventy eight and two thousand. Told Gothamist there was certainly a party aspect to their video, and that time was the height of all the gay
clubs in Chelsea. The YMCA did have some overlapping of gay cruising, but it was a serious gym for people who really wanted to go and work out every day, and a nice place to live for working class people.
Yeah, it's sad.
There was a New York Times article right before the McBurney why closed in I think it was two thousand and two about all these people who had been there since like the seventies and something some even have even from the sixties getting evicted. And it was really well written, like these like thumbnail sketches of these poets and people who lived in there.
It was really sad.
The types of characters seen in the YMCA video were likely what the Gothamist piece refers to as temporary occupants who mostly lodged there to relax and sleep between shifts, rather than these long term renters, often gay in their mid twenties or thirties. They used the YMCA as what Garrett describes as a dressing room, or as a place to discreetly hook up. Garrett continued, the weekend party people who would stay there really just needed the rooms to crash.
They didn't stay there at all to socialize, but to take in.
The night life.
After the success of YMCA, the Village People tackled another hive of mail support, the Navy. I've heard that the Navy actually contacted them after seeing the spike in business for YMCA and approached them about writing a song that would do for the Navy what they did for the YMCA.
I don't think that's true, but however, once the song was released in March nineteen seventy nine, just after YMCA had slipped down the charts, the Navy contacted the Village People's management asking to use the song in a recruitment ad on TV and radio. Management gave them the rights for free, on the condition that the Navy would help them shoot the music video, and that's how the Village People wound up atop the USS Reasoner Birth at the
Navy in San Diego. Hilariously, though, the Navy did not use the video or the song, opting instead to keep the traditional anchors away in their ads.
This was like a Jerry Bruckheimer thing where they were like, oh yeah, literally in bed with the navy to let them film on the large boat. Yeah, oh my god, you're right, like top gun.
The most surprising musical legacy that spun off on YMCA, as far as I'm concerned at least, and I've never heard this, is that it apparently helped inspire the Stones disco diversion Miss You tracks.
Do you know this? I didn't know this.
Bick Jagger was a mainstay at Studio fifty four and other similar clubs around the world in the late seventies,
and he absorbed the disco sounds of these places. A piece on Salon details the making of Miss You, and it cites interviews with Stones's drummer Charlie Watts recalling how much he and Mick loved disco, and Charlie specifically recalls mixed passion for YMCA reference one night in particular, when Mick left the club in Munich and he just sang it over and over and over again, which is a moment I would love to have a tape recording of.
God, that's just so funny.
Charlie would say. In the seventies there were some fantastic dance records out. Mick and I used to go to discos a lot. A great way to hear a dance record is by listening to it in a dance hall or a disco. Keith Richards predictively had to be coaxed into doing Miss You, saying we didn't think much of miss You.
As we were doing it.
It was ah mixed bin to the disco, humming someone's song or another.
Humming some other song, so true to life and hilariously withering. Yes, God, I love Keith.
It's a result of all the nights Mick s been at Studio fifty four and coming up with that beat, that four on the floor, and he said, add the melody to the beat. We just thought we'd put our ore in on, Mick wanting to do some disco keep the man happy. But as we got into it, it became quite an interesting beat and we realized maybe we've got a quit essential disco thing here, and out of
it we got a huge hit. And that was I believe their final number one and arguably the most successful instance of a rock group hopping on the disco train.
Yeah, I'd buy that. The song whips It does. I Was Made for Loving You by Kiss is also a pretty good example of that.
For some reason, maybe it's the Casablanca Records thing. Kiss glam glam disco feels very I don't know, I'm gonna get in trouble with the Kiss army, but that doesn't feel like a huge jump to me.
I love miss You. I love that whole some girls, I love that whole record. Man, it's so not an interesting opinion, but it's so good. I just love the way his vocal delivery on that album is hilarious and one of the all time like Mick Jagger isms, like we can come around around twelve with some poor Rican girls.
It's just d D meet you, and then Shattered when he does like the like yo, yeah, Denny Harry gets all these for being like the most awkward white person to try rap in the late seventies, but Shattered is such dogs. Yeah, there's the line where he goes it's my favorite because it's like the simultaneously the most fay and like offbeat thing that he's ever sung, which it's
during his like this town's been We're in tatters. Its shattered, No, but there's one Yeah, We've got Rats on the West Side, bed Bugs Uptown tremendous.
I saw for the first time after spending like two years of my life working on a podcast about the Rolling Stones on tour. I saw The Stones for the first time this summer. Oh yeah, zero expectation whatsoever. I'm not a huge Stones fan. It was one of the most incredible shows I've ever seen.
Yeah, dude, it's great when they have black people in a rhythm section. I mean, seriously, there's a reason, you know, Keith didn't keep Charlie or Bill when he started making you know, expensive Windos records. That Steve Jordan, that's the guy who's still touring with them, right, Yeah, yeah, that that relationship goes back a long time. Darryl Jones bass player, Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah. When they when they Jettis into their most a rhythmic square figures, of course they got good.
They only had one of the greatest frontmen of all time and like the coolest man ever to live on rhythm guitar and Ron Wood. I do love Ronwood. Actually, you know that his his guitar work on their guitar work on Beast of Bird, I mean Beast of Bird all time, perfect.
Songs on of my favorite songs.
But their guitar interplay on that is so cool. I mean they Ron Wood is really I think an undersold guitar hero. It's like he's truly he First of all, his hands are crazy, like if you've ever tried to play any of that faces, like the pinky stretches he does for like the boogie rhythms are nuts. But yeah, he's just like telepathic when he's playing with people. He just has that like sixth sense of like I know what you're doing before you do it, and my hands
will find something to do. That is cool. To add to that, and a great painter, I hear.
Yeah, great painter. Yeah.
Are we talking about now?
We got to talk about speaking of the dance floor. We got to talk about the YMCA dance you know, Yeah, we sure do, man, we gotta do the thing.
We gotta do it.
In April nineteen seventy nine, The Village People became the first disco act to launch an arenatour, beating the Beg's by two months. They were splashed on the cover of Rolling Stone and also made several TV appearances on The MERV Griffin Show and most crucially for our Purposes, American Bandstand, Dick Clark's American Bandstam. The latter program would become crucial to their legacy because it was here that the infamous YMCA dance was born.
Was Dick Clark like fifty at this point, probably in his forties?
Actually yeah, wait a minute, yeah, yeah, he was about the turn fifty, That forty nine year old.
Dick Clark staring down the barrel of like five strapping gay archetypes, just thinking what did I get myself into all those years ago? Just smile and non smile and non.
Surprisingly, the Village People didn't come up with their iconic YMCA dance. Instead, it was a spontaneous invention by the TV audience. The day was January sixth, nineteen seventy nine, when the Village People made their broadcast on Bandstand, and, as Randy Jones the Cowboy would recall in the spin Oral History of YMCA, the audience at this particular taping was a bunch of kids bust in from a cheerleader camp.
The first time we got to the chorus, we were clapping with our hands above our heads, and the kids thought it looked like we were making a y, so they automatically did the letters. Host Dick Clark was extremely impressed, and when the performance was over, he asked the producers to play the song again so the band could observe the audience in action, and as they watched, Clark asked singer Victor Willis, you guys think you can work that in your routine, and Victor Willis said, well, I guess
we're gonna have to. And you know what d and what he did. It's actually really funny how underwhelmed the band were upon first seeing what, in truth really only loosely qualifies as a dance.
Yeah, it's like it's like semaphore figure, like signaling it's not okay whatever.
No, I watched this American bands then clip on YouTube, and it's so funny because they just seem not impressed at all.
You guys are making letters. Who cares? Yeah, no, they really don't care. It was like the era when like Tony Basil or Tony Basil was like yeah doing mainstream, about to start doing video choreography and was like hanging out with the original break dancers in New York. So I'm sure these guys are like cool. You know, I've seen people spin on their heads, but cool letter shapes you're making with your hands.
David Hodo, the construction worker, it's told spin in two thousand and eight. When I saw the movements, I thought, wow, that is so stupid that everyone in America sent are doing. And I thought, wow, that is so brilliant. It took on a life of its own. The next thing we know, Hedeki Jaiko has a number one hit in Japan with his version of YMCA, and we hit number two in the US. That's how it always works. Saijo claimed he invented the dance, but as soon as we got to Japan, we straightened him out.
Menacing five three Japanese guy who doesn't speak very much English, suddenly confronted by towering, ripped gay archetypes like purposely striding down a tokyo. Streated him just as a heart attack, and.
Here heigel, this will interest you.
On December thirty first, two thousand and eight, the Guinness Book of World Records certified the Village People's performance at the Sun Bowl halftime show in El Paso as the largest YMCA dance ever, with forty thousand, one hundred and forty eight fans doing the move well.
I'm glad we got that over with. Yes all right, And as mentioned as has become a common trope on this show, this is where behind the music backing takes that takes that major third down apstep. Not long after the world beating success of YMCA, everything started to crumble for the Village People. Lead singer Victor Willis quit in the fall of nineteen seventy nine, supposedly upset that he was just a salaried hired hand from a rally. This move would have major legal ramifications and used to come
as we'll see. He was replaced by Ray Simpson, brother of Valerie Simpson of the famed musical duo Ashford and Simpson. This departure came mere days before shooting the band's movie Can't Stop the Music, belying the title. This ultimately wound up being a good move because the film has garnered a reputation as one of the biggest box office flops
in history. As we have talked about on the Grease episode, it was co written and co produced by Alan Carr, a man behind Greece who was notoriously one of the cokeiest men. In a very coked up age, he described his vision for the film as Singing in the Rain for the Disco Crowd okay Man. Can't Stop the Music was intended to be a loose biopic of the band, with an americanized Jacques Moraley Jack Morrell being played by
young Steve Gutenberg. Caitlyn Jenner is also in it. It's very weird and here we go, William Freakin moment, I'm gonna start doing that like your Beatles. Things just work in random anecdotes from Yea of William Freakin being either weird apple or a genius, or hopefully all three at
one time. Shooting of Can't Stop the Music in New York was disrupted by gay protesters who actually mistook it for the shoot for William Freakin's Cruising, which, as you will remember, is a film that depicts the leather subculture, particularly that of one bar who denied them the right to shoot there. So Friedkin went out of his way to literally steal every aspect of that bar and recreate it in a different gay bar. Hilarious. But that wasn't
even the only production issue they faced. The movie was originally titled Disco Land Where the Music Never Ends. This title was changed after the public opinion of disco started to take a nose the dawn of the eighties, memorialized in every Hacky Montage VH one, CNN, you know the usual suspects, with footage of disco demolition night at Chicago's Kminsky Park. For those of you privileged enough to have not seen this, they just threw a bunch of records in a big pile in the middle of the park
and a shock DJ drove a steamroller over it. Somebody blew something up, and that kind of thing used to matter. You know, you could just change the entire music industry off of a slovenly Chicago guy in a ballpark doing something insane an insane period in the most insane country. But the title revamp failed to pull people into theaters, and the film recouped only two million of its twenty
million budget twenty million in nineteen seventy nine. Money. Yeah, holy, that's either like the largest that's like the largest embezzlement fraud in history has to be. Yeah, that's that's nine one million today. Yeah, man, that must have been a lot of coke. Adding to its historic pedigree, Can't Stop the Music also became the first film to win a Golden Raspberry Award. The Village People's reputation took a hit
following this venture, and the group started to splinter. Randy Jones resigned, only to be replaced with another faux cowboy. The group then attempted to distance themselves from disco by taking out full page ads and the music trades to showcase their new glam rock look about ten years too Late Yep, and tease a new album which would become
nineteen eighty one's Renaissance. It would prove not to be the titular rebirth for the band, and this new sound was quickly dumped, and by nineteen eighty five, the Village People had decided to part ways. Since they were, as previously noted, salaried players, they reportedly all got normal jobs, though sadly not still in cost to just a tremendous image to like you know. One of them work in the Kim's video as like a short shorts butch.
Cop a call center.
Yeah. Glenn Hughes, the the Leather Biker Daddy worked in a camera store. Construction worker. David Hodo worked as a bartender. Alex in the Navy Guy related to the nine to eleven Guy was working at an office, and Philippe Rose, the allegedly part Lakota Native American Guy, was working as a secretary. Victor Willis recorded a solo album in nineteen seventy nine that went unreleased until twenty fifteen. Wild The band ultimately reformed in nineteen eighty seven as a legacy act,
hitting the oldies and bar Mitzvah circuit. One of the sources interviewed in spins oral History of Ymca is Roger Bennett, co author of the book bar Mitzvah Disco, in which he offers this choice line, Ymca is the single most
important song to hit the Jewish religion since Haffnagila. This is because of its popularity at bar Mitzvah's obviously, sadly, the man behind all of it, Jacques Morelli, became one of the victims of the AIDS epidemic when he died in nineteen ninety one as what was described in Goldmine Magazine as a bit and ailing recluse at the age
of forty four. There's a great expression in Britain, where there's a hit, there's a writ, meaning a legal writ, and that is indeed the case for ymca case, get it, That's all Jordan Baby, although in this situation it is somewhat justified. Victor Willis, the lead singer of the Village People. During their glory days, co wrote over thirty of their songs, including It's Like in the Navy, Macho Man, Milkshake, the Other One, San Francisco, I've already forgotten the parenthetical, and
Go West. But as a salaried contractor, he'd essentially signed away his rights as a writer for hire by the music publishing company. It was a bad and sadly all too common rookie move in the music industry, but he ultimately got the rights to these songs back after winning a landmark ruling from a court in twenty twelve that allowed artists to reclaim their masters and publishing rights from their record labels and music publishers after thirty five years.
Then a year later, Willis sued for a larger percentage of the songwrits on thirteen hits he'd been entitled to a third, with management Jacques Moraley and his business partner Henry Bilolo a Belulu sharing the rest. Their claim was that they'd written the songs in French and Willis merely translated them into English. Classic line change a word, get a third.
Oh, yeah, you're right.
Willis successfully argued that he was the sole writer for the lyrics, entitling him to fifty percent of the prophets. His ex wife. As we've mentioned, Cosby Show actor Felicia Rashad reportedly testified in court that she witnessed Willis writing these songs at home in What I Cannot Wait to be a moment memorialized in a cheesy biopic Ryan Murphy, Yeah, American, No, I wouldn't to be fully po faced and serious, get like Christopher Nolan to do it, but still have all
that cliche both from Bohemian Rhapsody. Like he's like, they're like watching the news and winding with a drink, and they're like they see like a navy recruitment and he's like, wait a minute, in the they want seamen, whips out a notebook, furiously starts writing Felicia Whippan to Felicia, what's going on. She's alarmed at first what's going on? But she doesn't realize that inspiration had struck at that exact moment.
Then we tastefully fade into a montage of them in the studio recording, and then that tastefully transitions into a third scene of them performing a live preferably at Live Aid. If this didn't happen, we lie because none of this matters anymore. This movie will make one billion dollars. It probably would anyway, presumably with his massive financial windfall from the song royalties. Willis obtained the rights to the Village People name in twenty seventeen and assembled a group that
has been touring intermittently ever since. He has proven to be a loyal steward to the song. When the YMCA rebranded into The Y in the twenty tens, Willis swiftly issued a statement in forming fans this change would not impact the song or the days decisive leadership, leadership we
truly need more of in this country. YMCA has of course been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and yes, the Library of Congress, in a class that included Doctor Dre's debut album, The Chronic, Whitney Houston's version of I Will Always Love You, the original Broadway cast recording of Fiddler on the Roof, Dusty Springfield's landmark album Dusty and Memphis, and Witchit Alignment by Glenn Campbell. Truly, that's a good class, truly an astounding cross section of American music there. I
guess British if you're Dusty Springfield. But she was couseplaying as an American, so we count.
That in Memphis.
Yes, and you know another queer icon man. I'd love to bring up the fact very much Dusty Springfield was in a relationship with Norman Tanega, who is the woman who wrote the novelty hit walk in My Cat Named Dog and more recently in like the past decade and change the theme song for what We Do in the Shadows, which is called Your You're Dead.
I had a dream of writing a Dusty Springfield biopic script. Yeah, to try to pitch to Adele. I didn't do that, did none of that.
It's like me with my CIA Acid LSD pitch.
Yeah, we gotta do that. Though.
Since nineteen ninety six, YMC has played at Yankee Stadium. When the ground's crew dredges the infield in the fifth inning, what a rich pedestrian task of menial labor to immortalize with that song. The crew stops to perform the arm gestures at the appropriate time as the crowd follows a long America's pastime field of dreams, say it ain't so Joe, etc.
This is just torture. YMCA has played in outer space in two thousands, a wake up song for astronauts on day eleven of the Space Shuttle Aquarius's visit to the International Space Station, well after the novelty of being in space wore the off. He's also used by Donald Trump to close out many of his rallies in the twenty twenty campaign trail, doing a sort of he rhythmic arms lowered swaying that I just find pulsively hypnotic. Yeah, yeah, like a bird of paradise if they were just a
dumpy dump. Initially, Victor Willis was quite fine with this, more or less saying that it was good for business, and then he reversed course following the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of twenty twenty and demanded that Trump stop, though like a true businessman, he later softened his stance. The song was played over loud speakers as Donald Trump boarded Air Force One on January twenty, twenty twenty one, as he departed Washington. Prior to the inauguration
of Joe Biden. Nothing remarkable has happened since.
Well, I think we finally run out of things to say about YMCA, But I'd like to end by humoring the group's stubborn insistence that this song is opened to multiple interpretations. As David Hodo says that the close of Spin's incredible oral history, the real genius of YMCA is that it can be taken anyway you want. Phrasing right, Yeah, that phrase I didn't occur to me until left I said it aloud. We were once on a TV show in England and the hostess said, now, this is a
gay song, isn't it? And I said, no, Actually, it's a Christian song the Young Men's Christian Association. I mean, honey, isn't it obvious? I mean, I think his tongue is firmly in cheek there.
I want him to say it like Dean Martin would have, like almost in a racist way.
Oh honey, honey, like like.
Elvis in a racial Elvis way. I mean, honey, isn't it all ViOS? Oh? Ice, cubes clinking and glass.
My personal favorite reading of the song is from a twenty sixteen piece in Vice by Josh Baines called, appropriately enough, Hey everyone in Rodney Dangerfield voice.
Hey everyone, we're all going to get laid. Yeah, hey everyone.
YMCA by the Village People is actually really really good. That's the headline. Of course, this was for I like to quote it. Now think about it. YMCA is an unbridled ode to masculine support networks. Young man, there's no need to feel down, I said, young man, pick yourself up off the ground. They sing with utmost force and feeling.
It's that direct young man that gets me. We've all been the skin and miserable young man they're addressing, and when you're that young man, it's hard to ask for help.
The Village People know that.
They understand that, because they understand that, they're going to offer you a helping hand. There's nothing they want and returned but your company, because they know all you really want is company.
That's stupid, and I'm going to offer the chance to actually rebutt that with an even stupider music critic cliche, and that is YMCA exemplifies the PMA, the positive mental attitude closely associated with the New York hardcore movement via the DC band Bad Brains, who had read the treatise Think and Grow Rich authored in nineteen thirty seven by Napoleon Hill. This book cause its that a man's mind is like a garden and that what you plant in
there will grow. And so the attitude of having a can do positive mental attitude became a rallying cry for
the band, best exemplified in the song PMA Now. There are a number of bands from the New York City hardcore tradition, because, as you will know, Jordan, although forming in DC, Bad Brains, did come to New York to perform at the legendary Venue two A and also cbgbi's and they influenced a lot of hardcore people there, most notably the Cromax founded by criminal Harley Flanagan and guy who was super into being Harry Krishna and still Is
and vegan John Joseph. That band itself was later famous for an altercation in which Harley Flanagan broke into a Cromax show and bit and or stabbed John Joseph. That
was not PMA. Turnstile, a hardcore band of the moment, recently repurposed Sylvester Slice to loans thank you for letting Me be myself into a PMA aligned message, So people please be on the lookout for my new article will be coming out it maybe Pitchfork or Who Gives a Shit really medium, maybe called y Ymca is actually a proto hardcore punk song and you should love it, or something by me.
How's that for a bit of non toxic masculinity.
This has been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan Runtalg. We'll catch you next time. Woo. Too much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog.
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.
The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Runtalk and Alex High, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review.
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