ARTS IN AMERICA; Here's to Disco, It Never Could Say Goodbye

Rock musicians of the 1970's and their fans loathed disco music: they said the music was gimmicky, banal and predictable.

By 1979, when disco had become an industry generating $4 billion annually and there were an estimated 15,000 discothèques in the nation, a backlash was inevitable. It was symbolized by the reaction of thousands of rock fans who held an anti-disco rally at a baseball game at Comiskey Park in Chicago and set fire to an estimated 10,000 disco records.

''Mainstream rock 'n' roll music tells us disco was a waste, a low mark in American music history in the last 30 years,'' said Robert Santelli, director and chief executive of the Experience Music Project here, a multicolored and swooping museum designed by Frank Gehry that is devoted to rock.

Perhaps it was as inevitable as the backlash, but now playing at Mr. Santelli's museum is disco, the revisionist theory.

''Disco has not gotten true credit,'' said Mr. Santelli, 50, an author of several books on rock and the blues, who in the 70's listened to Bruce Springsteen in Jersey City. ''There's a great value in understanding the history of disco because it teaches us what America was about in the 70's,'' he said.

The result is what is believed to be the first serious exhibition of the glittery phenomenon and its continuing impact on music from pop icons like Madonna and Michael Jackson, to teeny-bopper stars like Christina Aguilera and the band 'N Sync to the Latin pop of Ricky Martin, and even to the shores of hip-hop.

Called ''Disco: A Decade of Saturday Nights,'' the exhibition, which runs until May 26, explores the pop phenomenon that began in the New York underground party scene of the early 1970's, influenced by black and gay urban culture. By the early 1980's disco had exhausted itself: disco clubs like the cocaine-drenched Studio 54 in New York were stamped by an exclusivity that left a sour aftertaste, and the music was so oversold that it attracted the most unlikely singers.

Yes, there was Donny Osmond. But the most improbable one was Ethel Merman bellowing ''There's No Business Like Show Business'' to a disco beat. (You can hear this recording, which she made for her 1979 disco album, at the exhibition.)

''Disco was about escapism, but it became inescapable,'' said Barry Walters, a senior music critic at Rolling Stone and one of the curators of the show. '' In some ways it defeated its own purposes.''

It was to many rock fans terrible music. Musicians and critics said that the form was a pointed contrast to the works of diverse performer-songwriters of the 60's and 70's like Jimi Hendrix, with his showmanship and virtuosic guitar playing, as well as Bob Dylan, Mr. Springsteen and others. Their works helped redefine popular music with songs rooted in the blues that were alternately poetic, confessional and political. By contrast disco was about dancing and, to some degree, about sexual liberation.

AIDS helped kill disco. Frank Crapanzano, 68, a onetime guidance counselor in the South Bronx who donated photographs, clothes and videotapes of the era to the museum show, returned to New York after the show opened on Nov. 23. ''I wanted to call all my old friends about this wonderful show,'' said Mr. Crapanzano, a habitué of Studio 54 and other clubs who with his companion invented the campy ''beanie boys'' style with their crocheted hats. ''There was no one to call. I didn't know anybody from the old days who was alive.''

Mr. Santelli said that earlier this year, as the museum staff was exploring musical periods that had been ignored for possible shows, Eric Weisbard, senior program manager of the Experience Music Project's education department, received a phone call from a friend, Vince Aletti, a journalist and record company executive who wrote the first article about disco in Rolling Stone in September 1973. He was seeking a repository for his substantial collection of disco memorabilia (including an opening-night invitation to Studio 54) and records.

Mr. Weisbard, one of the show's creators, said he believed that disco probably began on Valentine's Day 1970, when a New York D.J., David Mancuso, opened his loft on lower Broadway for a party that was called ''Love Saves the Day,'' or ''LSD.'' Mr. Mancuso set up a sound system that played music continually for hours, without records being changed one at a time as was the custom, and he sold tickets. Soon dance clubs began proliferating, and not just in New York.

The basic gay influence on disco was always apparent (Mr. Weisbard said it was illegal until the 1960's in New York for men to dance together), but, he said, there was always a clear racial element. In the 1960's, he added, the counterculture listened to a blend of white and black music. By the 1970's, Mr. Weisbard said, this racial mix was becoming undone.

''Rock got white and whiter at the same time that disco was emerging,'' he said. Popular rock groups like Led Zeppelin and the Eagles were heard on FM radio. Disco emerged mostly on AM stations, which played black and Latino music.

''Most rock singers were white men, while the classic disco singer was a black diva,'' Mr. Weisbard added. ''Things happened in opposition to each other. FM became classically rock, almost exclusively white. It was about as segregated a form of popular music as we've ever had. Disco was exactly the opposite case.''

To the curators of the show the racial as well as sexual component of disco was an unspoken and inescapable issue that bothered some rock 'n' rollers. ''Unlike rock music, whose ideal audience is teenage white male, disco brought together young and old, black and white, gay and straight,'' said Mr. Walters, the Rolling Stone critic. ''It didn't follow any rules other than it had to be danceable. A lot of it was driven by sexual liberation, including the availability of the pill.

''Some people were threatened because it had a different sensibility,'' he added. ''I'm not saying disco had a black sensibility or a gay sensibility or a female sensibility. But it didn't have a straight-white-male sensibility. And that bothered a lot of people.''

Another curator at the show, Ann Powers, a former pop-music reviewer at The New York Times and now senior curator at the museum, said that the notion that discos were snobbish, allowing only trendy people or celebrities in, and that they had class overtones was wrong. ''There's this false dichotomy: rock is the music of the people and disco is bourgeois,'' Ms. Powers said. ''In fact rock was basically about star performers playing to an adoring audience. In disco the audience was as much the center of attention as anything, and all class barriers broke down. It welcomed everyone, from kids to elderly people who danced at senior-citizen centers.''

''There was a conscious shaping of this idea that disco was antipopulist by the rock establishment, which is totally false,'' said Ms. Powers, who is married to Mr. Weisbard.

The exhibition involves candid photographs of the hothouse environment of the disco scene, memorabilia and film clips of early New York clubs like the Gallery and the Flamingo as well as the music of disco divas like Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor and Patti LaBelle. John Travolta's white suit from ''Saturday Night Fever,'' the classic 1977 film about a working-class Brooklyn youth who finds self-worth on the disco floor, is among the fashions on display. The film, with its soundtrack by the Bee Gees, embedded disco into the nation's culture.

Several veterans of the disco scene contributed memorabilia to the museum show. Nicky Siano, who put together the throbbing soundtrack for the exhibition and was a pioneer disc jockey in early New York clubs like the Gallery as well as Studio 54, said that hard-drug use at the start of the disco scene in the early 70's was not pervasive but grew at the decade's close. ''By the end, people were pushing the envelope in everything they did,'' he said. ''And it became about greed.'' (The owners of Studio 54, Steve Rubell, who died in 1989, and Ian Schrager, the hotel owner, served 13 months in prison after being indicted in 1979 on federal income tax charges involving more than $2.5 million skimmed from club receipts over three years.)

The exhibition itself is only yards away from the museum's permanent collection of Hendrix artifacts, guitars and memorabilia. The founder of the museum, Paul G. Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, is an aficionado of the Seattle-born Hendrix, who died in September 1970 at age 27.

Disco's lingering effect is certainly no less than Hendrix's. ''Disco is all over the popular music of the 1990's, and internationally it never went away,'' Ms. Powers said. She pointed to stars like Kylie Minogue, who is Australian; the Vengaboys from Spain; and the Swedish group Alcazar, whose hit last year was called ''Crying at the Discothèque.''

And at the start of hip-hop in the Bronx in the late 1970's, the early D.J.'s came out of disco. ''Hip-hop basically evolved from disco,'' Ms. Powers said.

The music of Gloria Gaynor and Donna Summer is heard everywhere. ''Talk about mainstream -- have you ever gone dancing at a wedding or bar mitzvah where you didn't hear Gloria Gaynor sing 'I Will Surive' ?'' asked David Noh, who was a busboy at Studio 54 and contributed a jumpsuit he wore as a customer and other items to the museum show. ''Disco music has never really stopped.''