I am not a huge fan of the disco music but admit to liking a few tracks in that otherwise-despised (by me, at least) genre. So this week is all boogie, all the time, starting with today’s classic disco song of the day, “Boogie Nights” by Heatwave. This well-produced track was released in 1977 and rose to #2 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and Cash Box Top 100—even though it only hit #36 on the Billboard’s then-relatively new Disco Action chart.
“Boogie Nights” really isn’t your typical disco number. It starts out with a straight ahead jazz intro with layered vocals before it slides into a bass-heavy funk groove. It also features some neat vocal bits, including the “Got to keep on dancing” line in the bass. Some very cool layered vocals all around, stacked on top of that infectious beat. It’s not a bad track.
Heatwave was a British funk-disco group and “Boogie Nights” was written by the group’s keyboardist, Rod Templeton. The band formed in 1975, had a few hits (“Boogie Nights,” “Always and Forever,” “The Groove Line”), and broke up in 1983.
Interestingly, the song “Boogie Nights” was not used in the movie Boogie Nights, which debuted in theaters two decades later. The story goes that Heatwave’s lead singer, Johnny Wilder Jr., was a born-again Christian who was offended that the movie, a true classic in its own way, was all about the pornographic film industry in the 1970s. So we didn’t get to hear “Boogie Nights” in Boogie Nights, which would have been worth the price of a ticket.
Here’s a bit of trivia. You know what song kept “Boogie Nights” from the number-one slot here in the U.S.? It was the least disco-ish song of all time—Debby Boone’s deplorably white bread single, “You Light Up My Life.” It’s hard to imagine two songs so different sitting right next to each other on the charts at the same time, but that was the ’70s for you.
