Vince Degiorgio

Gerd Janson

So when one looks at your biography it is really difficult where to pick a point where to start. It is like almost the history of dance music in the last – where are we, 2007? – in the last more than 30 years. Maybe you could just start at the start?

Vince DeGiorgio

OK. In the beginning, actually I started DJing when I was 13 years old and my mixer had no headphone jack, no controls. You had two RTA jacks in the back and if you wanted to try mixing, you’d put your head down near the turntable and you’d try and hear where the breaks were. Which actually served me very well later in my career because you’d be talking to someone in your booth and you’d lose your place and you’d know exactly where the break was so you could just mix right into it. I started working in record retail around the same time. My father had an incredible record collection so all the inspiration I have being in the business comes from him.

Gerd Janson

What kind of stuff was in your father’s collection?

Vince DeGiorgio

Oh, you name it. Everything, including opera. I can remember “Love in C-Minor” by Cerrone coming out, “Love To Love You Baby,” and obviously those records were pretty edgy in their time, and him defending my taste in music against my sisters who just weren’t into it at all. There’s everything in his collection from Nat King Cole to Johnny Mathis to the USA/European connection, Cerrone, Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, you name it, it’s in there. Actually, this morning I was missing something and I called him, he’s looking for it, he probably has it.

Gerd Janson

So your father is still into music and buying stuff?

Vince DeGiorgio

Yes, and as we go through today’s conversation, I travel a lot, I’ve been on the road for five months this year and I never leave home without a list of things he’s still looking for. You know, 30,000 records later, I’m still out there looking for things for him and looking for things for myself.

Gerd Janson

Let’s get back to where it started. You grew up in Toronto, right?

Vince DeGiorgio

I actually grew up in Brampton, which is a suburb about 25 kilometers outside here and I realized pretty young I just wanted to be a DJ. I was a pretty shy kid and I felt it was a great way to not only share my love for music, but to also get into working. You know, working in the club world where there was so much excitement going on because it’s the middle of the ’70s and everything was in this evolutionary stage almost as it is right now.

Gerd Janson

Do you remember the first time you set foot in a club?

Vince DeGiorgio

Yes. I went to a club in Toronto and I was 17 years old. The legal age was 21 at the time and I remember I went to the Katuba disco, which is at Eglinton and Mount Pleasant, which is just about 15 minutes’ drive from here, in a hotel because at that time hotel discos were all the rage. And I managed to sneak in and I met the DJ at a store and I went inside and the first record I danced to was “From East To West” by Voyage and the girl I danced with ended up being the lead singer of Tapps, which is a group I ended up developing ten years later.

Gerd Janson

And Voyage was a French group, right?

Vince DeGiorgio

Yes, it was produced by a guy named Roger Tokarz, who is the pre-eminent disco/house producer in probably most of Europe, and he used some of the greatest session musicians in France, like Slim Pezin and Marc Chantereau and Alain Dahan. And they went on an incredible string of records, first doing “From East to West” with the Cerrone trio of Sue Glover, Sunny Leslie and Kay Garner doing vocals and then they discovered a 19 year old girl named Sylvia Mason-James from England, who ended up singing on “Souvenirs” and “Let’s Fly Away” and subsequently did a solo album with them on Carrere in France.

Gerd Janson:

Could you describe the setting in a disco back then a bit? You just mentioned that you were dancing with a girl, so people actually danced with each other back then?

Vince DeGiorgio

Yeah, I mean, I was probably the worst hustle dancer in the history of modern mankind, which is probably one of the reasons I was drawn to the after-hours clubs where you didn’t have to dance with anybody. You just got on the floor, threw your hands in the air and went crazy. But there was a lot of people practicing moves that they saw on television. There was disco television shows on NBC and CTV and they would read magazines, for example. It was very glittery. You’d have track lighting that would basically just blink on and off. It was wonderful and it was kitschy and today it would be incredibly cheesy. But I think if we were all there today, we would probably be up and dancing as well.

Gerd Janson

And it was all still pre-John Travolta, right?

Vince DeGiorgio

Yeah, thank God. Saturday Night Fever was a blessing and a curse in many ways. It really doesn’t tell the true story of it from everyone’s perspective and the disco scene wasn’t one sector of people in those days. Our disco composition was comprised of Italians, Greeks, people of color, people who did everything but listen to rock & roll. Lucy Martin of Chic, who sang so many great records with them, was quoted once as saying, “Disco has no color!” And in Toronto, having over 150 different nationalities living in it, it was absolutely true at that time. It didn’t matter who you were or where you were from. If you got in you owned the world and I think that’s what drew me to it.

Gerd Janson

And how hard was it to get in?

Vince DeGiorgio

It’s funny. I guess it was difficult in some ways, but there’s the running joke that in Los Angeles, if you put a velvet rope in front of a sewer, people will spend $25 to walk over it. But I think back in those days it wasn’t super difficult until the boom really hit. At that time it was just a place to go and listen to music and go dancing and buy a couple of drinks and hope you meet somebody. I think the getting into the clubs wasn’t really that difficult until the clubs reached a certain level, where they made you wait and they picked and choosed. But the velvet rope thing wasn’t really crazy in ’76 or ’77.

Gerd Janson

And what were the great clubs in Toronto then? You mentioned hotel discos, were they any different to normal discos?

Vince DeGiorgio:

Well, yeah because I think back then clubs were open from 9 PM until 1 AM. Toronto has always had this medieval problem of how long they are allowing people to drink.

Gerd Janson

They extended it to 2 o’clock.

Vince DeGiorgio

It’s a miracle or something. But I didn’t think I could express myself in those clubs so I always withdrew myself to the after-hours clubs. The big clubs in the day, the big disco bars, were like Hotspurs, which was the first club to have a live-to-air broadcast on a radio station, which was really huge here. It wasn’t like Montreal where it’s been a tradition since the mid-’70s. The Hippopotamus club, Rooney’s. Actually, Rooney’s was the place that had the live-to-air, the Port of Call, which is a place that I ended up working in, or just called “the Port,” and they had Scandals downstairs so you did your apprenticeship downstairs before you got to the big room upstairs. But there were a number of amazing gay clubs that really started things, like the Quest and the 511 and Steps and Stages. Stages was probably the granddaddy of them all when it was at its peak. There are so many of them that are innumerable to mention but that’s a big part of that time.

Gerd Janson

And you mention Montreal, so were there local differences between Toronto and Montreal?

Vince DeGiorgio

Oh, completely. The Montreal DJs in my opinion are probably the greatest that ever played. Guys like Robert Ouimet and George Cucuzzella from Unidisc, who was actually the first DJ at the Lime Light, and you could almost say that George was probably one of the first real superstar DJs.

Gerd Janson

The Lime Light was a club in Montreal.

Vince DeGiorgio

Yes, it was. The Lime Light and the 12:34, and when the Toronto DJs could get a day off because there wasn’t any of this residency stuff back then. Basically you worked six nights a week and if you missed a day, if it was a Tuesday you might come back and you’d been fired. It’s not about doing a seven-hour extended set like I’m seeing Danny Howells do, coming over from England, it was more about I had to do that every night. So the guys in Montreal, musically, I think the best word would be they had a certain continentalism, they had a certain je ne sais qua about the way they played their music. It was really different. And their mixing style, I’ve always said a bar DJ playing from nine to one out in a place way out in the suburbs was probably three times better than a DJ who was getting all the press in the US or internationally because they had incredible technique and a wonderful flair for their music and they drowned in it, they loved it in a way I have never seen.

Gerd Janson

Not even in New York?

Vince DeGiorgio

No. I think the great New York DJs, the really great ones, you can probably name and I just don’t think it’s all about one city. This was a party that everyone was invited to. And having to live, especially in Canada because you have a 900-pound gorilla with America being so much bigger right next to you, we just had a different perspective of it and we were feeding that market like crazy because some of the music coming through Canada was very difficult to get in the States unless they imported it from us.

Gerd Janson

So how would you describe that different perspective then compared to New York on a music point of view?

Vince DeGiorgio

I think that the American DJs, a lot of them in the beginning were playing a lot of records that were made in the USA. And to spice up their programs they wanted to get different things, like “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango in the early ’70s was one of the first imports to come from France. Also, “Jungle Fever” by the Chakachas and this one goes back to 1971, ’72 and ’73. But we had things that were causing nightmares for record labels, things like Crystal Grass and “Le Souffle Du Vent,” crazy obscure singles that would never be released in America because they could never get radio play. But in Canada, we were a lot smaller so we were able to end up feeding them a lot of things from South Africa and from Italy and from France and from Canada, of course. And we Canadians helped make it a global business because we weren’t only feeding them international music they couldn’t acquire, we were also feeding them Canadian music that changed the landscape. It didn’t feel boring. And if they released our records or the international records, if they picked them up, they’d also remix them because a big problem back then was the import. If a lot of the DJs are playing the import, you have to give them a reason to keep playing it. Like “Moon-Boots,” we were just playing a little bit earlier, when it came out as a 45 on Ariola, everyone was playing the 45, but when Tom Moulton remixed it – Tom Moulton, the greatest remixer of all time – he is a person who just loved music so much that when he remixed things was reinventing things, and that’s what you had to do back then. You couldn’t be boring back then because there was someone else out there staring at you trying to take your job. If you’re a DJ that’s for sure.

Gerd Janson

Maybe we could have a listen to some of the Canadian stuff?

Vince DeGiorgio

I’m going to play a little piece of the first 12" single that I ever bought, which is called “Fighting on the Side of Love.” This record was one of the few that combined people in Toronto and people in Montreal working together. Ian Guenther and Willie Morrison were two Toronto based producers who ended up producing Grand Tour, Sticky Fingers and THP Orchestra. This THP Orchestra record was actually the first one that they did and I sold a collection of baseball cards to become a DJ to afford to buy records. So this was the first 12" I bought, this is called “Fighting on the Side of Love” and they are accompanied, I think, by Michel Dayge and Dominic Secente of Montreal who ended up producing Alma Fay Brooks.

(music: THP Orchestra – “Fighting on the Side of Love” / applause)

It’s funny when I listen back to this because I also keep remembering how difficult it was to mix in and out of. But the great thing about it is that every music business has a beginning and he had a much bigger hit with a song called “Something’s Up” as well, and some of the records that ended up getting made by that production team are legendary and have been sampled over and over as well.

Gerd Janson

Maybe in comparison to that we could listen to something by the Bombers?

Vince DeGiorgio

That was the beginning of your discussion of the Toronto disco style. Montreal, as I mention, I’ve paid a lot of homage to it so far. They were definitely ahead of us. One of the things, of course, in that period was that a lot of songs ended up getting covered, and one of the biggest records in the foundation of the disco movement was a song called “The Mexican” by Babe Ruth, which was a rock band that recorded for Harvest in the early ’70s. This song ended up getting covered by Jellybean on his EMI WotUpski! EP that he ended up doing in the early ’80s. But long before that, Pat Deserio, who is one of the architects of the Montreal disco scene and George Lagios as well, great producer, did a cover version of “The Mexican” and this was mixed by Paul Poulos who was a DJ from the US. [plays record at wrong speed] I did that on purpose.

(music: The Bombers – “The Mexican” / applause)

Gerd Janson

So did you know that the original by Babe Ruth was also very influential for the – as Mr. [Jeff] Mao maybe can testify – was also very influential in New York with the first hip-hop guys?

Vince DeGiorgio

It wouldn’t surprise me.

Gerd Janson

But it was nothing that you in Toronto or Montreal or so noticed, coming up in New York?

Vince DeGiorgio

You know, it’s funny, when we would hear that information. Sometimes the fact that it was something that was developing or evolving, the press would only really give it to us when it hit a certain mark. The Village Voice wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to get back in the day and Billboard, or the major music magazines, were really covering things that were selling rather than things that were developing. And it was probably something that The New York Times would cover as a neighborhood story.

And I did want to mention one other thing before we move on. Back in the day there were a number of different kinds of clubs in the Toronto area. A couple of the really interesting ones like RV had a membership plan, where I think I worked there on Mondays, even though it was dead because I was trying to hone my skills, and a lot of us started working at the A-level clubs on the nights when there was nobody there. And to me, the best DJ in the world is the one who will play with the same kind of passion and intensity on a dead night than they can on a night when the club’s full. So whether I was working there, or in Heaven, or another of the big clubs, I always remembered that.

Gerd Janson

Speaking of that, when you have this night job that was actually a day job because you had to do it every day, how did you keep yourself motivated, playing music every night, the same records, trying to change it, or...? How did you do that?

Vince DeGiorgio

I actually didn’t sleep much in those days. My thing was that I’d be there from Tuesday to Sunday. I would have Mondays off, and I would work five days a week at a record store, which was, say, from where these chairs are to us. About maybe 150 square feet called Disco Sound Of Canada, which was maybe two blocks north of us on Young Street. I got in there by accident. I had looked for the store forever. I went and I worked there from 11 o’clock to 7 o’clock and then I would go home. I would have what I called a disco nap from 7:30 until 9, I would eat something that was really bad for me and then I would go to work at 11 PM and I would play until 4 o’clock in the morning, Tuesday to Thursday. And then on Saturdays until everybody left, which was usually about 7 in the morning. Then we’d all go to Franz and have breakfast between 7 and 9 o’clock and then we’d go home, go to sleep and I’d be up in three hours and be back at the store.

It was a life that I would never trade for anything because at any given time anything could come in, and when the new records came in our store was completely full. And I’m saying 25 A-level DJs trying to get ten copies of the record. Like the day “Disco Inferno” came to Canada and it was never anywhere and Tom Moulton actually went down to Record Haven, which was a huge exporter in New York and put one copy on it for Peter Frost, my late colleague, and we just stood there and we didn’t know what to do. And that happened every day. The first day that Santa Esmeralda came in, the first day that Patrick Juvet invaded North America as an import from France, the first day that Isaac Hayes’ “Disco Connection” came into the store, which was a song you could re-sell to people all the time because they liked it so much they forgot they already bought it. And the other thing about the store that was incredible was that anybody who was anybody was calling us from all over the world because we had what no one else could find. And we would pick up our phone. So the mail order business was crazy and it had a dog as a mascot. If you didn’t give something to the dog, the dog actually remembered and snarled you out of the store.

It was great to do that and you were talking to people inside the music business and there was this cultural boom that was going on. If you lived in an all-white neighborhood, you met someone of color. If you’d never met anyone from a different country or you’d never met somebody from the United States, or flew in from Amsterdam or someplace, you met them. If you’d never met a gay person in your life, you were going to meet them there. It was this cultural whirlpool. It was like the United Nations on a dancefloor, only it was made of carpet. And the one thing we used to get yelled at was trying to mix between two records because we had no cue headphone between two turntables in the store. So we auditioned and played the records for people and we had Lenco L75 turntables, which were motor driven. They weren’t belt-drives so you had the actual cue and you were just nudging it along because this thing [gesturing at the Technics turnables] was years away from coming. So I remember buying an old Lenco L40 and I said to my dad, “Look, it’s a collector’s item,” and he said, “It’ll be collecting dust in six months.” I don’t think I ever used it.

Gerd Janson

And do you remember the first day in the store when you heard something by Gino Soccio?

Vince DeGiorgio

I’ve got the world’s best Gino Soccio story, actually. Gino was one of those guys, he was a huge influence on me both personally and professionally and the first time I met him was at an Ontario disco pool meeting. The disco pools were a place where all the DJs were members of and they all used to congregate and we all used to go there and we would pay a membership fee and we would get some of the jewels and gems that we are playing today. And Gino kind of took me under his wing and I’d never been to Montreal and I said, “I’d really like to come to Montreal and see you work sometime, it’d be great.” And he goes, “Hey, whenever you’re in town, just give me a call.”

Naturally, I didn’t call before I got there, I just went to Montreal, knocked on his door and said, “Hey, I’m here!” He just looked and shook his head as if to say, “Who is this screwball from Toronto showing up on my doorstep?” He couldn’t have been nicer, he couldn’t have been a better mentor, we went out that night to a private Montreal club with Geraldine Hunt, who wrote “Can’t Beat the Feeling.” She’s from St. Louis originally and did some records for Roulette and moved to Montreal with a touring band, and we partied our faces off and I think I left at about five in the morning. Gino and I had breakfast the next morning and I think I was bitching about some record and he looked at me and he said, “Well, what the hell have you ever done in your career?” And that was the day that my career started.

Gerd Janson

Do you remember the record that you were bitching about?

Vince DeGiorgio

It was either that or a promotion person. The great thing about being a DJ is that you can complain about almost everything. It didn’t have to be anything special, you just had to...

Gerd Janson

Complaining is part of the trade?

Vince DeGiorgio

Oh yeah, whining, bitching, complaining, getting upset about not getting something first. You know, one of my former roommates, Cord McMillan, who was a great, great DJ, played here at the Quest as one of the pre-eminent gay clubs of the city. He was the best. He would get a record from one of the US promotion people, he would automatically chart it at number three or number two on his chart and he would put it in the store where I worked. So everyone was complaining about him all the time because he was obviously posturing that “I have it first.” But he would play the hell out of the record. He would date stamp everything, he was very specific about this stuff. It was things like that. I think I was complaining to Gino about not getting any respect for what I was doing, but the great thing is that when Gino set me straight, he said, “If you want to be a part of the business, you have to be positively passionate. You just can’t scream your head off and bitch about the world because the truth is that we’re all brothers and sisters.” I’m still a DJ today 35 years after I played my first record, and he was trying to teach me that and it’s a great lesson. And that’s why, no matter where I go, I really listen to the guy who’s playing. And if I don’t like the music, I’ll bitch about it as I always used to and as people used to about me. But I think the great thing is that you learned an awful lot about yourself by discovering what other people do and I think that’s what Gino was trying to instill in me and it worked.

Gerd Janson

Before we hear what Gino’s comments led you to, maybe we hear a little bit of Gino’s stuff just to give people an idea.

Vince DeGiorgio

This is actually a sin, I actually have the 12" of “Dancer” in the wrong sleeve. You knew that someone was in your DJ booth when you worked five or six days a week because you’re like, “I didn’t leave that there, that’s not my thumb print.”

(music: Gino Soccio – “Dancer” / applause)

Gerd Janson

It’s different to the THP record, right?

Vince DeGiorgio

I remember when I visited Gino at that time, he had a box that was kind of like some kind of historic sequencer and he was very much into developing new sounds and doing a lot of experimentation and he had done a remarkable thing on “The Visitors,” which is a song that was on his Outline record. And he really continued to be a lot more on the electronic tip, where Willy and Ian were doing a lot more orchestral-based music. And it just depended on what your groove was. I think people took “Dancer” as kind of like a national anthem in many ways because anybody can dance to that record. Some of the disco that was more on the orchestral tip you would expect to dance a different way to it than you did to this. You could just get on and move and it didn’t matter what size you were or where you were.

Gerd Janson

And what kind of groove did you prefer?

Vince DeGiorgio

You know, I was a huge snob and the orchestral stuff that was kind of mixed with something funky was big for me, or it was big and it was expansive and it was orchestral and it probably came from France or from Italy. Because I grew up on orchestral-based pop and this was just a natural extension to it and if it was funky, like I’m the biggest Thom Bell fan in the world, he’s my favorite producer on the soul side, as Giorgio Moroder on the electronic or Cerrone and Costandinos is on the disco side, so for me, the bigger it was, the more anthemic it was. And if it commanded you to listen, I was all over it and I would play the hell out of it and I would go anywhere to find it. I would do exactly what some of you have done by hitting the vinyl stores each week and experience something new. But for me, if it was European, the packaging was better, the mastering was better, it was a lot sexier to have. You wanted to have it and you wanted to piss off your fellow DJs by having it first and you wanted to bang it as hard as you could to make sure that they knew that you were there first. It was a real competition.

Gerd Janson

I was just about to ask, the competition side of being a DJ?

Vince DeGiorgio

It was ruthless. It was absolutely ruthless. I actually got my big break going from the B-clubs to the A-clubs because I had worked at Disco Sound, as I mentioned, and I was about to quit because I was going to get into the travel business. So I left and I took a job in the suburbs. I was going to go around the world once a year and, believe it or not, I was going to just retire. I figured, “Well, you know, I’m 20, maybe I’ll do something different.” And I quit working at Disco Sound for about three days, went home to the ’burbs, got a little bored, went to the music store and said, “Can I have a job? This is my experience.” They said, “OK, you’re hired.” Within three days they had transferred me back downtown to one of the chain stores where I had to be selling Meat Loaf and the Beatles and Styx and all these rock records along with people looking for the Commodores and disco imports.

So I basically went back to the store, begged to get my job back and on the second day I was there, one of the owners, there was a club chain called MoMo’s, they had a place right at Young and Buller, and the owner of the club had what most of us DJs would have considered the most gorgeous daughter you have ever seen in your life – blonde, ice blue eyes, the whole thing. Everybody was in love with her. So she came into the store to buy a record and she says, “I’m having a birthday party, I want you to be the DJ.” And two of my closest friends were working there and I don’t know what the hell I did because I don’t remember. All I remember was I was in a real DJ booth where you had to get steps to come and see me and it was an institution in Toronto and apparently I just kicked it. I was apparently amazing that night and that night I got held back by the owner, Manny Motta, and he looked at me and said, “I want you to be our DJ permanently here.” And I looked at him and said: “Well, I don’t even know what kind of crowd you got,” and he said, “I don’t care.” I said, “Are you sure?” He said, “Yeah!” So I said OK. Little did I know that two of my best friends got fired that night because I got their jobs. And believe me, what goes around certainly does come around in the city. And I used to visit those people when I was a junior, learning, watching how they would play to crowds. You can’t teach someone how to be a great DJ and you can’t teach someone to be a mediocre DJ. It’s either in your soul, it’s in your heart and you learn to relate to the crowd.

So basically, my roommate at the time had been recommending me to take over that job if they ever needed someone. They just said, “This is good, he seems to have all the imports, nobody else can find them. We don’t know how the hell he does it. You should hire him.” And I guess the rest is history. I ended up staying there for four years and everyone was trying to get my job. I had one guy who would literally just go in the middle of my dancefloor and stare at me for hours. Try to unnerve me. Never took a vacation in four years until it was time to leave. And like every other club, the end came swiftly. But in 1984, the very last night the club was open, one of my regulars who became the focal point of the group Tapps that I worked with in my Power Records label, he said, “I want you to come back.” He just started swearing his head off. He goes, “I don’t give a fuck about anything, this is your club. Everyone else can go to hell.” And he gave me the keys and I played the last night, and then the day after they turned it into a restaurant or a deli or something. One DJ would go into a club, they’d be working the managers like crazy, “I’ll do this for you, I’ll make tapes for you,” they would go and practice their mixes like crazy and then put a tape in the guy’s pocket and go, “I’m better than that guy you’ve got, he sucks.” And I’ll tell you something else, the female DJs in this town, there were four or five of them were unbelievable, and the ladies had to work twice as hard and they made us look real bad because they were damn good.

Gerd Janson

You were just talking about relating to the crowds, so how did you balance the whole DJ ego thing that goes on about, “Oh, I have all the best music in the world,” versus what the people actually want to hear or want to dance to?

Vince DeGiorgio

Well, there’s two things. I’m a Leo so my ego was completely out of control. There’s no hope there. But the bottom line is, I had one rule when I played for a crowd: I played for the ladies. I played for the women. I couldn’t care about the guys. The guys were coming anyway, and my job was to get the women on the floor and to keep them happy at all costs. The reason that I say that is because the pulse of a club in those days was based on how intense your party was and how our crowd related to what you did. If you can’t draw the first six to ten women... The women always came early, the guys never came early. Remember, I didn’t start working at this peak club until 11. The first hour was mine, 12 o’clock there were a couple of people who wanted to get in because we only had 32 seats in the club. You could only get 500 people in it or 400 people in it. And then we had like these things, if you can imagine these seats here, well, imagine having them stacked like steps. That’s what we had, and you could only get so many places to sit down and then you were done. You were basically up all night.

So my thing was, “Who do we have coming in tonight?” And if it was 50/50 female to male, the boys would love me and they would keep that floor going because they would be dragging the girls on the floor all night long, and that was my job. My job was to treat the female patrons like royalty so the guys would be happy. Because the happier they were, the longer they’d stay. It’s a strange philosophy because people go, “I went and I EQed my sound and I readjusted the lights.” It’s like, “Hey, I had the best sound man and the best light guy in the world, he didn’t want to be a DJ.” That’s another thing, the great light man, who always somehow wanted to be the DJ. We had to be aware of this all the time. One of the greatest light men who ended up being a musician was Patrick Cowley. He started off being a light man in San Francisco, worked those clubs and was a synthesizer keyboards player, so he kind of developed both things without ever becoming a DJ.

Gerd Janson

But did a lot of records, right?

Vince DeGiorgio

Oh, yeah. The “I Feel Love” bootleg, which we bought in New York for $40 on an acetate that you could only play like 25 times.

Gerd Janson

What is an acetate, for people who don’t know?

Vince DeGiorgio

Before a record becomes a record it used to go through three stages. Once the mix was done it would go to this place in New York called Sunshine Sound, which was at 1650 Broadway, one of the most famous record industry addresses in the world. And they would get, I guess in the dub world they call them dubplates, and you would get a 10" or a 12" cut and you could basically play it 30 or 40 times. And you would go from an acetate, like, let’s say you’re working in a club in New York, and this is your card from my late friend Richie Kaczor from Studio 54, and you’re the promotion guy and get this thing called an acetate. You go into the club and say, “Hey, how you doing? I got a new record for you, do you want to play it?” And of course you would because you don’t want to lose the luxury of playing something that hasn’t even been manufactured yet. And as soon as the mix is approved and they see the reactions, then the next thing they do is a test pressing, which is like a white label and it just has the name of the record on it. And it’s good to go and those mixes are approved and they manufactured it. So the acetate is kind of like the first generation of the piece of vinyl.

Gerd Janson

You were talking about Patrick Cowley.

Vince DeGiorgio

Patrick was someone who left us way too soon and I was working for… I was not only the first writer and the youngest writer writing for disco music or dance music in the history of the country, I was 17-years old, I was also the first promoter working for an American production company in a foreign territory in the disco business. I worked for a company called 120 Dance Promotions and TQ Fanshaw, who was a club impresario based in San Francisco. He hired me because I was always trading imports with his key DJs. He said, “We’ve got this record on the Fusion label that you’ve got to hear.” I go, “What’s it called?” And he said, “I think they’re going to call it ‘Menergy.’“ I said OK, and he goes, “It’s kind of like Giorgio, but it’s cool.” I said, “What does that mean? Giorgio’s God.” And he goes, “It’s really different, really trippy.”

And that was at a very crucial time, we’re talking 1981 where everything was changing because M came out with “Pop Music,” and the B-52’s “Rock Lobster,” so it really was changing the disco landscape a lot. I remember working at Le Tube and I got five copies of it, and I gave them to my two roommates and the other key DJs in the territory, you know, you really spoiled your friends. I remember putting this thing on for the first time and the place just went into orbit. Patrick had a consistent way of doing this and he had one clubgoer kept bugging him to do a record when he was doing lights and it turned into “Right on Target” by Paul Parker, which has been used as the basis rhythmically for “Weekend” by Dead Eye Dick, DJ Dick in Germany. Patrick was just one of those guys who really re-invented the wheel electronically because he was using technology and tape loops and all kinds of really different things and he was also mixing at a huge studio. He was working at the Automat and then he got together with Sylvester and ended up doing “Do You Wanna Funk,” which was made for $802 and has made about 20 million dollars in revenue and one of the greatest records ever made.

Gerd Janson

Sylvester was who?

Vince DeGiorgio

Sylvester was someone who came out of the San Francisco drag scene. He had done records for the Blue Note label on the West Coast, and then he signed with Fantasy Records. He was working with Harvey Fuqua, who had worked in Motown and had produced the Jackson 5 and everything. Gladys Knight, the great legendary R&B singer, was once told by her mother, “If you really wanna hear someone sing falsetto with soul, enough of that garbage, listen to Sylvester.” I saw him live three times, the best three shows I ever saw, and he was this towering 6-foot-3 androgynous male, who was the precursor to every flamboyant exotic insane performer, and just sang like a bird.

Patrick did a lot of records with him, played sythesizers on a lot of this stuff. And Patrick’s partner, Marty Blackman, was part of a team called Blackman Hedges Promotions in San Francisco and they remixed all of the Sylvester records with the exception of “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” Sylvester is a benchmark. Anyone who sings falsetto, you answer to Sylvester basically, in that era.

Gerd Janson

Do we have something you can play us?

Vince DeGiorgio

Yep. I’m going to do something I never thought I would ever do, but you know what? Where is it? Here. It’s still sealed. There’s a great story, when Sylvester came to do a show in Toronto, the Two Tons of Fun were with him, Izora Armstead and Martha Wash, and one of the legendary DJs, Thom Bell, kept trying to sell them diet powder after the show.

Gerd Janson

So maybe if someone doesn’t know the Two Tons of Fun?

Vince DeGiorgio

They were his background singers and they were huge and they ended up becoming the Weather Girls. This is the other thing, when we bought these records we never knew what speed they were because half the time they didn’t write anything on them. This is “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).”

(music: Sylvester – “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” / applause)

The other thing about this record that I remembered distinctly is how many perfect mixtapes it ruined because some of the edits in the later part of the song just used to drive us crazy because you used to have to try and time them to get out. This is a live drummer playing, and a great live drummer, too, and some of the musicianship and the edits of we had to do to construct a 12" single was completely different. But that being said, we would play Sylvester to death. He was a non-radio voice, he was purely a disco artist for the most part.

Gerd Janson

But Bronski Beat made that into a radio record later, right?

Vince DeGiorgio

Yeah, Bronski Beat also used one of the breaks of my songs and put it in “Small Town Boy,” matched me beat for beat. So it’s a...

Gerd Janson

So it’s a touchy subject?

Vince DeGiorgio

No, not at all. You know what? I just don’t think anything can beat this. I think Jimmy Somerville is a great artist and I even tried writing stuff for him when he was signed to Sony BMG in Germany, but Sylvester is an incomparable artist. He is one of the artists from the era you can just go back and listen to, there is no Auto-Tune and there’s no patching. When he says, “You make me feel mighty real,” it’s because he was. He lived out his dream and he was a great artist.

Gerd Janson

You just mentioned recording back then was a different game?

Vince DeGiorgio

Oh, god. Well, I was laughing because I was hanging out and getting to know some of the participants. I was there with Filipe in his room kind of constructing. We were just jamming basically trying to get some ideas together and I realized that all he had to do was double-click and GarageBand opens. And for me, when I started, that would have taken six and a half hours. We were on Atari, even before the Atari 1040ST came in. I mean, the first disco record I ever did was a record called “Heartquake” in 1981, which I’ll post on the Academy website. And basically, the drum was an old, old, old Roland drum machine and basically it just went... [mimes drum beat] We timed it one measure and then we repeated it, cut it twice, and that was the loop. So the drums didn’t change, because we were only working on an 8-track board. And we had the drums, the bass and everything was played live, including the percussion and the record never saw the light of day. It was a real masterpiece. We ended up doing electronic stuff. We had the old Atari 1040ST and we started with 2MB. Then we all had emotional overload when we were able to upgrade our system to 4MB. Amazing.

We had to record each MIDI track one at a time, and that took the syncman or the Roland SPX box to actually keep in time. I actually want to buy a Roland SPX, just so I can get a chainsaw and cut one in half, so I can kill one of my earliest problems. Making records back in those days was really difficult and it was very difficult making them here. Canadians, we live in a real folklore-rock country. A lot of the Montrealers would go down and they would mix their records in Philadelphia and would mix their records with great, legendary engineers like Gene Leone and Joe Tarsia at Sigma Sound. Or they would make a record just good enough so that somebody in the US would pick it up and want to remix it. The funny thing about it is the recording techniques, they would mix our records like they were rock records, so things couldn’t cut through, and that was really a huge problem. And the other thing, too, was once you’d made what you thought was a great record, the mastering engineers here needed an education as well because they were cutting the THP Orchestra record the same way they would cut a children’s record or a country record. They were cutting it for sonic fidelity. They weren’t cutting it to be played in a club. They didn’t have the knowledge. So a lot of the early Canadian pressings of records were nightmares for Canadian DJs because they just couldn’t play them.

Gerd Janson

So you had to have them mastered in New York?

Vince DeGiorgio

Either that or we’d wait until the record got picked up in France or the States or in Germany and we’d get the import and we’d play it. Because you have to understand the mixers that we used to use, I mean, they were Ranes or these Cerwin-Vega mixers of the past, which were great because they had a big, booming [sound]. They were great actually until someone poured a Coca-Cola into them, which has happened before. But they amplified the sound. I remember having these two old Yamaha amplifiers and these things were like tanks. If I had to play a Canadian record, I would go over to one of the amps and I would split it and just crank one side of it up so I wouldn’t lose my dancefloor mixing into it. The mastering engineers caused nightmares for us.

But in the end you’re going to get a hand out. And a big part of that is an article that was written on me in 1980 in Billboard where I complained about it and nearly got blacklisted by the Canadian music industry. I was never afraid to speak my mind and in that case, I think we actually educated the mastering engineers. When I started my label, I would never let them master a record on their own. I attended everything, even if I didn’t know what I was doing. I sure as hell was trying to learn at the same time and teach them as well. And I would also bring other records that had been mastered or mixed to educate the engineers.

Gerd Janson

So you had a label of your own as well?

Vince DeGiorgio

I’ve had quite a few. I started a record label in 1982 called Power Records. I started it because I was working as a promotion man for Unidisc.

Gerd Janson

Maybe you could talk a little bit about Unidisc first, a Canadian label?

Vince DeGiorgio

Sure, Unidisc Productions in Montreal was a company originally called Downstairs Records. They had a record store on Saint Laurent Boulevard in Montréal and what they did was, all the DJs went there the same way as they did with Disco Sound of Canada. What they did was they took them one step further, they decided to start a record label. And I might be wrong in quoting who they were, but I believe Pat Deserio was very involved, George Cucuzzella and Dominic Zarka. One was a business guy, one was the best DJ and one was a great producer, so it was a great combination. Plus they had the store. So, Dominique moved on, became my partner in Power Records, eventually. Pat was a great producer, who worked with Kebekeletrik and a bunch of other big records like Eclipse. And George actually changed the name and he changed the name from Downstairs to Unidisc, which was the record label. We’d known each other for years and he decided to hire me as a promotion guy. The first time I went to Montreal I saw all the gold records on his wall and I said, “You know what? I think I’m going to start a label.”

So they gave me a distribution agreement that I hated and George actually didn’t find this out until about two years ago, because his brother-in-law actually fired me when I wouldn’t sign the distribution agreement. So I was in the record business. And the first A&R decision I ever made sold 180 copies. It was actually an English record by a group called Hello, and it said goodbye really quickly, which is unfortunate, great band, and they actually have records over on Arista as well. And I decided that the three things I wanted more than anything was something that had a lot of energy, a lot of drive and a lot of guts and Power came out of that name. So I basically decided to start a record label on $250, a check from my club for working five nights, which proceeded to bounce. Which meant I had to go and collect the cash to cover the first mastering I did. The first record I released sold 380 copies. The second record I released sold 4,000 and the third one sold four million.

Gerd Janson

Four million?

Vince DeGiorgio

Yeah.

[applause]

It’s a really bizarre story, actually. There’s three kids from a Portuguese neighborhood that were real club kids and they decided to come to the club, and they were regulars. One of the guys said, “We’re making a record,” and I said OK. I was at that point their favorite DJ so they always came to see me. So I said, “Well, I’m thinking of starting a record company.” So I released the first two records. The first record was a song by a group called Ambience that went nowhere. Second was actually a re-pressing of “Souvenirs” by Voyage. And the funny thing is that this record ended up going through a whole bunch of changes and it also was the first time I ended up writing as well. They had this concept that was a little bit out there and...

Gerd Janson

How would you explain writing?

Vince DeGiorgio

OK, sorry about that. What Gerd has not mentioned is that I’ve been a songwriter for 25 years now.

Gerd Janson

Sorry about that.

Vince DeGiorgio

No, no, no, it’s okay. I’ve been too busy talking and interrupting you the whole time, but I’ve been a songwriter for years and this was my second foray. It was the second song I wrote, and I re-wrote a lyrical concept that turned into a song called “My Forbidden Lover.” And I was basically the lyricist, because I had actually been threatened with a suspension when I was 11 years old at school, because we had a poetry contest when I was in sixth grade and that’s when I knew that I had a talent to write. The teacher forgave me and forgave himself for accusing me of it and I ended up dreaming of being a writer ever since that day. So I finally got to put it to use with these two club regulars.

Way too many people involved. And a singer who answered an ad in a record store on Young Street who got paid $100, and she sang the hell out of the song and then the record exploded. And you know what happens after that, right? A young label, a lot of kids, a lot of people who are really at the beginning of their careers and everyone starts suing everybody, which is crazy. But the record took off like a rocket, was number one for ten weeks here. And Tapps still does shows in California 25 years later and Allan Coelho, who was the principle guy, is making a new record right now.

Gerd Janson

And how much time did you spend in court?

Vince DeGiorgio

Well, it never really got to court. Basically, a record that was made for just under a thousand dollars, I decided that it was part of my blood. So once my label got more successful, I just bought the entire catalog from the producer, who was a very clever guy and was a little bit more street savvy than us. I still own the publishing, I still own the master and, actually, it can never, ever be sold. It’s actually something that I’ve got with my lawyer that I will never ever sell it because it’s the most important record I’ll ever be a part of. And I should tell you one other thing: During the making of this record I got a phone call from my partner of the time, because there’s three of us who invested into the original record, and he said, “You’d better come down here.” I said, “Why?” And he said, “Because the producer’s trying to make this vocal masterpiece into an instrumental and he’s right about to print the mix.” I don’t think I was ever in a taxi that fast in my life and basically just had to settle everybody down, but the record came out and it led to a great tenure for the label.

Gerd Janson

And you just mentioned publishing, which is a field where you have some experience as well, right?

Vince DeGiorgio

Yeah, I am actually a music publisher today.

Gerd Janson

So what is publishing exactly? I never understood this.

Vince DeGiorgio

Let’s say that the next Gino Soccio and Patrick Cowley are these two guys right here, Gacowley is the name of the band. They come to me and they say, “We’ve got this record.” Well, what a publisher does is he protects the rights of the writers by working with the writers to go out and get them to work and produce with other artists, to collaborate with other artists, and to make sure that the royalties generated by the manufacture, or now the digital sale of a piece of music, is paid to the publisher who shares it with the writers. Does that make any sense at all? Basically, we’re very sexy accountants. We take care of the things, we do the business side where the creative people want to be creative, then what we do is we do the administration side. Once you’re finished we make sure your songs get registered, we make sure if there’s an opportunity for you to work with other people, we call them and say, “We’ve got these two unbelievable writers who are going to make you a star.” And I get you together with my writers.

And that’s how the meeting of the minds comes, where you have people who are writing with one another, how they exist. A lot of people, like “Disco Inferno” was probably two guys in a room writing together and it’s sold 75 million copies and a publisher would take care of those rights. If somebody wants your song for a big movie, well, they would contact your publisher and your publisher would then contact you and say, “They are doing Saturday Night Fever 3, they want your song to be the theme song. They are going to pay us X amount of dollars and they’ll pay for using the master rights and they’ll pay for what’s called the “synchronization rights,” which is to put your music in a film. They got to pay you twice, once to use the audio recording and once to the publisher to take care of the synchronization of it, to lock it together. Publishing is a very important business for you aspiring writers and producers. This is the real estate of the music business, and it’s extremely important for you to know that everything you do has equity. Never sign a hundred percent of your publishing away. I know where every one of my songs is from the first one I wrote to the four that got requested by a Japanese label this morning. I know where every one of them is. And it’s extremely important to me, because it’s you, it’s your creativity and you must never lose sight of that. A lot of people have and they’ve gone on to regret it. And you’re also at the forefront of a real, evolving music world right now, so whether it’s disco or anything else, you’ve got to take care of your publishing.

Gerd Janson

Always get your publishing right. So I’ve been asking questions the whole time, but maybe some of you have questions as well?

Audience Member

You were just talking about publishing and as a composer I’ve always wondered what the difference is between keeping my own publishing and just signing myself up with either Socan or Ascap or BMI or whatever? And then the difference between doing that and signing it over to you or another publishing company.

Vince DeGiorgio

Well, if I like it, I’d be really happy to hear that. Obviously, you should register your songs with a performance society, whether or not you’re with CI in Italy or Socan in France or ASCAP or BMI, to register the songs so that you can control the copyright and the ownership of the copyright. If someone can do something for you as a composer and as a writer, no matter what kind of music you’re making, you should have a discussion with them. And if you think it’s good for you, that would be part of your journey. I also think that if you’re a creative person, whether or not you’re producing tracks or doing any kind of music, you can collaborate with someone who can do something that you can’t. That’s why I have had so many mentors and that’s why mentoring many of you after all this is over is extremely important to me.

Audience Member

Is there any book on the Canadian disco scene? Do you know about it?

Vince Degiorgio

I’ve been trying to write one for a long time. There isn’t a book, but I think information-wise, I’ll give you my card and if there’s anything specific or there’s someone you’re trying to reach, it’s pretty easy. We’re a real close, tight-knit community, people back then. There’s also been some great journalists here who have had a long history that I can put you in touch with who have covered things who would probably remember things that I forget myself. There’s been some really interesting books, but I’m such a purist that I tend not to read them. I read the first hundred pages of a book from the UK called Saturday Night Forever. There’s so many errors in it, I just threw it in the garbage. If you were there, the trivia is part of your lifeblood, so it’s hard. The disco craze, or the event that happened during the disco era, it was such a whirlwind and such a crazy time that I don’t think everybody remembers everything. You almost have to...

Gerd Janson

How can that be?

Vince Degiorgio

Obviously, a lot of people are no longer with us, and that’s a huge part of it. It’s funny, in the disco world, a lot of people have different concepts of what they saw and seeing it through their eyes. Somebody in New York could say that they played Gino Soccio records nine months before anyone in Canada did. That could be true, but it would be so hard to prove. When I got asked by somebody this week about was Carol Jiani singing the original “Get on Up and Do It Again” by Suzy Q? And the answer is, “Yes.” A lot of people would go, “No, it isn’t. It’s this other girl from Montreal and her name is this and it’s on the record.” You say, “Yeah, it’s been re-recorded, but the original is by Carol Jiani.”

Audience Member

At the same time, this is what makes the whole thing so wonderful, right? That there’s not one truth, but many different sides of it.

Vince Degiorgio

It keeps it really interesting for all of us too. For me, when you talk about records that... You know, some records went to number one and some records went to number ten. Records like this one, for example, which is George McCrae working with Gregg Diamond who did Bionic Boogie and who was, to me, one of the greatest of the disco producers from America, it’s what keeps you looking for the facts that, you’ve got ten different versions of the same story. I’m just going to put this on for a minute.

(music: George McCrae – “Love in Motion”)

The other great thing about disco music itself is that it didn’t have to be the biggest record. It didn’t have to be a number one. It just had to connect with you. Then you’d start talking about it and you could start getting people very involved in what you love as well.

Gerd Janson

How did you feel about the downfall of disco music then, or the quote/unquote downfall, after all the big hype and then, all of a sudden?

Vince Degiorgio

In a way, it was bittersweet. The media built it up and the media tore it down. The truth is that when disco became a very, very dirty word and we changed from disco to dance, whatever.

Gerd Janson

It changed everything then?

Vince Degiorgio

It’s still disco to me. It doesn’t matter if it was made last week or 1973. Disco, at this point, is the grandfather to all these kids. I was really happy when the media got out of it because Saturday Night Fever was really a media creation. It was a great movie and it gave John Travolta a terrific career, but the Bee Gees songs were never written for the movie. They were written for another album. 99% of the record was pretty much glued together to make a great soundtrack. It’s a great music supervision job, whereas Thank God It’s Friday, which was the movie that Casablanca made that spawned “Last Dance” and “Disco Queen” by Paul Jabara is actually a far truer show. It’s a far truer representation of what disco was than by going to Brooklyn where the crowd was all one ethnic composition.

So we were happy when it went away because when disco was killed by the media, the truth of the matter is that they killed it, but they couldn’t put it six feet under. Yet a lot of people just fighting saying, “You know what? This business is a lot stronger than a media who is basically going to cover a cooking show five minutes after they cover a club closing.” The truth is, they accented on the negative so much, we were glad to get rid of them. The great thing is that, suddenly, you had this very beautiful burgeoning underground scene just like you’ve got now. You could say that dance music, or a high energy music, or funk, or the electronic funk music that came in the early ’80s, that was just another baby being born. It was a new evolution for a business and for a medium that had a heart beat long before they tried to kill it and had a bigger one when the industry peaked in their eyes.

There were disco specials and disco television shows. I remember distinctly that a lot of what the clubs were doing didn’t really change. I think the clothing changed a lot. What you see me wearing, this is what I wore to work. I once got fired for not wearing shoes in my DJ booth when I was working in a hotel club. My feet hurt. You stand in those shoes for seven hours, they’ll kill your back. They’ll kill your feet. I took them off and they fired me. That’s the shit I wanted to get away from. I just wanted to go where the people would come in, they knew exactly what they wanted, and what they wanted more than anything is they wanted to just hang out with me. Dance their faces off until they couldn’t stand up anymore. That’s really what happened after disco died. The thing is, it never really died, it just went to sleep. Because the truth is, the raw roots and elements of that era, the entire music in the ’70s has come back a zillion times. It’s going to come back again 25, 35 years after I’m gone because it’s too powerful. It’s too strong. Even when we went out last night, I heard the same thing. It was remarkable for me. The music is enduring because you might not love all of it, but you sure will love a lot of it.

Audience Member

People always want to dance.

Vince Degiorgio

Yeah, it’s funny, we went out last night and I heard you play. [looks at a participant] I would walk a thousand kilometers to hear you play. You were great because that room was empty, there was 20 people in it, in and out, and you never lost your focus. You could have played in any era. You were great. I really enjoyed myself. I was talking to a couple of the other guys... Please never say the word old-school in front me, I’ll go crazy. A lot of us veteran DJ types, we sat there and went, “She’s great.” One of the guys looked at me and he goes, “I hope she plays Don Ray next,” and, bang, it came on. That’s a generational instinct, that’s what I’m talking about. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, if the music moves you, then it’ll always move you.

Audience Member

Can I ask a question?

Vince Degiorgio

Oh, sure.

Audience Member

A lot of re-edits coming out, I suppose they are illegal in a way, how does this whole thing work? What can you make out of old tracks without having legal problems? How are re-edits created?

Vince DeGiorgio

Basically, when you go into your mix room, or your studio, or whatever you’re going to do and you do a re-edit, the best thing to do is contact the record company. And if you don’t know how to get to them, well, you’ll have my card and I’ll get them in touch with you. The truth is, if you can do things, if you have a gift to do things and you have the wherewithal to do them legally, it could turn into a career for you. It could turn into a mix album for you. The truth is that your inventiveness or your creativity is different. You would do an edit that’s different than he would, or that I would, or that they would, or anyone else in this room and the number one thing is to try and get it heard, so the best thing to be would be to contact the record company or the license owners. And if they won’t talk to you, you have to seek out somebody who will make sure that they talk to you.

Audience Member

But I think most of the stuff that is coming out is bootleg, actually?

Vince DeGiorgio

Bootlegs have been part of the dance history and the disco history for years and a lot of it is for a creative invention. One of the best bootlegs ever made was a song called “Let’s Do It in the ’80s” that turned into “Stars On 45.” That was a bootleg by three Montreal DJs. Another one is the “Get on the Funk Train” remix, which we believe Robert Rimet was involved in, and I have a 10" acetate of it and it’s absolutely amazing. And there’s one of “Freedom to Express Yourself” by Denise La Salle, and if any of you guys or ladies are playing ’70s disco, you have to get your hands on this if you can find it and it’s unbelievable. It’s always been part of the culture. I mean, even Patrick Cowley’s “I Feel Love” was a bootleg.

I think it just depends on what side of the business you want to be on. A lot of the music gets pirated because people can’t get it. I’m not interested in seeing Chic’s Greatest Hits with the same 11 songs on it again. It makes me want to shave my head. I want to see something where, if there’s a remix, someone believes they can actually make the song better. We have to get the name value thing out of the re-edits and put the artist back into the picture. If your edits are creative enough, people are going to want to hear them. And the other thing, too, is people manufacture these things on their own because they feel that there’s no other way to get them heard. We’re also at the forefront of a business that is really going into the digital age and personally I’m amazed at the love for vinyl here; that has really been a revelation for me. But I just say, find a way. There are people who manufacture vinyl, maybe they have the rights with the record company and have a way to get your edit re-issued.

One of the other things that’s a problem as well for example, is, let’s say, Dionne Warwick’s Track of the Cat record was produced by Thom Bell, one of my all time top ten favourite albums. I have a 7" 33 RPM, seven-minute version of a classic song called “Once You Hit the Road.” And I begged them to put this on the CD re-issue and they couldn’t because they needed the artist’s permission to do it. And that could take hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to get in touch with the lawyers and the accountants and the estate if the person’s no longer with us. But you’ll get my card, if you really want to do this, send me the edit and if I like it, I’ll fight for it to get it released because that’s what Gino did for me. So many people did this for me in the business. If you want to get there, I’m going to help you get there. It’s that simple. Next question?

Gerd Janson

We haven’t heard anything on Power Records.

Vince DeGiorgio

OK. I’m going to play the follow-up to “My Forbidden Lover,” actually. A song called “Burning With Fire” and this in its day was actually considered extremely progressive. They used a lot of Roland microcomposers. I know some of you guys have 303s and 606s and 808s and 909s and everything. I originally wrote this lyric for the song and it was originally called “Call Me” and the producer got into an argument with me and they took parts of what I wrote and it ended up being “Burning With Fire,” which was number two record in Mexico, number one record in Holland, number one record here and number one in the US.

(music: Tapps – “Burning With Fire”)

It’s funny, listening to that, it’s been a long time.

Gerd Janson

It sounds like it could have been made in Italy, right?

Vince DeGiorgio

Yeah, well, that’s the thing, the more arpeggiated some of the synths would be, they would classify it as Italo disco. But Allan Coehlo, who is the brainchild of Tapps and is a great musician, he was obsessed with Patrick Cowley. He was always bothering me for tapes and he really loved making the stuff. And the other thing, too, about the Tapps record is Barbara Doust is the singer on “My Forbidden Lover” and on this song. She never performed with the act. They had a huge, huge falling out and her vocal performances on these are for Canada an almost evolutionary setting. They are amazing, and these are one and two take vocals. She could just go. For those of you that are making records now: Don’t like the singer that is singing on your tracks, love the singer that is singing on your tracks. If you have that emotional connection that the song belongs to the singer when they sing it, it’s going to fly. That’s I think a big part of the reason why this record did what it did.

Gerd Janson

When was this created?

Vince DeGiorgio

1984.

Gerd Janson

And you were just talking about the singer so the song is very important to you, right?

Vince DeGiorgio

When we were chatting yesterday and I said there are some nights where you get into a club and you just leave because you don’t hear enough songs. Having been a songwriter for 25 years now, having something I can sing along with, that’s what makes it all work for me. It’s not like I don’t like the instrumental records, records like “Magic Fly” and “Beyond the Clouds” and “War Dance” by Kebekelektrik, great electronic records, or Klein and MBO’s “Dirty Talk” or things like that from Italy, “Feel the Drive” by Doctor’s Cat, I mean, a lot of those records are really memorable. But to be able to sing along with somebody, even if you have the worst singing voice in the world, which I do, you feel a completely different connection in my opinion.

If the song moves you, then you’ve made the connection with the record and you’ll play it again. I was out last week and had to go and meet a writer and I had Linda Clifford and the first Village People record in my car for the day. And it’s really funny, I live in Vancouver now, and it’s not exactly the disco capital of the world and I just blasted the thing. I was just hammering it as hard as I could. I almost got a speeding ticket because I had “San Francisco” going so loud in the car. The other thing, too, is that when you first sing along with a record, you have a memory that’s everlasting of going to get it and how you got it and how much you paid for it and where you were and who you met.

Gerd Janson

What’s the most you ever paid for a record then?

Vince DeGiorgio

I’m going to take you back to 1978, today it would be about 50 or 60 dollars comparatively in price, but we were paying 11 and 12 dollars for imports of Santa Esmeralda and Patrick Juvet and anything that came from France. They were the most expensive of all of them. The most I’ve ever spent on a CD was I spent $40 for Cerrone By Bob Sinclar because I’ve known Cerrone my whole life and Bob Sinclar really idolizes Cerrone. So I knew he wasn’t going to screw it up and the funny thing is that someone I knew from the start of my career was the sales person and I flew into New York and he goes, “Man, you’ve got to get this, here,” and I bought it. I play it once or twice a week.

Gerd Janson

But some of the stuff you have in the house of your parents house is worth much more than $40.

Vince DeGiorgio

So I’m finding out. I was amazed. I have 15,000 pieces of vinyl and I have a great collection of disco compilations because disco means something different in Germany than it did in England than it did in Italy than it meant in Canada. And it means something completely different in the US. So as a songwriter and a music publisher today, I’m always looking for something special when I travel. My vinyl hound days have never left me. I’m always looking for something and the compilations are all different in every country. The disco compilations in Sweden are completely different from the ones you get in Japan, which are unbelievable. I think I must have Earth, Wind & Fire on like 30 different compilations, but I have a remix compilation from Japan with all the songs remixed and the Jacksons all remixed and those things are clever just to hear the re-invention of the classics too.

Gerd Janson

Thank you. Any more questions? Then maybe slip on another plate from your world of merry music and thank you, Vince DeGiorgio.

Vince DeGiorgio

The last thing I'm going to play, actually, is a record that Giorgio Moroder produced, by a group called Sparks. This record is very pivotal in the history of disco music in this country, because it was a record that nobody wanted to play because it was considered a little bit rock on the fusion side. But the DJs in Montreal made it a point to play this record, to the point that Giorgio actually went in and remixed it. And I'm not sure if the two are interconnected, but it seems ironic that after it became a record as a $60 import that nobody could find, this track called “Beat the Clock” by Sparks, which has one of the best mixing intros you'll ever want on a record.

[applause]

(music: Sparks – “Beat the Clock”)

(music: Kat Mandu – “The Break (Remix)” / applause)

Vince DeGiorgio

You know the records they were making in Montreal at that time were much more technologically advanced than what we were doing here in Toronto just because they really knew how to be great finishers. But for myself, as I mentioned before, I was a big disco snob. So for me, if the Italians made it, I was gonna play it in a minute. And I think that the one record that’s really telling, and it’s probably my favorite record of that era is by Revanche, called “Music Man.” I think it’s really the life story of the DJ. And it’s Mauro Malavasi, you know...

(music: Revanche – “Music Man” / applause)

Vince degiorgio

...and you’re just in complete awe. I wanted to make records like that and I never was able to but, I mean, it’s something about having all the elements together. Great session singers from New York, like Bobby and Skip who sang on this record, and Jacque [inaudible] who’s a great producer, and Malavasi who’s the god of the arrangers in Italy. Musicians like Rudy Trevasi and Paolo Gionolo, we knew all their names. If someone did a mix or someone arranged something we all knew it. It was really unbelievable to listen to something like this and to see how incredible it stands up to today’s contemporary music, and the musicianship is mindboggling. We were just lucky.

Gerd Janson

Do you regret ending your active DJ career?

Vince Degiorgio

Do I regret ending my DJ career? You know it’s funny, I haven’t really faced it until this week. I have a mother that had 3,000 pieces of vinyl and wanted to know when I’m getting them the hell out of her house. I’ve never touched them until this week, I don’t own a turntable. But I’m really thinking of buying one now. You evolve and you move on. But I’ll tell you something, I had so much fun when I was a DJ and I absolutely loved it but when I decided to let go it was because I knew I’d have the chance to go out and hear somebody like Stonebridge, or somebody like you, or some of the other people I’ve been lucky to hear, as long as my heart is open to change, I could do it again if I want, who knows. I’m never going to close that door, I’ll be a DJ till the day I die.

Gerd Janson

Thank you very much.

Vince Degiorgio

You’re welcome.