SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER
Saturday Night Fever is a 1977 American dance film directed by John Badham and starring John Travolta as Tony Manero, an emotionally immature young man whose weekends are spent visiting a local Brooklyn discotheque. While in the disco, Tony is the king. His care-free youth and weekend dancing help him to temporarily forget the reality of his life: a dead-end job, clashes with his unsupportive and squabbling parents, racial tensions in the local community, and his associations with a gang of macho friends. A huge commercial success, the film significantly helped to popularize disco music around the world and made Travolta, already well known from his role on TV’s Welcome Back, Kotter, a household name. (More from Wikipedia)
Likewise, by the time the Bee Gees, John Travolta and the Saturday Night Fever crowd showed up, the disco craze was on the wane.
(January 2011)
* * *
Some great music came out of the disco era, without a doubt. One of the great voices in soul music, Lou Rawls had his biggest hit song with the disco-flavored “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine”. He was hardly the only 1970’s artist to retool their sound to a disco feel: The Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, Diana Ross, Blondie, and even Pink Floyd are examples; but no one made it bigger than the Bee Gees in their Saturday Night Fever heyday.
(March 2012)
