Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Too Much Information,
Speaker 2: the show that brings you the secret stories and little
Speaker 2: alone details about your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more.
Speaker 2: We are your disco DeVos of details, your historians of
Speaker 2: Homeronic hymns. To him, you're insensitive portrayals of indigenous people
Speaker 2: of ananity.
Speaker 1: My name's Jordan run Tag and I'm Alex Heigel. I
Speaker 1: was good. I thought you would have liked the indigenous
Speaker 1: and peoples of ananity. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Well today, in casey I haven't guessed already, we are
Speaker 2: talking about a glorious bit of sonic seventies spray Cheese,
Speaker 2: a song that will be a staple of bar Mitzvah's
Speaker 2: retirement parties in the pre nine PM time frame of
Speaker 2: wedding receptions until the end of time.
Speaker 1: That is right.
Speaker 2: Today, we are discussing the history of YMCA by the
Speaker 2: Village People, or possibly Village People. I think they're one
Speaker 2: of those bands that as a shoot an article, which
Speaker 2: is one of the many things they have in common
Speaker 2: with talking heads. The discussion of YMCA has two separate
Speaker 2: sides of my professional brand at odds. The longtime music journalist,
Speaker 2: then May, feels compelled to say that it's lame, because
Speaker 2: in a certain sense it is, but the long time
Speaker 2: events DJ that lurks within me also suggests it's actually
Speaker 2: pretty great because I've seen what YMCA can do on
Speaker 2: a dance floor, and folks, let me tell you, it
Speaker 2: gets results. It's just so unapologetically goofy and upbeat that
Speaker 2: regardless of how much you think you hate it when
Speaker 2: it comes on, you can't help but love it if
Speaker 2: you punch it in right here, just as like I
Speaker 2: jump scare, yeah, uh here I go. I mean to me,
Speaker 2: I love YMCA because it's unique in that it's so
Speaker 2: firmly of its time, and yet it's transcended it's time.
Speaker 2: It's almost like how the film Grease portrays this of
Speaker 2: the fifties that never really existed. That's kind of how
Speaker 2: I feel about WHYMCA. It paints this extremely sanitized yet
Speaker 2: also innuendo leaden as we'll later discuss cartoon portrait of
Speaker 2: the disco era.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't want to live there, but I.
Speaker 2: Think we can all agree that it's sometimes a nice
Speaker 2: place to visit. Heigel, I can see you going either
Speaker 2: way with this. It has horn charts by Horace Att,
Speaker 2: It's got that goal for it.
Speaker 3: What do you think of Whymca?
Speaker 1: You know, it's like what do you think of the air?
Speaker 1: You know? Like what I struggled with, it's like, you
Speaker 1: know American pie, well know, I hate American Well I
Speaker 1: was gonna say, yeah, yeah, I don't know, man, It's
Speaker 1: like it's just one of those things that's like woven
Speaker 1: into the tapestry of American life that it's inextricable and
Speaker 1: so bisy. Isn't that weird? Yes? It is. It is.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying. It's deeply weiz are. It's like
Speaker 1: the most successful like queer infiltration of mainstream culture since
Speaker 1: like Rock Hudson. I don't know, but he was pretending otherwise. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I insert any number of like deeply closeted
Speaker 1: Hollywood people can't say that, say, they'll bull up a
Speaker 1: big bleep on that. Yeah yeah. Uh. Kevin Costner before
Speaker 1: he before he was just a predator. First he was
Speaker 1: a closet a gay, No no different Kevin Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: Kevin Spacey. God, how much would have rule of Kevin
Speaker 1: Costner was gay? Just do a series of bleeps and
Speaker 1: then me going, God, how much would rule of Kevin
Speaker 1: Costner was gay? It would explain his obsession with cowboys.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I don't know, man, it's weird. I like
Speaker 1: I associate this with like a deep cosmic malaise because
Speaker 1: I know that your sister steady state, Well that's true,
Speaker 1: but like I know your wedding DJ man, but does
Speaker 1: anybody like like when I picture someone doing the YMCA
Speaker 1: or being in a room where YMC is playing, it's
Speaker 1: just like the most.
Speaker 3: There's some self loathing.
Speaker 1: Well, it's just like the most performative, listless thing. And like,
Speaker 1: you know, there was a roller rink in central Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: that I used to go to because we didn't have
Speaker 1: much to do, and they would play YMCA and it
Speaker 1: was just this perfect image of like American life, like
Speaker 1: people just circling this big thing, not going anywhere for
Speaker 1: any reason, and just sort of like half acidly making
Speaker 1: letter shapes with their hands. And like, I don't know
Speaker 1: any other pop song with an accompanying dance that really
Speaker 1: does that, Like Makarena at least you could be like,
Speaker 1: well it's quasi hispanic. You know. The electric slide is
Speaker 1: electric athletic. It's something chacha, real smooth. That's it has.
Speaker 1: It has its stupid shuffle. I don't even know that one.
Speaker 3: Oh really that's a I'd be more of a Southern one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I just so, it's it's so weird, man. It
Speaker 1: feels like it's like this national anthem thing that's like
Speaker 1: you just obligated to respond and it says nothing. It's
Speaker 1: like ticks something in our brains where we're like, oh,
Speaker 1: time to sing along and do the hand shape thing.
Speaker 1: And I don't really know what other song other than
Speaker 1: like the national anthem just elicits such a resigned sense
Speaker 1: of group think, you know, like you can play this
Speaker 1: on death Row and someone would put up the YMCA thing.
Speaker 1: It's just like it's just so drilled into our culture
Speaker 1: in a way that I don't think anything else really is.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: That's a phenomenal both visual and insight. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 2: I don't know. I mean you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: It could possibly be that it's the dance that requires
Speaker 2: the bare minimum. That's true, you know, I mean we
Speaker 2: love the bare minimum.
Speaker 1: You gotta know how to do quarter notes, yeah, and
Speaker 1: big obvious letter shapes. Although I tend to have a
Speaker 1: problem knowing which way the sea goes. Oh sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: is it your see or is it the is it
Speaker 1: like like stage left or no, it's the other way exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean we won't be talking too much about
Speaker 2: the song's musical merits in this episode, but as you said,
Speaker 2: more of the cultural phenomenon, that is, the village people
Speaker 2: are the village people something like that, and you know.
Speaker 1: You laughed, But they moved sixty five.
Speaker 2: Million records in the space of like six years, five years.
Speaker 1: It's pretty insane. Yeah, I mean part of me is
Speaker 1: always just inclined to like ignore anything that happened in
Speaker 1: like mid to late seventies in the record industry, maybe
Speaker 1: just the entire seventies for the record industry because it
Speaker 1: was at its like Imperial era. You couldn't you know,
Speaker 1: pirate vinyl and everyone had a nice stereo. Cable wasn't
Speaker 1: so much a thing. So it's like, yeah, twenty million then,
Speaker 1: but like you know, Disco Duck sold over four million, HAA, well,
Speaker 1: I mean that was the thing.
Speaker 2: This group was signed to Cusablanca Records, as we'll talk
Speaker 2: about later, as a novelty band. I mean, the guy
Speaker 2: who ran the record label had come from basically running
Speaker 2: a novelty label, and so every act he sign Kiss
Speaker 2: was one of them. Donna Summers was one, and that
Speaker 2: was Once You Had Loved to Love You, which is
Speaker 2: like nineteen minutes of her grown.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but that's genuinely subversive, man like, because that's that
Speaker 1: is that that's moroder Is on program that one. I think,
Speaker 1: so yeah, I mean that's just so like, that's almost
Speaker 1: avant garde, right, Kiss, for all of their lack of merits,
Speaker 1: except as businessmen like you see, you saw the niche
Speaker 1: that they filled. I just don't know who's clamoring for this.
Speaker 1: I have a thought. I mean, it's it's a fine line.
Speaker 1: Let's not do any let's not do any facts. Let's
Speaker 1: just pontificate about YMCA for I don't know an hour
Speaker 1: until we both sort of go hoarse and then we
Speaker 1: just the whole thing just ends.
Speaker 3: Both wander away.
Speaker 2: I mean, no, this is sort of the carollary the
Speaker 2: spinal tap. There's such a fine line between clever and stupid.
Speaker 2: There's a fine line between novelty and avant garde. I mean, oh,
Speaker 2: I was listening to some podcast about the history of
Speaker 2: the recorded music and they mentioned they're coming to take
Speaker 2: me Away.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the novelty song from.
Speaker 2: A and all the sped up tapes and stuff on
Speaker 2: that was like actually viewed as fairly groundbreaking.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Chipmunk still yeah, yeah, I mean because music
Speaker 1: Concrete was like the music Concrete was like the big
Speaker 1: thing at the but dumb. Yeah, yeah exactly, And yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know, man, It's just I would love to
Speaker 1: be inside that guy's head. Like, I also understand the
Speaker 1: idea of Casablanca Records as like an operating hole. Like
Speaker 1: you know, you have Donna Summer, You've got R and
Speaker 1: B disco dance crossover, you've got Kiss, big meaty lunkhead rock,
Speaker 1: and they dress weird. Where the do the Village People
Speaker 1: slot in? How did that come into his brain where
Speaker 1: he was like, I want to make the gayest band
Speaker 1: in the world, and that's it, full stop. Somebody didn't
Speaker 1: read ahead on the outline, No, I sure didn't. Well, well,
Speaker 1: we'll get to that.
Speaker 2: But I mean, I as you very correctly noted, arguably
Speaker 2: the Village People's greatest legacy, not arguably it is the
Speaker 2: greatest legacy, is that it helped int a greate gay
Speaker 2: culture in the mainstream largely through the use of subcultural stereotypes.
Speaker 2: And this brings us back to our recurring segment of
Speaker 2: the show that we like to call two straight white
Speaker 2: guys discuss queer culture.
Speaker 1: Hey, I know who Sylvester is. I have some crid.
Speaker 2: I mean the village people did play a crucial role
Speaker 2: in integrating gay culture into the mainstream, but don't.
Speaker 1: Take our word for it. Karen Tongsen, a.
Speaker 2: Queer studies scholar and associate professor of English and Gender
Speaker 2: Studies at the University of Southern California, makes the case
Speaker 2: that the YMCA song, and particularly the video, which was
Speaker 2: filmed on location at the wise famous McBurnie location in
Speaker 2: Manhattan's Chelsea District, illustrates the way that queerness has long
Speaker 2: existed in real life and pop culture. She says, a
Speaker 2: lot of queer expression has happened through innuendo. That's essentially
Speaker 2: how queer popular culture has existed as something that could
Speaker 2: be read in multi sltiple ways.
Speaker 1: There's a sense of having to be able to communicate with.
Speaker 2: Each other in plain sight, but without other people figuring
Speaker 2: it out. In England, there was a dialect call and
Speaker 2: maybe it made its way over here.
Speaker 1: I don't think it did called polari. Are you familiar
Speaker 1: with this, I'm not.
Speaker 2: It's basically queer Cockney rhyming slang. It was lingo and
Speaker 2: because in the UK homosexuality was outlawed and was illegal
Speaker 2: until nineteen sixty seven, Yeah, it was you'd go to jail,
Speaker 2: So there was a whole dialect that evolved to be spoken.
Speaker 1: I would generally not be able to tell if it
Speaker 1: were completely invented by like Anthony Burgess, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: oh seriously. Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, it's from the Italian polare to talk to the
Speaker 2: Italian verb, and it was used in Britain by actors,
Speaker 2: circus and fairground performers, professional wrestlers, merchant navy sailors, criminals
Speaker 2: and sex workers, and particularly among the gay subculture.
Speaker 1: What a beautiful cross section. Yeah, I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: people man at that party, circus folk. No, it's it's
Speaker 1: very fascinating.
Speaker 2: And you know what Professor Tonkson said earlier about YMCA
Speaker 2: being able to be read in multiple ways, this is
Speaker 2: a recurring theme throughout this episode, people insisting that YMCA
Speaker 2: has multiple potential meetings, which was very much not my
Speaker 2: perception of this song. I thought it was pretty cut
Speaker 2: and dry. But as we'll talk about Victor Willis, who's
Speaker 2: the Village People lead singer, and he's the guy who
Speaker 2: wrote the lyrics of the song. He is straight, and
Speaker 2: he's vehemently denied, with threats of legal action, that he
Speaker 2: knowingly wrote a gay anthem, though he says he doesn't
Speaker 2: care that it's been adopted as such. Randy Jones, the
Speaker 2: Cowboy and the Village People, made this point to Spin
Speaker 2: magazine in their oral history of YMCA. He said, I
Speaker 2: think you can go into the lyrics of YMCA and
Speaker 2: if you're a straight jock who worked out at the why,
Speaker 2: You're gonna perceive it one way. But if you happen
Speaker 2: to be a gay man and have the experience and
Speaker 2: perspective of hooking up with each other, that's another way
Speaker 2: it can be perceived, Okay, man.
Speaker 1: So that was news to me. I thought it was
Speaker 1: like very clear that it was about one thing. But yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean it's once you get the like the roster
Speaker 1: of gay stereotypes. I mean I understand that like in
Speaker 1: the seventies, like many people did not have exposure to
Speaker 1: full throated gay culture, but like I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: like if you're in San Francisco and you saw like
Speaker 1: a guy dressed in leather, you'd be like, I recognize
Speaker 1: what's going on there. And then the rest of them
Speaker 1: are all these macho archetypes, like a macho man if
Speaker 1: you will, yes, yes, yes, indeed, very clever. I forgot
Speaker 1: they had like more than one hit because it was
Speaker 1: about yeah, I was about to positi at one point
Speaker 1: they're like, whither the novelty artist? But like, we don't
Speaker 1: really have those anymore. We have like TikTok flukes, and
Speaker 1: some of them are like genuinely talented, and then some
Speaker 1: of them are like you know, your Megan Trainers.
Speaker 2: I mean I think, I mean, because of the timeline
Speaker 2: of TikTok, I would say it kind of went out
Speaker 2: with YouTube viral songs like what did the Fox say type?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean yeah, I mean it's really just like
Speaker 1: you don't even get a viral song anymore. You get
Speaker 1: a viral riff, you get a viral SoundBite, and then
Speaker 1: you got to go play that on a hastily arranged
Speaker 1: stadium tour like poor Steve Lacy did and just screaming zoomers.
Speaker 1: You still want to be a musician yeah exactly, dude.
Speaker 1: Oh god, that was so funny. By the end of
Speaker 1: that tour, people were like holding up their phones and
Speaker 1: being like, say how to my mom and he just
Speaker 1: flatly goes no and starts paying the next song, like,
Speaker 1: uh anyway, yeah, okay, man, let's get cool. You didn't
Speaker 1: know that, like the large buff men so mirrored other
Speaker 1: large buff men in your metropolitan area. Yeah, I mean, like, idiot, Like,
Speaker 1: what's my dumb ask? Like, I mean, how do you
Speaker 1: misinterpret that? Like, no, it's totally straight. I just like
Speaker 1: I'm surrounded by like beefy men, uh, dressed as cops
Speaker 1: and like leather guys, and you know all these other
Speaker 1: guys out on the street dressed in leather. That surely
Speaker 1: has no bearing on what I've done. Must be a coincidence.
Speaker 1: Dunce Well, a lot to unpack here.
Speaker 2: Dive in from the initial conception of the band from
Speaker 2: a Frenchman walking around Granwich Village, the band's tragic and
Speaker 2: honestly quite surprising connection to nine to eleven. The charitable
Speaker 2: organizations allege a connection to the CIA, the historical legal
Speaker 2: precedent that resulted in the wake of the song and
Speaker 2: the Rolling Stone hit it helped inspire plus the origin
Speaker 2: of that famous dance. Here's everything you didn't know about
Speaker 2: Ymca by the village people. The village people like so
Speaker 2: many of life. Some pleasantries are a fault of the French.
Speaker 1: Thank you for citing that in for me. You're welcome.
Speaker 2: I recently discovered that I have in the analytics can
Speaker 2: see where very precisely, like down to individual cities and
Speaker 2: like large towns where people are listening. I haven't checked
Speaker 2: to see how many how many French people are listening,
Speaker 2: So if you're listening right now, I'm sorry. I'm sorry,
Speaker 2: at least I don't know. If I go is no,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna do a segment and it will be part
Speaker 2: of our kofee thanking the fans kind of thing. I
Speaker 2: want to go through and look down because there were
Speaker 2: some like fairly small like so somebody listening from Wookesbury, Pennsylvania,
Speaker 2: which is next to the town where my mom grew up.
Speaker 2: So hello folks, if you're listening right now, we should
Speaker 2: drive past the Carousel Strip Club on the way to
Speaker 2: visit my grandparents, and I, as a little kid, thought
Speaker 2: it was a real carousel and always wanted to stop
Speaker 2: and go, and my parents would always find reasons to not.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's still there, but said my
Speaker 2: best to everybody in Woosbury, Pennsylvania. Anyway, back to Leatherman,
Speaker 2: The Village People were a brainchild of French music producer
Speaker 2: and promoter Jacques Morale, and it was essentially to appeal to,
Speaker 2: some may say, exploit, the burgeoning disco scene of the
Speaker 2: late seventies, which.
Speaker 1: As we discussed in our Studio fifty.
Speaker 2: Four episode, was largely gay disco we forget now. It
Speaker 2: was originally the music of the disenfranchised, the queer community
Speaker 2: and anybody else who'd essentially been othered gathered in downtown
Speaker 2: loft parties in the late sixties and early seventies of
Speaker 2: Manhattan because they essentially had nowhere else that they could
Speaker 2: drink and dance publicly due to discriminatory cabaret laws that
Speaker 2: prohibited same sex dancing, and the music played in these
Speaker 2: underground parties.
Speaker 1: Were generally soul.
Speaker 2: In R and B, you had guys like David Mancuso,
Speaker 2: who's arguably the most famous underground DJ of the early seventies,
Speaker 2: playing stuff like Mandudubango's nineteen seventy two proto disco classic
Speaker 2: soul ma Cosa, which is probably best known these days
Speaker 2: for its reference or sample in Michael Jackson's want to
Speaker 2: be Starting something.
Speaker 1: I'm say, mam say, ma'ma sokas. Yeah, I'm say mamaselle,
Speaker 1: what's that mean? Macosa means dance in Cameroonian, which is
Speaker 1: where Manu Debongo was from.
Speaker 2: So David Mancuso passed Saul ma Coosa to a broadcast
Speaker 2: DJ friend who started playing it on air, and that
Speaker 2: arguably became the first true disco hit. And so more
Speaker 2: of these sounds started to escape these downtown loft parties
Speaker 2: and it started to break into the mainstream and call
Speaker 2: us into a genre which we now know is disco
Speaker 2: and has its origins in soul, funk and salsa traditions
Speaker 2: of the Black and Latino communities which were played at.
Speaker 1: These gay dances. So, despite its reputation these days.
Speaker 2: As corny or hackey, disco started off having all the
Speaker 2: musical and cultural integrity in the world. But one of
Speaker 2: the factors, the biggest factor I would say that gave
Speaker 2: disco a bad name was the second and third and
Speaker 2: fourth wave of castions perpetrated by guys like our frenchman
Speaker 2: Jacques Moraley.
Speaker 3: Did that miss anything there? Like thumbing the else sketch
Speaker 3: in the origins at disco?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's it's I think I've mentioned him before,
Speaker 1: but I had a college professor named Thomas Stanley. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He was just like, I don't get why people bag
Speaker 1: on disco. Man. It says like everybody can dance to disco.
Speaker 1: It's four on the floor, you know, give people a
Speaker 1: quarter note. Everybody deserves the dance. Yeah, everybody deserves to dance.
Speaker 1: Give people a quarter note. Yeah, I mean, ah, with
Speaker 1: distance and knowing that we put up with now, it
Speaker 1: just sounds like it's all gold to me, you know,
Speaker 1: like even like even like Boogie Boogie Wonderland, I'm just like,
Speaker 1: what a oh, that's that's earth Winded Fire. Sorry, what's
Speaker 1: the one? Boogie Woogie Shoes? Can you sing a little bit?
Speaker 1: I want to put them. I wanna put on my
Speaker 1: boogie shoes.
Speaker 3: I actually don't know that song. Can you believe it?
Speaker 1: That's a wedding DJ I really, dude, I'm thinking of
Speaker 1: the Boogie Ogi Ogi one. That song also actually goes
Speaker 1: You've got to know this song. You you lived through
Speaker 1: the era when it was a huge hit, for when
Speaker 1: it was not maybe not huge, but the sample was
Speaker 1: for a trick daddy.
Speaker 4: First place I heard the horns, Oh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean like, I don't know. I listen to
Speaker 1: that and I'm just like, yeah, this smokes. These are
Speaker 1: like real musicians playing in a room. You know. It's
Speaker 1: just I'm so I've my attitude towards almost all disco
Speaker 1: has softened. Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, that's a good point, you know.
Speaker 2: Now now I'm looking up the origin of the term
Speaker 2: boogie boogers. The origin of the term boogie woogie is unknown.
Speaker 2: Oxfording in sixth United States that the word is a
Speaker 2: redoubling of boogie, which was used for rent parties as
Speaker 2: early as nineteen thirteen, maybe derived from Sierra Leone term
Speaker 2: a bogie, which means to dance. Also maybe akin to
Speaker 2: the phrase hoosa boogoo, which means to beat drums.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 2: In the late twenties and early thirties, the term could
Speaker 2: mean anything from a racy style of dance to a
Speaker 2: raucus party or a.
Speaker 3: Sexually transmitted disease.
Speaker 1: Cool.
Speaker 2: Well, this concludes your history of disco and boogie. Jacques Moraley,
Speaker 2: the man who is.
Speaker 1: The godfather of village people. I suppose he's a fascinating man.
Speaker 2: He started out writing music for live orchestras in France,
Speaker 2: including the legendary slash infamous Parisian nightclub Crazy Horse. He
Speaker 2: also produced a record by a future member of the
Speaker 2: band King Harvest, who would go on to have a
Speaker 2: massive hit with Dancing in the Moonlight Great Song, which was.
Speaker 3: My prom theme.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, that band King Harvest was named after
Speaker 2: the band song.
Speaker 1: I did know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think you
Speaker 1: told me that.
Speaker 3: I probably. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I love making things that have a lot of artistic integrity,
Speaker 2: a lot lamer and kitcher.
Speaker 1: Yeah me too. Well.
Speaker 2: Jacques Moraley apparently came to the United States after winning
Speaker 2: a twentieth Century Fox slogan contest. I that's what a
Speaker 2: rolling Stone piece says, and I have no further info
Speaker 2: on that, okay, but I enjoy that. He soon fell
Speaker 2: in love with the sounds of disco and started co
Speaker 2: producing Philly soul adjacent axe like The Richie Family, which
Speaker 2: tragically does not feature Lionel Ritchie. In nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 2: Moraley took a fateful trip to Greenwich Village. The story
Speaker 2: has been told many many, many times, in multiple ways.
Speaker 2: I'm going to choose to print the legends with the
Speaker 2: most colorful version. Morale would say that he was walking
Speaker 2: through the village when he heard the sounds of bells jingling.
Speaker 2: He turned and looked and caught sight of a man
Speaker 2: in a full on Native American outfit, complete with headdress
Speaker 2: and bells on his feet.
Speaker 1: The year was two thousand and nine, it was Coachella.
Speaker 2: Intrigued, Moraley followed him into a nearby gay club called
Speaker 2: I Believe the Anvil, where this man was reporting to
Speaker 2: work as a dancer and bartender. Maraley started peppering in
Speaker 2: with questions and learned that his name was Philippe Rose
Speaker 2: and he was actually part Lakota Soue. Inspired by the
Speaker 2: fancy dress of all the men around him, cowboys, etc.
Speaker 2: Moraley dreamed up the idea for a band, and Maraley's
Speaker 2: business partner, a man named Henri Bololo, happened to accompany
Speaker 2: him on the strip downtown, and Belolo recalled it vividly
Speaker 2: in a two thousand interview with discodisco dot Com. Philippe
Speaker 2: Rose was serving and also dancing on the bar. I
Speaker 2: bet he was serving and while we were watching him
Speaker 2: dancing and sipping our beer. We saw a cowboy watching
Speaker 2: him dance, and Jacques and I suddenly had the same idea.
Speaker 2: We said, my god, look at those characters. We started
Speaker 2: to fantasize about what were the characters of America, the mix,
Speaker 2: you know, the American man. And we named this mix
Speaker 2: the village people because they were in Gretich village.
Speaker 3: Get it.
Speaker 1: The French are unable to like not condescend to us
Speaker 1: in our own country. But I guess so, I mean,
Speaker 1: we do that to them all the time, with like
Speaker 1: the cigarette smoking and the existentialism, and like they really
Speaker 1: really loved to come over here and just talk down
Speaker 1: to us, the twentieth centuries, pre eminent Nazi collaborators coming
Speaker 1: over here and making fun of us. For the legend
Speaker 1: of the American West cough Oh.
Speaker 2: By nineteen seventy seven, producers Moraley and Audria Bololo. I
Speaker 2: can't I love saying that name assemble the group designed
Speaker 2: to attract a gay audience while parroting, or some would claim, exploiting,
Speaker 2: that same constituency stereotypes. These roles were all very carefully considered,
Speaker 2: you know, the Native American, the cop.
Speaker 1: The construction worker, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, union man, good guy,
Speaker 1: union guy. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The timeline of how the band came together is a
Speaker 2: little fuzzy. I've seen that the first person Moraley invited
Speaker 2: to join was Philippe Rose, the American guy from the bar,
Speaker 2: just because he was the guy that he saw first.
Speaker 2: Some reports say that he invited him to join this
Speaker 2: project that very night at the bar.
Speaker 1: It seems that sounds like something that you would do
Speaker 1: at a bar in Greenwich Village in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: like come up with a million selling band, like whacked
Speaker 1: out on good coke, and like watching a buff to
Speaker 1: gay dude dance. It's the beach scene from the doors
Speaker 1: where he's like, you and me are going to form
Speaker 1: a band and we're going to make a million dollars.
Speaker 1: But he's like murmuring it to a torque gay dude
Speaker 1: dancing at a bar in a headdress with pictrusive paps.
Speaker 1: Oh man, So.
Speaker 2: We'll call him even it was that strictly true, we'll
Speaker 2: call him the founding member because he's definitely spiritually the
Speaker 2: founding member.
Speaker 3: Felipe Rose.
Speaker 2: He was raised in Brooklyn, where he displayed an interest
Speaker 2: in the arts during his childhood and he first dressed
Speaker 2: as quote an Indian while in school for the Christopher
Speaker 2: Columbus Day parade.
Speaker 1: Oh I love this though.
Speaker 2: By twenty fourteen, he'd become an ordained minister to marry fans,
Speaker 2: including a gay couple who spontaneously decided to get married
Speaker 2: while aboard a ship in Australia, which is adorable. Arguably,
Speaker 2: the most important hire was the next one. Victor Willis,
Speaker 2: the lead singer and eventual lyricist for The Village People.
Speaker 2: Marley would call him quote the young man with the
Speaker 2: big voice. He'd seen him on Broadway performing in The
Speaker 2: Whiz in the original cast before inviting him to join
Speaker 2: his new musical product.
Speaker 1: And truly incredible opener.
Speaker 2: I had a dream that you sang lead vocals on
Speaker 2: my album and it went very very very very big.
Speaker 1: Can you say that on a French accent please? I
Speaker 1: had to dream you played inhale cigarette just pictured Serge Gainsburg. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're gonna assemble the image of like five o'clock shadow
Speaker 1: and lidded eyes like smoking a cigarette. I had to
Speaker 1: dream you sang lead vocalis on my album and it
Speaker 1: went valet valet valet meeg.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna put the uh the Surge Gainsburg song that
Speaker 2: was bands like the opening instrumental part under what you
Speaker 2: just said?
Speaker 1: I had to dream You sang lead vocalis on my
Speaker 1: album and it went Valet Valet and Valet meeg God,
Speaker 1: he sucks. What a clown? People like the video of
Speaker 1: hit them in the late nineties with a little kid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: stressedes him painted on stubble and he's like moved to
Speaker 1: tears by it, like pathetic. I'm sorry, I forget that
Speaker 1: must be moving to you as a person, but like,
Speaker 1: no idiot. He fumbled Jane Burkin. He fumbled Jane Burkin.
Speaker 1: He said like he was within a foot of Whitney Houston,
Speaker 1: which not many people got to be, and like fumbled that.
Speaker 1: I mean, not that there was ever a chance. But
Speaker 1: he like immediately pissed her off by being a weird pervert.
Speaker 1: So like, oh yeah, yeah for him, man, that's who
Speaker 1: people think of you as you know, why don't celebrate
Speaker 1: that well.
Speaker 2: He also made a concept album starring his wife playing
Speaker 2: a fourteen year old that he hit with his rolls
Speaker 2: Royce and then obsessed.
Speaker 1: But he I didn't even get into the pederast. I
Speaker 1: didn't even get.
Speaker 3: Into the Lemon Incess too, the song with his Yeah
Speaker 3: about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, super weird considering all the kids later dressed
Speaker 1: up as him and the weeping Oh just as clownish
Speaker 1: clownish people can.
Speaker 2: We discussed lemon incest on one episode. I forget what
Speaker 2: it was for, but yeah, he did a song with
Speaker 2: his daughter Charlotte, and the video for it was them
Speaker 2: in debt if I recall, yeah.
Speaker 1: She defended it, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think
Speaker 1: she defends it to the stage because they're weird people,
Speaker 1: the French. You know, she lives here now though, right
Speaker 1: you think it would have been like trained out of her. No,
Speaker 1: we can't do that. That's the thing. Like they're impervious
Speaker 1: to American programming. You cannot find a French person who's
Speaker 1: been americanized. I'm serious, I'm not joking about this. Like,
Speaker 1: think of every French person you met in New York.
Speaker 1: You would never go, oh, that's like an American with
Speaker 1: a slight accent. You're like, that's a French person. You know,
Speaker 1: they always staring out a window or like the Berets,
Speaker 1: like come on, So, yeah, you can never break that programming.
Speaker 1: I mean it's just not possible. Imagine being so fucking
Speaker 1: weird for your dad that, like thirty years later, you're like, no,
Speaker 1: that Incests song was funny, good bit. Pah.
Speaker 3: I don't think she said funny. I think she said beautiful.
Speaker 1: Well that's even stupider. I mean, you know it's funny.
Speaker 1: Though I was at a performance at this school last night. Well,
Speaker 1: I can't mention my place of work on here, even
Speaker 1: though it's obviously visible on my Twitter and LinkedIn. I
Speaker 1: was at a performance the other night and heard a
Speaker 1: lot of Debusy performed, and man, I fucking love Debusy. Dude,
Speaker 1: his harmonies are just his chord voicing is just like
Speaker 1: when people talk about like, oh, composers integrating sounds from
Speaker 1: other cultures, like it's usually so fascile, but like that
Speaker 1: guy really heard like ragtime and dominant seventh chords and
Speaker 1: was like, no, this is my thing now because I
Speaker 1: didn't realize. But his like mature period that people consider
Speaker 1: when he wrote all the Bangers started at forty, so
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, anyway, Debuty's cool. Didn't he do weird
Speaker 1: stuff too?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, dude, every one of those composers was
Speaker 1: like fucking on and like living like rock stars. Well
Speaker 1: back to the assembly of Yeah, I mean just cut
Speaker 1: off that young men, just fade me down in the
Speaker 1: background and just paste in like like yeah, or I
Speaker 1: was going to say, like an MTA lady like robot voice,
Speaker 1: like Alex goes on anti French rant. Sorry, what about
Speaker 1: Okay these guys village people. That's two. We're up to two.
Speaker 2: So now he's now he's got the Native American and
Speaker 2: uh Victor Willis who was the cop, he was the
Speaker 2: cop and I think he was occasionally a naval commander.
Speaker 2: To Victor Willis invited his friend, a fellow musical theater
Speaker 2: veteran named Alex Briley, who was at various points a soldier,
Speaker 2: a sailor following the release of in the Navy, and
Speaker 2: also a naval cadet.
Speaker 1: It's just so funny they had they had a pinch hitter.
Speaker 1: He was like, I need you to come in and
Speaker 1: play three to five gay stereotypes because in the beginning
Speaker 1: it was just a studio enterprise. So having a utility
Speaker 1: guy in the Village People was just a funny to me, Like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, throw him in. He's good in any position.
Speaker 1: What you got, Yeah, the sixth Man Award for the
Speaker 1: for the People.
Speaker 2: This is not the most interesting fact about Alex Briley.
Speaker 1: I need to modulate my tone for this. Yeah, go
Speaker 1: to Syria to go to True crime guy.
Speaker 2: Interesting side note about Alex Briley, his brother Jonathan is
Speaker 2: believed to be the man depicted in the iconic, slash
Speaker 2: horrifying photograph taken on nine to eleven by Richard Drew,
Speaker 2: known as the Falling Man. It defies description, but if
Speaker 2: you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 3: And if not, I was.
Speaker 1: Gonna say google it. No, maybe don't.
Speaker 2: It's an image of a man falling from the upper
Speaker 2: floors of the North Tower.
Speaker 3: It's unclear if he jumped or fell.
Speaker 2: Just this is gonna sound grotesque, but just the angle
Speaker 2: of him and the angle of the building, it's it's
Speaker 2: a very striking image. Deeply upsetting, very striking.
Speaker 1: I can say, some would say haunting. Yeah, extremely haunting.
Speaker 2: Elton John, for some reason, owns the original Jesus Christ
Speaker 2: and he's described it as the most perfect photo ever taken.
Speaker 1: But you didn't think I was.
Speaker 2: Going to Elton John, But yeah, he is an enormous
Speaker 2: photography collection, and he has the original and he's described
Speaker 2: it as the most perfect photo ever taken. I believe
Speaker 2: the image is the subject of an amazing Esquire piece
Speaker 2: by Tom Janaud. He wrote the profile of mister Rogers
Speaker 2: that was turned into the movie with Tom Hanks a
Speaker 2: few years ago, and it's also the subject of a
Speaker 2: two thousand and six documentary film called The Falling Man,
Speaker 2: all of which are trying to determine the identity of
Speaker 2: who this man is, because obviously it's even those a
Speaker 2: telephoto lens, it's hard to make out. But the most
Speaker 2: likely candidate so far is the younger brother of the
Speaker 2: Navy guy from the Village People.
Speaker 3: His name is Jonathan Briley.
Speaker 2: He worked as an audio engineer at the Windows of
Speaker 2: the World restaurant on top of the North Tower and
Speaker 2: the World Trade Center, and the impact of the plane
Speaker 2: rendered all of the exit stairwells impassable, so everyone above
Speaker 2: the impact zone died.
Speaker 1: Should we get back to Disco, imagine clocking in at
Speaker 1: your job running the PA at the Windows in the
Speaker 1: World planeheads.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's and they were not far from the I
Speaker 2: believe it was the observation deck. They were almost on
Speaker 2: the top floor, so they were only one or two
Speaker 2: floors down from the observation deck and for some reason
Speaker 2: they couldn't open the doors up there because they were
Speaker 2: going to try to have helicopters land up there to
Speaker 2: hoist people off.
Speaker 1: But yeah, let's just get off. Let's get off nine
Speaker 1: to eleven. Just maybe as a general I did. I did,
Speaker 1: and to my peril, I forgot how much you actually
Speaker 1: know about it a week after the election. But we're
Speaker 1: in a political podcast here, folks. Let's roll anyway. As
Speaker 1: they say, remember remember the weird I was talking to
Speaker 1: all these zoomers at our school and I was like, man,
Speaker 1: you guys like they genuinely do not know what nine
Speaker 1: to eleven was like, like the fallout from oh yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, they like. I was like, you got I
Speaker 1: mean they, I said, like, they renamed French fries at
Speaker 1: my high school. That was like a nationally really that
Speaker 1: was like a national but that was a national story,
Speaker 1: right like they were. So they didn't do it. I
Speaker 1: think we laughed at the people who did do it.
Speaker 1: It was in the White House cafeteria, as I remember,
Speaker 1: and then they what's.
Speaker 3: Different what Bush's House.
Speaker 1: My point is is that there was somebody in Central
Speaker 1: PA who took that at face value and did it
Speaker 1: in a high school, And these kids were like laughing,
Speaker 1: and I was like, you don't know, Like when we
Speaker 1: found out that let's roll was like the last words
Speaker 1: from that one guy. Yeah, I was like, didn't Florida
Speaker 1: or some Neil Young stop just naming things. Didn't some
Speaker 1: like top ten college adopt that is like their slogan
Speaker 1: or something. Tide.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I know it wasn't roll Tide, but I don't know.
Speaker 1: Truly crazy times eclipsed by every year since.
Speaker 3: Yep, yeah, pretty much boy.
Speaker 1: Okay, Jesus Christ. The main lyricists for The Village People's
Speaker 1: first album were Phil Hurt and Peter Whitehead, who were
Speaker 1: brought in purely because producer Moraley was French and could
Speaker 1: not speak English. God, this whole story becomes so much
Speaker 1: funnier when you imagine him doing all of this in
Speaker 1: like a brick thick French accent, not even lightly accented.
Speaker 1: Whitehead wrote lyrics that Morelly deemed too obscene for mainstream pop,
Speaker 1: so he had Peter Hurt, who'd already topped the charts
Speaker 1: by writing I'll be around for the Spinners, which is
Speaker 1: like a top ten song of all time.
Speaker 3: I'll be.
Speaker 1: Yeah great bass break anyway, he has some He came
Speaker 1: in to straight wash the song Hurt. Was reportedly offered
Speaker 1: the lead singer spot initially, but he turned it down.
Speaker 1: It's an important to note that, as we did previously
Speaker 1: but really underscored after all the nine to eleven talk,
Speaker 1: that not all the Village People were gay. Singer Victor Willis,
Speaker 1: who did have a handwriting some of the group's biggest hits,
Speaker 1: including Yes Ymca, was married to Felicia ayers Allen, who
Speaker 1: would go on to play Claire Huxtable on The Cosby
Speaker 1: Show The Nuts Yeah, good for him, and Willis would
Speaker 1: repeatedly say over the years that he did not co
Speaker 1: write Ymca in the Navy or Macho Man with the
Speaker 1: specific intention of making them gay anthems, which, Jesus Christ again,
Speaker 1: you're either lying or genuinely one of the stupidest people alive,
Speaker 1: especially when you realize that The Village People's self titled
Speaker 1: first album contains four tracks which are San Francisco parentheses,
Speaker 1: You've Got Me in Hollywood parentheses, Everybody Is a Star,
Speaker 1: and then Fire Island, before closing with Village People, which
Speaker 1: was the name.
Speaker 3: Of the band of New York Spirits.
Speaker 1: Village Also, if for those of you who don't know,
Speaker 1: Fire Island is like a intensely popular it's Long Island technically, right,
Speaker 1: I believe so. Yeah, it's a very popular gay nation
Speaker 1: stop for the the moneyed class. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: at one point it was like genuinely very like on
Speaker 1: the when when Long Island was like in the Hampton's
Speaker 1: were like the wilderness, when no one out there. I
Speaker 1: think it was like a big kind.
Speaker 3: Of like Capodi would go out there.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, like clandestine or just more hidden, more
Speaker 1: bohemian kind of spot. And then of course, like everything,
Speaker 1: it became fucking terrible. As you meditate on that. We'll
Speaker 1: be right back with more too much information after these messages.
Speaker 1: Village People's first single, because the afore mentioned San Francisco parentheses,
Speaker 1: You've Got Me, did actually not well. It didn't crack
Speaker 1: the top one hundred on Billboard. It hit one oh two.
Speaker 1: The Village People were signed to Casablanca Records, which was
Speaker 1: at the time a new label formed by a guy
Speaker 1: named Neil Bogar, an incredible seventies name.
Speaker 3: If I've ever heard one Yeah Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: After cutting his teeth by producing the group Cute question
Speaker 1: Mark and the Mysterians, including their garage rock classic ninety
Speaker 1: six tiers Hell Yeah Yeah or the er garage rock
Speaker 1: song it's.
Speaker 2: Like that in Louis Louis, Oh Yeah, oh yeah. I
Speaker 2: was gonna say and maybe something like them.
Speaker 1: No, I don't know, no too Irish. Yeah, it's gotta
Speaker 1: be something America. It's gotta be like the Seeds or
Speaker 1: the Sonics. I was gonna go to Van Morrison thing
Speaker 1: that I don't care. Van Morrison is too like, he's
Speaker 1: not he's not tough enough. I mean, he's like a
Speaker 1: drunken a but he's not like the entirety of moon
Speaker 1: Dance is about him, like being moved to tears by
Speaker 1: drinking water from a Irish stream. That's not garage rock.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you say the word fantabulous and Jeff
Speaker 2: fox Worthy voice, you're not you're not garage rock.
Speaker 1: And Bilgert had done a bunch of other dogs like
Speaker 1: green Tambourine by the Lemon Pipers, Yummy, yummy, yummy parentheses,
Speaker 1: I've got Love in my tummy? Is that the full title? Okay?
Speaker 2: No, I don't think that's the full title, but I'm glad.
Speaker 2: I'm glad you know it.
Speaker 1: Speaking of innuendo songs, man, good.
Speaker 2: Lord, oh my right, I mean god, I never really
Speaker 2: thought of that, to be honest.
Speaker 1: You live an incredibly cloistered life in that little head
Speaker 1: of years, don't you. Just a whole infrastructure they're dedicated
Speaker 1: to keeping them a lot of things out.
Speaker 3: I just did a tight five on nine to eleven.
Speaker 3: What do you want from me?
Speaker 1: I gotta balance it out somehow, et cetera. New Bogart
Speaker 1: his CV Bogert very much Sawivillage People was following in
Speaker 1: this lineage of novelty hits. If you look at the
Speaker 1: acts that he signed, Kiss Donna Summer, who, as you
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, was best known for like an insanely long
Speaker 1: playing song crafted by an Italian coke maniac, consisted mostly
Speaker 1: of orgasmic sounds. But Casablanca seemed to luck into having
Speaker 1: some of the best acts of the seventies on there
Speaker 1: that had not just Kiss Donna Summer and Village People.
Speaker 1: They had share lips inc uh, Parliament, one of George
Speaker 1: Clinton's I'm actually still too white to understand how Parliament
Speaker 1: and Funkadelic came together and then split again. I know,
Speaker 1: Parliaments was his like do wop group, and then Funkadelic
Speaker 1: was like a separate thing that he started and then
Speaker 1: they became one.
Speaker 2: When a funk band on a duop group love each
Speaker 2: other very much.
Speaker 1: And George Clinton is doing prodigious amounts of acid, like
Speaker 1: acid and coke, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, No. I just
Speaker 1: think it's funny because he was, like I just think
Speaker 1: of him as like one of the outliers of Black
Speaker 1: American acid consumption, you know, like yeah, other than other
Speaker 1: than Hendrix and sly Stone. I mean, like, you know,
Speaker 1: Barry Gordy wasn't doing acid, Booker t was not doing
Speaker 1: I wasn't doing acid. Like all those Southern Fried guys
Speaker 1: were not acid heads anyway, got p funk rules? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Flashlight song rips. We should pick one of their forty
Speaker 1: records to do. Did you ever hear the story about
Speaker 1: them driving into the filming of Night of the Living Dead?
Speaker 2: This sounds familiar, but I know, did they not know
Speaker 2: it was a movie with it?
Speaker 1: No, they didn't. They were all extremely on acid and
Speaker 1: driving through like outside Pittsburgh where that movie is filmed
Speaker 1: in Monroeville, Oh my God, and like late at night
Speaker 1: and just happened to stumble across like a zombie scene
Speaker 1: being filmed, the er American zombie text being filmed in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night while they were all extremely
Speaker 1: up on acid and whatever else. Like. Imagine what that
Speaker 1: must have been like to be a fly on that
Speaker 1: bus wall sadly knew. Bogert died in nineteen eighty two
Speaker 1: of lymphoma at the very young age of thirty nine.
Speaker 1: His son, though, has continued his proud legacy. His name
Speaker 1: is Evan Bogart, and he is a crazily accomplished modern
Speaker 1: pop songwriter, co writing Halo with Ryan Tedder for Beyonce
Speaker 1: and Rihanna's SOS. He went semi viral recently for revealing
Speaker 1: that SOS, which of course samples the synth line to
Speaker 1: Soft Cells Deathless hit Tainted Love features a verse that
Speaker 1: is just titles of hit eighties songs strung together and
Speaker 1: no one ever noticed, No Yeah, And that includes take
Speaker 1: on Me. The verse lyrics are take on me, you
Speaker 1: know inside you feel it right? Take me on. I
Speaker 1: could just die in your arms tonight. I melt with you.
Speaker 1: You got me head over heels. You keep me hanging on, man,
Speaker 1: that is so funny way you make me feel. Keep
Speaker 1: Me hanging On, of course, is a sixties one, but
Speaker 1: there was a there was a.
Speaker 2: Cover of it in the eighties by It might have
Speaker 2: been by Soft Cells, somebody out of Kim Wilder eighties
Speaker 2: Kim Wile.
Speaker 1: Someone didn't read ahead in the outline hoisted by your
Speaker 1: own petard. Uh Jesus Christ, this is a real bad
Speaker 1: one for staying on topic. Man. I took an adderall
Speaker 1: to day when there's self titled. I did. When their
Speaker 1: self titled album was released in July nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: the Village People were essentially at that point a studio group.
Speaker 1: But when the album sold a million, and the singles
Speaker 1: in Hollywood parentheses Everybody is a Star and San Francisco
Speaker 1: parentheses You've Got Me began to chart in the burgeoning
Speaker 1: disco markets, it became clear that they needed to take
Speaker 1: this show on the road. And Jordan, you've heard it
Speaker 1: said that it was good old Dick Clark that perennially
Speaker 1: Rick dis grinning teenager of the American Psyche told them
Speaker 1: to do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like the son of Sam the neighbor's dog
Speaker 2: told them to do it. Dick Clark told to do this.
Speaker 1: Dick Clark does tell me to do a lot of things. Actually,
Speaker 1: it's Casey case It's in.
Speaker 2: That, Yeah, yeah, Alex. Dick Clark's a harder impression.
Speaker 1: The hang on, Alex, this has been casey k. I
Speaker 1: don't have it at hand, Alex.
Speaker 2: I don't think you should take any more adderall today. Alex,
Speaker 2: grab that cops gun. Here's a letter, okay.
Speaker 1: Moraley solicited young hopefuls by putting this unforgettable ad in
Speaker 1: the trades, as they called them, macho types wanted, must
Speaker 1: dance and have a mustache. Vocal talent was not mentioned
Speaker 1: because the idea was that they would just be lip
Speaker 1: syncing all these songs. That ad found the band's eventual leatherman,
Speaker 1: construction worker, and Cowboy, three of the remaining American archetypes.
Speaker 1: Aspiring actor Randy Jones was brought on by the Cowboy,
Speaker 1: presumably because he was raised on a real North Carolina farm.
Speaker 1: David Hodo was the construction worker with the mirrored shades
Speaker 1: who would later tell Spin for their oral history on
Speaker 1: the song, I had just finished a musical about the
Speaker 1: Grand Ole Opry and I had a mustache. It was
Speaker 1: Christmas time and I needed money. They wanted a cowboy,
Speaker 1: and I had just finished a Western perfect But when
Speaker 1: they said they wanted me to be a construction worker,
Speaker 1: that was my dad's dream come true. I'm handy, but
Speaker 1: I've never built anything of consequence. I wouldn't say that
Speaker 1: my greatest fear. I wouldn't say that. David I was
Speaker 1: on hook for every next word in that statement musical
Speaker 1: about the grand Ole Opry Christmas time broke. He wanted
Speaker 1: to be a cowboy, they wanted to be a construction worker.
Speaker 1: His dad loved Dad, and then that tremendous kicker. I'm handy,
Speaker 1: but I've never built anything of consequence. It should just
Speaker 1: be the entirety of do you ever hear of Alvin Lucier,
Speaker 1: who's his avant garde composer, who recorded I Am sitting
Speaker 1: in a room. Oh yeah. He just loops a certain
Speaker 1: amount of text. He repeats it over and over until
Speaker 1: the overtones and echoes and everything render it this like
Speaker 1: non speech sound art consolation. We should do that for
Speaker 1: an episode. But I'm just looping the rays. I'm handy,
Speaker 1: but I've never built anything of consequence with increasingly distorted
Speaker 1: tape echo. I'm handy, but I've never built anything of consequence.
Speaker 1: I'm handy, but I've never built anything of consequence. I'm'm
Speaker 1: a handy, but I never really consequence. I'm a hand
Speaker 1: I'm handy, hand I'm hand consequence. Uh Anyway, rounding out
Speaker 1: the group was the only member who didn't come from
Speaker 1: an entertainment background. Glenn Hughes had been a Brooklyn Battery
Speaker 1: Bridge toll collector. Is that corrector I'm just now hearing this,
Speaker 1: that's correct when he was enlisted as the leather clad Biker.
Speaker 1: He is recognized for his extremely expressive horseshoe mustache, while
Speaker 1: his outfit was drawn from the dress code that was
Speaker 1: mandated at the infamous BDSM Leather Bar Mine Shaft, which
Speaker 1: is one of the two gay bars that are the
Speaker 1: inspiration and or filmed at in William Freakin's Cruising, starring
Speaker 1: a very obviously too old for this al Pacino playing
Speaker 1: like a twenty seven year old male cop. Is that
Speaker 1: worth watching? Ah? You know, I've heard a lot of
Speaker 1: people say it is, but it's I think all of
Speaker 1: those people hate you, No, are like freaking dorks. What
Speaker 1: are the actual clubs Get Pulse Orrivinos in There's a
Speaker 1: Oh Man. Richard Gear was going to be the lead
Speaker 1: in that movie. Oh oh okay, so here it is.
Speaker 1: It was intended to depict scenes cruising. Was intended to
Speaker 1: depict the scene at the mine Shaft. However, the mine
Speaker 1: Shaft would not allow them to film in there, so
Speaker 1: instead the scenes for Cruising were filmed at the hell
Speaker 1: Fire Club, which was then set decorated to resemble the
Speaker 1: mind Shaft and then populated with regulars from the mine
Speaker 1: Shaft as extras and also exterior shots were shot around
Speaker 1: the mind Shaft, and al Pacino visited the mine Shaft
Speaker 1: to research the role, so freaking once again demonstrating his
Speaker 1: apex pettiness as a filmmaker, was like, Oh, you want
Speaker 1: to let me film there, I'll just make it look
Speaker 1: like this in every single way anyway.
Speaker 2: This comes back later actually in this episode wonderful.
Speaker 1: In any event, mister Hughes was seen as a dandy
Speaker 1: of the disco age and no less an authority than
Speaker 1: our former employer. People Magazine named him one of the
Speaker 1: most Beautiful people of nineteen seventy nine, but this was
Speaker 1: the same era where they were thrown it like Nick Nolty, right.
Speaker 2: No, this is this is seventies when they when they
Speaker 2: were serious about it. Now the biker from the Village
Speaker 2: People made the cut, Nick Nulty sixiest, that was like
Speaker 2: ninety one, ninety two?
Speaker 1: No was it? Oh my god, you're right it was No,
Speaker 1: it was ninety two.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: On the basis of what when was that mugshot photo? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ cool man. He was not acting when he
Speaker 1: was clad in those leathers. He was. He died in
Speaker 1: two thousand and one at the age of fifty. When
Speaker 1: did he live to see it?
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: What Shrek I was striving for the Dana Carve movie.
Speaker 1: That paused for a moment of silence on this set.
Speaker 1: The impression the great impersonator was March.
Speaker 3: No, it was March died in March.
Speaker 1: Ah bummer.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: He was buried in all of his leathers. The title
Speaker 1: song from the second Village People, lp mancho Man, also
Speaker 1: became a best selling single in the summer of nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight, while the album itself went platinum as well.
Speaker 1: The group began touring, often featuring a young up and
Speaker 1: comer named Madonna as the Air Opening Act, but by
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight their fame would grow exponentially with YMCA.
Speaker 1: Where does the leather guy archetype come from? Is that
Speaker 1: a tom of Finland construction? Nope, gay servicemen returning from
Speaker 1: World War II?
Speaker 2: While leather because they spaw wrinkles Paul linn carry over
Speaker 2: from the Bewitched episode.
Speaker 1: No it, I guess it was part of biker gangs
Speaker 1: in the fifties.
Speaker 2: Now, Okay, this is a sincere question that you probably
Speaker 2: won't have the answer to. Are these looks aspirational, like
Speaker 2: we are attracted to that, and therefore I'm gonna dress
Speaker 2: like that because that is what I'm attracted to? Or
Speaker 2: is the implication that a lot of homosexual men are
Speaker 2: actually bikers, or are actually construction workers, or are actually
Speaker 2: cops or whatever?
Speaker 3: You know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Why can it be? Can it be? Can it be both?
Speaker 1: Can it be both? Jordan? You know, we don't. We
Speaker 1: don't want to limit them anymore.
Speaker 2: The conversational stylings of two straight men discussing gay stereotypes
Speaker 2: from fifty years ago. Don't let anyone ever say that
Speaker 2: we just show doesn't.
Speaker 1: Have any take on back Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: We had a very cool comment from somebody who listened
Speaker 2: to our Studio fifty four episode that was talking about
Speaker 2: how they.
Speaker 1: It was like their mom or something.
Speaker 2: No, I think they would go there. Oh okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't know how to say this. I'm sorry, d D.
Speaker 2: Ferrera or Faery. The reason a list there was such
Speaker 2: a share Gloria Gaynor or Grace Jones would be turned
Speaker 2: away from a Studio fifty four was because some nights
Speaker 2: it was strictly Dickley and gay sex was allowed to
Speaker 2: be anywhere and everywhere.
Speaker 1: No women were allowed.
Speaker 2: Because they wouldn't be wanted or partaking. Studio fifty four
Speaker 2: documentary mentioned that.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't get it. I remember seeing this archival photograph
Speaker 1: collection at some point when I was in Brooklyn about
Speaker 1: disco gay subculture, and that was when I was introduced
Speaker 1: to the practice of shirt cooking, which was like a
Speaker 1: thing in clubs when you just wore you would just
Speaker 1: wear like a button down, like a button top and
Speaker 1: like nothing else. No, like Winnie the Pooh, Yes exactly,
Speaker 1: but with your shlongout you know, Okay, all right, I
Speaker 1: mean I guess it was maybe presumably it was a
Speaker 1: bit of a self policing scene, like you didn't really
Speaker 1: shirk unless you like had to back it up shirt no,
Speaker 1: because the point was it wasn't un it. It was unshirted. Well,
Speaker 1: I know it was unbottomed.
Speaker 2: Even I'm just aesthetically that's not a good look, though,
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I'll talk with either.
Speaker 1: No, I mean but there, I don't know, think about
Speaker 1: any number of uh like eighties like like, think about
Speaker 1: the stereotype of like the woman in the man's dress
Speaker 1: shirt the morning after. You know, that's such a.
Speaker 3: M thinking of it.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, hang on, okay, I'm thinking of it.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Now just imagine it's a dude with a big Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of it. Yeah, so it's a thing. Hey,
Speaker 1: you get it. You get it, this guy gets it.
Speaker 1: You would have been allowed as strictly ticularly you like
Speaker 1: to party.
Speaker 2: Well from uh wun't of the poohing to YMCA, I
Speaker 2: guess it's not that far of a jump. Before we
Speaker 2: go any further, we should probably talk about what the YMCA,
Speaker 2: which has since been re christened the Why in twenty
Speaker 2: ten I believe, actually is, since it's kind of archaic
Speaker 2: these days, I feel like maybe a lot of people
Speaker 2: don't know. YMCA stands for Young Men's Christian Association. A
Speaker 2: lot of people know that, and it's generally associated with
Speaker 2: gyms and at the time provided temporary housing to men.
Speaker 2: The organization was founded in England in eighteen forty four,
Speaker 2: when the Industrial Revolution was bringing the young to urban
Speaker 2: centers in droves. The YMCA was founded essentially as an
Speaker 2: alternative to taverns and brothels, which is ironic given its
Speaker 2: future reputation.
Speaker 3: In the seventies at least.
Speaker 1: Author J.
Speaker 2: William Frost describes them thus in his book Christianity, a
Speaker 2: Social and Cultural History. Sounds interesting, That sounds interesting.
Speaker 1: From the crusadest Yeah, and the rest from the same period. Really, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true.
Speaker 2: Philanthropists saw the YMCAs as places for wholesome recreation and
Speaker 2: that would preserve youth from the temptations of alcohol, gambling,
Speaker 2: and prostitution, and would promote good citizenship.
Speaker 1: And so, in addition to being.
Speaker 2: A place to gather for these wholesome activities, they also
Speaker 2: provided inexpensive lodging, with one room units containing a bed,
Speaker 2: as well as use of a shared kitchen and bathroom facilities.
Speaker 2: And this sort of became the place for a certain period,
Speaker 2: at least where you landed when you arrived in the
Speaker 2: big city with your big dreams and you were trying
Speaker 2: to figure out more permanent accommodations. These lodgings started to
Speaker 2: disappear at the end of the seventies due to a
Speaker 2: combination of a real estate boom overseen by Mary ed
Speaker 2: Koch and the general social demonization of the poor following
Speaker 2: that Debbie Downer train of thought. It's been noted that
Speaker 2: the song YMCA is a stark reflection of the homeless
Speaker 2: crisis among members of the LGBTQ community in the seventies,
Speaker 2: a time when most were forced out of their homes
Speaker 2: or unable to find employment after coming out of the closet.
Speaker 2: Hence why so many men came to stay at the
Speaker 2: YMCA in the first place. It was a charitable organization
Speaker 2: that offered a warm bed and a shower to these
Speaker 2: people who often had nowhere else to go. The place
Speaker 2: was significantly less freewheeling than the song would have you believe.
Speaker 2: For example, there was a ten pm curfew and no
Speaker 2: access to a cafeteria or any shared social spaces.
Speaker 3: Other than a gym.
Speaker 2: The bathrooms were clean, but like a gym locker room facility.
Speaker 2: One longtime resident of the YMCA in New York City's
Speaker 2: Chelsea neighborhood, the one that inspired the song, would tell
Speaker 2: the website Gothamist there was more supervision of your social life,
Speaker 2: a kind of management as to how you behaved in
Speaker 2: the why than there would be in a commercial rooming house,
Speaker 2: which mostly just wanted to make sure that the rooms
Speaker 2: were rented. He also added that the housekeepers came by
Speaker 2: both the off of you clean sheets and towels, and
Speaker 2: also to keep an eye on you and make sure
Speaker 2: you were alone and not misbehaving.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really interesting, Deck Rante about Season of the Witch.
Speaker 2: No you taught It's funny. There's two books about Season
Speaker 2: of the Witch. One about a cult is in Rock
Speaker 2: and Roll. I assume this is the other one.
Speaker 1: The other one, it's about San Francisco from sort of
Speaker 1: the early sixties, well late sort of the fifties eate
Speaker 1: until like it essentially ends with the AIDS crisis. And
Speaker 1: it's interesting to note that despite being sort of the
Speaker 1: punching bag for like a liberal California city gone woke,
Speaker 1: San Francisco was an extremely conservative town based largely on
Speaker 1: Irish and Italian super catholic like dock labor and union
Speaker 1: power really and the sort of spill towards the west
Speaker 1: that made it what it is in the popular imagination
Speaker 1: today really started with the Summer of Love, like that
Speaker 1: was just that was the first wave of an insane
Speaker 1: amount of youth culture up the Beats. Yeah, but I
Speaker 1: think the Beats were less like the Beats didn't have
Speaker 1: I mean, this is this is also an interesting thing
Speaker 1: about San Francisco as far as where it landed in
Speaker 1: the popular culture, because the Beads I don't think, like
Speaker 1: they were on talk shows and stuff like you know,
Speaker 1: you would have seen like Jack Carrek reading on like
Speaker 1: Steve Allen or something, but they weren't radio ubiquitous, like,
Speaker 1: so they didn't have the cultural cachet as far as
Speaker 1: youth culture, I think I think the Beads were largely
Speaker 1: a little bit more of a you know, academic cultural
Speaker 1: intellectual crowd as opposed to just like let's take acid
Speaker 1: and lie in the grass all day. So that westward
Speaker 1: migration of people who like quote unquote didn't fit in
Speaker 1: anywhere else and just wanted to be starts with kind
Speaker 1: of the Summer of Love era. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: San Francisco is not really queer friendly. There was a
Speaker 1: point at which the SFPD was issuing more tickets for
Speaker 1: like public indecency than the NYPD by a factor of
Speaker 1: like ten in the early seventies.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: So I think a lot of it and it's sort
Speaker 1: of this, you know, you can see this sort of
Speaker 1: trickle down effect of like the liberating sixties. The backlash
Speaker 1: of that was maybe kids who were emboldened to start
Speaker 1: displaying their identity more openly on the East Coast found
Speaker 1: it unwelcoming and wound up in a YMCA and then
Speaker 1: just saved up enough money for bus fair to San
Speaker 1: Francisco because they heard that it was changing. But like
Speaker 1: that is not a deep seated part of San Francisco
Speaker 1: culture until this time, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean you talk about the backlash, I mean it
Speaker 2: wasn't this around the time and was seventy eight, I
Speaker 2: want to say, and Harvey Milk was assassinated and George Moscone.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, that was I mean, Dan White was a
Speaker 1: loser piece of who killed himself and is in hell.
Speaker 1: But I think a lot of that was also a
Speaker 1: reaction to just George Moscone, because Moscone was famously like
Speaker 1: very liberal as opposed to the previous power structures in
Speaker 1: San Francisco. And if I'm remembering correctly from this book,
Speaker 1: he had fired Dan White or like removed him or
Speaker 1: he was like not unelected, like removed from the Board
Speaker 1: of Supervisors, and then he came back. And I think
Speaker 1: Harvey Milk was a convenient target because of what he represented,
Speaker 1: and I believe was literally in the same room as Moscone.
Speaker 1: But I think that killing was less targeted at orientation
Speaker 1: than it was just sort of a general cultural malaise
Speaker 1: of like the straight irishman who saw their their city
Speaker 1: disappearing or whatever.
Speaker 2: Oh that is, that's interesting. I actually don't know a
Speaker 2: whole lot about San Francisco history. I always saw it
Speaker 2: as for a Lingetti and the Beats giving way to.
Speaker 1: Timothy learriacolytes. Yeah, no, I mean it was. It's really
Speaker 1: This book doesn't get into it, but another book I'm
Speaker 1: reading does. It was fully like lawless for a while.
Speaker 1: I mean, vigilante mobs were an incredible thing, like roving
Speaker 1: gang like they were because it was until the nineteen
Speaker 1: o six quake in the fire. The whole city was
Speaker 1: like a tense city that sprung up around the gold Rush,
Speaker 1: So it was all like right right, like shantyuns like
Speaker 1: you know, and these people were just hanging people in
Speaker 1: like the street. And there was one point one famous
Speaker 1: lynching where the governor of California at the time was
Speaker 1: like put out a statement that was like, yes, this
Speaker 1: is good and correct and a message from California that
Speaker 1: we will not tolerate like lawlessness or something insane.
Speaker 2: Well, Heigel, it's been a minute since we've had a
Speaker 2: Heigels and saying conspiracy theory corner, And I feel as
Speaker 2: though you should take this because it has to do
Speaker 2: with the CIA, which is an all real passion point
Speaker 2: for you.
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, I mean even dovetailing, even even getting aside
Speaker 1: from the fact that they may have started the Canyon
Speaker 1: and Hippie Rock to take the teeth out of the
Speaker 1: genuine new left and historically powerful labor coalition that was
Speaker 1: forming in many places around the country, even putting that
Speaker 1: I believe plausible theory aside. You know, there is documented
Speaker 1: evidence that they spent a sh load of time just
Speaker 1: with people during this period, like the American presidents were
Speaker 1: actually horrified to learn the extent to which the CIA
Speaker 1: had been operating without oversight. And back in the day
Speaker 1: when we used to actually do something about this, this
Speaker 1: was when all these commissions were formed and they were
Speaker 1: like actually sanctioned. But like we know for a fact
Speaker 1: that the CIO is paying guys like Jolly West to
Speaker 1: just post up in hate Ashbury and throw around acid
Speaker 1: and write about what see what happens? Yeah, anyway, So
Speaker 1: that's why I believe that the YMCA is actually a
Speaker 1: front for the CIA. Ooh tell us long long, rambling,
Speaker 1: long wrapping up with people tune back in, and that's
Speaker 1: why I go and the YMCA is a front for
Speaker 1: the CIA anyway. One of the sources for this rumor
Speaker 1: is a British lawyer named Fenton Bresler, tremendously British name,
Speaker 1: who published a book in nineteen eighty nine titled Who
Speaker 1: Killed John Lennon? And in this book he argues that
Speaker 1: Lenin's assassin, Mark David Chapman, was programmed by the CIA
Speaker 1: Manchurian candidate style. This is also a very popular theory
Speaker 1: among fringe conspiracy theorists that a lot of mass shooters
Speaker 1: or serial killers from the quote unquote Golden Age of
Speaker 1: serial killing, which is, believe it or not, an actual thing,
Speaker 1: were like rogue CIA assets. This was going along the
Speaker 1: theory that there were developments starting in the nineteen twenties
Speaker 1: and building into the era when the OSS, the predecessor
Speaker 1: of the CIA, was formed, that there had been some
Speaker 1: of the first psychiatric research into disassociative states as a
Speaker 1: result of trauma, and so their pet theory was they
Speaker 1: would recruit people who had generally been abused, who maybe
Speaker 1: went into the army and as a result of army screening,
Speaker 1: displayed some apparant tendencies, and then they would be institutionalized
Speaker 1: at several California institutions known to have colluded with the CIA,
Speaker 1: and then they would come out a few years later
Speaker 1: and all of the sudden they would just start murdering people. Anyway,
Speaker 1: if you want to read more about that, there's a
Speaker 1: book called Program to Kill by David Allen, who also
Speaker 1: wrote the Laurel Canyon conspiracy theory book, and he died
Speaker 1: in a uh what I deemed to be suspicious. Oh
Speaker 1: they all do. I mean, you know, I was also
Speaker 1: reading about Gary Webbman, like this shit that this country
Speaker 1: did to Gary Webb is honestly conscionable. The guy basically
Speaker 1: uncovered Iran contra and ties between the federal government and
Speaker 1: drug trafficking in south central LA. And like the rest
Speaker 1: of the media came at him like Main Street, like Newsweek,
Speaker 1: and people in the New York Times denounced this guy
Speaker 1: as like, how dare you assail the FBI and the
Speaker 1: integrity of the CIA? And then he mysteriously died alone
Speaker 1: in his house of two self inflicted gunshots allegedly two Yeah,
Speaker 1: crazy bad am Yeah right.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, the FBI killed Martin Luther King, but everyone
Speaker 1: knows that, and the John landis kill those and John
Speaker 1: Land has killed those kids. Yeah, and Vic Morrow, God
Speaker 1: rest his soul. And that about wraps it up for tonight.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening everyone. Bresler went on to note that
Speaker 1: the YMCA has offices in more than ninety countries, making
Speaker 1: it an ideal front for the CIA. Mark Chapman had
Speaker 1: strong ties to the YMCA throughout his life. An incredible
Speaker 1: sentence I was delighted to just read. He worked as
Speaker 1: a counselor at one YMCA throughout much of the seventies,
Speaker 1: and he stayed at one on the Upper West Side
Speaker 1: when he came to New York to murder John Lennin.
Speaker 1: In all likelihood this is merely coincidence. But there is
Speaker 1: one weird fact that emerged from all of this fringe postulating.
Speaker 1: There's a non profit organization called the United States Youth Council,
Speaker 1: which operated from nineteen forty five to nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 1: It was a coalition of sixteen organizations, one of which
Speaker 1: was the YMCA. In nineteen sixty seven, The New York
Speaker 1: Times revealed that ninety percent of the United States Youth
Speaker 1: Council funds came from the CIA, which was in turn
Speaker 1: dictating the organization's agenda. Also an incredibly common thing, like
Speaker 1: the CIA has all these shell companies that they funnel
Speaker 1: money through. It's all dog I mean, if even if
Speaker 1: you just want to drill into the they did with
Speaker 1: ASCID as part of mk Ultra, that's all documented. A
Speaker 1: full list of false companies that were receiving CIA money
Speaker 1: to post weird dudes up in secret compartments and record
Speaker 1: acid trips. This country, man, God damn, I know that
Speaker 1: book wal Courier, hair Man Acid Dreams. The CIA LSD
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 3: That is as that they be gone.
Speaker 1: No, No, that's two people. It's like the definitive text
Speaker 1: on the on the the CIO Martine Lee and Bruce Shalen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is the the definitive text on this kind of
Speaker 1: and it is horrifying. I had to put it down
Speaker 1: for like two weeks because I got to the part
Speaker 1: where in one of these California mental institutions, God, it
Speaker 1: might have been Stanford. Stanford has been involved in a
Speaker 1: lot of this. Yeah. They he gave a mentally ill
Speaker 1: person or possibly one of the like alcoholics and drug
Speaker 1: addicts they were also all testing this. They gave him
Speaker 1: a local anesthetic in his brain and then they just
Speaker 1: carved into his brain while he was conscious and tripping
Speaker 1: and asked him just interviewed him about the process.
Speaker 3: Did he live? I don't know.
Speaker 1: Detail was not elaborated upon, I imagine not unless they
Speaker 1: were careful about it, which spoiler alert they rarely were.
Speaker 1: Back to disco. Alex Heigel found dead alone keep gunshot
Speaker 1: wounds to the chest with a military grid handgun. Sources
Speaker 1: say he had been troubled recently and his whole life.
Speaker 1: A message was found scrawled in his own blood, Jazz
Speaker 1: that's jazz baby, that's Nascar baby. Yeah. Terry Gross interviews
Speaker 1: the Cia spook who did it next? On Fresh Air?
Speaker 1: It's like a voice modulator guard being like just broken
Speaker 1: news apartment and who was just sitting there? Like listening
Speaker 1: to Albert Iler was really easy anyway, you just had
Speaker 1: a big mouth and that stupid podcast is you know,
Speaker 1: we just got cigrevete. Terry Gross lips extremely close to Mike.
Speaker 1: Thank you. This has been Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross.
Speaker 1: A lot of good riffs, good riffs on this one.
Speaker 2: Yes, back to disco, Yes, Yes, Smithers with the gun mean,
Speaker 2: big smile.
Speaker 1: Everybody's happy.
Speaker 2: Ah. The ymca in question that inspired the song was
Speaker 2: arguably the most famous, know it as the mcbernie ymca.
Speaker 2: It was located on twenty third Street between seventh and
Speaker 2: eighth Avenue in the Chelsea district of New York City,
Speaker 2: which is adjacent to Greenwich Village. It's directly across from
Speaker 2: the Chelsea Hotel where the slightly richer bohemians stand. Leonard
Speaker 2: Cohen and Jennis Joplin and the rest stayed there. And
Speaker 2: yeah and Sid Vicious killed Nancy there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: The McBurnie WYMCA had a storied history. It was there
Speaker 2: that Charles Merrill met Stockbrooker Edmund Lynch to form Merrill Lynch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it sucks.
Speaker 2: I didn't dig deeper into that. Those guys weird place
Speaker 2: for that to farm. Other notable members who stayed at
Speaker 2: the McBurney YMCA have included Andy Warhol, Edward Alby, who
Speaker 2: who's afraid of Virginia Wolf, and.
Speaker 1: Al Pacino his second appearance then fought Alpacino.
Speaker 2: And we should also add village person Randy Jones, the Cowboy,
Speaker 2: also stayed there.
Speaker 1: The story goes.
Speaker 2: That the village people were leaving a photography session on
Speaker 2: twenty third Street nearby in nineteen seventy seven when they
Speaker 2: passed the McBurney YMCA, and their manager, Jacques Moraley asked,
Speaker 2: in his French way, what.
Speaker 1: I can't do? What is this is not its Italian?
Speaker 1: What is it is? No? I can't do cluse So
Speaker 1: what is a whim anyway? Yeah? Actually if he had,
Speaker 1: if well, it would be in fringe of emsa ah,
Speaker 1: because you say im.
Speaker 2: In David Hodo's recollection we told him why. It was
Speaker 2: a place where you could go when you first came
Speaker 2: to New York and you didn't have any money.
Speaker 3: You could stay there for very little.
Speaker 2: And of course someone joked, yeah, but don't bend over
Speaker 2: in the showers, and Jacques bless his heart, said, I
Speaker 2: will write a song about these.
Speaker 3: That.
Speaker 1: This is funny to me? Is he seeing you Americans?
Speaker 1: Do you out of poverty and desperation? The poetry of
Speaker 1: the dispossessed? They No, some of the best facial work
Speaker 1: I've ever seen. You do.
Speaker 2: I wish you could see, but the eyebrows fuse.
Speaker 1: Imse. Your mom is a French teacher, right, yeah, sure
Speaker 1: is Yeah?
Speaker 3: Are you fluent?
Speaker 1: Had to take French instead of piano ruined my life?
Speaker 1: Oh no, wonder you hate the French so much? Associated
Speaker 1: with things you could have done. I associated with the
Speaker 1: lost potential of being Keith Jarrett. Yes, not to say
Speaker 1: that I would have been, but who's to say. Heigel
Speaker 1: goes on anti French rant. So I hated it. Took
Speaker 1: it all through high school, and then I got to
Speaker 1: college and I was like, I'll learn Italian. That's my
Speaker 1: mother tongue. And may I tell you absolutely all of
Speaker 1: the brain cells I should have been using to conjugate
Speaker 1: Italian and become fluent. I used to learn jazz bass,
Speaker 1: so consequently I speak nothing other than English and music,
Speaker 1: which they say is the universal language, but that's actually
Speaker 1: not true. One of the other compositions that we saw
Speaker 1: at this thing the other night was this alumni who's
Speaker 1: from He immigrated from Iran, and he was talking about
Speaker 1: how much of it he's at UC. He's at the
Speaker 1: Herbalbert School, which is usc main campus, and a lot
Speaker 1: of his work is actually trying to transpose things like
Speaker 1: things from the Middle Eastern and South Asian diaspora are
Speaker 1: like quartertones that have no conventional notation in Western system
Speaker 1: and rhythms that don't really make sense across bars. So
Speaker 1: he had this string quartet that premiered last night and
Speaker 1: it was super cool, but like you could see people
Speaker 1: in the crowd wincing at some of these really close,
Speaker 1: weird dissonant intervals because they don't we don't have those
Speaker 1: intervals in Western music, closest thing you get as a
Speaker 1: half tone, but string players can do it. So one
Speaker 1: of our violin faculty was lead violin in this, and
Speaker 1: you know, she has incredible pitch, but it was so
Speaker 1: rankling people in the crowd to be like, ah, quarter tone,
Speaker 1: you know, and something Philip Glass talked about when he
Speaker 1: was transcribing Ravi Shankar stuff. He was like, I tried
Speaker 1: to notate that stuff in bars, and none of it
Speaker 1: made sense until I removed bar lines and just thought
Speaker 1: of everything as rhythmic unit like cells. So music's not
Speaker 1: the universal language, I hate to tell you, guys, actually
Speaker 1: a ton of international variants except for the pentatonic scale
Speaker 1: that sticks around. We all love the We love the
Speaker 1: pentatonic scale, don't we, folks. Beautiful it's a beautiful scale.
Speaker 1: Five notes, friend of the pod, the pentatonic scale, end
Speaker 1: of the pod. The minor pentatonic major pentatonic is less good.
Speaker 1: I'm practicing fingerpicking patterns right now. Can you hear that?
Speaker 2: On?
Speaker 1: Very softly? Unplugged the electric guitar on my Oh no,
Speaker 1: I can? Yeah, okay, disco.
Speaker 2: So the French guy wanted to write a song about
Speaker 2: poor young men going to stay at the YMCA. That's
Speaker 2: where we're at right now. They were walking by the YMCA.
Speaker 2: He said, what's this the village person who stayed there?
Speaker 2: Randy Jones? So, oh yeah, I used to stay there,
Speaker 2: and the kind of gave him the deal about what
Speaker 2: it was, and he said, I took there three or
Speaker 2: four times in nineteen seventy seven and he loved it.
Speaker 2: He was fascinated by a place where a person could
Speaker 2: work out with waits, play basketball, swim, take classes and
Speaker 2: get a room. Plus with Jacques being gay. I had
Speaker 2: a lot of friends I worked out with there who
Speaker 2: were in the adult film industry, and he was impressed
Speaker 2: by meeting people he had seen in the videos and magazines.
Speaker 2: Those visits with me planted a seed in him. Oh raising,
Speaker 2: then that's how he got the idea for YMCA, by
Speaker 2: literally going to the YMCA.
Speaker 1: You know they say, never meet your heroes. Yummy, yummy, yummy.
Speaker 1: Oh God, I've got love in an orifice or two three.
Speaker 1: You're giving me the more signal you already keep going, No,
Speaker 1: I'm counting. Oh okay, here we go. What do we got? Yeah,
Speaker 1: vam vamp. Yeah, do more stuff about anal sex that'll
Speaker 1: play well in Des Moines.
Speaker 3: Yeah, play good and Mooksbury.
Speaker 2: We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be
Speaker 2: right back with more too much information in just a moment.
Speaker 2: The song Yma It was written at the tail end
Speaker 2: of sessions for the Village People's third album. When they
Speaker 2: realized they were coming up short and needing what David
Speaker 2: Hodo would recall one more song as filler. Jacques wrote
Speaker 2: YMCA in about twenty minutes, the melody, the chorus, the outline,
Speaker 2: and then he gave it to Victor Willis, the lead
Speaker 2: singer of the band, and said, fill in the rest.
Speaker 2: That was a bit skeptical about some of our hits,
Speaker 2: but the minute I heard YMCA, I knew we had
Speaker 2: something special because it sounded like a commercial, and everyone
Speaker 2: likes commercials.
Speaker 3: Know about that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, Okay.
Speaker 2: The narrative that Willis put together is about a young
Speaker 2: man who's down on his luck and looking for a
Speaker 2: place to stay. The narrators trying to cheer this guy up,
Speaker 2: telling him I was once in your shoes.
Speaker 1: Willis says, this.
Speaker 2: Whole story comes from a very personal experience. He said,
Speaker 2: I would go to the Why to pick myself up.
Speaker 2: Then I'd go back home and get ready to get
Speaker 2: back to my life.
Speaker 1: I have no idea what that means, but what is that? Okay, man, No,
Speaker 1: that's weird. That's a weird thing to say. As we've
Speaker 1: mentioned so many people. The lead singer of the band
Speaker 1: who wrote the lyrics, not least of which maintain that
Speaker 1: it can be read as just a wholesome celebration of
Speaker 1: the Young Men's Christian Association. You know, it can be
Speaker 1: read as a celebration of gay culture or of the
Speaker 1: working man. Willis doesn't mind that it's been embraced by
Speaker 1: the LGBT community, but he does say it was intended
Speaker 1: as quote a song for everyone. He related it to
Speaker 1: YMC on Buchanan Street in San Francisco, just blocks away
Speaker 1: from where he grew up. As he says in a
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen interview with NewsCorp dot Au, YMCA was not
Speaker 1: written to be a gay song because of the sim
Speaker 1: fact I'm not gay. I wrote it about hanging out
Speaker 1: in urban neighborhoods in my youth. You can hang out
Speaker 1: with all the boys was a term about me and
Speaker 1: my friends playing basketball at the why the boy. I
Speaker 1: wanted to write a strong song and they could fit
Speaker 1: anyone's lifestyle. I'm happy the gay community adopted it as
Speaker 1: their anthem. I have no qualms with that. It's so
Speaker 1: funny the way that that kind of evolves. Man Like
Speaker 1: there was there's some blues book where they talk about
Speaker 1: being like slang for a women's genitals and like these
Speaker 1: you know this writer or a musician or something was
Speaker 1: talking about being like completely taken aback. When he went
Speaker 1: to the South the first time, was traveling around with
Speaker 1: Muddy Waters, and Muddy Waters was talking about how much
Speaker 1: he loved eating cor Ah. They were like, I beg
Speaker 1: your guam partner. He was like, yeah, you know, like
Speaker 1: dining at the y. They like that means something very different, Bud. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I was just hanging out, you know with my gay
Speaker 1: fellows who I had a gay time with, and we
Speaker 1: would just josh each other and jerk each other around,
Speaker 1: and they would come over and I would come over
Speaker 1: or around and inside I would come inside and we
Speaker 1: would just have a gay old time. Sorry, you're looking
Speaker 1: less and less amused. But then in September twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: things changed for mister Willis. Apparently, in the midst of Lockdown,
Speaker 1: he was fuming over the reputation that his song earned
Speaker 1: and decided to do something a little about it.
Speaker 2: He learned how to Google during Lockdown, and he didn't
Speaker 2: like what he saw.
Speaker 1: He posted the following note to his Facebook page, notice
Speaker 1: about ymca okay, misleading. There would be like a community
Speaker 1: note on Twitter not notice not actually from the CYMCI
Speaker 1: quote hammered to a tree, have to a church door
Speaker 1: Lutherian thess Yeah, the theses quote news and news and
Speaker 1: Twitter trending of YMCA is off the chart right now
Speaker 1: with false accusations about the song. Could have used another pass.
Speaker 1: But okay, but as I've said numerous times before, parentheses,
Speaker 1: and this was proven in federal court. I wrote one
Speaker 1: hundred percent of the lyrics to IMCA, so I ought
Speaker 1: to know what my song is about. YMCA is one
Speaker 1: of the most iconic songs in the world. I will
Speaker 1: not stand idle and allow it to be defamed. Therefore,
Speaker 1: I will sue the next media organization or anyone else
Speaker 1: that falsely suggests YMCA is somehow about illicit gay sex.
Speaker 1: Get your minds out of the gutter, please, it is
Speaker 1: not about that. Worthwhile noting that gay marriage had been
Speaker 1: legal for about eight years at this point, so weird
Speaker 1: definition of illicit. My guy, No, it wasn't the first
Speaker 1: one in twenty twelve.
Speaker 3: I think a Supreme Court was twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1: All right, And again this coming from the guy who
Speaker 1: did you know, macho man, and in the navy, see
Speaker 1: if we can parse some innuendo. And in the navy,
Speaker 1: it's a good point. Where can you find pleasure? Search
Speaker 1: the world for treasure? Where can you begin to make
Speaker 1: all your dreams come true? Where can you learn to fly,
Speaker 1: play in sports and skin dive? Okay, come on, sign
Speaker 1: up for the big band, or sit in the grand
Speaker 1: stand when your team and others meet. In the navy,
Speaker 1: can't you see we need a hand in the navy?
Speaker 1: Come on and join your fellow man. They want you,
Speaker 1: they want you, They want you as a new recruit.
Speaker 1: Don't you hesitate? There is no need to wait. They're
Speaker 1: signing up new seamen fast. Oh my god, maybe you
Speaker 1: are too young to join up today. But don't you
Speaker 1: worry about a thing, for I'm sure there will always
Speaker 1: be a good navy protecting the land and the sea.
Speaker 1: Absolutely dog scansion and slant rhyme. What are the parenthetical
Speaker 1: insertions in this song? After they want You? Is oceanography?
Speaker 1: What you kidding? I'm not? And then it simply just
Speaker 1: repeats all of those aforementioned lyrics. So you know, let's
Speaker 1: just go to Machaman now and see what we got. Also, misinterpreted.
Speaker 3: I only know the chorus.
Speaker 1: Body want to feel my body, body. Then there were
Speaker 1: parenthetical interjections from the chorus, such as baby, such a thrill,
Speaker 1: my body want to touch my body, it's too much
Speaker 1: my body, check it out my body. Don't you doubt
Speaker 1: my body talking about my body checking out my body.
Speaker 1: Everyone wants to be a macho macho man, to have
Speaker 1: a kind of body always in demand. Jogging in the mornings,
Speaker 1: go man, go, workouts in the health spa, muscles grow.
Speaker 1: You best believe me, he's a macho man. Glad he
Speaker 1: took you down with anyone you can Humm, it's so
Speaker 1: hot my body. Love to pop my body. You'll adore
Speaker 1: my body, Come explore my body.
Speaker 3: Well, it's not totally clear who the song's dressing.
Speaker 1: You can tell him macho. He has a funky walk.
Speaker 1: His western shirts and leather always looks so boss funky
Speaker 1: with his body. He's a king. Call him mister ego.
Speaker 1: Dig his chains. Have your own lifestyle. Every man ought
Speaker 1: to be a macho macho man to live a life
Speaker 1: of freedom. MACHOs make a stand, have your own lifestyles
Speaker 1: and ideals. Possess the strength of confidence that's the skill.
Speaker 1: You can best believe that he's a macho man. He's
Speaker 1: the special godson in anybody's land. I've got to be
Speaker 1: a macho parenthetical. Dig the hair on my chest. Macho
Speaker 1: macho man, parenthetical, see my big thick mustache. I've got
Speaker 1: to be a macho parenthetical. Dig broad shoulders. Yeah, macho
Speaker 1: macho man, parenthetical, dig my muscles. This man is either
Speaker 1: in the closet so far, or he is one of
Speaker 1: the stupidest beings to ever grace God's green earth, and
Speaker 1: everyone else involved in this was just guffawing behind his back.
Speaker 1: Those are the only two plausible explanations. Or its just
Speaker 1: denied till you die. I mean, I guess that's fair.
Speaker 1: Is he? What's is he? He was? His name Willis
Speaker 1: h Victor willis see Catholic son of a Baptist preacher.
Speaker 1: There it is h anyway, son of a Baptist preacher.
Speaker 1: That explains everything. I retract all of my other postulations
Speaker 1: for legal reasons. Career Dave Hodo, the construction worker the
Speaker 1: Cat had a different take. Victor Willis Ymca certainly has
Speaker 1: a gay origin, he told Spin. That's what Jacques was
Speaker 1: thinking when he wrote it because our first album was
Speaker 1: possibly the gayest album ever. I mean, look at us.
Speaker 1: We were a gay group. So was the song written
Speaker 1: to celebrate gay men at the YMCA? Yes, absolutely, and
Speaker 1: gay people love it regardless of the demographic it's aimed at.
Speaker 1: Randy Jones, the Cowboy, the Demon, the Quiet One made
Speaker 1: this important point to gold Mine to gold Mine. Why
Speaker 1: do I say that like Matt Berry made this important
Speaker 1: point to gold Mine gold Mine? We were always very
Speaker 1: positive about our energy and what we did. We never
Speaker 1: sang about broken hearts, lost love or shattered dreams. We
Speaker 1: always don't. With positive things in a very positive place
Speaker 1: is the YMCA. I think people had forgotten about whys
Speaker 1: and they're positive qualities. They provided food, shelter and spiritual
Speaker 1: encouragement to a lot of people for more than a century. Yes,
Speaker 1: they provide excellent physical programs for young and old, and
Speaker 1: it's a very positive institution. That's why we decided to
Speaker 1: sing about it. That's like corn flakes or wheedies or
Speaker 1: something made by dude trying to get people to stop
Speaker 1: cranking their hogs. Yeah. Yeah. The video, which was at
Speaker 1: the time rare for pre MTV act, was filmed at
Speaker 1: the McBurney YMCA on twenty third Street, the same facility
Speaker 1: that inspired the idea also as well as the west
Speaker 1: Side piers, Hudson River Park and a gay club called Ramrod.
Speaker 1: I'll just leave that as anything, but sadly you cannot
Speaker 1: stay at this YMCA anymore. It was closed in two
Speaker 1: thousand and two and moved to a fifteenth Street. Its
Speaker 1: ground floor was it David Barton Gym for a while,
Speaker 1: and then it was a Crunch Fitness. Above it are
Speaker 1: boutique condos, the large of which actually encompasses the old
Speaker 1: basketball court with a running track.
Speaker 2: Above affordable housing is now multimillion dollar apartments.
Speaker 1: Ah that's great. Yeah, you had to read it. Blood
Speaker 1: would have started running out of my nose had I
Speaker 1: started it. Per The New York Times, imposing steel rafters
Speaker 1: and soaring twenty nine foot ceilings there hark back to
Speaker 1: a time when the space was used as a gymnasium
Speaker 1: and an indoor running track. It is returning to the
Speaker 1: market with a fourteen point five million asking price and
Speaker 1: monthly carrying charges totaling eight thousand, eight hundred and seventy
Speaker 1: three dollars.
Speaker 2: As we mentioned, YMCA appeared on Village People's nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: eight album called Cruisin.
Speaker 3: Cruisin. What do you think about that?
Speaker 1: The fuck? More? Really? Come on? This guy? Willis like,
Speaker 1: you're how old? Does he? Man? Make peace with yourself,
Speaker 1: Like Jesus Christ, the.
Speaker 2: Village people saw, the song is no more than an
Speaker 2: album filler. But Neil Bogart, the president of Casablanca Records,
Speaker 2: their label, saw its potential and made the decision to
Speaker 2: push it, push it real good.
Speaker 1: He's seventy three, He's conceivably got a number of years.
Speaker 1: But like Jesus Christ, man, you know, get correct with.
Speaker 3: God, or at least try pegging.
Speaker 1: Oh, one of your better ones? Question with all the
Speaker 1: discourse around stealing valor these days around our boys, you know,
Speaker 1: and the.
Speaker 2: Oh you saw his picture when he's in a decorated.
Speaker 1: Military like a Navy admiral's uniform with like the obscene
Speaker 1: number of inscrutable fabric patches, like he looks like a doffy,
Speaker 1: Yes he does? Or idio mean yeah or idiot yeah exactly,
Speaker 1: idio meme would have been rocking the kilt.
Speaker 3: That's true.
Speaker 1: Wow, man, this is such a fascinating snapshot of America
Speaker 1: back when you could steal valor safely and have an
Speaker 1: incredibly closeted song hit the charts and then just deny
Speaker 1: it the whole weight of the bank and back. And
Speaker 1: he was married to Claire huxtaballt. Yeah, good god, what
Speaker 1: a what a CV Victor Willis. I salute an Era,
Speaker 1: I salute you, you absolute mad lad in America.
Speaker 2: YMCA spent a full half year on the charts, peaking
Speaker 2: in number two on Billboard for three weeks in February
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy nine, being held off the top spot by
Speaker 2: La Freak By She thank God, and then for two
Speaker 2: weeks behind another disco burner, Ooh not as good though.
Speaker 3: Do you think I'm sexy?
Speaker 1: Boy?
Speaker 3: Rod Stewart, That's song blows?
Speaker 1: No, it doesn't. That song goes? What incorrect tweeted us.
Speaker 1: We have a poll, does do you think I'm sexy?
Speaker 1: Blow or go? A question Alton asked about the village people.
Speaker 2: I'm kind of shocked that I've never heard that expression blow,
Speaker 2: Like that should be our that's going to.
Speaker 3: Be our new blower go, that's a new segment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, we could be totally closeted. Weird guys stealing
Speaker 1: queer valor.
Speaker 2: Contribute five dollars to the KOFE if you think it blows,
Speaker 2: or ten dollars at the Ghost.
Speaker 1: No, I actually do like that song. I think it's
Speaker 1: uh that it sounds like Abba. That's why I like it.
Speaker 1: What I mean, No, it's not good for it's not
Speaker 1: good for like faces raw, but it's it sounds like Abba.
Speaker 3: I just think you're wrong.
Speaker 2: I just think that sounds terrible, you know, all right.
Speaker 1: All right, agree to disagree, my friend. That's what makes
Speaker 1: this country great.
Speaker 3: Yes, this makes this podcast great.
Speaker 2: The YMCA single sold the report of twelve million copies worldwide.
Speaker 2: That's insane, becoming especially popular in the United Kingdom or
Speaker 2: it stayed at the top spot for three weeks and
Speaker 2: in Australia, where it was number one for five weeks.
Speaker 2: The song's success is due in part the awesome horn
Speaker 2: arrangement from Horace Ott, who did the same for people
Speaker 2: like Aretha Franklin, That King, Cole, Joe Cocker and Earth
Speaker 2: the Kit And he also wrote Don't let Me Be Misunderstood?
Speaker 2: Made famous by being on your point of view and
Speaker 2: music taste, Nina Simone or for me the animals.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, didn't I go on a whole rant about
Speaker 1: Nina Simone and the animals in that song. I believe
Speaker 1: I did.
Speaker 2: It was, Yes, it was for I think it was
Speaker 2: for the Moby episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was about sampling.
Speaker 3: Yes, sampling.
Speaker 1: Horace At also still alive. That means ninety one. Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Horice AT's horn arrangement is one of the things that
Speaker 2: makes the song great.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: The Financial Times, who covered the song for some reason,
Speaker 2: presumably because it made a stupid amount of money, have
Speaker 2: their own take on what makes YMCA so unforgettable. They
Speaker 2: write the song's rousing spirit can be attributed to its
Speaker 2: use of.
Speaker 1: How do you say that ekfhanis ekphanicis e phansis?
Speaker 3: That works for me?
Speaker 2: An emotional exclaimat to phrase originating from ancient literature. It's
Speaker 2: rallying cry of young man acts as a sort of
Speaker 2: wake up call, urging the listener to forget their woes,
Speaker 2: chin up and make a change.
Speaker 1: So there you go. That's a stupid thing to say.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, that's dumb. A dumb thing to say about
Speaker 1: a gay sex song by nakedly profiteering pop producers and
Speaker 1: confused a befuddled Frenchman. That is a dumb over intellectualizing.
Speaker 1: Shame on you, Financial Times, Shame on you for making
Speaker 1: me read that we were all the dumber for it.
Speaker 1: So people all around the world's automatic. That's like an
Speaker 1: something that like a chat GPT. If I was like
Speaker 1: chat GPT, write me a stupid Pitchfork article about some
Speaker 1: like heinously violent rapper, you know, with like a like
Speaker 1: confirmed rapes and like murders, they'd be like Young Genese's
Speaker 1: new song I killed everyone. I did it. I killed
Speaker 1: them all. My God, I killed them all and I
Speaker 1: loved it is really rooted in ekphonesis an emotional exclamatory
Speaker 1: phrase originating from ancient literature criticism. Sometimes I think it
Speaker 1: really does deserve to be a dead art.
Speaker 2: I mean yeah, writing about music, dancing about architecture.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for me, it really became about like it was Pitchfork,
Speaker 1: you know, honestly, I mean I don't love like I'm
Speaker 1: not like a Bangs or christ Gal or any I
Speaker 1: don't deify any rock critic. I think they're all pretty stupid,
Speaker 1: except for Jim Derogatus, who's like took down r Kelly
Speaker 1: single handedly out of a love for Chicago youth. And
Speaker 1: you know, there's obviously great music writers across the world
Speaker 1: who I'm short selling, But like it really was when
Speaker 1: they just started Pitchfork just started to write impressionistic reviews
Speaker 1: about like the colors they saw, Like come on, man,
Speaker 1: just reach out to find out what mixing board they used,
Speaker 1: or like, find out why they wrote the song. Don't
Speaker 1: just postulate about how it makes you feel or say
Speaker 1: like e herds. Now, I can't have a job doing it,
Speaker 1: he said, bitterly, having never been a professional music critic.
Speaker 1: So people all around the world love this song, But
Speaker 1: how about the actual YMCA organization. What's the YMCA say?
Speaker 1: What's Josh saying? They didn't really like it at first?
Speaker 1: Yeah they're religious.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah.
Speaker 2: Soon after the single was released, the YMCA is shoot
Speaker 2: a statement claiming that its trademarked name was used without
Speaker 2: permission and stated their intention to pursue an out of
Speaker 2: court settlement.
Speaker 1: The band were surprisingly sympathetic to this.
Speaker 2: Randy Jones the Cowboy later told Spin, we understood their
Speaker 2: points of view, and we actually talked about it before
Speaker 2: we cut the song. YMCA is a trademark, and a
Speaker 2: trademark needs to be protected. If they allowed one person
Speaker 2: or one group to violate the rights that would put
Speaker 2: YMCA into the public domain. David and I try to
Speaker 2: communicate this to our producer, but couldn't get through, So
Speaker 2: that's presumably.
Speaker 1: That's the coach the friends shot.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. But then the YMCA organization basically
Speaker 2: realized that the village people had made a great advertisement
Speaker 2: for them, which was extremely effective, so they soon backed off.
Speaker 2: Today the YMCA website actually shouts out the song on
Speaker 2: their website and at one point even had instructions.
Speaker 3: For how to do the dance on their homepage.
Speaker 1: That's like one guy in accounting who was like, we're
Speaker 1: cool with the gay thing because it's raking in money,
Speaker 1: And then a bunch of other people sat around a
Speaker 1: table and discussed for hours and they were all very
Speaker 1: unhappy for it, and the accountant kept having to come
Speaker 1: in and explain it to them.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, we at.
Speaker 1: The YMCA celebrate the song.
Speaker 2: Media relations manager Leah Powell told Spin in two thousand
Speaker 2: and eight, it's a positive statement about the YMCA and
Speaker 2: what we offer people.
Speaker 1: All around the world.
Speaker 2: Former residents of the McBurnie Why, however, weren't quite so impressed,
Speaker 2: particularly by the video, as David Garrett, who lived there
Speaker 2: for twenty two years between nineteen seventy eight and two thousand.
Speaker 2: Told Gothamist there was certainly a party aspect to their video,
Speaker 2: and that time was the height of all the gay
Speaker 2: clubs in Chelsea. The YMCA did have some overlapping of
Speaker 2: gay cruising, but it was a serious gym for people
Speaker 2: who really wanted to go and work out every day,
Speaker 2: and a nice place to live for working class people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's sad.
Speaker 2: There was a New York Times article right before the
Speaker 2: McBurney why closed in I think it was two thousand
Speaker 2: and two about all these people who had been there
Speaker 2: since like the seventies and something some even have even
Speaker 2: from the sixties getting evicted. And it was really well written,
Speaker 2: like these like thumbnail sketches of these poets and people
Speaker 2: who lived in there.
Speaker 3: It was really sad.
Speaker 2: The types of characters seen in the YMCA video were
Speaker 2: likely what the Gothamist piece refers to as temporary occupants
Speaker 2: who mostly lodged there to relax and sleep between shifts,
Speaker 2: rather than these long term renters, often gay in their
Speaker 2: mid twenties or thirties. They used the YMCA as what
Speaker 2: Garrett describes as a dressing room, or as a place
Speaker 2: to discreetly hook up. Garrett continued, the weekend party people
Speaker 2: who would stay there really just needed the rooms to crash.
Speaker 2: They didn't stay there at all to socialize, but to
Speaker 2: take in.
Speaker 3: The night life.
Speaker 2: After the success of YMCA, the Village People tackled another
Speaker 2: hive of mail support, the Navy. I've heard that the
Speaker 2: Navy actually contacted them after seeing the spike in business
Speaker 2: for YMCA and approached them about writing a song that
Speaker 2: would do for the Navy what they did for the YMCA.
Speaker 2: I don't think that's true, but however, once the song
Speaker 2: was released in March nineteen seventy nine, just after YMCA
Speaker 2: had slipped down the charts, the Navy contacted the Village
Speaker 2: People's management asking to use the song in a recruitment
Speaker 2: ad on TV and radio. Management gave them the rights
Speaker 2: for free, on the condition that the Navy would help
Speaker 2: them shoot the music video, and that's how the Village
Speaker 2: People wound up atop the USS Reasoner Birth at the
Speaker 2: Navy in San Diego. Hilariously, though, the Navy did not
Speaker 2: use the video or the song, opting instead to keep
Speaker 2: the traditional anchors away in their ads.
Speaker 1: This was like a Jerry Bruckheimer thing where they were like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, literally in bed with the navy to let
Speaker 1: them film on the large boat. Yeah, oh my god,
Speaker 1: you're right, like top gun.
Speaker 2: The most surprising musical legacy that spun off on YMCA,
Speaker 2: as far as I'm concerned at least, and I've never
Speaker 2: heard this, is that it apparently helped inspire the Stones
Speaker 2: disco diversion Miss You tracks.
Speaker 1: Do you know this? I didn't know this.
Speaker 2: Bick Jagger was a mainstay at Studio fifty four and
Speaker 2: other similar clubs around the world in the late seventies,
Speaker 2: and he absorbed the disco sounds of these places. A
Speaker 2: piece on Salon details the making of Miss You, and
Speaker 2: it cites interviews with Stones's drummer Charlie Watts recalling how
Speaker 2: much he and Mick loved disco, and Charlie specifically recalls
Speaker 2: mixed passion for YMCA reference one night in particular, when
Speaker 2: Mick left the club in Munich and he just sang
Speaker 2: it over and over and over again, which is a
Speaker 2: moment I would love to have a tape recording of.
Speaker 1: God, that's just so funny.
Speaker 2: Charlie would say. In the seventies there were some fantastic
Speaker 2: dance records out. Mick and I used to go to
Speaker 2: discos a lot. A great way to hear a dance
Speaker 2: record is by listening to it in a dance hall
Speaker 2: or a disco. Keith Richards predictively had to be coaxed
Speaker 2: into doing Miss You, saying we didn't think much of
Speaker 2: miss You.
Speaker 3: As we were doing it.
Speaker 2: It was ah mixed bin to the disco, humming someone's
Speaker 2: song or another.
Speaker 1: Humming some other song, so true to life and hilariously withering. Yes, God,
Speaker 1: I love Keith.
Speaker 2: It's a result of all the nights Mick s been
Speaker 2: at Studio fifty four and coming up with that beat,
Speaker 2: that four on the floor, and he said, add the
Speaker 2: melody to the beat. We just thought we'd put our
Speaker 2: ore in on, Mick wanting to do some disco keep
Speaker 2: the man happy. But as we got into it, it
Speaker 2: became quite an interesting beat and we realized maybe we've
Speaker 2: got a quit essential disco thing here, and out of
Speaker 2: it we got a huge hit. And that was I
Speaker 2: believe their final number one and arguably the most successful
Speaker 2: instance of a rock group hopping on the disco train.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd buy that. The song whips It does. I
Speaker 1: Was Made for Loving You by Kiss is also a
Speaker 1: pretty good example of that.
Speaker 2: For some reason, maybe it's the Casablanca Records thing. Kiss
Speaker 2: glam glam disco feels very I don't know, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: get in trouble with the Kiss army, but that doesn't
Speaker 2: feel like a huge jump to me.
Speaker 1: I love miss You. I love that whole some girls,
Speaker 1: I love that whole record. Man, it's so not an
Speaker 1: interesting opinion, but it's so good. I just love the
Speaker 1: way his vocal delivery on that album is hilarious and
Speaker 1: one of the all time like Mick Jagger isms, like
Speaker 1: we can come around around twelve with some poor Rican girls.
Speaker 1: It's just d D meet you, and then Shattered when
Speaker 1: he does like the like yo, yeah, Denny Harry gets
Speaker 1: all these for being like the most awkward white person
Speaker 1: to try rap in the late seventies, but Shattered is
Speaker 1: such dogs. Yeah, there's the line where he goes it's
Speaker 1: my favorite because it's like the simultaneously the most fay
Speaker 1: and like offbeat thing that he's ever sung, which it's
Speaker 1: during his like this town's been We're in tatters. Its shattered, No,
Speaker 1: but there's one Yeah, We've got Rats on the West Side,
Speaker 1: bed Bugs Uptown tremendous.
Speaker 2: I saw for the first time after spending like two
Speaker 2: years of my life working on a podcast about the
Speaker 2: Rolling Stones on tour. I saw The Stones for the
Speaker 2: first time this summer. Oh yeah, zero expectation whatsoever. I'm
Speaker 2: not a huge Stones fan. It was one of the
Speaker 2: most incredible shows I've ever seen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, dude, it's great when they have black people in
Speaker 1: a rhythm section. I mean, seriously, there's a reason, you know,
Speaker 1: Keith didn't keep Charlie or Bill when he started making
Speaker 1: you know, expensive Windos records. That Steve Jordan, that's the
Speaker 1: guy who's still touring with them, right, Yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 1: that relationship goes back a long time. Darryl Jones bass player, Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah. Yeah. When they when they Jettis into their
Speaker 1: most a rhythmic square figures, of course they got good.
Speaker 1: They only had one of the greatest frontmen of all
Speaker 1: time and like the coolest man ever to live on
Speaker 1: rhythm guitar and Ron Wood. I do love Ronwood. Actually,
Speaker 1: you know that his his guitar work on their guitar
Speaker 1: work on Beast of Bird, I mean Beast of Bird
Speaker 1: all time, perfect.
Speaker 3: Songs on of my favorite songs.
Speaker 1: But their guitar interplay on that is so cool. I
Speaker 1: mean they Ron Wood is really I think an undersold
Speaker 1: guitar hero. It's like he's truly he First of all,
Speaker 1: his hands are crazy, like if you've ever tried to
Speaker 1: play any of that faces, like the pinky stretches he
Speaker 1: does for like the boogie rhythms are nuts. But yeah,
Speaker 1: he's just like telepathic when he's playing with people. He
Speaker 1: just has that like sixth sense of like I know
Speaker 1: what you're doing before you do it, and my hands
Speaker 1: will find something to do. That is cool. To add
Speaker 1: to that, and a great painter, I hear.
Speaker 3: Yeah, great painter. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Are we talking about now?
Speaker 2: We got to talk about speaking of the dance floor.
Speaker 2: We got to talk about the YMCA dance you know, Yeah,
Speaker 2: we sure do, man, we gotta do the thing.
Speaker 1: We gotta do it.
Speaker 2: In April nineteen seventy nine, The Village People became the
Speaker 2: first disco act to launch an arenatour, beating the Beg's
Speaker 2: by two months. They were splashed on the cover of
Speaker 2: Rolling Stone and also made several TV appearances on The
Speaker 2: MERV Griffin Show and most crucially for our Purposes, American Bandstand,
Speaker 2: Dick Clark's American Bandstam. The latter program would become crucial
Speaker 2: to their legacy because it was here that the infamous
Speaker 2: YMCA dance was born.
Speaker 1: Was Dick Clark like fifty at this point, probably in
Speaker 1: his forties?
Speaker 2: Actually yeah, wait a minute, yeah, yeah, he was about
Speaker 2: the turn fifty, That forty nine year old.
Speaker 1: Dick Clark staring down the barrel of like five strapping
Speaker 1: gay archetypes, just thinking what did I get myself into
Speaker 1: all those years ago? Just smile and non smile and non.
Speaker 2: Surprisingly, the Village People didn't come up with their iconic
Speaker 2: YMCA dance. Instead, it was a spontaneous invention by the
Speaker 2: TV audience. The day was January sixth, nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 2: when the Village People made their broadcast on Bandstand, and,
Speaker 2: as Randy Jones the Cowboy would recall in the spin
Speaker 2: Oral History of YMCA, the audience at this particular taping
Speaker 2: was a bunch of kids bust in from a cheerleader camp.
Speaker 2: The first time we got to the chorus, we were
Speaker 2: clapping with our hands above our heads, and the kids
Speaker 2: thought it looked like we were making a y, so
Speaker 2: they automatically did the letters. Host Dick Clark was extremely impressed,
Speaker 2: and when the performance was over, he asked the producers
Speaker 2: to play the song again so the band could observe
Speaker 2: the audience in action, and as they watched, Clark asked
Speaker 2: singer Victor Willis, you guys think you can work that
Speaker 2: in your routine, and Victor Willis said, well, I guess
Speaker 2: we're gonna have to. And you know what d and what
Speaker 2: he did. It's actually really funny how underwhelmed the band
Speaker 2: were upon first seeing what, in truth really only loosely
Speaker 2: qualifies as a dance.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like it's like semaphore figure, like signaling it's
Speaker 1: not okay whatever.
Speaker 2: No, I watched this American bands then clip on YouTube,
Speaker 2: and it's so funny because they just seem not impressed
Speaker 2: at all.
Speaker 1: You guys are making letters. Who cares? Yeah, no, they
Speaker 1: really don't care. It was like the era when like
Speaker 1: Tony Basil or Tony Basil was like yeah doing mainstream,
Speaker 1: about to start doing video choreography and was like hanging
Speaker 1: out with the original break dancers in New York. So
Speaker 1: I'm sure these guys are like cool. You know, I've
Speaker 1: seen people spin on their heads, but cool letter shapes
Speaker 1: you're making with your hands.
Speaker 2: David Hodo, the construction worker, it's told spin in two
Speaker 2: thousand and eight. When I saw the movements, I thought, wow,
Speaker 2: that is so stupid that everyone in America sent are doing.
Speaker 2: And I thought, wow, that is so brilliant. It took
Speaker 2: on a life of its own. The next thing we know,
Speaker 2: Hedeki Jaiko has a number one hit in Japan with
Speaker 2: his version of YMCA, and we hit number two in
Speaker 2: the US. That's how it always works. Saijo claimed he
Speaker 2: invented the dance, but as soon as we got to Japan,
Speaker 2: we straightened him out.
Speaker 1: Menacing five three Japanese guy who doesn't speak very much English,
Speaker 1: suddenly confronted by towering, ripped gay archetypes like purposely striding
Speaker 1: down a tokyo. Streated him just as a heart attack, and.
Speaker 3: Here heigel, this will interest you.
Speaker 2: On December thirty first, two thousand and eight, the Guinness
Speaker 2: Book of World Records certified the Village People's performance at
Speaker 2: the Sun Bowl halftime show in El Paso as the
Speaker 2: largest YMCA dance ever, with forty thousand, one hundred and
Speaker 2: forty eight fans doing the move well.
Speaker 1: I'm glad we got that over with. Yes all right,
Speaker 1: And as mentioned as has become a common trope on
Speaker 1: this show, this is where behind the music backing takes
Speaker 1: that takes that major third down apstep. Not long after
Speaker 1: the world beating success of YMCA, everything started to crumble
Speaker 1: for the Village People. Lead singer Victor Willis quit in
Speaker 1: the fall of nineteen seventy nine, supposedly upset that he
Speaker 1: was just a salaried hired hand from a rally. This
Speaker 1: move would have major legal ramifications and used to come
Speaker 1: as we'll see. He was replaced by Ray Simpson, brother
Speaker 1: of Valerie Simpson of the famed musical duo Ashford and Simpson.
Speaker 1: This departure came mere days before shooting the band's movie
Speaker 1: Can't Stop the Music, belying the title. This ultimately wound
Speaker 1: up being a good move because the film has garnered
Speaker 1: a reputation as one of the biggest box office flops
Speaker 1: in history. As we have talked about on the Grease episode,
Speaker 1: it was co written and co produced by Alan Carr,
Speaker 1: a man behind Greece who was notoriously one of the
Speaker 1: cokeiest men. In a very coked up age, he described
Speaker 1: his vision for the film as Singing in the Rain
Speaker 1: for the Disco Crowd okay Man. Can't Stop the Music
Speaker 1: was intended to be a loose biopic of the band,
Speaker 1: with an americanized Jacques Moraley Jack Morrell being played by
Speaker 1: young Steve Gutenberg. Caitlyn Jenner is also in it. It's
Speaker 1: very weird and here we go, William Freakin moment, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna start doing that like your Beatles. Things just work
Speaker 1: in random anecdotes from Yea of William Freakin being either
Speaker 1: weird apple or a genius, or hopefully all three at
Speaker 1: one time. Shooting of Can't Stop the Music in New
Speaker 1: York was disrupted by gay protesters who actually mistook it
Speaker 1: for the shoot for William Freakin's Cruising, which, as you
Speaker 1: will remember, is a film that depicts the leather subculture,
Speaker 1: particularly that of one bar who denied them the right
Speaker 1: to shoot there. So Friedkin went out of his way
Speaker 1: to literally steal every aspect of that bar and recreate
Speaker 1: it in a different gay bar. Hilarious. But that wasn't
Speaker 1: even the only production issue they faced. The movie was
Speaker 1: originally titled Disco Land Where the Music Never Ends. This
Speaker 1: title was changed after the public opinion of disco started
Speaker 1: to take a nose the dawn of the eighties, memorialized
Speaker 1: in every Hacky Montage VH one, CNN, you know the
Speaker 1: usual suspects, with footage of disco demolition night at Chicago's
Speaker 1: Kminsky Park. For those of you privileged enough to have
Speaker 1: not seen this, they just threw a bunch of records
Speaker 1: in a big pile in the middle of the park
Speaker 1: and a shock DJ drove a steamroller over it. Somebody
Speaker 1: blew something up, and that kind of thing used to matter.
Speaker 1: You know, you could just change the entire music industry
Speaker 1: off of a slovenly Chicago guy in a ballpark doing
Speaker 1: something insane an insane period in the most insane country.
Speaker 1: But the title revamp failed to pull people into theaters,
Speaker 1: and the film recouped only two million of its twenty
Speaker 1: million budget twenty million in nineteen seventy nine. Money. Yeah, holy,
Speaker 1: that's either like the largest that's like the largest embezzlement
Speaker 1: fraud in history has to be. Yeah, that's that's nine
Speaker 1: one million today. Yeah, man, that must have been a
Speaker 1: lot of coke. Adding to its historic pedigree, Can't Stop
Speaker 1: the Music also became the first film to win a
Speaker 1: Golden Raspberry Award. The Village People's reputation took a hit
Speaker 1: following this venture, and the group started to splinter. Randy
Speaker 1: Jones resigned, only to be replaced with another faux cowboy.
Speaker 1: The group then attempted to distance themselves from disco by
Speaker 1: taking out full page ads and the music trades to
Speaker 1: showcase their new glam rock look about ten years too
Speaker 1: Late Yep, and tease a new album which would become
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty one's Renaissance. It would prove not to be
Speaker 1: the titular rebirth for the band, and this new sound
Speaker 1: was quickly dumped, and by nineteen eighty five, the Village
Speaker 1: People had decided to part ways. Since they were, as
Speaker 1: previously noted, salaried players, they reportedly all got normal jobs,
Speaker 1: though sadly not still in cost to just a tremendous
Speaker 1: image to like you know. One of them work in
Speaker 1: the Kim's video as like a short shorts butch.
Speaker 3: Cop a call center.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Glenn Hughes, the the Leather Biker Daddy worked in
Speaker 1: a camera store. Construction worker. David Hodo worked as a bartender.
Speaker 1: Alex in the Navy Guy related to the nine to
Speaker 1: eleven Guy was working at an office, and Philippe Rose,
Speaker 1: the allegedly part Lakota Native American Guy, was working as
Speaker 1: a secretary. Victor Willis recorded a solo album in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine that went unreleased until twenty fifteen. Wild The
Speaker 1: band ultimately reformed in nineteen eighty seven as a legacy act,
Speaker 1: hitting the oldies and bar Mitzvah circuit. One of the
Speaker 1: sources interviewed in spins oral History of Ymca is Roger Bennett,
Speaker 1: co author of the book bar Mitzvah Disco, in which
Speaker 1: he offers this choice line, Ymca is the single most
Speaker 1: important song to hit the Jewish religion since Haffnagila. This
Speaker 1: is because of its popularity at bar Mitzvah's obviously, sadly,
Speaker 1: the man behind all of it, Jacques Morelli, became one
Speaker 1: of the victims of the AIDS epidemic when he died
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety one as what was described in Goldmine
Speaker 1: Magazine as a bit and ailing recluse at the age
Speaker 1: of forty four. There's a great expression in Britain, where
Speaker 1: there's a hit, there's a writ, meaning a legal writ,
Speaker 1: and that is indeed the case for ymca case, get it,
Speaker 1: That's all Jordan Baby, although in this situation it is
Speaker 1: somewhat justified. Victor Willis, the lead singer of the Village People.
Speaker 1: During their glory days, co wrote over thirty of their songs,
Speaker 1: including It's Like in the Navy, Macho Man, Milkshake, the
Speaker 1: Other One, San Francisco, I've already forgotten the parenthetical, and
Speaker 1: Go West. But as a salaried contractor, he'd essentially signed
Speaker 1: away his rights as a writer for hire by the
Speaker 1: music publishing company. It was a bad and sadly all
Speaker 1: too common rookie move in the music industry, but he
Speaker 1: ultimately got the rights to these songs back after winning
Speaker 1: a landmark ruling from a court in twenty twelve that
Speaker 1: allowed artists to reclaim their masters and publishing rights from
Speaker 1: their record labels and music publishers after thirty five years.
Speaker 1: Then a year later, Willis sued for a larger percentage
Speaker 1: of the songwrits on thirteen hits he'd been entitled to
Speaker 1: a third, with management Jacques Moraley and his business partner
Speaker 1: Henry Bilolo a Belulu sharing the rest. Their claim was
Speaker 1: that they'd written the songs in French and Willis merely
Speaker 1: translated them into English. Classic line change a word, get
Speaker 1: a third.
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1: Willis successfully argued that he was the sole writer for
Speaker 1: the lyrics, entitling him to fifty percent of the prophets.
Speaker 1: His ex wife. As we've mentioned, Cosby Show actor Felicia
Speaker 1: Rashad reportedly testified in court that she witnessed Willis writing
Speaker 1: these songs at home in What I Cannot Wait to
Speaker 1: be a moment memorialized in a cheesy biopic Ryan Murphy, Yeah, American, No,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't to be fully po faced and serious, get
Speaker 1: like Christopher Nolan to do it, but still have all
Speaker 1: that cliche both from Bohemian Rhapsody. Like he's like, they're
Speaker 1: like watching the news and winding with a drink, and
Speaker 1: they're like they see like a navy recruitment and he's like,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, in the they want seamen, whips out
Speaker 1: a notebook, furiously starts writing Felicia Whippan to Felicia, what's
Speaker 1: going on. She's alarmed at first what's going on? But
Speaker 1: she doesn't realize that inspiration had struck at that exact moment.
Speaker 1: Then we tastefully fade into a montage of them in
Speaker 1: the studio recording, and then that tastefully transitions into a
Speaker 1: third scene of them performing a live preferably at Live Aid.
Speaker 1: If this didn't happen, we lie because none of this
Speaker 1: matters anymore. This movie will make one billion dollars. It
Speaker 1: probably would anyway, presumably with his massive financial windfall from
Speaker 1: the song royalties. Willis obtained the rights to the Village
Speaker 1: People name in twenty seventeen and assembled a group that
Speaker 1: has been touring intermittently ever since. He has proven to
Speaker 1: be a loyal steward to the song. When the YMCA
Speaker 1: rebranded into The Y in the twenty tens, Willis swiftly
Speaker 1: issued a statement in forming fans this change would not
Speaker 1: impact the song or the days decisive leadership, leadership we
Speaker 1: truly need more of in this country. YMCA has of
Speaker 1: course been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and yes,
Speaker 1: the Library of Congress, in a class that included Doctor
Speaker 1: Dre's debut album, The Chronic, Whitney Houston's version of I
Speaker 1: Will Always Love You, the original Broadway cast recording of
Speaker 1: Fiddler on the Roof, Dusty Springfield's landmark album Dusty and Memphis,
Speaker 1: and Witchit Alignment by Glenn Campbell. Truly, that's a good class,
Speaker 1: truly an astounding cross section of American music there. I
Speaker 1: guess British if you're Dusty Springfield. But she was couseplaying
Speaker 1: as an American, so we count.
Speaker 3: That in Memphis.
Speaker 1: Yes, and you know another queer icon man. I'd love
Speaker 1: to bring up the fact very much Dusty Springfield was
Speaker 1: in a relationship with Norman Tanega, who is the woman
Speaker 1: who wrote the novelty hit walk in My Cat Named
Speaker 1: Dog and more recently in like the past decade and
Speaker 1: change the theme song for what We Do in the Shadows,
Speaker 1: which is called Your You're Dead.
Speaker 2: I had a dream of writing a Dusty Springfield biopic script. Yeah,
Speaker 2: to try to pitch to Adele. I didn't do that,
Speaker 2: did none of that.
Speaker 1: It's like me with my CIA Acid LSD pitch.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we gotta do that. Though.
Speaker 1: Since nineteen ninety six, YMC has played at Yankee Stadium.
Speaker 1: When the ground's crew dredges the infield in the fifth inning,
Speaker 1: what a rich pedestrian task of menial labor to immortalize
Speaker 1: with that song. The crew stops to perform the arm
Speaker 1: gestures at the appropriate time as the crowd follows a
Speaker 1: long America's pastime field of dreams, say it ain't so Joe, etc.
Speaker 1: This is just torture. YMCA has played in outer space
Speaker 1: in two thousands, a wake up song for astronauts on
Speaker 1: day eleven of the Space Shuttle Aquarius's visit to the
Speaker 1: International Space Station, well after the novelty of being in
Speaker 1: space wore the off. He's also used by Donald Trump
Speaker 1: to close out many of his rallies in the twenty
Speaker 1: twenty campaign trail, doing a sort of he rhythmic arms
Speaker 1: lowered swaying that I just find pulsively hypnotic. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like a bird of paradise if they were just a
Speaker 1: dumpy dump. Initially, Victor Willis was quite fine with this,
Speaker 1: more or less saying that it was good for business,
Speaker 1: and then he reversed course following the Black Lives Matter
Speaker 1: protests in the summer of twenty twenty and demanded that
Speaker 1: Trump stop, though like a true businessman, he later softened
Speaker 1: his stance. The song was played over loud speakers as
Speaker 1: Donald Trump boarded Air Force One on January twenty, twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, as he departed Washington. Prior to the inauguration
Speaker 1: of Joe Biden. Nothing remarkable has happened since.
Speaker 2: Well, I think we finally run out of things to
Speaker 2: say about YMCA, But I'd like to end by humoring
Speaker 2: the group's stubborn insistence that this song is opened to
Speaker 2: multiple interpretations. As David Hodo says that the close of
Speaker 2: Spin's incredible oral history, the real genius of YMCA is
Speaker 2: that it can be taken anyway you want. Phrasing right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that phrase I didn't occur to me until left I
Speaker 2: said it aloud. We were once on a TV show
Speaker 2: in England and the hostess said, now, this is a
Speaker 2: gay song, isn't it? And I said, no, Actually, it's
Speaker 2: a Christian song the Young Men's Christian Association. I mean, honey,
Speaker 2: isn't it obvious? I mean, I think his tongue is
Speaker 2: firmly in cheek there.
Speaker 1: I want him to say it like Dean Martin would have,
Speaker 1: like almost in a racist way.
Speaker 3: Oh honey, honey, like like.
Speaker 1: Elvis in a racial Elvis way. I mean, honey, isn't
Speaker 1: it all ViOS? Oh? Ice, cubes clinking and glass.
Speaker 2: My personal favorite reading of the song is from a
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen piece in Vice by Josh Baines called, appropriately enough,
Speaker 2: Hey everyone in Rodney Dangerfield voice.
Speaker 1: Hey everyone, we're all going to get laid. Yeah, hey everyone.
Speaker 2: YMCA by the Village People is actually really really good.
Speaker 2: That's the headline. Of course, this was for I like
Speaker 2: to quote it. Now think about it. YMCA is an
Speaker 2: unbridled ode to masculine support networks. Young man, there's no
Speaker 2: need to feel down, I said, young man, pick yourself
Speaker 2: up off the ground. They sing with utmost force and feeling.
Speaker 2: It's that direct young man that gets me. We've all
Speaker 2: been the skin and miserable young man they're addressing, and
Speaker 2: when you're that young man, it's hard to ask for help.
Speaker 1: The Village People know that.
Speaker 2: They understand that, because they understand that, they're going to
Speaker 2: offer you a helping hand. There's nothing they want and
Speaker 2: returned but your company, because they know all you really
Speaker 2: want is company.
Speaker 1: That's stupid, and I'm going to offer the chance to
Speaker 1: actually rebutt that with an even stupider music critic cliche,
Speaker 1: and that is YMCA exemplifies the PMA, the positive mental
Speaker 1: attitude closely associated with the New York hardcore movement via
Speaker 1: the DC band Bad Brains, who had read the treatise
Speaker 1: Think and Grow Rich authored in nineteen thirty seven by
Speaker 1: Napoleon Hill. This book cause its that a man's mind
Speaker 1: is like a garden and that what you plant in
Speaker 1: there will grow. And so the attitude of having a
Speaker 1: can do positive mental attitude became a rallying cry for
Speaker 1: the band, best exemplified in the song PMA Now. There
Speaker 1: are a number of bands from the New York City
Speaker 1: hardcore tradition, because, as you will know, Jordan, although forming
Speaker 1: in DC, Bad Brains, did come to New York to
Speaker 1: perform at the legendary Venue two A and also cbgbi's
Speaker 1: and they influenced a lot of hardcore people there, most
Speaker 1: notably the Cromax founded by criminal Harley Flanagan and guy
Speaker 1: who was super into being Harry Krishna and still Is
Speaker 1: and vegan John Joseph. That band itself was later famous
Speaker 1: for an altercation in which Harley Flanagan broke into a
Speaker 1: Cromax show and bit and or stabbed John Joseph. That
Speaker 1: was not PMA. Turnstile, a hardcore band of the moment,
Speaker 1: recently repurposed Sylvester Slice to loans thank you for letting
Speaker 1: Me be myself into a PMA aligned message, So people
Speaker 1: please be on the lookout for my new article will
Speaker 1: be coming out it maybe Pitchfork or Who Gives a
Speaker 1: Shit really medium, maybe called y Ymca is actually a
Speaker 1: proto hardcore punk song and you should love it, or
Speaker 1: something by me.
Speaker 2: How's that for a bit of non toxic masculinity.
Speaker 1: This has been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel and
Speaker 1: I'm Jordan Runtalg. We'll catch you next time. Woo. Too
Speaker 1: much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive
Speaker 1: producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog.
Speaker 2: The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.
Speaker 1: The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Runtalk
Speaker 1: and Alex High, with original music by Seth Applebaum and
Speaker 1: the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard,
Speaker 1: please subscribe and leave us a review.
Speaker 2: For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.