Disco as a musical style predated the movie Saturday Night Fever by perhaps as many as five years, but disco as an all-consuming cultural phenomenon might never have happened without the 1977 film and its multi-platinum soundtrack featuring such era-defining hits as the Bee Gees\u2019 \u201cStayin\u2019 Alive\u201d and Yvonne Elliman\u2019s \u201cIf I Can\u2019t Have You.\u201d What is absolutely certain is that Saturday Night Fever would never have been made were it not for a magazine article detailing the struggles and dreams of a talented, young, Italian-American disco dancer and his scruffy entourage in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. That article\u2014\u201dThe Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,\u201d by journalist Nik Cohn\u2014was published on this day in 1976 in the June 7 issue of New York magazine.<\/p>\n
In the blockbuster film that was based on the article, a young John Travolta turned the role of Tony Manero into a career-maker thanks to his own considerable talents, but the character Travolta played was brilliantly drawn by Nik Cohn before a frame of film was ever shot. From his style of dress and his job in the paint store, to his god-like status at the local disco and his vague dreams of escaping to something bigger, the young man named \u201cVincent\u201d whose experiences Cohn reported on practically leaps off the page with his undirected ambition and otherworldly charisma. You can practically hear the Bee Gees singing \u201cMore Than A Woman\u201d and picture \u201cVinnie\u201d pointing to the sky in his platform shoes and white three-piece suit as you read Cohn\u2019s profile, and you can certainly see why it caught the attention of Hollywood. There was just one problem, though, with the story that served as the source material for one of the biggest pop-cultural phenomena of the modern era: \u201cThe Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night\u201d was almost entirely fabricated.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Yes, there really was an Odyssey 2000 discotheque in Brooklyn, and yes, its habitu\u00e9s were of the general age, ethnicity and social class as depicted in Cohn\u2019s supposedly nonfiction piece, but the truth is that Cohn never immersed himself in the life of young \u201cVinnie\u201d and his cohorts, because young \u201cVinnie\u201d and his cohorts were the product of Cohn\u2019s imagination. Cohn\u2019s admission of his fabrication came in 1994, in a piece for the UK\u2019s Guardian newspaper. \u201cMy story was a fraud,\u201d he confessed. \u201cI\u2019d only recently arrived in New York. Far from being steeped in Brooklyn street life, I hardly knew the place. As for Vincent, my story\u2019s hero, he was largely inspired by a Shepherd\u2019s Bush mod whom I\u2019d known in the Sixties, a one-time king of Goldhawk Road.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Disco as a musical style predated the movie Saturday Night Fever by perhaps as many as five years, but disco as an all-consuming cultural phenomenon might never have happened without the 1977 film and its multi-platinum soundtrack featuring such era-defining hits as the Bee Gees\u2019 \u201cStayin\u2019 Alive\u201d and Yvonne Elliman\u2019s \u201cIf I Can\u2019t Have You.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}