Van McCoy
when younger
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Van McCoy |
One of the album covers debuting McCoy's Hustle | The Disk Coordinator when younger |
Another picture of Van McCoy |
G9 Kicker: Track 27 on G9 and g9.1, Track 28 on G9.2: The Hustle By Van McCoy and the Soul City Orchestra
The G9 kicker (which you should be hearing assuming that Windows Media Player is on your operating system) includes another of the disk coordinator's favorites. To understand this, you have to realize that the disk coordinator spent much of the late 70's in discotheques dancing to what would become the hustle beat. Here he would meet the most interesting manic depressants and be introduced to the world of uppers(heroine) and downers(quaaludes) but he never partook and this is a story for another website. But it was always his contention that the early hustle songs - created for the 7 step in 6 beat Latin Hustle - were the best.
For many people not living or dancing through that era, hustle music begins and possibly ends with the BeeGees' (The Bee Gees represents the Brothers Gibbs: Barry, Robin and Maurice: singer, songwriters from Australia) Staying Alive album used in Saturday Night Fever. Most people don't appreciate that the Beegees were working on this genre of music - which was sweeping the airwaves of the nation - for their own album long before the movie. In essence, the music was appropriated for addition to the movie and not the other way around.
However, for the aficionados among us, the Hustle begins with Van McCoy, a singer and songwriter popular in the 1970's. He was in New York using a studio to finalize a new album when an associate invited him to one of the many Brooklyn based Latino (then called Puerto Rican) dance bars where a new type of Latin music was being played and, even more importantly, being danced to. This dance had its origins on street corners where teenagers would wait for school buses. Someone would hum or play this type of music on a radio- almost a version of a combination of cha cha, mambo and swing(although be careful in taking this as fact as the disk coordinator, who is writing this, has no training or ear in music and is probably wrong in his analysis). Steps for a line dance were put in place and appropriately named the Bus Stop for where this was occurring each morning.
The music was eventually moved indoors and became the Latin Hustle. It is this music and dance that both Van McCoy and the disk coordinator became enamored with, although in McCoy's case during the space of an evening visit to Brooklyn. And, as opposed to yours truly who just danced to this music every night for 4 years, Van McCoy could do something about this beat. The next morning, in the sound studio, he wrote, performed and included a track to pay homage to what he had witnessed the night before: The Hustle by Van McCoy. This is the kicker to G9. It is the disk coordinator's contention that this is still the best representation of hustle music ever written. What it lacked in lyrics, it surely made up in tempo and beat. Everytime one person hears it, it brings back the excitement of that era in music. On a sad note, however, Van McCoy died in his late 30's in 1979.