The Fabulous Sylvester by Gamson Joshua

Author:Gamson, Joshua [Gamson, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Music, History
ISBN: 9781466850163
Goodreads: 18194633
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2005-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

9.

FLAME (ON THE DANCE FLOOR)

Although the folks at Fantasy were certainly thrilled to have a hit record on their hands, they couldn’t even begin to wrap their arms around Sylvester. Sylvester wasn’t interested in competing with the “middle-of-the-road disco people,” he said, but with the stars in the disco big league—Giorgio Moroder, Donna Summer, Linda Clifford, Cerrone, Grace Jones. “If you are going to compete in that league,” he told a San Francisco Bay Guardian reporter, “you cannot be safe.” Fantasy had the largest jazz catalog in the world, and made its biggest money from Creedence Clearwater Revival and the soundtrack to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It was a conservative, cautious, jazzy kind of place. An employee who was around at the time remembers Phil Jones, the president of the company, as your basic “racist, sexist homophobe.” He was known to read Reader’s Digest.

Sylvester didn’t usually complain to anybody about Fantasy—he was grateful and loving his life—but when the company released a 12-inch disco mix of “Disco Heat” without his consent, Sylvester was livid. Listening to it at Harvey and Nancy’s Berkeley pad, he threw himself on their bed and cried. “It took four months for us to mix that record,” he said. “And then to have somebody just roll the tape, and these effects just come in, and go out, and lots of fabulous things are left out: the panning, the effects, the way you play with the electronics.” What really pissed him off, just destroyed him, was the way someone else was credited with the “concept” of the mix. “I died, I cried, I flipped out,” he said. He threatened to walk on desks and scream and break things. In fact, band members heard that he walked into a Fantasy executive’s office, threw a pile of the records at the wall, and broke one on the man’s desk. “I’ll never have that done to me again,” he said. “No one conceptualizes me. I am the concept.”

Sylvester was constantly conceptualizing. In case you weren’t planning on seeing his show, Sylvester—promoting himself in the British publication Sounds—could sell it to you it in such a way that you more or less had to change your plans. “Izora Rhodes is just enormous, and so real,” he said in 1978. “She sings and dances and sweats and shakes. Martha Wash has these huge tits that just come out like this, and shake from side to side when she sings, and she’s got the nerve to have a shape from the waist down. I’m putting them in skin-tight dresses, like the Supremes. That’ll be unbelievable, with them singing, all these butts and bellies and tits sticking out and shaking, and me being absolutely crazed.” Indeed, Sylvester conceptualized Martha and Izora on a day-to-day basis. “No one was telling him what to wear,” says Izora Rhodes Armstead. “He will make you go home and tell you what to wear.” He made the Tons matching gowns from red-and-gold Chinese fabric; he even had them in spandex for a while.

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