Rinder and Lewis was the perfect confluence of age and time and place and people. Harris had been captivated by disco at clubs in Europe and was keen to market this music to American audiences. In 1975, he called Mike and Laurin into his office to play them some imports and proposed they start recording disco tracks. He sent them to Studio One—a gay nightclub in L.A.—to get a feel for the scene. Mike and Laurin found the whole experience perplexing.They didn’t warm to the music, whose formulaic excesses affronted their sense of musical integrity. Moreover, they couldn’t understand how DJs that were simply blending old Motown records could send people into such raptures. Yet there was something in the hedonistic energy that emanated from the dance floor that captured their imagination. Mike and Laurin understood the commercial potential in the spirit of inclusion advanced by disco, and they went into the studio the next day to start work on El Coco. It is telling that Mike and Laurin were introduced to disco as a European phenomenon. They, like Harris, were unaware of the disco and proto-disco movements that had been happening in the New York underground for several years already. They came into disco at the time that it was hitting the mainstream, and everything about El Coco was geared towards marketing. The name—although commonly thought to be a reference to the ample quantities of cocaine Mike and Laurin were consuming—was thought up by Harris, who took it from Harvey Averne’s Latin music label Coco Records. Harris wanted to market El Coco as an overseas product, and so its first release on AVI, 1975’s Mondo Disco , was adorned with a concoction of foreign references. The records themselves were even sent to Europe and brought back so they could be sold to DJs as imports, a shrewd marketing scam that capitalized on the perceived prestige of foreign commodities. Harris noticed how another Latin label, Salsoul Records, had started targeting DJs by releasing promotional 12-inch records, cut at 45 rpm with one long track on each side. He copied this model with the “Giant 45s,” which promoted their cuts— in French and Spanish—as special 12-inch disco versions. The first “Giant 45” was El Coco’s “Let’s Get It Together,” a 1976 recording that anticipated what would become the distinctive RinLew sound.
“Let’s Get It Together” drew on Mike’s and Laurin’s backgrounds to introduce a jazz aesthetic to disco, combining elements of swing with funk. It feels like a slow- motion fantasy: it is bright, luscious, and sensual, and this resonated with an audience that looked to the club environment for a world of glamour and romance. El Coco records sold very well, and, brimming with commercial success, Mike and Laurin took advantage of the situation by creating several groups with distinct identities. If El Coco was sophisticated, Le Pamplemousse was stripped down and dirty. In contrast, Saint Tropez and Tuxedo Junction brought into play the shiny, gay, and indulgent side of disco. Released on A. J. Cervantes’s new label, Butterfly Records, Saint Tropez was a silky trip into musical erotica, replacing wah-wah pedals and horns with an orchestra fronted by three female singers charged with homoerotic intimation. The records’ cover art pointed to a close physical intimacy between the women: their bodies always touching, inviting you inside the gatefolds, which disclosed fantasies of embraces and light kisses. Laurin had come up with the idea of arranging swing songs from the ’40s to a disco beat, a concept that Cervantes instantly bought into. Tuxedo Junction recorded extremely kitsch disco renditions of big-band classics—like “Chattanooga Choo Choo”—which became unlikely crossover hits.These recordings were similar in substance to Walter Murphy’s take on classical masterpieces, and, like Murphy’s Big Apple Band, none of the groups actually existed. Mike and Laurin did all the instrumentation and attributed the music to fictitious performers. As the need for public performances intensified, they even put together false ensembles to send on the road while they recorded new songs. Mike and Laurin spent their entire lives in the studio, constantly turning out cocaine-fuelled material for their bands. “It was like being a character actor casting for a movie,” recalls Mike. “Between us, we played all the instruments and simply brought in different singers and specialists for solos.” In many ways, Mike and Laurin continued to be session musicians, churning out anonymous music to satisfy the ever- increasing demands of an industry exploiting every hour that disco spent in the limelight. They were the wizards behind the machine in Oz: masterminds of the popular disco idiom, hiding their own identities behind
the masks provided by the studio walls. Masks are almost invariably related to ambivalence, and for Mike and Laurin, the studio provided an avenue for selective personification. Laurin reveals that they were “deeply embarrassed by disco.We didn’t want anyone to know what we were doing. We thought of ourselves as really serious guys, and this music was just so easy for us.”Indeed, commercial disco was a musical dead end that ended up tormenting them with self- doubt.They were torn between their desire for commercial success and their fidelity to using music as a strategy for rebellion and romance, and they eventually realized that something needed to change. “We really had to stop making generic music,” Laurin confesses. “We had more money, girls, and cocaine that we knew what to do with.We had to do something for our soul.” It was at this point that the masks were removed, and Rinder and Lewis finally came into view.
We were deeply embarrassed by disco . We didn’t want anyone to know what we were doing. We thought of ourselves as really serious guys, and this music was just so easy for us.
Laurin Rinder and W. Michael Lewis, circa late ’70s. Photos courtesy of Laurin Rinder.
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