I’ve Put Gino Soccio Behind Me
crowd and waited around until the song came on. Two hours later, Soccio witnessed the reaction. “I’m just about to leave,” Soccio says, “and then ‘War Dance’ comes in, and everyone had every lick of it. And I got it there. That was an epiphany.” Shocked that this mistake-ridden jam could move a dance floor, Soccio leveraged the money he’d earned and set out to record a real “artist album,” something that would make up for the hastiness and mistakes of “War Dance.” A fan of Rubber Soul , Soccio wanted to make a disco statement. “I wasn’t a singles guy. It was an album or nothing.” With a $12,000 budget, Soccio used his summer break to track after-hours at Listen Audio in Old Montreal. “On my ten-speed bike, I’d shoot down to the studio and record for five or six hours until the cleaning lady came in.” The sessions were marked by heavy use of synths and grease-pencil-meets-razor-blade tape editing. Typical of his approach was the song called “Dancer,” written and recorded as a four-minute tune but later doubled in length through mix- downs, re-edits, and loops. A few months later, with his debut album still doing the demo rounds in Canada, Soccio was recruited to produce a project called Witch Queen, with sessions in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Peter Alves, a Canadian studio veteran hired to coproduce, says the Muscle Shoals sessions were fruitful but also daunting, given that legendary artists from the Stones to Aretha had cut at the studio: “And here we are, a couple of bozos from Canada!” Witch Queen was a one-off, but it gave Soccio connections to Black musicians from the South and exposed him to real American R&B, two touchstones he would revisit throughout his career. As Soccio was in Muscle Shoals, his full-length record was being shopped to U.S. labels—a move that would land him greater exposure but also one that would eventually sow the seeds of his professional downfall.
The voice on the phone has a slight accent that’s hard to place. It has the kind of tone that can only be earned by years of cigarettes. After this author’s search that spanned a year and ended with a bizarre twist and ten digits, the past had finally caught up with Gino Soccio. “I built a wall between me and the media. After twenty- five years, you run out of shit to say,” Soccio tells Wax Poetics. In an age when many musicians retire just to come back again, and others fight to stay in the spotlight, Soccio is an anomaly: He no longer makes music. He claims to not use email. There are hints he uses an assumed name, as he says cryptically, “I’ve put Gino Soccio behind me.” A week after that first conversation, Soccio is back on the phone, talking about his unlikely entry into disco. He’s agreed to his first interview in two decades, but only if personal details and information about his current life remain hidden. Born in September 1955, Soccio started playing piano at age eight and was playing Bach sonatas by eleven. Switched on to electronics by Kraftwerk, Stockhausen, and Wendy Carlos in the early ’70s, he started renting synths and earned a reputation as one of Montreal’s best keyboard specialists. Studying philosophy at the University of Montreal, Soccio earned his living as a session man, and in 1975, he got a call from a local producer named Pat Deserio who was putting together a “disco” record. Soccio had never done disco and didn’t care much for the genre. But he showed up to the studio and remembers seeing a roomful of ARPs, Moogs, and Hammonds, along with a wooden box that contained a primitive, homemade drum machine. When Soccio asked where the other band members were, the engineer pointed back at him and said, “You’re it!” Deserio’s concept was to make a disco version of Ravel’s “Bolero” and release it with a few other tracks under the banner Kebekelektrik. And Soccio would play every note. “It was very labor-intensive,” says Soccio, “but at the same time, I had free rein of the entire studio, which had never happened [before]. It was a really great learning experience. I had never done disco. As you’re going along doing it, you fall right in love with it.” The Kebekelektrik sessions also spawned “War Dance,” an orgy of analog squirts and electronic flourishes that Soccio wrote and recorded on the spot, warts and all. “I was scared shitless of that one,” he says. Buried on the B-side, Soccio the perfectionist was told no one would ever hear the track. The four-song LP Kebekelektrik was given the remix treatment by Tom Moulton and released in the U.S. on Salsoul in 1978. “Bolero”—which took up the entire A-side—was considered to be the lead track, but it was “War Dance” that caught fire on dance floors. Curious, Soccio went to Montreal’s Lime Light where DJ Robert Ouimet spun for a sexually diverse
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Ray Caviano is supposed to be dead. But on a crisp day last November, Caviano was sitting in his Brooklyn office talking about disco, the Paradise Garage, and Luther Vandross. Today, the sixty-three-year-old works as an addictions counselor, but he still exudes a fast-talking vibe that must’ve served him well when he quarterbacked a string of hits by the likes of KC and the Sunshine Band at Henry Stone’s TK Records. (Caviano says rumors of his demise can be traced to the untimely death of his brother Robert, who managed Grace Jones and the Village People before passing away from an AIDS-related illness in 1992.) Flamboyant, charismatic, and well-attuned to both dance floors and bottom lines, Ray Caviano was disco royalty by the end of the 1970s. His tireless promotion in DJ booths, at roller
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