rinks, and in underground clubs had resulted in Warner Bros. chief Mo Ostin handing him his own label. Never shy about self-promotion, Caviano called the new venture RFC Records, after his own initials. Caviano recruited his buddy, Rolling Stone music writer Vince Aletti, to help run the new label, which would focus on the freshest disco sounds. Armed with $6 million of Mo Ostin’s money, Caviano just needed a hit. “Gino Soccio was the first artist I signed. I fell in love with it the minute I heard it,” says Caviano, calling Soccio’s art “statement music.” Soccio’s music had come to New York via John “Disco” Driscoll, who was the man in Canada when it came to dance music. Driscoll was running Quality Records at the time and was looking to bust out of the tiny Canadian market. “I thought we had something there,” Driscoll says. “That’s why I jumped on a plane to New York.” Driscoll’s first appointment was with Prelude Records boss Marvin Schlachter, who liked Soccio’s music but reckoned it needed a remix. Driscoll took a pass and went to Caviano, where he scored a worldwide deal. The Canadian spent the rest of the day riding around New York in a limo. The major-label record machine was gearing up to create a disco star, and Soccio recalls going to New York, where Caviano “locked him up for two days” at the Hotel St. Regis for photo shoots and media interviews. Soccio also flew to Los Angeles and met Mo Ostin and the staff at Warner. Soccio was greeted with a stretch limo full of booze at LAX—a surreal encounter that would stick with Soccio to this day. Upon release, Soccio’s debut album, Outline , was hailed as a connoisseur classic. The Village Voice compared Soccio to Kraftwerk and Steve Reich. Outline mixed dance-focused cuts like the smash “Dancer” with arty cuts like “The Visitors,” which showed up in Federico Fellini’s La Città delle Donne . Even the Outline album cover, with its minimalist design, portrayed Soccio as a kind of disco auteur. According to Aletti, Soccio shifted the disco template when the genre needed it most: “Gino was certainly unlike anything else that had been out. It was sweeter, smoother. It had a kind of lightness that people responded to—a buoyancy.” The album had an impact in the underground too. Soccio remembers going to the Paradise Garage with Caviano and hearing Larry Levan spin an extended mix of “Dancer”: “They would play that song three times in a row sometimes, and it was already an eight-minute song. It was twenty-four minutes of ‘Dancer,’ and people just would not get enough of it. It really was something. It blew me away.” The William Morris Agency wanted to put Soccio on tour, but frankly, he was making too much money as a producer. He scored club hits for Arista’s Karen Silver and Quality’s the Mighty Pope. In 1980, Soccio bought his parents a home in Montreal. That same year, label interference took its toll on his
album S-Beat , which Soccio says was a disappointment. “After that experience, I decided to shut the studio door.”
Try It Out
For his next record, Soccio hired Erma Shaw, a singer he’d met at Muscle Shoals. Shaw had been discovered as a teenager by Stax cofounder Estelle Axton and was a session vocalist at Willie Mitchell’s Royal Recording Studios in Memphis. For Soccio, she was the perfect voice to bring out his American influences: “I wanted to go ultra, ultra R&B, and she was Black as Black. She was Willie Mitchell’s girlfriend, she was from the South.” With Shaw on vocals, Soccio cut the LP Closer and the lead single “Try It Out,” which spent ten weeks at the top of the disco chart in 1981. It also crossed over to Black audiences, climbing as far as number twenty-two on the R&B chart—an achievement Soccio said is a crowning moment in his career. “I was proud of that,” he says. “I’d been criticized for being too Black: ‘It’s too Black; it’ll never work.’ Well, you can never be too Black.” In 1982, Soccio released Face to Face , a robotic funk record that flirted with hi-NRG and yielded the hit “It’s Alright.” It was his most accomplished work so far, but what he says in an interview with the Montreal Gazette during the album’s promotion is telling: “It gets to me after a while, this constant pressure of wondering whether the record will take off, or whether the royalties will come in on time.” In 1983, Soccio composed the soundtrack for the Canadian film Hey Babe! (aka Baba! ), a mildly pedophilic film starring a very old Buddy Hackett and a very young Yasmine Bleeth. Personal cracks were beginning to show. In January 1984, Soccio was involved with some kind of altercation with Montreal police. He would claim officers dragged him from his car by the hair and beat him with a flashlight. An inquiry was launched and the story made headlines across Canada. A more public bruising would be on the way. A greatest hits LP, led by the single “Turn It Around” was set for release, but the cover—featuring a lingerie-clad young woman bound by two-inch tape—ran afoul of women’s activists, who threatened to activate a U.S.-wide boycott. Soccio wouldn’t change the cover, citing his artistic license, and the record was shelved in the U.S. For Soccio, it was a setback. But something else started to gnaw at him. Around this time, he took a trip to Atlantic Records (which had since picked up the RFC imprint) and sensed something sinister. Listening through a pile of new Atlantic 12-inches, he hated everything: “They were putting out the worst garbage, anything with a 4/4 bass drum on it, and I’m saying ‘Why? This is garbage!’ And then I understood, they wanted to flood the market. The end part of disco was really bad—it was bad music. But they would put out anything as if to gross you out.
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