And it worked.” Dance music was changing, and as a disco artist, Soccio didn’t like where it was going. Digital recording and programmable synthesizers like the Yamaha DX7 were coming onto the market, meaning producers no longer had to splice tapes and spend hours tuning an ARP 2500 to make a dance track. Gino Soccio—the artist who created full-length records, the studio wizard who had mastered LFO filters and tape loops— was becoming a dinosaur.
Through the ’90s, his music collected dust in record crates, in basements, and in storage warehouses. Soccio returned to Montreal and worked for the Canadian government, running a program for arts grants. But in the dying summer days of 2001, Soccio placed a call to his old friend Erma Shaw. He wanted to do a track. She flew to Montreal for three days, wrote lyrics, and recorded forty-five vocal takes on a song the pair called “Spirits.” The song was never released because it sampled the guitar line to “Hotel California” by the Eagles. “Don Henley and them just wanted us to get rid of that riff,” Shaw told me over the phone, adding that Soccio didn’t have the budget to recut the track without the sample. Another roadblock, and Soccio once again reverted to the shadows. “We just sort of lost contact with each other,” Shaw adds. “I’ve tried to reach him, to no avail.” A few days after our interview, Shaw’s manager called me and suggested I get hold of Soccio and pitch him on a disco review show in Las Vegas. But at fifty-seven, Soccio feels as though his time has passed. Even as younger generations discover his music, he believes it’s too late: “I’m just coming to grips with it, because when I was doing this music, I was doing it for the day, I was doing it for the minute… I wasn’t thinking, ‘Thirty-five years down the road, I hope this is still alive.’ ” Some resentment seeps into Soccio’s words when he hears about online comments from fans who demand more music, more singles, another album. “I guess I’m fortunate. I don’t know how I feel about it.” But there’s also a sense that revisiting the past has brought up a well of emotions. “I saw some disco artists keep going after the disco era, and put out album after album that didn’t sell. I didn’t want to be one of those… I didn’t want to dilute my catalog, my repertoire, in that way.” Soccio won’t say what he does for work these days, only telling me he has “business interests.” He still lives somewhere in Montreal and prefers to be left alone. But even as he tries to bury his past, it simply won’t die. In a way, Soccio’s career mirrors the genre he fell in love with thirty- seven years ago. “Everything I hear is disco. It’s all disco to me. Fuck Billy Joel and ‘it’s all rock and roll.’ It’s still disco to me. That’s what it is.” .
Human Nature
At Billboard ’s 1980 International Disco Forum 8 at the Roseland Ballroom, Soccio had appeared on a panel about the record business, saying that “producers should trust record companies.” But by mid-decade, his relationship with the industry had soured. Soccio issued the 1985 12-inch “Human Nature” on a new label (Celebration), but it didn’t live up to his expectations. There are still hints of frustration in his voice: “ ‘Human Nature’ really marked the end of my career, because I thought it was a great record, but nobody wanted to know from it. Nobody wanted to play it, nobody wanted to even put it in the store. It was the end of disco, and that’s when I got out.” Soccio recalls driving around downtown Montreal, seeing boarded-up discos that only a year earlier had been teeming. “I went through a bunch of existential questions,” he says with a sigh. For Soccio, those questions triggered memories of his first trip to Warner Bros. back in 1979. Soccio recalls walking through a maze of cubicles near the front of the office, and facing a wall of death stares. Once in the disco section, Soccio was told that the rock people hated the disco people. Disco was too popular, too Black, and too gay. The rock staff was intimidated. “The reason that disco died, they oversaturated the market,” Soccio says. “It was a bunch of racist, homophobic rockers who wanted us gone.” Soccio felt betrayed. “When I was younger, it didn’t bother me that much, but when disco died, I understood there was a conspiracy to kill it from the beginning. It’s like, ‘The job to our shareholders is to make money, and if disco sells, then fine; but let’s burn it out.’ ” Depressed in Montreal, he was invited by a friend to Los Angeles. Soccio sold all his gear and moved to Hollywood. He tanned and jogged. It was his first break in about fifteen years, and it turned into a two-and-a-half-year vacation. By 1986, Caviano was doing time at the Taconic Correctional Facility on drug charges, stemming from what the Village Voice reported was a $500-per-day blow habit. An unnamed RFC staffer told the paper, “We were all doing drugs. You couldn’t see what was serious and what wasn’t.” Disco was done and Gino Soccio had been thrown out with the disco trash. He was barely out of his twenties.
This article originally appeared in Wax Poetics Issue 55, 2013.
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