There's that floor again, that famous floor: geometric primary colors, flashing in the perpetuity of pop culture memory, an icon of the distant disco era. You've probably seen it, throbbing beneath John Travolta's platform shoes in the 1977 film “Saturday Night Fever.”
Is at auction in Los Angeles later this month along with other items of Hollywood lore, including the Ark of the Covenant prop from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The auction is a joint project of Julien's Auctions and Turner Classic Movies (for which the publicity has been relentless). At the moment, the offer for the dance floor is at $50,000; Estimated sales price is $200,000 to $300,000.
This news caught my attention because I haven't quite seen that striking floor. I know it personally. I met him in the years after the film, while he was living in obscurity in the club featured in the 2001 film Odyssey, in a Brooklyn neighborhood called Bay Ridge.
Who says Hollywood legends don't have a second and even a third life?
I played bass in a high school band called Zones and we rented the club to play. We would charge $4 and put $1 on the house: a considerable profit. We packed up the place.
We played a mix of original songs and contemporary covers: “Message in a Bottle” by Police and “Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)” by Squeeze always got a great response. About two or three songs into our set, the guy behind the bar would change on that floor, and the last holdouts would come out and dance. The plane would take flight. Those flashing lights really had an effect.
We worked hard in the Zones, harder than we did in our classwork (at least I did). There were five of us, five heads of greasy hair that were impressive until compared to some of the huge 80s bonnets that were jumping up and down on the dance floor. The future as famous musicians clearly attracted him.
You'd think reading about the auction would take me back to those days and make me think: What happened to those guys? But it's not necessary because I saw them a few weeks ago. I know exactly what happened to them.
It all started last year with Dave's idea: after 40 years, to gather and record our originals again, this time with modern technology that will eliminate hiss, feedback and other defects from the recordings we made in 1983 and 1984.
Dave played keyboards and I think it was his playing that set us apart the most. His Gibson G-101 added a layer of strident warm chords over and between the guitars, bass and drums. It was difficult to read it in the essay. If he didn't like a new song, for example, he would never tell. He would just play with minimal enthusiasm or, if he really didn't like it, he would just get up and leave the room.
But in the emails and text messages that circulated about the meeting, it wasn't difficult to read at all: He wanted us to meet, he booked studio time, and he pushed until we all agreed.
Matt, the guitarist, came from North Carolina. Steve and Jamal, drummer and drummer-vocalist (yes, we had two drummers) came from New Jersey. I was the only one still living in Brooklyn.
Almost all the hair was gone. Dave still occasionally plays with ska band The Toasters, and Jamal is always hard at work recording this or that project, but really, those are the only two with any footholds in music. I play bass in the basement for fun (when I'm not watching Turner Classic Movies), but it's my son's bass.
The auction site says the flat was built for $15,000 for the movie and lived in Odyssey 2001 until the place closed in 2005. It measures 24 feet by 16 feet and is still in working order. It looks like something modern, space-age, in “Saturday Night Fever,” but close-up photos show it to be a relatively primitive analog affair, built of wood, with colored light bulbs beneath acrylic panels. The tender ends on June 16.
The Zones were also an analogue affair. And we have traveled through time as that apartment has done: marriages, divorces and almost divorces, health problems, professional successes and lost jobs, a total of eight children, deaths of parents and people even closer to us. No grandchildren yet
We took our places in the studio at our first meeting last year and connected. We had had a few Zoom meetings to plan it, but this was the moment of truth. Sonny, the engineer, was ready to capture it all, digitally.
It didn't happen right away, but it happened. Maybe in the second song, maybe in the third. It was like that moment on the track when suddenly, magically, you're in the air. Forty years later, we were still a band. Jamal always laughed out loud from his team when we sounded good, when everything clicked and we were in the bag, and now he was laughing long and hard. And Dave never left the room. We have met repeatedly since then to fine-tune.
We've had our ups and downs and no one's a rock star, but we made those songs. We continue to go strong. Like that famous apartment.
Wendell Jamieson, a political and communications consultant, spent 18 years at the New York Times, where He occasionally wrote about music and film..
