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A new book celebrates a mid-'70s scene's surprising diversity in real-time

By Andy Beta

Tuesday, October 20th 2009 at 5:28pm

On my way to interview former Village Voice art director (and current New Yorker photography critic) Vince Aletti, I happen to pass a poster proclaiming, "Disco Is Back! Now playing at Bloomingdale's." This is strangely appropriate, as I'm meeting Aletti for lunch to discuss the publication of his first book, The Disco Files 1973-78: New York's Underground Week by Week, which, as its title attests, collects five years' worth of articles he wrote about the burgeoning disco scene as it happened.

So with this mighty new tome of his, is Bloomingdale's right? Is disco back? Aletti laughs at the notion: "I feel that disco never really went away, as much as it was declared 'over' as the spotlight of the media moved somewhere else." Seated across from the sixtysomething scribe in a St. Mark's Place café, we are but a stone's throw away from the Ukrainian National Home, which, every few months, hosts David Mancuso's still-extant Loft parties. First reported on by Aletti in these very pages (June 16, 1975, to be exact, as part of a news story entitled "SoHo vs. Disco" and reprinted in the book), he was the first writer to address disco and the first to pen a story about Mancuso, the inscrutable DJ and consummate party host universally hailed as the genre's founding father.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-10-20/music/vince-aletti-s-disco-diaries