Donna Summer on the cover of
'Rolling Stone.'
Photograph by Brian
Leatart
This story is from the March 23rd, 1978 issue of Rolling Stone.
Until I saw Donna Summer a year ago on a
Midnight Special with Lou
Rawls, I'd viewed her music simply as brilliantly packaged aural sex, nothing
too meaty, and, in spite of its implied intimacies, nothing too personal. But
when she joined Rawls on the dais dressed like a Bloomingdale's Cleopatra, she
sang probably the most affectingly full-blooded version of "Swing Low, Sweet
Chariot" I'd ever heard. This wasn't the cooing voice she used on records.
The second time I saw her was on the set of the Casablanca Records and Film
Works-Motown production,
Thank God It's Friday. Donna was playing an
aspiring singer trying to persuade a disco DJ to let her perform a song. After
several rebuffs, the singer sneaks into the booth and locks the door behind her,
so it's just the two of them. Then she unbuttons the top button of her blouse
and fixes him with a stare from the corners of her eyes. I remember thinking it
was one of the most curious expressions I'd ever seen, wide-open, withheld and
coldly erotic.
But now, at Christmas time, when Donna pulls into the Casablanca Records'
office of Susan Munao, wearing a billowing green velvet dress and pencil-heeled
black boots, she looks neither mysterious nor erotic, just dog tired.
Her handshake is firm and her smile is friendly, but her wide eyes are
bloodshot. Her tall frame is muscular and her face, framed by wavy black hair
and centered with a puggish nose, is less angular than in album photos. While
Munao leaves to fetch Cokes, Donna sinks into a swivel armchair with an
exaggerated sigh.
In rotelike speech with an occasional Bostonian curl, Summer attributes her
languor to the last two days' regimen of interviews and rehearsals. Then,
without breathing space or prompting, she launches into a detailed, detached
explanation of her plans for taking
Once upon a Time (her latest album)
to the stage in the spring. After a few minutes, Munao returns to announce that
Summer's boyfriend, Michael, would like to speak to her for a moment. "He has
those Christmas cards you wanted," Munao says. Michael, a tall, blond man
wearing a red-and-white satin warmup jacket, saunters into the room possessively
and places a card before Donna.
"No, no," she says, plucking it from his hand, "this won't do. You can't tell
who's supposed to be who. Is that a cartoon of Neil Bogart [Casablanca's
president] or Jeff Wald [Donna's comanager with Joyce Bogart at the time]?"
"Well, that's Neil, I guess," he says. "You can tell because he's sort of
fat." Before going, Michael mentions that he'd met a psychic healer earlier in
the day and asked him by Donna's later.
"Well, I don't want to see him." Donna hitches her shoulder like a kid
turning down porridge.
"Believe me," he says slowly, "you
want to see him. I mean, this guy
has such an eerie aura about him. He told me more in fifteen minutes about
what's been going down in your life and career than
I could've told
him."
"Oh yeah? What'd he say about my headaches and insomnia?"
Michael leans over the desk at Donna, resting his weight on his knuckles. "He
said to tell you that he'll take on your pain because it won't hurt him."
"Really?" Her face brightens. "Really? Look, ask him if he'll meet with me
tonight. Maybe he'll take away this negativity so I can sleep." After Michael
saunters back out, I tell her it sounds as if she's going through a rough
stretch. "Oh God," she says, letting out a long breath, "I can't even begin to
tell you. Too much has happened lately. It seems like an absurdity. I just got
back from this Italian tour that was so ill organized and badly paced that I
thought I was going to break. In one airport I was so gone that they had to give
me oxygen and wheel me to the plane, and all I could think was, 'I've got a show
to do tonight.'
"Sometimes it gets to the point where you've been pushed for so long, by this
motorous, monstrous force, this whole production of people and props that you're
responsible for, by audiences and everything that rules you, until you take it
upon yourself to be a
machine. And at some point a machine breaks down.
I feel like I want to cry most of the time and just get rid of it, but sometimes
I get so pent-up, I can't. And that's when I get afraid."
Probably
more than any other single personality, Donna Summer has come to represent disco
artistry, a fairly enigmatic thing to epitomize. In the rigid framework of
disco, the artist's role is so often reduced to that of a prop that the term
"artist" hardly even applies. Few disco performers have attempted to adopt the
genre to their own bents and even fewer have managed to escape it altogether.
Strangely, Summer has been not only its most flagrant example of prop usage, but
also the most successful at transcending the prop – and, in turn, disco
itself.
In her early hits, particularly "Love to Love You Baby," Donna and her
producers – Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte – embellished and strengthened the
prop by affording it a persona of sorts: Donna became a servile vixen with a
whispery voice, intoning and moaning over a metronomic beat that had all the
intensity of a sex act between consenting androids. (No less an authority than
Time clocked the seventeen-minute performance at a prodigious
twenty-two orgasms.) If it seemed a persona of dubious and limited worth, it
nevertheless had the desired results: Donna became disco's best-known
personality – one of the few to endure – and, in the bargain, one of its most
consistent sellers.
