I've only heard about this show from ThoughtStreams, but recognized it when reading a BBC review which claims the show is a little anachronistic on the rock vs pop front:
Much as I’ve enjoyed it, the show’s main flaw is that even as it takes pains to name-check almost every fabled rock star ... its musical vision is ... a myopic purist’s dream of what rock & roll should be, rather than what it was.
I don't really have a dog in this fight, my youthful impression of the 70's having been closer to a hand-me-down version of The Serial, than to any experience with the NY rock scene, but I am curious as to why disco died abruptly in the US, but remained popular elsewhere.
When I first started digging into the cyrillic side of Youtube, I ran across Soviet Disco: The Tripped Out World of ’80s Communist Exercise Records which wonders about:
a whole nation of comrades in legwarmers
Now that I've been listening to (and watching some of) the late-soviet stuff for a while, it's clear that the second world took the whole comrades in leg warmers thing far more seriously than the author of the "soviet disco" article, and that disco not only never died in western europe, but seems to have become even more popular in eastern europe through the 80's, up to (and even after) the fall of the wall, long after it had "died" in the US.
Any ideas as to the mechanism behind the regional death? I suppose one of the simplest explanations is that if the US were more media-saturated than other regions of the world in that decade (how did disco fare in AU or in CA?), it would be much easier for a fad to both bubble and burst.
another question for those of you who actually "made the scene" during the seventies:
Here's ONJ doing a disco cover of Dolly's Jolene.
All that shimmying (during, as well as in between, the verses) reminds me strongly of the 1980's soviet pop I've been watching lately. Is it just that (like Grandpa Simpson's belt onions?) everyone did the song-and-dance thing back then? Or was this limited to Ms Newton-John's interpretation?