“Disco Inferno” (1976) – The Trammps

“Disco Inferno” (1976) – The Trammps * Written by Leroy Green and Ron “Have Mercy” Kersey * 45: “Disco Inferno” / “You Touch My Hot Line” * LP: Disco Inferno * Producer: Baker, Harris and Young Productions * Mixed by Tom Moulton * Label: Atlantic * Charts: Billboard disco (#1, 1977); Billboard Hot 100 (#11, 1978)

First released in 1976, the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno,” with its sonically expansive Tom Moulton mixing treatment, had already hit #1 on the Billboard disco chart before getting a recharge from its appearance on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. In his Heart of Rock and Soul (1989), Dave Marsh writes of hearing the record at the height of its spring 1978 popularity at the New York Yankees’ batting practice on opening day and finally catching the vision of disco: “Reggie Jackson stepped to the plate… [and] began sending balls flying out of the park… Reggie was crushing the ball as well as he would six months later against the Dodgers in the last game of the World Series, when he hit three that counted. [Marsh forgot that Jackson had actually done this in the ’77 World Series.] [Y]ou could feel Reggie get pumped right along with the music… Jackson made me feel the vitality of the music as a bubbling stew of drum and bass, building and building and boiling over and building again til you were wrung out and breathless” (pp. 59-60). That “til you were wrung out” element is an important part of the disco story. The Trammps gave it its perfect anthem, bearing a title that played off of both The Towering Inferno—the 1974 film that contained a burning discotheque scene—and of Dante’s Inferno, which tells of a special hell reserved for the hedonists “who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites.” And yet the song itself still shows no signs of burning out.