Finola Hughes | Iowa life

I chose to lead off with this photo on purpose. Finola is talking to a woman in the foreground who also has a lot of hair. I thought it captured the 80s so well. Lots and lots of hair. Hair as far as the eye can see.

Cruising YouTube the other day brought on the disco revival! Say amen! It started with KC and the Sunshine Band. Which was a gateway group to Gloria Gaynor, Three Degrees and others. Being musically ignorant I tried to get some information on ‘the disco beat’. There’s some at Wikipedia, but to a large degree, simple info is tough to find. It seems 4/4 time was the beat used. I think it comes out to 120 beats per minute (then I start to get the indication ‘time’ is not necessarily ‘beats per minute’). A lot of exercise videos like to use 130 bpm. Either way, I loved it! For those not familiar with disco the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack will get you started. One of my favorite tracks from that movie was David Shire’s Manhattan Skyline. Musical heaven to me. Harry Wayne Casey’s I’m Your Boogie Man (although its never really made clear what being our ‘Boogie Man’ consists of) was another classic.

Yvonne Elliman (Jesus Christ Superstar) singing If I Can’t Have You. Disco consisted of a lot of bass, horns, sometimes organ, tambourine, piano, violin, stuff I love. While I liked a lot of the rock classics (Smoke On the Water, Slow Ride, Long Cool Woman), disco consisted of more than 3 guitars and a set of drums. Disco is the one that get’s your foot tapping. It also had a lot of orchestration. Beautiful. John Travolta had a huge hand in it with Saturday Night Fever and Stayin’ Alive. SNF being the bigger of the 2 what with the mind blowing success of the soundtrack, largely the Bee Gees. I think the beauty of the music bolstered the beauty of the 2 lead females, Karen Lynn Gorney and Finola Hughes (where the heck does the name ‘Finola’ come from?).

But anyway, that is who the pictures are of. 2 very pretty women. The edge for me is Finola, she’s got that Rachel Ward vibe that sends a guy over the edge. Karen seems more the hardboiled scrapper.

What was interesting was the timing of the 2 movies. SNF was 1977 at the height of the disco craze. SA was 1983, post mortem. There was a bizarre event at Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979 where they blew up a crate of disco records between games at an event called Disco Demolition Night. It was all part of this drive to make disco seem uncool. I don’t get it. I missed out on a lot of good music back then by the determiners of cool making some really bad calls. But as far as the movies go its illustrative to look at budget versus US gross on the 2. Stayin’ Alive budget $22 million vs $64 million gross. Good. Saturday Night Fever: budget $3 million, gross $94 million, phenomenal. 3x vs 30x.

In the intervening 6 years between movies someone was able to stick a knife in disco. Not sure who it was. Were the “wrong” record companies making the big bucks? Was it the “wrong” artists getting all the attention? In a situation like this all you have to do is follow the money. I guarantee you an industry insider could tell you what happened. Artistically there was nothing wrong with disco. But somebody really wanted to label it “uncool” for the masses. I’d love to know what the story was. Disco didn’t die, it was murdered! I have to figure the “wrong” label had the disco artists. Somebody’s ox was getting gored.