5 Rock Musicians Who Tried '70s Disco — With Mixed Results

Disco is polarizing. Some people recognize it for the beautiful, life-affirming genre it is; others, uncreative types to whom life has been unkind, incorrectly think of it as an irritating, inauthentic press-on nail of an art form. What both sides agree on is that for a few intense years, it was not only dominant, but a cash cow, attracting even artists from outside the genre — especially, but by no means exclusively — rock performers, to see if they could pop out a disco track and get a slice of that dance club publicity.

Some of these crossover projects were startling: "The Ethel Merman Disco Album" is so bizarre as to be almost hypnotic. Some of the results were excellent, getting rockers onto the dance floor and offering disco lovers fresh energy. And, most fun to talk about, some of these disco field trips were so bad they'll peel paint from the walls. Below, we've curated five examples of rockers going disco that capture extremes of quality.

"Shakedown Street" is probably an honest effort from the jam band of all jam bands, the Grateful Dead, which makes it all the more creepy. This track is firmly within the disco uncanny valley. It sounds like disco, looks like disco, probably even smelled like disco in the recording studio, but the energy isn't there. "Shakedown Street" is to real disco what a pod person is to a human being: A clever facsimile with nothing under the hood.

Though admittedly disco is not a genre famed for the elegance and subtlety of its lyrics, those of "Shakedown Street" are especially off-vibe. "Maybe the dark is from your eyes / You know you got such dark eyes!" "I recall your darkness / When it crackled like a thundercloud." Nothing's shaking on Shakedown Street because the town is full of vampires! (Or zombies! Or something!) This low-impact disco is all they can take, because if they tried to dance harder they'd fall apart. This B-side, transposed into a minor key and with freshened instrumentation, is right there to build a horror movie around ... but not a club set.

Thinking Rod Stewart is sexy is the kind of low-grade secret you might keep from your friends to avoid being teased about it for the rest of your life. Not the first name on your celebrity hall pass, but maybe after a chance meeting after a concert, a couple of Harvey Wallbangers, you could imagine... entertaining the offer, shall we say. But one of the least sexy things Sir Rod (lol) has ever done is record "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?"

At four minutes and 38 seconds, the song feels very long indeed. It's repetitive, but even with its small reservoir of lyrics, there's enough cringe for days. It tells the story of a bar pickup, with the chorus introduced with immortal lines like "They catch a cab to his high-rise apartment / At last, he can tell exactly what his heart meant." The taxi is seldom the most memorable part of the night, and if it is, expect a cleaning fee. The video adds an additional dose of yikes, taking a cute concept, Sir Rod performing on the TV in a singles bar, and spoiling the look with bales and bales of fluffy '70s hair and long, leering shots of a model's lovely but way-too-close face.

Trivia nerds who don't know anything about Blondie know they sang "Heart of Glass" the way they know the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 and the atomic symbol for tin is Sn: It's just a fact, part of the baseline information about the universe. But apparently, the light-disco number that made Blondie even more famous (and presumably, stinking rich) almost came out in a very different form. The song that became "Heart of Glass" languished in a drawer for years because the band didn't quite know what to do with it. They even apparently tried a reggae version, a truly chilling idea.

But what Blondie called "Heart of Glass" was "the disco song," and that's just what it ultimately became. A new producer, Mike Chapman, liked the rough version and started playing with a new drum machine he had ... fast forward to Blondie's first No.1 hit in the United States and the disco song that's also one of the iconic tracks of the new wave.

Jethro Tull's "Warm Sporran" is, in its way, perfect. It won't be most people's favorite song, even their favorite Jethro Tull song, but it succeeds where so many experiments fail because it sounds like Jethro Tull doing a disco track. The flute is there! We know who this is! But the mechanics of that drumbeat in the background mean we're doing something new and having a little fun. If anything, they could have upped the disco quotient a bit. "Warm Sporran" is Jethro Tull with a belt of disco in it, like the whiskey in an Irish coffee, but it's a successful enough track that some listeners will wish it had two belts of disco in it, like the whiskey in an especially good Irish coffee.

Note: a "sporran" is the little decorated bag Scotsmen who are so inclined wear at the front of their kilts in traditional Highland dress. "Warm Sporran" is instrumental, so why it might be especially warm is left, perhaps mercifully, to the listener's imagination.

"Alice Cooper disco track" sounds like a throwaway line from an early season of "The Simpsons," a mildly funny what-if along the lines of "what if Arnold Schwarzenegger were governor of California?" There is no absurdity so profound that the Fates won't spin it into reality to amuse themselves, and thus it was that Alice Cooper released "(No More) Love at Your Convenience." The song is only mildly bad, an over-orchestrated plea to a lover to take the singer seriously and quit expecting the relationship to exist only on her own terms. But if you played it for a completely unaware listener, the sun would go supernova and the universe would boil away into oblivion before she guessed it was by Alice Cooper.

Cooper got a bit of his own back later in his career with another arguably disco-tinged track, 2011's "Disco Bloodbath Boogie Fever." The gory, rap-inflected track about how much disco sucks isn't a triumph, but it succeeds where the earlier "(No More) Love at Your Convenience" failed: it's at least fun to listen to. And it sounds like Alice Cooper.