Tragic Stories About Disco's Biggest Stars

There was no bigger disco act than the Bee Gees. The three Gibb brothers were pop sensations in the early '60s as a folky rock group, crafting vocal  magic on songs like "To Love Somebody" and "I Started a Joke." The Bee Gees completely reinvented themselves in 1975 with the super-funky, proto-disco "Jive Talkin,'" ushering in five years of dance music dominance. "Nights on Broadway" and "You Should Be Dancing" established their disco bona fides, which led to the plum gig of creating the soundtrack for the disco-themed 1977 drama Saturday Night Fever. The set became one of the bestselling albums ever, thanks in large part to the Bee Gees' #1 singles "How Deep Is Your Love," "Stayin' Alive," and "Night Fever." The band's influential disco-meets-soft rock (plus lead singer Barry Gibb's falsetto) continued into 1979 with Spirits Having Flown, which produced more chart-toppers in "Too Much Heaven," "Tragedy," and "Love You Inside Out."

The Gibb brothers continued to record after the anti-disco backlash, but were more successful as songwriters — the trio wrote Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton's country-pop smash "Islands in the Stream," for example. Family ties are strong, and only death could stop the Bee Gees. In January 2003, according to The Guardian, Maurice Gibb collapsed at his Miami home and had a heart attack during an intestinal operation. He briefly recovered before he passed away at age 53. Nine years later, Maurice Gibb's twin brother and fellow Bee Gee, Robin Gibb, died at age 62, of cancer complications and intestinal surgery, per the New York Times.

With its funky, frenetic, and delirious dance songs primarily about dancing, K.C. and the Sunshine Band happily provided fuel for the discoing masses. The group, fronted by singer and keyboardist Harry Wayne Casey (or "K.C."), released a string of singles as inexhaustible as the average K.C. and the Sunshine Band song, including "Get Down Tonight," "That's the Way (I Like It)," "(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty," and "I'm Your Boogie Man," all of which hit #1 on the pop chart. In 1979, as if prophetically aware that disco was on the way out, Casey and company switched gears and released the non-danceable ballad "Please Don't Go," which topped the Billboard Hot 100. For a follow-up in 1980, Casey ditched the band entirely, credited as just K.C. on the #2 hit "Yes I'm Ready" with Teri DeSario.

Just when it looked like Casey would navigate away from disco with his career intact, a series of tragedies threatened to undo everything. According to the Orlando Sun-Sentinel, Casey was involved in a serious car accident not far from his home in Hialeah, Florida in 1982. It left him paralyzed on his left side, and Casey had to use a wheelchair while he learned to walk again. The recovery led to a painkiller addiction, and after coping with more sadness after his father suffered several strokes before passing away, Casey entered drug rehab in 1986.

The Hustle was among the few clearly defined dance sequences of the disco era, and it came with its own routine-popularizing song, "The Hustle," which, confusingly, is completely instrumental (except for studio singers imploring listeners occasionally to "do the hustle!") and offers no instructions on how to do the dance itself. Nevertheless, the tune, driven by flutes and saxophones, was a monster hit that helped set off the late '70s disco craze, hitting #1 on the Billboard pop chart in July 1975, credited to Van McCoy and the Soul City Symphony.

That was McCoy's one and only major hit, but not his only success. In the 1950s, he was part of a moderately successful vocal group called the Starlighters, which led to McCoy starting a small record label and landing a job as a staff writer for Scepter Records, where he wrote hits for Jackie Wilson, Gladys Knight, and The Shirelles. In the '70s, McCoy moved heavily into production and arranging soul records for the likes of David Ruffin and The Stylistics. He recorded sporadically throughout all of it, but never had a hit of his own before or after "The Hustle." In late June 1979, according to the Washington Post, Ruffin had a heart attack at his New Jersey home and subsequently fell into a coma. A week later, the musician died in a hospital at the young age of 39.

A handful of late disco hits have a similar sound — crisply-produced with lots of bass, synth, and strings in the mix, among them Sister Sledge's "We Are Family," Diana Ross's "I'm Coming Out," and Chic's "Good Times" and "Le Freak." What do they have in common? All were produced by Chic's Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers. After Chic split up, Edwards went on to record for Rod Stewart and ABC, but his life was cut short in April 1996. After a reunited Chic played a gig in Tokyo, Rodgers discovered Edwards, who'd reported feeling sick earlier that day, in his hotel room, per the New York Times. The cause of death was later determined to be pneumonia; Edwards was 43.

Rodgers is an architect of modern music, not just disco. His hook from "Good Times" became a sample for the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight," one of the first rap singles which introduced the culturally dominant genre to millions in 1979. Rodgers helmed Let's Dance, David Bowie's successful mid-1980s foray into pop music, Madonna's Like a Virgin, and he co-wrote and played guitar on Daft Punk's Grammy-winning 2013 mega-hit "Get Lucky." He's also dealt with prostate cancer for the better part of a decade. First diagnosed in 2010, he announced a full remission in 2013. However, the sickness recurred, and after doctors discovered a cancerous mass on his kidney in 2017, he opted for surgery. He's been healthy ever since.

"Turn the Beat Around" is one of the definitive, most irresistible disco hits, opening with a killer, expectant orchestral riff before giving way to the energetic vocal acrobatics of singer Vicki Sue Robinson, who thoroughly sells the lyrics of a song about how a song is constructed, and the powerful effect it can have on a crowd of dancers. Robinson only hit the top 40 once but remained a sensation in the world of dance music past disco and well into the '90s, knocking out hits like "Common Thief," "Daylight," "Hold Tight," and groovy covers of "To Sir With Love" and "Everlasting Love." 

And to think that Robinson came relatively late to pop music. She appeared in Broadway musicals when she was still a teenager, including shows like Soon and Jesus Christ Superstar, and acted in movies, including To Find a Man and Going Home (as "Hippie Girl"). After the death of disco, Robinson turned to singing commercial jingles and toured her one-woman nightclub act Behind the Beat. And then, shockingly, it was all over. In 2000, Robinson died at her Connecticut home of cancer, according to the New York Times. The singer was 46 years old.

So many elements of disco came from New York's gay nightlife scene of the '70s, and few disco acts represented that subculture more outwardly than the Village People. Because homosexuality was not widely accepted in the U.S. at the time, it wasn't a topic that was widely discussed, and so record buyers, radio listeners, and disco dancers maybe didn't fully grasp that many of the Village People's hits were anthems of gay pride and paeans for acceptance and living true to one's own self. The public merely enjoyed the gimmick of the Village People, in that each member wore a costume embodying a masculine stereotype, such as construction worker, soldier, cowboy, and for singer Glenn Hughes, a biker. 

Glenn Hughes was a motorcycle enthusiast when he wasn't singing on "Y.M.C.A.," "In the Navy," "Go West," and "Macho Man," although Village People producer Jacques Morali crafted the biker character after patrons of a New York leather bar and sex club. The world grew weary of the Village People's schtick by 1980, and the group couldn't transition into a post-disco world, and it faded into obscurity after the marginal reception of its 1981 costume-free New Wave album Renaissance. Hughes, sadly, died of lung cancer in March 2001 at just 50, per Deseret News.