In 1971, when she was 28, Gloria Gaynor was singing at a Manhattan nightclub called Play Street. She was surrounded by go-go dancers, one of whom fancied herself a singer. “She wasn’t very good,” Gaynor says, but she had a manager who knew Clive Davis, then the powerful head of Columbia Records. The dancer’s manager arranged for Gaynor to meet Davis. “He had me sing for him five times,” she recalls. “I said, ‘This man just likes my voice. There’s no way it takes him that long to determine if I could sing.’”
Davis signed Gaynor, and she recorded a song for him called “Honey Bee.” But then Davis left the company, formed his own label, Arista Records, and Gaynor “got lost in the shuffle. Nobody was caring about somebody who got signed by somebody who was no longer there.”
But an executive at MGM Records heard “Honey Bee,” liked her voice, and rescued her from Columbia. As they were picking songs for her first album, she said that audiences at the clubs she played loved her rendition of the Jackson 5 hit “Never Can Say Goodbye.”
“They didn’t call it disco then,” she says. “It was just upbeat.” MGM liked it, too, and it became the title of the album. The song went to the top of the charts, helping usher in the disco era. After that came the song that would make her one of the great and enduring disco divas, “I Will Survive.”
A compelling documentary about her life, “Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive,” came out in 2024 (you can stream it on Lifetime), and she is releasing an EP called “Happy Tears” on June 6. It includes her new single, “Fida Known,” a modern take on her disco classics. Below, she reflects on the era that made her famous and how the music business has changed — not necessarily for the better.
How did you come to record “I Will Survive”?
Well, I had fallen on stage, but jumped back up, finished the show, went home, and woke up the next morning paralyzed from the waist down. I was in the hospital for three months. The record company called and said they were not going to renew my contract. We all get to know the Lord real good when we get in trouble. So, I’m praying and I’m reading the Bible, and I left the hospital in a back brace confident God was going to do something. The [company] called me and said they’d gotten a new president from England, and he liked my voice. He had a song that was a hit over there — “Substitute” — and he wanted to repeat that success here in the United States with me. They sent me the song, and I hated it, but I wanted to continue my career, so I was willing to do anything. “Substitute” was the A-side, and they asked me what kind of song I’d like for the B-side. I said, “I like songs that are uplifting, encouraging, empowering.” And they played “I Will Survive” for me, and I’m standing there, in a back brace, hoping I’ll survive this whole thing and thinking about my mother, who had only passed away a few years ago. I thought, “Everybody’s going to relate to this song no matter what they’re going through.” I said, “What are you, nuts? How can you put this on the B-side?” They said, “That’s the deal we made.” And I said, “Well, if it’s left to me it won’t stay on the B-side.”
How did you get it off the B-side?
They gave me a box of records, and I took them to Richie Kaczor [the DJ at Studio 54] and asked him to play “I Will Survive.” He played it, and the audience immediately hit the dance floor. I’m like, “OK, I don’t need any bigger confirmation that this is a hit song.” So I gave him the box of records and told him to give them to all his DJ friends around New York. And they played it, and people then began to request it. They’d call in because they wanted to hear it on the way back and forth from work, in all the traffic. And the radio stations called the record company and wanted to know, “Where is this song everybody keeps asking for?” And they had to say it was on the B-side of “Substitute.” And the next compression, they flipped it and made “I Will Survive” the A-side.
“They played ‘I Will Survive’ for me, and I’m standing there, in a back brace, hoping I’ll survive this whole thing and thinking about my mother, who had only passed away a few years ago.”
Studio 54 was the most famous club of the 1970s. There was a rope line, and you had to be selected to get in. I bet you went right in.
I had some friends come in from England, and they wanted to experience Studio 54. I took them there in a limo and I asked the driver to please get the guy at the rope — I called him the “casting director” — and tell him Gloria Gaynor is here, and she’d like to come in. He left the rope, came over to the car, tapped on the window and said, “Miss Gaynor, you don’t want to come in here tonight.” I said, “Thank you,” and we just pulled off. I don’t know what kind of debauchery was going on in there but I was flattered that he knew that I wouldn’t want to be a part of it.
Did you grow up wanting to be a singer?
There was lots of music around. I have five brothers, four of whom sang. They had a quartet. They didn’t sing professionally, but around the neighborhood [Newark, New Jersey] and in school. But they weren’t interested in me, because I was a girl, so they didn’t know I could sing. My mother knew I could sing, but they didn’t.
What were you singing? Which singers influenced you?
Nancy Wilson, Nat King Cole, Gloria Lynne, Frank Sinatra. I couldn’t afford voice lessons, but my coaches were Nat King Cole, who taught me diction, and Frank Sinatra, who taught me phrasing. Ella Fitzgerald and Barbra Streisand helped me increase my range by trying to reach the songs that they were singing that I couldn’t do. I would just sing them over and over again until I could reach the range.
So, you grew up singing the Great American songbook — Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II.
Yes. And that’s what I miss in music today. You’re supposed to be emitting emotions and telling a story, and every story doesn’t have to be tragic and every story doesn’t have to be about sex. And certainly, none of them need to be berating or belittling someone else, which is what all the music today seems to be about. And there’s no attention to tone quality. I’ll never forget when I was in the studio recording with [producer and musician] Meco Monardo, and he said, “I need to hear your tears in your voice.” And I learned to put tears in my voice, to put laughter in my voice, to put sadness in my voice, to put happiness in my voice. And they don’t do that anymore. They don’t even know about it. They don’t learn from anybody. They just say, “I want to be a singer” and they start singing. Some of them are touching emotions today, but not in any deep-seeded motions. It’s all very surface.
How did you land your first professional gig?
I was babysitting for a friend for a couple of weeks and I heard somebody’s footsteps in the apartment upstairs. And I began to follow those footsteps, thinking if I can hear them walking, they can hear me singing. So I just sang one song after another. A few weeks later, my brother and I went to a nightclub, and while I’m sitting the [band] plays a song I happen to know — “Save Your Love for Me” by Nancy Wilson. So I’m singing to myself, and suddenly this guy gets up onstage and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, this young lady in the audience, she’s got a wonderful voice. Maybe if you give her a good round of applause, we can get her up to sing a song.” He’s looking at me, and “at first I was afraid, I was petrified,” but my brother said, “Go!” So I sang “Save Your Love for Me” and got a standing ovation. And the guys [in the band] came over and asked me if I’d sing with them. They’d had a singer, but she was out that night and was very unreliable. They needed to replace her and wanted to know if I was available. I’m like, “Am I ever available!” I had a list of 200 songs I knew, so I told them, “You pick whatever songs you want. I know all of them.” We picked out a repertoire, I started singing with them and never looked back.
“Every story doesn’t have to be tragic and every story doesn’t have to be about sex. And certainly, none of them need to be berating or belittling someone else, which is what all the music today seems to be about.”
How did the guy at the club know you and that you could sing?
He was the owner, and it turned out that he was the person whose footsteps I was singing to. One day he looked out the window and saw me talking to my girlfriend and he heard her call my name. So when I walked into the club, he recognized me.
That’s one way to break into show business! How did you go from singing the standards to becoming a disco diva?
The cabarets I was singing in were closing. Some were switching over to disco. They moved out all the seating, put in a dance floor, took part of a closet, put it on a piece of wood and put a turntable on top of it, and they had a discotheque. People were coming in droves to these clubs to sing and dance and have fun, and I thought, “Well, they need some music to dance to, so let’s give it to them.” I continued doing disco right up until I did my gospel album just a couple of years ago.
“Testimony.” I just listened to it. It’s excellent.
Thank you. That’s what my documentary is about. It’s about the making of that album and how difficult it was for me to change genres and how it just wasn’t accepted. It won a Grammy, and I’m very pleased with it, but it didn’t get the airplay that I hoped for. They didn’t want to hear Gloria Gaynor singing gospel music.
When the disco era came to an end, how did you figure out what you were going to do next?
I didn’t think it was ending. I thought that it was engineered by someone whose bottom line was being negatively affected by the popularity of disco music, and it was their determination to end it. What made me come to that belief was that thing that happened in Comiskey Park — people burning disco records.
Right. Comiskey Park. July 12, 1979. They called it Disco Demolition Night. Shock jock Steve Dahl told everybody to bring a disco record to the stadium, and they’d have a bonfire. Barry Gibb once told me that that was the beginning of the end of the Bee Gees.
It was a shock to me because I thought, “Wow, somebody’s really desperate here to come up with something as crazy as this.” God calls us sheep, because that’s exactly what we are. They came up with a stupid idea, and people just followed along. They wanted to be part of the in-crowd, just like sheep. When they burned their records, I said, “Can someone please explain to me, what are you doing with disco records in the first place if you hated disco music?”
What did you do when it all came crashing down?
I went to 90 other countries where they weren’t burning records.
People still wanted to hear disco.
They still do. Disco music is alive and well and living in the hearts of music lovers around the world.
Finally, what do you make of the music business today?
I have no idea. It is a completely different animal these days. I don’t know if it’s the technology that has made it so difficult and so impersonal. The only advice I give to kids who want to be singers is make sure somebody else thinks you have a voice besides your mother.
The post Gloria Gaynor Talks About ‘I Will Survive’ & Life At Age 28 appeared first on Bustle.
