TOP 40 DEBUT: January 26, 1980
PEAK POSITION: #5 (March 8, 1980)
By the time Donna Summer scored her first #1 hit, in November 1978 with “MacArthur Park,” disco had taken over America. The soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever reigned atop the Billboard 200 for nearly six straight months, creating a seismic cultural shift and helping to turn an underground, gay-friendly movement into a mainstream phenomenon. Half of 1978’s #1 singles could charitably fall under the disco umbrella; those ten songs, combined, occupied the top spot for 33 weeks. That percentage only increased in ’79, thanks to club-leaning chart toppers from acts as disparate as Rod Stewart, Blondie, and Michael Jackson. Three of the year’s #1’s came courtesy of Summer herself.
Two years removed from “MacArthur Park,” disco was all but dead, toxic to Top 40 and a dirty word among deejays and record execs alike. The backlash that had been bubbling since Saturday Night Fever’s chart takeover reached a crescendo on July 12, 1979, when “Disco Demolition Night” attracted 50,000 people—mostly white, angry rock fans—to Chicago’s Comiskey Park, eager to watch shock jock Steve Dahl blow up crates of disco records between baseball games. It was an ugly event, driven by racism and homophobia and ending in a stadium-wide riot, but beneath the spectacle, the resentment was real. And culture responded accordingly. “Disco sucks” turned into a rallying cry, disco tracks were dropped from playlists, and labels began switching to the generic term “dance music.” Within months, the genre’s biggest artists found themselves effectively blackballed from radio altogether.
Donna Summer survived the disco backlash. Her peers weren’t as fortunate. Chic scored two #1’s in the first eight months of ‘79 but never reached the Top 40 again; K.C. and The Sunshine Band topped the first Billboard chart of 1980 before disappearing from the Hot 100 completely; The Bee Gees landed six #1 singles in a row between 1978 and 1979, and then didn’t get back to the Top 10 for almost ten years. Summer, though, remained a chart presence throughout the Eighties: ten Top 40 hits, several Top 5 singles, and a #7 placing as late as ’89. But the collapse of disco still blunted her career momentum. Her third chart-topper of '79 would be the last of her career, and following “On The Radio,” the “Queen of Disco” would never return to the genre that made her famous.
Like so many great divas, Donna Summer started off in gospel. LaDonna Andre Gaines first sang lead in her church choir at age ten before expanding into acting and performing, initially in her high school’s musicals. Weeks before graduation, she left for New York City to join a blues rock band. Once the group disbanded, she landed a role in the German production of Hair and relocated overseas. Gaines eventually settled in Munich, married Austrian actor Helmuth Sommer, and began working as a studio vocalist. Her debut album, 1974’s Lady Of The Night, only saw release in Europe; thanks to a printing error on the front cover, “Sommer” became “Summer,” and the name stuck.
All the writing and production on Lady Of The Night was handled by two men: British-born Pete Bellotte and Italian studio owner Giorgio Moroder. It would prove to be an inauspicious beginning to the partnership that would shape the rest of Summer's career; that initial ’74 effort found Bellotte and Moroder playing things safe, conservative, and old-fashioned. No one could've known their next collaboration with Summer would predict the future.
Released worldwide in November 1975, “Love To Love You Baby” was a 17-minute symphony of simulated sexual ecstasy, a side-long orgasm set to an Italo disco soundtrack that reached the Top 10 in nearly a dozen countries. It broke boundaries, defied censors, and birthed both the modern 12” single and Summer’s first American label deal. Neil Bogart, president of Casablanca Records, signed Donna immediately upon hearing the original, shorter version; it was his suggestion to extend the track to target the rapidly expanding discotheque market. Released in edited form, “Love To Love You Baby” hit #2 on the Hot 100 in February 1976, while the full-length cut topped Billboard’s “Dance Club Songs” for four weeks. (It’s a 9.) Summer would work exclusively with Moroder and Bellotte for the rest of the decade.
In less than four years, the former LaDonna Gaines amassed enough hits to release a double-LP compilation full of ‘em. On The Radio: Greatest Hits Volumes I & II appeared in October ’79 and soon topped the Billboard 200, making Summer the first artist in history to reach #1 with three consecutive double albums. (All three—Live and More, Bad Girls, and Radio—arrived within the span of fourteen months.) The 16-track retrospective included each of her three #1 singles from the previous year (“MacArthur Park,” “Hot Stuff,” and “Bad Girls”), along with five additional Top 10 hits and a new track—the Barbra Streisand duet “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)”—that would also top the Hot 100 before the decade ended. In a genre known for talented divas, none could match Summer for consistency or longevity. The “Queen of Disco” wasn’t just huge in clubs; for most of ’78 and ’79, she was one of the most successful acts in the entire landscape of pop music.
“On The Radio,” the compilation’s other new track, started life as an instrumental piece for the movie Foxes, a low-budget teen drama now remembered for some fascinating credits—Jodie Foster, Scott Baio, and Runaways vocalist Cherie Currie in her first film role—and for being Adrian Lyne’s feature directorial debut. (Lyne would follow Foxes with Flashdance, 9 ½ Weeks, and Fatal Attraction, which is an absolutely insane run.) At this point, Moroder was just beginning to expand into film scoring; Foxes would be one of two soundtracks he’d oversee in 1980. (We’ll be discussing the other, American Gigolo, very soon.) So the cinematic sweep of “On The Radio” was no accident. Moroder wrote a swooning, wistful theme perfect for underscoring teenage angst, but it took Summer—along with her lyrics, and melody, and mighty pipes—to unlock its full potential.
Structurally, “On The Radio” starts quiet and slow before shifting into club-friendly overdrive. It’s a trick Summer and Moroder used on several of her biggest hits: “Last Dance,” “MacArthur Park,” and even, to some degree, “Dim All The Lights.” But “On The Radio” feels different somehow: sadder, weightier. A song like “Last Dance” (#3 in August ’78, a 10) treats its tempo change like an explosion of pure joy, Kansas turning to Oz as the world becomes Technicolor. “On The Radio” stays gray and clouded even as the beat keeps pushing it towards the dance floor; there’s a reason the song shares its E-minor key with the darkest folk dirges and the heaviest metal.
Summer struggled for weeks to put lyrics to Moroder’s original, piano-driven demo. Early on, she asked her boyfriend (and future husband) Bruce Sudano, of the R&B trio Brooklyn Dreams, for assistance. He refused, primarily on artistic grounds: “There’s no way I’m writing this. The song is for you.” Summer finally cracked the code by channeling the work of her friend and fellow songwriter, Stephen Bishop, as she explained to NPR’s Fresh Air in 2003: “I just thought, how would Stephen say this? What line would be come up [with]? He’s so clever.” (Bishop will be appearing on this site in a few years.)
The lyric she landed on—“It must have fallen out of a hole in your old brown overcoat”—is a small wonder, specific yet cryptic, an entire backstory suggested in a single image. Summer fills in the rest of the details sparingly, letting the sweet yearning of the melody carry the weight as much as the words themselves. I love the idea of the radio acting as a surrogate third party for two people unable to communicate in any other fashion: true confessions delivered via deejays, an entire back-and-forth that only occurs over the airwaves. “On The Radio” takes the inherent loneliness of every “long distance dedication” and elevates it to the level of anthem. When Summer slips in that final twist during the fade-out (“The only friend I know/ Is my radio”), it’s absolutely gutting.
For all the melancholy baked into its subject matter, “On The Radio” still delivers a perfect slice of dance-floor euphoria, as befitting the woman who’d spent the last half-decade delivering nothing but dance-floor euphoria. Strings and horns punctuate the chorus with expert precision. A rubbery synth bass bounces merrily underneath. Summer fashions every last whoa-oh-oh-oh into a solid-gold-plated hook. But the peak disco moment—on a track that’s already way more disco than Top 40 radio probably wanted by the first months of 1980—doesn’t arrive until 2:40, and it’s so gloriously, unabashedly throwback there’s no way it wasn’t intentional.
For one solid minute (slightly less in the radio edit), “On The Radio” winds the clock back to disco’s glory days: a backbeat decorated with bongos, stuttering brass, string section as lead instrument. At one point, there’s a three-second transition—from horn stabs, to piano glissando, to sax solo—that’s so Seventies, it deserves its own pair of bell bottoms. This is pure disco, the uncut stuff, the pre-Saturday Night Fever stuff. Most artists were not making songs like “On The Radio” in late ’79. Even Summer and Moroder would stop making songs like “On The Radio” after late ’79. No wonder the whole thing feels like one final curtain call.
On The Radio: Greatest Hits Volumes I & II topped the Billboard 200 in the first week of 1980, with its titular single hitting #5 nine weeks later. Within months, Summer would be gone from Casablanca Records, increasingly frustrated with Bogart’s heavy-handed tactics and the overly sexualized way she continued to be promoted; Moroder, meanwhile, would continue to shift his focus to new wave acts (Sparks, Blondie) and synth-driven, electronic music. Ostensibly, both parties entered the studio that previous summer to record nothing more than a movie tie-in song. But somehow, Summer and Moroder still found a way to craft their own perfectly bittersweet ending. “On The Radio” is a goodbye, but it’s also a love letter to the genre that created them, one final example of how intoxicating disco could be in the right hands.
“On The Radio” would not be Summer’s final single for Casablanca; after she split for Geffen Records in mid-1980, her former label muddied the waters by releasing additional Bad Girls cuts long into the autumn. But it would be the last track she ever made on Bogart’s dime, along with the last true disco recording of her career. “On The Radio” also capped her amazing run of eight consecutive Top 5 singles, a streak that began, fittingly enough, with “Last Dance.” Listen to them back-to-back, and you’ll hear echoes of the earlier hit in Summer’s older, wiser, sadder sequel. And you might hear something else: the sound of disco’s one true superstar at the end of an era, embracing her past before closing the door on it forever.
GRADE: 9/10
12”ERS: Here’s the seven-minute mix of “On The Radio” that appeared on the Foxes soundtrack as well as a rare DJ promo 12” single. It’s basically the long version from On The Radio with an extra minute of breakdown starting around 4:50. (You can now find this track, along with eight of Summer’s other 12” mixes, on the “Deluxe Edition” of Bad Girls.)
BONUS BITS: You’re probably as surprised as I am to discover that the first artist to cover Donna Summer’s classic (on a proper studio release, anyway) turned out to be country legend Emmylou Harris. Her version appears on the 1983 album White Shoes, and it will not surprise you to learn that it’s slow, and sad, and absolutely amazing.
BONUS BONUS BITS: The only charting cover of “On The Radio” came in February 2001, when British actress/vocalist Martine McCutheon took her club-friendly version to #7 on the U.K. Singles chart. Martine is clearly no Donna Summer, but if you’re a fan of early-2000s EDM, this might hit the sweet spot.
BONUS BONUS BONUS BITS: Jennifer Lopez’s version of “On The Radio,” recorded with David Guetta and originally planned for her 2011 album Love?, never saw official release, but leaked versions quickly appeared on YouTube. J.Lo is clearly no Donna Summer, but if you’re a fan of 2010s EDM...
BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BITS: Bringing everything full circle, here’s a tantalizing tidbit of Selena—the late Latina superstar played by Jennifer Lopez in the 1997 cinematic biopic—performing her own live rendition. (Unlike the actress who played her, Selena actually could give Summer a run for her money.)