50 years ago last weekend, as March was on the verge of turning to April in 1975, it was quietly announced that disco had arrived in Wausau, Wisconsin, my hometown.
Sneaky Pete’s was a small cocktail lounge that had been booking bands. Just two weekends earlier, the Safety Last String Band, a popular local bluegrass band, had played there on a Friday and Saturday night in mid-March.
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On Friday, March 28, 1975, though, Sneaky Pete’s ad in the local paper’s weekend entertainment section hyped music “spun by our disc jockeys on our new sound system!”
Well, that was disco as I remember it at Pete’s.
This was Pete’s as I remember it, a small place that looked like a cave. In this picture, said to be from 1975, the DJ booth and the small lighted dance floor are behind the right end of the curved bar, sort of right center.
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From the summer of 1975 to the summer of 1977, I stopped out at Pete’s from time to time. Did more drinking than dancing, but chalk that up to my cluelessness with the ladies. It often was just popping in to see who was there, staying and mingling if there were friends, moving on if not.
One of my high school classmates, a young lady I didn’t know well back then, had this take on that time:
“Being single was much easier then. No screens. Just getting together.”
Pete’s was a popular place, but there wasn’t enough parking for everyone who wanted to go. The tiny parking lot filled up quickly, as did the road to the north. Many nights, the cops just went right up that road, ticketing car after car, especially those parked in the neighbors’ driveways.
During those two years, from 1975 to 1977, at least three other discos popped up in Wausau, then a town of 32,000 in central Wisconsin.
Free Spirit was my other regular stop, and it was more of the same. More drinking than dancing, more cluelessness with the ladies, just popping in to see who was there, staying and mingling if there were friends, moving on if not.
King’s Knight was in an old bank building and had a dress code and thus a slightly older and a vaguely more sophisticated crowd. Disco 2001 was in an old, long, narrow, low-slung building that previously been the House of Boogie, a dive bar.
Disco got a bad rap in the mainstream back then — some of it racially driven — but there was a bunch of cool music. Now, all these years later, I can’t really associate any particular songs with any of these discos. Some of the acts that come to mind are K.C. and the Sunshine Band — who we heard constantly but who I didn’t come to appreciate until years later — along with Donna Summer, Thelma Houston and the Trammps.
For me, this song defines that particular time and those particular places.
“Turn the Beat Around,” Vicki Sue Robinson, 1976. In which Latin rhythms join the party.
One last fun fact: Sneaky Pete’s eventually became Wausau Mine Co., a popular restaurant. We went there some years ago, and it was mind-blowing to realize we were sitting at a table on what used to be that lighted dance floor.