Donna Summer, Fire Island, more memories of 'A Night at the Disco'

Disco is "ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive" as far as Alice Harris and Christian Wikane are concerned.

And to help ensure the music lives on, the two East Hamptonites have put together "A Night at the Disco" (ACC Art Books, $50), a handsome coffee-table book coming out March 24 that tells the story of how disco evolved in the 1970s and recaptures the era of bell bottoms, platform shoes, "Saturday Night Fever" and Studio 54. Adding even more sparkle than a disco ball are the dozens of photos of the era's biggest acts.

Wikane and Harris recently spoke by phone to Newsday about the glory days of disco and why the music will never die.

What made disco so special?

Harris: The music was brilliant. Brilliant music, brilliant artists.

Wikane: There’s always a reason to celebrate and there's always a reason to dance. And the music that’s covered in the book between 1970 and 1979 is the era that we always return to and it’s always fresh. And there's soul in that music.

What was the disco scene like in the 1970s on Long Island?

Wikane: When I was in junior high, we would drive to Bridgehampton and Southampton and we would pass these two places that I was always curious about. One was called The Attic and the other was called The Swamp [both in Wainscott] ... The Swamp, or Club Swamp, I went to before it closed [in 2001]. That was the one chance I had to go to a club in the Hamptons as a young gay man.

Harris: I have a home in East Hampton and The Swamp is where I went will all my buddies every single weekend until it was gone. Now they made a park out of it, but it was fabulous. We had the best time.

How else did Long Island impact disco?

Wikane: Fire Island as such an important part of the music being popularized before it got to such a mass audience, And there’s a few different artists in the book that can speak to how important that was. One is the group Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band. "Cherchez La Femme" was their big hit. And it’s only because promoters took them to Fire Island in the summer of 1976 that they broke through because their album was played at all of the clubs in the Pines. And then the DJs brought the music to the city in the fall of ’76 and it exploded.

Which performer do you think defined that era?

Harris: Donna Summer. She changed the way we listened to music from three minutes to 18 minutes.

How did you meet her?

Harris: I was working in PR for Casablanca Records in 1975 and she was an artist that was coming in from Germany. We didn’t know anything about her other than "Love to Love You Baby" and we were promoting it and that ‘s how we met. And the rest is history. She was my best friend.

Wikane: It was through Alice that Donna and I met each other. Donna Summer was the first artist I ever interviewed and we have several interviewed over the years. It was great to see how much people adored her and to see how the Olympics introduced the "MacArthur Park Suite" to a whole new generation when Alysa Liu skated to it at the [2026] Olympics. Forbes said that streams of the "MacArthur Park Suite" surged 1,292% in 24 hours on Spotify.

Why did disco eventually just go away?

Wikane: My theory about that is there’s an evolution of dance music and I feel like this book shows that. It’s not so much about disco as music as it was about the music that was played in the discos. That’s why we start off the book with Sly and the Family Stone and Isaac Hayes because they kind of laid the foundation for dance music to grow as the decade proceeded. And I feel like between 1979 and going into 1980 and 1981, it’s not as if music changed over night. The way that music sold might have changed and certain artists may not have been played as much on the radio as they had six months before. But the beat never died. ... You still had a lot of dance music happenings in the '80s, but the production standards changed and it became more synthesized and keyboard oriented and it didn’t really have the strings and the horns being as prominent as they were in the 70s.

Of course, some people consider disco a dirty word?

Harris: We’re not going there. [Laughs.] That’s like putting down the Bible. Disco is here forever.