Casablanca 7119
Producers: Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte
Track listing: Once Upon a Time / Fairy Tale High / Faster and Faster / Spring Affair / Rumor Has It / I Love You Only One Man / I Remember Yesterday / Love’s Unkind / May Man Medley: The Man I Lovell Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good/Some of These Days The Way We Were / Mimi’s Song Try Me, I Know We Can Make It / Love to Love You, Baby / I Feel Love Last Dance / MacArthur Park Suite / MacArthur Park / One of a Kind / Heaven Knows / MacArthur Park (Reprise)
November 11, 1978
1 week
By the summer of 1978, Donna Summer was the queen of disco, scoring such hits as the sexy “Love to Love You Baby,” “I Feel Love,” and “Last Dance.” Summer even starred as an aspiring singer in the 1978 disco- themed film Thank God It’s Friday, which featured the latter track.
Yet despite her success on the Hot 100 Singles chart, Summer’s albums didn’t fare as well. Up to that point, her highest-charting album was her 1975 debut, Love to Love You Baby, which reached number 11 in February 1976. There were also those who assumed the singer was nothing more than a puppet of producer Giorgio Moroder, the mastermind behind her early hits.
Summer and Casablanca Records devised a plan to prove her naysayers wrong. She would record a live album that would prove her vocal prowess and put to rest the claims that she was nothing more than a studio creation. “It was always rumored that disco singers can’t sing,” Summer says, “It was all hype from studios, the engineers, and the producers. It’s all producers’ magic. I just felt that having come from a real history of theater and music, it was time for me to get up there and sing.”
Although Summer first gained fame for her work in the recording studio, her first big gig was as a cast member in a production of Hair that played in Munich. While in Germany, Summer was discovered by Pete Bellote, and Moroder in 1973.
Recorded at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, Live and More featured in-concert recordings of several of Summer’s big hits and album tracks. There were also some surprising selections, including a cover of “The Way We Were,” a song made popular by Barbra Streisand.
Yet Live and More, as the title suggests, wasn’t just a live album. Summer’s concert performance filled three sides of the album, leaving the fourth side open. “But they didn’t want me to go in and fake a live performance of something that wasn’t real,” Summer says. “So they said, ‘Let’s call it Live and More and the More will be new songs and that will be good, because that will push the record too.”
Side four centered around a disco-fied cover of Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park.” Says Summer, “Giorgio thought it would be a great track for me to sing, because it would show more of my range. He felt I needed to sing something more demanding.”
Moroder’s idea did the trick, as the edited version of “MacArthur Park” hit the top of the Hot 100 the same week that Live and More reached Number One on the album chart. In March 1974, Live and More‘s studio side yielded another hit, “Heaven Knows” (credited to Summer and a trio of backing vocalists called Brooklyn Dreams), which reached number four.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of November 11, 1978
1. Live and More, Donna Summer
2. Living in the USA, Linda Ronstadt
3. Grease, Soundtrack
4. Double Vision, Foreigner
5. 52nd Street, Billy Joel