Results: Walter Gibbons: Peculiar Disco Pioneer

Though disco music became associated with visual an auditory showiness by the time of the US "disco sucks" backlash of 1979, the discotheque disc jockeys who became the sonic architects of the genre are often unheralded by the general music-loving public. The late Walter Gibbons is one of disco's earliest and most innovative DJ's and re-editors/remixers. Before starting this question, had you heard of Gibbons?

Gibbons built his reputation as a DJ in New York City nightspots patronized by homosexual men (of which he was one) in the early to mid-1970's, where he was, if historians of the music are correct, the first disc jockey to seamlessly lengthen songs in real time by extending the percussion breaks in records by toggling between two copies of the same record cued just so...from which he mixed one tune into another without pause and matching their tempos. Whether in a disco or elsewhere, have you ever danced to music mixed on the beat?

Gibbons' intuitive talent at manipulating the individual elements of songs to maximize their dancefloor impact made him, an ideal candidate to remix (or re-edit?; there's dispute as to which) the first commercially available 12-inch disco single, for vocal group Double Exposure's 1976 release "Ten Percent." Have you ever purchased or received a 12-inch single (or download equivalent) of an extended version--or multiple versions--of a song?

Just as disco was reaching its full ascendance in 1978, with the public responding to John Travolta's role as a clubgoer in the movie Saturday Night Fever by buying millions of copies of its soundtrack, Gibbons apparently experienced a Christian conversion. His attempts to apply biblical principles to his life & work and zeal that occasionally resulted in career self-sabotage diminished his opportunities in the music that his sense of sonic adventure helped to develop. Have you ever withstood limited career prospects because of personal principles?

Before his 1994 death at the age of 39, Gibbons contributed to one last monster of a song. His mix of the 1984 club hit "Set It Off" by Strafe (born Steve Standard) fit into a niche shared by hip-hop in its early years as recorded music, the house music developing contemporaneously in Chicago discos, echoes of classic disco, gospel (lyrically) and more. Though Gibbons died a largely unheralded force in a music with global reach, he had one last triumph. And don't you like to read of people eking a final victory from defeat's jaws?