Gino Soccio

This page is a tribute to Gino Soccio and an attempt to make contact and lure him out of retirement. Please show some love to one of the greatest pioneers in electronic dance music history by leaving a comment at the bottom of this page.
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How many musicians can you name who reach number one on the disco charts with their debut record. Gino Soccio has done it with his hit “Dancer.” Young (he’s only 23 years old!), good-looking (take a gander at the accompanying photo), and very talented, Gino appears to have a very bright future. Although his primary instrument is the piano, Gino plays an amazing number of others: acoustic guitar, drums, synthesizers. In addition, he handles horn and string arrangements as well as lead vocals. Something of a Renaissance disco man, you might say.
Born and raised in Montreal, Canada, Gino began studying piano at the age of 8. His parents insisted that he extend his cultural background. As he puts it, “I wasn’t into sports very much, and music was a good way to get out of it.” By the time he was 11 Gino was enjoying playing Bach sonatas, “because after one listening they would stay in your head – they really had hooks.”
By the age of 18 Gino had begun renting electronic keyboards and synthesizers to use in his own home studio. He was so into recording his own music that he gave up entirely on social life. The next year he was ready for his first break. It came after a producer asked him to play keyboards and write a tune for a group called Kebeletrik. He ended up, however, doing practically the whole LP by himself. This meant recording 48 tracks, synthesized drums to keyboards, soup to nuts. Fortunately for Gino, “War Dance” went top ten disco in the U.S. When Gino walked into a Montreal disco and saw how much people were enjoying dancing to his music, he was hooked on disco.
With this first success, Gino dropped out of college, using the money he made to record one more demo. When Ray Caviano, head of Warner/RFC Records, heard it, he signed Gino to inaugurate his new label and rest is history. The album “Outline” is now considered one of the most adventurous disco LPs.
Recently I spoke with Gino and here are a few highlights I culled from our conversation:
Wresch: I hear that you’re about to tour. Are you going to try to produce the same sound you can create in a studio?
Gino: That’s a problem. The way I’m getting around it is to produce a second album. I’m trying to develop a more ‘live sound’ on the second one, to make it easier to reproduce it on stage. The first album was constructed in the studio and to reproduce it on stage would be practically impossible. There’s a possibility of using some tapes of heavy programmed synthesizer lines with a live rhythm section.
Wresch: Why do you choose disco and not rock or jazz?
Gino: I did do a little of all that before I did disco. The reason I went over to disco was that it seemed to be the only type of music where I could really be free. There are no limits to what you can do with disco. With other kinds of music, I felt it had already been exploited, that I couldn’t contribute as much to something like rock.
Wresch: When will your new album be released?
Gino: It should be completed in four or five months.
Wresch: Will it be more funk or Euro-disco sounding?
Gino: It will be a marriage between both. Everything I’ve been hearing lately has been going in different directions. Mine, though, is very personal. I’m not being influenced too much by what everybody else is doing; I’m just going ahead and doing what I feel is right.
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Breaking Artifical Barriers by Gino Soccio
With the practical elimination of the word "disco" from the industry's vocabulary, and the new-found recognition of dance music, new artists are being introduced to new audiences. Once specialty chart toppers such as the Dazz Band and the Gap Band are now seen at the top of pop, dance and black charts.
We are beginning to see new wave acts like Human League, Haircut 100 and Soft Cell achieve dance as well as pop recognition. And bands formerly pegged as "punk", like the Clash, Gang Of Four and Bow Wow Wow, are scoring higher in dance circles than in pop chart numbers.
All this indicates a breaking down of the useless barriers that kept artists from getting maximum exposure, pigeonholing them into unnecessary classifications of music. Thanks to the trend toward de-categorization, whole new areas of musical crossovers are now being developed.
When disco first took off, we were living in a fantasy world. People were treating the music like it was the new Beatles, about to revolutionize a sleepy industry. This led to a serious backlash; artists were labeled with a tag that became inflexible.
Early disco artists like Giorgio Moroder and I predicted the current trend of Euro-techno-pop dance songs, and as early as 1979 incorporated it into our music.
I watched the scene change in my hometown of Quebec, and throughout Europe, where deejays have generally been more liberal in mixing r&b with dance, techno-pop, punk and rock.
But DJs in the States were more conservative in their tastes, and it has taken them longer to open up to this style of crossover.
Today, it is no longer unusual for a good song to go top 10 in pop, dance and r&b simultaneously. However, this change did not take place overnight. It took a year of persistence to get Soft Cell off the ground. It is a change that has been evolving. One of the first fusion hits was "Pop Musik" by M.
Most of these rock acts did their homework by watching the club movement grow. Their techniques for the use of drums and synthesizers were developed on the dance floor. It was a sound rock artists knew little about before.
The new rock-dance clubs are an extension of the disco experience. The ideal situation would be to get both markets to agree, and to get the consumer of black music to buy rock music acts like the Bus Boys, Soft Cell and Human League. In urban markets, these acts broke on black radio stations.
If you can get a record that crosses over all the charts, you have a real seller. Just as punk, when it began, was a musical style thought too abrasive and attractive to a marginal audience, so disco had to undergo a fusion before it could grow. Combining its sounds with rock and r&b influences pleased a more varied audience.
Some artists, initially short-changed by pigeonholing, could win recognition today if they had a second chance. After all, it is the industry that is more likely to put a label on the music and artist than the consumer. He has his say by buying or not buying the record.
It's about time radio began picking up on more dance-oriented music. By eliminating the misleading disco label, the way has been opened for a Rick James, Patrice Rushen or Change to chart across the boards.
The acceptance earned by the first few hits is an indication that the barriers are falling. But the process is still too filtered, too slow. There's still a lot of good music that needs to be played. At least it's a start.
(Billboard, September 18, 1982)