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On today's show, if I asked you to name the first artist to top the Billboard album chart with three consecutive double albums, who would you guess? Probably Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd, right? Try again. Maybe The Beatles? They had just one double album when they were together, and several chart-topping double LP compilations after they split up, but they weren't first. Or maybe all those rappers who released two CD sets in the 90s. Tupac has had several top the charts, but never three in a row, and never while he was alive. So, which badass dude pulled off this trifecta of double album chart crushers? Actually, it wasn't a dude at all, but she was a badass. Dona Summer has been called the Queen of Disco, and that name is both totally correct and somewhat limiting. It's correct because no female recording artist commanded the charts during disco's late 70s height than Dona Summer. Among solo acts, she might well be the king of disco too. And there's no longer any shame in being attached to disco. Four decades after the music's peak, disco has proved its resiliency as a musical form. The term Queen of Disco is limiting, however, because Summer's roots are in rock, soul, and Europop, and her hit-making career outlasted, however fitfully, disco's infamous implosion in the early 80s. But even accounting for the cultural beating disco took in the Reagan era, Dona was a survivor, even if the arbiters of classic rock prestige waited until after her death to fully acknowledge the vital role she played in the evolution of rock and roll. Today on Hit Parade, we'll consider the one-of-a-kind career of Dona Summer, from her popularization of new recording formats to her co-creation of entire genres, her attempts to find common ground between the rockers and the dancers, and her years of chart hits. The woman-born Ladonna Adrienne Gaines in Boston, Massachusetts solidified her Queen of Disco honorific when the second of those three chart-topping double albums, Bad Girls, dominated the radio in the final year of the 1970s. And that's where your Hit Parade marches today, the week ending July 14th, 1979, when the song Bad Girls rose to number one. Hey guys, it's Afeera Ingencia from the Girls' Bathroom Podcast, and this message is brought to you by L'Oreal Paris. Now, we like to think we're the experts, to be honest, on green and red flags and dating, but really it comes down to the basics. Someone who's reliable and who actually shows up when you need them most. So why aren't we expecting the same from our makeup? With 46 shades and skin matching technology, True Match Foundation is the one. And to lock it in, the L'Oreal Paris infallible three-second setting mist. It commits in three seconds and locks in your makeup for 36 hours. No stickiness or transfer, just total unfiltered loyalty. Shop, True Match Foundation and infallible setting mist that ultimate do-out online or in-store. While the former number one hot stuff was just a couple of notches below, Donna Summer had two of the top three singles in America. All of this success was a long way from Donna's roots in the Boston neighborhood of Mission Hill, where she was born on New Year's Eve 1948 and sang in her church choir, soloing on hymns as young as eight years old. But Summer's 1979 peak was also quite a ways away from where she'd been just 10 years earlier, an era when hedonism didn't mean disco. When a disco was a place and not a genre, and when 20-year-old Donna Gaines had nothing to do with dance music at all. That's Aquarius from the musical Hair, the smash theatrical hit whose album was the last Broadway cast recording to top the Billboard album chart. And that show played a vital role in the career of young Donna Gaines. When she arrived in New York City in 1967 at the age of 18, Donna's first performing experience was with a blues rock combo called The Crow. When that band splintered, Gaines tried her luck auditioning for Broadway. The Broadway cast of Hair was full up, but the producers offered Donna a different opportunity. That's American Donna Gaines singing Wasserman, the German version of Aquarius, playing the role of Sheila in the Munich production of Hair. The musical opened in Germany in October 1968. More important to Donna than the show was Germany itself. Relocating there did for the future Donna Summer what gigs in Hamburg had done for the young Beatles at the turn of the 60s, or what Berlin would do for David Bowie in the 1970s. What began as a break onto the stage for Donna changed the course of her life, both professionally and personally. Hair was not Donna Gaines's last German show. Developing quick fluency in the language, she took part in two tonic productions of Godspell, Showboat, and the rock musical The Me Nobody Knows, known in Germany as Ich Bin Ich. When she moved to Vienna in 1971, Donna even sang for the Viennese folk opera. Alongside all of this theatrical activity, Donna's powerful voice attracted the notice of the European music industry, and she began releasing singles for various labels. At least one track was given a badly translated title by German label Phillips, the 1969 Northern Soul single If You Walk In Alone, a phrase Donna never actually sings in the song, although her young voice is potent. Even more interesting was Donna's one-off single for MCA Records, recorded in 1971 for its UK subsidiary in London. Sally Go Round The Roses had been a top 10 pop and R&B hit in 1963 for the Jane Nets, a one-hit wonder act from the Bronx, New York. Donna's cover of the hit in 1971 amped up the soul and pumped up the funk. None of these singles won Donna Gaines a long-term recording contract or an invitation to record an album. Before that would happen, Donna would marry for the first time. In 1973, while in Vienna, she tied the knot with a co-star from God's Spell, the Austrian actor Helmut Sommer, S-O-M-M-E-R. The marriage only lasted three years, but it produced a child, Donna's first daughter, Mimi, and, of course, her stage name, which actually was yet another accident. When the newly married Donna Sommer recorded a track for German label Lark Records in 1974, the single was pressed and labeled as Donna Sommer, S-U-M-M-E-R. The name with that spelling not only stuck, it outlasted Donna's first marriage. That single, Denver Dream, in 1974, was pivotal, and not just because the single cover read Donna Sommer for the first time. It was also her first collaboration with a pair of producers who, like her, had relocated to Munich from other countries, an Italian producer, Giorgio Moroder, and a Brit, Pete Bellotti. The three of them met at a German recording session for American band Three Dog Night in 1973, and they formed a creative partnership that, without exaggeration, would change the sound of dance music in the 1970s. Among the pioneers of electronic and dance music, few artists cast as long a shadow as Giovanni Giorgio Moroder, born in the German bordering northern Italian province, South Tirol, speaking a polyglot mix of Italian, German, and Ladine. Even if you are more familiar with the music of the 21st century, you have felt his influence. Moroder took home a Grammy less than four years ago for his contribution to the 2013 album Random Access Memories by Daft Punk, a chart-topping, electro-robotic duo that owes vast swaths of its sound to Moroder. My name is Giovanni Giorgio, but everybody calls me Giorgio. Moroder began as a recording artist himself, issuing tracks under the single name Giorgio, as early as the mid-1960s, and scoring his first trans-European hit in 1969 with Looky Looky. The single, which made the top 40 in several countries and sold a million copies, read as sugary pop, but it included synthesizer effects that were innovative for the period. Three years later, Moroder, now teamed with lyricist Pete Balotti, wound up writing a UK number one hit. Son of my Father, a glam pop song Moroder wrote on synthesizer, was covered by British rock band Chickery Tip. Their version sported a fat-bottomed Moog synthesizer, and it topped the UK chart and even scraped the bottom rungs of the American Hot 100 in the winter of 1972. Thus, by the time Moroder and Balotti met Donna Summer in 1973, all three of them had already explored an enormous range of American and European pop styles, proto-electro, show tunes, girl group, glam rock, Europop, funk, and soul. Literally all of these styles would find their way into the chart-conquering pop music Summer the Artist and Moroder and Balotti the producers and craftsmen would generate over the next decade, as disco began to take over the global hit parade. Denver Dream was Summer's first recording with Moroder and Balotti, and soon they were working on an album and finally scoring their first chart hits in Europe. Lady of the Night was the title track of Donna Summer's debut album in 1974. All of the songs were produced and written by Moroder and Balotti. The album was a pastiche of styles, showcasing the breadth of Summer's pop influences. Its title track was an homage to 60s girl group pop, and the album's first single, The Hostage, was a story song with melodramatic spoken word segments and the music was a hybrid of R&B and symphonic rock. The Hostage was a number two hit in the Netherlands, and Lady of the Night's title track was a number four Dutch hit and a minor top 40 hit in Germany. Not a bad start for the Summer Moroder-Balotti team-up, but not enough to guarantee the trio's days as session musicians were over. It would take one more single, a track Donna conceived but at first regarded as a lark and almost gave away, to finally bring about Summer's global breakthrough, and it all started with a Dutch hit that sounded like this. The song that began its life as Love to Love You was unprecedented in more ways than one. For one thing, it was the smallest Donna Summer's voice had sounded on any recording to date. Gone was her powerful, rangy mezzo-soprano in favor of a whispery sex-kitten vocal. It showed off Donna's versatility, but to some extent she meant that voice as a joke. She came up with the lyrical hook Love to Love You Baby, and when she brought it to Moroder, thinking it might make a good demo for another artist, Giorgio convinced her she should keep it and record it. As they laid down her vocals, they deliberately camped it up, including Summer's overdubbing of orgasmic moans. For years afterward, Summer would roll her eyes at panting journalists, wondering if she had been pleasuring herself while recording that vocal. She usually quipped that she hadn't been touching anything more than her knee. But the fact was Love to Love You was unironically sexy, as the single reached number 13 on the charts in the Netherlands in early 1975, Moroder decided to seek distribution for the track in the United States. Donna Summer was still unknown in her home country. Giorgio sent the track to Neil Bogart, the legendary, hard-living founder of Casablanca Records, the label that would come to dominate the music business in the late 70s. A few days after receiving the recording, legend has it Bogart played it for a party at his home. The crowd not only loved it, they asked to hear the orgasmic record over and over again. Bursting with excitement, Bogart called back Moroder in the middle of the night, Germany time, to tell him not only that he wanted to distribute the track, but that he and Summer should make Love to Love You longer, many times longer than a three-minute single, long enough to fill the entire side of an LP record, long enough to soundtrack a hedonistic party or a love-making session. Now retitled Love to Love You Baby at Neil Bogart's suggestion, the new version, fully re-recorded by Summer, Moroder and Bellotti, with a string section and additional backup singers, was 17 minutes long, five to six times the length of the original Dutch single. It did indeed fill a whole side of a vinyl album, also titled Love to Love You Baby, Summer's first American album release, issued jointly by Moroder's Oasis label and Casablanca Records in the late summer of 1975. And as explicit as the song seemed at the time, Bogart's team managed to get it on the radio, promoting a five-minute edit of the new, more lush recording. That new single peaked at number two on the Hot 100 in February 1976. Donna Summer's global hit was not only her breakthrough, it was a watershed for popular music. Love to Love You Baby is now enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one of its songs that shaped Rock and Roll. In both music and format, the song was the culmination of several trends. Musically, it signaled that disco had come of age. By 1974 and 75, lush club music was just starting to break on the charts. One year earlier, a pair of singles had topped Billboard's Hot 100 that signaled the music's early breakthrough. First, a Philly soul instrumental with proto-disco strings by Barry White and his love unlimited orchestra called Love's Theme. Followed not long after by a very memorable single from a short-lived vocal trio, The Hughes Corporation, called Rock the Boat. The smash is widely considered the first full-on disco number one hit. In addition to these feathery proto-disco hits, radio stations and disco techs had already embraced small, raw and ribbled funk and R&B singles such as Sylvia Robinson's Pillow Talk and Chacacha's Jungle Fever. So the market was primed for Donna's sensual disco fantasia. But Love to Love You Baby, both the single and the album went a step further, reimagining disco as album length music and helping to popularize the concept of the extended mix. In 1975, the extended club mix was in its infancy. Legendary DJ Tom Moulton is credited with inventing the form in 1973 when he began spinning his own acetates of favorite club tracks with the instrumental passages prolonged. It took another two years for the so-called 12-inch single, which we talked about in our fifth episode of Hit Parade, to emerge as a radio promotional tool. 12-inch singles for consumers didn't hit record shops until 1976. Although Love to Love You Baby wasn't issued as a 12-inch in 1975 because the format was still too new, Summer's Hit helped prime the consumer market for the very idea of the Tantric epic length club track. Saving seekers, we hear you! Seeking energy savings, always keep your energy prices under the price cap. 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Counsel anytime in the Clana app. Exclusions, conditions, and limitations apply to membership benefits. Clana membership terms apply. Of course, the full length Love to Love You Baby could only be purchased in 1975 on the album of the same name. The 17-minute title track took up all of side A. That made it not unlike so-called album-oriented rock. AOR, which dominated FM radio in the first half of the 70s, was famed for its 15-20-minute suites of music, performed by elaborate rock combos with multiple guitar and keyboard solos, jazzy instrumental breakdowns, string arrangements, even nature sounds. In the early to mid-70s, a whole LP side would be filled by these uber songs, composed of movements by such bands as Pink Floyd, Genesis, Jethro Tull, and Yes. In effect, Donna Summer, her producers, and record executive Neil Bogart were bringing concepts from album-oriented rock to dance music. The Love to Love You Baby album was the first of its genre to feature a full-side suite. The album sold unusually well for a disco LP. Going gold and peaking at an impressive number 11 on the Billboard album chart, alongside LPs by the Electric Light Orchestra and Peter Frampton. The full LP side disco cut could have been a one-off, but Summer, Marotter, and Bellotti committed to the concept, not just to extended length dance suites, but to the idea that Summer was an album artist, and they moved quickly. The next two Donna Summer LPs were both issued in 1976. Each featured extended length tracks and actually did better on the album chart than they did on the radio. A Love Trilogy, released in March 1976, while the Love to Love You album was still in the top 40, led off with the 18-minute track Try Me, I Know We Can Make It, taking up all of side A. And just seven months later, Four Seasons of Love was a full-blown concept album, composed of a suite of six to eight-minute tracks named for the seasons, from Winter Melody to Spring Affair. On Billboard's Club Play, a chart that tracked the songs New York DJs reported as their most played in the city's top disco texts, tracks from both A Love Trilogy and Four Seasons of Love reached number one, cementing Summer's status as disco's emerging queen. Both of Summer's 1976 albums went gold within weeks of their release. However, neither a Love Trilogy nor Four Seasons of Love generated a top 40 pop hit, and it began to look like the chart-climbing success of Love to Love You Baby the year before had been a fluke. Donna was perhaps destined to be a queen of the clubs, but not the Hot 100. What finally cemented Donna Summer as both a pop force and, with Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotti, an all-time innovator came with her next album, a concept Bellotti came up with called I Remember Yesterday. Side A would consist of tracks recalling the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Side B would feature current-sounding tracks and close with a song that represented the future. That futuristic track, almost an afterthought to the album, would feature no string section, no funk breakdown, no four-on-the-floor drumming. Indeed, it featured no traditional instruments at all. It wasn't even all that long. Its radio edit was under four minutes, the album version less than six. But in that timeframe, this single quite literally changed everything. That's I Feel Love, the final track and lead-off single to I Remember Yesterday. The chart stats on the song were fairly impressive. It reached number six on the Hot 100. It was her first top ten hit and first gold single since Love to Love You Baby, and it was her first number one hit in England. But the shadow I Feel Love casts on popular music can scarcely be overstated. The brainchild of Bellotti and Marauder, I Feel Love is generally agreed to have single-handedly invented electronic dance music, while it took inspiration from contemporaneous electro rock bands like Kraftwerk. I Feel Love was the first ever hit single with an entirely synthesized backing track. The only organic thing on it was Donna Summer's voice. Summer helped Marauder and Bellotti arrange the song's complex vocal melody, because, as Marauder told veteran music critic Simon Reynolds, I Feel Love is a difficult song to sing. In an appreciation of I Feel Love, Reynolds wrote for Pitchfork Magazine on the occasion of its 40th anniversary this year. Bellotti revealed that Summer co-wrote the mantra-like lyric of I Feel Love the night she met her future husband, Bruce Sudano, of the band Brooklyn Dreams. Her fluttery vocals on such lines as Fallen Free, Fallen Free, Fallen Free, You and Me, You and Me, You and Me were romantic and full of reverie. The contrast of her ecstatic vocals with Marauder and Bellotti's driving mechanistic backing track proved an irresistible combination. The record was a smash in discos, particularly Reynolds' notes, gay clubs, and artists from Blondie to the Human League to David Bowie and Brian Eno took inspiration from it. I remember Brian Eno running into my, running into my room with a single in his hand, he said, I've heard the future. I said, are you serious? And he said, yes, listen that teutonic drumming, that black voice, this is fantastic. As it happens, he was right. Simon Reynolds writes, quote, its impact reached far beyond the disco scene. Post-punk and new wave groups admired and appropriated its innovative sound, the maniacal precision of its grid-like groove of sequenced synth pulses. Within club culture, I Feel Love pointed the way forward and blazed the path for genres such as high energy, Italo, house, techno, and trance. If any one song can be pinpointed as where the 1980s began, it's I Feel Love, Unquit. By the time I Feel Love reached its peak on the Hot 100 in November 1977, disco was taking over the charts in both America and Europe. Saturday Night Fever would open in movie theaters the next month, and Summer became a more consistent hitmaker on both sides of the Atlantic. At GrapeTree, you'll find fantastic deals like our best-selling Supreme Almond's, now for just £8.99 a kilogram, or £3 for £25. Plus, use code PICK15 for 15% of a £35 or more spend, or code PICK20 for 20% of a £50 or more spend on selected products when you order online, or shop at one of over 190 of our stores nationwide. If you're looking for big bags and big value, GrapeTree is the place to go. GrapeTree, your health, our products. This is Sam and Pete from Saying Relevance, and we are currently sponsored by Tui. Sam, what is the one thing we always disagree about? Where to have lunch, or what time we start recording the podcast, the title of episodes even. 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