Dialed About a Thousand Numbers

Donna Summer : Hot Stuff

[Purchase]

On April 25, 1979 Donna Summer released Bad Girls, a double album that became the best-selling of her career thanks to the #1 singles "Hot Stuff", "Bad Girls", and the #2 hit "Dim All The Lights".  Disco was still at its height and Summer was still the reigning queen of disco in 1979, but she felt the genre was choking her to death. So she and producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte decided to add elements of rock and funk to the palette.

The first song on the album, and the first single, is "Hot Stuff". That's Doobie Brother and disco hater Jeff "Skunk" Baxter on guitar. The song offers a blueprint for incorporating rock into dance music that Michael Jackson used for "Beat It". Lay down the beat and make room for a rocking guitar solo.  When Summer took the song to Casablanca label chief Neil Bogart, he told her the song rocked too hard for her and suggested she give the song to Cher. She refused, won the argument and scored a #1 hit and a Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance.

The title track was the second single. Summer said she was inspired by an incident involving a Casablanca secretary:

"I was in my office in the old Casablanca building," she said. "I sent my secretary to do something, and the police stopped her on Sunset Boulevard. She was dressed in business attire, but they were trying to pick her up. That ticked me off. I pondered why that would happen to innocent people -- and then I developed compassion for the girls, working on the street." And the "toot-toot, beep-beep" at the end of the track? "I figured, what do guys do when they pick up girls? I had to emulate them tooting their horns."

Fans of the futuristic euro- disco sounds of "I Feel Love" will get more of a kick out of "Sunset People" and "Our Love", both released as singles in 1980 after Summer had left Casablanca for Geffen Records. 

In all Bad Girls sold more than two million copies and finished #10 in the Village Voice Pazz and Jop Critics Poll. It might be my favorite of her albums if only I didn't have such a soft spot for "Try Me, I Know We Can Make It" which helps A Love Trilogy top that list.

Critic Robert Christgau gave Bad Girls an A-, writing:

You tend to suspect anyone who releases three double-LPs in eighteen months of delusions of Chicago, but Donna is here to stay and this is her best album. The first two sides, for songs per, never let up -- the voice breaks and the guitars moan over a bass-drum thump in what amounts to empty-headed girl-group rock and roll brought cannily up-to-date. Moroder makes his Europercussion play on side four, which is nice too, but side three drags, suggesting that the rock and roll that surfaces here is perhaps only a stop along the way to a totally bleh total performance. Me, I still love my Marvellettes records.