Donna Summer (December 31, 1948 – May 17, 2012) – Spring Affair (1976)

Although all four tracks on the Queen of Disco's Four Seasons of Love LP hit #1 on dance charts, this epic disco jam was the album's masterpiece.

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Donna Summer rocketed to fame in the mid-1970s as the disco movement took off and became its leading lady. Known as the Queen of Disco, she broke through with “Love To Love You Baby” (1975) and dominated dance charts for the next several years, crossing over at her peak with four #1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 during 1978-79 (“MacArthur Park,” “Hot Stuff,” “Bad Girls,” and “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough),” her duet with Barbara Streisand). With over 100 million records sold worldwide, she became one of the best-selling artists of all time.

This Saturday, May 20 at 8 pm ET/PT, HBO Max premieres the new documentary Love to Love You, Donna Summer, co-directed by her daughter Brooklyn Sudano.

LaDonna Adrian Gaines was born and raised in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood, located between Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. She was the third of seven children, and first sang in public when she was ten years old, filling in for another vocalist who didn’t show up for a church performance.

During high school she acted and sang in musicals. In 1967, only weeks before graduation, she dropped out of school and moved to New York City. There she joined a psychedelic rock band named Crow, which broke up after a record label passed on signing them.

Summer auditioned for the hit musical Hair in 1968 and agreed to take the role of Sheila in the show’s Munich, Germany production. She moved there that summer and spent the next eight years living in Europe. After Hair, she appeared in various other musicals and released a series of unsuccessful singles. In 1971 she moved to Vienna, Austria, where she met her first husband, Austrian actor Helmuth Sommer who performed alongside her in Godspell during 1972. They married the following year and had a daughter together (Natalia Pia Melanie "Mimi" Sommer who was born in 1973), but eventually divorced in 1976.

She was working as a backing vocalist at a recording session for Three Dog Night in Munich when she first met producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte. They signed her to their Oasis label in 1974.

Their first collaboration was a single released in 1974 on Lark Records, with the ABBA-esque “Denver Dream” on the A-side, written by Bellotte, and “Something's In The Wind” on the flip, which Moroder and Bellotte co-wrote, and was later re-recorded as “Back In Love Again” and included on her I Remember Yesterday LP (1977). After a printing error on the single’s cover mis-spelled “Sommer,” she adopted the stage name “Summer” for good.

Her debut album Lady of the Night (1974) was produced by Bellotte and released in early 1974, although only in the Netherlands. Like her first single, it was a pop/rock LP, and its two singles “The Hostage” and the album’s title track went Top-10 in that country.

That summer, she had an idea for a new song, inspired by “Je t'aime... moi non plus” (1969), the infamous erotic duet between Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg (originally written by Gainsbourg for his then-girlfriend Brigitte Bardot), which had been re-issued and was back on the European charts. Summer envisioned an even sexier song, and came up with the lyric and title “Love To Love You Baby.” Moroder had been looking for a way to break into the emerging disco market, and created a laid back disco backing track, then encouraged her to moan orgasmically as part of her vocals. She was initially reluctant, but agreed to record a demo version on the condition that another singer be found for the finished product.

After improvising epic sounds of passion during the recording session, later saying she imagined she was Marilyn Monroe in the throes of ecstasy, Moroder insisted her version would be a hit and that it should be released. Summer eventually agreed, and it was issued to modest success across Europe, co-written by herself, Bellotte and Moroder, produced by Bellotte, arranged by Moroder, and titled “Love To Love You.”

They sent a tape of the song to Neil Bogart’s newly launched label Casablanca Records in the U.S., and he played it over and over all night long at one of his house parties. Bogart then requested they produce a twenty-minute version. They re-cut the track in Munich, first to an extended 13:35 take, then to a final 16:48 length, and flew to the U.S. with a test pressing. Their first stop was in Boston, where pioneer disco DJ (and future top remixer) John Luongo was behind the turntables at The Rhinoceros, the city’s biggest disco.

He told the story of what happened next in a 2017 interview with Michael Jackson biographer Brice Najar:

“I can remember one very special time in my career that I will always cherish. I was playing at The Rhinoceros, it was a miserable, foggy, rainy evening and the club was packed. Somebody came to the front door and walked into the club wearing a white trench coat with the collar pulled up on the neck and accompanied by a local record promoter who walked her in and came to my glass booth.

He handed me the test pressing of a new recording he had just received and said to me, “Would you play this? The artist is in the club and she originally comes from Roxbury (a section of Boston).” To that, I said “Ok.” And preceded to listen to the song that was slow, sexy and extremely long! It was a bit awkward as she was there, a hometown girl and the record promoter was a good guy and friend of mine, so I had to do something.

Well, I put it on and just as I anticipated, it cleared the whole dance floor. People just glared at me with arms crossed and that look of disdain. If you are a DJ, you know that look that only an angry owner of a crowd ready to let go gives you when you make any mistake or lose the floor! My boss was there with his friends, right outside my booth sitting at a table and he wanted to show everybody how I could make people get up, dance, move, and do anything I wanted them to do so he hit the side of the glass booth I was in and said, “Take that SH$T OFF!”.

I ignored him and the audience and wouldn’t take the record off. My boss kept hitting the glass but I was not paying any attention to him and shifted my head as if I was previewing my next record to play. It was not good as NOBODY was dancing for 16 minutes and 48 seconds. You have to have a lot of courage to do something like that or an escape hatch from the booth.

I tell DJs all the time; “If you’re not going to have that kind of courage to clear the floor for something new and groundbreaking that you truly believe in, you shouldn’t be doing this”. That’s because playing it safe and complacency are two of the most deadly downfalls any of them can make.

But I knew I was doing the right thing because I thought the record was going to be great and broke some ground, and my old boss, Jackie Gateman, still to this day chuckles when we talk about this. He feels a little bit foolish because the record he was asking me to take off, well, that was actually the first time it was played in the United States and it was called “Love To Love You Baby” by a local woman from Dorchester, Mass., who went by the name of Donna Summer!

She was the woman in the club and if you look at the movie Thank God It’s Friday they have a disc jockey scene where she comes up to the DJ booth to hand her new record to him to play and I was the one in real life who she had someone come up to hand her record to. That was pretty amazing and stuck me as a moment I had with history that the world may or may not have ever known! My message to people and the DJs specifically are to ‘Do what your heart tells you.’”

Thankfully, Summer’s disco career was not derailed that night before it even had a chance to take flight. Officially released by Casablanca on November 26, 1975, “Love To Love You Baby” ended up becoming a huge hit, first reaching #1 on dance charts and #3 R&B, then crossing over to peak at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Banned by some radio stations for being too racy, it received endless free publicity as the press breathlessly reported on Summer’s “22 (or 23) simulated orgasms.” It became the title track to her debut LP for Casablanca, which went gold and hit #11 on the album charts.

Summer followed up that album with A Love Trilogy, released in March, 1976. It contained another lengthy disco cut, “Try Me, I Know We Can Make It,” which clocked in at 17:57 and became her second #1 dance hit. The LP only reached #21 on the Billboard album charts but still went gold.

Next came her fourth studio album, Four Seasons of Love (1976). It contained four tracks, one representing each season.

Although all four hit #1 on dance charts, the LP’s highlight was the epic eight and a half minute long dancefloor jam “Spring Affair,” which she co-wrote with Moroder and Bellotte. Released as the album’s first single, it stalled out at #24 R&B / #58 Pop, and remains little known today. She performed the song on television shows around the world, including a great Soul Train appearance during which she was accompanied by three sexy backup singers and showed off her own killer dance moves.

Seven months after the release of Four Seasons of Love, Casablanca put out her fifth studio album, I Remember Yesterday (1977). Its concept was that its different tracks had themes from different time periods. The one track on the LP that represented the future was its biggest hit and became one of her signature songs, the driving, proto-techno “I Feel Love,” which Moroder later described as “really the start of electronic dance (music).”

The next year, Summer starred in and contributed three songs to the soundtrack of Thank God It’s Friday (1978), a joint production between Motown and Casablanca that attempted to recreate the box office and soundtrack chart success of Saturday Night Fever (1977).

Panned by critics, it has nonetheless become a cult classic and is today regarded as the best disco film of the 70s. Summer’s phenomenal but little known “With Your Love” (1978) was one of the double LP’s standout tracks.

She co-wrote it with Moroder and Bellotte, and a short version was featured as the B-side to her smash hit from the film, “Last Dance” (#5 R&B / #3 Pop / #1 Dance), for which she won that year’s Grammy for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, plus an Oscar and Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.

The brilliant extended version of “With Your Love” was only released by Casablanca as a promotional 12-inch record, but it still shot to #1 on the dance charts.

Rest in Power to the Queen of Disco, Donna Summer.

Further info:

"Electronic Conductor: Giorgio Moroder," Wax Poetics, Issue 62, January, 2015.

"‘I was decadent, I was stupid, I was a fool’: the dark days of Donna Summer," by Daniel Dylan Wray, The Guardian, April 28, 2023.

“'Love to Love You, Donna Summer' tells the story of the music icon's career and tumultuous life,” Here & Now, WBUR.org, May 18, 2023.

#disco #GiorgioMoroder #DonnaSummer