Patrick Cowley (October 19, 1950 – November 12, 1982) – If You Feel It (1980)

The Godfather of hi-NRG disco wrote this dancefloor masterpiece for Paul Parker but it was unreleased until 1987, with its brilliant original demo finally released in 2022.

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Patrick Cowley was a synthesizer pioneer, the Godfather of hi-NRG disco which helped lay the groundwork for many genres of electronic dance music that followed, and one of the music industry’s earliest AIDS casualties.

Born in Buffalo, New York and raised in nearby Rochester, Cowley drummed with local rock bands in high school. He attended the Catholic college Niagara University and then the University of Buffalo. In 1971 he moved to San Francisco and enrolled in the City College of San Francisco, where he studied music and became enthralled by the emerging technology of synthesizers. He was 21 years old and spent the next few years creating experimental electronic music and immersing himself in the city’s rapidly expanding gay culture.

His early dancefloor masterpieces included a phenomenal 16-minute remix of Donna Summer’s 1977 classic “I Feel Love,” which itself was a groundbreaking electronic disco record. Cowley’s mindblowing demo version and finished megamix both took the track to even higher levels.

It caught the attention of Bay Area singer/songwriter Sylvester, who hired Cowley to join his studio band in 1978. He played synthesizer on Sylvester’s breakthrough album Step II (1978) which included the hits “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Dance (Disco Heat).” He helped transform the sound of “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” from Sylvester’s original mid-tempo gospel conception into the hi-NRG liberation anthem that became a disco classic.

Cowley went on to write two songs for Sylvester’s next LP Stars (1979). See our earlier post on Sylvester for more on their collaborations.

Also in 1979, Cowley created another epic megamix, this time for “The Hills Of Katmandu” by the Italo disco group Tantra.

The years 1979-81 were some of Cowley’s most musically productive, right before he became sick with HIV. In 1981 he released his second solo album Megatron Man. It was the inaugural release on Megatone Records, the label he co-founded with Marty Blecman, which derived its name from the album. Its title track was a hi-NRG anthem and Cowley’s second #1 dance chart hit, after “Menergy,” the title track to his first solo album, released earlier that same year on Fusion Records.

After Cowley left Fusion, they threatened to sue Megatone because the initial 10,000 pressings of Megatron Man (with catalog #M-1001) included “Menergy” and its B-side “I Wanna Take You Home,” which Fusion still owned the rights to. Subsequent pressings (#M-1002) replaced those tracks with “Teen Planet” and the spaced out masterpiece “Sea Hunt,” based on the theme song to the late fifties TV show.

Circa 1980, Cowley produced a brilliant demo intended for singer (and future Megatone artist) Paul Parker titled “If You Feel It.” Despite its stellar quality it was not completed, possibly because Thelma Houston released a single by the same name the following year in 1981 that hit #6 on dance charts and went to #35 R&B. In 1987, Megatone put out a finished version as the B-side to a remixed “Megatron Man ‘87.” The remix and engineering for that release was credited to Joseph Watt (one of the founders of the Razormaid! Records remix service) with Blecman as executive producer.

Cowley’s original demo version was officially released last year by Dark Entries Records, the San Francisco label run by Josh Cheon that for the past decade and a half has put out unreleased material by both Cowley and Sylvester and kept their legacies alive. It was issued as the opening cut to Malebox on November 12, 2022, the fortieth anniversary of Cowley’s death.

Further info:

“San Fran-disco: how Patrick Cowley and Sylvester changed dance music forever,” The Guardian, October 26, 2016.

“How the Lost Recordings of Patrick Cowley Were Finally Released,” by Blake Gillespie, Bandcamp Daily, December 6, 2017.

“In Conversation: The Lost Tapes of Patrick Cowley with Dark Entries’ Josh Cheon,” by Tana Yonas, In Sheep's Clothing Hi-Fi, February 9, 2021.

#disco #HiNRG #LGBTQ #SanFrancisco #Sylvester #PatrickCowley