Key Tracks: Cerrone’s “Love In C Minor”

During disco’s heyday, dancefloors burned red hot with the sound of Marc Cerrone: a French producer, composer and drummer whose hit 1977 album Supernature saw him bring together live orchestral composition and the radical synthesized sounds pioneered by Giorgio Moroder. Cutting his teeth with percussive Afro-funk warriors Kongas in 1974, it was his following solo experiment “Love In C Minor” that saw him put the drum set high in the mix, and front and center of a dynamic, New York-friendly sound. After selling millions of records worldwide, turning his impressive live performance into a successful Broadway musical and scoring film soundtracks, Cerrone’s legacy of bringing disco into mainstream music consciousness remains. In this excerpt from his RBMA Radio interview with Jeff “Chairman“ Mao, Cerrone discusses the story behind Love In C Minor.

I started to play the drums at 12 years old. Really soon after, perhaps a year and a half later, I started to have some good success playing in bands. My father was not happy to see me to go in that direction. He made me go to school and said, “When you finish school, then you’re going to decide [what to do next].” I finished my schooling at 16-and-a-half years old, and I was happy because I thought, “He’s going to be happy [that I finished school], and he’s going to let me play music,” but he said, “No way, you’re not going, stop it.” I got a slap on the mouth, and he closed my bedroom door. I waited for him to leave the next morning, and when he did, I broke the window and ran away. I spent two years on my own in order to live with the music. Every time I would hear the police in the street, I was worried that they were coming for me.

I gave some news to my mother: “I’m not stupid, I’m not a gangster, and I’m not going to jail.” I told her that I just wanted to make music – that I couldn’t live without the music. She was in the middle of my father and I. She told him, “We know what he’s doing and when he finishes, he’s going to come back. Don’t worry.” So there I was – 18 years old, playing drum solos in the street from 7 PM to 9 PM, while people had their drinks outside. I had a girlfriend and I played my drums to make money. We lived very well.

One day, a guy called Barclay said to me, “When you finish [playing drums], come to my table. I want to speak to you.” That moment was the beginning of everything: the summer of ’72. Barclay invited me to have lunch with him, with a girl. He said, “You cannot play the drums the way you do on record if you want to be on the radio.” I told him, “I’ve got a band, called the Kongas.” He asked to hear us play, so he gave us a gig at a non-name club somewhere. After that first gig, we played two, three, four gigs – we played for a month and at the end of that month, we signed a record label contract. Two months after signing the contract, we had our first single – a hit, called “Afro Rock.”

The Kongas were the most important band of my life. We had two percussionists, like the Santana band had. I learned to play the kick on every beat, and right in the front. During our show, which would last for one and a half hours, we decide to have ten minute live percussive performances to help with my percussion. I would play the kick on every beat and see the reaction of the crowd. I could really see and feel that the public was really hurt, so after the live solo percussion we would go back to playing as a band.

When I decided to produce Love in C Minor, I used that kick all of the time. I had the attitude to put the drums right in front, really high in the mix. I recorded 16-and-a-half minutes of music for the track, and I’d decided that we were going to cut six or seven minutes of it out, but when I heard the full 16-and-a-half minutes, I said, “I’m not going to cut anything because I don’t care about being played on the radio. This isn’t going to be a success [whether I cut it or not], with the girls crying on it and everything, so just leave it.”

I recorded the drums and the bass first, with a hook of bass. In the studio, I decided to build and build and build. Then, after the back-up session was done, I brought champagne in for the girls to be happy when we were recording the chorus. At the end of the recording session, we spoke about sex (because that period was really a sex period). We smiled and we talked about crazy things, and then when I was listening back to the recording, I was like, “Wow.” That’s what helped to create the atmosphere of the LP.

A few days later, I called the girls back to the studio to play. These girls were the back-up singers for Elton John and Genesis – really big names. I played the recording for the girls, and everyone said, “Wow, Marc - it’s great. That creates an atmosphere. It’s completely new, so keep it,” so I keep it. That was a big surprise for me. When the record was finished, I tried to get a deal with a major record company. When I played them my record, everybody thought that I was crazy.

I went back to U.K. to press 5,000 copies of Love in C Minor and in three weeks, the copies arrived in Paris. With a friend, I sold copies to record shops: three here, five there, and so on. Day by day, the buzz started to happen. There was a record shop in the Champs-Élysées that was the real place for DJs at the time. I sold ten, 20, 50, 100 copies there. Then the delivery guy said to me, “Deliver me 300 copies, and at the end of the month we’ll do a count.” I gave him 300 copies and two days later, he calls me back. “Hey, listen. One of my guys has made a mistake. We were supposed to send back 300 copies of a Barry White album to a reseller in New York, but we accidentally sent them the copies of your album.”

When the guy in New York opened the boxes, he saw this really excessive, extravagant record sleeve. He must have thought, “What is this?” When he heard it, he was like, “I want to play that in the club,” and he did. People in the club would come up to him and ask him what he was playing, so the buzz became more intense. A month later, a friend of mine came to me and said, “We listened to your record in a club in New York, they’re playing it in every club!” I said, “Wow, are you crazy?”

I took a plane to New York and I rang the bell of the first record company I could find, which was Atlantic Records. It was my lucky day when I met Ahmet Ertegün, who ran Atlantic at the time. He said, “You are the guy who did that record? Where did you get the idea for it?” I said, “There is no idea.” I made it at what I thought was the end of my career, so I just did whatever I wanted to do. We signed a contract then and there, and Love in C Minor sold three million copes and went to No. 1 in the U.S. charts.