Quote:
Originally Posted by rostasi
Yeah, also consider that Stax was pretty much desperately trying to stay solvent in '75 and so jumped on
any kind of bandwagon that might pull them thru the doldrums. Witness their disco version of the Star Trek Theme
from that period and the above mentioned album if you need proof (or read Rob Bowman's work).
Saying that many of these gospel and/or R&B performers were disco stars would be like saying that Andy Griffith was
a prominent folk or blues singer because he emoted a version of House of the Rising Sun and did an album with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. It's not what they brought at all to the community.
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Plus Motown got into the act with packaging their classic older Soul songs under the Disc-O-Tech banner. Not to be confused with the legendary Early 70's UK-released Motown Disco Classics series, the US division had a couple of these collections right around the same time as the Stax collection.
http://www.discogs.com/Various-Disc-...elease/1413725
For Stax, sadly they lost one of the masters of Disco in Isaac Hayes, who was headed that way by the Mid 70's but went to ABC for some credible dance records peppered with his trademark ballads. "Chocolate Chip" was a major hit.
To my ears, the Warp Nine version of Star Trek was more in line with Eletropop as if someone just got a Kraftwrek record and thought that it would be easy to get a hit out of something like that following up on the US success of Autobahn, and leave it to the legendary Terry Manning to do it, but I can see where the Disco connection is. It was released on Privilege in 1975, one of the many Stax Distributed labels and fully connected to the label's dying days as you can tell in the article linked (it also had a re-issue of Big Star's "September Gurls" as a promo copy after the band folded).
A history of that label here...
Untitled Document
Now you want a Disco Star Trek, although a very low budget one, I found one for you!
...sadly, I don't see Grace Lee Whitney's Disco Treckin' anywhere, yet.