Donna Summer – Bad Girls

The label told her the song wasn’t right for her and to hand it to Cher — two years later an engineer found the forgotten tape, and it spent five weeks at No. 1.

In 1979, a studio engineer named Steve Smith was rummaging through a pile of old tapes at Casablanca, looking for blank space to record over. He found a demo instead — a two-year-old song nobody had touched, written and then abandoned by the label’s biggest star. He played it for Donna Summer, who had forgotten it existed, and mentioned it to Giorgio Moroder. Four months later, on July 14, 1979, that resurrected demo went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for five weeks. The song was Bad Girls, and it had almost been given away to somebody else entirely.

Keep watching: Donna Summer – Hot Stuff · explore more →

Summer had written it back in 1977 with the members of Brooklyn Dreams — Joe “Bean” Esposito, Eddie Hokenson, and Bruce Sudano, the man she would later marry — sketching a portrait of the women working the Los Angeles streets outside the label’s own Sunset Boulevard offices. It was written with empathy rather than judgment, its narrator refusing to look away from lives the culture preferred not to see. When Summer played the demo for Casablanca boss Neil Bogart, he heard too much rock in it and told her it wasn’t right for her voice; the song, he suggested, should go to Cher. Summer wanted to sing it herself. Rather than argue, she shelved it, and there it sat until Smith went looking for a blank reel.

The summer she owned

What Moroder and Pete Bellotte built around the rediscovered demo at Rusk Sound Studios in Los Angeles was disco with the safety off — Harold Faltermeyer’s arrangement stacking horns against a hard rock pulse, Jeff Baxter soloing on a prototype Roland guitar synthesizer, and, dropped in near the end, the four syllables that made the record immortal: the toot-toot, beep-beep call-and-response that no one who lived through that summer has ever fully gotten out of their head. Released on June 23, 1979, as the second single from the double album Bad Girls, it did something no woman had done before. That same week, as Hot Stuff sat at No. 1, Bad Girls vaulted from No. 11 to No. 5 — making Summer the first female artist ever to hold two songs in the Hot 100’s top ten at the same time.

Then it took the throne outright. On July 14, 1979, Bad Girls reached No. 1, holding for five straight weeks and outlasting Hot Stuff, which had managed three. The parent album spent six weeks atop the Billboard 200, went double platinum, and sold more than four million copies worldwide — the commercial peak of her career and her final studio record for Casablanca. She took Favorite Pop/Rock Female Artist at the 1980 American Music Awards and drew a Grammy nomination for Best Disco Recording. All of this happened in the same season as Disco Demolition Night, the backlash bonfire that supposedly killed the genre. It did not touch her.

The song she kept

The rejected demo became the record everyone else wanted. Aaliyah interpolated it. Lil’ Kim sampled it. It has soundtracked films, awards shows, and four decades of dance floors. And Summer never let it go: the second performance on this page comes from her VH1 special Live & More Encore! in 1999, twenty years on, delivering the song with a stage command that answers Bogart’s old objection permanently. It was always hers. It was never Cher’s.

Donna Summer died on May 17, 2012, at 63. The Queen of Disco title she wore uneasily, and Bad Girls is a good argument for why — the record is rock, soul, funk, and street reportage as much as it is disco, sung by a woman who fought her own label for the right to record it. She was proved right in the most public way available: five weeks at the very top, forty-seven years ago this week.

Twenty years after the record hit No. 1, Summer performed it again for VH1 — the same song, a different woman singing it, and not one ounce of the authority lost.