![]() ![]() Little did anyone know that history was about to be made. In 1964, a Whisky A Go-Go opened in Hollywood (-note the alternate spelling of Whiskey without the ' e', and the hyphenated ' gogo'). ![]() So great was it's success, it generated myriad imitators ( Cafe A-Gogo, etc), and many other " Whiskey A Gogo's" around the world - the name eventually being franchised. It was then that the ' Discotheque' moved away from the small, more private word-of-mouth ' record library' style nightclub to something grander, generally advertised to the public, with a larger, dominating dance floor. They are credited not only with opening the first modern Discotheque, they are also credited for redefining it now meaning "a nightclub where the featured entertainment is dancing to recorded music (rather than an on-stage band)". The Whiskey A Gogo enjoyed great success, and in 1960 it revitalized and marketed the wartime term " Discotheque" - and, well, I think we can lay the blame for the ' Disco Revolution' directly at their feet. As the Nazis had been driven from the land, dancing returned, and an increasing number of these French nightclubs also provided for customer dancing, albeit the dance floors remained small and personal. Before the end of the year (1947), one such new Night Entertainment Venue opened in Paris, and, inspired by the movie, called itself Whiskey A Gogo. This was the beginning of Paris' own ' La Dolce Vita' era. These smallish almost-private nightclubs were the sort where the patrons put their names on their own bottles of cognac, returning regularly to join their "in crowd". But with money in short supply, the nightclubs would continue to entertain with recorded music most of the time, and, rarely, when they could afford it, with a live band. )Īfter the war's end (the real war, not the movie), these nightclubs, these ' discotheques' became ever more popular - all the while maintaining that wartime underground mystique. ' galore', - most likely from Old French gogue. (The exact translation of ' A Gogo' or ' Au Gogo' is It was made into a movie called, " A Tight Little Island", but when the film was released in France, they reverted to the direct translation of the novel's original title: it became " Whiskey A Gogo". ![]() In a seemingly unrelated event, shortly after the war ended, in early 1947, Compton MacKenzie published a book titled Whisky Galore about an ocean freighter with 10,000 cases of whisky that was wrecked near a booze-starved island during World War II. (The Nazi occupation took a particularly dim view of jazz music, convinced that as it had "black" roots, it must be degenerate.) And to keep from drawing attention to themselves, these clandestine private clubs were called: " record libraries", or in French, " discotheques". They would slip away to secret " libraries" - libraries that kept jazz recordings and the like, and listen to their hearts' content. ![]() We have settled on A Go-Go, and soon you will see why.ĭuring World War II in France, the resistance managed to find time for recreation despite the German occupation. There are more spellings of A Go-Go than there are spellings of the name ' Moammar Ghaddaffi' in Libya, so among other things on our list-of-things-to-do whilst researching the world's favorite nighttime viewing sport, we have been questing after the most ' legitimate' spelling of this entirely ubiquitous word. ![]()
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