Rarely does a dance movement fit so precisely within a decade. Seventies Disco was born on Valentine's Day 1970, when David Manusco opened The Loft in New York City. When the Disco movement peaked in 1978-79, the demographic was predominantly white, heterosexual, urban and suburban middle class. But it didn't begin that way. For the first eight years, Disco was an underground movement. Then the film Saturday Night Fever (December 1977) helped turn the simmering subculture into a mainstream fad, resulting is a 30-fold increase in disco clubs. Electronic synthesized dance music entered the disco scene in the late 70s, as the perfect match for state-of-the-art sound systems with hanging arrays of super-tweeters above mammoth subwoofers, illuminated with the highest-tech lighting, fog machines, computerized multimedia visuals, animated neon and multicolor lasers. To quote Steve D'Acquisto, "It was like a cross between outer space and a big playhouse."
