Donna Summer - I'm a Rainbow

I've just made the kind of musical discovery that probably happens once in a lifetime. I was born in 1975, right around the time disco was beginning its climb to the top of the musical Olympus. And although I was born in the USSR, disco made it even there, despite the official bans on most Western music.

As it happened, my parents had plenty of friends back then — students from countries friendly to the USSR. But unlike those of us unlucky enough to be born in the USSR itself, they had no trouble travelling to the countries of the "decaying West". And since vinyl was the main music format in the late '70s, and keeping records in university dorms was risky for all sorts of reasons, that vinyl was kept at our place.

So from early childhood I soaked up the sound of Chic, Boney M., Donna Summer, Karen Young, Santa Esmeralda, and the Bee Gees, along with heavier rock like Kiss, Led Zeppelin, and so on. It's hard now to remember all the records and all the artists that played in our home in defiance of the bans.

It's no surprise, then, that Donna Summer's voice is a whole era for me — the one where my musical discoveries began. Only when I was older did I learn that her co-writer and producer in those years was the legendary Giorgio Moroder, the man who invented the sound of the '80s. It was a golden pairing of two talents, grown in the fertile soil of Casablanca Records, the most daring and distinctive label in the history of the music industry.

The '90s, on the other hand, I flatly dislike. Even though it was the last decade of musical revolutions — grunge, Britpop, rave, techno, Eurodance, nu metal, trip-hop — most of them are simply not to my taste. That said, I'm grateful to the '90s for acid jazz in general and for Jamiroquai in particular. But the point is that '70s disco stars had nothing to do in the '90s, so I had always passed over Donna Summer's I'm a Rainbow.

Then, just recently, I came across an article about this album, and it hit me like a bolt from the blue! It turns out the album was recorded by that very Moroder/Summer duo in 1981, right at the turning point from the sound of the '70s to the sound of the '80s — the very shift that, as we know, Giorgio himself was responsible for. Quality had nothing to do with it: by then Donna Summer had already left Casablanca Records for the new Geffen Records, and its owner, David Geffen, unhappy with what he heard, shelved the album just weeks before its scheduled release.

I've listened to it several times in a row, and I have to say: it's a stunning piece of work. Had it come out in 1981 as planned, it would have been a flawless classic, giving the world a string of sure-fire hits that everyone would know today, just as they know "Love to Love You Baby" or "Bad Girls". The album carries the listener from one decade into the next so subtly that its release in 1996 (for which I'm still grateful) was out of place to a degree that's hard to put into words.

For me, finding this album today is like a Beatles fan stumbling upon a tape of their unreleased songs. It's a real shame that I'm a Rainbow didn't get its first vinyl release until 2014, and that pressing now sells for crazy money: I've seen listings at US$2,500.

So if, like me, you're stuck in the past and somehow missed this release, do yourself a favour and listen to this document of its era. It's stunning.