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a “following.” He’s been very
popular in cities like San Francisco, where he now lives, and New York. But his popularity seems to be getting national. We took a look at Billboard , the music-trade magazine, and saw that his latest album was in the Top Forty of both the regular chart and the black-music chart.
    At the Wollman Memorial Rink, we saw many people wearing T-shirts that said simply “Boz.” Onstage, Boz Scaggs, a tallish, handsome man with brown hair that he wears swept back in a beatniklike style, wore blue pants, a red turtleneck sweater, and white sneakers. He was accompanied by some other musicians and by two pretty girl singers wearing white backless gowns. Sometimes he sang and played a white guitar, sometimes he sang and played a gold guitar, sometimes he sang and played a piano, and sometimes he sang and danced around. Almost always he said something about the song he was about to sing. He said, “This song is about a lady thing; it’s about when it’s all over,” and he sang a song called “It’s Over.” He said, “This is a song about a cat who’s inside doing time all because of a girl named Georgia. If you listen, you’ll know why,” and he sang “Georgia.” Then he sang a song called “What Can I Say.” It’s our favorite Boz Scaggs song, because of these two lines: “Stop makin’ like a little schoolgirl” and “Could be your lucky day, baby.” That song made us very happy.
    â€” August 30, 1976

A Gathering
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    PARTY: Among certain hip people in New York the word “party” has nothing to do with a dinner, or a birthday, or fishing, or hunting, or politics; rather, it has to do with going out to a discothèque, dancing for hours, and having a good time. They say to each other, “Let’s party.” Or—and this is the coolest way of saying it—“Let’s party down.” Songs have been written in which the word “party” alone, chanted against a funky beat, is the refrain. A man we know named Vince Aletti spends much of his time “partying,” and, as can be imagined, he has a lot of fun. Vince Aletti loves to dance, knows just about all the good current dance songs, and writes a column on discothèque music for a national music-trade magazine. When popular-music critics write uncomplimentary articles about discothèque music, Vince Aletti, in turn, will write articles defending and promoting discothèque music. He has written articles defending the Trammps, Archie Bell and the Drells, and others. Last winter, in his column, he mentioned
what a great song for dancing “Love to Love You Baby,” by Donna Summer, was, and because he was the first person to write about that song and it became a big hit the record company gave Vince Aletti a gold record.
    Every Saturday night, Vince Aletti goes dancing at a place in lower Manhattan called The Loft. On a recent Saturday night, he invited us to come along. On our way, he told us some things he thought we ought to know about The Loft. He said, “The Loft is open only on Saturday nights. It isn’t like a regular discothèque; it’s more like a private party. You just go and you meet your friends and you have a good time.” (Vince Aletti is a very shy, retiring man in his late twenties, and it occurred to us that he would never go anyplace where his friends wouldn’t be. Once, we introduced him to a man from the Midwest, and the man grabbed his arm and said, “Hey tiger, how ya doing? God love ya.” It made him wince visibly.) Vince Aletti said that the people who go to The Loft to dance were called “guests”; that most of them started coming in at one o‘clock; that to get into The Loft you had to show an invitation; that to receive an invitation you had to have a friend who was already a member submit your name; and that The Loft sometimes