Roller Disco: Skates, Lights and Good Times
When the rink became the dance floor. In 1979 America went wheel-crazy. Here is how roller rinks, disco records and skate legends like Bill Butler turned skating into the coolest party in town.
A roller disco hall lit up in neon: Charlotte Coneybeer she_sees, CC0
From organ music to soul
Roller rinks were an American tradition long before disco. From the 1930s to the 1950s, skaters circled wooden floors to electric organ music. The four-wheel quad skate that made all those smooth turns possible dated back to 1863, when James Leonard Plimpton designed it in New York City.
Change came from the skaters themselves. At the Empire Roller Rink in Brooklyn, Bill Butler, later nicknamed Mr. Charisma, encouraged the owners to swap the organ for the jazz and R&B records the neighborhood actually loved. Butler showed off a bouncing, dance-heavy style he called jammin', and he is remembered today as the Godfather of Roller Disco. In Chicago and Detroit, skaters were building their own styles too, from JB skating to bebop and soul skating.
Mirror balls on wheels
By the mid-1970s disco was the sound of the moment, and rinks noticed. The Village Skating rink in Greenwich Village began spinning disco records in 1976, and suburban rinks soon followed with DJs, flashing lights, fog and mirror balls. A roller disco was basically a nightclub where everybody happened to be wearing skates.
In 1979 the craze peaked. Billboard estimated there were about 5,000 roller rinks in the United States, drawing more than 28 million skaters. Celebrities headed to Brooklyn to skate at the Empire, and Cher hosted a skate party there that year.
The soundtrack
The music made the moves. Chic's "Good Times", released in June 1979, name-checks roller skates, and Vaughan Mason and Crew answered that summer with "Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll", written after a trip to the Empire. Cher released the skate-themed single "Hell on Wheels" in October, and the movie Roller Boogie, starring Linda Blair and champion freestyle skater Jim Bray, arrived in December.
The same decade also put softer polyurethane wheels in the spotlight. A Virginia plastics factory had first tried them on rental roller skates, and Frank Nasworthy turned them into a skateboarding revolution in California in the early 1970s, proving how much smoother and grippier wheels could be.
Couples skate, forever
The disco wave faded in the early 1980s, inline skates took over in the 1990s, and many classic city rinks eventually closed. But the culture never really left. Birthday parties, adult nights and the lights-down couples skate kept rinks spinning.
In 2020, roller skating came roaring back as people looked for a fun way to move, and skate shops sold out. If you have ever rented a pair of tan quads with orange wheels and tried not to fall during the limbo, you already know: the rink is still the place to be.
- A roller disco hall lit up in neon: Charlotte Coneybeer she_sees, CC0
- Roller disco skaters in Brooklyn, 1979: Discoskater, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Oaks Park roller rink, Portland, Oregon: Another Believer, CC BY-SA 4.0
Text written by Original General.
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