When Grace Jones was strutting around Studio 54 and Donna Summer was playing records in New York clubs, Empire Rollerdrome made its move in Brooklyn.
It was the late 1970s, the disco fever was in full swing, and the crowd of mostly black and gay Brooklyn folks had spent the decade dancing and skating in the Empire. Unlike some of the elite nightclubs in Manhattan, the ice rink was a welcoming place with no velvet ropes or moody bouncers. Anyone with a few dollars could get in.
As it became a nightlife hot spot, skaters and celebrities from different parts of the city traveled to Empire to experience its “wonder maple” floor, where the Detroit Stride met Cincinnati style and Brooklyn Bounce. Cher threw parties there. Ben Vereen and John F. Kennedy Jr. slid across the rink.
At the center of it all was Bill Butler, a skater whose flair and skill were anchored in his many nicknames: Brother Bounce; Mr. Charisma; and on various occasions the king, the grandfather and the godfather of the roller disco.
“He would do all those things that just looked impossible – twists and turns and dips and changes of direction in an instant,” said Elin Schoen, who profiled him for New York Magazine at the time. “It was like watching a whirling dervish.”
Mr. Butler’s skating-jammin style, which is composed of rhythmic dips, spins, cross-crosses and turns, is now seen by other skaters as the beginning of roller disco.
When he joined Empire in the 1950s, Mr. Butler just wanted to skate.
“I didn’t know anything about Empire,” said the 87-year-old butler in a video interview from his Atlanta home. “I didn’t know I was going to destroy the place.”
From the beginning, Mr. Butler pushed for new sounds. Traditionally, ice rinks hired live musicians to play rhythmic music on organs, often bought second-hand in churches and theaters. Or they had DJs who played music at predictable tempos that allowed the skaters to match the beat.
It was in 1957, when he was a young man in the Air Force, that Mr. Butler first went to Empire. He arrived in his uniform with a Jimmy Forrest LP and Count Basie’s “Night Train” under his arm and convinced the DJ to play his record. As the swinging blues filled the air, Mr. Butler made his movements, spinning through the crowd, and walking backwards to the music.
In the mid-1960s he persuaded Gloria McCarthy, the daughter of an Empire owner, to change the music. Friday turned into “Bounce Night” when popular music – jazz, R&B, funk, and then disco – boomed from the speakers.
In the early 1970s, Empire replaced its live organist with a DJ. In 1980, club sound designer Richard Long, who had developed sound systems for places like Studio 54 and Paradise Garage, redesigned the ice rink, which was renamed Empire Roller Disco, to include a 20,000-watt stereo system.
This was the empire at its height. It was “like a Mecca,” said Robert Clayton, who DJ Big Bob there for more than 20 years. “You didn’t go skating until you got to Empire.”
The skater many people came to was Mr. Butler, whose flashy movements attracted admirers and brought him students. Cher even hired him as a skating date for a night at the Empire shortly after the release of her roller disco-inspired song “Hell on Wheels”.
“If you skate with him, you weren’t afraid of falling,” said Ms. Schön, the reporter, in a telephone interview.
“When you go to ballet and see these performers, don’t think their feet must hurt,” she added. “This is what Bill made skating look like; He made it look simple, and I think it turned into an art form. “
Mr. Butler, who grew up in Detroit, learned to skate there in the 1940s and started out at the Arcadia Roller Rink on Woodward Avenue. Black skaters were only allowed to be in Arcadia one night a week, and on those evenings the rink hired a DJ instead of a traditional organist to play soul and R&B.
“We used to call it Roller Rocking,” Butler told Rolling Stone in 1979. “They just changed the names. Black people have been jamming on ice skates for as long as I can remember. But the terms don’t matter – it’s the skating. It’s the way you move your body. “
In Arcadia, 10-year-old Bill noticed a skater named Archie move his body and stun the crowd by sliding backwards with his hair combed back and his boots untied.
“It ran clockwise while the rest of us ran counter-clockwise and that was driving me crazy,” said Mr. Butler.
After that, Mr. Butler used the money he had earned to deliver groceries to buy his own ice skates for what was then a whopping $ 23. But he wasn’t ready to skate, he said, until he could command the rink like Archie. So he practiced in his family’s basement, sliding into the hot water kettle and coal canister to perfect his step.
Nobody knew he was skating, he said; He was a loner – he took the bus to and from the ice rink by himself. Even after joining the Air Force and traveling, he slipped away from the base alone to check out the local ice rinks.
When he moved to Brooklyn in 1957, he brought with him his music and a variety of moves that he had taken from skating everywhere. Soon, he said, he was spending most of his nights at the Empire, where he began giving classes to those interested in his style.
He called himself Jamma, a term he had borrowed from both jazz and roller derby. (In roller derby, it refers to the team member trying to pull in front of the pack and ideally lap the group.) Jammas, Mr. Butler said, build their movements by focusing on the fulcrum points of the skate. By rooting their movements in different parts of the inside or outside edge of the shoe, skaters can properly grip the ground and push it off with intent and force.
“If you have the technique, the improvisational part won’t break a sweat,” he said. “You have the sophistication to be an improviser – a person who can skate syncopated rhythm.”
He taught this to generations of skaters and brought it to the cinema. He has worked as a skating director on films such as “The Warriors” (1979), “Xanadu” (1980) and later “Roll Bounce” (2005) that helped bring the funky, colorful world of skating into the mainstream of pop culture bring.
Mr. Butler also opened an ice skating school on Long Island, where he lived. He was recruiting new students in the late 1970s and commuting to Brooklyn regularly to continue teaching at Empire.
One of his former students, Denise Speetzen, was 11 years old when she started training with Mr. Butler in the 1980s. As she got older and met skaters from all over the world, she discovered a common thread.
“They said, ‘Oh, we always drove this way because this is the kind of music we liked, so we have this other kind of influence or boast,” she said, “but when you talk to them longer and longer and tracing who taught each person is like a family tree. “
“After all, you can trace it all back,” she continued, “and it will come back to Bill.”
Mr. Clayton, who traveled the world as a guest DJ to ice rinks, also recognized Mr. Butler’s signatures. “All of that came from Detroit,” Clayton said, referring to popular moves like skate pulls and tension drops, “but he refined it and made it better.”
In 2003, Mr. Butler moved to Atlanta where he continued to teach at local ice rinks. After 77 years of perfecting his moves on ice rinks around the world, the pandemic has forced him to hang up his skates for the time being. He says he plans to go back to skating and teaching as soon as it’s safe.
And his ideas about skating haven’t changed.
“Space plus beat correspond to what we do with our bodies and feet,” he said. “That’s where I come from.”
