Song Of The Day 1/7/2016: Walter Murphy & the Big Apple Band – “California Strut”
Anyway. "A Fifth of Beethoven" was a disco reworking of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. It's a conceptual descendant of Deodato's outstanding arrangement of Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra," with all of the dramaticism and fairly little of the will to power. They called it "A Fifth of Beethoven" because a "fifth" of alcoholic beverages was a standard measurement, and people drank lots of alcoholic beverages in discotheques. A "fifth" was, from all the inexact data I've been rifling through this evening, somewhere around 30 fluid ounces. So a fifth of Beethoven, or any romantic composer really, would get you really messed up. Then you'd almost have to move on to Strauss just to bounce off the Beethoven. It was all very manageable; it was only when people started doing fifths of Stravinsky that the world started going to hell.
"California Strut" was the B-side of "A Fifth of Beethoven." It has no Beethoven, no Strauss, no Stravinsky. It might have a touch of the Love Unlimited Orchestra. And there was no stopping at just one fifth of them, let me tell you.