Buck Rogers Does Disco: How an ’80s TV show inspired an underground jam

Johnny Harris is not from Philadelphia but an Edinburgh-born Scot born to Welsh parents.

He didn’t grow up in R&B and soul but rock and pop. He wasn’t working with Gamble & Huff but Glen Larson & NBC. “Odyssey” debuted not at the Paradise Garage but on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, a schmaltzy sci-fi TV series that was supposed to take place in the year 2491 but was more evocative of Hollywood in the late 1970s, much less than the steamy discotheques of Miami where “Odyssey” would find a home.

The disco era was plagued by corny musical tie-ins with popular culture, with records often produced by artists with little connection to the roots of the most important new musical movement since electric blues. “Between 1974 and 1977,” Nicky Siano once said, “any record that had the word ‘disco’ on it would just sell. People didn’t have to hear it. They just took it and bought it. When the record companies saw that happening, they put any old piece of garbage in that wrapper. People started getting burnt, and they got really pissed off. And they stopped buying.”

“Odyssey” is from the tail end of that era. But despite having been a purely synthetic creation grown in a lab in Hollywood, “Odyssey” is actually good. I mean it’s really good. Johnny Harris broke his creation up into two parts that take up both sides of a 12″ — and “Odyssey” was actually released on a 12″ (rather than solely the 45rpm records that filled jukeboxes) by a very legit outfit — Sunshine Sound Disco, the short-lived sublabel of the legendary TK Disco.

How a guy who made music for TV shows got to TK Disco and released one of Miami disco’s most loved and futuristic recordings is a strange story. Johnny Harris was originally a trumpet player, with traditional schooling in London. He first made his name with those abominable Beatles cover albums — not the Beatles playing covers, but bands covering the Beatles — that proliferated in music store windows in the mid-1960s and have plagued record collectors ever since.

“I was approached by an independent record company to do a record called Top 6,” Harris, who passed away in 2020, recalled for a fan interview. “The idea was, each month I would second-guess what was going to appear on next month’s top ten and emulate it. Of course, most of the time it was the Stones and the Beatles. The record company’s idea was, if I could sound like these guys, we could release this single, which would have six tracks on it, but it would be the same price as a standard single. The first one we did sold enough to get into the top 40.”

Harris was hired by Pye Records (home of the Kinks and Petula Clark) as an arranger and conductor, later working with Nancy Sinatra, Tom Jones, Paul Anka and Englebert Humperdinck. He also had a solo career, but by the late 1970s he was in Hollywood and mostly doing work for TV.

“Odyssey” was not featured on Buck Rogers as a promotional tie-in: Harris was an old hand on the show. He composed the music for five episodes according to IMDb, and created the brief lead-in to the theme music at the beginning of each episode — the tense, pumping fanfare that played underneath the narration about Buck’s long, cold journey from the year 1987 to 2491. Many of the special effects and props for the show were recycled from Larson’s previous project, Battlestar Galactica; the writing and acting (mostly one-liners and occasional fights settled by acrobatic judo) didn’t make it stand out much either. But it was tapped into something of its time, with its slinky, skin-tight costumes and sci-fi takes on drug use and a hedonistic life beyond the styrofoam sets.

Harris himself later described the episode as “really quite stupid” but it had an important audience. Harry Casey from KC and the Sunshine Band was in the television audience that night and was, surprisingly, intrigued.

“Odyssey” was featured in an episode called “Space Rockers” which was pretty much standard fare for the show. A band wearing glitter in their hair and tiny light bulbs on their costumes are employed by a devious rock promoter, who implants secret messages in their music which causes listeners to go insane (and maybe even worship Satan and play Dungeons & Dragons). These are the space rockers. The music they play in the episode to drive kids wild is “Odyssey.”

Writing the song, Harris said, was actually sort of a chore. The band in the show was supposed to be warming up and needed some music. “In the original scene, they were just messing around,” he said. “I had to score it so the music sort of went along with their arm movements.” In context, it is easy to tell that the person that wrote “Odyssey” worked extensively on Buck Rogers — it has a few sound signatures recognizable with other music Harris wrote for the show.

Harris himself later described the episode as “really quite stupid, I suppose,” but it had an important audience. Harry Casey (KC from KC and the Sunshine Band) was in the television audience and was, surprisingly, intrigued. He called up the show to ask for the 24 track master and brought it into the studio for some touch-ups. “The band added a few things like handclaps, a few shouts and another drum in their own Miami studios,” Harris recalled. “Then it was released as a 12″ club record. It was a big hit.”

The two parts of “Odyssey” don’t lock together (unlike Dan Hartman’s “Vertigo”/”Relight My Fire” from the previous year), and there’s no real reason for a DJ to play them back-to-back (also unlike “Vertigo”/”Relight My Fire”). On first listen, you can hear some Euro influences, perhaps a strain of the prog-rock lineage that spawned some of disco’s most psychedelic performances. But the percussion (aided no doubt by Harry Casey in the studio) is pure American shakedown soul.

There wasn’t a whole lot of anything that sounded like “Odyssey Part 1” in 1980. It’s appropriate for its setting that “Odyssey Part 1” sounds like the future — like disco if it had been allowed to roam free for another decade rather than being forced to shelter-in-place by racists, homophobes and coked-up executives with haircuts like Eddie Money.

“Odyssey Part 2” is more at home in a set spiked with Italo Disco, with leads climbing to heights that are hard to reach without the assistance of God or amyl nitrate. The keys return just when the loops start to drag and raise everyone back up into the atmosphere. What’s really cool about “Odyssey Part 2” is how tinny and synthetic the rhythm track sounds, but this precursor to the future sound of machines was made with acoustic instruments. Fingernails or metal picks give the riffs a spiky edge that became much more prominent in records made a few years later.

Among the last tracks released by Sunshine Sound Disco in its heyday, “Odyssey,” over-pressed like most disco records from 1980, is nothing like a rarity though it is a bit obscure. It also enjoyed a resurgence of interest from people outside of the DJ field from its inclusion in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. (Such a choice selection is not surprising: Rockstar Games has a bunch of heavy heads on their music crew lead by Ivan Pavlovich, co-founder of Chicago house label Guidance, and they frequently license eclectic and unusual tracks to fit the aesthetic of their games.)

From the background of the artist that made it and the circumstances of its release, “Odyssey” has no right to be as good as it is. This strange artifact from a year when major label disco was choking on its own fumes has to be considered one of the best if unusual instrumentals of the disco era — like the show that inspired it, lively, manic, a bit corny but fun.

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