In 1977, Donna Summer’s secretary walked out of the Casablanca Records office onto Sunset Boulevard to run an errand — and was mistaken for a streetwalker by the Los Angeles police. That misunderstanding, absurd and a little dangerous, became one of the biggest disco anthems ever recorded. “Bad Girls” — five weeks at number one, the defining song of 1979, the track that turned the Queen of Disco into a full-blown cultural phenomenon — started as a joke in a Hollywood office and nearly became a Cher record. It survived label politics, a two-year exile in the tape vault, and the supposed death of disco itself. This is the story of how Donna Summer fought for her song and won.
The Secretary on Sunset Boulevard
Picture Casablanca Records in 1977: Neil Bogart’s label is the wildest party in the music business, home to Kiss, the Village People, Parliament — and Donna Summer, the Boston church girl who had become Europe’s disco queen with “Love to Love You Baby.” The office sits on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, in the thick of the street life that gives the boulevard its reputation.
One afternoon, Summer’s secretary, Nellie Prestwood, left the office to run an errand down Sunset. What happened next depends on who’s telling the story — in some versions she was stopped by police, in others merely propositioned — but the punchline was the same: the cops mistook Bogart’s respectable office worker for a working girl. Summer, who had a wicked sense of humor beneath the diva image, thought it was hilarious. And then, being a songwriter, she thought it was a song.
Back in the office, she started playing with the idea: a streetwise anthem about the girls who worked the boulevard after dark — not judging them, not pitying them, but celebrating their swagger, their survival, their defiant joy. She had lived in New York and Munich; she knew what the night looked like from the sidewalk’s point of view. The song practically wrote itself.
The Demo With Brooklyn Dreams
To cut the demo, Summer turned to Brooklyn Dreams, the trio of Joe “Bean” Esposito, Eddie Hokenson, and Bruce Sudano who were part of the Casablanca family. Together — Summer, Esposito, Hokenson, and Sudano — they hammered out a rough, rocking version of “Bad Girls,” with a guitar-driven edge that owed more to rock and roll than to the lush Munich disco of Giorgio Moroder. All four shared the songwriting credit, a collaboration born in a single inspired session.
It was Sudano who would become the most important collaborator of Summer’s life — within a few years, her husband of more than three decades — but in 1977 he was just a fellow songwriter with a good groove and a good ear. The demo crackled. It had attitude, a strut, a chorus that stuck in your head like a siren. Summer was thrilled. She took it to the label, confident she had a hit.
She was wrong about one thing: the label’s reaction.
The Song Neil Bogart Wanted to Give Away
Neil Bogart heard the demo and heard a hit — just not a Donna Summer hit. The track was too raw, too rock, too far from the sensual disco goddess image he had built around her. In Bogart’s mind, “Bad Girls” belonged to someone edgier, someone with a different persona. His choice: Cher.
Yes — Cher. Bogart wanted to give “Bad Girls” to the queen of variety television, and there were even discussions about other artists, including the idea that it could work for a group like LaBelle. Summer was floored. She had written the song. She had lived the joke that inspired it. And now her own label boss was shopping it to other singers like she was a demo vocalist.
Her response was immediate and unambiguous. In a 2003 NPR interview, she remembered it plainly: “This is my song.” She refused to let it go. It was one of the first times in her career that Donna Summer — the compliant church girl, the singer who had let producers shape her image — drew a line and said no. The song sat on a shelf, unreleased, for nearly two years, while the label figured out what to do with the artist who wouldn’t surrender. Looking back, that refusal was the moment Donna Summer stopped being a voice for hire and became an artist in full — the moment she decided her instincts were worth more than her boss’s.
The Tape in the Vault
“Bad Girls” might have died in the vault if not for an accident of archiving. Nearly two years after the demo was cut, Casablanca engineer Steve Smith was digging through tapes and rediscovered the “Bad Girls” demo — and he played it for the right people at the right moment. Disco was at its absolute peak, riding a wave that would crest that very summer. Summer was coming off the triumph of “Live and More” and the chart-topping “MacArthur Park.” The label needed a follow-up album with a statement single, and the demo that had once sounded too rock now sounded like exactly what the moment demanded.
This time, nobody talked about Cher. The song went into full production at Rusk Sound Studios in Los Angeles, with Moroder and Pete Bellotte — the architects of the Munich sound — producing, and Harold Faltermeyer, the future “Axel F” composer, handling arrangements. The rough rock demo was rebuilt into a disco juggernaut: that unstoppable bassline, the horns, the handclaps, and Summer’s vocal — playful, commanding, winking — riding over the top like she owned the boulevard. Which, by then, she did.
“Toot Toot, Beep Beep”
Every great record has a moment of studio serendipity, and “Bad Girls” had one of the best. During production, there were empty spots in the arrangement that needed filling — little gaps that begged for something memorable. The solution became the song’s signature: the “toot toot, beep beep” refrain, a playful imitation of car horns honking on a busy street.
The inspiration came from an unlikely source: Joe Cuba’s 1966 Latin soul hit “Bang Bang,” which used a similar call-and-response device. Moroder and the team adapted the idea into a horn-honking hook that turned the whole song into a three-minute traffic jam on Sunset Boulevard — cars cruising, horns blaring, the girls strutting past. It was silly, it was perfect, and it made the record instantly recognizable from the first two seconds. Decades later, you still can’t hear those honks without picturing the boulevard at midnight.
Five Weeks at Number One
“Bad Girls” was released on June 23, 1979, as the second single from the double album “Bad Girls” — and it detonated. The song hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on July 14, 1979, knocking Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell” off the top, and stayed there for five weeks. It also topped the R&B chart, proving that Summer’s appeal crossed every boundary the industry tried to draw.
The album itself was a landmark: a double LP that showed Summer could do it all — disco, rock, ballads, soul — and it produced three more hits in “Hot Stuff,” “Dim All the Lights,” and “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough),” her electrifying duet with Barbra Streisand. For a few months in 1979, Donna Summer wasn’t just the Queen of Disco. She was the biggest pop star on the planet, full stop — with multiple singles storming the charts at once, a feat few artists in history have ever managed.
The song’s imagery became iconic in its own right. The album cover showed Summer under a red streetlight, channeling the boulevard girls she sang about. The video made for her 1980 television special ended with her waving goodbye from the back of a police car — a wink at the secretary, the cops, and the whole glorious misunderstanding that had started it all.
The Song That Outlived Disco
Here is the delicious irony: “Bad Girls” hit number one on July 14, 1979 — two days after Disco Demolition Night, the infamous Chicago baseball-stadium record-burning that was supposed to kill disco forever. While rock fans were chanting “disco sucks” in the bleachers, America was buying Donna Summer’s record in numbers that made the whole backlash look like a tantrum. The song didn’t just survive disco’s supposed death. It danced on its grave — proof that the music’s real audience, the dancers and the dreamers, had never gotten the memo.
The “Bad Girls” album earned Summer Grammy nominations and cemented her as far more than a disco act — the record’s rock and soul excursions pointed to the versatile artist she had always been. Decades later, when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame finally inducted her in 2013, “Bad Girls” was Exhibit A: not a novelty, not a fad, but a masterclass in pop songwriting that outlasted every trend it rode in on.
The Song She Refused to Lose
Years later, Summer reflected on what “Bad Girls” had meant — and not just as a hit. “I was mentally ready for fame but not emotionally,” she told the Los Angeles Times, in a quote that captures the double edge of her stardom. “I think we’re all hookers to somebody. We all sell something.” It was a startlingly honest line from a woman the industry had tried to package as a fantasy — an acknowledgment that the song’s streetwise heroines and the singer herself had more in common than anyone wanted to admit. She had sold her voice, her image, her privacy; the least she could do was sing about the transaction with a knowing wink.
“Bad Girls” endures because it was true in a way disco rarely allowed: funny, tough, and human. It was the song Donna Summer wrote from a real moment, fought her label to keep, and turned into the biggest hit of her remarkable career. Neil Bogart wanted to give it to Cher. Thank heaven she said no — and thank heaven the tape survived.
Every era gets the anthem it deserves, and 1979 got “Bad Girls” — a song born from a secretary’s misadventure on Sunset Boulevard, nearly stolen by a label boss, rescued from a tape vault, crowned with car horns, and released two days after disco’s funeral. Donna Summer didn’t just sing the biggest record of the year. She fought for it, believed in it when her own label didn’t, and made it hers with a wink and a strut. The boulevard girls got their anthem. And the church girl from Boston got the last laugh — five weeks at number one, and a song that still honks its way into every dance party, half a century later.
Leave a Reply