CULTUREGRAM : Disco’s Back! (So Let’s Party) : That’s the Way, Uh-Huh, Uh-Huh, They Like It

Just off the corner of Figueroa and Jefferson, where cars are lining up to park outside the Shrine Auditorium, are a dozen people holding “I Need Tickets” placards. One hopeful in particular inspires triple-takes from unwitting passers-by: Sign-waver Eric Spidell is wearing a grotesque white Travolta tux with 14-inch-circumference flairs on the pants, an earth-toned polka-dot shirt, high-heeled brown boots and--between pointed collars that poke into adjacent counties--a shiny medallion that by no means resembles gold.

What Spidell and his fellow booty-shaking seekers are desperate to get ducats for on this Friday night is, of course, a disco inferno--the “Power 106 Retro Party,” a sold-out ball featuring live performances from KC & the Sunshine Band and Thelma Houston, plus DJs spinning all the hits that’re fit to hustle to. The event is an outgrowth of KPRW-FM’s weekly “retro” show on Sundays and is proving so popular that scalpers are asking $60 for tickets.

The 5,000 attendees have been asked to dress the part, and about half of those lined up around the block have dutifully taken up halter tops, hot pants, jump suits, shag and Afro wigs, belt buckles the size of Cincinnati, and the rallying cry of no-natural-fibers. Ugly as sin? That’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, they like it. To the tune of Shirley & Company: This crowd has no shame, shame, shame .

And they’re not alone, judging from such recent phenomena as “Brady Bunch” stage shows, the re-emergence of girls’ bell-bottoms in mall stores and Jerry Brown’s brief viability as a presidential candidate. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the culture, the strangely self-deprecating American wave of ‘70s nostalgia that kicked in about five years back hasn’t crested after all.

Can a return of Kahoutek to the night sky as a prophetic sign be far off?

“Everything is 100% polyester,” says Spidell. His vintage duds come from thrift stores, but he’s had the pants altered to actually put more material in the flairs. Spidell’s pal, Andreas Koch, went even further, crafting mind-bogglingly oversized bell-bottoms and putting coat-hanger wire inside the hems, which makes his slacks look like two low-slung hooped skirts coming at you.

Disco “never went out of style,” claims Koch. It didn’t? “Well, it went out,” he allows, “but it’s cyclical. The rhythm is still alive in the new dance music, it’s just altered a little bit.” Events like this offer the twin lure of “a costume party mixed in with the fact that the music was really good.”

Spidell and Koch finally score tickets and go in. So I talk with Alfonso Aguilar of Paramount, who is towering over the line in self-made platform shoes, the vintage thing being impossible to find now. He’s screwed dress shoes onto a pair of carefully carved 5-inch wood blocks. He assures me he can boogie in them. “You wanna try ‘em on?” he offers.

Sure, I say, always ready to step into another man’s stilts, nearly falling over in the process till Aguilar braces me. He tags along in socks as I clunk toward the ticket-taker, Godzilla-like. “Are you comfortable in them?” No, but I can see Monrovia.

Back down to earth and inside the hall, the smoke is chokingly thick, the strobes and mirror balls blinding in pockets of the fog’s absence. Near the stage, the place is packed solid with dancers inadvertently doing the Bump. ( Hey, buddy! Get your lapel out of my eye! ) Most move like typical ‘90s blobs, with only a few select couples having any lingering clue how to dance to disco, which may have represented the last significant gasp of actual touch-dancing--unless you want to count the lambada, but let’s not.

The music itself is strikingly jubilant--”rhythm without the blues,” as Newsweek called it--and free of the horror-movie minor-chord progressions that characterize modern dance genres like techno. Post-hippie-consciousness and pre-AIDS, disco was celebratory music--sing along with Diana Ross on “I’m Coming Out” and be glad to be garish. Many of the hits hold up remarkably well; it’s mostly the fashion that’s hell.

Disco revivalism “fits in great with the rave scene ‘cause it’s so happy,” says Alex Watt of Studio City. “It’s like, take your gang (stuff) out back, but when you’re in here have fun. You can’t really fight to the Bee Gees, you know?”

Shannon Duvall waxes equally philosophic: “Disco is sweat, sex, velour--all the pleasures of life--free.”

The younger attendees here are divided between two camps: those who mostly see the camp appeal of mocking their foolishly dressed forebears, and those who are surprisingly serious about disco as part of their cultural heritage.

“My brother used to be in a low-riders car club when disco was in,” says Peter Padilla, 19, of South-Central. “And you know how you look up to your older brother, how they pass down stuff? It’s mostly an inheritance more than a fan thing. And it’s something different from rap.”

But, respectful or no, Padilla and his buddies from his “graffiti artist crew” had too much pride to dress ‘70s for the occasion: “Nah, can’t have it. We might not look so attractive to the women.”

Natural law dictates that no man can don ‘70s period garb and be flattered. Proving this point is none other than KC himself, whose Sunshine Band is seen to still put on a creditable show as the evening continues but who actually manages to drive people away from the stage by virtue of his tight, all-too-revealing stretch pants. Even this crowd agrees that some fashions should stay dead.

Female ‘70s buffs have a slightly better shot at looking decent. Brunettes can go for that elegantly black-pantsuited, Bianca-at-Studio-54 look. Blonds parting their hair down the middle in front and going for that poufy thing in back take a bigger risk: If it works, you look like Kelly Lynch in “Drugstore Cowboy”--simply smashing--but if you’re a little too old to pull off the Marcia B. Wanna-Be thing, you look like “The Portrait of Dorian Brady,” mid-dissolve.

Speaking of scary, how about the evening’s grand prize, the lucky winner of which will be whisked off to . . . Baltimore, to see a concert by . . . the Village People.

A prize to some; to others, the threat of what torture might befall the wicked in an afterlife.