This tale starts with a singer failing to show up for a session and ends with a neglected genius being crushed under his own bulldozer.
George McCrae only got to sing Rock Your Baby because his wife, Gwen, was held up elsewhere and TK Records employees Harry W Casey and Richard Finch were determined to make some use of the after-hours studio time they were allowed by their employers.
It turned out that moustachoed former US Navy serviceman George was the owner of a dreamy falsetto which perfect matched this blissful slice of proto disco driven by Casey's gospelly organ swells and Jerome Smith's funky, propulsive guitar.
Rock Your Baby reached No.1 on both sides of the Atlantic, along with 80 other countries, on its way to selling 11million copies.
It was only denied the title of the first-ever disco No.1 because The Hues Corporation's Rock The Boat had got there a week earlier in the US in July 1974. Rolling Stone still declared Rock Your Baby the best single of the year.
Casey and Finch obviously didn't waste any time getting an album out and wisely decided not to mess with the formula.
Starting with a 6:20 version of Rock Your Baby - twice as long as the single and essentially a 12-inch version before such a notion existed - the remaining three tracks on side one all mine the same ecstatically discofied vein.
What's interesting here is how stripped back it all is. Casey and Finch were already up and running with KC & The Sunshine Band, who came with an extensive horn section.
But there's no horns anywhere on Rock Your Baby - and hardly any lyrics either.
You Got My Heart has two two-line verses and apart from that it's McCrae singing the title, saying 'baby' a lot and whooping joyfully.
You Can Have It All is even more to the point, with two two-line verses, all four of which start with 'If you want...'.
McCrae serves more as verbal percussion than a frontman, adding to the hypnotic effect of the music with his blissed-out repetition.
Casey and Finch seem to have aimed these songs purely at the dynamic of a couple using a song to seduce each other on a dance floor.
When McCrae sings 'Look at you/sexy woman' over and over again on Look At You at the start of side two, it feels exactly like the sort of thing the local nightclub Casanova would mouth while busting out his best moves to impress his target.
The mood finally falters on halfway through side two with I Need Somebody Like You, a soulful stomper you'd expect from Diana Ross.
But I Get Lifted and a two-minute reprise of Rock Your Baby finish off the album in style.
Rock Your Baby shifted massive units but it's now largely forgotten. The reason is probably because the public just don't see disco acts as album artists.
We dance to it at weddings, we may even stick on a compilation at home occasionally on Friday nights, but the perception is that it's not to be taken seriously.
Not that Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards had any such qualms when they lifted Jerome Smith's brilliant guitar sound and took it to the bank with Chic.
Smith transfered to KC & The Sunshine Band, underpinning hits such as Boogie Shoes, Get Down Tonight and Queen Of Clubs (the later also featuring uncredited vocals from McCrae).
Even Gwen got in the act, making up for her late appearance with the huge hit Rockin Chair, a response song to Rock Your Baby.
She and George also had another crack together - producing at least one overlooked nugget with The Rub before they parted ways amid accusations of marital violence.
It all went wrong for Smith when he was kicked out of KC&TSB for drug problems in 1979. He ended up working in construction before being crushed by a bulldozer while working in Florida aged 47.
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