mecca. After the World's Fair To retire the US$35,000 debt from the Symphony's production of Aida, Seattle arts patrons founded PONCHO. The resulting gala auction was such a success that it also provided $50,000 to help establish the Seattle Opera, and $16,000 to other organizations. PONCHO would go on to raise over $33 million for the arts over the next several decades. Robert Nesbitt writes in the liner notes to the compilation album Wheedle's Groove that in 1972 the city had "a minimum of twenty live music clubs specializing in funk and soul," and that doesn't count other popular music genres. That collection of live music clubs would shrink drastically beginning in the mid-1970s, first with the rise of disco music and recorded dance music in general, and then with Seattle's slightly rundown center becoming a financial district of new skyscrapers. Writing in 1972, Nard Jones remarked on the Seattle telephone directory having "three solid columns" of art galleries and dealers, representing "an astonishing variety". Of these he singled out the Richard White Gallery (which in 1973 became Foster/White) and the avant-garde Manolides Gallery (now defunct) and the Woodside Gallery (later Gordon Woodside / John Braseth Gallery) in the Broadway district of Capitol Hill. The 1980s It wasn't until the 1980s that Seattle began to be generally recognized as an important performing arts locale. One of the key events in this respect was the Seattle Opera's ambitious and successful staging, under its founding general director Glynn Ross, of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. Performed in its entirety every summer from 1975 through 1983 back-to-back cycles (first in German, then in English, by 1982, The New York Times reported that Seattle had become a serious rival to Bayreuth. Seattle's Wagner festival has continued to the present day, albeit no longer quite such an ambitious annual event. In 1982 the Seattle Chamber Music Society was formed for the purposes of presenting a summer festival of chamber music. The organization has since expanded to include a winter festival and regularly includes internationally recognized artists such as Cynthia Phelps and James Ehnes on their artist roster. The popular music scene at the time included such teen-pop bands as the Allies (whose song "Emma Peel" received a good deal of local play, but never broke out nationally) and the Heaters (later "the Heats"). That same era saw the more sophisticated pop of the short-lived