White folks trying to sound like black folks: that’s your condensed history of rock ’n’ roll right there. Some 60-plus years of felony vocal identity theft. It may or may not have begun with Sun Studio’s Sam Phillips, who famously said, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.”
In any event, shortly thereafter a young Elvis Presley walked through Phillips’ door, and white singers from P.J. Proby to Michael McDonald to the Young Americans incarnation of David Bowie have been giving it their soul brother best ever since. Why, even John Denver tried to horn in on the trend, and I own a mint copy of his 12-inch club hit “Get Up Offa Grandma’s Funky Feather Bed (Geriatric Sex Machine)” to prove it. None other than James Brown called it “out of sight.” Or perhaps he said, “Get it out of sight.” I’m pretty sure there’s a difference.
All of this raises the question: Who is the biggest, baddest, blackest white singer of them all? Elvis? Janis Joplin? Mick Jagger? Gilbert O’Sullivan? I don’t know about you, but my vote goes to Rob Parissi of Mingo Junction, Ohio, population 3,454. Parissi, in case the name doesn’t ring a bell, was the vocalist, guitarist, and chief songwriter behind Wild Cherry, the band that brought us the great “Play That Funky Music.” Parissi sounded so much like a brother he made Joe Cocker sound like Leo Sayer.
As for Wild Cherry—which swiped its name from a brand of cough drops—it played a hardcore hybrid of funk rock, soul, and disco that blew away other white competitors in the black sound appropriation sweepstakes such as the Average White Band and KC and the Sunshine Band. When it came to pure funk copyright infringement, Wild Cherry was King.
And to think it almost didn’t happen. Formed in 1970 in Steubenville, Ohio—whose chief claim to fame is that its population is declining at a faster rate than any other urban area in the U.S.A.—Wild Cherry plied the hardscrabble Rust Belt circuit, playing hard rock and funk at clubs from Pittsburgh to Wheeling, West Virginia, and releasing several albums in the process. But the LPs went nowhere and Parissi became disillusioned, so disillusioned in fact that he quit the music biz to become the manager of a series of Bonanza steak houses.
Fortunately, Parissi liked selling the sizzle even less than being too impoverished to afford the steak, so he re-formed Wild Cherry with a new cast of musicians just as disco, the only biblical scourge to favor wide lapels and platform shoes, was sweeping the nation, moving behinds from New York to LA while creating a new species of humankind, the glitter ball millionaire. One result of the advent of disco was that black patrons at Wild Cherry gigs took to asking the band to play more dance music. And on one fateful night at the 2001 Club in Pittsburgh, black fans playfully asked, “Are you white boys gonna play some funky music?” Between sets, drummer Ron Beitle, who was one skinny vowel away from being a Beatle, uttered those famous words, “Play that funky music, white boy.” Parissi liked the phrase so much he sat down and wrote “Play That Funky Music” on a drink order pad, in five minutes flat. I wonder if he still has the order pad. I hope so, because it’s a holy relic. Anyway, the rest, as they say, is history.
The 7-inch of “Play That Funky Music” skyrocketed to No. 1, while Wild Cherry’s eponymous 1976 LP went platinum. And it’s no great mystery why. “Play That Funky Music” is one frenzied fandango of fanny-shaking funkification, with Parissi throwing himself into the vocals like a man possessed. Or deranged even. His is a bravura vocal performance, better even than The Trammps’ Jimmy Ellis’ vocals on “Disco Inferno.” If you don’t like “Play That Funky Music” you’re whiter than the suit John Travolta sports in Saturday Night Fever, and possibly even whiter than that habitué of Disco Mecca Studio 54, Andy Warhol, and I’m talking about the dead Andy, not the merely deadpan one. As for Parissi, he modestly attributed the success of Wild Cherry’s brand of “electrified funk” to geography, telling one interviewer, “We were lucky. Cleveland is a Rock ‘n’ Roll town. Pittsburgh is an R&B town. If you come from the middle of that, you see why a lot of White Funk guys come from there.”
Geography and good timing aside, the real reason for Wild Cherry’s success was Parissi, period. The guy was a natural, both in the vocal and songwriting departments. It’s obvious in “Play That Funky Music,” which opens with Parissi playing a guitar riff as instantly recognizable as the one in “Smoke on the Water,” and then singing in a voice that could have belonged to a member of Funkadelic, “Hey, once I was a boogie singer, playing in a rock’n’roll band.” And from there the tune, whose subject matter is its own creation, is sheer genius, from the crack rhythm section to the unforgettable chorus to Parissi’s super-cool guitar solo. Throw in some tremendous backing vocals, a happening horn section, and the way Parissi sings, “I was funking out in every way,” and its no wonder “Play That Funky Music,” as Parissi sings, changed “both rock and roll and minds.” It was that rare disco-friendly tune that even rockers could love, and back in the days when rockers hated disco to the extent that Chicago’s rock-oriented radio station WLUP-FM held a “Disco Demolition Night” during which it exploded a crate of disco LPs between the games of a double-header at Chicago’s Comiskey Park (“Burn baby burn” indeed!), that was no small achievement.
If Wild Cherry had nothing to recommend it besides “Play That Funky Music” I would still love it, but fortunately it boasts a slew of other excellent cuts as well. The mid-tempo second cut “The Lady Wants Your Money” isn’t the best of them, but it boasts a nice groove, one truly funkadelicious guitar solo, and oodles of great backing vocals (provided by Becky Goldstein and Tampa Lann), to say nothing of what sounds like a synthesizer imitating a harmonica imitating a train. “99 ½,” Wild Cherry’s cover of Wilson Pickett’s “Ninety Nine and a Half Won’t Do,” is more like it. Indeed I like it more than the original, because while it may be less soulful, it’s a whole lot funkier. The tune opens like a rock song but quickly makes a freaky turn into Funkytown, with Parissi singing in a crazed voice totally unlike the crazed voice he employs on “Play That Funky Music” while the horn section kicks ass and backing vocalists Goldstein and Lann throw down. If you can’t dance to this baby you don’t have legs, and the same goes for the very up-tempo “Don’t Go Near the Water,” one spin-worthy slab of slinky syncopation on which Parissi employs his “Play That Funky Music” vocals to wonderful effect. But it’s the sinuous guitar line that runs through the tune that makes this one so infectious, that and the groovy percussion and those super-funky female backing vocals.
Wild Cherry’s cover of Martha and the Vandellas’ propulsive, melodic, and eminently danceable “Nowhere to Run” is another winner, what with sessions guy (and future band member) Mark Avsec sending all manner of squiggly synthesizer lines your way, to say nothing of some groovy tandem singing, lots of cool backing vocals, and the rock-steady drumming of Beatle, I mean Beitle. Sure, I miss the snow chains Holland-Dozier-Holland and the Funk Brothers used to give the original its distinctive percussive sound, but Wild Cherry’s take is every bit as soul savvy as Martha and the Vandellas’ 1965 Motown version. Meanwhile, Parissi and Company’s cover of The Commodores’ 1974 non-hit “I Feel Sanctified” is tremendous as well, opening with a voice crying, “Doing all right out there?” to which a crowd responds with whoops and applause. While the horn section, Beitle’s excellent drumming, and one very funky lead guitar do most of the heavy lifting, the song also benefits from Parissi’s gruff vocals, which are wonderfully complemented by the higher-pitched group vocals on the choruses.
“Hold On” is one of the two tunes on Wild Cherry I’m not completely enthralled by. It’s a mid-tempo blue-eyed soul number, and blue-eyed soul is not Parissi’s strong suit. He does his best, but he’s no crooner, and in the end “Hold On” is distinguished mainly by the excellent backing vocals of Goldstein and Lann on the choruses and a guitar riff that is catchy but that I don’t particularly like. My own feeling is that Parissi should have passed this one on to Hall and Oates and made a bazillion dollars in royalties, because I’m dead certain Daryl Hall could have nailed it. Nor am I crazy about “Get It Up,” a high-speed instrumental (aside from the occasional female vocalist crying “Get it up”) that sounds more like a backing track than a finished song, and has “rush job” written all over it. A mash-up of rock, funk, and disco, I have a hard time imagining anyone dancing to it, but I will say this for “Get It Up”: it would have made a wonderful theme song for a TV show about one badass brother (let’s call him Superfro) who also happens to be a cop working under cover. I can almost see him sliding across the hood of a car, bell-bottoms flaring and .357 blazing, during the opening credits.
LP closer “What in the Funk Do You See” is a mid-tempo number with a dance-friendly beat that I initially wrote off as a po-faced cousin of “Play That Funky Music.” But upon repeated listens I grew to love the fabulous interplay between Parissi and his red hot female vocalists, as well as its funkadunk guitar, and I’ve come to the conclusion that “What in the Funk Do You See” is the best Parliament tune Parliament never wrote. Parissi’s elastic vocals are positively jaw-dropping, going from the guttural to the upper registers in less time than it takes a couple to bump behinds, and the lyrics are great: Parissi says he feels like James Brown, delivers one of rock’s great line when he sings, “The hell with Woodstock/I’m going on Soul Train!” and closes the tune and the LP by repeating, “I’m going on Sooouuuul Train!”
Wild Cherry went on to record three more LPs between 1977 and 1979, but like Richard Harris sings in “MacArthur Park,” Parissi never found that recipe again, oh no. The songs got smoother, the band failed to play to its own strengths by tipping the ratio of songs away from funk and towards soul ballads, and Parissi never sounded like the funkalunatic of “Play That Funky Music” again, as “1 2 3 Kind of Love,” that awkwardly titled failure of a cash-in “Keep on Playing That Funky Music Again,” and the too-slick by a disco mile “Take Me Back” demonstrate. Not even the addition of vocalist/guitarist Donnie Iris on 1979’s Only the Wild Survive could propel Wild Cherry back onto the charts, although tunes like “Hold On To Your Hiney” and “All Night’s All Right” show flashes of the genius that produced Wild Cherry.
The band broke up after Only the Wild Survive and Parissi found a new niche playing smooth jazz, off all things. I happen to think smooth jazz is the Devil’s music, but what are you going to do, besides wish Parissi the best and hope he someday re-forms Wild Cherry and returns to the funky fold, because his voice is one in a million, he wrote some great electrified funk, and he did indeed make it on to Soul Train, which makes me glad. I suggest you disco down and check out the video on YouTube, both to hear Don Cornelius (greatest voice ever, period) chat with Parissi and to crack up at the sight of Donnie Iris, who’s the spitting image of Weird Al Yankovic.
Now excuse me, cuz I must be funking out in every way, and I don’t want to be late for my weekly Hustle lesson. Because as General George MacArthur never said, “Disco shall return,” and I want to be disco-booted, all-white-suited, gold-chain bright, and ready to “shake my behind like dynamite” (thanks, Gino Vannelli) when it does. Now, does anybody know where I can get my hands on some poppers?
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
