New York City was the undisputed epicenter of the disco inferno that engulfed America in the mid-1970s. It was the glitter ball and coke-spoon necklace Capital of the World, and home to such legendary discotheques as Studio 54 (natch), the Copacabana, the Funhouse, and Paradise Garage (one of the Big Apple’s first openly gay nightclubs), just to name the best known. It was where you wanted to be if you wanted to dance and be your hedonistic, do the Hustle, natural born-to-boogie self. Naturally 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, which brought disco to the great unwashed from Harrisburg, PA to Hawthorne, CA, was set there. Tony Manero would have been shit out of luck in Milwaukee.
But South Florida, and particularly the environs of Miami, was a hotbed too. And it wasn’t really late to the party—the artists signed to Harry Stones’ TK Records (and the other labels under his umbrella) created some of the earliest disco out there—George McCrae’s 1974 hit “Rock Your Baby” was just the second no-doubt-about-it disco song to top the pop charts. Other TK Records artists included Foxy, Anita “Ring My Bell” Ward, and Peter “Do You Want to Play Funky with Me” Brown, amongst others. And artists from other labels were also on the scene, including (my personal favorite) Rice and Beans Orchestra, who bequeathed us the unforgettable “The Blue Danube Hustle.”
It may have been Miami—where clubgoers thronged such legendary discos as the Limelight, Scaramouche, Pete and Lenny’s, Honey for the Bears, the Copa, and Casanova’s—that garnered all the attention, but it was in humble Hialeah, some eight miles northwest of the Magic City, where the real magic was being made. Hialeah was home to TK Records, and more importantly to the label’s bread and butter act, KC and the Sunshine Band.
Formed in 1973 by Harry Wayne Casey, a TK Records part-timer and co-writer of McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby,” the soon-to-be disco superstars were first known as KC & The Sunshine Junkanoo Band. (Fortunately that “Junkanoo” soon found its way to the disco junkyard.) Theirs was a funk-based sound, complimented by a full horn section and lots of percussion, and they were dance floor favorites from the beginning.
Their 1974 debut didn’t exactly tear up the charts, but the song “Queen of Clubs” (which featured McCrae on lead vocals) became a glitter ball mainstay. It was their second album, 1975’s eponymous KC and the Sunshine Band, that broke huge, thanks largely to a pair of No. 1 singles, “Get Down Tonight” and “That’s the Way I Like It (I Like It),” and a third song (“Boogie Shoes”) that would also score big several years later (in early 1978, to be exact) thanks to its inclusion on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Altogether the band would produce five Billboard chart toppers and one number two before the band went the way of disco in general at the tag end of the seventies.
Feel free to boogie on down to your favorite record store to snatch up the six albums KC and the Sunshine Band released during their commercial heyday. Or play it smart and hustle your way out of said record store with a copy of 1980’s Greatest Hits. It’s the real Van McCoy, despite the inexcusable inclusion of two new tracks (“Let’s Go Rock and Roll” and “All I Want”) both of which put the “lack” in lackluster and made it clear disco was DOA. Otherwise you get all the hits and a pair of superb non-hits (including “Queen of Clubs”) from the band’s debut LP. Greatest Hits is less an album than a funky party accelerator and perfect for a night on Disco Mountain, where the snow is deep and comes straight from Colombia!
KC and the Sunshine Band were the ultimate good times band, and their sound was as bright as the Florida sun. They weren’t out to burn down the disco—they just wanted to put a smile on your face and get you out on the dance floor. Theirs was a smooth, slick, seamless groove, and they never sounded like they were working up a sweat—that was your job.
Comp opener “Sound Your Funky Horn”—from their 1974 debut—is as close as they ever got to raw. The song opens with the band whooping it up, then they come in horns a’blazing with a melody that is pure Motown and reminiscent of the best work of the early Kool and the Gang. I wouldn’t exactly call it a lost classic but I’d never heard it before, and it’s a stellar example of the band’s early commitment to the funk. The giddy-making feel is there, fully present, but KC and the Sunshine Band had yet to develop the knack for making it all seem so… effortless. “Sound Your Funky Horn” isn’t exactly down and dirty funk, but never again would KC and Company swing so hard.
Thanks to McCrae’s vocals, the band’s pre-fame dance track “Queen of Clubs” also has a soulful feel—KC had yet to buff the band’s sound to an air-brushed sheen. The horns are in your face—the song’s all trumpet flourish and sax blurt—and the chorus is pure Village People. It’s that stripped down and primal. The female backing vocalists aim for the stratosphere, and every dance floor diva—gay, straight, male, female, whale, whatever—must have thought the Sunshine Band was singing about them. And talk about nationwide—the Queen of Clubs didn’t just rule over the dance floors of New York and Miami—as McCrae makes clear she was also queen of the prairies, where every boogie-shoed prairie dog wanted to do the bump with her.
“Get Down Tonight” is KC and the Sunshine Band in all of their glory. Their first Number One hit, it featured an opening that sounds like synthesizer but actually is Jerome Smith’s guitar recorded at double speed, then gets straight to the matter. It’s pure up-tempo keep-it-simple; a hit the dance floor in your platform shoes sensation with one of the catchiest sing-along choruses of the era. And it’s pure disco reductio ad absurdum, that chorus—do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight. Simple enough, right? Especially with a groove and melody this infectious.
“I’m Your Boogie Man” is a blast of apocalyptic disco power guaranteed, to cop a phrase from Lowell George, to “boogie your scruples away.” It starts as a percussive shuffle, somebody counts off the cadence, and in come the horns and Casey, who doesn’t sound white, doesn’t sound black—he’s a totally unique disco animal. And all he wants is to be your rubber ball, whatever the hell that means.
“(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty” is slinky glitter ball disco and TSOP smooth—all relaxed like, but still wonderfully boogalicious. The horns are great as usual, but it’s the remorseless shuffling groove that pulls you in. And Casey sounds mesmerized—literally hypnotized—by ass! “That’s the Way (I Like It)” opens with a chorus of female backing vocalists doing their thing before slipping and sliding its way into a lubricious, remorseless and non-stop groove that is all “uh huh uh huh.” And its combination of exclamatory vocals repeated ad infinitum over a never-hit-the-pause-button beat will send you into a disco trance or your poppers back.
“Keep It Comin’ Love” same deal, but let’s say maybe ten percent less undeniable, because there’s no way no how the human mind could come up with a more undeniable refrain than the one on “That’s the Way (I Like It).” Disco was, for the most part, about keeping it simple, although the brothers Gibb couldn’t be accused of keeping it simple—they were, by the standards of Donna Summer, the Trammps, etc., positively baroque. Disco classical. KC and the Sunshine Band went hammer and nail simplicity—just keep it comin’ love indeed.
“Boogie Shoes” is footwear of the highest order—a loping funky stroll across the checkered black-and-white dance floor that comes complete with a horn section that provides perfect punctuation to each of Casey’s oracular pronouncements. And Casey, God bless him, is so excited about putting on his boogie shoes he can’t help stuttering “my-my-my-my-my” (oh my!), and even let’s out a Michael Jackson “woo!” or two.
“Please Don’t Go” is the odd great one out in their catalogue—a heartfelt plea of a ballad from a band that were laser-focused on partying down and didn’t, as a rule, truck in matters of the heart. But by 1979, when it came out, the whole disco craze was winding down (as was their reign of terror at the top of the charts) and they obviously were looking for new ground to cover. It worked–the song became the first Number One single of the 1980s—but it was also a last gasp, aside from the 1983 fluke “Give It Up,” which I challenge you to hum a bar of.
Proof that the end had come lies in the compilation’s final two songs. “Let’s Go Rock and Roll” is an embarrassment—the band doesn’t rock and the band doesn’t roll and even if the band did rock and the band did roll Casey’s reedy voice is totally unsuited to the task. And evidently they’d never heard about the invention of the electric guitar. It’s a lukewarm-water approximation of first-generation rock and roll and it makes me very, very sad—why they didn’t backtrack into funk territory I’ll never understand. “All I Want” is just as bad—call it mediocre soul, R&B undone by the dragging rhythm and Casey’s totally wooden vocals and awkward phrasing. Rarely has a band raised the white flag so ingloriously—and on their own greatest hits album yet.
KC and the Sunshine Band weren’t the grittiest, funkiest, sweatiest, most sophisticated, sexiest, or most soulful of the entries in the Great Disco Sweepstakes of the era. As for R&B, forget about it. And Lord knows Casey wasn’t the best singer. But like the best of their brothers and sisters—Donna Summer, Sister Sledge, Tavares, ABBA, the Bee Gees, MFSB, Gloria Gaynor, the Trammps, the Hues Corporation, the Village People and so many others—they made a unique contribution to the multicultural melting pot that was disco. Theirs was an ebullient, sunny, and somehow innocent sound—I’m tempted to say that they were the only bubblegum disco band. And they put the lie to the belief that the Big Apple was where you had to be. They put Miami, which was hardly a center of youth culture at the time, on the disco map.
Kool & the Gang may have sung about celebrating good times (come on!) but KC and the Sunshine Band were doing it, great song after great song. And it’s a testament to their greatness that they did it without breaking a sweat. Their music has stood the test of time—when was the last time you heard the likes of Santa Esmeralda, Walter Murphy, or the great MFSB for that matter?—for the simple reason that they packed more boogie shoes per foot into their songs than almost anyone else. Shake your booty if you agree.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
