This exuberant disco-funk anthem completely passed me by at the time. I was listening to very different music when it came out in 1981.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, is about as midwest as you can get in the Midwest. It’s a lovely city where very little happens and its most famous musical natives, JJ Cale and Leon Russell, seem to have pursued careers without ever making a thing about being Okies.
Then there’s Hanson, the boy band who gave us the Motown-lite earworm Mmm Bop, and whom I will always like because they’re lovely fellas who looked after me in Tulsa for a few days when I went there to write about them.
Then there’s The Gap Band.
Comprising the three Wilson brothers – Charlie, Ronnie and Robert – they became one of the most popular funk groups of the late Seventies, pioneering a brand of music that took the genre into the Eighties on a wave of synthesized basslines.
In fact their run of hits spanned nearly 20 years from 1977 to 1995, all of them featuring Charlie’s deep, invigorating lead vocals.
Like most black groups of the era, the brothers began singing and playing in their father’s Pentecostal church, also taking music lessons at home. The oldest sibling, Ronnie, started his own band by the age of 14 while Charlie joined a rival group a couple of years later.
One night both bands were performing across the street from one another and Ronnie stopped by to check out Charlie grooving on the organ; impressed enough to offer him aa $50 raise to join his own band. Soon after that the bass player quit so they summoned their younger brother Robert, still barely 14, to take over the vacant spot.
Adopting the unwieldy name of the Greenwood, Archer & Pine Street Band, they quickly shortened it to the G.A.P. Street Band but due to a typographical error, they were advertised as the Gap Band – and the new name stuck.
They performed at venues around the Tulsa area, including country & western joints and tennis clubs, but the band as we know them only really took shape after Charlie moved to LA and convinced his brothers to join him on the west coast.
After a couple of minor hits, a deal with Mercury put the Gap Band on the fast track with a self-titled 1979 album, led by the success of the singles Shake and Open Up Your Mind. Their first major hit did not arrive until the turn of a new decade.
Burn Rubber (Why You Wanna Hurt Me) introduced the brand new sound of a synthesized bassline from Cavin Yarbrough – who died this week – who had his own huge hit with Alisa Peoples’ Don’t Stop The Music (by Yarbrough and Peoples).
Both tunes defined the sound of clubs in 1980 but The Gap Band also did ballads, such as Yearning For Your Love, though I prefer them ripping up the dancefloor on funky tunes like this one, You Dropped A Bomb On Me.
Robert Wilson died in 2010 and his brother Ronnie in 2021, leaving Charlie as sole survivor.
I don’t remember The Rose Of Avalanche as much more than a name I heard on the John Peel Show back in the mid-Eighties. But I do remember this, their debut single.
There are deep cuts and then there are deeper cuts. This UK reggae gem by Sharon Little falls into the latter category.
Rarely has a band changed direction quite so radically, frequently and successfully as The Thompson Twins.
The Blow Monkeys’ hit single Digging Your Scene symbolised the Eighties with their lavishly produced single, topical lyric, and stylish video. (more…)
Bomb The Bass, the studio project of Tim Simenon, shot straight into the singles chart in early 1988 with their sample-heavy debut single Beat Dis.
It’s so sad to learn of the death of Blondie’s drummer Clem Burke, another of the Class of ’77 who has left us far too soon. Is this his finest moment?
Felt were the ultimate cult band of the Eighties and Primitive Painters was the finest moment for their cerebral jangle pop.
After a gap of 45 years and a long career in fashion, original Siouxsie & The Banshees guitarist John McKay releases his first solo album of archive material.
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