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 a $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 and 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.