Here is a sultry slice of funk, driven by a killer bassline, with the sweet sibling vocals of The Pointer Sisters from their third album Steppin’ back in 1975.
I don’t think I had the right idea about The Pointer Sisters at all. I only knew them from their early-’80s hits and had no idea of what they’d done before. Or how versatile they were.
Changing styles as often as Bowie, the Pointers moved through boogie-woogie, bebop, blues, country, funk, disco, soft rock, electro-pop, hard rock, and several other subgenres as if they were all second nature.
The sibling group backed Grace Slick (on the 1973 song Fat) and Boz Scaggs on his album Moments, made stops at Sesame Street and the Grand Ole Opry, won a country Grammy and appeared in the movie Car Wash.
And they did all that before scoring the four hit singles I know them for in the mid-’80s.
Sisters June and Bonnie Pointer grew up in Oakland, California, listening to gospel music at the behest of their father, a preacher from Arkansas who warned them away from rock’n’roll and blues as “the devil’s music.”
His advice fell on deaf ears once they began performing in clubs back in 1969 as Pointers Au Pair (groan), becoming a trio when sister Anita joined them and put out their first two singles: 1971’s Don’t Try To Take The Fifth (which sounds just like the Jackson 5) and the following year’s Destination No More Heartaches.
The sisters expanded to a quartet when a fourth sister Ruth joined in December 1972 and they recorded a debut album with backing band the Hoodoo Rhythm Devils, producing the Allen Toussaint-penned single Yes We Can Can, which went on to become a Northern Soul classic.
Other singles included a cover of Willie Dixon’s Wang Dang Doodle, and How Long (Betcha Got A Chick On The Side), which must have appalled their father the Reverend Pointer.
But their biggest hit was a country tune, Fairytale, written by Anita and Bonnie, earning them a Grammy for Best Country Vocal Performance in 1975, and a bit of history as the first black vocal group to appear at the Grand Ole Opry – as well as the honour of having it covered by Elvis Presley.
Bonnie left the group in 1977 and they slimmed back down to a trio of June, Ruth, and Anita, going on to achieve their biggest success – and two more Grammys in 1984 for the top ten hits Automatic and Jump (For My Love).
Those were followed by Fire, He’s So Shy, Slow Hand, Neutron Dance and a remixed version of I’m So Excited. But behind the scenes there was trouble: youngest sister June was a drug addict and when she left the group in 2004 (she died two years later aged 52) she was replaced by Ruth’s daughter Issa.
In 2009 they added Ruth’s granddaughter Sadako Pointer to the line-up but mostly performed as a trio, rotating the line-up until 2015 when Anita was forced to retire due to ill health, leaving Ruth the sole member of the original sibling lineup, performing to this day with Issa and Sadako.