EVERY Billboard #1 hit discussion thread 1958-Present

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by alphanguy, Jan 29, 2016.

  1. alphanguy

    alphanguy Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Missouri
    Next is "Get Down Tonight" by KC and the Sunshine Band, #1 from August 24 - August 30, 1975.

     
  2. Manapua

    Manapua Forum Resident

    Location:
    Honolulu
    I love Get Down Tonight! The spacey keyboards, guitars and of course the horns. The horns! I know they get denigrated for their sound-alike songs but for me, each one is just different enough to have it's own special pleasures. And for the disco crowd, it just didn't get any better than:
    Do a little dance
    Make a little love
    Get down tonight!
    Gotta love a line with a double meaning. This one busted the doors to the discotheque wide open.
     
  3. John54

    John54 Senior Member

    Location:
    Burlington, ON
    As disco went, for whatever reason KC and the Sunshine Band seemed to appeal to me a little more than other acts. Get Down Tonight is quite alright but not quite up to the standard of That's the Way I Like It IMHO.
     
    Jrr likes this.
  4. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    Oh this was the bomb! It has a deep funky groove where everybody gets a part in the mix. This was huge in my part of the world.

    It should be noted that the actual 45 edit does not appear on CD. It's so important to me that I had to do a needledrop of my 45.
     
    SomeCallMeTim, Manapua and sunspot42 like this.
  5. ronm

    ronm audiofreak

    Location:
    southern colo.
    I liked it.Fun music.
     
    Witchy Woman likes this.
  6. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Of course, KC had already tasted pop success as the co-writer and a player I believe on George McCrae's #1 from the prior summer, "Rock Your Baby". "Get Down Tonight" shares some obvious stylistic similarities with that smash - the clopping beat and a bit of twinkle in the accompaniment - but "Get Down Tonight" amps up the sexiness and the raunchiness. The band's 4th single, it immediately established them as disco superstars, drew even more attention to the Miami sound in the wake of the Miami-based Bee Gees #1 a couple of weeks before with "Jive Talkin'", and amped up the funky party atmosphere of the newly reinvigorated, post-"Hustle" genre.

    It's not my favorite KC song but it sure is fun, and has "hit" stamped all over it, from its arresting double-speed guitar intro to its party chant ending. While the group probably returned to this formula too often and for too long, never really evolving or diversifying the way The Bee Gees did, what the Sunshine Band did they did extraordinarily well.

    They were crucial in establishing disco as a mainstream monster. It was undoubtedly this stream of #1 disco singles in the summer of '76 - prime listening season - which lured a host of label execs and radio programmers to hop on the disco bandwagon. As "The Hustle"-sparked dance craze was burning up dance floors across the country, disco fashions started bleeding out into pop fashion, and what had been a somewhat marginal-though-successful genre the prior year was now suddenly the center of the pop music firmament. As is often the case, success breeds success in pop music, and we were only months away now from an explosion of disco, with the charts populated with more disco than any other single genre.

    You really see that in the Billboard top singles for each year. While no straight-up disco tracks managed to make the 1975 Top 10 songs on the year-end charts, by '76 roughly half of that Top 10 is disco or near-disco - indeed, over a third of the entire Top 100 for '76 is disco or its cousin, funk.

    Get down! Get down! Get down! Get down! Get down tonight, baby!
     
  7. Hoover Factory

    Hoover Factory Old Dude Who Knows Things

    Location:
    Spokane, WA
    A great, iconic tune of the 1970s - probably my favorite of KC’s hits.

    Question: Do you consider KC & the Sunshine Band to be disco music? A few years ago, he was being interviewed on a Washington DC radio station in advance of a performance on the Mall. The interviewer casually mentioned the nostalgia he feels for 1970s disco songs. KC interrupted the interview to emphasize that he plays R&B music, not disco music. I thought that was interesting.

    Personally, growing up in the era and listening to the music, I never really considered whether a song was “disco” or not...at least until Saturday Night Fever. Then I thought disco was a bunch of white guys in sequins trying to be funky. Not a fair assessment but I was only 16 at the time.
     
  8. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    You often heard the, "it's not disco, it's R&B" line after the big disco crash. You didn't hear it so much at the time, when their stuff was #1 on the disco charts and rocking dance floors around the globe.

    I doubt you'd find KC's stuff on R&B compilations very frequently. It's all over disco compilations. And disco's certainly a descendent of R&B and funk, but it's also it's own thing. I think apologizing for it is a huge mistake. We could use more of this kind of musicianship and incredible tight jamming on today's pop music.
     
  9. Jrr

    Jrr Forum Resident

    Couldn’t agree more...spot on post. And I just loved this group and still do today. Their songs just screamed party and fun. I actually didn’t love Get Down Tonightwhen it was new, and had they disappeared into obscurity I probably would have forgotten about it, like many one hit wonders. But then their next hit came out and from there on, this was a top three band for me, clear up to the end. And I quickly came around and loved Get Down Tonight. I actually bought the MFSL vinyl edition of that album and it really smokes! Far better than the TK album, the horns just blaze out of the speakers. The only problem was they really didn’t grow on successive albums, keeping their sound and very limited lyrics, sometimes repeating the chorus so many times on their last couple of albums that you had to turn the thing off (It’s The Same Old Song...talk about beating a dead horse...they repeat the chorus probably ten times in a row...did the same thing with the title song from the same album, Who Do You Love). This would unfortunately be their demise as the casual listener checked out for the most part after their awesome Part 3 album, which contained some more monster number ones we will discuss. But I kept with them and there were gems on every album all the way to the end. And their very last number one would be quite a departure from all their other songs.
     
  10. Manapua

    Manapua Forum Resident

    Location:
    Honolulu
    They were basically a singles act making dance music so I'm guessing the lyrics weren't as important as the beat and sound which was uniquely theirs. They weren't that interested in much more than chants, exhortations to have fun, get dancing and hopefully score some lovin'. That's basically all it took to get people on their feet and if you had a great melody and killer production, you were almost guaranteed to have some success. 5 #1s in a four year stretch proved they'd hit on a winning formula so I can see why there'd be a reluctance to mess with it. Shortsighted, maybe but that road was well traveled in the heady days of disco.
     
  11. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I, and no one else I knew, ever considered K.C. & Band. disco, and I was a teenager at the time. It is R&B. It's party music. K.C. knew exactly what he was doing. And, just because you can play a record in a disco, or if a disco played a record, it doesn't mean the record is disco. When we get to 1979, we will see how the mis-labeling of his music caused him to record a song that emphasizes the idea of a house party, and the music you would play at one as opposed to a disco.
     
    Manapua likes this.
  12. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    Yup. They made music that asked do you wanna go party where you can put on your boogie shoes and shake shake shake your booty and get down tonight. And, in a way, it was the same old song. But, I guess, K.C.'s overall feeling was to just keep it coming love. Ain't nothin' wrong with that! I get lifted! :)
     
    pablo fanques likes this.
  13. Manapua

    Manapua Forum Resident

    Location:
    Honolulu
    Please don't go and don't give it up.
     
  14. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    Of all the pressing variants of this seminal single (which has also topped the soul singles chart the prior week), not one is Columbia (the only copies they ever pressed of T.K. and sublabel product were LP's for record club members). My own copy is a Shelley Products pressing. The basic edit, I seem to remember there were two versions, though the sequence is the same. One, the splice between the "baby" and the horns coming in is more obvious on one set of lacquers than another, and the first "Get down, get down, get down, get down, get down tonight, baby" comes in a few milliseconds off the beat (not as noticeable for those with hearing not as acute as mine). The "other" version of that sequential edit is more seamless on all counts - and much rarer, relatively speaking.

    There was a time, in late 1975, on late Sunday nights/early Monday mornings when WABC Musicradio 77 was off for transmitter maintenance (in-between the public affairs programming and the shift of the DJ who came on at 4 A.M.) when the long version of "Get Down Tonight" was in rotation with two other songs. The others may have been The Ritchie Family's "Brazil" and another future #1 of which I'm holding off on mentioning till we get there. All played in a loop.
     
  15. Victor/Victrola

    Victor/Victrola Makng shure its write

    Get Down Tonight is a fun dance song. Its simple chorus is instantly recognizable and has become part of pop culture. I was never a big fan of dance music, but I do like this track. It's very good for what it is.
     
  16. Black Thumb

    Black Thumb Yah Mo B There

    Location:
    Reno, NV
    Hot damn, do I ever love "Get Down Tonight"! The rhythm section is like a force of nature (this is the song that really has more cowbell).

    The sped-up guitar that opens the track made for a nice quirky touch, and KC's vocal stylings show more than a little Ohio Players influence.

    It's always a surefire cure for a party that's starting to lag.
     
  17. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    KC wasn't the only one apparently influenced by the Ohio Players. Another act a decade hence also showed some of that OP influence, vocally if nowhere else.
     
  18. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Dang, I forgot to mention the cowbell! Yes!

    [​IMG]
     
    MielR, Hoover Factory and Grant like this.
  19. Witchy Woman

    Witchy Woman Forum Resident

    Location:
    Third Coast, USA
    Well, I see him in TV ads plugging the Disco Cruises where not only he performs but multiple other Disco acts as well—Gloria Gaynor, the Village People, etc. Maybe in his heart of hearts he considers himself an R&B artist but knows the Disco label keeps him viable as a performing act. Or maybe he changed his mind.
     
  20. Manapua

    Manapua Forum Resident

    Location:
    Honolulu
    Yeah, I'm sure he knows how his bread is buttered. The reality is artists like him are pretty much relegated to oldies shows so even if the terminology isn't to his liking, he really has no say in what the promoters label it. For better or worse, history looks at him as a Disco act.
     
    SomeCallMeTim and Witchy Woman like this.
  21. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    There is a difference between R&B/funk and disco.
     
  22. Witchy Woman

    Witchy Woman Forum Resident

    Location:
    Third Coast, USA
    did I say otherwise? :confused:
     
    sunspot42 likes this.
  23. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    Seems the promoters of these cruises in which KC now performs not only can't tell the difference, they couldn't care less.
     
    Grant likes this.
  24. cut to the chase

    cut to the chase Forum Resident

    Location:
    Germany
    The week ending 30th August 1975, when 'Get Down Tonight' reached number one, one of my favourite songs of 1975 entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 88, 'Sky High' by Jigsaw. It would later peak at number 3.

     
  25. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Wow! There's a moldy oldie! It sounded vaguely familiar until that soaring intro to the chorus - then it snapped back into memory.
     

Share This Page

molar-endocrine