I dig this one a lot, Jungle Boogie even more. I acknowledge they had great dance stuff in the 80s but I really miss this style of theirs. Don't have a cow but I always felt I heard some K&TG in KC & The Sunshine Band.
You may not have a cow, but K&TG certainly, on some tracks (namely "Funky Stuff"), had a cowbell . . . I seem to recall that on the "pop" side, "Hollywood Swinging" was the second-highest charted of their tracks from Wild And Peaceful (which was one of several LP's in the record collection of the upstate New York summer camp I stayed in during the late 1970's), peaking "over there" at #6. ("Jungle Boogie" had been #2 R&B, #4 pop.) The "P" suffix in the DEP- cat. # prefix signified that at the time, Pickwick-owned PIP Records distributed K&TG's label, De-Lite.
"Kool" Bell doesn't get enough props as a bassist. His line on "Hollywood Swinging" is crazy good. And yeah, KC definitely had these guys in mind when the Sunshine Band was rising up. Always wondered who's point of view the song is from. Ricky West, the bad piano playing man was with K&TG from the start, and they're from Jersey City, so I'm guessing it ain't him. Just some fictional Hollywood cat that dug their show so much he decided to get his own act together, I suppose.
I know two early KC&TSB records were "Blow Your Whistle" and "Sound Your Funky Horn." Never heard of "Blow Your Funky Horn," though . . .
I'm really mystified by the lack of interest in Kool & The Gang's "Hollywood Swinging". It really was a popular crossover hit. Another song I really loved during this time was The Stylistics' "You make me Feel Brand New". This wasn't the end of the group. They simply changed record labels after this hit. They went to Mercury Records. We'll get to that later. But, this song is my favorite by them. It was a style of soul music that was fading in 1974, as smooth soul gave way to grittier and faster sounds.
I remained a big fan through Star On A TV Show, then they stopped getting airplay and that was that. Anything on Mercury I should know about?
Heh! In my opinion? Not really. They did have a soul hit single in 1978 called "First Impressions", but the lead vocal was kind of embarrassing. I found a sealed copy of the "In Fashion" album a couple of weeks ago and immediately did a nice needledrop the song for my digital archives. I listened to it, but, I don't care about the rest of the album.
Actually, at the outset, after this big hit they changed producers and arrangers. With their next hit, "Let's Put It All Together," they would be produced by Hugo & Luigi, and Van McCoy was arranger. Good though that was, neither Hugo & Luigi nor Mr. McCoy were Thom Bell. And as far as the latter, we'd be hearing from him soon enough.
Yeah, it's like for some people K&TG didn't become relevant until after they radically changed their sound many years down the road from here, and added a smooth vocalist for pop appeal. But we'll all get to that when we get there. I do fondly remember those three singles off the Wild And Peaceful album though - but only since at summer camp they had the album itself.
I always thought this was older than the summer of '74 and predated our move to Phoenix, so I get what you're saying about the sound of soul having moved on a bit from this by '74. But I adore the song and regardless think it's one of the finest hits of the decade. I will say though, for those who want to know why the Bee Gees thought it was a good idea to inflict those falsettos on an unsuspecting public with their stream of disco hits and ballads starting in a year or so and running thru the end of the decade, you don't have to look beyond this cut.
I was in high school when Kool & The Gang brought in J.T. and got smooth, so that was the only version of the group I knew throughout the '80s. I had "Open Sesame" on the SNF soundtrack, but their mid-70s stuff had vanished from the airwaves. Then in the early '90s Polygram put out 2 volumes on them in the Funk Essentials series, and I finally got my head right. When "Jungle Boogie" came back thru Pulp Fiction it was amusing watching friends wrap their head around the fact that it was the same group that did "Cherish" and "Joanna".
I like the falsettos, and I suspect it's what the public liked, too. I take it you don't like the post-1974 Bee Gees. I do.
Why would you think that? Yeah, they're probably a little over the top and definitely represented some kind of odd craze, but I was a huge fan as a kid and they still bring a smile to my face, same as ELO and Jeff Lynne's similarly helium-inflected vocals of the period. Barry Gibb was an enormously talented composer and those disco-era arrangements are still iconic and spectacular decades on.
I haven't heard that many R&B- or disco-themed records with Rickenbacker basses, especially those whose audio was set up as it was, as played by the late Maurice Gibb on the Bee Gees' 1975-79 streak o' hits . . . but I'll get more to them when the time comes. Let's just say some of Barry's lyrics were this side of Bernie Taupin.
June '74, I was 15, working in a poultry processing plant before my senior year of high school. "Hollywood Swinging" was a part of the soundtrack to that summer; the car I was driving (small town Arkansas, it wasn't unusual for those of us under 16 to drive ourselves to work or ball practice) only had an AM radio in it. During the day, it was pretty much KAAY in Little Rock; if I was out at night, WLS was the main station. Both of these played "Hollywood Swinging" quite a bit. However, I'm not hearing it on XM 70's station. I have had that service for 8 years now, and I don't remember hearing it a single time. Now, I don't listen to it exclusively when in the car, nor do I have it on when I'm not driving, but that car has 172,000 miles on it, and many of them were on the 70's station. Nor do I remember hearing it on the oldies station before I got a car with XM, and not the times since then when I've had it on in a different vehicle. JcS
Every so often, Felix Hernandez plays "Hollywood Swinging" on his Rhythm Review on WBGO 88.3 in Newark, NJ. (I've heard some head scratchers on that show, that could hardly be considered R&B, funk or disco - "Time Of The Season" by The Zombies, for example. Or "Peg" by Steely Dan.)
Next #1: Sideshow - Blue Magic I like the song but always found it boring. It's quite popular, even amone many rockers. I always confuse this group with The Stylistics. It's obvious why.
Barry Biggs, one of the grandmasters of reggae-fying pop and R&B hits, took his version to #3 in the UK.
Blue Magic was one of the most heavily choreographed vocal groups of the day - dig their moves up on the Soul Train stage ... they were showing a lot more groove than the dancers!
