After twenty years fronting seminal Tokyo psych band Yura Yura Teikoku, Shintaro Sakamoto released his sublime solo debut How to Live with a Phantom last year on his own Zelone Records in Japan, and Other Music Recording Co. in North America. The album is a haunting psych-pop concoction that draws on the diverse sounds of 1970s pop from around the globe, and now Other Music is announcing a new 7-inch single of similarly breezy, percussive pop, “Don’t Know What’s Normal” b/w “From the Dead,” out July 9. Sakamoto directed the dancing skeletons in this great clip for “From the Dead,” premiering here on Wax Poetics.

On June 13, 1972, former lead vocalist of the Drifters, Clyde McPhatter, died in the Bronx from complications of heart (and liver and kidney) disease due to alcohol abuse.

Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun signed McPhatter, a Durham, North Carolina, native, in 1953 after he left his former group, Billy Ward and the Dominoes. Though McPhatter put the Drifters together himself, he did not stay for long, going solo after only a couple years.

As his spotlight faded during the ’60s, McPhatter turned to the bottle, finally leaving the American music industry and moving to England in 1968. He returned to the States in 1970 and attempted a comeback, recording Welcome Home for Decca. Though he never realized his comeback before his death, his final single’s B-side, “The Mixed Up Cup,” allowed McPhatter to live on in future generations of music, as its beat was sampled heavily in hip-hop.

Photo by Morgan Howland.

William “Darondo” Daron Pulliam passed away today, June 12, 2013, at age sixty-seven. Ubiquity Records, who first reissued his music, released a short statement on their Facebook page:

Today we at Ubiquity have heavy hearts as we learn of the passing of William Daron Pulliam aka Darondo a true artist, performer, character and friend. RIP.

The following article was originally published in Wax Poetics Issue 16 (April 2006).

The name “Darondo” is so unique, it’s hard to forget. But for many years, all people knew of him was only that: a name on a faded label. In his brief recording career, the Bay Area native only released three 7-inch singles, all in the late ’60s and early ’70s. In the music world, only a select circle of sweet-soul aficionados and Bay Area music collectors had any awareness of his existence, though he held his own notoriety in local cable television and, shall we say, “other” pursuits.

The thing about Darondo’s music though—especially the sublime “Didn’t I,” his best-known single—is that once you hear it, you crave more. That curiosity is largely how the Bay Area native has resurfaced after thirty years. Ubiquity recently released Let My People Go—less an anthology and more of a long-delayed debut album that combines his six songs on single plus an additional three songs taken from a previously unreleased reel of recordings from the same era. At last, Darondo is finally emerging out of obscurity, bringing his small but intriguing legacy with him.

William “Darondo” Daron Pulliam, aka “Double D” Darondo, aka “Rolls Royce” Darondo, grew up in Berkeley, California, where his mother bought him his first guitar when he was eight. While never a serious, professional-minded musician, he played well enough that he and his high-school friends became a house band for a “teenage nightclub” in Albany called the Lucky 13 Club. “I mean, it was set up strictly for teenagers,” he says. “I think the age group was thirteen to sixteen. On Friday and Saturday nights, they’d open around seven and they’d close, maybe, at ten.”

Music was always a hobby; as a young man in his twenties, Darondo had actually trained to be an electrician. However, when he half-seriously told his friends that he wanted to record a record, their skepticism only fueled his desire to go out and get it done. “So many people out there were talking, ‘Darondo, you’re not going to do nothing,’ ” he recalls. He responded by insisting, “I’m going to show you suckers something. I don’t care if I have to do it myself; I’m going to put this thing out.”

His first single was for Leroy Smith’s Ocampo label, where he recorded “How I Got Over” and “I Want Your Love,” two slices of funky soul that showcased Darondo’s distinctive voice: an almost mournful, crooning style reminiscent of Al Green but grittier. Riding on the strength of that, he came to the attention of Music City’s Ray Dobard, who brought Darondo down to record an entire album’s worth of material, starting with the single, “Didn’t I” b/w “Listen to My Song.” Unlike the more lo-fi sound of his Ocampo recordings, the Music City material was clear and lush, especially thanks to the orchestral accompaniment that Dobard added to the arrangement.

Unfortunately, the single was all that ever came out of that session. “We did about ten tracks,” says Darondo. “I think [Dobard] stole the records. I don’t know what happened to those songs, I don’t know what he did with it.” There’s persistent rumors that the studio reels are sitting in a vault at Polydor or Atlantic and that a stash of hundreds of “Didn’t I” singles is collecting dust somewhere in Oakland. All that is certain is that the song ranks as one of the most incredible pieces of sweet soul to ever emerge from the Bay Area…or anywhere else.

Photo by Morgan Howland.

Darondo’s last single would end up as his rarest, recorded for the uber-obscure Af-Fa World imprint: “Legs” b/w “Let My People Go.” By this time, Darondo’s voice had matured, settling in with a refined falsetto that harkened to his years listening to and singing gospel, or what he calls, “spiritual things.” “Spiritual and rhythm and blues—it’s two different things,” he explains. “If you can sing a spiritual thing, you can mostly sing anything, because you are hitting so many more…high pretty notes.”

One of the great ironies to Darondo’s music is that as angelic as his voice could be, his day-to-day life and profession were bound up in the earthliest of human desires. The man was a pimp—literally. For many years, both preceding and following his music career, Darondo was a local pimping legend, on par with Fillmore Slim and other Player’s Ball VIPs.

To be sure, it’s a topic that the man himself refuses to speak about, neither confirming nor denying, though he does elliptically refer to it as his “fast life” days. If even half the stories of his pimping days are true, “fast” is an understatement. Not only did the lifestyle pay well—he didn’t get the nickname “Rolls Royce” for running a car dealership—but it also brought him into contact with many local notables, including Sly Stone, whose infamous mansion/home studio was a frequent destination for Darondo and his stable of women.

Even in the midst of this life, Darondo could see the dark side creeping up. Though he recorded “Let My People Go” about ten years before he got out of pimping for good, he explains that the song encapsulated much of the concern he felt for those who couldn’t handle the fast life. “People wanted the money thing; if it ain’t about money, it’s about sex. In the end of it, all it adds up to is destruction. That’s why I was singing, ‘Let My People Go.’ I’m talking about: give us a land, or island in the sea, good food so we can work the land, so we could all live in harmony—the Black man, the White man—everybody lives in peace. All you other suckers, go ahead and do what you want to do.”

Appropriately, in the early 1980s, Darondo did find an island in the sea—several in fact—traveling to Great Britain, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, Fiji, as well as France, Venezuela, Mexico, and other places. As he puts it, he traveled so much as a way to “cool” down, “in order to get yourself together. No sense in me lying: I was very fast. When you’re running too fast, you got to slow down,” he says.

With his pimping days behind him, Darondo still found interesting ways to ply a living. KDIA’s Johnny Morris introduced him to Chuck Johnson, a fellow radio DJ who founded the local Oakland cable station Soul Beat in 1977. Morris convinced Darondo that he’d be perfect for television, and in the early 1980s, the two helped pitch Johnson on a suite of variety shows that included Darondo’s Penthouse After Dark, Doze Comedy Videos, and Talent Exposure.

Ubiquity has a few clips from Penthouse and Doze up for viewing on their website. Suffice it to say, they’re an entertaining time capsule of Oakland’s local culture, but they also capture “Dynamite D” Darondo’s personality in full performance. Through them, it’s easy to see how he could have gotten into showbiz and, shall we say, “other pursuits,” with his flamboyant attitude and slick charisma. Thanks to the shows, Darondo found fame in a different way from his past. He remembers that his son once told him, “ ‘Dad, do you know that as soon as people get out of school, they’re running home to the TV to look at Darondo’s Penthouse?’ I said, ‘Oh my goodness.’ ”

While he wasn’t recording music anymore, he still found ways to use his singing and playing to positive effect. In another strange twist of careers, Darondo ended up as a physical therapist for a few years, after his TV days had ended. He’d bring his guitar into the hospital and play for the sick and infirm, and, as a form of therapy, it often produced unexpected results, even from those suffering from paralyzing strokes. “I was amazed at the responses I was getting for the music,” he says. “They would be sitting up there all day, trying to blink their eye or do something. The music, a lot of the time, would bring stuff out of them.”

Darondo now lives in quiet semi-retirement in Sacramento, but he’ll still blow the dust off his guitar and play on request. His voice doesn’t ring with the same power as it did thirty years back, yet the delicate tremble that’s crept in with age only seems to enhance his voice’s appeal. He was never a shouter but a crooner, speaking to love and loss with a hushed intimacy that has seduced many a listener (and Lord knows whoever else). There’s a tinge of regret when you hear him, the obvious thought of “what might have been” had Darondo turned his erstwhile hobby into a full-blown career. It’s hard to get too greedy, though, considering the handful of songs he did leave behind. On the finest of those few he asks, “Didn’t I treat you right?” Yeah, Darondo, you did.

Photo courtesy of Roy C.

Originally published in Issue 47.

It’s hard to conceive that hip-hop was almost deprived of one of the most ubiquitous breaks in the history of the genre due to its composer considering the most unlikely of careers for a future sultan of soul: pugilism. “Heavyweight,” exclaims soul singer-songwriter Roy C. Hammond. “Would you believe the same people that trained Joe Louis trained me?” From his self-contained Carolina Record Distributors offices located in the sleepy town of Allendale, South Carolina, Roy C twists the lid off the time capsule of his lofty childhood dreams. “From the time I was a young kid, I always said I was going to be a prizefighter,” he says with a grin.

“I used to order all kinds of literature about boxing when I was living in Georgia. Then at the age of fifteen, when I’d moved to New York, I started studying hard and training. Not long after, I met a guy out in Long Beach [New York] who introduced me to [legendary boxing trainers] Whitey Bimstein and Freddie Brown.” But as kismet would have it, a series of uppercuts and right hooks during a sparring match with legendary boxer Hurricane Jackson would knock him smack-dab into an effervescent cauldron of funk and soul. “He told me, ‘You can hit me as hard as you want to, and I’m not gonna to hit you back.’ So by him telling me that, I just let my guard down. And he hit me straight in my face! Bow! I said, ‘Man, I’m gettin’ out of here!’”

From that crucial moment on, the Georgia native has staunchly committed himself to over five decades of the funkiest funk and silkiest soul that ever spun at 45 and 33 1/3 rpm. One of those compositions, born out of a 1973 presidential espionage scandal, would go on to have an unexpected shelf life decades beyond the mom-and-pop record-shop bins of the day. With a sly, syncopated backbeat and loopy guitar licks courtesy of a precocious group of high school kids from Queens, New York, called the Honey Drippers, “Impeach the President” was one funky juke-joint juggernaut destined to inform the headphone masterpieces of generations to come. Serving as the backbone for a cavalcade of hip-hop hits and misses over the past twenty-five years, from Audio Two’s “Top Billin’ ” to Nas’s “I Can,” the tune has earned its rightful place in the pantheon of lauded breaks. And just think: we have a punch in the nose to thank for it all.

It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to assume that Roy C has most every god and demigod in the history of hip-hop production on speed dial. However, this is where the praise dissipates and the story takes a rather sour turn. “You can do a computer search on ‘Impeach the President,’ and the results for how many times it has been sampled will come up in the hundreds,” he testifies. “But I’ve gotten nothing in the way of mechanical royalties.” It’s no secret that everyone from Spoonie Gee to Sprite owes a great debt to Roy C. Still, that collective debt has yet to be paid. Sandwiched between a jab to the jaw and a backhanded slap, Roy C’s hard-knock career as a soul crooner has taken a licking and kept on ticking. But it’s all too apparent that he doesn’t intend on going down without a tenacious fight.

Since he pushed Summer Knights back until July 1st, ya boy Joey drops another jewel over a Lee Bannon steamer. We told you this kid was nasty, NY stand up!

While Small Talk helped establish Heron as one of the great African American poets/singers/writers in modern history, with poignant critiques that called out the inadequacies and rampant racism that Blacks faced in the late ’60s and early ’70s, it would be his fourth album, Winter in America, that would mark the first time that collaborator Brian Jackson’s name would be listed on the album’s front cover. First collaborating with Gil on 1971’s Pieces of a Man, Jackson would compose music and play keys for nine albums.

The LP 1980 would be the duo’s last full-length work together. The record features Jackson on the TONTO, an amalgamation of classic and custom modular synthesizers built by creator Malcolm Cecil, who coproduced the album. Emitting deep-bass tones and warm timbres, the TONTO is in full display, both on the album’s cover, where Heron and Jackson sit side by side with the massive instrument in the background, and on tracks like “Shah Mot” and “Late Last Night.”

Like many of Heron’s prior releases, the lyrics on 1980 still resonate years later, even more so since we are just now entering a new decade ourselves: “The turning of the decade like a marker hung in space / is a man-made definition like the bending of a page,” Gil sings on “Corners,” a song that meshes sounds from two different decades: the spacey synthesizers, a staple of new wave ’80s music, and an earthshaking bass riff and wah-wah guitar from the funk of the ’70s.

As a whole, “Corners”–the last official song on which Jackson and Heron collaborated—speaks to the state of mind Heron was in while recording this album, writing that signals an impending sense of doom for the upcoming decade. Jackson confirms this notion on the record’s liner notes: “To those of us living in 1979, it felt like 1980 was the twenty-first century. With 1984, the Orwellian doomsdate, right around the corner, we were concerned… Even though the Vietnam War was years away, many of us still saw a glimmer of hope in the seventies. But now there really wasn’t, as Gil laments in the song ‘1980,’ ‘Even no way back to ’75, much less 1969.’ ”

The lyrics of 1980 were classic Gil Scott-Heron: fearful of what the future holds, but conscious of the effort we as individuals need to make in order to keep society functioning for all.

Wax Poetics writer Dean Van Nguyen reports via TNT24 that Kanye West has unveiled his new album with a few songs collabed with Daft Punk:

Kanye West debuted new album Yeezus to a crowd of critics, fans and celebrities at a listening session in Manhattan last night, revealing that Daft Punk have worked on “three or four” songs on the album as well as announcing several other collaborators including Chief Keef, Kid Cudi and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver.

Continue reading at TNT24.

Grand Central: Linda Anderson, André Cymone, Morris Day, Terry Jackson, Prince, and William Doughty.

Originally published in Wax Poetics Issue 50.

In the early 1970s, the Way Community Center, a local recreation center in the heart of Black Minneapolis, hosted battles of the bands as competitive as New York’s 1980s rap battles. Flyte Tyme (whose name was inspired by the Charlie Parker recording “Bird in Flight”) and Grand Central (inspired by Prince’s fascination with Grand Funk Railroad) were two of the most electrifying rival bands.

Considered to be the creation of bassist André Cymone (originally Anderson), Grand Central included André’s younger sister, Linda, on keyboards,Terry Jackson and William Doughty on percussion, and drummer Charles “Chazz” Smith (who played football withTerry Lewis in high school and was Prince’s cousin), later replaced by a left-handed drummer named Morris Day. The final and most notable member was Prince, plucking the guitar—along with any and all other instruments—with abandon. All of the members ranged in age from thirteen to sixteen and were self-taught musicians. Bernadette, André’s mother, a recent divorcée and mother of six children, let them use her basement as their rehearsal space. Prince was also living in the basement after running away from home when he was twelve years old because of disputes with his stepfather. “You know how there’s one house in the neighborhood that everybody kind of comes to and hangs out? That was my crib,” André said in a 1998 interview where he doesn’t dispel rumors that it was also a space

where they frequently entertained girls. Their rivals, Flyte Time, included Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis, Jellybean Johnson, Monte Moir, and Cynthia Johnson. Members of both bands lived within a three-block radius of each other. At Central High School, Jim Hamilton, a former piano player in Ray Charles’s band, taught a class about the music business. The same faces appeared in his class—André Anderson, Terry Lewis, William Doughty, and Prince became his mentees. LaVonne Daughtery, Morris Day’s

mother, became Grand Central’s manager. Grand Central was focused—the group would spend half their days in school and the other half skipping school to rehearse in the basement. They played community centers, YMCAs, and hotels in the area. Flyte Time was more R&B-focused, playing covers of legends like Chaka Khan, Al Green, and James Brown, while Grand Central would play covers from groups ranging from Steely Dan to Sly and the Family Stone. Pepé Willie, a Brooklyn-born musician with a band of his own named 94 East, would be instrumental in Prince and André’s later success. When Pepé first heard Grand Central at a ski party, he asked Daughtery if he could manage the group. He took them to meet Dale Minton, owner of Cookhouse Studios on Nicolett Avenue, armed with a demo of songs like “You Remind Me,” “39th Street Party,” and “Sex Machine,” written by André and Prince.

“He felt they weren’t ready,” Pepé remembers, “because they would play cover songs better than they would play their own songs. They couldn’t show what they could do on their own.” But they were not without talent. Prince and André stood out from the group. “Prince would take off his guitar and go over to Linda and play the chords on the keyboard he wanted her to play,” Pepé recalls. “And I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, this guy plays keyboards too?’ Then he would take André’s bass and play like he had been doing it for twenty years, playing the funkiest lines. And then André would pick up whatever he wanted him to play like he had been playing it forever. That’s how talented these guys were. I was like, ‘We got something here.’ ” André and Prince would have contests about how fast they could write songs. “I would say, ‘Let’s take five,’ and we’d go to the kitchen to make some chocolate cake,” remembers Pepé. “Prince would stay and wouldn’t eat; he would just continue playing. His work ethic started at a real early age.” But André’s band was short-lived. They had one last name change to Champagne—when people began comparing them to Graham Central Station—before the group began to disband. Pepé took André under his wing as bassist for 94 East with Colonel Abrams as a vocalist and Bobby Z as a drummer, and they recorded two songs for Polydor—“Fortune Seller” and “10:15”— but, because of problems with the label, their contract was canceled and the songs weren’t completed.

Meanwhile, Prince had his sights set on getting out of Minneapolis, and when he met producer Chris Moon and a young manager named Owen Husney, it was the beginning of the end for Grand Central.

“Chris plays me this demo he had been recording on this eight-track,” Husney recalls. “Incredible. I was like, ‘Who’s the group?’And he was like,‘It’s not a group. It’s one kid, and he’s writing and singing and playing everything. I said, ‘Holy shit! Get him here now!’ ”

In a 1982 interview with Nat Morris on Detroit TV show The Scene, André didn’t mince words when describing Grand Central’s band as his group. “Morris and Prince was in it,” he said matter-of-factly. After the crowd erupted in applause, André smiled and said, “You hear that straight from the horse’s mouth.” Prince would go on to define the Minneapolis sound, but André Cymone had a less-celebrated impact. In an interview in Billboard magazine, Husney described how Prince and André would stay up all night working on what would eventually become Prince’s 1980 album, Dirty Mind. Eventually, André became frustrated with his lack of recognition for his contributions and, in 1981, began a solo career with futuristic electronics and signed to Columbia Records, releasing Livin’ in the New Wave (1982), Survivin’ in the ’80s (1983), and A.C. (1985).

“They spent millions of hours jamming together in that basement,” says Husney about the group Grand Central. “André had a lot of input into that sound.”

Read Ericka Blount Danios’s exclusive interview with André Cymone.

With one exception, the LP’s songs were cobbled together from two recording sessions, one in 1978 in Minneapolis at the Sound 80 studio and another in early 1979 at NewYork’s Music Farm. Both occasions were under the aegis of Linster “Pepé” Willie, a New Yorker who was Prince’s cousin by marriage and for this short window of time the most musically connected member of the family. Pepé Willie’s uncle was Clarence Collins, one of the founding members of Little Anthony and the Imperials. The New York session was intended to serve as a demo for Tony Silvester, lead singer of the Main Ingredient, who was slated to produce an LP for the Imperials. Silvester did not find the songs a good fit, and the group returned to Minneapolis empty-handed (the Imperials gig went to Leroy Burgess collaborator Stan Lucas).

Willie himself was a keyboard player, but what he actually contributed to these songs is a matter of conjecture, since Prince is credited with both guitar and synthesizers. The other individual who features heavily here is André Anderson, later to rename himself André Cymone, who played most of the bass parts. The teen Prince Rogers Nelson (“Skippy” to his school friends) had moved in with neighbor André and his mother after leaving his parents’ house sometime around 1973. It was shortly after this that he met Willie, who took the boys jam band under his wing. In 1975, he began using them on sessions for his nascent 94 East project, a group he hoped to get signed to Polydor (the LP’s earliest cut, “Games,” dates from this period).

The 1979 session gave birth to the album’s most popular cut, “If You Feel Like Dancing,” a favorite of Larry Levan and the Paradise Garage crowd. It was later remixed by house DJ Tony Humphries and issued as a 12-inch single, but the more organic LP version is the preferred take (as evidenced by its inclusion on the notorious Paradise Garage Classics bootleg series). The blistering ribbon of lead guitar that unwinds over the course of its seven minutes is testament to the possessed musical imagination belonging to the twenty-one-year-old guitarist.

The tracks were never used for the Imperials, and Willie’s wooing of Polydor fell flat. But in 1985, Prince blew up.The odds and ends that had been gathering dust gained new life as the debut of the Minneapolis Genius.

Adding fuel to the fire was Sierra Leonean guitarist Geraldo Pino. An early adopter of the JB sound, Pino held residencies in Accra and Lagos, and, in the words of no less than Fela Kuti, “had all Nigeria in his pocket.” In this environment, now indifferent if not hostile to highlife, a working band who couldn’t beat ’em had no choice but to join ’em. So began a fertile time for a rough-and-ready crossbreeding of the grooviest strains of music on the planet.

Charles Kofi Mann was no newcomer; he played in the popular ensemble Kakaiku’s No. 1 Guitar Band in the mid-’60s and formed his own Carousel 7 band late in the decade. They recorded for the ubiquitous Essiebons label, which fortuitously had legendary guitarist Ebo Taylor as a house producer. After an early highlife hit, “Edina Brenya,” the Carousel 7 began a conscious effort to incorporate elements of the new sound into their typical highlife arrangements. A strong effort entitled Party Time with Ceekay was followed in 1975 by the group’s most explicit combination yet, Funky Highlife.

The first side of the party-ready record—simply two fifteen-minute medleys—is anchored by a monstrous hybrid groove that must rank as the supreme representative of its mongrel genre. Congas, clave, and shaker in the left channel jostle with a galloping trap set on the right, while muffled handclaps wait their turn in the spotlight. A spellbinding call-and-response vocal section (shouting out the Asafo tribe) builds like water bursting a dam until liquid wah-wah guitar ripples over everything, the handclaps finally stepping well out in front and cracking like celebratory gunshots. When the organ enters with reggae stabs on the offbeat, there is no doubt that highlife has truly gone funky.

Mann’s audacious experiment was a sensation, and is still a favorite—not just among DJs and producers (the Funky Lowlives lifted their name and first record directly from it), but also in Ghana, where Omanhene Pozo, a respected name in the latest cross-cultural genre mix-up, hiplife, recorded an updated version with the assistance of C.K. himself.

German photographer Kai Schäfer is using photographs of records on turntables to tap into the same emotions that hearing those same records conjures up. Using only first pressings from the native country of a record’s release and period turntables, Schäfer is appealing to collectors who would call him out otherwise. You can’t quite get the full impact online, but some of the photos are as big as six feet and make for the perfect wall hangings in any vinyl sanctuary.

Peep the full gallery here.

[via Wired]

Whether Goodbye Brains was ahead of its time or not, it certainly flew under the radar.

Masking itself deceptively as an ’80s electro record, Ginny Gillam’s sleeve design belies the record’s early 1970s origins.

Written almost exclusively by the largely unknown Barry Cole and self-released on his eponymous label, Goodbye Brains is a multifaceted beast, part jazz, part funk, part Python surrealism. Poet Paul Bura’s state of the nation laments and odes to the paranormal provide meandering interludes to Barry Cole’s well crafted funky, left-field jazz.

More akin to Ian Carr than to his Canterbury scene contemporaries, saxophonist Coley kept things tighter than many of the cities well-known avant-gardists who often eschewed brevity and punch for spiraling improv.

With only two thousand self-financed copies pressed, this home-grown labor of love remains largely undiscovered and under appreciated.

Photo by Shawn Brackbill

Originally published in Wax Poetics Issue 50.

In tight, ripped jeans, glasses, tank top, and backwards cap, Devonté Hynes records as Blood Orange, a recent handle for the twenty-five-year-old musician. His solo sets are minimal; he croons and shreds guitar while triggering sounds from his laptop. And for years, out of necessity and preference, lonely bars were his main practice space. “I literally had nowhere to just mess around, be loud, and play. I lived in small apartments, and the only time I could do whatever was on weeknights in random spots somewhere,” he remembers, laughing. “It’s funny, my friends say I’m the guy who won’t tell anyone about his gigs. [laughs] I’d just book a show and come alone to play. But, really, it was the only way I could practice, and I’m grateful I was able to take advantage of it.” Playing for slow-sippers indifferent to live music gave him room to breathe, to freely play without having to align or explain himself to anyone.

Dev’s persona isn’t entirely easy to depict. His musical training began early, but his inspirations are quite varied. “I started playing piano at seven, moving onto the cello, then drums, then bass; everything just fell around that. I don’t know what else to say,” he says, rather apologetically. In his mid-twenties, he’s young and has had lifelong musical training. He avoids the spotlight but moves easily beneath it. His favorites are completely wide-ranging, so much so, it’s difficult to tell what and who has bled into his work. He cites Janet Jackson, Pantera, Marilyn Manson, and Prince as leaving huge imprints—as did Arthur Russell, Phillip Glass, and Ryuichi Sakamoto of Yellow Magic Orchestra. He says further: “I could also recite the words to, like, every rap song while growing up.” Adding: “Oh yeah, and Marvin Gaye is one of the best singers ever.”

He’s foggy, scattered almost, when explaining his influences but speaks easily on finding strength in transgender culture and its history. Admittedly, all his new songs are written “from a female perspective,” he says. The inspiration derived from transgender and gay history is perhaps linked to his own dealings with intolerance. “I felt a lot prejudice growing up—a lot,” he reiterates. “Even though I’m not gay, I felt a lot of gay prejudice and homophobia from kids because of what I wore and what I was into. I mean, I played football when I was young, and I absolutely love the NBA. But I also played cello and was in the chess club. [laughs] Where I’m from, I guess I always stuck out for all sorts of reasons.”

Originally born in Houston, Texas, Dev and his family relocated early on to Essex, a non-metropolitan area in Eastern England where most of his childhood was spent. He left for the big city of London as a teenager, continuing all the way to Los Angeles. His wanderlust led him to Queens, New York, around 2006. He now lives in Brooklyn where Coastal Grooves, his newest, most distinct work, developed gradually in his bedroom through the last few years. Like most young musicians, Dev was in many bands with assorted styles, lobbing darts and seeing which ones stuck.

His first troupe, Test Icicles, made spastic rock with overtly thrashy sounds. It was a learning experience in working with others, says Dev. “We would all write by ourselves and come in the studio and record, then have someone come in and overdub certain parts and segments. People were in and out all the time. We would record, and rerecord, and rerecord. I know that’s normal, but it wasn’t my style. Sometimes it went well, sometimes it was absolutely painstaking.” The band released one official project before disbanding in 2006.

Moving away from group dynamics, Dev forged Lightspeed Champion, a more subdued, folk-driven solo effort with clangy guitars, handclaps, and pop melodies—much different from the raucous noise of Test Icicles. Reasonable success was had in both ventures; units sold moderately well and album reviews were pleasant. But it was Dev’s songwriting prowess that heads picked up on, asking him eventually to write for their own acts. His writing acumen gave him work for a diverse cast, a reflection perhaps of the range easily seen in his own songs. He quietly penned for a hodgepodge of artists: Basement Jaxx, Florence and the Machine (whose album hit number one on the U.K. music charts), and musical sketches for television’s Saturday Night Live. He also contributed to the Chemical Brothers’ We Are the Night, a hit Grammy winner that same year. He meanwhile scattered songs and compositions on the Internet via blogs and message boards on his own as well.

With projects on the upswing, Dev returned to recording by himself and for himself, explaining: “I’d write in the kitchen, record in the bedroom, and randomly play out all by myself.” He even reverted to playing small bars for practice, basking in the anonymity, especially since it was purely practice nevertheless. “There’s no pressure whatsoever, and people generally don’t know what to expect when they see me,” he says, adding: “I still wouldn’t tell anyone I was playing, because I wanted to be alone and just practice stuff I felt I liked. It was just some songs I started during [and a little after] the last Lightspeed Champion album. I was still trying things out—they weren’t even whole recordings yet.” These songs, essentially ideas and rough sketches, became the template for Blood Orange.

Around 2008, however, a persistent aching developed in Dev’s throat, leading to emergency surgery that put his career—and worse possibly, his voice—in jeopardy. Diagnosed with growths on his vocal chords, called nodules, it was unclear if he’d ever sing again, or sound as he did before surgery. It’s thought to have developed from overworking his voice through constant gigging, a condition that affected Elton John and other notable—but mostly longtime—vocalists. And while severity of the condition greatly varies, it was nonetheless a sobering time. Dev recalls, “I had to have them removed, and doctors didn’t even know exactly how it would alter my voice. It was pretty weird and scary but was fun sometimes too. [laughs] Overall, I couldn’t speak at all for two months and basically had to learn how to sing all over again. I’m so grateful it worked out; but at first, it was like running into a brick wall.”

With speech therapy that followed, Dev regained speech function and recovered while reworking the Blood Orange sketches that had sat dormant on his hard drive. He eventually ironed out enough tracks for a demo, an EP that he slid to friends and label affiliates. “They were just short bits of songs I’d listen to when I was on my skateboard or riding around the city on my bike. I didn’t play them to anyone, and I came to realize that for the first time ever, really, I was trying to write the kind of songs I actually wanted to hear.”

The demo made its rounds and was well received, especially since insiders were acquainted with his writing credits. The EP was eventually picked up by Domino Records, an indie label based in the U.K. The imprint wanted a longer, more fully realized project, and newer songs were added to flesh out the release; existing songs were rerecorded professionally in the studio.

The resulting Coastal Grooves is Dev’s debut, or rather, his newest incarnation as Blood Orange, a deviation from his existing works. The album has nods to new wave and R&B but also has the drive of ’80s power pop. Aesthetically, Asian melodies and timbres push up-tempo drums along with synth sounds. “I used my guitar, bass, keyboard, and laptop, and just basically put everything together at home,” he says of the album, which has predominately been labeled as indie-dance rock. But there are strong currents of disco and David Bowie throughout; a bit of Cyndi Lauper and Bohannon too. The vocals, soft and breathy, have been likened to Prince, an aforementioned favorite of Dev’s. “On face value, that’s an amazing compliment but also a million miles off the mark,” he laughs, adding to it: “Who could ever truly be compared to Prince? It’s mainly just a comparison to what he did on Purple Rain, not the million other records he made. I’m sure he’d be offended at the thought of my shitty plug-ins and Garage Band bullshit being compared to his production,” he says, laughing.

There is a sense of androgyny found on Coastal Grooves that merits some of the Prince talk, a fact Dev concedes to. Actually, it’s his new outlook that’s entirely bolstered his approach to songwriting. “I love androgyny in music—in general, I love androgyny. But somewhere along the way, the lines got blurred. I’m at a point now where every song I write, it just comes natural for me to think and sound androgynous. It’s a girlish register I’ve worked really hard at [in order] for it to sound properly when doing it. I probably did it most on this Blood Orange album.” He continues,“It’s all about escapism, about running away, and the idea of freedom. I guess the only real main inspiration was Octavia.”

Octavia St. Laurent was a transgender model from 1980s New York and was featured prominently in the revered film Paris Is Burning. The documentary examined gay Harlem and New York City “drag balls.” It was a subculture comprised primarily of transgender and gay men, most of them Latin and African American. “[St. Laurent] died two years ago from cancer and HIV-related causes. I was thinking about her the whole time while making Coastal Grooves. Just the basic idea of having a place to go hide, to feel comfortable, and just really be oneself spoke to me. You can see it in the film, and she really lived her life that way.”

The artwork for Coastal Grooves also affirms its sexual and emotional themes—a drag queen adorns the cover, posing in front of Sally’s Hideaway, a well-known nightclub that existed in Times Square between 1986 and 1992. It was a mecca for gay and transgender men and a fixture of the 1980s gay-power movement. The picture was taken by Brian Lance, a photographer who was also a part of Paris Is Burning. Dev selected the cover art after a chance meeting with Lance. “I made contact with Brian through the Internet while I was googling Octavia and found all these wonderful photos he took during that era.” Some of those images are now part of Coastal Grooves’ overall design aesthetic and media campaign. “I’m sure some people will see it and not know what to make if it,” says Dev. “But to me, it was the perfect fit. It’s probably the one thing the record directly relates to.”

Dev recently embarked on his first solo tour as Blood Orange, having just written and produced for Theophilus London’s newest project. He is also working with Beyoncé’s younger sibling, Solange Knowles, on her upcoming project. Through all the fogginess, it’s clear that Dev is a young artist whose career is in the ascendant—his next album could be a complete deviation from what he’s into at the moment of this writing. But he’s untrammeled by notions of sexuality and style, an outlook that seemingly—and refreshingly—underpins all his work regardless of genre.

“I was already in NewYork at the time and kept thinking about how difficult being Black must’ve been in the ’80s. Then I thought about how harder it must’ve been being Black and gay! But some people were, are, Black, gay, and transgender! How I was then, how I am now, basically, was always different for whatever reason. I get that feeling, and that’s what shows most on this record, on this whole Blood Orange thing, I think. There’s a lot of people running away in these songs.”

“As well as digging for records,” says Nostalgia 77’s Ben Lamdin in Issue 15, “I realized you can dig for scores.” As fellow obsessive collectors, we eventually made our way to sheet music as well. Whether it’s to lay open on your Fender Rhodes, or frame on your wall, each piece of music has that special quality that keeps history alive. Check out a few of the sheets we’ve collected over the years.

Though he’s sold over a hundred million albums, Nile Rodgers is still a mystery to most people. Which is exactly how he planned it. Since the beginning of a fruitful career that’s spanned over three decades, Nile has remained comfortably in the shadows. While most people may not recognize the face, they most certainly recognize the songs. With his musical soul mate, bassist Bernard Edwards, Nile formed Chic, marrying the sophisticated stylings of Roxy Music with the anonymity of KISS—an unlikely, if not highly effective, pairing. Bernard’s bubbling bass lines and Nile’s soaring guitar licks are at the heart of a seemingly simple, but complex, form of disco that dominated clubs and airways at the end of the ’70s and early ’80s. By applying that successful formula to others, the duo created some of the most anthemic popular music of the last century. Songs like “Good Times,” “We Are Family,” and “I’m Coming Out” have become the celebratory soundtrack to the lives of millions, embedded in our collective consciousness.

“Rapper’s Delight” changed the course of music history on the back of Bernard’s bass, not the Sugarhill Gang. You could stick Nile in a room with a cardboard box, and somehow he’ll come out with a hit. His collaborations with Sister Sledge, Diana Ross, Madonna, David Bowie, and Duran Duran provided them all with the biggest and funkiest records of their careers. In an autobiography published a couple of years ago, Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny, Nile opened up about everything from his troubled childhood to his close relationship with Bernard Edwards, cocaine addiction, and his recent cancer scare.

We sat down with Nile last year, but unbeknownst to us at the time, he was sprinkling some of that magic Chic dust on a couple of tracks for Daft Punk, just as he has for so many others over the years. The following interview was done before a live audience at the opening reception dinner of the Scion Music(less) Conference in Los Angeles, California, on Wednesday, October 3, 2012. Be sure to check waxpoetics.com for Part II that includes an April 2013 follow-up on the Daft Punk collaboration.

You published a revealing autobiography last year, documenting your unorthodox childhood from growing up with two parents that were junkies to dropping acid with Timothy Leary during your teenaged years. Yet, you triumphed despite the adversity and mischievous behavior. How has music remained a salvation for you throughout it all?

I started out learning music in the public school system. I started out learning classical music, and even though I loved R&B and I loved pop music, they didn’t teach that at school, so I didn’t play that in school. I just listened to it and loved it at home. I was born in New York City, and I moved to L.A. when I was seven years old. A lot of times, people ask me about all the different accolades and accomplishments in my life. When I was seven years old, I lived in South Central L.A. near Exposition Park, and I went to a Catholic school. I set the national truancy record for parochial school when I was seven years old. I cut school for seventy-five days in a row! [laughs] I used to go downtown to an area in L.A.; they used to call it Skid Row. They used to have grind house movie theaters, and I used to take my money from Catholic school and go to the movie theaters and listen to music in the films all the time. In those days, they didn’t have any ratings, so kids could do what adults did, and I would watch all these different films with lots and lots of music. It just consumed my life and gave me a sense of purpose at a time where my life was very lonely. I was the only Black kid at this particular Catholic school, and I felt very disenfranchised. But somehow, music was so special to me, and I could tell it at that young age. It just kept me going and going.

After cutting school for seventy-five days straight, they finally caught me. I came home and the police were at my house, and they shipped me back to New York. My mom was suffering from postpartum depression, where she used to threaten to kill my little brother and myself every day. But by the time I had spent time in L.A., I guess they cured her or something, and I moved back to New York. In New York, I really started to cherish music in a way that it was a life-saving force in my world; I just did it every day. I went to school hard, I studied hard, and I basically became a classical musician. It was jazz that was being played around my household, so I elevated to a jazz musician. Because I learned to become a jazz musician, was a proper classical musician, and I could write, orchestrate, and arrange, I never had a boss. So when I got my first big break, the money came right to me. Well, we did have one middleman who helped us get the deal, but the great thing about my life is that I’ve actually managed to have all those hit records and that big career just on my own. I would just meet a person like you, and we would talk, and we’d say, “Damn, let’s do a record.” We’d do a record, that person would happen to be Diana Ross. Or that person would happen to be David Bowie. Or that person would happen to be Duran Duran. Or that person would happen to be any one of a number of really big people who could control their own destiny to a certain extent.

It’s a great arc from your entry into the industry. Can you talk a bit about your beginnings in the Sesame Street band and the Apollo?

At the time, I was studying classical guitar, and my teacher wanted me to go to either Juilliard or Manhattan School of Music because they both had what they called the extension division. Guitar is not part of the symphony orchestra so you had to study in the extension curriculum. I went to Juilliard—that was cool, it felt okay. Then I popped up to Manhattan where a lot of my friends were hanging out, and right up on the bulletin board, they were hosting auditions for Sesame Street. I went and I auditioned, and I got the job the first day. That was the beginning of a whole life change for me, because after I did Sesame Street for a year—they were only in their second season [in 1971]—the woman who was in charge of Sesame Street, Loretta Long, her husband Peter Long was the manager of the Apollo Theater.

A year into my Sesame Street gig, [the Apollo] had an opening because Carlos Alomar left to join David Bowie’s Young Americans. Now in those days, I grew up as a hippy, so my appearance was always weird. I’d always have weird hair, and when I went to audition at the Apollo, I had green hair—big green Afro. You used to cornrow and then braid it, and let it out before the show and your Afro is all big and green. But then after you sweat, it’s all tight on your head. [laughs] I went and I auditioned, and the old-time dudes were making fun of me because I was a hippy with big platform shoes. I was real skinny; I towered over everybody. So they were like, “Let’s teach this cocky young kid a lesson.” They said that I got the gig, that I was a good music reader. The opening act was Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. I’m gonna get around to Parliament-Funkadelic, ’cause that’s the shit that changed my life, but Parliament was the next week. This first show I did was Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Betty Wright, and Maxine Brown. I was just that bad young brotha who could just read everything. You know, just throw it my way. They let me take off and told me I didn’t have to make rehearsal because I was such a good reader that I could just go out and hang in the neighborhood.

About a year prior to getting that job, I used to be in the Black Panther Party, and the Black Panther office was right around the corner from the Apollo Theater. I went to see what was going on, and I was lamenting ’cause the Panthers were over and I was sad. So I walked around the neighborhood, came back, sat down, took my chair, and the conductor puts his hand up and he gets ready to start out “I Put a Spell on You.” I didn’t really know the song, but I could just look at the charts and say, “I could just read this shit, nothing to it.” I didn’t know Screamin’ Jay’s routine, so I didn’t pay attention to this coffin that had been wheeled in stage right and was just sitting over there. Conductor puts his hand up and goes, “Bom Bom Bom Bom,” and as soon as he does that the coffin opens up, Screamin’ Jay jumps out. Now they got all this stuff planned, but I don’t know. So Screamin’ Jay jumps out, I jump out of my skin.

Meanwhile, I’m bad Mr. Black Panther, right? Jump out of my skin, grab the plug out of my amp, my guitar under my hands, and go running off stage left. Now they blocked the wings, so I can’t get out. So I gotta run back towards Screamin’ Jay, but they got the other side of the stage blocked. So I’m running back and forth screaming, “Ahhh, ahhh, ahhh, power to the people! Black Panther Party, power to the people!” The whole Apollo Theater was cracking up; I mean, they were crying. It brought me down a peg, and they could tell it was genuine emotion. You know flight or fight? I was flying; I mean, I was running all across the stage. [laughs] Screamin’ Jay had his rattle with the skull coming after me [mimics Screamin’ Jay’s ghoul-like moan], and the band was accenting, the band was playing that shit. So we turned it into a routine.

After that, the old-timers took me under their wing and decided to school me in R&B. They said the notation looks the same, but you don’t interpret the same. It’s not like classical music, it’s not even really like jazz, but it’s closer to jazz. At that point, I got a little humble; took my little chair and played the gig. I stayed in the Apollo house band for a while, and during that time, I met this incredible man who changed my life named Bernard Edwards. Bernard Edwards was the greatest bass player, if not the greatest musician I ever met. He and I formed the band that would go on to become Chic. After that, life just—it’s never a straight line to success; it’s a lot of ups and downs—but once he and I formed that partnership, to us in our hearts, we were invincible. I kept thinking to myself, let Screamin’ Jay chase me now. I got my boy with me; let’s see what happens now.

Roxy Music and KISS both had a big impact on the concept behind Chic. Can you talk a little bit about their influence?

Even though we lived in New York, funk is what ruled our world, bro; that was it. I had already played at the Apollo for a year, so I was down with Parliament; I had gigged with them. I gigged with New Birth, all these other bands; it was incredible. What we tried to do is formulate this concept of what we called sophistofunk. We just made it up, it didn’t mean nothin’. We knew that Cameo was from near us but sounded like they were from the West Coast. Our first tour, we were on tour with Cameo, Con Funk Shun, Rufus, bands like that. But we wanted to be different; we didn’t want to come out wearing the outfits that everybody was wearing. It just felt like if we’re in New York, we gotta be different. Bernard and I were backing up this group called New York City. They only had one hit record, a Philly sound cut by Thom Bell, and we gigged off that record for about two years. We did our final show in London, and my hotel room got robbed. They stole my passport, so I had no passport, no money, and no way to get home. So the band left me, but like all musicians, if you have a girlfriend, you have a place to stay.

I had a girlfriend, and she let me stay with her, and she was working as a hostess in a club. She told me she wanted me to come and check out one of the bands that she liked. I was getting a nice little rep in London; I was playing and they were trying to make me the funk version of Jimi Hendrix. So I went out with her one night to see this band called Roxy Music, and they were playing at this spot called the Roxy. It was the first time I had seen an audience so in tune with the artist. I had never seen anything like that before. In the old days, if you saw James Brown, Parliament, or anybody like that, you clearly knew they were on another level and you were just in the audience in awe. But Roxy Music had this thing where they had almost like spiritual tentacles that came out and touched the audience. The audience was sort of glamorous, and [Roxy Music was] glamorous, and their sound was sort of awash with texture—it was a different kind of thing. It wasn’t like any funk or any rock I had seen before. I just never heard anything like that before, never experienced it. Plus, they were at a joint called the Roxy. I was like, “Damn!”

So I called up my partner Bernard who left with all the other guys, left me stranded. I made up this concept called “a totally immersive artistic experience in music.” But remember, even though I loved funk, I was still a hippy at heart. So I called up my boy and went, [in cool hippy voice] “Ah, Bernard, man, so, like, what I just experienced is a totally immersive artistic experience in music. And I think that’s what we should do, man, when I get back home and we put our band together.” And he looked at me and said, “What the—‘n-word’ what? What are you talking about?” [in hippy voice] “No, man, I’m telling you, man, I just saw it, it was incredible. So like, if we do the Black version of that, you know, what would we be?”

We were still called the Big Apple Band and decided to keep that name. Except one of the dudes from my school—this guy named Walter Murphy who was an incredible composer—he did a record called “A Fifth of Beethoven” where he took Beethoven’s Fifth and made a disco record out of it. You can hear it in Saturday Night Fever. So everybody thought that was us; they were calling us up going, “Yeah, y’all finally made it! I love that, man, ‘Fifth of Beethoven,’ Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band.” We were like, “Nah, that’s not our Big Apple Band.” So Bernard said, “Well, yo, my man, you know about that totally immersive artistic experience thing in music? Why don’t we call ourselves Chic?” [Me] and Tony [Thompson], who was our drummer at the time, we were on the floor laughing; we could not stop laughing. We thought Chic was the dumbest name ever, until we realized that Walter Murphy had the Big Apple Band, and we had to change our name.

So now we went out on this sophistofunk hunt. Because if you look at Parliament, you look at the Geto Boys, you look at a lot of bands, everybody had characters and roles to play. So we went out to hire the people that would represent this sophistofunk thing called Chic that we were just making up, we didn’t have any music yet. We hired this drummer named Tony Thompson, who had just finished a stint with LaBelle. And LaBelle, they were sort of into the fantasy funk fusion, so it was like, “Okay, cool, that brotha, he’s cool, he’s gets it.” Then we hired this guy named Rob Sabino, and he was into this band called KISS. Now, KISS didn’t have a record deal yet, but he told us that we had to go see them. Now, my boy Bernard [is] Mr. R&B and “I don’t understand the totally immersive artistic experience, my brother.” All of a sudden, we see KISS, and they got their grease paint, the high platforms, the tongue, and the blood. They had no record deal, but, meanwhile, the crowd—these guys had New York, the punk scene, on lockdown. They just had fans that were going crazy.

I was so happy, because now I could show Bernard by example. I said, “Now we can see an artist who’s totally unique, totally original, no record deal, they got a fan base. Look what’s going on; that’s what I want us to do.” So we tried to come up with the Black version of melding what we called the anonymity of KISS with a lot of stylization, and the sophiso-whatever of Roxy Music. And then Bernard said, “So what’s wrong with the name Chic?” And then Tony and I said, “Okay, cool, we’ll call ourselves Chic.”

[In 1977,] I wrote the very first Chic song, which was called “Everybody Dance.” And I’ll never forget when I played it for my boy, when Bernard came back to rehearsal and I played the cut for him. Our stuff is pretty sophisticated. It’s not the regular kind of R&B; it’s got really jazzy chord changes. I played [hums melody to “Everybody Dance”] and I started singing, “Everybody dance, do-do-do-do, clap your hands, clap your hands.” And my partner Bernard went, “Ah, yo, my man.” “Yeah?” I got all defensive. “The song is cool man, but what the fuck does ‘do-do-do-do’ mean?” [laughs] I said, “It means the same as ‘la-la-la-la.’ ” He said, “Then why don’t we go, ‘Everybody dance, la-la-la-la clap your hands.’ ” I said, “Haven’t you been listening to music lately, nobody goes ‘la’ anymore, everybody goes, like Soul Train, [hums “do-do-do-duh-do-do” from the Soul Train theme].” I said, “ ‘La-la-la-la’ ain’t happening anymore. It’s gotta go ‘do-do-do-do.’ So just shut the fuck up and play, ‘do-do-do-do, clap your hands.’ ” At the time, we were backing up Luther Vandross; Luther was playing at Radio City the night we cut “Everybody Dance.” “Everybody Dance” costs ten dollars to make, and Luther Vandross and everybody in his band sang on it for free ’cause we were his backup band. We walked into the studio, and the ten dollars actually—we didn’t have to pay any engineer—was to keep the elevator man quiet to not let the boss know we were recording in his studio after hours. Luther Vandross taught us how to arrange vocals, and that was our very first recording session. In those days, we didn’t have any cassettes to take home, so the only way you could take the music home was to cut an acetate. We didn’t have any money, so we just played the song and listened to it in the control room over and over again until we had to leave.

I never heard the song again until about three weeks later. My boy who had paid the ten dollars had made two acetates of the record and had taken it to his club; he was a DJ. He called me up three weeks later and said, “Nile, you gotta come see this.” I said, “Come and see what?” He said, “I can’t explain, you just gotta come and see this.” So I come down to his club, it was called the Night Owl. In those days, Black people were just starting to get dressed up, look sophisticated, and work on Wall Street. In New York, we used to call it the “Buppie Movement,” the Black Urban Professional Movement. And we walked into a buppie club, the kind of place that Bernard and I could never get in—we didn’t have the money, the look, nothing. But we get to the door, and this is the beginning of the big bouncers and the red velvet rope and stuff. We walk up to the club and my man goes, “Yo, my man, you can’t come up in the club dressed like that.”

And I remembered my boy who told me to come down, he said, “When they stop you”—’cause he knew they were gonna stop me—“when they stop you, just tell ’em you wrote ‘Everybody Dance.’ ” The shit sounded like code to me. I thought I was in the CIA or something. So they stopped me at the door and I said, “I’m a friend of Robert Drake’s.” And his exact words were, “I don’t care if you are Robert Drake,” who was the DJ. And I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, also I did ‘Everybody Dance.’ ” Swear to God, the bouncer went, “ ‘Everybody Dance’?! My brother, come in, man!” He started hugging me, a scary big dude. I don’t know this guy from Adam, and he’s hugging on me, and I thought he was gonna start trying to tongue-kiss me and shit. He walks me inside past the girl collecting the money and there’s another bouncer inside, and he’s like, “Whoa, you can’t come inside dressed like that!” And the bouncer said, “No, tell him who you are.” I said, “Oh, my name is Nile.” “Yeah?” “I wrote, ‘Everybody Dance.’ ” [He says,] “ ‘Everybody Dance’? Come here, man, come here! Let me take you up and introduce you to Tom.”

So we go into this joint; the guy who owns the club is a guy named Tom. It was a Black club, but Tom is a White guy; he’s the owner. The part we didn’t get into was my own family life. My stepfather is Jewish, so you had an interracial couple in my family. He married my mom in 1959; you never saw couples rolling like that. Usually, you would see a Black man with a White woman, ’cause the Black man was a jazz musician or something like that. You would rarely see a White man married to a Black woman. So I go into this club and meet this dude Tom. Tom is like my stepfather; he’s got Jungle Fever—nothing but sistas. We walk in and the guy says, “Tom, this is Nile, he wrote ‘Everybody Dance.’ ” [Tom says,] “Ahh man, ‘Everybody Dance’!”

Tom is my boy now, he’s giving me drinks, and I’m saying, “Okay, this is a trick, when is it gonna backfire on me?” My boy who recorded the record sees me come in with the owner, we’re walking across the dance floor, the club is filled with smoke, he could barely see me. I fight my way through the smoke, and my boy sees me and just starts laughing right away. I get to the DJ booth, and he goes, “Nile, watch this.” Puts on the record, right away drum fill, [starts humming melody and lyrics to “Everybody Dance”] swear to God the entire club screamed and jumped up. The whole club is packed on the dance floor. They’re out there, practicing, playing air guitar and air bass, jamming it and singing it. I’m like, “I just wrote this shit three weeks ago.”

Continue to Page 2 for the extended interview.

Lucky for us, Curtis Mayfield was there to turn it all into music. From the deep clavinet riffs of “Billy Jack” to the hopeful horn lines of “Love to the People,” 1975’s There’s No Place Like America Today is the restless, searching sound of a country coming undone—but refusing to give up. Slow and pensive, the funk of America is miles away from the exuberant sounds of Curtis or Super Fly. No one was serious, and it made Mayfield furious.

And you could feel it in the album art. Illustrated by Peter Palombi, America’s cover features a dapper-looking White man behind the wheel of a car filled with pretty women. Juxtaposed is an all-Black breadline. It’s a fitting accompaniment to the music on America, especially the anthemic Curtis original “Hard Times,” not to be confused with David “Fathead” Newman’s trademark track of the same name.

Famously recorded by Baby Huey in 1970—and by Gene Chandler as “In My Body’s House” before that—Curtis finally tackled this one himself in ’75. Dark and foreboding, and marked by mournful wah-wah guitar and Quinton Joseph’s stellar, just-the-facts drumming, “Hard Times” finds Curtis confronting the reality of Black-on-Black crime: “From my body house, I see, like me, another / Familiar face of creed and race, a brother / But to my surprise, I found another man corrupt / Although he be my brother, he wants to hold me up.”

But the real sparks fly on the aforementioned “Billy Jack,” a companion piece to the far-more-visible “Freddie’s Dead.” To begin, keyboardist Rich Tufo spells out a chilly bass line in three-note fragments. Henry Gibson’s congas and a chunky rhythm guitar part emerge from the ether. Thirty seconds in, we hear a snare crack, and a quiet, menacing groove has arrived. Like Freddie, Billy is a tragic character, dead before the song’s begun. But Curtis lacks the sympathy he felt in 1972. “It’s a wonder he lived this long,” sings Curtis.

Thirty-five years after the release of America, the unemployment rate in the U.S. is at a whopping 9.7 percent, and we’re once again in the throes of a punishing recession. I guess there’s no place like America any day. And I guess we still need this music to pull us through.

Originally published in Wax Poetics Issue 38.

The streets of New York City weren’t very pretty in the 1970s. Littered throughout once welcoming communities, an influx of heroin junkies, many broken young brothers home from the Vietnam War, became yet another symbol of a deteriorating society. As essayist James Wolcott described the then-rotting Apple, it was “a metropolis on the verge of a nervous breakdown with a side order of panic in Needle Park.”

Of course, chocolate-hued hoods like Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, and Harlem were the hardest hit by high unemployment, poor school systems, run-down rental properties, and drug addiction.

Uptown, noted underworld icons Nicky Barnes and Frank Lucas became rich, stylish men, surrounding themselves with “the baddest bitches,” expensive shoes, and gaudy furs. However, the killer-diller, word-is-bond truth was that the drugs these men supplied were detrimental to Harlem in ways still felt today.

From its former glory days as a cultural capital where Langston Hughes scribbled poetry, Billie Holiday sang the blues, and Duke Ellington tinkled his Steinway, the once vibrant village of Harlem had become, as Wesley Snipes’s stoic gangster Roemello Skuggs observed in Sugar Hill (1994), “a burnt-out jungle, a ghost of better days.”

Yet, while the streets of Harlem had become a haven for the criminal minded (in addition to drug dealers, there were also numerous pimps, whores, number bankers, and practitioners of other vices), that depressing wonderland of burned-out tenements and trash-strewn lots became the perfect backdrop for the coolest crime movies of that period.

Beginning with the goofy adventure/comedy Cotton Comes to Harlem in 1970, based on a novel by Chester Himes, the next couple of years bought forth a slew of Harlem-based films including Shaft, Come Back Charleston Blue, Across 110th Street, and Gordon’s War. Not yet known as “blaxploitation,” these new-jack action flicks became the staple of crumbling movie theaters throughout the country.

“The one thing about our movies was that they had dynamic music,” says film legend Fred Williamson, who starred in the 1973 Harlem double feature Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem. “The music was as big as the movies.”

While Stax mack Isaac Hayes laid the groovy groundwork with his brilliant soundtrack to Shaft in 1971, the following year, Curtis Mayfield’s mighty Super Fly album built on the same funky foundation and constructed a soaring skyscraper of soul that sold five million copies in the ’70s.

Composer and arranger Johnny Pate, who collaborated with Mayfield on the Super Fly soundtrack and later scored Shaft in Africa (1973) and Bucktown (1975), explained to Billboard in 1973, “There are people making black films who are into a thing where they feel that if they get a song or a record or an artist involved, regardless of whether the movie is good or bad, they will have a hit.”

Released the same year Harlem’s congressional representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. died, I can still remember watching the Super Fly trailer at our local movie house, the Tapia. “He’s not just fly, he’s Super Fly,” the laid-back announcer flowed as various scenes of slick-haired pretty boy Ron O’Neal established the character. “Can a Super Fly Harlem dude leave the system? He’s got a plan to stick it to the Man. He’s super hood, super high, super dude, Super Fly.”

As the heated jazz of “Junkie Chase” (one of the two instrumental tracks, the other being “Think,” that arranger Johnny Pate insists he wrote independent of Mayfield, but was denied credit) blared in the background, the neighborhood kids were excited by the playerlistic images of the characters and the uptown street scenes.

“I played alone on ‘Junkie Chase,’ ” recalls guitarist Craig McMullen from his home in Ohio. Describing McMullen’s sound, one critic wrote, “[He] played great wah-inflected counterpoint, combining lead lines and strong chordal playing in a sweet, laid-back, but still completely badass post-Hendrixian manner.”

Having studied at Berklee College of Music for two years, McMullen was introduced to Mayfield through Rufus drummer Andre Fisher in 1970. “Like ‘Shaft,’ we had that wah-wah thing down,” says McMullen. “On ‘Junkie Chase,’ I wanted to do a constant rhythm that was freer than what others were doing with wah-wah at that time. But when you hear those horns and stuff, that’s definitely some Johnny Pate cold, nasty, jazzy stuff.”

Super Fly, which was the first feature of director Gordon Parks Jr. (whose iconic father was an internationally known photographer and the director of Shaft), follows the story line of a hustler who wants to do one last drug deal and escape with his woman, Georgia. “A big score, a million in cash; yeah, the big one,” bragged the trailer voiceover.

Played with the method-actor swagger by former stage actor Ron O’Neal, who four months after Super Fly premiered admitted on the program Soul! of dabbling in “a little field research in cocaine” after taking the role. Airing on PBS, the actor explained to host Ellis Haizlip, “We made Priest a coke hustler, but he could’ve easily been a pimp, a number runner, or maybe even a preacher.”

Harlemite and New Jack City screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper, who saw the film six times “at the rat palace on 145th otherwise known as the Roosevelt Theater,” was enthralled. “Seeing the landmarks of 127th and 128th and Eighth Avenue, St. Nicholas Avenue, the film was so real, it was almost like a documentary. In the midst of its glorious ruin, Super Fly put a Harlem on display in a way that will never be seen again.”

Super Fly generated controversy with its liberal use of coke by the main characters Priest and his drug partner, Eddie (played superbly by Carl Lee, who also cowrote and starred in girlfriend Shirley Clarke’s 1964 Harlem masterwork The Cool World; ironically, his name in that movie was Priest).

“I don’t see why people are complaining about the subject of these films,” Curtis Mayfield told Jet magazine in October 1972 in a statement that foreshadows the words of modern-day rappers. “The way you clean up the films is by cleaning up the streets. The music and movies of today are the conditions that exist. You change music and movies by changing the conditions.”

Former football player and blaxploitation actor Fred Williamson believes that the people who were opposed to the new wave of Black gangster movies simply had little knowledge of film history. “My generation grew up with heroes like Bogart, George Raft and Edward G. Robinson,” Williamson says. “Black audiences weren’t accustomed to seeing a stylish leading character at the same time being tough. Sidney Poitier had style, but he was never tough or bad. In the ’70s, we were the main stars carrying these movies, and we created characters that stood up for themselves.”

Indeed, Mayfield agreed. “These films were positive for us,” he told me in 1996. “Prior to blaxplotation, we didn’t dare show any intellect in films. The Black characters were always getting killed. But with Shaft and Super Fly, things were different.” Although Mayfield didn’t admit it at the time, his urban blues-soaked lyrics gave the characters emotions and conflicts absent from Phillip Fenty’s screenplay.

While director Park’s talents were also limited (his Three the Hard Way released two years later is one of the worst films ever made), the nostalgic side of me still gets chills when watching Super Fly late at night on cable.

Drifting on distant memories, I recall the real-life Super Fly guys profiling through Harlem—“sporting life” dudes who got haircuts at Jerry’s Den, threw back drinks at the Shalamar, and parked their colorful cars along Seventh Avenue on Saturday night.

The first time I saw Super Fly was at the Lowe’s Victoria on 125th Street. Next door to the Apollo, the theater was a hundred feet away from the pigeon-eyed view of the movie’s opening shot. Filled with young folks who couldn’t wait to enter into that playa playa netherworld of hustlers, scramblers, dames, and gamblers, folks were psyched.

As the reel started rolling, music spilled from the speakers and the audience hummed along, mouthed the words, or sang aloud to the soundtrack, which was released a few weeks before the movie. Savvy record executive Neil Bogart, whose Buddah Records distributed Mayfield’s co-owned label Curtom, had released the album six weeks prior.

Coming during a period when soundtracks were often put on the market months after a film had closed, this strategy proved a winner for both the record company and Super Fly producer Sig Shore.

With a neo-psychedelic red logo that inspired a million graffiti artists, the first single, “Freddie’s Dead (Theme from Super Fly),” which is how it was credited on the 7-inch, had blown up on pop and urban stations; the song peaked at number four on the U.S. pop charts and number two on the R&B chart.

“Original music for motion pictures will become increasingly important as an avenue of exposure,” Bogart told Billboard after the Super Fly soundtrack had sold 212,000 in ten days. A million television commercial or radio spots couldn’t have bought the kind of anticipation that built throughout the pop-culture landscape, especially in America’s chocolate cities, after folks heard “Freddie’s Dead.”

Premier blues guitarist and Chicago homeboy Jean-Paul Bourelly, who has played with Miles Davis and Muhal Richard Abrams, fondly remembered the impact of “Freddie’s Dead” over aspiring hometown musicians. “If you didn’t know how to play ‘Freddie’s Dead’ in Chicago,” Bourelly recalls, “then you couldn’t be in any South Side band. Curtis never played it too much, which made it perfect.”

Besides the constant coke sniffing in the film (before crack swept through the hoods of America a decade later, coke wasn’t a poor man’s drug; the real problem was heroin), the biggest surprise in Super Fly came midway through when Curtis Mayfield made a appearance performing “Pusherman” with his sizzling band.

Wearing eyeglasses and strumming guitar, the then thirty-year-old composer looked more like a scraggly poetry professor than a hip soul man. If judging by visual style alone, Mayfield was anti-fly.

“Technically, ‘Pusherman’ was the first song we recorded for the Super Fly soundtrack,” says McMullen. “Unlike the rest of the music, which we recorded back in Chicago at the RCA Studios, ‘Pusherman’ was done in New York City during the same time we came to film our cameo.”

They recorded at Bell Sound Studios, which was owned by Buddah Records coproprietors Viewlex. The then-popular midtown Manhattan studio was where Cannonball Adderley, Kiss, and Roberta Flack had also worked. “Pusherman” was the only track featuring drummer Tyrone McCullen; Morris Jennings played  drums on the rest of the album. “It was also the only track we recorded without arranger Johnny Pate and a full orchestra,” informs McMullen.

Pre-music videos, it was exciting to see an artist on the silver screen. Yet, being a kid, I had no concept that Curtis Mayfield was already a respected star. If truth be told, in 1972, I’d never heard of his former group the Impressions nor had any idea of Mayfield’s legacy as a songwriter, producer, label co-owner, and shrewd businessman.

But disco pizza is always the first thing I think of when I look at the cover of Buari’s Disco Soccer, picturing the staunch Ghanaian activist and music pioneer and his topless companion in complementing “6” and “9” shorts and pants, sharing a slice against the refulgent backdrop of the hottest pie party in town. Prior to the album’s release, you could pretty much combine “disco” with anything for a hit, so why not soccer? It was the most popular sport on the globe outside of the United States, and Sidiku Buari himself was a superb all-around athlete, living at the time in New York City, where the New York Cosmos—buoyed by a three-year stint from Pelé—had just won the 1978 North American Soccer League Soccer Bowl.

Disco Soccer, the album, has moments of supreme Afro-disco intensity—“I’m Ready,” “It’s What’s Happening,” “Hard Times”—but “disco soccer,” the concept, was not quite as sound. It was described as a new dance craze, but unfortunately, was more of a gimmick than anything else. Buari—who idolized James Brown, studied music and business in the States, and served as president of Musicians Union of Ghana—recognized such and later apologized for the content of some of his U.S.-produced recordings. “We were being childish,” Buari told Ghana’s Joy FM radio in 2002. “The producers wanted commercial music to make money, but now we don’t want the [younger musicians] to make the same mistakes we made those days.”

Hopefully, I can keep Bryan from doing the same. 1979’s “Disco Demolition Night” at old Comiskey Park in Chicago—the pinnacle of disco disgust—was bad enough, but a disco pizza demolition night? The horror is unimaginable.

Wax Poetics Records will release the new Kendra Morris album of covers, Mockingbird, on July 30, 2013. The first single, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” was featured in the theatrical trailer to Dead Man Down. The Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy has just debuted Morris’s Radiohead cover of “Karma Police,” and coming soon is acclaimed photographer Marc McAndrew’s music video to “Miss You,” reinterpreted by Morris from the Rolling Stone’s 1978 album Some Girls.

Photo via strictlyskilled.com

It’s a sunny, laid-back day in Brooklyn, the type of day Robert Hall relishes. Better known as Lord Finesse, he’s spent the better half of the afternoon combing the borough for records. As founding member of the D.I.T.C. Crew, his search for vinyl is routine and has remained so for decades.

D.I.T.C.—which stands for Diggin’ in the Crates—was at the pinnacle of poise in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The Bronx-based collective brimmed with talent, boasting members Lord Finesse, Showbiz and A.G., Diamond D, Fat Joe, O.C., Buckwild, and the late Big L. Their creed was the construal of their name: to find records, of any sort, and create something substantive. “We got together in the mid-’80s,” explains Finesse. “We all had solo careers, but formed together because we all loved music, records especially. We all had records and would always go out lookin’ for ’em. It just made sense to combine our interests, talents, and our strengths.”

Nineteen years since his debut, The Funky Technician, I caught the esteemed rapper/producer as he came back from sun-soaked Brooklyn to drop off his latest stacks, before heading out to scour more bins around the city.

You haven’t been as prolific recently when it comes to rapping, but you still produce and DJ quite often. Are you more interested in production at this point in time?

Right now in my career, I’m more fascinated by the musical aspect of things. I just love music. There’s also no age limit to being a producer. There’s no marketing plan or promotional garbage for producers. Nothing has to be applied to you as a producer in terms of looks or image, ya know? If you make great music, people will notice. That’s what I’m after.

How often do you still look for records?

I try to go three days a week or more. If I don’t go out looking for records, I feel like I’m not doing my job. I feel like there’s always an obscure record out there, and I’m on a mission to find it. I’m always looking to get new musical knowledge.

When you get records now, is it simply for your collection, or is it viewed more as a production tool?

It can be ten different things. I look for records that I can loop or chop up. But I also get records that I just want to play, or records that I liked as a kid. I get obscure soul joints to use at parties, or [to use] as an intro when I walk onstage. Sometimes, I find obscure records for cheap and sell it to another store for store credit. I look for a variation of things.

Having been one of a few known rappers who can also successfully make beats, can you share the standouts in your collection that are immensely valuable to you and your career? 

Now you got me excited! Hold on, hold on, let me go kneel down and look through my shelves and all that. I’ll call you right back.

The phone rings ten minutes later, and Finesse, in his signature smooth tone, rattles off the following records.

De La drops visuals for “Get Away” Feat. The Spirit of Wu-Tang. AOI grind, you hear it. If you’re still complaining about hip-hop, welcome to the renaissance.

Joey’s released the first single from his upcoming Summer Knights EP coming next month. “Word Is Bond” finds Joey dropping jewels over a piano-driven neck snapper courtesy of Statik Selektah.

Gino Soccio in Brazil. Courtesy of Gino Soccio.

From Gino Soccio’s early productions in Witch Queen to his robotic, Italo-inspired masterpiece “Remember,” this 57-minute mix takes a portrait of the disco artist as a young man. Soccio’s output abruptly ended in the mid-1980s and Soccio dropped out of public view, but his legend has only grown in recent years. DJ Jex Opolis (aka Jered Stuffco) threw the mix together while researching Soccio for the Wax Poetics article.

Track List

Gino Soccio ”It’s Alright”
Gino Soccio “You Move Me”
Gino Soccio “Try It Out”
Gino Soccio “Hold Tight”
Gino Soccio “So Lonely”
Witch Queen “All Right Now”
Karen Silver “Nobody Else”
Karen Silver “Set Me Free”
Gino Soccio “Love Is”
Gino Soccio “Closer”
Gino Soccio “Whodunnit?”
Gino Soccio “Dancer”
Gino Soccio “Remember (12-inch Re-mix)”

At the board, 1981. Photo courtesy of Gino Soccio.

From Issue 55.

About a month before thousands chanted “Disco sucks!” at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, Gino Soccio was ensconced in his Montreal studio, sipping coffee with cognac and laying down tracks for his second LP. Leaning against a twenty-four-channel mixing desk, Soccio spoke like a disco evangelist during a June 1979 interview with the Canadian Press: “Disco is more than just music. It’s a social movement, and I’m not jiving you when I say it’s spreading to epidemic proportions. It fills a demand for people who want to blow their minds dancing.”

Soccio had been blowing plenty of minds over the past year. His debut LP’s lead single, “Dancer,” had topped the Billboard disco charts for six weeks, propelling his LP Outline onto more than a million turntables globally. Slim and wide-eyed with a handlebar moustache and mane of dark hair, Soccio was immediately hailed as a disco auteur and a synth wizard. Trained in classical orchestration, Soccio created music that mixed the glamour of European disco with the gritty bottom-end of American R&B.

From 1978 to 1985, he released music at a blistering rate: four full-length albums and a clutch of 12-inches under his own name; singles and EPs under different monikers; production and writing for other artists; a motion picture soundtrack.

But shortly after a 1984 alleged Montreal police-brutality incident, Soccio vanished. There were rumors: He had lost his mind. He’d become a vagrant. He’d become a reclusive shut-in. While many believe Soccio is another disco-inferno-turned-dance-floor burnout, the untold truth about why one of the era’s singular talents abandoned his career is a tale of ego, conspiracy, and betrayal.