When the Funk was Flamin’ –Interracial Funk in the ’60s and ’70s
Black music was great, white music was great, and in Rock & Roll America, they were even better together.
EVEN THE BLACKEST GENRE of the Rock & Roll era was made better for dreaming bigger.
What came to be known as Funk was essentially the vision of one man: James Brown (building on the visions of others, of course, especially the guitarist Lowman Pauling — nothing happens in a vacuum). The Godfather of Soul was so essential to the foundation of Rock & Roll America and what came after that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which, granted the least dispensation, will practice every conceivable sin of omission or commission, had to include him in its first class of inductees.
Like many funk bands, Brown’s were made up of black musicians. But his vision was too compelling (and frankly, too much rooted in New Testament brotherhood) for it to remain racially exclusive for long. By the time the funk revolution had played out through the 1960s and ’70s, it had developed an interracial component that was not merely floating on the surface of the music’s skin but coursing through its bloodstream.
Though interracial enterprises were, in some sense, the entire point of Rock &Roll America’s very existence, far transcending Jazz’s tentative, essentially professorial, efforts, Funk (and its disco offshoot) would end by being the last line of defense against the nihilism that rose to replace it.
By the 1960s and ’70s, funk had developed an interracial component that was coursing through its bloodstream.
When Funk and Disco America became Punk and Rap America (giving way in turn to Grunge and Hip Hop America, where a fat, bland style of glop-pop featuring endless melisma-for-its-own-sake oozed across everything in between and the once-more-lied-to races were driven as far apart on the bandstand and the charts as they had been before Fats and Elvis and, yes, James, set out to merge them, a condition that ended a few years ago, with white acts, for instance, spending an entire year atop the black charts, by which time every style was too bland to have any taste at all), the new order consisted of obeying the commands of the new bosses and running back to the tribes.
Lest we forget then, here’s a Handy Ten from the last age when we were able to do more than dream of making it come out right.
Note: This is an adaptation of my Handy Ten category at The Round Place in the Middle. The (Year) is the year the single version of the record peaked on the carts. All chart positions are from Billboard: Hot 100 (Pop Chart) / R&B (Black Music Chart). “The funk was flamin’,” is a misheard lyric from “Disco Inferno” that I shouted at the top of my lungs for decades. Now I find the lyric is “Folks are screamin’.” They really should hire me to mishear lyrics. The ones I make up are always better.
Sly & the Family Stone “Dance to the Music” (1968: Hot 100 #8/R&B #9)
All you have to do to imagine how groundbreaking this was in 1968 is to listen to it now because the world hasn’t caught up. There were albums being made throughout the ’60s (and occasionally afterward) that attempted to capture the entire history of rock &roll to that moment. This might be the closest anyone came to pulling off the concept on the A-side of a single.
The underlying question was whether such a record, which sounds like it could explode into pieces at any second but never does, could be made by any band that didn’t have black and white, men and women all pulling together. If history is any judge, the answer is still no.
Booker T. and the MGs “Melting Pot” (1971: Hot 100 #45/R&B #21)
Booker T. Jones and company — two white men, two black men — had been hitting the pop and soul charts with some regularity since 1962’s “Green Onions.” They were nearly as close to the foundation of funk as James Brown himself. By the ’70s, they were the same super-tight unit they had always been, but with more inclination to claim a space in the new funk universe that was emerging in Sly Stone’s wake.
It wasn’t necessarily a commandment of the Cosmos that they cook up eight minutes worth of spaced out jazz-funk fusion and call it “Melting Pot” as if demanding the NewAmerica use it for a soundtrack. But that was a slip. Its modest chart placement (in an edited version) suggests the status of a crucial amendment to the Funk Constitution that failed the three-fourths majority by a vote or two. Oh, what might have been.
War “Slippin’ Into Darkness” (1971: Hot 100 #16/R&B #12)
An L.A. collective, six black men and a Danish harmonica player, who, by the time they had coalesced into Eric Burdon’s latest backing band, had absorbed every influence their home town had to offer. Their albums were miniature histories of rock & roll, especially as it had developed in East Los Angeles, where they reigned as kings for a good part of the ’70s as the inheritors of a thousand doo-wop groups, garage bands, local mariachis, and the hardcore hometown funk of Dyke & the Blazers and Charles Wright.
Especially in its full-length LP version, this was their most scarifying sound, deep testimony about the past and present that added up to a warning of what was to come if we didn’t embrace what War was offering.
We didn’t, of course. And it’s still coming.
The Staple Singers “I’ll Take You There” (1972: Hot 100 #1/R&B #1)
In many respects Rock & Roll America’s spiritual and musical Everest: part clarion call, part plea, part warning. The Staples took all the vocals of course, including Mavis’s plea for her Pops (one of the finest guitar players in the world) to “play Daddy now.” The stinging guitar, however, like the rest of the music, was played by the white boys of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, affectionately known as the Swampers. At that moment, they may have been the greatest soul, funk, or rock & roll band in the world. If anybody had asked for proof, they could have just played this record and left it at that.
Tower of Power “What is Hip?” (1973: Hot 100 #91/R&B #39)
A fierce (mostly) white horn-driven band fronted for a brief but vital period by black vocalist Lenny Willams, Tower of Power was closer in spirit and construction to the pre-Rock era’s big bands than even the most sprawling rock or funk outfit. Until they played. Then they scorched. Their albums sold well enough for the name to be turned into a permanent brand and “What Is Hip?” was one of their few to dent the singles charts.
It should have gone higher but it has worked its way into the consciousness of pretty much anyone who cares about ’70s funk anyway via its ubiquitous presence on genre comps. Willams keeps answering the title’s question with Tell me, tell me do you think you know?. He might have been taunting you, me, Richard Nixon, or himself. It’s too bad none of us ever found the answer.
Rufus featuring Chaka Khan “Tell Me Something Good” (1974: Hot 100 #3/R&B #3)
Anyone laboring under the illusion that funk wasn’t defined by great vocals as well as great grooves will have to answer for this, one of the greatest vocals ever sung into a microphone. The band was a true and deep mix of white and black players. The singer was Yvette Marie Stevens, daughter of Hyde Park bohemians, who had formed her first girl group in 1964 — when she was eleven.
As Chaka Khan, she would forge a mighty destiny for herself across several decades, but she never reached further or higher than here at the very beginning. Rufus had evolved out of the American Breed, a ’60s garage band who had a hit with “Bend Me, Shape Me.” Garage bands, bohemians, girl groups. It was all there. Plus a grown woman begging her man to tell her how much he liked it. Else telling him to beg for more. We blew off a lot when we blew off the ’70s.
KC & The Sunshine Band “Get Down Tonight” (1975: Hot 100 #1/R&B #1)
Marketed disco, and a huge part of why it became the definitive genre of the decade, they were really a smoking, southern (mostly) black funk horn band assembled behind the white producer/writer team of Herbert Wayne Casey (KC) and Rick Finch, with Casey on lead vocals (becoming the biggest white boy on the R&B charts since Elvis in the ’50s) and playing the keyboards that made up the rest of the group’s signature sound.
KC also ended up being one of the most important record men of the rock & roll era. His records almost single-handedly reoriented the center of the southern funk universe from its Memphis home to sun-baked Miami. Except for record buyers, he and his mighty band have rarely been thanked or even acknowledged, but you shouldn’t let the intelligentsia’s willful ignorance keep you from getting to know them on the deepest level, even if, like me, you can’t dance a lick.
Average White Band “Cut the Cake” (1975: Hot 100 #10/R&B #7)
And, by now, there was almost bound to be a British component to both the root funk phenomena and its interracial branch. AWB wasn’t merely British but Scottish and their first big hit, “Pick Up the Pieces,” a chant- instrumental, was perhaps the first true funk masterpiece by an all-white band. Their ace drummer, Robbie McIntosh, died of a heroin overdose before they assembled to record a followup and the resulting turmoil effectively destroyed the band’s ethos.
But, adding black drummer Steve Ferrone, later a long time member of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, they managed to make one more go-rilla, this one their tightest and mightiest. Scotsman Alan Gorrie’s lead vocal might be the blackest thing on the record. He had survived the party that killed McIntosh because Cher held his head and kept him awake until the ambulance arrived.
They had taken heroin believing it was cocaine. It doesn’t get any sadder, more absurd, or more ’70s than that.
Hot Chocolate “You Sexy Thing” (1976: Hot 100 #3/R&B #6)
Leaving aside “Brother Louie,” the ultimate manifesto of racial confusion in both their own and the Stories’ more famous version, as its own inimitable thing, this was the signature track of the greatest interracial funk band after the Family Stone and War.
On this supposed manifesto of hedonism, Errol Brown, a Jamaican raised in London since the age of twelve, was at least as spiritually desolate as the Righteous Brothers’ Bill Medley had been on “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’,” a record that had defined both “blue-eyed soul” and desolation itself a generation earlier.
Perhaps there was something about standing on the line where you were likely to be shot by both sides if you didn’t go deeper than others dared that drew forth such performances . . . if speaking in tongues this deep can be relegated to the concept of performance.
The Traamps “Disco Inferno” (1976–77: Hot 100 #11/R&B #9)
Pop success finally came for R&B stalwarts the Traamps after this top ten black music charter from 1976 was included on Saturday Night Fever’s mega-selling soundtrack in 1977. But just because it’s definitive disco, doesn’t mean it’s not also definitive funk.
The 45 edit was turned into a locomotive by Jimmy Ellis’s straight-from-church-by-way-of-Wilson-Pickett lead vocal and Ronald Baker’s boiling bass. But the signature horns were from Don Renaldo (white) and the guitars (most prominent in the winding, ten-minute version featured on the SNF soundtrack) were from Norman Harris (black), Bobby Eli, and TJ Tindall (both white).
Time was that Burn that mother down, ya’ll! was an assault on the walls that divided us.
The whole black-and-white crew playing behind the Traamps were drawn from MFSB, who had hits of their own but, more importantly, played the same role at Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International label in the ’70s that Booker T. and the MGs had at Stax in the ’60s. Black and white together: in the studio, in the culture, in the street, and in our heads, in a way that never quite happened before and has never quite happened again, no matter how much lipstick we paint on the blind pig of man’s dubious and enduring tribal nature.
Time was that Burn that mother down, ya’ll! was an assault on the walls that divided us, a targeted burn. Now, if anybody even had the strength to shout it, it would just mean nothing matters and what if it did.
You know, the way it always did before the rise of Rock & Roll America challenged the old assumptions and, for a fleeting moment, we could dance the night away together, without fear of the morning.
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Thanks for reading! Below are links to three articles that are essential to knowing what the Tell It Like It Was publication here on Medium is all about — mostly rock & roll music of the ’50s and ’60s. Hope you’ll give it a look-see!
