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| A jagger bush. |
The Hit
I don’t recall ever hearing “The Rapper” before this week, which doesn’t give me a lot to work with on the “memories” side. On the one hand, it’s before my time (1970), but, on the other, I came out near enough to where I grew up to where that surprises me a little.
Having heard it, I can confirm it’s a catchy little bugger. No matter how many times I went through the two albums by The Jaggerz Spotify gives me access to, I always found myself humming that one (and only that one) after moving on. As noted by its main songwriter, Donny Iris, it opens on a simple strumming guitar riff vaguely reminiscent of Creedence Clearwater Revival. Tight, bright harmonized vocals break over that singing about a guy chatting up a girl - they called that “rapping” back then, or at least in Pittsburgh, PA, hence, “The Rapper” - before the song shifts to a booming funk chorus with fuzz bass buzzing under it and a cowbell clanging through it. Amending the above, it’s a really fucking catchy tune. As for the inspiration, it’s as straightforward as it sounds, as Jimmie Ross recalled in an interview the always awesome Classic Bands:
“Actually, that was a Black saying years ago. What it meant was a guy rapping on a girl in a nightclub. We would see that all the time, so Donny wrote a song about it.”
Iris (born Dominic Ierace) worked up the lyrics, put together the guitar part and brought it to another member of The Jaggerz, Benny “Euge” Faiella. After they fleshed out the song together (the band worked collaboratively in generally), they couldn’t exactly explain the why or what of it. As Faiella explained to the Times Online (from western Pennsylvania?):
“At the time, we were a very soulful band and we were influenced by R&B and like the Temptations and the Impressions and all the black music we played a lot. That song was nowhere like where we were. It sounded entirely different, you know?”
I don’t recall ever hearing “The Rapper” before this week, which doesn’t give me a lot to work with on the “memories” side. On the one hand, it’s before my time (1970), but, on the other, I came out near enough to where I grew up to where that surprises me a little.
Having heard it, I can confirm it’s a catchy little bugger. No matter how many times I went through the two albums by The Jaggerz Spotify gives me access to, I always found myself humming that one (and only that one) after moving on. As noted by its main songwriter, Donny Iris, it opens on a simple strumming guitar riff vaguely reminiscent of Creedence Clearwater Revival. Tight, bright harmonized vocals break over that singing about a guy chatting up a girl - they called that “rapping” back then, or at least in Pittsburgh, PA, hence, “The Rapper” - before the song shifts to a booming funk chorus with fuzz bass buzzing under it and a cowbell clanging through it. Amending the above, it’s a really fucking catchy tune. As for the inspiration, it’s as straightforward as it sounds, as Jimmie Ross recalled in an interview the always awesome Classic Bands:
“Actually, that was a Black saying years ago. What it meant was a guy rapping on a girl in a nightclub. We would see that all the time, so Donny wrote a song about it.”
Iris (born Dominic Ierace) worked up the lyrics, put together the guitar part and brought it to another member of The Jaggerz, Benny “Euge” Faiella. After they fleshed out the song together (the band worked collaboratively in generally), they couldn’t exactly explain the why or what of it. As Faiella explained to the Times Online (from western Pennsylvania?):
“At the time, we were a very soulful band and we were influenced by R&B and like the Temptations and the Impressions and all the black music we played a lot. That song was nowhere like where we were. It sounded entirely different, you know?”
In some ways, that’s where the story both begins and ends. Oh, and to confirm, the song has absolutely nothing to do with, or any connotations to, either rape or Jack the Ripper. It’s “R-A-P-P-E-R.” Nothing creepy. And, as they all never get tired of pointing out, the word meant something back then than it does today.
The Rest of the Story
The Jaggerz started as two college bands at Slippery Rock State College (now Slippery Rock University), a small college in a small town of the same name due north of Pittsburgh. Iris played with a group called Donny and the Donnells when he crossed paths with Jimmie Ross of Gary and the Jewel Tones, both of them in cover bands playing the area college/frat circuit. The latter needed a guitarist, so Iris joined up and they changed their name to The Jaggers shortly after that, somewhere around 1965. Their name came out of local slang - “Pittsburgh English” (aka, Western Pennsylvania English) - specifically the name for a thorn bush that stuck to your clothes. They swapped in a “z” to become The Jaggerz fairly early; Wikipedia is really clear on the reason, attributing it to their manager, Joe Rock, who wanted to avoid confusion with another band called “The Jaggers,” but that doesn’t make sense in the timeline (Rock came later?) and Iris talked about it like it was a lark in later comments to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
With the line-up firmed up - originally featuring Iris, Ross, Faiella, Allen George and Kenny Koodrich (instruments unclear beyond Iris on guitar) - The Jaggerz expanded from playing colleges to working the Pittsburgh/Beaver Valley (a river basin northwest of Pittsburgh that points to)/Youngstown, OH circuit where they found good crowds and good money. They built a big and fervent enough regional following to catch the ear of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, the Gamble/Huff team that built the powerhouse Philly Soul sound that dominated the 70s. They impressed them enough for Gamble Records to sign them and produce their debut in 1969, Introducing the Jaggerz…if with a couple of catches. Gamble and Huff wrote most of the material - the exceptions being a Jaggerz original “(That’s Why) Baby I Love You” and “Gotta Find My Way Back Home” by Melvin & Mervin Steals - but also this (from Jimmie Ross):
“Our first album was with Gamble and Huff...Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff in Philadelphia, who handle all Black groups. I think, from what we hear, that's one of the reasons why they never put our pictures on the first album.”
Musically, it files under “blue-eyed soul” (if a little awkwardly) and, while it helped The Jaggerz regionally, it didn’t do much commercially. The band, however, carried enough regional swagger that they could switch over to the Kama Sutra label in 1970 and call in Rock, then working with a band called The Skyliners, to manage them. “The Rapper” came to them while they were working on their first album for Kama Sutra, 1970’s We Went to Different Schools Together. As noted above, the band recognized it didn’t sound like the rest of their material - and that holds up. Beyond thinking the poppier sound might appeal to a younger crowd, no one involved at any level thought much of anything about it; they put it on the album because it was there.
The Times Online piece tells the best stories about what happened as the song’s popularity grew. It took off on regional radio immediately, but the guys in the band started hearing it playing in Chicago and New York. Before long, they started tracking all the places they got word of it getting air-time by putting pins in a map. Iris’ dad, who owned a bar in a town called Elwood City, PA (sort of north northwest of Pittsburgh, east of Beaver Valley), hung a spray-painted 45 rpm of the single on the wall with a thermometer next to it to track its rise to gold record status; he waited less than a week. As Iris remembers: “My dad walked around with his chest puffed out with pride. He was very proud. My mother, too.” They did Dick Clark, the whole she-bang. And then…
They plugged away for a while after, first pushing a couple more songs from We Went to Different Schools Together - “I Call My Baby Candy” and “What a Bummer” - with Kama Sutra, then two more albums - one on the Wooden Nickel label (Come Again), then a novelty album with Wolfman Jack. Ross left before all that to join The Skyliners (and Rock’s urging), while Rock shuffled a couple new members into The Jaggerz for Come Again, but none of it went anywhere. Looking back, Ross explained why they never really left their regional roots:
“Yeah. We did some mini tours. We didn't really go out and live out of our cars for like nine months. Maybe we should have. (laughs) We were so comfortable back here in the Pittsburg area because we were making a ton of money with the success of that song and the other two regional hits we had, that we didn't want to go on tour.”
For anyone hoping for a spicier ending, Ross relates a rumor that Curtis Mayfield got The Jaggerz black-balled by going to the president of Kama Sutra, Neil Bogart, and warning he’d leave the label “if he didn't stop pushing those White boys' records and start doing something with him.” A better ending, no question, but unconfirmed…though Superfly did prove Mayfield’s point (platinum beats gold, and not just in Dungeons & Dragons). The likelier story makes just as much sense - i.e., The Jaggerz made good money playing their circuit. Two grand a night, six nights a week…
At least one band member had a long afterlife. Iris wound up joining the rock-funk outfit, Wild Cherry, but after “Play That Funky Music.” More importantly, he fell in with a producer/keyboardist named Mark Avsec through that, who would push him (by Iris’ admission) to a long second act through the 1980s fronting Donnie Iris and the Cruisers. They played on the fringes of stardom with ten singles in the Top 100 and five albums in the Top 200, air-play on MTV (“Do You Compute,” I remember) and “Ah Leah,” a song that got big enough for someone to try to sue Iris for the rights to it. Both of those are 80s AF...
If you take the time to pick through those sources, you’ll see they’re all still playing, both as The Jaggerz and Donnie Iris, and sometimes together. They hold “The Rapper” for the end of the set and the crowd still goes wild every damn time. As one of them says somewhere, Pittsburgh’s an oldies town…
About the Sampler
I want to start with the song on the sampler with the second longest, but definitely weirdest afterlife - “Memoirs of the Traveller.” A couple hip hop artists found that tune and liked the haunting quality of its melody, so it lives on in songs by The Game (“Letter to the King”) and Wiz Khalifa ("Rollin' Up"). Apparently, Dilated Peoples got to it as well, but Wikipedia didn’t name the song they used, so…
As for the rest, and those not named above, I mostly went with songs that captured what The Jaggerz served up. They had a thing for harmonized vocals - see their inspirations - and that showed up from the beginning on tunes like “Need Your Love” and “What Now My Love,” both from the short-lived Gamble Records era and Introducing the Jaggerz. The distance between their debut and We Went to Different Schools Together sounds longer than the year between them, with the way they seemed to respond to the sounds coming out around them - see the psychedelic tones of “Will She Believe Me” and the funk-tinged (and notably political) “At My Window.” I added one more from We Went to Different Schools Together, “Don’t Make My Sky Cry,” to rep their slow-jams.
Finally, and on the theory that the way a band puts its stamp on a cover gives a pretty clear signal of how they think musically (which assumes they don’t just play it straight), I added their spin on “Higher and Higher.” I get that it's early and they didn't have much control at that point, but...
That’s a good stand-in, as it happens, for why The Jaggerz don’t do much for me. At the same time, there’s something very likeable about them as people and a band. There’s something appealing about simple contentment. Fit in where you get in, y'know?
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