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| This, but funky and from Eastern Ohio. |
The Hit
Raise your hand if you think KC & the Sunshine Band put out “Play That Funky Music” half the time. Anyone? (For the curious, here's them playing it live on and old TV show.)
Wild Cherry was the band that dropped it in 1976 and it blew all the way up. Both single and album went platinum in a flash, Billboard named Wild Cherry the Best Pop Group of ’76 and, beyond the song and group picking up a couple more nominations, the single picked up an American Music Award as the top R&B single of the same year.
Guitarist Bryan Bassett came up with the classic opening guitar riff - as he told an outlet called Brave Words, “I have played a million notes in my life but those are the seven notes that people will remember.” - but Wild Cherry front-man, Rob Parissi, wrote their monster hit in a burst of inspiration with desperation snapping at its heels (“Disco was coming. Rock clubs were closing down.”). The details vary from one telling to the next, but the story of where that inspiration came from follows the same, broad outline. I credit Bassett for giving the tidiest version:
“We were playing Led Zeppelin and Robin Trower in the clubs at the time when The Bee Gees and KC & the Sunshine Band were coming out. We were playing in these big clubs that had a thousand people and we were rocking out while all these people were just looking at us. We would take a break and the deejay would come on and play all these new dance songs and the dance floor would immediately be packed. Literally, one guy actually came up to us and said, 'You better start paying some funky music, white boy.' We were still a covers band so we went out and learned the hits of the day.”
With that thought in his mind, Parissi said to his bandmates, “how about if Led Zeppelin did ‘That’s the Way I Like It”? He borrowed a drink order pad and pen from the bar and started writing before they went on one night and had most of the lyrics worked out before they took the stage; he finished it later that night on the cab ride home. When he played that song for people - e.g., people at his label, even his dad - they all thought adding “white boy” after “play that funky music” would absolutely never, and in no way fly (his dad begged him to take it out). Parissi stuck to his guns and he got it right. I’ll leave it to American Songwriterto sum up the origin story:
“A mixture of the Ohio Players ‘Fire,’ Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’ and a whole lot of Eastern Ohio/Pittsburgh, PA white boy grease, ‘Play That Funky Music’ was essentially written out of sheer desperation.”
For a stagnating band, the desperation was real, if uncomplicated. As Bassett put it, Wild Cherry wanted to “go from five hundred bucks a night to eight hundred bucks a night.”
The Rest of the Story
Parissi, who hails from Mingo Junction, Ohio, started Wild Cherry with musicians he knew from other modest cities that straddled the Ohio/West Virginia border - Steubenville, OH, and Weirton, WVA, specifically. The original line-up came together in 1970 and played together until 1974. That version of the band stuck with rock and even released several singles - e.g., “You Can Be High (But Lay Low),” “Something Special on Your Mind” (neither of which I can find), “Get Down” (in which you'll hear both their hard rock roots, and what was to come), and “Show Me Your Badge” (see, can't find) - but none of it broke out or ended their run as, mainly, a cover band. They made their reputation in the biggest music market close to them, Pittsburgh, PA. In a chat with Classic Bands, Parissi recalls the area as a hot-bed of musicians, all of them pushing the others to get better and better. Wild Cherry would toil longer than some, maybe even most.
In another fun note, the band backed into the name that pairs so well with their hit single accidentally. Getting drafted to ship to Vietnam gave Parissi enough anxiety that he developed stomach ulcers and, in the course of getting that checked out, the doctors conducted various tests, shoved some tubes down his throat, and so on. He was recovering from all that in the week and a half before the band had lined up its first show and the band still hadn’t come up with a name. One would come to them in the middle of an exasperated fit Parissi had one night. As he told a site called Blues.GR, one thing led to another:
“I took a box of cough drops off the B-3 I'd been nursing a sore throat from all those tubes and said: ‘You even can call it Wild Cherry, as the band will make the name, and the name doesn't make the band!’ And with that, everyone just said, Whoa, that's a great name.”
Parissi hated the name and agreed to play under it just so they had a name when they walked on stage, but swore he’d change it eventually. His bandmates struck back by introducing him to groups of young women after their shows, all of whom loved the name. And so it stuck…
After checking out for a year after that 1974 break up, Parissi pulled together a second line-up, this one built around himself, Bassett, Allen Wentz (bass/synth) and Ronald Beitle (drums). Even that second line-up puttered along - “playing Led Zeppelin and Robin Trower,” as Bassett put it - until they pulled together “Play That Funky Music” (hereafter, “PTFM”). Once they nailed down a final version, they road-tested it a few times in front of live audiences and it got the reaction they wanted. After performing it live for about a week, they went to their small Cleveland, OH label and recorded the album version after two takes. An employee at that label took it from there, cold-calling radio stations and pushing them to play it. It didn’t take much pushing: as Bassett told American Songwriter, it took just four to five weeks for the song to push toward No. 1; “Within the year, we were playing arenas.” Before the year was out, Parissi could take his parents to the Grammys and let them gawk at show-biz luminaries like Ringo Starr, the Beach Boys, Henry Mancini, and Steve Allen.
The end didn’t come nearly as quickly - as Wikipedia notes, Wild Cherry released at least three more albums; Electrified Funk in 1977 (featuring what they call a “sound-alike” for “PTFM,” “Baby Don’t You Know”), I Love My Music in 1978, and finally, Only the Wild Survive in 1979 - but trouble and frustration did. As Parissi told Goldmine Mag, he thought Wild Cherry had three hits - “PTFM,” “I Feel Sanctified” (a cover of a song by The Commodores; also, I can vouch for that one), and “Hold On”(a ballad; good, traditional choice) - that should be released and in that order. With “PTFM” catching fire, the label rushed them to wrap up the rest of the album and chased them out on the road shortly thereafter - see earlier note about arenas - but they still pressured Parissi for a cookie-cutter follow up. As he shared with Classic Bands, he gave in and “fed the beast”:
“But what I did was, I caved and I tried to appease them. Chapter Two. We played ‘Play That Funky Music, What's Happening Now?’ It was stupid. It was the wrong thing to do. And I told them in the beginning it was the wrong thing to do. But they were telling me about all the other bands that were doing well out there and signed to the same label as we were, that were a pain in the ass. But as it turns out, those pain in the ass bands ended up lasting a hell of a lot longer time than we did. I caved. I have to blame myself.”
The functional end came before the actual one, in other words. The main story pretty much ends there, but, fortunately, everyone kept busy after. Parissi, who started in songwriting (at the famous Brill Building, no less) returned to the craft, often working in partnership with a woman named Ellie Greenwich (who had a pretty fat rolodex). Bassett, meanwhile, did stints with Foghat and Molly Hatchet (among other things) and Wentz became a session synthesist and worked with major artists including Roberta Flack, Luther Vandross and Cyndi Lauper. Even a couple late additions to the band - Mark Avsec, who pitched in on the band’s eponymous debut and became a regular member, and a guy named Donny Iris, who only showed up for Wild Cherry’s 4th and final album (from The Jaggerz, who featured earlier in this series) - went on to from Donnie & the Cruisers, who had a whole career of their own.
Based on what I’ve read, Parissi - who continues to put out music, but for the parts of the smooth jazz market he can get to notice - has become the default face of Wild Cherry and its legacy. He spent a decade wrestling for control over the copyright to their catalog - he gives what strikes me as very sound advice to today’s artists about how to protect their IP in that Blues.GR interview - and continues to protect the band’s name by shutting down various fly-by-night bands trying to play under the Wild Cherry name, up to and including siccing the FBI on them. Parissi moved to Florida in 1979, but he still ranks high among Mingo Junction’s favorite sons. The city declared August 11 (hey, that’s today!!) “Rob Parissi Day,” and they named its longest street “Rob Parissi Boulevard.” He returned the compliment by establishing a scholarship endowment and playing a fund-raiser for it in Mingo Junction every year. To repeat something I’ve said a couple dozen times in this series, Parissi, Bassett, et. al. come off as very likeable people. Midwest nice, etc.
About the Sampler
Between hearing most of it as all of a similar piece and Spotify’s thin holdings for Wild Cherry, I kept this sampler fairly tight at just 10 songs. Only a couple appear in the above…somehow, and most of them came off Wild Cherry. It’s hard to know what the label wanted because most of them listen like approximate spins on “PTFM” - e.g., “What in the Funk Do You See,” “The Lady Wants Yor Money,” “99 1/2,” and a relatively de-funked and entirely passable cover of Martha and The Vandella's “Nowhere to Run.” With the exception of that last song, you'll hear a fairly faithful representation of what Parissi described above - e.g., Led Zeppelin playing KC & the Sunshine Band, i.e., hard-rock-influenced funk. I pulled the rest off a compilation called Super Hits, including numbers like “Hot to Trot” (a minor hit outside U.S. markets, apparently), “I Love My Music” (presumably from the album of the same name), “Try a Piece of My Love,” - all of which sound closer to straight disco, for what it's worth - and, in the biggest departure from the norm I heard, the pure 70s-pop number, “1 2 3 Kind of Love.”
Wild Cherry’s catalog probably isn’t as homogenous as I made it out to be above; regardless, and credit to them, they had the chops to not only re-invent themselves as disco penetrated into their neck of the woods, but to write one of the enduringly famous songs of the era
Raise your hand if you think KC & the Sunshine Band put out “Play That Funky Music” half the time. Anyone? (For the curious, here's them playing it live on and old TV show.)
Wild Cherry was the band that dropped it in 1976 and it blew all the way up. Both single and album went platinum in a flash, Billboard named Wild Cherry the Best Pop Group of ’76 and, beyond the song and group picking up a couple more nominations, the single picked up an American Music Award as the top R&B single of the same year.
Guitarist Bryan Bassett came up with the classic opening guitar riff - as he told an outlet called Brave Words, “I have played a million notes in my life but those are the seven notes that people will remember.” - but Wild Cherry front-man, Rob Parissi, wrote their monster hit in a burst of inspiration with desperation snapping at its heels (“Disco was coming. Rock clubs were closing down.”). The details vary from one telling to the next, but the story of where that inspiration came from follows the same, broad outline. I credit Bassett for giving the tidiest version:
“We were playing Led Zeppelin and Robin Trower in the clubs at the time when The Bee Gees and KC & the Sunshine Band were coming out. We were playing in these big clubs that had a thousand people and we were rocking out while all these people were just looking at us. We would take a break and the deejay would come on and play all these new dance songs and the dance floor would immediately be packed. Literally, one guy actually came up to us and said, 'You better start paying some funky music, white boy.' We were still a covers band so we went out and learned the hits of the day.”
With that thought in his mind, Parissi said to his bandmates, “how about if Led Zeppelin did ‘That’s the Way I Like It”? He borrowed a drink order pad and pen from the bar and started writing before they went on one night and had most of the lyrics worked out before they took the stage; he finished it later that night on the cab ride home. When he played that song for people - e.g., people at his label, even his dad - they all thought adding “white boy” after “play that funky music” would absolutely never, and in no way fly (his dad begged him to take it out). Parissi stuck to his guns and he got it right. I’ll leave it to American Songwriterto sum up the origin story:
“A mixture of the Ohio Players ‘Fire,’ Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’ and a whole lot of Eastern Ohio/Pittsburgh, PA white boy grease, ‘Play That Funky Music’ was essentially written out of sheer desperation.”
For a stagnating band, the desperation was real, if uncomplicated. As Bassett put it, Wild Cherry wanted to “go from five hundred bucks a night to eight hundred bucks a night.”
The Rest of the Story
Parissi, who hails from Mingo Junction, Ohio, started Wild Cherry with musicians he knew from other modest cities that straddled the Ohio/West Virginia border - Steubenville, OH, and Weirton, WVA, specifically. The original line-up came together in 1970 and played together until 1974. That version of the band stuck with rock and even released several singles - e.g., “You Can Be High (But Lay Low),” “Something Special on Your Mind” (neither of which I can find), “Get Down” (in which you'll hear both their hard rock roots, and what was to come), and “Show Me Your Badge” (see, can't find) - but none of it broke out or ended their run as, mainly, a cover band. They made their reputation in the biggest music market close to them, Pittsburgh, PA. In a chat with Classic Bands, Parissi recalls the area as a hot-bed of musicians, all of them pushing the others to get better and better. Wild Cherry would toil longer than some, maybe even most.
In another fun note, the band backed into the name that pairs so well with their hit single accidentally. Getting drafted to ship to Vietnam gave Parissi enough anxiety that he developed stomach ulcers and, in the course of getting that checked out, the doctors conducted various tests, shoved some tubes down his throat, and so on. He was recovering from all that in the week and a half before the band had lined up its first show and the band still hadn’t come up with a name. One would come to them in the middle of an exasperated fit Parissi had one night. As he told a site called Blues.GR, one thing led to another:
“I took a box of cough drops off the B-3 I'd been nursing a sore throat from all those tubes and said: ‘You even can call it Wild Cherry, as the band will make the name, and the name doesn't make the band!’ And with that, everyone just said, Whoa, that's a great name.”
Parissi hated the name and agreed to play under it just so they had a name when they walked on stage, but swore he’d change it eventually. His bandmates struck back by introducing him to groups of young women after their shows, all of whom loved the name. And so it stuck…
After checking out for a year after that 1974 break up, Parissi pulled together a second line-up, this one built around himself, Bassett, Allen Wentz (bass/synth) and Ronald Beitle (drums). Even that second line-up puttered along - “playing Led Zeppelin and Robin Trower,” as Bassett put it - until they pulled together “Play That Funky Music” (hereafter, “PTFM”). Once they nailed down a final version, they road-tested it a few times in front of live audiences and it got the reaction they wanted. After performing it live for about a week, they went to their small Cleveland, OH label and recorded the album version after two takes. An employee at that label took it from there, cold-calling radio stations and pushing them to play it. It didn’t take much pushing: as Bassett told American Songwriter, it took just four to five weeks for the song to push toward No. 1; “Within the year, we were playing arenas.” Before the year was out, Parissi could take his parents to the Grammys and let them gawk at show-biz luminaries like Ringo Starr, the Beach Boys, Henry Mancini, and Steve Allen.
The end didn’t come nearly as quickly - as Wikipedia notes, Wild Cherry released at least three more albums; Electrified Funk in 1977 (featuring what they call a “sound-alike” for “PTFM,” “Baby Don’t You Know”), I Love My Music in 1978, and finally, Only the Wild Survive in 1979 - but trouble and frustration did. As Parissi told Goldmine Mag, he thought Wild Cherry had three hits - “PTFM,” “I Feel Sanctified” (a cover of a song by The Commodores; also, I can vouch for that one), and “Hold On”(a ballad; good, traditional choice) - that should be released and in that order. With “PTFM” catching fire, the label rushed them to wrap up the rest of the album and chased them out on the road shortly thereafter - see earlier note about arenas - but they still pressured Parissi for a cookie-cutter follow up. As he shared with Classic Bands, he gave in and “fed the beast”:
“But what I did was, I caved and I tried to appease them. Chapter Two. We played ‘Play That Funky Music, What's Happening Now?’ It was stupid. It was the wrong thing to do. And I told them in the beginning it was the wrong thing to do. But they were telling me about all the other bands that were doing well out there and signed to the same label as we were, that were a pain in the ass. But as it turns out, those pain in the ass bands ended up lasting a hell of a lot longer time than we did. I caved. I have to blame myself.”
The functional end came before the actual one, in other words. The main story pretty much ends there, but, fortunately, everyone kept busy after. Parissi, who started in songwriting (at the famous Brill Building, no less) returned to the craft, often working in partnership with a woman named Ellie Greenwich (who had a pretty fat rolodex). Bassett, meanwhile, did stints with Foghat and Molly Hatchet (among other things) and Wentz became a session synthesist and worked with major artists including Roberta Flack, Luther Vandross and Cyndi Lauper. Even a couple late additions to the band - Mark Avsec, who pitched in on the band’s eponymous debut and became a regular member, and a guy named Donny Iris, who only showed up for Wild Cherry’s 4th and final album (from The Jaggerz, who featured earlier in this series) - went on to from Donnie & the Cruisers, who had a whole career of their own.
Based on what I’ve read, Parissi - who continues to put out music, but for the parts of the smooth jazz market he can get to notice - has become the default face of Wild Cherry and its legacy. He spent a decade wrestling for control over the copyright to their catalog - he gives what strikes me as very sound advice to today’s artists about how to protect their IP in that Blues.GR interview - and continues to protect the band’s name by shutting down various fly-by-night bands trying to play under the Wild Cherry name, up to and including siccing the FBI on them. Parissi moved to Florida in 1979, but he still ranks high among Mingo Junction’s favorite sons. The city declared August 11 (hey, that’s today!!) “Rob Parissi Day,” and they named its longest street “Rob Parissi Boulevard.” He returned the compliment by establishing a scholarship endowment and playing a fund-raiser for it in Mingo Junction every year. To repeat something I’ve said a couple dozen times in this series, Parissi, Bassett, et. al. come off as very likeable people. Midwest nice, etc.
About the Sampler
Between hearing most of it as all of a similar piece and Spotify’s thin holdings for Wild Cherry, I kept this sampler fairly tight at just 10 songs. Only a couple appear in the above…somehow, and most of them came off Wild Cherry. It’s hard to know what the label wanted because most of them listen like approximate spins on “PTFM” - e.g., “What in the Funk Do You See,” “The Lady Wants Yor Money,” “99 1/2,” and a relatively de-funked and entirely passable cover of Martha and The Vandella's “Nowhere to Run.” With the exception of that last song, you'll hear a fairly faithful representation of what Parissi described above - e.g., Led Zeppelin playing KC & the Sunshine Band, i.e., hard-rock-influenced funk. I pulled the rest off a compilation called Super Hits, including numbers like “Hot to Trot” (a minor hit outside U.S. markets, apparently), “I Love My Music” (presumably from the album of the same name), “Try a Piece of My Love,” - all of which sound closer to straight disco, for what it's worth - and, in the biggest departure from the norm I heard, the pure 70s-pop number, “1 2 3 Kind of Love.”
Wild Cherry’s catalog probably isn’t as homogenous as I made it out to be above; regardless, and credit to them, they had the chops to not only re-invent themselves as disco penetrated into their neck of the woods, but to write one of the enduringly famous songs of the era
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