One Hit No More, No. 79: Wild Cherry, Playing That Funky Music (White Boy)

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:

One Hit No More, No. 49: The Jaggerz...and That's the "R-A-P-P-E-R"

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?”