The Vinyl Dialogues Blog

Stories behind memorable albums of the 1970s as told by the artists

Month: April 2018

A collectively creative effort: Kool & the Gang still celebrating good times

By

On April 29, 2018

In The Vinyl Dialogues Book

Kool & the Gang

Kool & the Gang

Ronald Bell was sitting at the piano one day when his brother Robert “Kool” Bell walked in.

“You got anything for me?” said Ronald Bell.

“Yeah, I got two things for you,” said Robert Bell. “Hanging out. And ladies night.”

“A lot of people hang out,” said Robert. “But Ladies Night, man there’s one of those everywhere in the world. That’s gotta be a hit.”

The brothers and other founding members of Kool & the Gang had experienced some success with the group’s fourth studio album, “Wild and Peaceful,” in 1973. The album produced the band’s first three Top 10 singles – “Jungle Boogie,” which got to No. 2 on the Billboard R&B chart and No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles charts; “Funky Stuff,” which made it to No. 5 on the R&B chart and No. 29 on the singles chart; and “Hollywood Swinging,” which topped the Billboard Soul Singles chart and reached No. 6 on the pop chart. The album itself would go to No. 6 on the R&B chart and No. 33 on the Billboard 200 albums chart.

But from 1974 through 1978, Kool & the Gang hadn’t been able to really capitalize on that success, and the band’s label, De-Lite Records, was looking for more hits from the group.

“Initially there was pressure to make a hit. But what is a hit? We had no clue. Not really. We understood we had to make a commercial record. We were familiar with the whole commercial part of it. But we were in it now, so let’s make something happen,” said Ronald Bell.

It would take a reality check, though, to help the band back on the road to the top of the charts. That happened at an in-store promotion in Jersey City in the late 1970s. Only one person showed up to the store to see Kool & the Gang and she was less than impressed. She referred to the band as “old hat.”

“Old hat? Oh, no, no,” said Bell. “I took that so personally.”

Some changes needed to be made. Kool & the Gang had started as an instrumental-driven jazz and funk band that featured a lot of street hollering and chants, but hadn’t to that point in the late 1970s featured a dominant lead singer.

The band needed a lead singer along the lines of Lionel Richie of the Commodores or Maurice White of Earth, Wind and Fire. So they hired James “J.T.” Taylor to handle the lead vocals and went to work on trying to write hit singles.

“We were in pursuance of doing something really great. We didn’t have a lead singer, we were doing some experimentation at the time and disco was alive,” said Bell. “We had to come up with something that worked.”

So when Robert “Kool” Bell mentioned the phrase “Ladies Night” to Ronald Bell that day, something clicked for the songwriters.

“We all made the connection, and we went in hard and came up with the song ‘Ladies Night.’ That was a peak moment, that album with a new lead singer,” said Robert Bell.

The “Ladies Night” album was released in September 1979 and featured two Billboard Top 10 hits: the title track made it to No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart and No. 8 on the Hot 100 singles chart; and “Too Hot,” written by George Brown and Kool & the Gang, made it to No. 3 on the R&B chart and No. 5 on the singles chart. The album itself was No. 1 on R&B chart and No. 13 on the Billboard 200 albums chart.

And the single “Ladies Night” would lead to the band’s next hit, which would become its signature song.

In “Ladies Night,” the female background vocalists can be heard singing, “Come on, let’s all celebrate.” And the pressure was even more intense from the record company for the group to follow up “Ladies Night” with another hit single.

Ronald Bell had been reading scripture about humans being created and the angels celebrating the creator for doing so. And he still had the line “Come on, let’s all celebrate” from “Ladies Night” fresh in his head.

Those two ideas combined to create “Celebration,” which would be the lead single from the band’s next album, “Celebrate!” released in September 1980. It ran up the charts to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart, the Billboard Hot Soul Singles chart, U.S. Cash Box chart and the U.S. Record World chart.

“I don’t care where we are in the world, people respond to that song,” said Bell. “It’s a beautiful thing to see that, where everybody is just dancing and celebrating to that song. We can’t play a song after that one.”

Bell said that with both “Ladies Night” and “Celebration,” he had a sense that both songs would be good for Kool & the Gang.

“There was one of those (a ladies night) everywhere, so why wouldn’t that be a hit?” he said. “Plus, ladies buy records like that. Guys don’t go in hard on those kind of records. This was a tribute to ladies and I thought, this is definitely gonna work.And then ‘Celebration’ came from the thought of ‘Ladies Night.’”

For many of the Kool & the Gang songs, the Bell brothers and the other members of the band shared writing credits, something that Ronald Bell said the band had collectively decided from its inception.

“We decided to share our writing with each other. I was the primary writer. I was focused primarily on making hit records,” said Bell. “We did that and still do that. You might see my name on a lot of the hits, but you see Kool & the Gang also. We shared that with each so that when we got this old, that we would be all taken care of in some kind of way. And we continue that kind of mindset to this very day. There are no regrets with that.”

Bell added that sharing spirit has been the critical element of the group’s success.

“It was a collective creative effort – collective with a K – that was the genius of the band the Kool & the Gang,” he said.

With Judy Collins and Stephen Stills, ‘There were sparks right away’

By

On April 21, 2018

In The Vinyl Dialogues Book

Judy Collins first met Stephen Stills when Collins was recording her seventh studio album “Who Knows Where the Time Goes" in 1968.

Judy Collins first met Stephen Stills when Collins was recording her seventh studio album “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” in 1968.

Judy Collins and Stephen Stills were driving around one day in Malibu, California, when Stills had an idea.

“He said, ‘You know, we need another song on this album,’” Collins says.

It was mid-1968 and Collins was coming off the success of her sixth studio album “Wildflowers,” which reached No. 5 on the Billboard Pop Albums charts after its release in October 1967. The album featured Collins’ Top 10 hit cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.”

Stills’ band Buffalo Springfield had just broken up in May, 1968. When Collins and producer David Anderle were planning the next album, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” they decided to record it in Los Angeles.

“This was an opportunity to go to California and I was thrilled to be able to do that,” Collins says. “My producer said, ‘I want to bring you to California to make sort of a live album.’”

Anderle then put together a top-notch band in Los Angeles that included musicians with whom Collins had not previously worked. Among them were Buddy Emmons — who played with the Everly Brothers, Roger Miller and Ernest Tubb — on pedal steel guitar; James Burton — who recorded and played with Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard — on dobro and electric guitar; Chris Ethridge — who would go on to play with Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers — on bass; Jim Gordon — a session drummer who backed the Everly Brothers — pianist Mike Melvin, who performed on the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” album in 1966 and Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life” album, also in 1966; Van Dyke Parks, a songwriting collaborator with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, on piano and electric piano; and Stills, fresh off the Buffalo Springfield gig, on guitar. (Collins has said in other published interviews that she believed Anderle had asked Stills to work on the album only to find out later that it was the other way around.)

“That’s where Stephen and I first met,” Collins says. “Stephen was somebody that I had never worked with before, so that was exciting. I didn’t know him and I really wasn’t aware of the Buffalo Springfield. I knew who they were but I didn’t know who the individual artists were. So it was a great surprise for me to meet him. And of course he’s a genius, so that was good.”

Not only that, but the attraction between Collins and Stills was there from the first moment.

“Yes, there were sparks right away,” she says.

There was an immediate attraction between Judy Collins and Stephen Stills when they first met.

There was an immediate attraction between Judy Collins and Stephen Stills when they first met.

So when Collins and Stills were driving around Malibu taking a break from recording sessions for “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” Stills shared with Collins his idea about a song he thought they should record for the album.

“He said, ‘Let’s do “Someday Soon.”’ So that’s what we did,” Collins says.

Canadian singer-songwriter Ian Tyson, who with his wife Sylvia had formed the duo Ian and Sylvia in 1961, had written and recorded “Someday Soon” in 1964 but had not released it as a single. Collins was friends with Ian and Sylvia when they all lived in Greenwich Village in the mid-1960s.

“We used to hang out together. I had heard all of their songs,” Collins says.

So Collins didn’t need much convincing to record “Someday Soon” for the “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” album, and the song helped propel the album to No. 29 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart after its release in November 1968. The song itself would go on to become one of Collins’ signature songs.

Although the 1960s romance between Collins and Stills inspired Stills to write “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” for his then-new band Crosby, Stills and Nash in 1969, Stills won’t be featured in these two shows.

And even though the two are no longer linked romantically, they are still making music together. They toured as a duo in 2017 and plan to do so again in 2018.

“We’ve remained friends all these years,” Collins says. “And I always thought that maybe someday we’d do something together, but we had no idea what that would be.

“He was always so deeply involved with Crosby, Stills and Nash and at the time, there wasn’t very much room at the table for anything else.”

The two did finally make an album together, titled “Everybody Knows,” which was released in September 2017. The album features an updated version of the Sandy Denny-written “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” and a new Collins song called “River of Gold.”

“It was thrilling to have a new song on board for that album,” Collins says. “Stephen and I are going out again on tour this year in May and June. It was so much fun. We want to work on some more new songs together if we can find the time.”

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén