Oct. 25, 2006 — Long before John Travolta strutted down a Brooklyn sidewalk in "Saturday Night Fever" or translated a Royale with Cheese in "Pulp Fiction," Kool and the Gang was there.
"Until Michael Jackson came along with Thriller, the 'Saturday Night Fever' soundtrack was one of the biggest albums in history," says Robert "Kool" Bell, leader and namesake of Kool and the Gang. The band had a minor hit with "Open Sesame" from "Saturday Night Fever." "Then we turned around and did it again — with John Travolta starring again." In 1994 "Pulp Fiction" revived the group's smash from 20 years earlier, "Jungle Boogie" — one of the most propulsive funk songs ever to hit the charts.
Kool and the Gang will bring the funk to the Virgin Islands for the first time in years Saturday, headlining a show at the Reichhold Center for the Arts on UVI's St. Thomas campus. The band scored with a series of ballads in the 1980s, including "Joanna" and "Cherish," after hiring lead singer James "J.T." Taylor.
But Kool and the Gang sealed its place in history in 1980 with "Celebration," a buoyant, timeless party anthem that DJs will probably spin at class reunions and wedding receptions for decades to come. The group itself keeps rolling, playing everywhere from corporate parties for the likes of Microsoft and IBM; casinos in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and Native American reservations; and venues such as the Reichhold. At the show Saturday, Bell says, his younger son, Prince Hakim, will "add a hip-hop flavor to 'Jungle Boogie' and 'Celebration.'"
"We haven't been to St. Thomas in awhile — maybe over 15 years," says Bell, who plays bass. "We've been to other parts of the islands — Jamaica, St. Maarten, Martinique, Antigua. We do close to 100 shows a year. The last couple of years we've played a lot in Europe, at jazz and rock festivals."
Bell and his younger brother, Robert (now Khalis Bayyan), natives of Youngstown, Ohio, formed the first version of the band in 1964 after their family moved to Jersey City. Another founding member, guitarist Claydes Charles Smith, died in June after a long illness. Smith had to quit the group in January, which still left it with four of its five original members after more than 40 years.
Kool and the Gang has seen — and made — a lot of history across those decades. Long before Donna Summer blew the whistle on "Bad Girls," Kool and the Gang blew them on "Funky Stuff." Long before George Clinton got his Parliament-Funkadelic "thang" together, Kool and the Gang was there — although Bell admits that Clinton helped turn a band with jazz and R&B roots into a funk machine. The first version of Bell's group called itself the Jazziacs, followed by the Soultown Band and Kool and the Flames, a nod to the godfather of soul and the progenitor of funk, James Brown.
"We didn't wanna mess with the godfather, so we changed it from 'Flames' to 'Gang,'" Bell says.
In the late '60s, Brown and Sly Stone turned their heads. Both Bell and Clinton were kicking around New Jersey at the time, getting their respective acts together — the Bell brothers in Jersey City, Clinton a few miles down the road in Plainfield, working as a barber before he took off for Detroit.
"George Clinton had a group called the Parliaments," Bell says. "Their hit was '(I Wanna) Testify.' We saw George about three years later, and he came in with his Mohawk haircut. He had gone funk with Parliament-Funkadelic."
After paying its dues on the Southern "chitlin circuit" in the mid-'60s, Bell says, Kool and the Gang spent the late '60s and early '70s opening for everyone from Johnnie Taylor to the Del-Fonics to a series of blues legends. Bell remembers one show in Brown's home base of Augusta, Georgia, where Brown stood in the wings taunting soul man Tyrone Davis.
"Your band can't play!" Bell remembers Brown saying. "They can't play with me, I'm the godfather! I got the baddest band in the land, I'll kick Tyrone Davis' behind!"
Kool and the Gang hit its stride in the mid-'70s with a series of funk smashes, including "Funky Stuff," "Jungle Boogie" and "Hollywood Swinging." By the end of that decade, Bell says, the group realized it had to change with the times.
"We decided we needed to get a lead singer, because we were competing with Earth, Wind and Fire, who had Maurice White and Philip Bailey, and the Commodores, who had Lionel Richie," he says. "We wanted to stay in the game."
So Taylor joined in 1979, starting a new run of hits with "Ladies' Night," "Celebration" and the smooth ballads of the '80s. While the band has had a number of greatest-hits collections and remix albums released in recent years, Bell says that next week Kool and the Gang will wrap up work on its first true collection of new music in about 15 years.
"This album is a combination of the pop songs we've done, the funk things we've done, the jazz things," Bell says. "We've got a smooth-jazz cover of 'Sailing,' a Christoper Cross song. We're also exploring more of our rock side than we have in the past. "We call it funk, rock and roll, Kool and the Gang-style."
In addition to the group's new album, scheduled for release next year, Bell says, Kool and the Gang also has a feature motion picture scheduled for release in 2008. It will dramatize the band's story, focusing more on the culture that spawned it than its years on the road.
"Everybody has the same problems," Bell says. "Bad managers, bad tax problems, bad accountants. We've already seen that in a lot of other movies."
They're calling the movie "Hollywood Swinging: The Kool and the Gang Story," Bell says.
"We wanted to have a slightly different hook to it," he says. "Did you ever see that movie 'Remember the Titans,' with Denzel Washington? It's about football, but it's also about the community. It had a double meaning to it. We want to do that kind of movie about our career."
Back Talk Share your reaction to this news with other Source readers. Please include headline, your name and city and state/country or island where you reside.
