GEORGE McCRAE – "Rock Your Baby"

Blimey Tom, you didn’t say anything about that on Saturday (or was this after Club P?). Glad that all is well though.

Now to “Rock Your Baby” – which incidentally is the second consecutive number one to owe little or nothing to the support of Radio 1 – well, it’s the beginning of time, isn’t it? The start of what we commonly know as disco, the use of the drum machine as a seducer (whereas on Sly’s “Family Affair” it ticks away like a time bomb), George’s near-androgynous vocal, and the immaculate yet human way in which Howie Casey makes the 1974 technology shuffle and swing in ways perhaps no longer possible. Inescapable on import in every worthwhile club for 3-4 months before President Records (home of the Equals and Dorothy Squires inter alia) secured UK release rights and put it out on their Jayboy subsidiary; an immediate hit on commercial radio, whereas Radio 1 only played it when they had to.

Timmy Thomas’ “Why Can’t We Live Together?” – #12 here in ’73, at least ten places too low – acted as a sort of John the Baptist for what was to come, so it’s fitting that the extra splash of heaven blessed to “Rock Your Baby” is the twin keyboard interplay between Timmy’s swirling Fender Rhodes and KC’s almost hymnal, stately organ which reminds me, in both nature and delivery, of what Zawinul, Hancock and Corea did on Miles’ In A Silent Way. It’s a sensual hymn (“come on…” McCrae’s voice trails off into the instrumental break as though nothing further needs to be said) and still sounds impossibly noble. As persuasively modern in its day as “Cumberland Gap” and “Telstar” were in theirs. A 10.

One of my very favourites – I can remember watching some silly Channel 4 Best 100 Number Ones Countdown a few years ago with my friend Harry and as there were only two left him asking “Well, what are the best two going to be, then?” and my replying “Well, if it was me deciding it would be ‘Rock Your Baby’ and ‘Tiger Feet'”, but sadly that wasn’t to be.

Marcello has written acutely about how this works musically and rhythmically in several places, but all I can add to that is that the effect is to create a truly holy and sanctified sounding music. Rarely have I heard a more convincing evocation of the bliss and joy of love, and don’t know of any other song as likely to leave me feeling swoony when I listen to it. 10.

They do tend to be much of a muchness but they’re all good ‘uns; “It’s Been So Long” is superb but my favourite is “You Can Have It All” as subsequently (and beautifully) covered by Yo La Tengo.

The Story of Pop (of which Marcello still no doubt has every issue complete with binder) once remarked that, as a seismograph of pop, the charts may not be sensitive to every slight tremor but they never miss a worldwide explosion. It was talking in the context of the 1963 charts reflecting the Beat Boom, but the 1974 charts are a case in point as well. By July ’74, the only black face at number one in the UK singles chart for nearly three years had been Chuck Berry, and that with a song that was hardly a standout example of a black music genre. Just one black performer in a sequence of 48 number ones since the Tams had displaced Diana Ross back in 1971 (there may have been one lurking in the Simon Park Orchestra or the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards but I doubt it). Beginning with George McCrae, six of the next nine number ones were by black artists, and they were to have a fair share of the rest of the decade.

However, here’s where I diverge greatly from the consensus of many of the contributors on this site. As you might already have guessed, I despised disco – I found much of it a repetitive, tacky, mindless, soulless mash, and hated its marketing, its World Disco Dancing Championships, its Saturday Night Fever hype, its monotonous exhortations to dance, etc etc. As ever, there were honourable exceptions and there are disco records I remember fondly, including two of the biggest summer hits of the next three years – but generally I find it to be almost the antithesis of soul. Yes, in answer to the charge of rockism, there were no doubt skilled musicians involved, but such a degree of cynical addiction to the beat as well. As for George McCrae, sorry but it never did anything for me then and doesn’t now.

Glad you’re on the mend Tom, that’s what kids do to you…

As Erithian has now unmasked himself as HATING FUN he is duly sentenced to three years of having to listen to a loop of “Dance With Me,” the 1980 single by Reginald Bosanquet.

I did once accidentally tape that Reginald Bosanquet song off the radio! Might even still have it somewhere. All together now, “Dance, doo-wop, doo-wop, oh wee…”

Someone should do a mash-up with “Oh Bosanquet” by Not the Nine O’Clock News.

!!!!

And Curve cover “I Feel Love” (I’ve never heard it, but I imagine they sound like themselves).

Didn’t the writer of Oh. Bosanquet die recently?

I saw Reggie Bosanquet once, propping up the bar of the Sun in Splendour in Portobello Road, back in the days when the Sun was a really good pub (Britannia tables, banquettes covered with scuffed and slashed red vinyl, hand-pulled draught Bass of exceedingly high quality) and before its transformation, firstly into a Victorian tart’s boudoir and then into a Firkin-clone. ITN were on strike, and this being Notting Hill, if you saw somebody who looked like somebody famous, it invariable was somebody famous. He looked bored and tired, and I didn’t feel the slightest inclination to emulate Anna Ford.

Anyway, while I don’t remember this being number one, I do remember it very vividly from a visit to a sweaty club in the Manchester cellars the following autumn, and I felt very heady. I was impressed. Then I forgot all about it until I tracked it down for this project, and I was immediately impressed again.

I was talking about Soul earlier today. Soul never went away, for me, but of course this is quite a way from Wilson Pickett. It’s Soul with its collar buttoned down and its shoes buffed up and ready to ride in something low-slung and Italian with the roof open to the wind. Something old and something new, all rolled into one. For me, it’s a point when the singles charts start being interesting again.

It is undoubtedly sexy. But then both I and this record belong to an age when dancing was the vertical expression of a horizontal desire, something I’ll have more to say about anon.

Eight feels about right.

Full disclosure: I was the typical American Midwest smalltown white guy in my reaction to disco when it was new. Meaning I invested great passion in a quasi-religious insistence that it was not only bad, but somehow blasphemous. I remember with particular embarrassment a closing night cast party for a college play where I was deeply distressed when “Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy” was taken off the turntable and replaced by the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack.

Now I listen to a lot of the disco hits and wonder, “What the heck was I thinking?” Leaving aside for a moment the fact that many of those hits are very fun and enjoyable – it shouldn’t have taken me so long to figure that out, but I guess better late than never – even looking at it from my 15-year-old rock and soul purist’s vantage, a lot of disco (especially early disco) sounds like light soul. Why didn’t I hear that at the time?

The three exceptions to my cloth-eared response to disco were Donna Summers’ “I Feel Love,” Vicki Sue Robinson’s “Turn the Beat Around,” and George McRae’s “Rock Your Baby.” I always loved those three singles – Donna’s because it was so strange in a wondrous way, and Vicki Sue’s and George’s because they were so exuberant. I wish I’d been as open-minded about the rest of disco – some of it did indeed suck, just like every other genre of music, but lots of it could have made my daily radio-listening much more enjoyable, if I’d let it.

I owe a debt of thanks to my older sister for opening my mind a little. Sometime in the mid-1970s, when I found her listening to a disco song, I of course made a point of saying how stupid I thought it was. She replied, in so many words, that in a world as tough as this one, any music that made people feel like dancing was doing something important. That made me reconsider for the first time. (Many years later, when it finally dawned on me that Tommy James meant more to me than Robbie Robertson – that, in other words, Pop was infinitely greater than post-“Sgt. Pepper”/Dylan ponderously self-important Rock – I could finally hear what had always been right in there in the grooves of the good disco records.)

Thanks to Marcello for the info about Timmy Thomas playing on “Rock Your Baby.” I *loved* “Why Can’t We Live Together,” so I’m happy to know Timmy played on this record, too. (Did he remain in the Sunshine Band?)

I wish George McRae had been the permanent vocalist for KC & the Sunshine Band. Howie casey’s vocals have an Everyman charm, but I really like George McRae’s light, floating tenor.

My only regret about this single is that it inspired John Lennon’s “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” – a record that sounded like a hippo trying to dance – bad, in a word – even in 1974, at the height of my Beatle worship.

I’d be OK with this as a 10, for a combination of artistic and historic reasons, as described by everone before me.

Well, there’s not much more that I can add to the splendid observations above. This felt like a sea-change – even TOTP changed its format while Rock Your Baby was at #1, just to underline the final break from glam – and indeed it was a sea-change. Didn’t mean much to me at the time (although I lapped up “Rock The Boat”), as I spent the Summer of 1974 discovering prog. Sadly, and give or take the odd noble exception, I swallowed that “mindless brainwash music for the masses” line for far too long, from prog into punk. That’s sexual repression for you!

I should perhaps state here, in response to wwolfe, that “I Feel Love” was very much one of the records for which I made an exception to my anti-disco stance. Much more on that in a few years’ time. I was partial to the Timmy Thomas record too.

Time perhaps to deploy my claim to fame, which is a mite less cool than Billy’s having sat next to KT Tunstall in Contemporary Feminist Playwrights. While I was staying loyal to Sweet and Slade, the ginger lad in the year above me at school was no doubt getting into the new sounds coming along. And given the sound of my singing voice, it was probably better for music lovers everywhere that Mick Hucknall was the one who took it to the next stage.

Mick Out Of Simply Red’s true spiritual forefather hasn’t come up yet on Popular but he will do after having been kept at number two on three separate occasions!

Although it should be recorded that Paul Anka unexpectedly returned to our top ten later in 1974 with the heartrending “You’re Having My Baby.”

“THE KID GETS SHIRTS! DON’T MAKE A FUCKIN’ MANIAC OUT OF ME!”
“I’m the only important one in this cot.”

“Does the mobile have a spotlight?”

Yes, while it went to #1 in the US…odd how all the #1s just after Nixon resigned weren’t very good, but then a month later things pick up again.

So then…hmmm…not Tom Jones…oh dear…

Oh, him! He of the chain of Liverpool cake shops.

Someone above asked about other good George McCrae records, the follow up single “I Can’t Leave You Alone” is terrific, more poppy and less slinky than “..Baby” but still great, and it had the classic funky b-side “I Get Lifted” – all those are on the ‘Rock Your Baby’ album.

Rosie #20

Ah, Reggie Bosanquet.

He stood (successfully)in Glasgow University’s Rectorial Election in 1980.

While he was at the University for the pre-election hustings he turned up in the refectory one lunchtime with his minders and sat at the table next to me.

The poor sod was clearly so addicted to drink that the beverage he selected to wash down his lunch was a can of Schweppes Shandy. Clearly he couldn’t get through lunch in the non-licensed refectory without some approximation of booze. Sad, really.

Anyone else remember how he cocked up the News at Ten announcement of the death of Elvis?

As for the record – I’m another who likes it more now than I did at the time. Pretty classy stuff.

Well, as the man himself wisely urged on “Dance With Me” – “Bop around, lose all your junk.”

All this summer (1974) I was working as a lorry driver’s mate, furniture removals and Babysham deliveries a speciality – and Rock your baby, and Rock the boat for that matter, were everywhere, and I had hardly thought of them in 10 years (since I left my record collection at home) and today they come flooding back. That’s why it is worth sticking with this Popular business. Basically, Thanks Tom.

Also the second Crossroads-related hit, following Sue Nicholls’ “Where Will You Be?” in 1968. Always loved “Born With A Smile On My Face” and indeed the future (and now ex) Mrs Angus Deayton.

She was certainly a regular on That’s Life at the time, singing a topical song every week. The woman who eventually replaced her definitely appeared on New Faces.

The song was specially written for Crossroads by Simon May, who seems to have written or co-written most soap opera-related songs from the seventies onwards, since Steph was appearing in the show as a visiting pop star (and where better for a visiting pop star to stay than at the Crossroads Motel?). There were lots of shots of her and her band (Rain) cruising around Spaghetti Junction to the soundtrack of the tune.

Before that she was one of the shadowy cabal of female session singers along with Sue and Sunny, Madeline Bell etc. and sang back-up on a lot of songs which Dale is apt to spin of a Sunday.

Later in the seventies she co-presented a kids’ TV pop show called Look Alive! with a chap whose actual name was Gordon Bennett.

Simon May wrote the EastEnders theme as well. Speaking of which, I didn’t watch it in its early years, but there was a kind of Endersmania circa ’86 in which Nick Berry and several other cast members had hits – were any of them written into the storylines? There have been getting on for 30 performers who’ve had both a hit record and a stint in Enders, from Wendy Richard to Samantha Janus.