KC & the Sunshine Band: Boogie Shoes

Felicity Huffman dances to Boogie Shoes

One of the greatest TV commercials ever
Budweiser Ants: Get Down Tonight

     The history of music, in many ways, is the history of modern man.  We know, for example, that cave men had music because we've found flutes made from the hollow bones of birds and bamboo dating back about 10,000 years. If you weren't actually making the music you were probably dancing to it.  In fact dancing is one of the most common things that all of mankind does perhaps only second to making war.  I would mention sex as the most ubiquitous of all human activities except that it is often preceded & followed by dance.  War is also often preceded by dance and almost always followed by it.  There is no question that people love to dance to the music.

Harry Wayne "KC" Casey

      Oftentimes music itself was created specifically to encourage people to dance.  The Waltz, the Polka, and eventually the Twist, the Hustle, and of course the entire Disco craze are examples of music specifically designed to make us shake our groove thing.
      In the early 70's just as the hippie/folk, & psychedelia music genre's were peaking and tailing off disco emerged and, like surfing music a decade earlier, became a world wide fad.  The roots of disco can be heard in the music of Sly & the Family Stone, Isaac Hayes, and many Motown songs.  The OJ's had a major hit in 1972 called Love Train that featured the fusion of funk with a steady 4 count beat.  Eventually songs like Don't Rock The Boat by Hughes Corporation &  George McCrae's Rock Your Baby came to dominate both the R&B charts as well as the US charts.
       Rock Your Baby was penned by a Florida native and rising star named Harry Wayne Casey.  Casey wrote and produced the McCrae hit and was himself ready to take center stage.  He had been a record store clerk who struck up a friendship with some of the distributors that delivered the records to the store.  He was eventually invited to the TK Record Studio who was one of the record stores' distributors.  He picked up part time work at the studio sweeping the floors and packing boxes for shipment.  Then he became friends with recording engineer and bassist Richard Finch.  It became immediately evident to Finch that Casey was a gifted song writer and the two started a working collaboration

Colorful and dance-able KC & The Sunshine Band

      In 1974 Harry Wayne Casey's music became popular in Europe and it was necessary to cross the ocean to promote the record Casey and his new band had released.  That band was called KC & the Sunshine Band.  The European tour was a huge success.  That led TK records to re-release and promote KC's music in the US where the album Do It Good finally garnered a little attention and strong reviews.  The sales were not strong but word of mouth and the local popularity of the band in Miami started to focus more national attention on both the band and the newest dancing fad.
       In 1975 the Disco craze took off like a rocket ship powered by a strong 4 on the floor drum beat and a lively bass guitar.  The main rock and roll instrument for nearly 3 decades, the guitar, was relegated to a support role under the synthesizers, horns, and percussion.  The music oftentimes featured Latin, soul, & funk influences but all of it came in a very bright, very dance-able package.  Soon the music caught on in a big way and nightclubs all over the country sprung up to cash in on the new rising popular dance music.

Typical Disco Fashion
(No, seriously!!!)

       The folks that showed up to dance and enjoy this new brand of music were wearing leisure suits, slinky dresses, sophisticated hair cuts, big gold jewelry and were fueled by sex, cocaine, and alcohol.  The culture that formed around disco music was revolutionary in many ways.  Birth control had only recently become legal and it gave liberty to participate in recreational sex with an abandon that had never existed in human history.  Drugs were easy to come by and were cheap and there was little if any stigma attached to using if it was just for fun.  It appealed to the twenty something baby boomers who were relieved from the worries of conscription and death in Viet Nam.  In fact Disco is the dancing that everyone did to celebrate the end of that extremely unpopular and costly war.
       KC & The Sunshine Band became one of the biggest disco era bands.  They amassed huge success with songs like the hard rocking Get Down Tonight, That's The Way I Like It, & Shake Your Booty as well as somewhat softer yet still dance-able love songs like the Keep It Comin' Love.  In fact KC & The Sunshine Band were so popular they did something that has only been done by the Beatles, they scored four #1 hits within a one year period.  They had 4 albums in a row that went platinum with 2 of them certified multi-platinum.  It really is hard to imagine but in the mid 1970's KC was about as big as a band could be..

1979 Chicago Disco Demolition Night
note the smoke in centerfield left by
the explosion

      I've never really been certain why but disco as a cultural phenomenon suffered a terrible backlash which culminated in 1979's "Disco Demolition" fan promotion.  Between the games of a baseball double header at Chicago's Comisky Field headline hunting radio shock jocks Steve Dahl and Gary Meier blew up a box of disco albums.  The promotion was a disaster.  It is estimated that as many as fifteen thousand people sneaked into the already sold out stadium.  The crowd doused the field with beer and firecrackers before the promised record explosion even took place.  Eventually a big box of disco records was brought out to center field where it was blown up seriously damaging the field.  Immediately after the explosion a crowd estimated to be around twenty thousand stormed the field and pretty much stole or destroyed anything that wasn't nailed down or painted over.  In the aftermath it was reported that as many as fifty people suffered injuries and the promotion is still seen as one of the worst planned most disastrous events in baseball & music history.  After that disco music was seen as an embarrassment by the main stream record buying public.

Disco King John Travolta

       If that was disco's low point then it's high point was probably the 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever.  The movie itself was not a masterpiece but it was energized by the smooth & attractive dancing of John Travolta in a white leisure suit and the breathtaking sound track featuring the Bee Gee's.  That movie soundtrack was certified 15x platinum becoming the biggest selling soundtrack of all time.  It spawned several chart topping hits like Staying Alive by the Bee Gee's and If I Can't Have You by Yvonne Elliman.  Also on that sound track is the hit song Boogie Shoes by KC & The Sunshine Band.

Felicity Huffman

       The song broke on Saturday Night Fever and then went on to show up again and again in the media.  It has been featured in at least 6 movies and several TV shows as well as commercials.  Shapely and sexy actress Felicity Huffman danced to the song on two different TV shows.  The first time was on a desk shaking her booty quite fetchingly on the show Sports Night and the second time she was on bar in a scene from Desperate Housewives.  KC's use of the word booty caused dictionary's all over the world to amend the definition of the word from the stolen gains of pirates to include it's use as a description for the human buttocks.
     Boogie Shoes might not exactly be a forgotten classic, but it certainly isn't the first song that pops into your mind when you think of the songs that transcended disco and still sounds as fresh today as it did during it's mid-70's heyday.  
      Disco, as a genre did make a comeback.  In the 90's The Bee Gees went on a highly successful world tour and later disco radio stations started popping up everywhere including on satellite radio.  KC and The Sunshine Band were invited to perform on the mega-hit TV show American Idol in 2009.  Disco didn't die on that baseball field 35 years ago, it still exists today and it's one of the greatest forms of dance music to ever spring from the creative mind of the ancestors of the cavemen...

One last note:  Disco music was the last musical genre either invented or popularized by the baby boom generation.  So the people who gave us Woodstock and single-handedly ended the Viet Nam War by popular demand finished their creative run by giving us Disco, & George W. Bush.  I'd like to extend a big well done to those boomers & wish you luck in your dotage...