Still Miss You 'Lufer'

Today would have been the 59th birthday of one of my fave singers back in the day, Luther Ronzoni Vandross. He was born on this date in New York City in 1951.

Wow. Has it been five years since he heft us on July 1, 2005? Doesn't seem like it's been that long, but yep, it has.

The man left behind a musical legacy that will be hard to match. There are also probably a lot of people born in the 80's and 90's who probably owe their existence to being conceived while their parents were getting busy while listening to his music.

Anyway, happy birthday 'Lufer'. You are still missed by your fans, and no one as of yet has stepped up to fill your considerable shoes.

Happy 60th Birthday Donna Summer

While I was perusing the celebrity birthdays on New Year's Eve, I discovered that one of my favorite singers was celebrating a milestone birthday.

Back in the day I was a huge disco fan, and one of my favorite singers was Donna Summer. She started off as a gospel singer, but what a lot of people don't realize about her is that she's an accomplished songwriter as well.

She has won five Grammys and is the only artist to have three consecutive number one double albums and three number one pop singles in the same year. While she's known for the disco hits, her musical repertoire encompasses rock, pop, R&B and gospel.

She has sold over 130 million records worldwide and I definitely have my share of Donna's music in my collection. She's one of the most successful female artists of the 1970s and 1980's and was inducted in 2004 to the Dance Music Hall of Fame.\

Happy birthday, Donna and may you have many more.

Chic Nominated Again For Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Pardon Nile Rodgers and the rest of Chic if they're starting to feel like All my Children's Susan Lucci. Susan was nominated 18 times for a Daytime Emmy Best Actress Award before she finally won it in 1999.

They've been nominated in 2003, 2006, 2007, and now 2008 for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and when the votes are counted, they fall just short of becoming one of the five inductees in that year's class.

Chic is one of my my fave groups from my high school days (and still are). For those of you with knee-jerk reactions to disco, you can stop right now because this band was cutting edge.





Ask the Sugarhill Gang, because without Chic's Good Times song, Rapper's Delight, the song that catapulted hip hop into prominence doesn't happen.



Ask Sister Sledge, who thanks to Nile and 'Nard's production talents, created a song that became a championship anthem for the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates.



Once again Chic has been nominated along with Jeff Beck, Wanda Jackson, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Metallica, Run-D.M.C., the Stooges, War and Bobby Womack, but only five of these outstanding nominees will get in. After the votes are tabulated, the announcement will be made next month as to who will comprise the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2009.

The induction ceremony will take place in April, and this time I'm hoping along with other Chic fans that they'll FINALLY get in.

Nightmare on Hillcrest Ave

Happy Halloween, peeps!

GLBT people aren't the only folks that like to celebrate what we jokingly call in the community the 'Gay National Holiday'

One fast growing tradition here in Da Ville is checking out a group of Crescent Hill homes by the reservoir on Hillcrest Ave. It's a must walk through destination for pint sized ghouls, goblins and costumed candy seekers of all ages.

For twenty years those homeowners in that stretch have done lavish decoration jobs for Halloween. It has grown so popular that they draw crowds of up to 20,000 people from all over the Louisville metro area to see them. Some of the owners bought their homes specifically so that they could participate in this annual neighborhood frightfest.

My favorite in that four block stretch of homes between Frankfort Ave and Brownsboro Rd is 'Dante's Disco Inferno'.

The owner of this house puts down an authentic flashing lights disco floor, has mirrored disco balls, has tombstones with death dates for disco and Tony Manero (John Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever) and plays disco hits all night long. Usually people walking along that stretch will hear a song they like, stop and shake their booty's.

Themes range from the Peanuts gang Linus welcoming the Great Pumpkin to ghostly cemeteries. Freddie, Leatherface and various Hollywood horror monsters pop out from behind trees at inopportune times to scare you.

They spend tons of cash on candy, and sometimes to one up each other. One memorable Halloween Dawn and I stopped by this house that rented a 16 piece orchestra. They played Halloween and Christmas music as they served hot chocolate and passed out candy on a clear but cool night.

Others will show screenings of classic and current horror movies. The Peanuts themed one runs the classic 'It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown' cartoon all night long.

Many of the homeowners say that the annual project has helped them get to know their neighbors and built a close knit community in the process. Neither they, the civic association or any group gives out an official prize for the best decorated home, but it's obvious there's a little bit of a competitive streak going when it comes to putting together these themed decorations.

And it's deeply appreciated by all of us looking for interesting stuff to do on Halloween night.

In Praise Of Disco

I've come to praise disco, not bury it like the 'disco sucks' haters tried to do back in the day.

I'm one of those peeps who loves disco. I adore the fact that it's a blend of dance music, soul, funk, latin rhythms and jazz to an uptempo beat. When KRLY-FM changed their format to playing disco music 24/7 and called themselves Disco 94 my radio was tuned to it. I got some raised eyebrow looks from peeps and took some ribbing from my high school classmates for admitting that I liked the Village People.

I have this and a lot more to say about disco. It was one of the few music formats (jazz, R&B, country and classical are the others) that crosses racial boundaries in terms of its fanbase. Walk into any disco during the 70's and you would literally see a rainbow of people out shaking their bootys on the dance floor.

It started getting played on the Houston R&B radio stations about the mid 70's and it wasn't long before I started hearing some of my favorite artists recording songs to disco beats. In addition to being introduced to the Village People, I also became a huge fan of Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, Sylvester, Chic and a few other groups. A 70's commercial jingle and backup singer by the name of Luther Vandross hooked up with a group called Change and sang lead vocals on the album's 'The Glow of Love' and 'Searchin' tunes. They got major airplay and set the stage for the 1981 platinum debut album Never Too Much that launched his solo career.

Rap owes its origins to disco along with house music. Without Chic's 'Good Times' the Sugarhill Gang would've had to use some other beats as the basis for 'Rapper's Delight'. Would the Pittsburgh Pirates 1979 championship be as memorable without hearing Sister Sledge's 'We Are Family' rocking Three Rivers Stadium? The tune was adopted as the Pirates theme song that season. Even the US Navy considered using the Village People's 'In The Navy' as a recruiting song.

One thing I must point out about the 'Disco Sucks' movement is the homophobia and racism that were a component of it. I found it interesting that the main peeps hollering 'disco sucks' when I was in high school were overwhelmingly white males who were hardcore rock fans.


Best of all, before disco got eclipsed on the American music scene it was fun. I was reminded of that when I got taken to Polly Esther's Culture Club by some friends a few weeks before I moved to Louisville. It has three themed rooms. One of them is a 70's room complete with a lighted flashing disco floor and mirrored disco balls hanging from the ceiling.

I observed as the DJ continued to spin my fave tunes from the 70's that there was a multicultural crowd dancing to it. Nobody cared whether the artist being played was White, Black, Latino, gay or straight. The music was slammin', everybody was having fun and you didn't have to be a Soul Train dancer or know the latest dances to groove to it.

I need to find my Disco Greatest Hits CD. Time for me to relearn how to do 'The Hustle'.

Tres Chic

The dictionary definition of chic reads: smart elegance and sophistication especially of dress or manner. That's a dead-on target description of one of my favorite bands of the 70's.

Chic's music like most of the stuff I grew up listening to has proven to be timeless and ground breaking as well. I fell in love with their amalgamation of deep bass guitars, the lush strings courtesy of the Chic Strings (Cheryl Hong, Karen Milne and Marianne Carroll) and funky rhythms. Sometimes it was at a disco pace. Other times it was pure 70's funk with some cool soulful ballads and instrumentals thrown in just for good measure.

While Dad introduced me to Parliament-Funkadelic, I discovered Chic on my own. I opened the package of promo albums that got mailed to the house one day back in 1977 from Atlantic Records and noticed Chic's debut album. It was the self titled one that contained what would become their first hits 'Dance Dance Dance' (Yowsah Yowsah Yowsah) and 'Everybody Dance'.

Dad sometimes used me to screen albums because I tend to be analytical about the way I listen to music. The lyrics are extremely important for me. I'm into great guitar players, sax players who can blow and great producers. I got spoiled listening to peeps produced by Holland Dozier Holland, Gamble and Huff, Maurice White, Quincy Jones, et cetera. In Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards they already had the quality producers and musicians.

Norma Jean Wright started out as Chic's front singer. They decided after a year of touring to support the first album they needed another female singer to expand what they could do in the live show and musically. Norma Jean suggested her friend Luci Martin. When Norma Jean Wright was forced to leave the band because of her contractual solo career obligations. Alfa Anderson, who sang backup on the second album C'est Chic was moved up to replace her in 1978. Norma Jean did get to sing some vocals on the monster Sister Sledge 1979 We Are Family LP.

C'est Chic got released in late 1978 with 'Le Freak' as the lead single and sold six million copies. Risque was released the next year. It contained a a song that would help propel a new music genre to prominence. That song was 'Good Times' and it became the basis for the Sugarhill Gang's breakthrough hit 'Rapper's Delight' and a host of other rap records that sampled it throughout the 80's. The basslines were sampled by rock, rap and R&B producers as well.

C'est Chic was supposed to contain the song 'He's The Greatest Dancer'. While producing Sister Sledge's album they decided that this song was a better fit for them and swapped it with another song. The song they exchanged it for that ended up on the Risque album was 'I Want Your Love'. They also featured an up and coming commercial jingle and session singer by the name of Luther Vandross on several of their albums. Luther hit it big singing lead vocals on Change's 1979 album featuring the hit singles 'The Glow Of Love' and 'Searching' and set the stage for his debut Never Too Much LP in 1981.

Nile and 'Nard also produced Diana Ross' hit singles 'Upside Down' and 'I'm Coming Out' for her 1980 Diana LP.

They struggled to get airplay in the early 80's and disbanded. They did produce Madonna's 1984 breakthrough album Like A Virgin album and scored some successes producing other artists.

After a 1992 party in which Nile and 'Nard played old Chic tunes along with Paul Shaffer and Anton Fig to thunderous applause they organized a reunion of the band and produced CHIC-ism. It not only charted but received critical acclaim and airplay all over the world.

In 2005 they became three category inductees in the Dance Music Hall of Fame. They have received nominations for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003, 2006 and 2007 but have yet to be elected.

Here's hoping that someday they'll be enshrined there as well.