DJ's Old-Time Granny and Dyn-O-Mite spin old school soul, funk, and disco jams! The show airs on special occasions on WCOM radio, 103.5 FM in Carrboro, NC, and streams online worldwide. www.resoul.org
Hung out with Leafy Greens this afternoon before heading to Raleigh for First Friday and a couple of great art shows, like Plugged In @ Lump, feat. video installations by Neill Prewitt aka DJ Tongue and Seoen Sung, plus recent works by Ashley Florence, Lee Delegard, and Jason Osborne, among others. And This Wild Desire at The Morning Times, a solo show of amazing new paintings by the next Robert Rauschenberg, aka Lincoln Hancock.
Before that all went down, LG re-acquainted me to some of the goodies he was playing for us the night before outside the Open Eye. Like Moon Jocks & Prog Rocks by Mungolian Jetset (the Todd Terje re-edit). And Fait Le Chat (Do The Cat), by El Coco. The competition for today's JOTD was fierce. I would have to go with John Ozila's Funky Boogie, circa 1979.
This cut is an afro-salsa funk monster from France that I'd never heard before, but is apparently well known in Europe because it was used in recent years in a friggin' Lipton Ice Tea commercial starring Hugh Jackman, WTF. Very little info is out there on the interwebs about John Ozila, so he rates a more in-depth SOUL investigation in the future. Regardless, the track is seriously off the chain and hopefully LG will bust it out when he appears as our special guest DJ at the next Club T. That's Club Taqueria 5: Boogie Salsa, coming up Friday, September 16! The music is gonna be super duper bumpin', so be there!
Brainstorming about future Club Taquerias and other live events, I sat down with newcomer to the SOUL fold Leafy Greens this evening outside the Open Eye in beautiful downtown Carrboro. I wish we'd had a proper sound system to connect to his laptop, b/c he was playing some truly funky shit for us. People were walking by and jamming to the beat, even though it was just the two of us huddled around the screen, straining to hear. And wish I could remember all of the re-edits he turned me on to, but I definitely remember this one, a re-imagining of Hot Chocolate's Heaven Is In The Back Seat Of My Cadillac.
Originally off their 3rd LP, Man to Man, released in 1976, which was largely overlooked in the U.S., peaking at #172 on the Billboard 200. As opposed to 1975's Hot Chocolate (feat. You Sexy Thing), which hit #41, and Every 1's A Winner from 1978, which charted at #31 thanks to the strength of the title track. Anyway, this edit from The Revenge brings the funk.
Last weekend's party brought the funk. Special thanx to our guest DJ Tongue, master of beatbox disaster, and mad spinner of party-starter jointz. Tongue blew up the spot!
Dancers came out to get down, peeps dug the flickering images on the wall of sight and sound from classics like Liquid Sky and Wild Style, and some tasty beats were served up hot & spicy.
Electric Burrito's Revenge! Photos by Tongue & Groove.
So guess what...the Club T flava is comin' back atcha! It's Club Taqueria 4: Burrito Boogie! Anotha FREE street party at the Taqueria Jalisco taco truck (next door to Cat's Cradle - 206 E. Main St, Carrboro), on Saturday nite, Aug 27, from 11 pm – 3 am.
This time, we're presenting a special pre-party movie in full, the greatest roller disco flick on wheels...Roller Boogie! Showtime is 11 pm, and we will run out of chairs, so bringing your own is encouraged.
Our guest DJ is DJ Taco Libre, Latino Man of Mystery! As always, e-mail your funk, disco, soul, and old school hip hop requests to resoul.org@gmail.com, and we'll hook you up.
We had such a good time getting down this past weekend two nights in a row at Club Taqueria, we're gonna do it again!
So, get ready for Club Taqueria 3: Electric Burrito's Revenge! It's a FREE street party at the Taqueria Jalisco taco truck (next door to Cat's Cradle - 206 E. Main St, Carrboro), on Saturday nite, Aug 20, from 11 pm – 3 am.
Along with your regularly scheduled turntable hosts, this weekend's special funky guest DJ is DJ Tongue, of Tongue & Groove fame! E-mail us your soul, funk, disco, and old school hip hop requests to resoul.org@gmail.com, and we'll hook you up.
From Eumir Dedato's 1984 LP Motion, feat. Camille on vocals. This LP either recently materialized in the dolla bins at All Day Records, or as a $2 record in the stack I picked up at the Carrboro Record Show last Sunday. All but one of which I bought from Gene Brown's friend Paul O'Boyle.
And as luck would have it, I already had a copy in my Lost City back stock that was ready for sale. But whatever, now I can sell it instead of hanging outo it like I would have done otherwise. Becuz it's a classic track with a timeless feel, it spent 12 weeks on the Billboard Top 20 Dance Chart.
The whole reason I went by All Day Records in the first place yesterday when I ended up with a dollar bin score (besides the fact that I was hanging out with my pal Barbara, formerly known to some as DJ Berrytone, now shopping for a new name, and considering DJ Taco Trouble) was naturally, to pick up another record from out the dolla bin that I had on hold! Which I figured was a karmically silly situation, since back in the day at the Lost City, it drove me right up the f-ing wall when heads would hand me a fat stack of expensive rekkids and ask me to put them on hold. Then not show back up for months at a time. I would regularly paw through the hold crate just to see all the great records we weren't selling.
But just to set the record straight, it wasn't becuz I didn't have a dollar in my pocket that I had to put the joint on hold, altho there's no shame in being a broke-ass DJ with a vinyl habit. I spotted this LP during a previous visit as Ethan was desperately trying to evict us from the store at closing time, and just wanted to make sure it wasn't totally scratched up before taking it home.
It was the full-length LP of Keep On Jumpin' (1978) by Musique, produced by Patrick Adams. Missing the sexy picture sleeve, which is the only reason this record got slept on, since it was sitting right at the front of the dolla bins, staring kids in the face as they walked in the store. Besides the title cut (which went #1 on the Hot Dance Club Play charts), this one included In The Bush (also hit #1 Dance, and was a late nite Lost City fave), plus today's Joint Of the Day – Summer Love. The fourth track on this LP (they all clock in at around 8 minutes) is an instrumental, soundtracky version of the same cut (Summer Love Theme). But the vocal version is the bomb. Too bad it's not the summertime yet. Listen to this, and it'll get you in the mood early.
As featured in the Mel Brooks flick Spaceballs, this joint came to me as the title track of a Pointer Sisters LP I picked up at the Carrboro PTA last weekend for $.20, and I would have thrown it back had I noticed it was from 1986. Becuz in my yet-to-be-educated mind, that was past the Pointer Sisters' prime. Now I'm psyched it ended up in my pile.
On a side note, if the foxy lady who raises hens in Graham and was shopping for a used drum kit ever reads this, e-mail me! Bona fide missed connection after our conversation got interrupted by a very inopportunely-timed incoming phone call that I should have let go to voicemail.
The whole side B of this record is pretty good (other standouts being Sexual Power and Eyes Don't Lie), as opposed to Side A, which flat out sucks. How did that happen?
Although not the original LP versions, the YouTube remixes featured (and linked to) here are all true to the originals' spirit. They come courtesy of a dude from the UK who loves the Pointer Sisters, and the high-quality videos he's put together to go with these great remixes prove it.
Yesterday, I was unexpectedly in Carrboro during the middle of the afternoon. So I swung by the PTA on Jones Ferry for the first time in literally, several years. Back when Shaun & Leslie lived on Carr Street circa the late 90s, one of them would truck over to the spot every day like clockwork, leaving slim pickings for the rest of the unhappy crate diggers around here. Of course, they only could choose from what was left over after another infamous cat who WORKED there (who I ran into just last month when he started honking at me in the Rams Plaza parking lot) got through choosing what 12" treasures he wanted to add to his huge personal collection. So eventually, I was like, f- it, I'm never gonna find anything worthwhile under those circumstances, and quit going.
But clearly times have changed, because there was a giant wall of vinyl to dig through, and I amassed a fat stack of goodies at the extended holiday sale rate of twenny cents per. I hope they extend that sale a little longer, because that much vinyl in one place is likely to spontaneously combust at some point, maybe. A freaking dusty groove fire hazard.
The thing that initially caught my eye about (Mucho Mambo) Sway by Shaft was that it looked really familiar, like I'd seen it before. And sure enough, it turned out to be a record that we sold new at the Lost City for $10-$12 when it was first released on Jellybean Recordings in 1999. Right after we'd moved to 402 West Rosemary Street, the second and final Lost City location. I could tell by the remnants of our original price tag. So that was kinda cool, to be buying it back twelve years later for $.20 at the Carrboro PTA.
Then I listened to it, and got into the latin house groove. The 6:16 Extended Mix is the real deal, but good luck finding it YouTube amidst the hundreds of different videos out there that name-check this track. Probably a result of the Pussycat Dolls having covered it. The remix featured here (supposedly from 2009) sounds as close as I could find. But the promo video from the original '99 release is funny, especially when the mambo crew evicts the lame DJ from his booth and takes over the dancefloor. Actually, there was also a super-funny alternate video shot that had me mad laffing when I saw it, featuring a guy with a tail.
Xmas nite, and on the way back from a fun holiday party in a gorgeous Carrboro home lined with artwork by tons of the most talented Chapel Hill/Carrboro artists around, I had to share this tune with my fellow Xmas travelers. Use It Up and Wear It Out by Odyssey. Whose original lead singer Tony Reynolds died earlier this year (February 4, 2010) at his home in Jamaica, Queens, New York.
Great live performance footage in this video. Amazingly, this track hit #1 in the UK for two weeks in the summer of 1980, yet failed to crack the U.S. Hot 100. WTF?! All I can figure is that the American disco backlash was in full swing, and Use It Up was a casualty.
It was one of the highlights of the mix CD that Hot Damn Stewart dropped on me during his infamous visit to Chapel Hill from the Left Coast back in the spring of '09. The occasion for its replay was that earlier in the night, I got an Xmas txt msg from Hot Damn.
So we drove through the deserted streets of Carrboro, snow still falling all around us, enjoying a beautiful white Christmas as we rocked out to a funky, funky soundtrack from the late disco era.
