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
Today marks the anniversary of the release of Marvin Gaye's landmark album What's Going On, which debuted on May 21, 1971.
Motown's last surviving Funk Brother Jack Ashford who played tambourine, vibes, and percussion on the LP just celebrated his 90th birthday a few days ago and gave a career retrospective interview to Jointz Of The Day, our daily old school music newsletter on Substack.
It is one of the most intimate, revealing interviews ever given by Ashford, who besides playing on hundreds of hits during the 1960s and 70s and helping shape the Motor City sound is also one of the greatest unsung songwriters and producers of all time. Backed by the other Funk Brothers as they moonlighted from their regular gigs at Hitsville U.S.A., with much more freedom to improvise and jam, his independent production companies and record labels took the Motown sound to a higher, more creative level and churned out one amazing song after another.
Click below to read the full interview.
Exclusive Interview with Jack Ashford of Motown's Funk Brothers (born May 18, 1934) by JointzOfTheDay
The iconic percussionist who played on hundreds of Motown hits and is one of the greatest songwriters and producers of all time looks back over his career.
Today I unearthed a nice stack of choice records at a thrift store spot I seldom swing through, and clearly, it was a good thing I stopped there. The first joint I spotted, the one that made me realize there were goodies lurking, was Clear, by Cybotron.
A legendary electro release, and one of the records that heralded the dawn of techno. Cybotron (Juan Atkins, Richard "3070" Davis, and John "Jon 5" Housley) got signed to Fantasy Records after their two earliest tracks, self-released out of Detroit as 7" slices of wax in 1981 and '82, sold a combined 15,000 copies. Clear was the most successful single off their 1983 debut LP, Enter, and shipped 50,000 nationwide.
There's debate over whether this can be considered the first-ever pure "techno" track, an argument that's a little silly in light of the fact that Cybotron was building on the foundation already laid down by Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra. And a lot of people consider Clear too electro to be techno, pointing to Cybotron's 3rd single, Techno City, as the real techno holy grail, or No UFO's, the first track that Atkins released (as Model 500) on Metroplex, the record label he founded after leaving Cybotron over creative differences with Davis. But however you want to classify it, Clear is still a classic track.
