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
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.
Where'd you learn to funk like that? This joint came from today's Carrboro Record Show, out of the stack I picked up from Gene Brown's friend Paul O'Boyle, who runs a Charlotte record label. Old-Time Granny and myself were sucked into his selection immediately, becuz one of the first things we saw on his table was a great record, with no price on it. And when we asked him how much it was, he didn't give it a second thought, he was like, oh, a dollar. So that was all it took, we dug through all the funk & disco stuff he had. This was before we found out he and Gene were tight.
The highlight of the show was seeing my man Gene again after at least ten years. I would trade records with Gene back when the Lost City first opened, after he came through a couple of times and mentioned that he was into old school.
DJ Jaycee, Dave West, and Gene Brown in Hotlanta (January, 2009)
He was also pals with Jacob Ehrmann, the cat who had a tough time returning rentals within a reasonable time frame. I particularly remember him checking out the Danny Elfman/Oingo Boingo cult flick Forbidden Zone from our dolla rental section and then keeping it indefinitely, to the point where I eventually made a housecall and went by his place to try and retrieve the tape. I don't even know if we even found it, since Jacob had a ridiculously cluttered crib. He was a beat junkie and producer, and his place was truly a vinyl graveyard. Lots and lots and lots of records, stacked up everywhere you turned. I was in awe, and of course, all I wanted to do was dig through the stacks, so looking for the tape took a backseat to that. But Jacob always gave our store lots of hookups when he worked at Kinko's back in the day, so it all evened out.
Then Gene helped me DJ both the infamous 70s-themed parties that we threw at the Lakehouse during the summer of '98. Nothing I can say about these parties will do them justice, at some point I may have to post the scene reports I wrote from that summer just so I can link to something here backing up my claims. Or REALLY get my shit together and transfer the videotaped evidence from HI-8 to a more YouTube-friendly format. Let's just say that things got fairly wild and crazy.
When I first got to the Century Center today, OTG greeted me with a copy of Breakin' Out, the Fat Larry's Band full-length from '82 with Act Like You Know and Zoom. I think the guy wanted $4 for it. And she was saving for me, but I had no cash. So I asked him to hold it. And then forgot all about it. Just like I also lost my water bottle. Mercury was in retrograde, and shit was all out of wack. I wasn't the only one losing stuff. DJ Tongue was AWOL from the show for a good while becuz he'd dropped his iPhone, and was frantically retracing his steps through the streets of Carrboro looking for it. Eventually, somebody found it, and all was good. Meanwhile, I was on a mad quest to find twenny bucks to cover the stack I'd picked out from Paul's stuff, which meant trying unsuccessfully to (a) convince the clerks at Carrboro's upscale mini-mart to let me trade a credit card slip for cash, without making a purchase of any kind (which should demonstrate the mania I was feeling that afternoon as I felt myself sinking further and further into a temporary vinyl addiction relapse); and (b) get cash back from a banana purchase at the Teeter, something I never do, and of course, it didn't work properly - a big NO THANKS going out to Wells Fargo, whose takeover of Wachovia is giving me a headache, in addition to making my bank owned by a wack bunch of greedy banksters who had no qualms about funding payday loans and subprime mortagages in the very recent past, and are probably still up to their eyeballs in other shady business; before (c) breaking down and driving into downtown Chapel Hill to visit an ATM.
I could have avoided all this hassle by simply bringing some cash with me to the show. But that would have encouraged me to buy records. Just like recently, when I stepped into that same upscale mini-mart with Old-Time Granny and Tongue, this time to actually purchase some beverages. No sooner had I offered to pony up three bucks towards the tab when Tongue was like, oh too bad All Day is closed, we could have gone over there and bought 3 dolla rekkids! And OTG was all over that, she said, "Oh no, are you sure they're closed? Maybe there's somebody still in there!"
Okay, so the record in question is by Poussez! Pronounced "Poo-say," as the cover helpfully points out. There's also a translation, which I just noticed for the first time ("Poussez (French verb, active; imperative mood) - PUSH!"). This was entirely an Alphonse Mouzon production (produced, arranged, and conducted by, plus "all keyboards, synthesizers, bass synthesizer, drums, percussion, vocals"), with Randy Brecker among the guest musicians and a bunch of sexy female vocalists (The Poussez Singers), two of whom may or may not have been the foxes featured on the cover.
(UPDATE 8/16/11 - Since Alphonse succeeded in getting his videos pulled from the dastardly YouTube, I foresee versions of this track will only be sporadically available in the future during the lag time between when fans upload them and when they're taken down. IMHO, old school artists whose hits dropped thirty-plus years ago should realize that YouTube is a valuable promotional channel to catalyze paid downloads of their dusty grooves. Far more than the marginal revenue they stand to lose from the tech-savvy population of users who simply download YouTube videos and convert them into MP3's. Let's face it, most music consumers in 2011 have no idea who Alphonse Mouzon is or that he created some great tracks back in the day. So taking action to shut down one of the few ways new fans might discover him is extremely counter-productive).
This was a record that Paul swore up and down I would dig if I was into disco. So I went with it, despite the fact that the cover had been shot through with a freaking BB gun! WTF is that about? That's some little kid f-ing up his big brother's record collection shit right there.
But it was the first track we listened to when we got back to Old-Time Granny and Tongue's place, and it didn't disappoint. The LP version is what we heard, and it sounded great, but the video included here is the original 12" mix, which is even better.
