On May 14, 1973, Skylab was launched. And apparently, inspired this epic, spaced out Moog joint by Electronic System, aka Dan Lacksman, who later formed the Belgian avant garde synthpop group Telex.
America's first space station orbited the planet until falling back to Earth in 1979. In the pre-internet, pre-cable news era, it was still a global media event.
- Dyn-O-Mite
A long-forgotten original soundtrack from a 1968 French exploitation flick yielded this funky cut. The whole soundtrack would have been lost to the ages if an acetate copy hadn't been rescued from a landfill in Paris a few years back.
If you can decipher Google's slightly twisted translation, or speak French, you'll dig this page, which drops some knowledge about the strange career of Jean-Pierre Mirouze, including how he was hired in the late 60s to create the music for a never-completed political film called Farewell America, after a book of the same name. The entire project was supposedly a creation of the French intelligence service, embarked on with the knowledge and/or encouragement of Bobby Kennedy. It was to have featured the full-length Zapruder film (then unseen by the American public), and like the book, explored the possibility that multiple gunmen killed JFK, with backing from a cabal of U.S. oil interests, rogue elements of the CIA, and Kennedy's domestic political enemies.
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Also known just as Kokolo. Formed in NYC circa 2001, by now these cats have over 50 releases to their credit and apparently are one of the reasons there's been a global Afrobeat revival in recent years.
From their 2009 LP Heavy Hustling, with a sexy assist from Sheree, doing her original tiger dance! Of course, a reworking of the 1971 James Brown classic.
As certain fiends and denizens may recall, the version redone by Maceo and the Macks as Soul Power '74 was a Pink House standard back in the day.
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The Chakachas were a group of studio musicians from Belgium (including Tito Puente's wife, the singer Kari Kenton) who laid down some seriously funky Latin soul tracks. They were best known for their sex funk hit Jungle Fever, which went to #8 on the Billboard Hot 100 after being released in late 1971, and undoubtedly resulted in the birth of many a Gen Xer. It sold over a million copies in the U.S., and was a seminal track of the early disco era, heating up the then-underground dance floor scene.
But this cut right here, Stories, was also a killer.
Off the follow-up to Jungle Fever, 1972's Los Chakachas, it's a playful groove with lots of giggles and silly background noises, and clearly a song that a lot of folks enjoyed while getting stoned. With recreational marijuana use on the ballot this November in five more states (California, Nevada, Arizona, Maine, and Massachusetts), it's high time to revisit some classic smoking tracks!
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Went to a wedding today, and this was one of the only decent tracks the DJ threw down.
Turns out there's a romantic story behind it. King Floyd wrote Groove Me as a poem that he planned to give to a coed he was crushing on who worked with him at a box factory in East L.A., since he was too shy to ask her out. But after he wrote it, she never came back to work. "Man, I'd sure like to meet her one day just to thank her," Floyd said in 1999. The track was a #1 hit on the Billboard Soul chart over four non-consecutive weeks in early 1971, and crossed over to the white pop charts, making it to #6 on the Billboard Hot 100. He was working at a New Orleans post office when the song blew up, and Groove Me's success allowed him to quit his job and tour the U.S., pursuing his musical career full time. R.I.P King Floyd (1945-2006).
- Dyn-O-Mite
While hanging out at the new gelato spot today, I ran into a CT-based rapper and producer named Skobie Won. It intrigued me to learn he's out of New London, since I recently relieved the the New London Sal's of all their decent vinyl, and found another large used record stash at a nearby antique mall that yielded some goodies, too. Skobie said he had a big collection, and I bet he does...those producer cats stockpile up all the good crate-dug shit. He just dropped his third album, Drive, and checking out his website led me to this very dope electro-flavored track right here, Burn:
- Dyn-O-Mite
