Mark Anthony Neal

Critical Noir

"Just Be Good to Me": R&B's Forgotton Era (Part 2)

Posted 07/16/2008 at 11:59 AM | Comment?

The real visionaries of R&B in the late 1970s were two recording industry veterans, who created recording labels out of the ashes of failed projects. Dick Griffey's SOLAR label was born after Griffey parted ways with Soul Train producer Don Cornelius ending their joint venture Soul Train Records. Clarence Avant founded Sussex records in the early 1970s, with Bill Withers as his most prominent artists. After Sussex folded for financial reasons in 1976 (Withers ended up at CBS), Avant returned in 1977 with Tabu Records. What the Griffey and Avant shared was an ability to discover and development new talent.

Among the groups eventually signed to SOLAR were Midnight Starr (and their producing members, the Calloway Brothers), Lakeside ("Fantastic Voyage"), The Whispers ("And the Beat Goes On"), Shalamar ("This is For the Lover in You") and The Deele. Within the The Deele, Griffey identified the producing potential of Kenny Edmonds and Antonio Reid. One of Edmonds's early songwriting efforts was with label-mate Midnight Starr's classic "Slow Jam". By the end on the 1980s Edmonds and Reid were of course popularly known as LaFace, one of the dominant R&B production houses in the period.

At their peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s, LaFace shared a friendly competition with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Jam and Lewis initially founded a group in Minneapolis in the early 1980s called Flyte Time. When Morris Day and others joined the group shortly thereafter, they became simply known as The Time and became a part of the musical camp Prince was developing in the Minneapolis area. The group's 1982 debut What Time is It? contains classics like "Gigolos Get Lonely Too" and "777-9311". At the time Jam and Lewis came to the attention of Clarence Avant, who signed the duo to produce the third album of Tabu's best known artists, The SOS Band with Mary Davis on lead vocals. The immediate product of that collaboration was "Just Be Good to Me", which began a string of hits for the SOS Band until Davis departed the group in 1987. When their production responsibilities began to conflict with their work with The Time, Jam and Lewis were famously fired by their management (Prince). Out on their own, they would produce Tabu artists like Alexander O'Neal and Cherrelle and others such as Cheryl Lynn ("Encore"), eventually leading to their groundbreaking work with Janet Jackson with Control (1986).

The seeds to Jam and Lewis's vision can be found in that initial hit they had with the SOS Band. In "Just Be Good to Me", the audacity and brashness of this generation of R&B producers and performers can be easily discerned. The song begins with simple drum programming (and that familiar cowbell), followed by a cacophony of synthesized noise that suggest the coming of something grandiose (you can almost hear God coming over the horizon) before the song settles into a rapid staccatoed dance rhythm neatly packaged inside a rolling baseline. It was a sound, like the post-human noise the Calloway Brothers crafted for Midnight Starr on tracks like "Freak-A-Zoid" and "Wet My Whistle", that simply redefined the sound of R&B with traces of that moment still being heard in the rhythms of the Dirty South. In retrospect, there was no reason for these young producers to think so boldly of themselves, except for the fact that they could--and because R&B mattered so little to the bottom line of the music industry, no one was gonna call these folk on their brash designs.

There no small irony that the major black crossover stars of the era--all unprecedented in many regards--like Prince, Rick James, Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie (whose self-titled solo debut in 1982 was primed to be the Thriller, well before Thriller), Luther Vandross (though it took him longer than the others) and of course Michael Jackson, were all products of the very R&B world that their success helped to obscure. Yet this was the R&B World that kept black radio afloat and primed the success of contemporary artists like Mary J. Blige, Usher Raymond, and Beyonce two decades later.