Category: jheri curl june

  • Jheri Curl June: Vesta Williams’ “Once Bitten Twice Shy”

    Similar to Monday’s Jheri Curl June inductee, Pennye Ford, Vesta Williams also began her career as a backup and session singer for various artists, including Chaka Khan. Her 1986 solo debut, Vesta, included her first Top 10 R&B hit: “Once Bitten Twice Shy”–which, regrettably, is not an R&B version of the Ian Hunter song, later covered…

  • Jheri Curl June: The Girls’ “Girl Talk”

    We’ve talked a fair amount on this blog about the, ahem, interesting similarities between Rick James’ Mary Jane Girls and Prince’s Vanity 6: a concept James always maintained he came up with first, only for the Paisley Bandit to swoop in and summarily bite it. But if other stories are to be believed, Prince was…

  • Jheri Curl June: Pennye Ford’s “Change Your Wicked Ways”

    Penny Ford (a.k.a. Pennye Ford, for reasons unknown) began her musical career as a backup singer for Zapp in 1979 and went on to become a session singer at Motown in Los Angeles before signing to Total Experience Records, home of Gap Band and Yarbrough & Peoples. So, needless to say, her Jheri Curl credentials were…

  • Dystopian Book Club Podcast, Jheri Curl June Edition: The Memoirs of Rick James

    It didn’t take a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for this year’s Jheri Curl June podcast. Rick James may be the most important architect of the genre we call Jheri Curl Music who we hadn’t already commemorated with a long-term feature. He also has a hell of a story: one he…

  • Jheri Curl June: Kool & The Gang’s “Fresh”

    Kool & The Gang is yet another ’70s funk band that sustained themselves through the changing landscape of ’80s R&B with their ability to adapt to the times. I mean, just listen to anything off 1973’s Wild and Peaceful, and then consider that “Ladies’ Night” (which, by the way, will always be THE fucking jam) came…

  • Jheri Curl June: Eddie Murphy’s “Party All the Time”

    This Friday, we’ll be posting a special Jheri Curl June edition of our podcast series-within-a-series, Dystopian Book Club, on the memoirs of Mr. Rick James. It’s a fun conversation–after a year and a half, we’re finally hitting our stride as podcasters!–and I’m excited to unleash it upon an unsuspecting (/indifferent) Internet. But I also wanted to…

  • Jheri Curl June: Junie Morrison’s “Show Me Yours”

    Back in May when we did our Memorial Day podcast, I was sorely unaware of Junie Morrison’s music. Sure, I had heard the Ohio Players’ albums from the early ’70s, of which Junie played a seminal part; I had heard Funkadelic’s late ’70s music, particularly “(Not Just) Knee Deep” (I mean obviously, I’ve watched Good…

  • Jheri Curl June: Stevie Wonder’s “Love Light in Flight”

    It’s a well-known fact that most white music critics don’t “get” ’80s Stevie Wonder. And for a long time, I was no exception: I took as gospel the truism that it was all downhill for Stevie after Hotter Than July, and I levied what I considered to be the appropriate amount of scorn on his material from…

  • Jheri Curl June: Kashif’s “Ooh Love”

    Last month, we recorded our annual Memorial Day podcast, a budding tradition in which we commemorate (and lightly mock) many of the important musical artists we’ve lost since the previous May. And this time, one of those artists was especially bittersweet: former B.T. Express keyboardist, producer, singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and dope-moustache-haver Kashif. As I said on…

  • Jheri Curl June: Kleeer’s “Tonight”

    Kleeer had a rocky road to Jheri Curldom. Originally conceived in  1972 as the Jam Band, the backing band for the Choice Four, they later became their own entity, changed their name to Pipeline, and recorded the hard rock infused “Gypsy Rider.” After the single tanked, Pipeline transformed into the Universal Robot Group, under which they recorded and toured for…