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It’s #jhericurljune in July! After a brief delay due to COVID- and car theft-related trauma, we’re finally back with Part 2 of our deep dive on Morris Day‘s 2019 memoir On Time: A Princely Life in Funk! Join us as we celebrate one of the greatest cultural achievements of the late 20th century (“Fishnet”), and we’ll see you again in two weeks for the first half of Pamela Des Barres‘ I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie!
(more…)Lillo Thomas is something of a renaissance man. Besides being a former world-class sprinter (he qualified for the 1984 Olympics, but was prevented from participating due to a car accident), he is also an actor, painter, and of course, a singer. Thomas provided vocals for several Jheri Curl June veterans including Evelyn “Champagne” King and Kashif. He also worked with Paul Laurence, a Jheri Curl June inductee from earlier this month. In fact, Thomas’ “Sexy Girl”–not to be confused with the 1984 jam by the late Glenn Frey–was cowritten by Laurence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go5JPaa_1mc
“Sexy Girl” begins as your standard late-era Jheri Curl song with a thumping, New Jack Swing-esque beat; but the chorus, where Thomas’ vocals reach a soaring falsetto, is where the song really takes off. Unfortunately, “Sexy Girl” is not available on Spotify, and there is no official video, but I did find this vertically-oriented video of a shirtless guy Harlem Shaking to it that will just have to suffice. I think it does:
With every passing week, 2016 feels more and more like a never-ending, real-life Grammy Awards tribute montage. We couldn’t even go the six days between recording and posting the podcast without losing another pop music icon: this time, Marshall Jones of the Ohio Players, word of whose death regrettably reached us only after we had finished editing. Clearly, this is a trying time to be a music fan. And, as I’ve found myself saying more than a few times in the past several months, the sheer volume of notable musicians’ deaths starts to feel overwhelming to a small site like ours. I’m not a full-time obituary writer, so even many worthy artists who passed away have inevitably gone unmemorialized.
That’s why, in the spirit of the real Memorial Day holiday, we’re taking the time to commemorate those the music world has lost since last May. Unfortunately, this will almost certainly be a recurring feature: the cruel realities of the human lifespan, combined with the generational ebb and flow of American popular music, means that things are only going to get worse in the coming years. And sadly, even this tribute isn’t truly exhaustive–even aside from the aforementioned omission of Marshall Jones, we’re only really talking about musicians of whom we have some miniscule level of knowledge, so plenty of important people are still going unmourned (at least by us). But we did our best, and we at least tried to do everyone justice. Here’s hoping we get a break, at least for a couple more weeks.
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