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It’s a special #jhericurljune installment of the ol’ Book Club as we dig into 2019’s On Time: A Princely Life in Funk by Morris Day with David Ritz–so, slightly less headbanging than normal, but don’t worry, there’s plenty of the important stuff (i.e., cocaine). We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with Part 2, at which point we’ll also announce our official HBC selection for July. Remember, don’t let us Meat Loaf!
(more…)Earlier this week, we mentioned that Bonnie Pointer had departed the Pointer Sisters for a solo career in the late ’70s. Her third album, 1984’s If the Price Is Right, still has remnants of the disco sound of her former musical output, but soaked with Jheri Curl juice. Even the album cover features a glossy image of Bonnie in a Vanity 6-esque teddy.
Sadly, Bonnie Pointer passed away last year, on June 8, 2020; but because we postponed Jheri Curl June that year, we are honoring her with a posthumous induction into a year late. Rest in peace, Bonnie Pointer!
Remember to check out the Spotify and YouTube playlists below. We’ll be back tomorrow with another day of Jheri Curl June Ladies’ Week!
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Zach and Callie reconvene in (by our standards) record time for another Dystopian Book Club Official Selection: Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You? by Parliament–Funkadelic maestro George Clinton. Enjoy as we discuss our love of P-Funk and the book’s disappointing lack of hot deets on the Super Mario Bros. movie.
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After almost three years of ripping on trashy rock biographies with Dystopian Book Club, it was only a matter of time for us to get around to the trashiest of them all: Neil Strauss’ and Mötley Crüe’s masterpiece of filth-wallowing, The Dirt. The two-hour conversation we had doesn’t even begin to cover everything in the book, but we think it will give you a good idea of what to expect from the movie adaptation that just premiered on Netflix. Thanks to our YouTube subscribers Bruce Gaskins and Tony Bernardo for recommending we cover this book–I think it’s obvious that it gave us a lot of joy.
(more…)It’s a poetic fluke of the cosmos that so many Jheri Curl Music innovators’ birthdays fall in June, the genre’s holiest month. So far, we’ve highlighted Prince (June 7), Jimmy Jam (June 6), L.A. Reid (also June 7), and Jesse Johnson (June 1)–as well as Michael Jackson, who passed away on June 25, 2009. Now, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, it’s finally time to induct André Cymone into the JCM Hall of Fame.
As Prince’s earliest musical collaborator, André Cymone played an integral, but regrettably overshadowed part in the creation of the Jheri Curl Music strain more popularly known as the Minneapolis Sound. On our Prince associates podcast from a couple of years ago, I described Cymone as the twin Prince (figuratively, of course) consumed in utero. So many of the more famous artist’s stylistic choices in the first three years of his career–from his embrace of New Wave sounds and fashions to the whole song “Do Me, Baby”–can be more accurately interpreted as a collaborative effort between himself and his one-time surrogate brother. By the time André, understandably fed up with the lack of credit for his work, went solo in early 1981, the persona known as “Prince” had been more or less fully formed; this inevitably did his longtime partner a disservice by making his solo career look like an imitation.
But today we celebrate André Cymone not as an imitator, but as the innovator he was. While he may not have scaled the critical or commercial heights of his musical other half, his efforts–both behind the scenes and in the spotlight–left an indelible mark on Jheri Curl Music, and on the last 30 years of pop and R&B in general.
(more…)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 actually biting from someone much closer to home: his first bass player and one-time surrogate brother, André Cymone.
The rocky relationship between Prince and Cymone is another thing we’ve discussed in Jheri Curl Junes past, and it should be noted that Prince had a history of “borrowing” from his friend and collaborator: “Do Me, Baby,” among other early songs, was by all accounts an André Cymone joint. So it wasn’t exactly a shock to hear that Prince got the idea for a girl group after catching wind of Cymone’s own side project, creatively named “the Girls.” At some point, according to the excellent (and sadly out of print) biography Dance Music Sex Romance, André and Prince even combined their ideas for the group, then known as “the Hookers”; André, however, walked away after realizing that Prince wanted him to do the work without taking any of the credit. And the rest was history: the Hookers became Vanity 6, who became Apollonia 6, and Cymone’s “Girls” released their debut album in 1984, to commercial and critical indifference.
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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 told in not one, but two posthumous memoirs–2007’s Confessions of Rick James: Memoirs of a Superfreak and 2014’s Glow–which makes him a perfect candidate for the Dystopian Book Club. A “habitual line-stepper” in both life and art, James was vital in bridging the gap between 1970s P-Funk and 1980s Jheri Curl; his later decline into drug addiction and imprisonment was unfortunate, but could only somewhat dampen his boundless talent and charisma. So join us on this most sacred of occasions as we celebrate Mr. Cold Blooded himself: a man whose artistic potential was the only thing bigger than his larger-than-life personality and appetites. Gimme some ganja!
(more…)For the past three years, we’ve commenced our Jheri Curl June festivities with profiles of major figures in the style we call Jheri Curl Music, timed to line up with their birthdays in the beginning of June. In 2014, it was Prince (born June 7); in 2015, it was Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (the former born June 6); last year, it was L.A. Reid (June 7 again). But until now, we’ve never managed to make time for another architect whose birthday falls as close to the beginning of June as possible: June 1, 1960. I’m talking, of course, about Jesse Johnson.
Jesse, in our defense, hasn’t exactly been a stranger to Jheri Curl June. His “Be Your Man” was our second-ever JCJ post back in 2014, and we’ve also considered his work both as a member of the Time and as the producer of late-’80s Minneapolis funk-rockers dáKRASH. But we’ve never taken a deep dive into his music–and that’s a damn shame, because whatever Johnson might have lacked in the innovation of his former associates Prince, Jam, and Lewis, he more than made up for with some of the strongest pure Jheri Curl Music of the mid-to-late 1980s. In other words, there’s no better person with whom to launch our fourth annual celebration of all things wet and silky in ’80s R&B music. So let’s get to it!
The Mary Jane Girls were essentially Rick James’ answer to Vanity 6: the girl group Prince constructed as the prostitute foil to The Time‘s pimp image. In this case, though, Rick James might have actually one-upped his longtime rival; for their 1983 American Bandstand performance of “All Night Long,” the girls look like they were literally picked up off the corner on the way to the studio.
James originally conceived of the Mary Jane Girls project as a solo act for his backup singer, JoJo McDuffie. The other members of the group couldn’t sing: hence why this clip is a lip-synced performance of the studio recording. Check out that choreography, though!
The Spotify playlist continues to grow after the jump: