(He was also planning on going to school for criminal law.) Finch and Casey were considering a few different singers, including Gwen, to record “Rock Your Baby.” But George ended up recording it, mostly because he was literally the first person to walk into the studio. Gwen eventually made a couple of minor hits, and George, whose career wasn’t really going anyway, essentially became her manager. He’s spent a few years in the Navy and formed a singing group called the Jivin’ Jets, which eventually came to include his wife Gwen. George McCrae had grown up in nearby West Palm Beach. But “Rock Your Baby” needed someone who could sing notes higher than what Casey could reach. The people at TK loved the song’s demo and didn’t want Finch and Casey to change anything. Together, Finch and Casey pieced together the “Rock Your Baby” groove, and then they paid Sunshine Band member Jerome Smith $15 to play guitar on it. He also put a microphone inside his kickdrum, which helped beef up the song’s drum sound. Finch played drums to the drum-machine beat, which he says helped him become a better drummer. In the studio, Finch and Casey built on that beat. Two of the first hits ever to feature drum machines actually used the very same drum machine. Finch’s beat would become the backbone of “Rock Your Baby,” and it’s baffling to consider that the same instrument ended up on two leftfield hit singles. One day, Richard Finch was messing around with it, and he programmed in a weird and rickety synth-samba beat - a faster version of the “Why Can’t We Live Together” beat, really. When Thomas finished putting that song together, he left his organ in the TK studios. Thomas used a Lowry organ, an instrument that included a primitive drum machine, to put together the incredibly strange “Why Can’t We Live Together” beat. Meanwhile, Drake’s “ Hotline Bling,” which was built from a sample of “Why Can’t We Live Together,” peaked at #2 in 2015. TK had only become a label in 1972, and it had a hit right away with Timmy Thomas’ oblique and experimental soul lament “ Why Can’t We Live Together.” (“Why Can’t We Live Together” peaked at #3 in 1973. (Casey was KC.) At this point, KC & The Sunshine Band had released a couple of singles, and the members of the group were working as de facto studio musicians for TK Records, the Florida indie that had would eventually become huge in the disco era. “Rock Your Baby” was the baby of two young Florida musicians, Henry Wayne Casey and Richard Finch, both of whom were members of KC & The Sunshine Band, a group that will end up in this column many times. “Rock Your Baby” isn’t the first disco #1, but it might be the first intentional disco #1 - the first disco hit that knows it’s a disco hit. (They paid special attention to “Rock The Boat.”) They knew that it was selling, and they knew that there was an audience that wasn’t being served. The people who made “Rock Your Baby” were watching the success of this pulsating, club-ready new form of R&B. It wasn’t aiming itself at the clubs, but club DJs were the ones who found it and pushed it toward mainstream popularity. “Rock The Boat” was a song that DJs discovered. And when those two songs hit #1, it was immediately apparent to anyone paying attention that disco music was now a commercial force, something that had to be taken seriously.īut it would be a mistake to conflate “Rock The Boat” with “Rock Your Baby” too much. Both of them had the word “rock” in the title, and neither of them sounded remotely like rock. Here, we had two silky, bass-thumping soul-pop songs that started out in clubs and spread to the rest of the world. It’s tough to overstate the impact of the Hues Corporation’s “Rock The Boat” and George McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby” landing at #1 back-to-back. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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