EASTON, Pa. — When funk and R&B musician Harry Wayne “KC” Casey released his first hit in early 1975, he said he had no idea he was introducing most of American to disco music.
The swirling, intoxicating song, “Get Down Tonight,” led people to take to the dance floor months before the Bee Gees’ “Jive Talkin’,” and nearly three years before the movie “Saturday Night Fever.”
KC and the Sunshine Band will bring that music to Easton’s State Theatre at perform at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 28. Tickets, at $90-$110, remain available, though some sections are limited.
Easton State Theatre website
Even after KC and the Sunshine Band had a half-dozen Top 10 hits and sold 4 million singles in less than four years, KC said, he just thought he was just making the R&B-pop he loved.
More than 55 years later, KC and the Sunshine Band’s music not only has continued to be popular, but it’s winning new fans,
And he’s again releasing new music that has given him five songs in the Top 40 on Billboard’s Dance chart in the past decade.
KC and the Sunshine Band will bring that music to Easton’s State Theatre at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 28. Tickets, at $90-$110, remain available, though some sections are limited.
“It’s great to know that the music has stood the test of time, and more than I ever expected, every dreamed, ever thought of, in my life,” KC said in a recent telephone interview.
“I have a great time doing it. Great.”
‘Mystical and Magical’
Nine months before “Get Down Tonight,” KC had written and produced the No. 1 George McCrea hit “Rock Your Baby” for the independent label TK Records, for which he worked.
He already had released an album, “Do It Good,” in 1974 that had a Top 25 R&B hit, “Queen of Clubs,” that became a Top 10 hit in Europe.
Because of that, KC said, he did a tour of 48 European cities in 24 days — some theaters, but mostly clubs — most of which were “spinning records and no live bands except for us … because we had a hit record.”
“Disco didn’t even exist, right? You know, people were dancing to songs because of ‘American Bandstand’ and all that, and people have been dancing to music forever and ever. But I did know that there was a scene happening.”
KC, regarding his band’s first tour of Europe
“Disco didn’t even exist, right?” he said in a call from his Miami home. “You know, people were dancing to songs because of ‘American Bandstand’ and all that, and people have been dancing to music forever and ever.
“But I did know that there was a scene happening,” he said, and it was at that point he said he realized “something really bigger was going to happen.”
“You know, everywhere it was already kind of, I guess, happening in Europe,” he said. “And … I just knew it was just a matter of time before it came to the States.”
KC said he was working on his next album at TK Records studios, when 16-track recording had just been introduced, letting artists broaden and layer sounds.
“So we went there to do the horns and the background of vocals” on a song called “What You Want is What You’ll Get” that eventually was reworked into “Get Down Tonight.’
“We slowed the track down and then the guitarist played that part you hear — that is actually guitar; people think it’s a keyboard,” he said. “And, you know, came out great.
“I remember the first time that I played it back, I must have listened to it 98 times because I knew it was, like, different in something just mystical and magical.”
‘Love songs in a lot of ways’
Despite the emergence of a scene, and a hit record, KC said he still “was just making music that I love to make.”
He said because it was a time of America emerging from the Vietnam War and the first gas shortage, he thought music of the time “was like, really, really dark.”
“And being that I always liked uptempo music, I wanted to do these records that were all uptempo,” he said. “Because I go buy an album and … my favorite song would be uptime and the rest of put you to sleep, you know?
“So I wanted to create these albums … they were just midtempo to uptempo, and with a little bit more energy to them. So that was the whole idea behind the music.”
“I think I was just writing these songs that were love songs in a lot of ways that a lot of people can relate to.”
KC of KC and the Sunshine Band
At that time, KC had no real band. He had hired studio musicians to play on the records, and as they went out to perform, they were called KC and the Sunshine Junkanoo Band.
“And I dropped the Junkanoo Band after the first record, and called it KC and the Sunshine Band,” he said.
“Get Down Tonight” went platinum and pushed the “KC and the Sunshine band” album on which it appeared to No. 4 on Billboard’s overall Albums chart and No. 1 on the R&B chart.
That opened the door to the string of No. 1 gold hits that followed: “That’s the Way (I Like It),” “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty” and “I’m Your Boogie Man,” and the platinum “Boogie Shoes.”
But KC said there was no intention to be the disco standard-bearers.
“I was just doing what I do, making music that I felt good about,” he said. “And I think my songs were about not only good times, but they were kind of little love songs, in a way, a lot of them.”
For example, he said “I’m Your Boogie Man,” originally was called, “I’ll Be a Son of a Gun” and was inspired by a friend who was a DJ at radio station WHIY-FM 100 in Miami.
“The DJs were very familiar with a lot of the people,” KC said. “And they kind of were, you know, a lot of your life. I mean, you talk to them, sometimes more than you talk to your parents and stuff, and they played music that you know you related to.
“So ‘Boogie Man’ was really written about kind of coming from the fact that, like the DJ’s there, 24 hours a day, late afternoon or midnight.
“So, yeah, I think I was just writing these songs that were love songs in a lot of ways that a lot of people can relate to.”
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State Theater
A sonic shift
Even as disco continued to ride a wave of success, KC and the Sunshine Band by 1979 already was exploring different genres.
The group had the first Billboard Hot 100 chart No. 1 hit of the 1980s with the sentimental ballad “Please Don’t Go,” then followed that with a cover of the 1960s hit “Yes I’m Ready” in a duet with singer-songwriter Teri Desario that hit No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart.
“It was definitely deliberate,” KC said of the change. “I just wanted to do something, you know, different. I did.
“And the clubs grew and grew and got bigger and bigger and more of them. And here they are saying disco sucks. It’s like, do you really know what you’re saying? You’re making no sense at all, because evidently, it doesn’t suck, because you guys are eating it up even a bigger way.”
KC of KC and the Sunshine Band
“I didn’t feel like — although I was — the forerunner to what was becoming disco, or whatever, what they were calling disco. I just wanted to not follow my own trend and do something different outside of my box.”
By then, disco’s popularity had started to wane, represented by a 1979 event by a Chicago disc jockey in which he blew up disco records at a White Sox baseball game.
“I don’t know if I felt it at all, because I was already moving on,” KC said, referring to his previous two hits.
Still, he said, he found it interesting that, while there was a backlash against disco, some of the “new wave” music that followed had a lot in common.
“It was still disco,” he said. “I mean, you couldn’t be more disco than Madonna and all that stuff that came out in the beginning of the ‘80s? I mean, it was just more electronic.
“And the clubs grew and grew and got bigger and bigger and more of them. And here they are saying disco sucks.
“It’s like, do you really know what you’re saying? You’re making no sense at all, because evidently, it doesn’t suck, because you guys are eating it up even a bigger way.”
KC said the Chicago DJ “even came to Miami at one point and apologized to me in the middle of our Marlins baseball game one evening.”
Final hit, and retirement
As disco disappeared, KC & The Sunshine Band went for more than three years without a hit, and in 1981, a serious car crash left KC paralyzed for months.
But in 1983, the group rebounded with a surprise hit, “Baby Give It Up,” that incorporated that new wave sound KC had mentioned for perhaps the group’s most accessible sound.
KC said he wrote it after his car accident.
“It was a huge hit,” KC said. “It was number one everywhere for six weeks or more on every radio station, across no matter where the U.S., Europe, Japan — I mean, everywhere.”
Yet it reached only No. 18 on Billboard’s singles chart because many stations had played it before it was released in the United States, KC said.
Still, Epic Records, to which KC & the Sunshine Band had switched from TK Records, didn’t want to release the album in the United States, despite it being “huge in Europe,” he said.
So he left the label.
“They gave me $100,000 and I put the record out myself,” he said. “And then I retired after that” in 1984.
The retirement lasted seven years before renewed popularity in disco prompted him to revive the band in 1991.
The group has toured since, and has even released five more albums, though none has charted.
Finding new chart life
Then, in 2015, KC and the Sunshine band began releasing singles that found a home on the Dance chart — the first, “I Love You More,” peaked at No. 30.
“I started doing these, coming back out of retirement,” KC said. “Creatively, 2012 was like I woke out of, like, some creative coma.”
“I don’t think me or Donna Summer were ever happy with the word ‘disco.’”
KC of KC and the Sunshine Band
He said his then-manager, the late Billy Samuth, introduced him to London DJ Lee Dagger, who sent him a song that he “sat on” for 10 months.
“I woke up one day, and I put the track on, and all of a sudden, the words, the melody, just came to me,” he said.
“And I was like, ‘Holy cow! You know, this is crazy.’ And after that, I’ve just been non-stop. So I released that record, and that was kind of the beginning of it all.”
In 2016, “I’m Feeling You” (featuring Bimbo Jones) got up to No. 11. In all, five have charted, with the most recent being “Give Me Some More (Aye Yai Yai)” (with Tony Moran featuring Nile Rodgers).
He said he recorded perhaps 56 songs and has “been releasing some of the songs just in the dance market and nowhere else.”
He said another, called “I Feel You,” will be released soon.
KC said the new music is really no different than his disco hits.
“Not at all,” he said. “I mean, disco is not dead or whatever you want to dance to. Now they could just call it dance music.
“I don’t think me or Donna Summer were ever happy with the word ‘disco.’”
A legacy
With those new hits — and with a new generation discovering disco music — has come a recognition of KC and the Sunshine Band’s cultural impact.
“That’s kind of been an after-the-fact sort of thing, because my music was so … critics just destroyed us, and said there was nothing to it,” KC said. “And the longevity has proved them all wrong, actually.
“I even hear my songs in that Bruno Mars record and stuff. I mean, I hear my music in a lot of stuff.”
KC of KC and the Sunshine Band
“I’d say I have the last laugh, but it’s kind of good to know that I made this music to make people feel good, and all these sort of things.
“And it’s great to know after 55 years or whatever it’s been on some of them, that they still generate the same energy and the same message, and bring the same happiness to people, that they did 50-some odd years ago.
“And that there’s some depth to the music and not just throw away, the way the critics were making it out to be in retrospect.”
KC said he has read that he influenced Abba to write the hit song “Dancing Queen,” John Lennon to write “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” and Dr. Hook to write “‘When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman.”
“And many, many, many songs I hear,” he said. “I even hear my songs in that Bruno Mars record and stuff. I mean, I hear my music in a lot of stuff.
“Harry Styles has a new album out, and the second cut on the album is ‘American Girls’ or something, and it’s a twist on ‘Rock Your Baby’ that I wrote. So it’s like I’m influencing Harry Styles. Now, you know, it’s crazy.”
And a new audience
KC said he recently performed at The Ryman Theater in Nashville — the original Grand Old Opry.
“And afterward, this friend of mine’s wife works in one of the bars there, Tootsies,” he said. “And I went over there and she says, ‘Come on up.’
“So I got up on stage with her, and then after she got off work, a rock band came on, and they’re just playing all rock. They wanted me to get up there.
“It’s good to see two, three, four generations in the audience sometimes, and everybody having a good time. And I have people coming to say, ‘Wow, you were my mom and dad’s favorite band, and we grew up listening to you,’ and that sort of thing.”
KC of KC and the Sunshine Band
“Now everybody that audience was 21, 22, 23, and they all knew ‘Shake Your Booty.’ They all knew ‘Get Down Tonight.’ And they all knew ‘Boogie Man.’
“It was just like, I mean, the new generation knows it. They may not know KC and the Sunshine Band, but they all know the songs. And it’s pretty awesome. It’s pretty amazing.”
“Some shows are 21 and older, but there’s all ages at my shows — from, like, babies to grandmas.”
“And like I used to always say, we’ve always had a very diverse audience, even in the beginning of my career. So it’s good to see that.
“It’s good to see two, three, four generations in the audience sometimes, and everybody having a good time.
“And I have people coming to say, ‘Wow, you were my mom and dad’s favorite band, and we grew up listening to you,’ and that sort of thing.”