By the time “Just Be Good To Me” hit the R&B charts in 1983, it looked like all The S.O.S. Band was going to show for their years of toiling in the Atlanta music scene was the 1980 disco smash “Take Your Time (Do it Right)”. Two albums worth of follow-ups had come and gone while making little noise.
S.O.S. then became one of the first artists to benefit from the magic touch of Time members Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis. The budding producers laced S.O.S. with a nasty midtempo groove, complete with a blazing guitar solo on the unedited (9 minute!!) version. Add in slightly eyebrow-raising lyrics (the song’s protagonist shrugs her man’s infidelity off, singing “I don’t care about the other girls…just be good to me”), and you have the makings of a classic. This was the beginning of a very fruitful 3-year relationship between Jam, Lewis & the band, which resulted in a handful more R&B classics, such as “Tell Me if You Still Care”, “Just the Way You Like It”, “No One’s Gonna Love You” and “The Finest”. For a time, S.O.S. was a mainstay on the R&B charts, even if none of these songs made it to the Top 40 pop back in the days when you had to “cross over”. Although Jam & Lewis’s production career has become legendary in the past quarter century, this, their first major hit, remains one of their all-time best songs.
I love when bands appeared on these televised variety shows back in the day like there was a full band playing the song when they knew damn well that the song was basically made by a handful of synthesizers. I think the only actual live instrument on this song was the guitar. Something also tells me someone synced up the CD track with the performance instead of this being the actual performance-since it skips. Oh, well.
