web analytics

Pop Rock Nation

Category: People

all-about-musicians-and-the-people-who-help-them-make-music

  • Infatueighties: The Spawn of Wham: Pepsi and Shirlie and Deon Estus

    George Michael is known as many things nowadays. World-class singer and songwriter. King of Stubble (and he’s worked that look for two decades plus now), Public Restroom Inhabitant. But did you know that when George first stepped on the scene with his Wham! partner Andrew Ridgeley, he was…

    …a rapper?

    I’m sure if anyone were to show this 1983 performance to George these days, he would look for the nearest hole to crawl under. However, I (one of maybe 10 people in the U.S. who knew who Wham! was before “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”) find this performance to be quite energetic and charming. I still can’t figure out what the hell Andrew Ridgeley did, though.

    Anyway, the song, “Young Guns (Go For It)” appeared on Wham!’s debut album “Fantastic” (actually, for their first album, they were named Wham! U.K. here in The States). A year later, they were global superstars, and a year or so after that, George Michael had officially gone solo. But what of the two fetching young ladies who danced with George & Andrew in that television performance (and whom you might also remember from the “Go-Go” video)? Well…

    Their names were Pepsi and Shirlie, and they had a minor U.S. hit in the fall of ’87 with “Heartache”, a pulsing bit of mid-tempo pop that was helmed (as was just about everything else in the late 80s in Britain) by the Stock/Aitken/Waterman team. The production team kept busy with artists like Kylie Minogue, Donna Summer, Rick Astley and Bananarama…one member of whom went on to marry…you guessed it, Andrew Ridgeley. See how everything folds into itself? You gotta love it. Anyway, “Heartache” wasn’t a huge single, but I remember it getting enough airplay in New York that I still remember the chorus after not hearing the song for two decades, and it’s a much better song than you’d expect a duo of background singers to come up with.

    Around the same time “Heartache” came out, George Michael went nuclear with the “Faith” album and it’s attendant singles. No matter what radio station you turned on, whether it was the Lite station, the Top 40 station or the R&B station, George was impossible to avoid, and with good reason. “Faith” still stands as one of the 80s’ most irresistible pop albums.

    By the spring of ’89, George could sneeze on a record and it would become a hit. This is probably the reason Deon Estus’s “Heaven Help Me” cruised into the pop & R&B Top 5 around that time. Estus (who looked like a cross between Soul II Soul’s Jazzie B, a member of Milli Vanilli and the black dude from Color Me Badd) had previously been best-known (if at all) as George & Wham!’s bassist, with some prominent facetime in the “I’m Your Man” and “Monkey” videos.

    “Heaven Help Me” doesn’t have a particularly ingenious bassline, but what it does have is George Michael. LOTS of George Michael. George wrote and produced the song, sang background vocals and handles the chorus damn near on his own. In addition, Deon’s voice is enough of a dead ringer for George’s that you’d be forgiven if you’ve thought for all these years that this is a George Michael record. Estus’ album, called “Spell”, was otherwise George-free and that’s probably the reason it bombed. However, this song is damn good-as good as most of the material on “Faith”. And the video is one of those “so bad it’s good” deals.

    While Andrew sits at home and counts checks (and I won’t scare you by putting the video for “Shake” on here), Shirlie from Pepsi & Shirlie is now married to one of Spandau Ballet’s Kemp brothers (man, are all British 80s pop stars married to each other?), Pepsi has settled into civilian , and Deon Estus continues to tour as a support bassist. George Michael seems perfectly content to rake in money re-releasing greatest hits compilations and getting arrested every so often, but at least he’s contributed to some of the Eighties’ most indelible musical moments.

  • The Random Endorsement Files: Cindy Blackman- Europeans are Crazy!

    From the Random Endorsement Files: the new pitchwoman for Volkswagen appears to be none other than Lenny Kravitz… ‘s drummer. That would be Cindy Blackman, whose appearances in Kravitz’s videos have been, for this writer, all that truly matters about Kravitz’s recording career. Witness her magnificence in the 1993 video for “Are You Gonna Go My Way”!

    There she is amidst all the dread-flailing and fancy lights – she’s the only one in the whole video not throwing her hair around. In fact, her whole body seems completely consumed in the generation of the song’s relentless beat. That singularity of purpose coupled with giant black sunglasses and auburn chrysanthemum afro make her the most magnetic sight in a video full of people trying really, really, really hard to hold our attention. There’s really no one else in the video I want to look at, and I can’t think of anyone else who projects such a mystifyingly wonderful stage presence from behind a drum kit without opening his or her mouth.

    Which, apart from the shear randomness of the casting, is what makes her appearance in this new Volkswagen ad such a surprise: Cindy Blackman speaks! Playing the leader of the house band (Kravitz’s band, minus the Lenny) for a talk show hosted by a VW bug with a comically thick accent and an effusively flattering manner, she delivers the familiar tagline – “Europeans are crazy” – with a withering cool. Even better though is the “whooo” she launches before she and the rest of the band play the ad out. The vocal equivalent of the ascending flare of a firecracker just before it explodes into its colors, that “whooo” is what makes the commercial for me – a nanosecond of good old-fashioned, retro-soul, dance-to-the-music joy, incorruptible even within the context of something so crass as a car ad (albeit a crazy European one).

    Of course, more than making want to check out the new VW Tiguan, the ad made me want to look further in Cindy Blackman’s work, and as might have been predicted, the Lenny Kravitz connection is not just the tip of the proverbial iceberg (she’s played on Joss Stone’s records too), it’s also largely an anomaly in a career that’s found the 48-year-old Brooklynite jamming with a virtual who’s who of contemporary jazz players – Bill Laswell, Cassandra Wilson, George Benson, Hugh Masekela, and her most frequent collaborator bassist Ron Carter, among many others – and, with her gift for dynamic Tony Williams style polyrhythms, holding her own quite well in a still-very-much male-dominated genre on a still-very-much mail-dominated instrument.

    Since 1987, she’s released 10 albums as a band leader, and though her most recent album – 2004’s monumental double-disc Music for a New Millennium – is woefully out of print (at the time of this writing, Amazon has a single third party listing for the album, selling for $170), you can hear a few tracks from the album, recorded with saxophonist JD Allen, keyboardist Carlton Holmes, and bassist George Mitchell on Blackman’s website. I’m particularly digging “Letter to Theo”. Whooo!

    -P.Lorentz

  • Introducing the Falsettometer: Part 1: Philip Bailey


    Welcome to The Falsettometer, where we will look at Great Moments in Falsetto History. Please keep all glass objects out of reach when reading this column or playing one of the videos embedded in a falsettometer column.

    Of course, we have to begin with one of the All Time Falsetto Greats. Someone whose voice can hit notes so high, 5 year old boys look at one another in awe and ask “How did he do that?”

    At any rate, here are the three things that come to mind whenever I think of Earth, Wind & Fire:

    1) No one must have been getting paid in that band, because there were about 64 members. Anyone remember seeing them on Merv Griffin or Mike Douglas back in the day? There were literal *tiers* of members.

    2) Maurice White has one of pop music’s all-time biggest foreheads. Put him and Peabo Bryson together and you basically get a 10-foot tall skull.

    3) Philip Bailey’s voice was so high, he didn’t even sound like a girl. He sounded *unnatural*. Whether the song was “Can’t Hide Love” (“bet-TAH!!”), “September” (“bow-de-ow-de-ow-de-ah!!” or his own “Easy Lover” (if you don’t love “Easy Lover”, something is wrong with you), there was no doubt who was singing. I would say the man’s testicles up and ran away at some point during the Seventies, but Mr. Bailey has *several* kids. God bless him.

    Anyway, EW&F were one of the best at synthesizing pop and funk back in the day (although I’ll admit that they were a bit sanitized for my tastes-even Lionel Richie and The Commodores were grimier than EW&F), but their calling card was ballads. The combo of Maurice White’s ethereal growl and Philip’s falsetto was a hell of a two-pronged attack. And when it comes to slow jams, there are very few better than “Reasons”, which is all Philip. Enjoy, and stay tuned for future editions of The Falsettometer!!