Get Down Tonight: KC & The Sunshine Band’s 2nd LP at 50
Celebrating a half-century of a disco essential
A disco classic had its roots in a story straight out of an old Hollywood musical.
KC & The Sunshine Band broke through in a big way with its self-titled second album 50 years ago this month, bringing its distillation of the Miami sound to a mass audience.
Harry Wayne Casey came by it honestly, growing up in the area. Upon graduating from Hialeah High School, he started working in a shopping mall record store. But retail didn’t hold his interest. What was all around him in his family growing up was.
“Music is all I ever wanted to do. That’s what I was put here to do. I’ve had no other thoughts in my mind,” Casey told the Miami New Times in 1990.
So, Casey started hanging out and working at TK Records as he honed his musical skills, learning on the job, even though he didn’t technically have a job there at first.
“I don’t know how much of it was luck and how much of it was just determination,” Casey told classicbands.com. “Actually, the first time I asked them to hire me, they said they didn’t have any openings. I kept hanging around and I really didn’t get paid for boxing up records. They would kind of give me free copies of records or something for doing it. I had nothing to do, so I just started pitching in around there to let them know I wanted to be there and I wasn’t some bum off the street, wanting everything done for me. I wanted to prove to them I was worthy of being there, no matter what the job was.”
TK Records was created out of necessity — a partnership between Steve Alaimo and distributor Henry Stone when major labels finally decided to cut out middle men and distribute records themselves.
Alaimo was an understandably frustrated performer who had the record for most singles in the Billboard Hot 100 without reaching the Top 40 — nine. He’d also worked for Stone’s distribution company, Tone, which was at one time the biggest in the Southeastern U.S.
Stone often distributed records for Atlantic and would have done so again, but opted not to do so in late 1972.
AUDIO: Timmy Thomas “Why Can’t We Live Together”
Timmy Thomas’ “Why Can’t We Live Together,” an anguished plea prompted by news reports of casualties in Vietnam, was released in its demo form and became a No. 1 R&B and No. 3 pop hit. Notably, it was the first pop hit to use a drum machine, an early one that played a bossa nova beat.
By this point, Casey was getting paid for his work at TK, which involved anything from session work to answering phones to artist management. He’d also been introduced by Stone and Alaimo to Richard Finch, three years Casey’s junior, a bass player whose day job was studio engineer at the label.
Casey had keys to the place and often was the last to leave, working on music after his work was done. He was particularly influenced by a party he’d attended at TK artist Betty Wright’s house, which had entertainment provided by a Junkanoo band. The sound, with its roots in the Bahamas, was percussive and danceable, full of horns, chants and whistles.
The music especially resonated with Casey as he wanted to create songs that were meant for good times, a contrast to Watergate and collapsing American intervention in Vietnam.
He and Finch formed the band, which went under the name KC & The Sunshine Junkanoo Band initially and briefly, with guitarist James Johnson and drummer Robert Johnson, both TK session players.
There wasn’t a need for a group, per se, until 1974 when one was needed for live shows.
Their debut album, 1974’s Do It Good, which was written or co-written by Casey without Finch, didn’t dent the American charts, despite having three singles — “Blow Your Whistle,” “Queen of Clubs” and “Sound Your Funky Horn” hit the R&B Top 30, the latter two hitting the Top 20 of the U.K. pop charts.
It was enough to whet the appetite at the label for a follow-up album, but the breakout hit for Casey and Finch, now writing together, would come from someone else.
The TK suits were in the upstairs recording studio at 2 a.m. when Casey and Finch burst in with an instrumental demo they’d finished in less than an hour. Stone and Alaimo liked what they heard, feeling that all the song needed was the right singer to make it a hit.
That singer was George McCrae, who happened to be at the studio that night. McCrae had sung backup on Do It Good, most recognizably on “Queen of Clubs.”
With lyrics added, “Rock Your Baby” employed a similar drum machine sound as Timmy Thomas had, though more upbeat and less sparse (notably that scratchy funk guitar). With McCrae’s soaring vocals , the song became a No. 1 hit, eventually selling over 10 million copies.
The track inspired others. John Lennon’s “Whatever Gets You Through The Night” started in that vein, with Lennon saying the following year, ” I’d give my eyetooth to have written that. But I never could. I am too literal to write ‘Rock Your Baby.’ I wish I could.”
In the 2013 documentary The Joy of Abba, Bjorn Ulvaeus said the song led to “Dancing Queen,” saying, “We were kind of inspired by a huge hit in America called ‘Rock Your Baby.’ The cool, soft rhythm of that song. We sort of felt, oh, we would like to do one of those.”
While KC & The Sunshine Band sounded nothing like The Beatles, they were an inspiration in the directness of some of their earliest hits, like the insistence of “She loves you, yeah yeah yeah.”
With a shot of confidence, the band went to the studio to record its next album, not knowing it would soon have No. 1 hits of its own.
Unlike “Rock Your Baby,” the first single took longer to come together. Casey had the basic guts of the song. Finch came up with the idea of the sped-up guitar solo in the intro. It took a while to piece it all together.
The key was changing the title. A long time into the process, the song was called “What You Want Is What You Get.”
“The song was cut with the working title, but it just didn’t fit with the lyrics — there was no flow,” Casey told Musicradar in 2014. “Then as I listened to the verses, they made me think of doing something else with the chorus. Gradually, I came up with what we know now.”
VIDEO: KC & The Sunshine Band “Get Down Tonight”
Now titled “Get Down Tonight,” Casey felt he had a hit on his hands, an “overnight sensation” five years in the making.
“When I finished recording my vocal, I listened to the song… and then I kept on listening. I must’ve listened to the song 100 times. There was just something hypnotic about it,” he said to Musicradar.
Casey had hit upon a formula. These were not story songs. These were repeated hooks (as in “Do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight, get down tonight”), marrying what he heard at that party to soul and pop, designed to induce dancing.
“Get Down Tonight,” started slowly, but once stations in places other than Miami picked up on it, it shot up the charts, reaching the top spot at the end of August.
“That’s The Way (I Like It)” kept its working title, a song about well, it was quite clear it wasn’t about how Casey wanted his Cubano pressed.
The title pretty much was the hook, with Casey adding the repeated “uh huh uh huh” parts in chorus to replace groans, as if that made it less sexual.
AUDIO: KC & The Sunshine Band “That’s The Way (I Like It)”
The song was more than its insistent title, thanks to a tight horn section and soulful female backing vocals.
The album’s third hit single wasn’t a hit upon release. In fact, it initially wasn’t a single at all.
While still funky, “Boogie Shoes” is poppier with just the slightest hits of blues. It boasted yet another earworm chorus, with its repeats of “”my-my-my-my-my boogie shoes.” More on the playful side, it seemed like a no-brainer for the third single.
Motown nods were coming. Billy Ocean would have his first hit the following year with a blatant and catchy pastiche in “Love Really Hurts Without You.”
Casey ran Detroit through a Miami filter,, emphasizing the horns on “I’m So Crazy (‘Bout You),” which was TK’s choice for the third single.
It’s no “Boogie Shoes,” but it’s perfectly likeable.
The film Saturday Night Fever gave “Boogie Shoes” a second life, with the song cracking the Top 40 as a single and providing some royalties from its inclusion on the mega-selling soundtrack.
AUDIO: KC & The Sunshine Band “Boogie Shoes”
“I Get Lifted” was another song that had hit for McCrae the year before, becoming his only other Top 40 pop and Top 10 R&B hit.
“I was just messing around on the piano, like I did at every session, and I came up with that strange piano part,” Casey told Songfacts in 2021. “The lyric, ‘I get lifted up high,’ I wasn’t talking about drugs or anything because I really wasn’t doing any drugs at that time, so it was just about the spirit of feeling lifted, of being lifted up by someone you love. All the songs I wrote were about being in love and the feelings of being in love.”
That’s Casey on piano on McCrae’s version, driving the groove. The version on KC & The Sunshine Band, lets scratchy funk guitar lead the way, the core of the song, less in your face than the big hits, intact, making it a nice change-up.
“Ain’t Nothing Wrong” breezily recalls late ’60s Ramsey Lewis, punctuated by the horns underscoring Casey’s lovey doveiness.
One reason the band’s peak has held up is that underneath that shiny rotating disco ball was a tight band, percussive and funky without descending into slickness.
The writing/producing team behind West Germany’s Silver Convention distilled the simple lyrics idea down even further, turning 12 words into two big hits in the same time period — No. 1 “Fly Robin Fly” (adding “up into the sky”) and “Get Up And Boogie (adding “that’s right”). The result was enough Eurocheese to instantly melt.
Casey, meanwhile, was never aiming to be the Dylan of the dancefloor, but he did write verses. At the end of the day, the result was more pleasure than guilty pleasure.
AUDIO: KC & The Sunshine Band “Let It Go Pts. I and II”
“Let It Go” is broken up into two parts that bracket the album, the second section an instrumental reminder that there was some funk in this particular Florida stew.
No, Casey didn’t “invent disco,” as its elements were already well past creeping into soul and dance records — the moment the hi-hat kicks on Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “The Love I Lost” in 1973 and the way Gloria Gaynor turned the Jackson 5 ballad “Never Can Say Goodbye” into a soaring club anthem in 1974, to name two.
But the man clearly absorbed the influences around him, both Black and Latin, channeling what was bubbling up between the Everglades and South Beach into disco music for the masses.
There may have been something in the water there, as most of the Bee Gees’ massively successful second act as disco kingpins, starting with “Jive Talkin’,” was recorded at Miami’s Criteria Studios.
The self-titled album would be KC & The Sunshine’s most successful, but the hit formula held together for a few more years.
1976’s Part 3, another strong album, yielded more inescapable tunes. “(Shake Shake Shake) Shake Your Booty” and “I’m Your Boogie Man,” would top the U.S. charts while “Keep It Comin’ Love” spent three weeks at No. 2 in the fall of ’77, kept from the top spot by Meco and, more horrifyingly, Debby Boone.
The Casey/Finch team had a hook for a future hit in their work with fellow TK artist Jimmy “Bo” Horne. The sampled horns on the Stereo MC’s 1992 hit “Connected” were instantly recognizable to anyone who heard Horne’s 1978 song “Let Me (Let Me Be Your Lover).”
VIDEO: Jimmy “Bo” Horne “Let Me (Be Your Lover)”
Casey, who wanted to try to write something different from the funky good times at the disco, showed he had a hit ballad in him with “Please Don’t Go.”
Seemingly tailor made for slow dances at the skating rink, the song steadily climbed up the charts, becoming the first U.S. No. 1 single of the ’80s.
It became slow going from there. He dueted with his old high school classmate Teri DeSario, on a cover of the 1965 Barbara Mason hit “Yes I’m Ready” on DeSario’s album that he produced. The song, more bland adult contemporary than anything at the band’s peak, spent two weeks at No. 2 in March, kept from the top spot by Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.”
This is when a lot of things went bad behind the scenes. TK Records went under in 1981, with some acrimony between Casey and the label, which, frankly, could only survive so long as a scrappy upstart.
A car accident that year badly injured Casey. He recovered from the head-on collision, but it took several months to overcome the nerve damage to be able to walk and play music again.
The musical partnership of Casey and Finch split up, by all accounts a bad split, even though those involved didn’t really talk about it.
Finch dropped out of the music business and the public eye until he spent nearly seven years in an Ohio state prison in the 2010s for sexually abusing a number of teenage boys who were aspiring musicians.
Casey moved on from TK to Epic Records, but his two albums did nothing, especially with the label refusing to release “Give It Up” as a single in 1982 or even the following year when it topped the charts in the U.K. and Ireland.
An independent label, Meca, which put out his next album, included the song on it and released it. Peaking at No. 18 in March 1984, the upbeat song gave indications that Casey could emerge from the disco ashes to provide more dance hits. It was his last hit single instead.
Casey’s father died that year, a devastating blow.
He also was getting burnt out on the business, walking away in 1985.
“I was disappointed in it all — it’s very political at times and I just was tired of being told what to do, when to do it, how to do it, you know? It was just all the demands. My father died that year, too, and I was just tired,” Casey told Classic Pop. “I’d spent 10 years or more, day and night, sacrificing everything in my life – every event, every anniversary, every wedding, everything, everything — everything came second to what I was doing. And I was just tired, and I just wanted to get away from it all.”
Rather than recharge and renew, Casey’s time out of the spotlight was when he sank into addiction.
“My father’s last wish was for me to never stop (striving), and I stopped,” Casey told the Morning Call in 1997. “I ran with the wrong crowd. I went through the ’70s straight and Mr. Goody Two Shoes, and I went crazy in the ’80s.”
A revived interest in disco in the ’90s helped bring him out of the abyss, as he became interested in creating and playing again. While his days as a chart presence are long gone, many of the songs never went away, getting placement in film, television commercials and loads of hip-hop samples. Casey is still able to go out and play before audiences full of people who enjoyed KC & The Sunshine Band during its peak to those young enough to be their grandchildren, discovering the joys in those grooves.
“It’s inspiring to know that I created a sound and a type of music that was to bring energy into people’s lives to bring happiness and to bring joy and to know that it still does that for people is just the greatest reward of anything,” Casey told the 305 Vox Populi Podcast in 2021.
1975’s self-titled album is a prime example of why that music stuck around. Sure, its hits overshadow the rest of it, but there is nothing on it that makes you wonder, “What the hell were those guys thinking?”
All these years later, the joy in the grooves is difficult to deny, a well-deserved payoff for that real-life musical.
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