Here, though, over a throbbing breakbeat clearly inspired by hip-hop, he delights in the way the word pops - just one more percussive element in a track full of them. We brought it on tour, but it was just so unreliable that Prince had to scrub the whole thing and come up with a different arrangement for doing it live.”Ī year later his name actually wasn’t Prince but an unpronounceable symbol. “You’d move your hands on it and it wouldn’t necessarily give you the pitch that corresponded to the position of your hands. But it opens with a squirmy, theremin-like solo played on a Roland synth-guitar that Rogers remembers as “a real pain in the neck.” “It didn’t track very well,” she says of the instrument. This funky “Parade” cut rides one of the great Prince bass lines. Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman of the Revolution came up with “Mountains’” perpetual motion machine of a groove, but it’s Prince’s airy falsetto - which Rogers is pretty sure they recorded with a “cheap little stage mike” at Prince’s rehearsal warehouse - that gives the song its blissed-out energy.įrom the otherwise jittery “Controversy” album, a beautifully laid-back outlier of an old-school R&B love song. Recycling the iconic drum-machine beat from “When Doves Cry,” Prince addresses a “funky congregation” in this highlight from the throwback-minded “MPLSound,” which he sold exclusively at Target. “He’s saying we all better start paying close attention.” He’d stand there and wave his finger and say, ‘You shouldn’t behave like this.’” In this propulsive Reagan-era funk track with worries about a creeping communist threat, Prince is “issuing a warning,” Rogers adds. “Prince was oddly conservative - very much a Minnesota boy,” says Susan Rogers, the singer’s trusted engineer throughout the mid-’80s who now teaches at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. IPhone and iPad users: click here to enterA lightly trippy psych-soul duet between Prince and Apollonia that feels like the bridge between “Purple Rain” and “Around the World in a Day.”Ī moving pop-stardom-is-hard plaint in which Prince reflects on his youthful overindulgence (“First one intoxicated, last one to leave / Waking up in places that you would never believe”) as well as his iffy real estate decisions (“I used to want the house with the biggest pool / Reminiscing now I just feel like a fool”).
Sign up for the Luhrs Center eNewsletter here! The Stylistics current lineup consists of Airrion Love, Herb Murrell, Jason Sharp, and Barrington “Bo” Henderson. He was featured on The Temptations album Phoenix Rising, which nearly went double platinum, and he was on their album Ear-Resistible, helping them to win a GRAMMY® Award. Bo previously sang with The Dramatics, Lakeside, and was lead singer of The Temptations. In 2011, Jason Sharp, former lead singer of Heatwave, joined The Stylistics, and in 2018, Barrington “Bo” Henderson joined The Stylistics. Friends since junior high school, Herb and Airrion have managed to keep the music alive.
Herbert Murrell and Airrion Love are the remaining original members of The Stylistics. The Stylistics soon became known as the Philly group with the sweet love songs. The success of this album was phenomenal, and the ball continued to roll with the release of their second album Round Two. Hit veteran producer Tom Bell was hired to produce the group’s first album titled The Stylistics, and out of that album came hit songs like “Stop, Look, Listen to your Heart”, “You Are Everything” and “Betcha By Golly Wow”. Interested in promoting the record nationally, Bill Perry contacted Avco Records and made a record deal. 1 hit in Philadelphia, and then other cities followed. Their first song, “You’re a Big Girl Now” was recorded at Virtue Recording Studio in Philadelphia, written by their guitarist at the time, Robert “Doc” Douglas and road manager, Marty Bryant. The group was then approached by Bill Perry, offering to record a song. When members from each group were drafted, the remaining members joined forces and changed their name to The Stylistics. The Stylistics were formed in Philadelphia, PA in 1966 from two groups, The Percussions and The Monarchs. Ric Luhrs Performing Arts Center at Shippensburg University to promote The Stylistics at the Luhrs Center in Shippensburg!
#Who sings betcha by golly wow free#
Now, it’s time to find better ways to interact with you and ensure we meet your high standards of what a credible media organization should be.Įnter to win a pair of FREE tickets to see The Stylistics at the Luhrs Center in Shippensburg, PA – Friday, March 13 at 7:30pm! The days of journalism’s one-way street of simply producing stories for the public have long been over.