The Twelve Inch Presents : 5 Deep Cuts to get through any heatwave

🔥 Hot Records For Hot Days: Seven Dancefloor Gems From The Crates

The Twelve Inch is the story of dance music, told one record at a time.

It is not just about artists, genres, musical evolutions, or the broader historical picture. It is also about the joy of discovering, or rediscovering, the records that packed dancefloors without necessarily crossing over into the pop charts.

Some stories are simply too small to justify a full A-side and B-side deep dive. Yet the records themselves still deserve their moment in the spotlight. So from time to time, instead of a regular extended episode, I’ll be taking a shorter dive into my record boxes and uncovering a handful of forgotten gems.

To provide some sort of connecting thread, each selection will revolve around a common theme.

As I write this, Western Europe is being hit by a second heatwave in just a few weeks. Meteorologists are even talking about a heat dome. Temperatures of 35°C (95°F) and higher are expected, conditions for which we are neither particularly well suited nor especially well organised. And summer hasn’t even officially begun yet.

So the theme of this week’s journey through my collection is rather obvious: hot.😁

Fortunately, not many dance records have been written about weather phenomena. There are, however, quite a few that feature the word hot in the title. And in most cases, the temperature they’re referring to has very little to do with the weather and everything to do with other, far more exciting experiences. 😁

Click on the covers and it’ll lead you to the (hot) music

During the eighties, I spent far too many hours volunteering at my local radio station, presenting several shows every weekend. It was the era when Belgium was littered with local radio stations, usually covering little more than the village or town where the studio happened to be located.

Although the equipment we worked with wasn’t exactly substandard, it was a long way from the professional studios used by the national broadcasters. We had to be creative when producing our jingles and programmes. Our examples weren’t to be found in Belgium. We listened obsessively to Dutch radio, knowing full well that they, in turn, were looking across the Atlantic for inspiration.

In the summer of 1986, I finally understood why.

One of my best friends handed me a cassette recorded from Los Angeles radio station KPWR, better known as Power 106. It contained one of their Saturday evening shows, packed with Freestyle, Synth-Funk and club music. I played that tape endlessly. It became one of my treasures.

Everything about it sounded exciting: the jingles, the presentation, the records they played, and the reports from a roaming reporter checking in from the city’s nightclubs to tell listeners what was happening on the dancefloor. To a young radio enthusiast in Belgium, it sounded like the future.

One of the records that tape introduced me to was “Hot Spot” by the Dazz Band.

I already knew the Dazz Band from their early eighties synth-funk hit “Let It Whip”. In fact, that track became something of an underground dancefloor classic in the Benelux. It never troubled the charts, but if you were DJing a local party, you’d better have a copy with you because sooner or later someone would ask for it. A few years later they scored a genuine chart hit with “Let It All Blow”, a record I’ll come back to in a future episode.

By 1985 and 1986, however, the Dazz Band had largely disappeared from the spotlight. I loved “Hot Spot” from the moment I heard it on that KPWR tape, although it took me quite a while to discover who actually recorded it. Shazam wasn’t around yet. Strange times, I know. 😁

“Hot Spot” is a perfect example of the synth-funk sound that blended seamlessly with the Freestyle records dominating American dancefloors at the time. It sits comfortably alongside the music that Power 106 was championing in 1986. Despite its quality, the record only managed to reach No. 33 on the US Dance chart.

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This is The Twelve Inch, a community about the history of dance music from 1975 to 1995, told one twelve-inch record at a time.

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When the Jackson 5, soon to become the Jacksons, left Motown for Epic, one member stayed behind: Jermaine Jackson. He was married to Berry Gordy’s daughter, which may explain the decision. There may have been other reasons as well. I’m sure we’ll come back to that story in a future episode.

The thing is, Jermaine was already pursuing a solo career before his brothers left, so he could simply continue doing what he had been doing. Yet while the Jacksons at Epic increasingly embraced disco on their late seventies albums, Jermaine largely stayed away from it.

And this isn’t a case of hindsight being twenty-twenty. We can be fairly brief about the outcome: the second half of the seventies was not Jermaine Jackson’s most successful period.🤔

For a long time, the explanation seemed obvious to me. It fitted neatly into the familiar story of Motown losing touch with the market because it failed to embrace disco. Since starting this newsletter, however, I’ve discovered that the reality is far more nuanced. Motown was never the premier disco label, but it certainly wasn’t absent from the genre either.

Which makes Jermaine’s musical choices during those years seem, well… rather curious.

Everything changed in early 1980 with the release of Let’s Get Serious. The title track, produced and arranged by Stevie Wonder, who also contributed backing vocals, became Jermaine’s biggest solo hit to date. It was a pure funk record and a very good one at that.

I bought the album as soon as it was released, only to discover that the second single sounded remarkably disco. Granted, it was the sleek, funk-driven disco that bands like Kool & The Gang were making at the time, but disco it was nonetheless.

What’s more, Jermaine and Motown clearly had the dancefloor in mind when compiling the album. Both “Let’s Get Serious” and “Burnin’ Hot” were included in their full twelve-inch lengths. For a cash-strapped record buyer like me, that was very welcome news indeed.

The funny thing is that by the time Jermaine finally embraced disco, the backlash had already happened. Some artists, like Chic, were hit hard by the anti-disco mood. For others, including Jermaine Jackson, it largely passed unnoticed.

That may explain why “Burnin’ Hot” never matched the commercial impact of “Let’s Get Serious”. Not on the dancefloor, however. Together, the two tracks reached No. 2 on the US Dance chart during the summer of 1980.

Looking back, “Burnin’ Hot” feels like the perfect summer record. More importantly, it captures a fascinating moment when disco was beginning to evolve into the synth-funk sound that would dominate the early eighties.

So perhaps the story isn’t that Jermaine Jackson was late to disco.

Perhaps Jermaine Jackson was early to what came next.

I was a bit confused in the eighties when Streetwise, Arthur Baker’s label, started releasing records under the name Cuba Gooding. Then, a few years later, a Cuba Gooding was on his way to becoming a world-famous actor.

Granted, the actor had a “Jr.” attached to his name. But did that mean he had started out as a singer before moving into acting? It wouldn’t have been the first time, nor the last.

Some research was clearly required.

It didn’t take long to discover that the Cuba Gooding making records for Streetwise was not the future Hollywood star. It was his father. They could have avoided the confusion by adding “Sr.” to his name, but I understand why they didn’t. Nobody likes being called “senior”, especially not in the music business. 😂

By the time he recorded his Streetwise singles, Cuba Gooding Sr. already had a distinguished career behind him as the lead singer of The Main Ingredient. The unusual first name shared by father and son goes back another generation. Cuba Sr.’s father had fled Barbados and promised that his first son would be named after the country that had welcomed him. This was long before Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution entered the picture. Apparently the name caused no great hardship because when Cuba Jr. was born, the family simply used it again.

The solo career of Cuba Gooding Sr. never really took off. After two singles on Streetwise, it was effectively over. Yet those two records have become genuine dancefloor classics.

“Got The Hots” is a perfect example of the slower synth-funk groove that many of us were digging in the mid-eighties. Almost every funk and R&B artist seemed to have at least one track built around that laid-back tempo. The urgency of disco had given way to something smoother, more seductive and perhaps a little cooler.

And let’s be honest, when the temperatures start climbing, slowing things down isn’t necessarily a bad idea. We don’t want to work ourselves into too much of a sweat on the dancefloor, do we?

I could end with a joke about the father setting an example for the son, especially given the song’s title and lyrics and the fact the latter is being accused of sexual misconduct by at least 30 women. But that would be in very poor taste indeed, so I’ll resist the temptation.

Instead, I’ll point to another connection. Beneath the synth-funk production sits a subtle Caribbean flavour that makes “Got The Hots” a perfect soundtrack for hot summer days. In a way, it brings the story full circle. The music carries echoes of the region from which Cuba Gooding Sr.‘s family originally came, giving the record an extra layer of meaning that wasn’t obvious to me when I first heard it all those years ago.

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The Twelve Inch is a growing community of people who love disco, eighties, and early-nineties dance music.

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Talking about a …hot potato. 😂

I know, I know, it’s a terrible joke. But La Toya started it, not me.

The Jackson family must surely be the most successful musical family in history, with an astonishing number of its members building careers in the music business. Not all of those careers were equally successful, of course.

Take La Toya’s sisters.

There’s Rebbie Jackson. She released a handful of albums on Columbia during the eighties. Most of you probably won’t remember them. If I mention the title “Centipede”, a light might come on. Though I suspect it will be a rather dim one. Even among dedicated dance music obsessives like myself, it’s hardly a staple of mid-eighties funk playlists.

Then there’s Janet Jackson. I’ve written about her not so long ago. A hugely successful career by any measure.

La Toya’s story was… somewhat different. 😂

It started promisingly enough. Her debut album arrived in 1980 and produced a respectable dancefloor hit with “If You Feel The Funk”, a record that reached the pop charts in the Benelux and climbed to No. 17 on the US Dance chart. Unfortunately, she struggled to build on that momentum. Each successive album and single seemed to perform a little less well than the previous one.

In total, La Toya has released twelve studio albums for ten different record companies. That statistic alone tells you quite a lot about her career. 😂

At first glance, it looks like a simple story of bad career decisions. Ten decisions, eleven of them wrong. But the reality turned out to be far more complicated and far stranger. Her life would eventually involve estrangement from her family, the increasing sexualisation of her public image, and even disfellowshipping from the Jehovah’s Witnesses.🫣

Along the way came allegations of a forced marriage, claims that she feared being kidnapped by her own family, accusations against her father, a topless appearance in Playboy, a contract with the Moulin Rouge… Somehow her eighties album Bad Girl almost sounds like an autobiographical release. 😂

It would make for a wonderful narrative if we could say that everything started with her final dancefloor hit, the 1984 single “Hot Potato”.

But even by Jackson family standards, that might be stretching the story just a little too far.

I’ve written before about the system of cut-outs. Back when LPs were the primary format for distributing music, record companies often ended up with large quantities of unsold stock. In the United States, these returns were marked by cutting a corner of the sleeve, punching a hole through it, or adding a notch to the spine. The records would then be sold off at heavily discounted prices through other retail channels.

It was a very American practice and one that was rarely seen elsewhere.

When the disco backlash collided with the economic troubles of the late seventies and early eighties, enormous quantities of these cut-outs found their way across the Atlantic and into Europe.

That’s how I acquired a sizeable chunk of my disco and early funk collection.

And let me be clear: I love cut-outs. 😂

Yes, there’s the minor inconvenience of having to explain to anyone browsing through my records that no, I do not have destructive tendencies, nor do I spend my weekends punching holes in record sleeves. But at the time, cut-outs allowed me to buy what was, for me, absolute prime material at prices I could actually afford.

One of those purchases was the 1980 debut album by Chuck Cissel on Arista.

I loved the lead single, “Cisselin’ Hot”.

And frankly, if you can think of a better record to end a deep dive inspired by the tropical temperatures we’re currently enduring, I’d love to hear it.

No? Thought so. 😂

Chuck Cissel’s recording career was relatively short-lived. He released just two albums for Arista before his time as a recording artist effectively came to an end in 1982.

But like so many artists who briefly crossed the dancefloor radar, there was far more to his story than those few records suggest.

Cissel earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Oklahoma, becoming one of the first African Americans to graduate from the university’s fine arts school. Later in life he would serve as CEO of the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame from 2000 to 2009 and subsequently become its Artistic Director.

Long before that, however, he had already built an impressive career on the stage.

In his early twenties, Cissel appeared on Broadway in productions such as Hello, Dolly! alongside Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway, as well as Purlie, Lost in the Stars, Via Galactica, and Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope. He was also an original cast member of A Chorus Line, at a time when Broadway was only beginning to open its doors more widely to African American performers.

While performing in A Chorus Line, he recorded his first album, Swept Away, produced by Michael Bennett, the visionary behind the musical itself.

That eventually led to his recording contract with Arista and the release of Just For You, the album that contained “Cisselin’ Hot”.

The record never turned Chuck Cissel into a household name. But forty-five years later, “Cisselin’ Hot” still sounds exactly like its title suggests: warm, sunny, infectious and impossible to dislike.

Which makes it the perfect soundtrack for a summer that currently seems determined to melt Western Europe.

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There isn’t an accompanying mix for this week’s episode, but I did publish a new mix on Mixcloud.

It’s the latest volume in my second mix series, a collection of personal musical journeys that wander freely across genres and decades. The series is called Let The Beat Take Control because, more than anything else, it’s the beat that guides the listener through hip-hop, trip-hop, classical music, pop, exotica, film scores and dance music.

If my regular mixes are usually confined to the genre, period and story I’m writing about, this series is the exact opposite. There are no boundaries, no rules and no preconceived destination.

Well, perhaps there is one rule.

It all has to make musical sense.

The new mix is Episode 13. And yes, it was published on a Friday.

What else could possibly go wrong? 😂

https://www.mixcloud.com/pedupre/let-the-beat-be-your-guide-vol13/

I’d love for you to give it a try. And if you enjoy it, you’ll be pleased to know there are twelve more episodes already waiting to be discovered.

Enjoy the journey, and as always, let the beat take control.