With each passing decade, music seems to shift into a new evolutionary phase that defines a specific moment in time. The bubblegum pop of the 1950s gave way to the blues-driven rock ‘n’ roll of the 1960s, which eventually ceded to the hard rock psychedelia of the 1970s. By the end of that decade, disco had overtaken hard rock in a wave of sequins and lamé. As each new musical cycle begins, some artists are left behind, doomed to grow more and more antiquated.
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But for heavy rock ‘n’ rollers Wild Cherry out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this musical shift wasn’t just happening on the Billboard charts. The musicians could see those changes unfold right in front of them, with each pair of feet that walked off the dance floor whenever they came up to play at a nightclub. After a long, slow battle of trying to resist the changing tide, Wild Cherry got feedback from an audience member that ended up becoming a massive 1976 hit.
Although technically, it was more of a question.
How a Passing Question Led to “Play That Funky Music”
In a 2013 interview with Tampa Bay Times, Wild Cherry guitarist Rob Parissi reflected on what the wave of disco did to his heavy rock band. The music that once got them in the door in various nightclubs and venues around the Pittsburgh area now felt outdated. People left the dance floor specifically when they started to play their heavy rock music. They wanted disco. So, Parissi tried to tell the band that. “They went nuts,” he said. They didn’t want to play disco.
But one fateful night at the 2001 Club on the city’s north side, the band realized that even though they didn’t want to play disco, they might have to start. “When we would play clubs like 2001, the dance floor would just clear out,” Wild Cherry member Bryan Bassett told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The night the band wrote the song that would turn them into one-hit wonders, they were playing to a predominantly Black crowd that wasn’t connecting to their music.
At one point, a man approached the band’s drummer, Ron Beitle, and said, “Are you going to play some funky music, white boys?” Beitle told the band what the man said, and a lightbulb went off in Parissi’s head. “I grabbed a drink order pad and started writing, ‘Once I was a boogie singer playin’ in a rock ‘n’ roll band,’” Parissi told the Tampa Bay Times. “It probably took me five minutes to write the whole thing.”
A Chart-Topper, One-Hit Wonder, and Music History Lesson
Wild Cherry’s 1976 single “Play That Funky Music” was a smash hit, topping the Billboard Hot 100 and entering the Top 10 in the U.K., Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Belgium. This was Wild Cherry’s biggest and only success, landing them in the one-hit wonder category. Still, that’s not to diminish its impact. It’s not often that a one-hit wonder can also serve as a music history lesson with a beat. But “Play That Funky Music” could.
The Wild Cherry hit marks a milestone in the transition from hard rock to disco that would come to define the late 1970s to early 1980s. By the end of the following decade, hair and glam metal bands would face the same fate as grunge pushed them out of the mainstream in the mid-1990s.
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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