Kool & The Gang – Steppin Out

Fifteen years into their career, they hired a lead singer for the first time.

Kool & the Gang formed in Jersey City in 1964 and spent fifteen years without a frontman. There was no lead singer on Jungle Boogie, none on Hollywood Swinging, none on Funky Stuff — the vocals were shouted, chanted and traded around by whoever was nearest a microphone, and the horns carried the melody. Then in 1979 they hired one, brought in an outside producer, and turned into a completely different commercial proposition. Steppin’ Out comes from the far side of that decision.

Keep watching: Kool & the Gang – Ladies’ Night · Kool & the Gang – Celebration

The two people who changed it were James “J.T.” Taylor and Eumir Deodato. Taylor became the band’s first dedicated lead vocalist. Deodato was a Brazilian arranger and keyboard player whose own biggest record had been a jazz-funk reworking of a Richard Strauss theme, and who understood how to build a pop record around a horn section without losing the horns. The results were immediate and did not stop: Ladies’ Night, Too Hot, Celebration, Get Down On It, Joanna, and the album this came from.

Something Special arrived in 1981 on De-Lite, and Deodato took a writing credit on Steppin’ Out alongside Ronald Bell, Claydes Charles Smith, George Brown, Robert “Spike” Mickens, Robert “Kool” Bell and Taylor — seven names on a four-and-a-half-minute record, which tells you it was built in a room rather than brought in finished. Record World, reviewing it in January 1982, picked out the brisk beat and the punchy horns, and that is a fair description of the mechanism: the rhythm section is doing disco, the brass is doing what Kool & the Gang had always done, and Taylor is on top holding the two together.

A hit in the wrong country

Britain took it first and took it further. It reached No.12 on the UK singles chart in 1981 and No.20 in Ireland. America came to it late and barely came at all — it crawled to No.89 on the Hot 100 in 1982, though it did far better on the charts that were actually paying attention, reaching No.12 R&B and No.16 on the dance chart. An American band from New Jersey had made a record that British radio understood immediately and American pop radio essentially ignored.

That gap explains why this performance exists. Musikladen ran on Radio Bremen from December 1972 until November 1984, taking over from Beat-Club and doing the same job — bringing acts to a West German studio and filming them properly. European television was booking Kool & the Gang at a point when the American singles chart had them at eighty-nine, and the footage that survives from those studios is often the best-shot material any of these bands have.

What the band became

The Deodato and Taylor era ran to the mid-eighties and made Kool & the Gang one of the most-played bands in the world, which sits oddly alongside their first fifteen years as a horn-driven funk collective admired mostly by other musicians. Celebration went to No.1 in America and became the default song for every American event requiring one. Taylor left in 1988. The band carried on, reunited with him in the mid-nineties, and has kept working with changing personnel ever since.

Steppin’ Out came back in 2004, re-recorded with Beverley Knight for a remix album — which is a reasonable indication of where the song’s reputation had settled. It was never an American hit and it did not need to be. It was a British one, and it belongs to the two years when a fifteen-year-old band was busy becoming something else entirely.