BY JOEY SWEENEY

I had already known that music was magic. But I had not seen it with my own eyes. 

By age 8, I already had a record player and a few records, and I kept a little tape recorder next to my clock radio, always ready for whenever a song I liked came on.  I would tape not just what was coming out of the radio but also, inadvertently, room noises, my own breath noises and so on. But what I was looking for was stuff off of WMMR, where they’d play these little radio documentaries about The British Invasion, or the funny songs from the Morning Zoo; Power 99 or WDAS, where they’d play really early hip-hop stuff; and even stuff of WOGL because they had Casey Kasem and wow, did I love Casey Kasem. 

So I knew about music. I knew that it did things to me, like it made me feel strong and like I could be somebody else, but I knew it almost as a physical response exclusively, I had no real understanding of how music is made, and certainly not how we come to hear the music that is made, all of the things that would have had to happen in order for me to hear a song on the radio. In fact, I don’t even think that I understood, in this earliest phase, that there was even music that I didn’t know about. Like, not that I thought I knew all music, but that the music that was available to me represented all the music there was to know. I was like a dog. I had no music object permanence. 

By the time I was 11, most of the above still held, but I was beginning to understand that music now also had a visual component, due to MTV, which existed but I had never seen, and Video Rock on WPHL-17 (“The Great Entertainer”), which we did get but it came on at 11pm on weeknights and that was later than I was supposed to be up, unless I had a pushover babysitter or something.

One day, I don’t remember how, I got taken to a concert, by my mom’s younger sisters I believe, though this too could be wrong. What I remember, though, is that we went to see Kool & The Gang, and that Kool & The Gang were the first band I ever saw. It is my belief that they were the first whole group of human beings I had ever seen, in the flesh, playing music.

If I told you it was unlike anything I had ever seen, you would understand this because I just told you that. To put a finer point on it, it was unlike anything I ever thought could be. Up until now, I had only seen music played and sung live at church, dour incantations meant to convey Christ’s long dark monotony during the stations of the cross, and I had probably seen a person playing piano. 

But nothing like this. Nuh-uh. No way. Because history is cruel, because what gets to be trivia is cruel, Kool & The Gang are forever married to “Celebration,” a song so codified into the language of weddings and wedding bands that we no longer understand it as a song. But in 1984, “Celebration” was still a recent hit. It was a jam. And it was a really good one at that. But also in 1984, “Celebration” wasn’t even the best Kool & The Gang jam, not even by a long shot. Because again in 1984, the band put out an LP called Emergency that had all of these jams on it:

• “Cherish,” which was a ballad that I think I had slow danced with a girl to;

• “Fresh,” which I believe was inspired by maybe one of the only rap songs I knew about then, and made such an impression on me that this is still a term that I use for things I like;

• “Joanna,” a mid-tempo ballad that might have been the first love song that really got through to me;

• and “Ladies Night,” which I would hear through the floor anytime my aunts had a party and they were supposed to be babysitting me (and in my memory, this was every time my aunts were supposed to be babysitting me).

These were not low-key deep cuts. They were songs that everybody knew. These were Kool & The Gang songs. 

In my kid mind, I would think that this was why Kool & The Gang was playing Great Adventure, though as an adult, it is almost impossible to explain why Kool & The Gang was playing Great Adventure. Except to say this: In the early 1980s, concerts at Great Adventure were a Thing. Amusement parks in those days were maybe the purest, most undiluted expressions of teenage culture that there was. They were literal expressions of wildness, of hormone and rush. They had haunted houses that were wayyyyyyy outta line. They had rides that went super fast in circles in ultra-cold tented rooms that had black lights and blasted Blue Oyster Cult. Great Adventure in particular (still has? how?) a live animal “safari” you would drive through and where it was a badge of honor if the animals destroyed any kind of textiled car roof you might have. The vibe at Great Adventure in the early-to-mid-1980s was like this:

That big shows by megapopular bands would come into this culture, at its highest iterations, seems inevitable. A Great Adventure fan community reveals that the 1984 concert season was… crazy. I’m gonna say some names now, and you’re gonna imagine the vibes. Ready? The Beach Boys. Christine McVie. Stray Cats. The Four Tops and The Temptations, on the same bill. Ted Nugent (on “Senior Nite.”) The Romantics. The Charlie Daniels Band.  DeBarge. 

I don’t remember what we did before the show, but I remember when the group came out and I saw and heard live music for the first time in my life. They had matching outfits, but all in various hues, I remember it reminded me of Fruit Stripe gum. The band was, even by my know-nothing standards then, quantifiably huge. 14 members! Horns, backup singers, the works! And from the moment they went on, I have no memory of my head being pointed anywhere other than squarely on that stage, where the distant men in colored suits never stopped moving, never stopped being earth-shakingly fascinating.

I found a video on YouTube of what this concert would have looked like, at the stage level at least. It’s of Kool & The Gang performing “Get Down On It,” which is as fine a jam as the group ever produced and put it on now and tell me it does not slap. 

I was a weird little kid in just about every way. I was already having difficulty with the other kids, getting pushed around and stuff. But “Get Down On It” spoke to me: “How you gonna do it if you really don’t take a chance?” I wouldn’t totally understand this until hip-hop and then punk put it out there explicitly for me that fortune favors the bold, but I was beginning to get the picture. 

I had already known that music was magic. But now, I had seen it with my own eyes.