KOOL & THE GANG’S ROBERT BELL: ‘MY BROTHER RONALD WAS UPSET WHEN HE HEARD CELEBRATION’
Imagine for a second you’d written a song as eternal as Kool & the Gang’s 1980 funk hit “Celebration” – the sort of record, as founding member Robert “Kool” Bell puts it, that you hear at “every wedding, every bar mitzvah, every Super Bowl, every soccer game, every everything!”
Now imagine that – just like Kool & the Gang – it was announced on a special edition of American Idol earlier this year that, this October, you are to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, that most American of music industry coronations. How would you, er, celebrate? “Well, we played ‘Celebration’,” Bell says. “We were celebrating! We had a big party. And we were drinking Kool champagne. People, when they drink and party, normally have Dom Pérignon. I just happen to have my own champagne.”
Bell, now 73, speaking via video call, is indeed sitting beside a bottle of his own branded Kool & the Gang champagne. Behind him on the wall is a host of framed platinum discs; to his right is a 50th-anniversary Kool-branded acoustic guitar, complete with a photograph of all original members of Kool – including his brother, the band’s main songwriter, Ronald Bell, and drummer George “Funky” Brown. “They’ve all passed on,” he says. “I’m the last man standing.”
Ronald died in 2020; Brown just last year shortly after coining the phrase of Kool’s last album, 2023’s People Just Wanna Have Fun. It’s made the achievement somewhat bittersweet. “It’s a challenge. Those guys I grew up when we started back in 1964, we all wanted this. Especially George Brown, he pushed and pushed for Kool to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”
Bell insists the call from the Hall should have come sooner. “Absolutely!” It’s a fair argument. Putting aside Bell talking up Kool’s rock ‘n’ roll credentials and the shows with Elton John, Kid Rock and Van Halen – “David Lee Roth was watching us at Glastonbury on the BBC and he rang up Van Halen and said, ‘If we’re going back on tour I’m bringing Kool and the Gang!’” – they are one of the most successful and enduring bands of all time. Kool have sold 70 million records worldwide and boast an arsenal of decades-old, joyous, inescapable floor-filling hits – “Get Down on It”, “Ladies Night”, Jungle Boogie” – that make them the ultimate good-time band.
They are also one of the most sampled acts of all time. Madonna and Janet Jackson have taken from Kool tracks, while the entire hip-hop community, from Jay-Z to 2Pac, have used Kool’s music. Bell, in fact, claims to be the most sampled. “James Brown claimed he was number one and Kool & the Gang are number two,” Bell smiles. “But Questlove did the homework. He told me that we’ve been sampled 1,800 times. I said ‘What? 1,800 times? What did they sample? Which parts? I should put somebody on sample control.’” Does that mean he hasn’t been paid for any of it? “There was no payday in the heyday,” he smiles ruefully. “It was just ‘let me grab that’.”
Kool & the Gang are officially marking their 60th anniversary with a slew of summer dates – including this weekend at Love Supreme festival – although that number doesn’t quite tell the whole story. Born in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, Bell began performing when the family moved to New Jersey in 1964, initially as The Jazziacs, an ensemble inspired by the great era of American jazz. Bell says there was always music around growing up, from his grandmother, who played piano, to his jazz-loving father Bobby Bell, a professional featherweight boxer who had an unlikely would-be protégé in Miles Davis. “In New York, Miles was wanting to be a boxer and wanted to get in the ring with my father. And my father said, ‘Miles, I can’t really do that. If I hit you the wrong way and bust your lip, I bust up your career!’”
The Jazziacs became Kool & the Gang in 1969, and remained a mostly instrumental band – “we’d do a little shouting on the tracks” – until their 1973 breakthrough fourth album Wild and Peaceful, which, despite the lack of a proper singer, added vocal hooks (the “get down, get down” of “Jungle Boogie”) and switched to their now-trademark funk and R’n’B sound.
It wasn’t exactly a planned move: it only came about because their record company, looking for something easier to sell, wanted to hook Kool up with the producer of a hit of the day, “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango. “So we had a meeting with him, and we weren’t feeling him. So we went to a studio one morning in downtown New York called Baggies, and went in at eight o’clock. We came out at midnight producing and writing [future hits] ‘Jungle Boogie’, ‘Hollywood Swinging’ and ‘Funky Stuff’.” All in one day? “Oh, yeah. We heard nothing from the record company after that!”
A peculiarity of Kool’s career was their failure to capitalise on the late-70s disco movement, despite being closely aligned. “We were very dance, then the whole disco thing was popping and coming in. So we got the call all about the Saturday Night Fever [soundtrack]”. Kool’s contribution, “Open Sesame”, was overlooked despite the album’s mega success. “Then things changed around and disco started to fade. In Chicago, they were burning disco records.”
As disco’s leading lights such as Chic fell out of favour, you might have thought that was also it for Kool. But a chance conversation changed music history. During a tour with the Jackson Five, legendary producer and promoter Dick Griffey, the owner of SOLAR Records who had worked with Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin, gave Bell a suggestion. “He said, ‘Listen, I think you guys need a lead singer’.” He laughs at his initial reaction, which was to say, “Really?”
“But I thought about it, and I said ‘Lionel Richie with the Commodores, of course, Michael Jackson in the Jacksons, Earth Wind and Fire have Phil Bailey and Maurice White. Maybe it is time for us to grow a little bit.”
They soon recruited James “J.T” Taylor, a vocalist they met and auditioned at a studio in New Jersey. “My brother played him a little funk, a little jazz, a little dance. He fell right in, so we said, ‘Hey, he got the job right away.’” All of a sudden, they started having different sorts of ideas for songs. “I was hanging out at a club in New York and every weekend they’d have a ladies’ night,” he says, smiling. “So I went back to the guys: ‘I got a great idea for one of the new songs with JT!’ My brother said, ‘Wow, man, you get one of those all over the world.’” “Ladies Night”, from 1979, sold one million copies in America and reached the UK Top 10; Kool became internationally known.
But that was nothing compared to “Celebration”. A legend exists that the song was inspired by the Qur’an after Bell’s conversion to Islam in 1972. “Well, me and my brother were reading it, and it’s the celebration of human life,” he says of the book. But it was mostly taken from a lyric in “Ladies Night”: “This is your night tonight/ Come on, let’s all celebrate.” “My brother said, ‘That’s another song!’ We were creating music using the hook of celebration.”
Though it nearly sounded very different. “My brother was a little upset because we had a 40-piece orchestra on the track in the studio. When it came down to mixing the song, all that was gone. It just had this little guitar part. He said, ‘That sounds like the Jacksons. What happened to my song?!’ And the producer was like, ‘Well, you got a singer now. This is the hit.’” The song has travelled everywhere – even to outer space. “Astronauts going up to the space station are floating around listening to ‘Celebration.’ Whoever thought that record would be up there?”
Success rolled on until the mid-80s as Kool evolved with the times: 1983’s smash hit “Joanna” was an of-its-era pop ballad; their 1984 album Emergency, aided by “Cherish”, another worldwide ballad hit, was their biggest ever seller. But then Taylor dropped the bombshell in 1988 that he wanted to leave. “JT had some issues with management at the time. He wanted to do something else on his own. So I said, ‘Well, you can still do that. Look at Genesis and Phil Collins – you don’t have to leave the band.’ But you know how it is. It’s lead singers,” he says, smiling. “So he left. We had to regroup.”
His answer was to “expand our fan base” by turning Kool into a worldwide touring group: he excitedly talks about how they went to “England, France, Germany” before eastern Europe, “all through Africa, all through Asia, all through Japan”. He says everywhere they went, the music was a connector. “They were all singing the lyrics, and they didn’t speak our language. But they knew the songs. Sometimes better than we did.”
Six decades on, Kool & the Gang continue to live by their last album title. “People just want to have fun. And when we play, you can see people just having a good time.”
Kool & the Gang play Love Supreme Festival on Sunday